Day 73 "The birth"

In Tokyo it costs more to see a movie than the total price of nineteen McDonald’s cheeseburgers, back home. That’s a lot of cheeseburgers. One could feed a small village of people with that kind of beef product. But here, in this fifteen by eighteen foot ninety-nine yen grocery store on the second floor basement of a discount generic everything is gray department store, nothing costs that much. It’s eighty-seven cents for four eggs and one dollar and seventy-four cents for ten slices of bacon, thick slices of bacon, and so I am thinking this is pretty cheap for a place like Tokyo.

I’m also thinking it’s time to leave; this grocery is getting more and more cramped by the minute. Three old women with what look like lawn chairs on wheels push their way into the store. This causes a small boy and his friend to literally pop right out of the store and shuffle over to the singlewide escalator. This is kind of funny because the boys have rectangular yellow-leather backpacks emblazoned with the words “Let’s Friendly Endeavor” in the shape of two people leaping.

I try turning around to shuffle toward the register, but I can’t. A pretty young housewife has cuddled up to the pyramid of eighty-seven cent sausages to my right. She is pinching and cooing at them as if they were her own baby’s fingers, her own baby that is at this moment regurgitating a piece of what I think is a banana on the shoulder of her mother’s expensive cashmere sweater.

Since I can’t turn around, I try sliding to my left, down the aisle of vegetables, which have all been neatly cloven and individually sealed inside perfectly wrinkle free cellophane. No luck. An older gentleman in a brown sweater, a shade of brown I have never before witnessed, a color more brown than anything should ever be, has fallen to the floor, undoubtedly pushed there by seven or eight barely pubescent girls huddling around the trinket rack. I stopped through this part of the store on my way in so I know they are fussing over the colorful fruit scented erasers and miniature postcards of Japanese pop icons like Glamour Friends and Beastie Foot. They don’t seem to notice that they butted this man to the floor. I reach down without bending over to try and help him up, but he refuses my hand. He apologizes several times, quickly, and then pushes past me toward the sausages. The girls do not move as I approach.

Excuse me I say in Japanese, one of the first words I learned upon arriving here. The girls ignore me. I say it again, only louder, and one girl turns to look at me. She stares, apparently in awe and backs into her mass of friends. They all squirm and grunt a little at first, but then two more of them turn to look at me and suddenly they all fall together into the trinket rack and the whole thing collapses. One girl screams and begins to cry. The other girls roll around a bit, trying to get up. I slide past and step up to the register. The attendant looks at me, astonished.

All I have to pay for is a pear and what I think are shortbread cookies. But the attendant won’t take my coins. He shoes me away, mumbles something under his breath, and steps over to the trinket rack to stand it up again. Being unfamiliar with the customary gesture in a situation like this, I smile, bow, pocket my fruit and probable cookies, and step onto the escalator. I think everyone is watching me. I think everyone suspects I am not actually human. I think I need to avoid small, cramped stores like this in the future.

At the top of the escalator, the two boys with the yellow, “Lets Friendly Endeavor” backpacks are waiting. They too are staring straight at me, mouths open, arms akimbo; two little endeavors with their feet planted firmly on the ground.

-tinhart