your dream of becoming a photographer and die like the lowlife bum you are!”
I pretended to look dejected and edged toward him with my head bowed.
“Get back to work!” he barked, and at that moment I shot my head up straight, leaving me slightly below Tajima. My intention had been to bump him on the chin, but I hadn’t moved in close enough, so instead I got his nose. There was a soft popping sound as he covered his nostrils. When the nearby customers turned toward us, he removed his hand to reveal dribbling blood.
It was all the worse that we were on the sales floor. The few Sunday customers set off quite a commotion, with someone threatening to call the police. And that was what brought the store manager’s wrath down on me, though I suppose it was also he who kept Tajima from pressing charges, knowing that it had been a private argument.
* * *
It was after ten when we left work. Looking forward to being off the next day, Yasokichi, a drinking buddy my age, and Minami-san, who had his own issues with Tajima, proposed that we head for a pub.
“Well done!” exclaimed Minami-san, as we raised our glasses. “But what did he do to so piss you off so bad?”
I gave him a rundown of what had happened.
“Nagano-kun, do you really want to be a photographer?” he asked, completely missing the point.
“You pushed the wrong button,” chimed in Yasokichi knowingly. “That’s what made him go off the rails.”
“No, I’m not that touchy . . . What pissed me off was hearing about it from Tajima . . .”
“But you even get annoyed when I mention it!” Yasokichi grumbled.
“So what are you aiming for anyway?” Minami-san asked.
“Pushing buttons,” said Yasokichi, pointing to me, “is what got him into a fight with his old man—and caused him to move out.”
“I didn’t simply ‘move out.’ I wanted to be independent, on my own. Don’t put words in my mouth!”
“Hitoshi here seems to have a propensity for rubbing people the wrong way.”
“After graduating from photography school, I looked for work but got rejected at every turn. So I wound up as a job-hopping part-timer. My old man kept bugging me about getting a ‘real’ job, and things grew increasingly tense between us. And that’s why I ended up living alone.”
“But then you became a full-timer anyway.”
“Yeah.”
“So are you back in your father’s good graces?”
I shook my head without saying anything, and the three of us fell silent for a moment.
“It’s a delicate issue and hard to explain. I don’t understand it myself.”
“I’ll come out and say it: you still want to be a photographer. So Tajima deliberately provokes you—”
“No way. I’ve given up on it all. The fact that I even had that dream still causes me a lot of pain. When I was young my father got transferred a lot, so I went from school to school without ever fitting in anywhere. My parents got worried and tried to find a hobby that might interest me, so when I entered middle school they gave me a single-lens reflex camera. Back then we were still using film.”
“What was the model?” asked Yasokichi.
“An EOS,” I replied, making no effort to hide my annoyance at the unwelcome question.
“You got an EOS when you entered middle school? Wow, some pampered rich kid you must’ve been!”
“Come on . . . I suppose being an only child I was a bit spoiled, and my parents probably felt guilty since we moved around so much. But I got into it and set up a camera club at school, and that made them happy, and my father in particular seemed proud that I put in the effort to do something I really wanted to do. But then, in my last year of high school, when I explained that instead of going to college I wanted to become a photographer, he hit the roof, saying that very few people can make a living this way, and that I ought to get a degree instead. That’s when things starting going downhill between us.”
“That must have been hard on your father too.”
“He finally caved when my mother said that if I really had my heart set on going to photography school, it might not be such a bad idea for them to fork out the money. But when I couldn’t find employment after I graduated, he lorded it over me with his told-you-so sermonizing, saying that I should have gone to a proper university after all, that it was too late now, and that I would have to make the best of it on my own. I have to admit that I’d let myself be carried away by wishful thinking, and seeing my dream shattered gave me a huge shock. I didn’t know what to do and drifted for a while doing part-time jobs. Still, those questions about getting a real job or thinking seriously about the future were a total pain in the ass, and it ticked me off when my father needled me about it.
Hitoshi, he’d say, you and I are alike in having no outstanding talent and thus we are stuck with having to follow the straight-and-narrow path of white-collardom. But you can’t let yourself be brokenhearted at disappointment. There are all sorts of other dreams you can pursue even while working for a company. For example, I could never have become an automobile designer, but I still find plenty of satisfaction in selling the cars I like.
“He would rattle on like that, but I knew he had no interest whatsoever in cars and detested being a dealer. I remember that once, when he and my mother had gotten into a row, he raged about how he was merely putting up with his job, saying that if he didn’t have a family to support, he’d give it all up and become a ceramist. Instead, he remained a mediocre cog in the sales machine, with no particular achievements to boast of. I got fed up with it all and told him to look in the mirror before starting in on me.”
As I talked, I was putting the beer away big time. I had thought I was drinking because I was in high spirits, but then I realized that my real intention was simply to get sloshed. I didn’t know what it was, but something was causing me unbearable pain.
I’m the type who falls asleep when drunk. Already my eyelids were starting to droop.
“Have you told Tajima any of this?”
“I tried hard to get along with him in the early days, and so I bravely opened up about what was weighing on me.”
“He disliked you even from the beginning.”
“It seems so.”
“Why?”
“I guess I do things that rub people the wrong way,” I said, trying to make a joke at my own expense. When I first appeared on the scene, I had been working part-time at the nearby Yoshinoya. My only source of pleasure was going to the local Megaton and fooling around with the cameras on display. I had resolved to give up on photography and had left my own cameras behind when I bolted out of my parents’ house, yet I remained interested in the latest models and would keep up by checking them out on the Internet and reading specialty magazines. And that made me realize that what I liked was not so much photographs as cameras.
I’d
