Chapter 5 The View beyond Friendship Carrot Cake #2
I was now alone in the café, staring off into the ceiling as I reflected on everything that had happened. It was almost ten o’clock, time for the Funeral Committee to gather.
That face. It wasn’t the Iori I know.
The easygoing, nonchalant Iori who lived a carefree life had disappeared. The face he wore now was the face of a man who was worried about his daughter—it was the face of a father.
And that made me feel as though he had gone somewhere far away. “How pathetic am I?” I mumbled to myself.
Hozumi’s face suddenly came into my view.
“Why are you getting all melancholic?”
“Ahhh!”
I panicked, nearly falling off the sofa. I quickly straightened myself up.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“I didn’t? The door creaked as loudly as it usually does, and the bell rang out,” Hozumi retorted, then plonked into the seat in front of me. “You seemed to be completely lost in thought.”
“I was thinking maybe we shouldn’t do this. Let’s call Iori and tell him he doesn’t need to come in, since there are no bookings.”
“I’m sure he already knows what we’re thinking about doing tonight. It was written all over your face.”
“Seriously?” I touched my cheek instinctively.
“Besides,” Hozumi said as he crossed his arms, “his daughter showed up, you know? I’m sure even he knows that he can’t just not say anything.”
“I don’t want to make him talk about it if he doesn’t want to. But maybe he does want to let it out…. Oh, I don’t know.”
As I groaned and cradled my head, Hozumi rose from his seat and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard him rummaging around for something, then he reemerged with two glasses filled with ice cubes and milky iced tea.
Without hesitation, he poured syrup into the glasses.
“Sugar is the best cure for an overworked brain.”
He pushed one of the glasses toward me.
Although I wasn’t thirsty, I brought my lips to the straw and sipped. It was nice and cold. The tip of my tongue tingled. The scent of tea and the sweetness of the sugar seeped into every corner of my tired body.
“You’ve known Iori much longer than I have, right?”
It seemed as if he and Iori had known each other a long time, but I had never asked.
“I don’t know him that well, either,” Hozumi said. “I’ve been a regular customer ever since this café opened its doors, but it’s only recently that I started having proper conversations with him.”
“Really?”
“Until we started doing the Funeral Committee, he was just the manager of a near-bankrupt café, and I was merely one of his local regulars. We said hello and made small talk, but that was about it.”
Hozumi picked up the menu that was laid down on the table and flicked through it.
“Back then, there was hardly anything on the menu. It was just coffee, tea, ice cream soda. Not that it mattered to me—all I wanted was a quiet place to read.”
I stirred my milky iced tea with my straw. The melting ice cubes shifted and clinked in my glass, emitting a soothing sound.
“You changed things,” Hozumi said. “It was you who made this café a place where everyone belongs.”
“What?” I was taken aback, unable to process his words.
“You wouldn’t know, because you don’t seem to have a problem with shouting out all your feelings to the world as you please, but there are a whole bunch of people out there who can’t show their vulnerable side unless someone forces them to.”
“Umm, is that a compliment?”
“Think about it,” Hozumi went on. “Makiko, Nagi…remember how they were? Some people can’t start talking about it—they’re not able to realize what it is that is troubling them. Not until someone asks. Someone like you.”
Now that he mentioned it, I realized that the clients of the Funeral Committee came to us so that they could pour out the feelings that they’d been bottling up.
Once we started to untangle those feelings, little by little, we would see the emotions buried deep within their hearts—emotions that hadn’t been acknowledged, not just by others, but by the clients themselves.
People are inept at accepting pain and suffering.
They pretend to be grown-up. They pretend they’re not needy. They pretend as though they can seamlessly switch between emotions. They don’t know how else to live life.
“There are people who are in need of that somebody who will come in and track down the regret, loneliness, and insecurities they’ve long buried away,” Hozumi said.
“There are times when they need somebody like you, who can break into people’s hearts with the vigor of a warrior brandishing a huge naginata sword. ”
“Wait—is that what people think of me?”
Hozumi leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “The point is, perhaps today is that day for Iori. And if so, you should be the one who listens to him.”
Right.
Iori was the same.
