Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

A few days later, my friend Hasebo, whom I’d known since high school, asked me to organize the after-party for her upcoming wedding. At first I demurred, saying there must be someone better for the job, but she said I seemed like the one with the most spare time to plan, which was true, so I agreed. For a while my days were as busy as back when I’d had my office job, and before I knew it the rainy season had given way to high summer.

“Look at you go,” my husband would say every time he noticed me rushing around with party preparations in the blazing heat. “I can’t believe you said yes. I wouldn’t do it if you paid me.”

“What else could I do? It’s Hasebo,” I said, feeling offended. He’d obviously forgotten how much she had done for us at our wedding.

“Hasebo—she was married before, right, already has kids? Then what difference does it make? Why are they even bothering with a wedding?”

“That’s why they’re doing the reception with family only, and all their friends are invited to the after-party,” I said, recalling how I’d taken charge of most of the preparations for our wedding too.

“Make sure you get her to pay you, if it turns out to be too much work,” he said, and without waiting for a response to this piece of totally unreasonable advice, turned back to the TV.

Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couch, I had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. Even when I told him about Sansho’s toilet accidents, his only response was to pick up Zoromi from the floor and say, “Zoromi! You’re not going to cause me any extra trouble, are you? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

How was it that he could have so little compunction about always letting someone else pick up the slack? I wanted to ask, but no doubt this exotic creature would consider the question just another thing that was too much effort to deal with. How had I ended up married to a completely different species of being from me?

I’d seen Kitae in the dog run several times since our last conversation, but between being short of time and feeling hesitant, I hadn’t gone over to talk to her.

Do you really think Sansho’s going to make it in the mountains? I’d almost said this to her as we stepped out of the café when we last met. But just before I could, my lips had crumbled and instead I’d said, “I’ll try the neapolitan next time,” and on that irrelevant note we’d gone our separate ways. I resolved to ask her the next time we talked, but at the same time I also expected I wouldn’t be able to, and those two feelings had hung suspended in the air ever since.

I was on my way back from a big stationery store in Shinjuku where I’d acquired supplies of construction paper and self-adhesive vinyl sheets for the after-party when I remembered that the dental clinic where Hakone worked was nearby. I decided to drop in. I hadn’t had a chance to thank her properly for her and Senta’s help selling the refrigerator.

As I went down the steps leading to the basement floors of her office building, I saw Hakone at the reception desk and caught her eye. While I was dithering about whether to go inside or not, Hakone said something in the ear of the other receptionist and came out to me, pushing open the glass door.

“San! What brings you here?” She was probably surprised by how much shopping I had.

“I was just passing by.” I put down the stationer’s branded bags. “Thank you so much for everything with the auction. It’s quite a lot of work, isn’t it, selling things online?”

Once I’d realized that taking photos for the listing was only the beginning of a process that involved a mountain of tasks like signing up for a seller ID and answering questions from watchers, I’d ended up passing the whole business over to the two of them. When Hakone messaged me saying someone had asked when and where the refrigerator had been purchased, I took my time looking for the warranty. Then Senta called and said, “Sis, our rating goes down if we don’t respond immediately.” Apparently even a small drop in your rating meant that buyers would avoid doing business with you. I could hardly repay Hakone’s kindness in letting us use her seller ID by damaging her reputation, so I’d looked frantically for the paperwork. The whole thing had been a weight on my mind until the buyer left feedback that they’d safely received the item.

“It’s amazing that someone actually bought it for seventy thousand yen, though,” Hakone said. “When we posted our old fridge, it got zero bids. Nothing.”

“It is. Especially since I was planning to pay a waste collection company to get rid of it. Seventy thousand yen for that!”

“I’d never even heard of it, but I guess it’s a really popular foreign brand?”

“I bet it was his ex-wife who’d wanted it to begin with. He’d never go for anything so flashy himself.”

“But he sprang for it.”

“He was trying to impress her. Oh, Hakone, I think you’re being called.” The other receptionist was waving and pointing to the phone.

“I’m almost done for the day, so if you want to wait a few minutes, I can leave with you.”

“Okay. Why not, while I’m here?”

I followed Hakone into the waiting room. Inside the space, which smelled like disinfectant, a woman with long hair was sitting on the bench, head lowered, looking at the floor. “We get a lot of slightly strange patients here,” Hakone had told me once, when I’d come in to get my teeth whitened.

“Strange?” I’d asked.

“Our clinic director doesn’t believe in tooth extraction, and has books and gives talks about how you shouldn’t let your dentist extract any teeth, no matter what. Because of that, we get patients from all over the country who believe their lives have been ruined by losing teeth under other doctors. Which gives it a different atmosphere from other clinics, I guess. I’d recommend going elsewhere for treatment.”

Hakone was six years younger than I was, but it had been nearly ten years since Senta had first introduced us, so I didn’t have to worry about her not feeling at ease to tell me what she really thought. She looked like a lady-in-waiting from a Doll Festival display, and I thought her creaseless eyelids were cute on her, but she seemed to have a complex about them and once seriously asked me whether I thought she should have plastic surgery. She had scaled my teeth for me when I’d come here before, even though, as far as I knew, she wasn’t a qualified dental hygienist. Without thinking too deeply about it, I’d asked about some stubborn discoloration, whereupon she’d said, “I’m sure a quick polish will get rid of that for you,” and had gone at the tooth surface with the drill. Thanks to that incident, I still had a tiny dimple on the bottom of one of my front teeth.

I sat on a bench behind the one where the other woman was, flipping through a magazine. Soon Hakone came out of the door behind the reception desk, having changed out of her uniform. When I got up, the bag with the construction paper rustled loudly, but the woman on the bench kept looking at the floor, as she’d done the whole time, and didn’t move an inch.

“He says his ex-wife’s been sending him strange garbled emails recently,” I said. We’d found a table in the seating area of the department store’s food hall. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation.

“You must be concerned,” said Hakone, sounding anything but as she took a pair of disposable chopsticks out of their packet.

“Maybe I should have gone for that one too,” I said enviously, looking into Hakone’s bento box as I took the rubber band off my own.