The Translation of Love by Lynne Kutsukake

Author:Lynne Kutsukake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

27

Ever since they had delivered the letter, it was hard for Fumi to contain her impatience. She was back at school, but who could concentrate on studying when so much was happening in real life? She could barely sit still.

Her mother seemed to have an endless number of chores to keep her occupied after school and on the weekends, but whenever she could, Fumi sought to escape the confines of her home and neighborhood. The wide world was waiting, and she felt an overpowering urge to embrace it.

She was always on the lookout for junk, an activity which was by no means frivolous. Whenever she found something discarded on the street—a scrap of cloth, a cracked plate, a cushion splattered with mud—she investigated and usually picked it up to take home to her father who, ever since their bookstore had burned down, made his living collecting old newspapers and magazines for recycling. He went all over the city begging for unwanted papers, which he hauled in a makeshift wooden cart. Along the way, he often picked up other garbage. Not everything had value, of course, but Fumi had learned from him that sometimes you could be surprised. Scraps of material, for instance, might still have buttons attached or even a fancy clasp, and a cracked plate could be fixed with some glue. A few times she had been lucky to find empty tin cans, which were valuable for the metal they contained. Her father sold what he collected to a variety of dealers, most of whom gave him a pittance for his troubles.

Occasionally her father met people who were desperate enough to sell their books for next to nothing. He would pile what they gave him into his cart, head for a sunny corner, and spread the books neatly on the roadside. Then he waited for customers. A book here, a book there—often he made no money at all—but it was almost like the bookstore days again. He told Fumi that nobody wanted to read the classics anymore. Penny romances and pulp magazines were the current rage. Some of the covers she’d seen were illustrated with men and women embracing, their lips almost touching, and the captions promised exciting stories of romance and love. When she’d asked if she could read them, her father had winced and said they were too contemporary for a young girl like her.

Sometimes people recognized him as the former owner of Tanaka Books. Fumi had been with him a few times when it happened. “Is it Tanaka-san? How nice to see you. You look so healthy.” But all the while the person was studying her father’s dusty clothes or staring at the wooden cart and its contents. People liked to compare. To measure how far another had fallen was to confirm how fortunate you were.

Akiko and Tomoko still made Fumi laugh with all the naughty things they said about other girls in their class—how Michiko’s father wore a toupee or how Sanae tried to straighten her bowed legs by binding them with string—but Fumi now spent most of her time with Aya.

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