Like the clients who had come to us, maybe he was hiding his true self. Maybe he was fighting through life pretending to be someone else.
“Don’t you agree, President?”
It was the first time Hozumi had called me that.
“Sorry I’m late. The forecast said there were going to be light ‘showers’ today, but it doesn’t look like this downpour rain is going to stop anytime soon.”
Iori had changed his clothes, swapping his suit for his usual shirt and cotton pants. Brushing off the drops of rain on his shoulders, he lowered himself onto the sofa. “Who is our client again?”
“Oh, umm…”
Say it. Come on. Just be your usual bold self and tell him he’s the client tonight.
But I couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come.
I lowered my gaze to find my hands trembling on my knees.
Maybe I was able to “break into people’s hearts” before because I didn’t know them that well. But Iori is different.
What if…what if Iori’s feelings do become clear, and he decides to leave Amayadori and return to his family?
Then…
Where will I go?
“Momo-chan. Let me guess—I’m your client, right?”
Glancing up, I saw him grinning his usual smooth smile.
“I knew we didn’t have any bookings today. I was just messing with you, sorry.”
Iori’s smile grew wider, trying to defuse the awkwardness in the air.
“Iori…if you don’t want to talk about it—”
“I don’t, to be honest.”
The sound of rain, which at first was a light tapping, grew louder and louder. Soon it was pelting down.
“But,” Iori continued after a beat, “if I hold on to this regret, it will continue to smolder in my heart, and life can get pretty hard when you have something like that trapped inside of you. It has been hard.”
Iori shifted his eyes to the window.
“Maybe it’s time I let the embers I’d kept going in my heart burn out.”
Following Iori’s gaze, Hozumi and I looked outside. Large drops of rain hit the concrete, making circular waves on the sidewalk over and over again.
“I didn’t want to tell anyone about it, and didn’t ever think I would. But I think now is the best time to talk, and the best people to talk to are you two.”
Iori returned his gaze from the window and turned towards Hozumi and me.
“I will talk. I want to. I want you to hear it.”
The grin had disappeared from his face.
“First of all, Shizuku isn’t my biological daughter,” Iori said in a tone that sounded as if he were confessing a crime. “But for a while I was something of a father figure to her. She’s the daughter of Koharu…the person I love.”
Biting his thin lips, Iori stared down at his palms. He seemed to be hoping that his next words would appear on the creases in his hands.
“Would you like something to drink?” I offered.
“Could you make me a coffee?”
Using Iori’s favorite dark roasted beans, I made a hot cup of coffee and brought it to the table, along with additional servings of milky iced tea. Without saying anything, Iori drank the coffee in three sips.
“Koharu and I first met—let me see…seventeen years ago.”
“That long ago?” I said in surprise. It would mean that they met when Iori was in high school. A thought crossed my mind.
“Was she your first love?”
Iori gave a tight-lipped smile, running his fingers over the handle of his cup.
“It’s kind of a complicated story,” Iori began. “I was raised by a single parent—my dad brought me up on his own. But when I was eight, he died in an accident while he was at work. Crushed by a forklift truck. After that, I went to live with my grandma.”
My throat tightened. I swallowed drily.
“But then, just before I entered middle school, Grandma started to have problems with her memory. I also became her caregiver. I think this might be why I’m so good at getting others to help me.
I learned from experience what kinds of things I needed to say in order for people to do me favors, and I needed those favors to survive.
I hardly had the time to do my homework, you know?
So I found the most efficient way of getting things done, like getting girls who liked me to take notes or do my homework for me. ”
“That’s why…”
“Yeah. I’m good at swaying people, aren’t I?”
Iori had a knack for negotiating with the people of the local shopping district. I once heard Adachi and his friends having a lively conversation about how they could never say no to Iori’s requests. Without Iori’s savvy networking skills, Amayadori may not have managed to stay afloat.
“Things were pretty bad. We were so broke. All we had was the money left over from my dad’s insurance payout and my grandma’s small pension, which was hardly enough to make ends meet.
There was so much stuff to deal with every day, I once even reached my breaking point and briefly ran away from home. ”
Iori’s tough upbringing came as a complete surprise to me.