“Of course not!”
“But as an invitation to someone who came all the way here to bring you your homework, it’s not bad.”
It was a slick response. She moved over and plopped down on the stool next to Rintaro.
“I’m going to give you points for effort,” she said.
“Thanks for that.”
Rintaro barely had time to sigh with relief before Sayo continued, “I’ll have a cup of Darjeeling with plenty of sugar.”
Her upbeat voice was like the unexpected arrival of spring in the midst of winter.
The Second Labyrinth
The Mutilator of Books
Rintaro’s grandfather had always been a mysterious character.
He seemed to inhabit a slightly different reality than the one Rintaro knew. A man of few words, elusive, but not standoffish or cold. He came across as a quiet, wise old man.
He would get up at 6:00 a.m. and finish breakfast by half past. By 7:00 a.m. he would have prepared bento lunch boxes for both Rintaro and himself. Then he’d open the doors and windows to air out the shop and water the outside plants. From morning time when he saw his grandson off to school, to the early evening when Rintaro returned, he never surfaced from his ocean of secondhand books. His daily routine was regular, unchanging, like a river flowing steadily to the sea.
You would imagine this little old man had lived his whole life in that bookshop, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Rintaro’s grandfather didn’t talk about it much, but he had once held a rather important post at a university somewhere. Rintaro heard from one of the elderly customers that he’d suffered some kind of a breakdown. The man who confided this to him was a silver-bearded gentleman who always turned up at the shop dressed in a suit with a bolo tie. He’d drop by from time to time to purchase some thick work of literature, or occasionally foreign language books. He told Rintaro that he used to be a colleague of his grandfather’s.
“Your grandpa is a wonderful human being,” he once told Rintaro, reaching down and ruffling the boy’s hair.
That must have been when Rintaro was still in junior high school. Grandpa had been out on an errand, leaving his grandson in charge of the shop.
“He took some of the world’s most troubling problems and did everything he could to try to find a solution. He made the greatest of efforts, dedicated his whole mind to them. He did seriously brilliant work.”
The silver-haired man absentmindedly stroked the exquisite, cross-shaped design on the cover of a book as he reminisced.
“But—”
The man broke off. He sighed as he scanned the bookshelves in front of him.
“It wasn’t enough. He retired from the world stage before accomplishing his goal.”
World stage? Rintaro didn’t associate that kind of phrase with his grandfather at all.
“What was my grandpa trying to accomplish?” Rintaro asked. The old man smiled.
“Nothing exceptional. He just tried to remind people of the obvious. Not to tell lies. Never bully someone weaker than themselves. To help out those in need . . .”
Rintaro looked confused. The old man grimaced slightly.
“Because the obvious is no longer obvious in today’s world.”
He gave a deeper sigh, then continued.
“In today’s world, a lot of what should be obvious has been turned upside down. The weak are used as stepping-stones and those in need are taken advantage of. People just get caught up in this pattern. Nobody stands up and calls for it to stop.”
“But my grandfather did?” Rintaro asked.