The Missing One
“One, two, three, four . . .”
Outside the window a bicycle raced from right to left, its bell ringing cheerfully, and for a second Kikue almost lost track of her count, but she managed to focus her efforts and resumed.
“Five, six, seven, eight, nine . . .”
Kikue took her hands off the plates and stretched them above her head. This was her third attempt to count the plates.
“Nope, there really is one missing here,” she murmured to herself. She checked the stock sheet just to be sure, but it was marked with an unambiguous “10.” Kikue stared at the nine plates laid out in front of her on the counter. She’d loved them the moment she first laid eyes on them at the trade show last year. Seeing those pretty drawings of plants and animals, she’d felt her heart rate quicken. They were proving to be a hit with the customers too. As soon as Kikue posted news on her blog and her Instagram account that the plates were in stock, people would start appearing from goodness knows where, walking away with their favorite piece from the selection. It was fair to say they were the shop’s most popular product. Because they were hand-painted individually by an up-and-coming illustrator, the plates took a while to be delivered, which only fueled people’s passion further. And now, when Kikue’s order had finally arrived after such a long wait, one of them was missing.
Returning to their boxes the plates she’d been intending to put straight out onto the shelves, Kikue opened her laptop and typed an email to the person she’d been in touch with at the manufacturing company:
Unfortunately, the shipment we received today is missing an item.
As she hit the send button, Kikue let out a deep sigh. Writing these kinds of emails always made her a bit tense. Manufacturers quite often refused to take her seriously, or listen to what she was saying, because she was a woman single-handedly running a shop. In that respect, at least, owning a shop wasn’t that different to office life. She’d only interacted with this particular company over email, and the one thing she knew about the person she’d been in touch with was that he was a man. She could tell by his name: Yūta. She just had to hope that he believed her.
You sure about that, love? an imaginary middle-aged man admonished Kikue in her head. Sure you didn’t just break it? Think you can pull the wool over our eyes, do you? With lewd eyes, the man glared at her mockingly.
In order to preemptively alleviate the shock she would feel if something really terrible happened, Kikue chose to imagine the worst-case scenario. This habit of insuring herself in advance, of building a protective wall around herself, had been firmly established by the time she entered her mid-thirties.
Would this Yūta be that kind of a man? Kikue asked herself as she stared at his name on the screen. Well, even if he was, she’d already imagined the worst so she wouldn’t be surprised, and she wouldn’t be hurt.
Kikue closed her laptop and set about arranging the other items from the shipment, which she’d checked and found no problems with. It was a small shop, the size of just eight tatami mats, with built-in wooden shelves lining the walls on either side. In the middle was a large wooden table arranged with ceramics and linen items, and at the rear the counter with the cash register, behind which Kikue spent most of her time. She’d painted the plaster walls white, back when she first opened the shop. At first, she’d thought they might be a bit too white, but by now the color had lost its glare and looked rather good. It was the same with Himeji Castle, which you could see wherever you were in this town—when its renovations had finished, people had been variously worried or up in arms about how white it looked, but now, two years on, the color had toned down and it was just right. The same went for everything in life: you had to give things some time before you could be really sure about them.
The section of wall closest to the shop window jutted out slightly, offsetting the balance of the whole space. It caused Kikue a lot of concern, but there was nothing she could do about it. Behind the protuberance lay the concrete beam holding up the monorail. The Himeji Monorail had officially shut down the year that Kikue was born, although in fact it hadn’t been running for several years prior to that. Kikue had never once ridden it, and yet it was an integral part of her everyday life.
The monorail had opened in the 1960s, and for a period of just eight years had run the mile-long stretch from Himeji Station westward to Tegarayama. The brevity of its lifespan stood to reason. A mile was an eminently walkable distance. Because it was an eminently walkable distance, and because monorail tickets were expensive, everyone walked. When Kikue had learned about it as an adult, it had sounded to her like a bad joke. What on earth had the mayor been thinking?
Tegarayama was home to an aquarium, a botanical garden, and a cultural center familiar to locals who had taken classes of any kind. All of Himeji’s recitals took place there. Kikue had learned piano until middle school, and had taken part in several recitals held at the center. To get there, you just had to follow the trail of columns holding up the monorail track. Although it seemed scarcely believable, it was in fact true: even after the monorail was shut down, the tracks had remained there untouched for decades because pulling them down would have been too costly. If the Good Witch of the North had lived in Himeji, it wouldn’t have been the yellow brick road she’d have been telling people to follow, but the vestiges of the
