Izumi looked up from her tea. “People?”
“Especially people. They shatter in the most fascinating ways. Every dent, scratch, and crack tells a story. Invisible scars hide the deepest wounds and are the most interesting.”
Izumi twisted one of her two large diamond rings around her finger, pulling on her skin. “That is a very unique point of view, Ishikawa-san.”
“Oh, it is more than a point of view. It is the very reason I run this business. This is a different kind of pawnshop, Takeda-sama. We are not in the business of trading trinkets. Diamond rings and pearl necklaces have no value here.”
—
Hana listened in on Izumi and her father from the back room. She had heard the same conversation carried on over tea more times than she could count.
But no matter how many times he said those words, her father always sounded sincere. For the most part, he told their clients the truth, regardless of how hard the truth was for them to believe. While what he shared with the clients, in her opinion, was not by any means a staggering revelation, it always took them a few moments to wrestle their eyebrows down. This was understandable. On the other side of the ramen restaurant’s door, up was up, down was down, and pawnshops such as this one did not exist. Her father’s special skill, as Takeda Izumi was about to learn, was to, in the time it took her to finish her tea, convince her to let go of everything she was brought up to believe and allow her mind to grasp what her hands could not.
Hana strode back to her desk and picked up a book from the pile on top of it. It was a dog-eared paperback whose pages clung to its spine by sheer will. A client named Ito Daisuke had pawned it that morning. She checked the item against the list in her record book and put a little tick mark when she confirmed that everything was in order. It was her favorite among the items that had found their way into the pawnshop that day.
Hana pulled out her mother’s old gold-rimmed glasses from a desk drawer. She put the glasses on, adjusted them over her nose, and, through its lenses, saw the book for what it really was: a choice that had changed the course of Ito Daisuke’s life.
Its true form was much prettier than that of a book. It had traded its pages for feathers made of wisps of light, transforming into a glowing songbird. It perched on Hana’s finger, its colors constantly shifting between blue and gold.
Once, this bird had sung brightly inside Daisuke while heworked on writing a mystery novel every night for five years, after his shift as a convenience store clerk. When he had abandoned it and deleted all his unfinished drafts two years ago, the bird dimmed, grew silent, and turned as black as coal. It pecked at his gut whenever he thought about the series of fictional Harajuku murders he was never going to solve. But now Daisuke had pawned his choice, and he was free. There were going to be times when he would feel a cold emptiness where the choice had once lived, but these would pass. He was not going to remember this choice, or this pawnshop, or the man who had persuaded him to part with a battered mystery novel. Peace of mind, Toshio had told him, was worth the price of never knowing what happened after page 254.
Hana took the glasses off and made room for Daisuke’s book on a shelf next to a set of house keys and a plane ticket torn in two. That evening, when the pawnshop closed, her father would take all the items from the shelf and store them in the vault, together with the rest of the day’s acquisitions.
—
Takeda Izumi blinked, trying to comprehend the words that hung in the air over two cracked bowls of tea. “That doesn’t make any sense. How can people pawn choices?”
“ ‘Sense’ is relative,” Toshio said. “There are things that make sense in your world that are ridiculous in mine. I have never been able to understand the purpose of televisions or telephones.”
“What do you mean by ‘your world’?”
“You come from the world outside that door. My daughter and I are from the world inside it. Whenever anyone from your side finds their way to our pawnshop, there is always a good reason for it. Our clients have choices that have become tooburdensome to carry. We take these choices off their hands so that they may return to their world lighter. Content.”
“Is this a joke?”
“I would not make jokes about such things. We do important work here.”
Izumi grabbed her bag. “I do not know what kind of game this is, but it is not amusing.”
“It is not a game, and it is not meant to be amusing. I cannot force you to stay, but I do know that no one finds the pawnshop by accident. If you had no need for our services, you would have opened that door and walked into the ramen restaurant just like all the other customers waiting in line outside.”
Izumi pulled her shoulders back and lifted her chin. “Assuming that what you are saying is true, which it is not, I still would not require your services. I do not have any regrets.”
“I apologize if I have offended you, Takeda-sama.” Toshio bowed his head. “But I have been doing this job for a very long time. I can tell when people are happy and when they are not, regardless of how well they are dressed or how bright their smile is. Happiness has little to do with what you have, and everything to do with what you do not.”
Izumi tightened her grip on her bag. “You do not know anything about me.”
“Perhaps. But what I do know is what I have learned from the collective experience of the generations of my family who have run this pawnshop. Every client who has passed through our door has insisted that they stumbled into our little establishment because they were lost. And they were right. Losing your way is oftentimes the only way to find something you did not know you were looking for.”
“I know perfectly well what I was looking for today. Ramen.”
“There are many good ramen restaurants in the city. Why were you looking for this restaurant in particular?”
“I used to live in this neighborhood when I was younger. I ate at this restaurant all the time.”
“But surely you must have had better ramen since then?”
“Yes, of course, but—”
