Adult videos were packed wall to wall.
New releases lined the display platform. The tablet set up there played sample footage of an actress moaning in pleasure, and all around, shelves were stuffed in a jumbled, lewd mess with adult goods aimed at a wide range of customers, men and women alike. This area, cut off from the cluttered used-book corner by shelving and a noren curtain, gave off an overall dim, underground sort of vibe, while its color palette was dyed a deep pink, obscene and garishly toxic.
The shop stood in a sun-starved back alley near central Tokyo, and its name was Sagara Books.
The used-book corner, stocked with secondhand books bought up willy-nilly regardless of genre, made up eighty percent of the store; the remaining twenty percent was the adult corner, walled off by shelves and a curtain. From noon until evening, students on their way home from hanging out at the big commercial complexes would stop by, browse the used books standing up, and leave; at night, a more adult clientele quietly slipped past the curtain.
The time was 9:00 p.m. The students’ summer vacation was drawing to a close, and autumn was beginning to show its face.
A man of hefty build, who had cut his way through the slightly chilly early-autumn night, passed beyond the curtain, gathered up several men’s adult toys, and came to the register.
The inside and outside of the register counter were separated by an opaque panel, designed so that the clerk could not see the customer’s face. From a crime-prevention standpoint this wasn’t ideal, but surely not many people want their face seen when buying sexual products, so there was no helping it.
Behind that opaque panel stood the clerk: a young girl in an apron.
Most of the regulars probably assumed she was a university student working a part-time job or something. First-time customers might be a little taken aback. But in truth, she was a bit younger than that. An immature girl who didn’t fit the sordid shop at all, she was a second-year high school student, currently enrolled, attending a school a few stations away.
Her name was Mizuki Aya. She had a slightly quirky long bob worn carelessly, and a medium-height, slender build.
Slender, yes, but not delicate, her body was muscular, with every ounce of unnecessary fat ruthlessly stripped away. Her default expressionless face made her seem cold, and people often took her for unfriendly, but she displayed joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure about as much as anyone. After exchanging a few words with her, people often said she was “a little different from her first impression.”
If you asked why Aya worked at this shop, the answer was simple.
Because this shop was the used bookstore run by her biological father. In other words, helping out with the family business.
“That’ll be six items, five thousand two hundred yen. We have two kinds of bags, which would you like?”
Having finished scanning the barcodes, Aya showed the customer the samples taped to the counter, and he silently pointed at the black bag.
Sagara Books’ nighttime customers hated being spoken to. So customer-service communication was kept to the bare minimum. Aya didn’t even grunt in acknowledgment, she swiftly stuffed the goods into a black bag, stood the handles up straight, and held it out to the customer without so much as a “sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Mm,” the man said, just that, as he took the bag. He made to leave through the curtain quickly, then suddenly stopped. Aya, who had been tracking his feet below the opaque panel, raised an eyebrow and uncrossed her arms. A moment later, the male customer leaned his face toward the register and murmured.
“Um.”
“What is it?”
“Over there, “
The customer lowered his voice, so Aya lowered hers too and replied, and he pointed toward the corner of the adult section.
“There’s a young girl wandering around over there the whole time, and like this it’s kind of hard to shop.”
“Ahh…”
Aya traced the line of his finger and spotted a skirt half-hidden behind a product shelf.
A customer who’d come in ten-something minutes ago. Apparently she still hadn’t bought anything, but she wasn’t leaving either, she seemed to be sizing up the adult goods.
Even if service was kept to the bare minimum, she couldn’t exactly ignore this, so Aya chose her words carefully.
As a basic premise, as long as someone wasn’t a minor, she had no intention of picking and choosing customers. Exceptions aside, of course, people who were extremely filthy or rowdy, she didn’t discriminate by gender, and since they stocked a rich selection of adult goods for women, all the more so.
She understood what the man was getting at, but even so, she couldn’t very well scold someone for that reason.
“We also carry products for women, so we hope to be patronized by a wide variety of customers. I’m sorry, but I’d be grateful if you could understand.”
For a chain store, that reply would probably earn a complaint to head office.
But the regular male customer only muttered grudgingly, “Huh, I see,” as if he’d accepted it, and left.
Watching his back go, Aya said, “Please come again,” offering a farewell to a customer for the first time in a month, then, with her hand, visible from the blouse with its sleeves rolled up, resting on her hip, she let out a small sigh.
Then she put a hand in her apron pocket and tracked with her eyes the feet of the female customer wandering back and forth.
She had not the slightest intention of driving her out, but even so, it was a fact that the woman had been wandering alone for over ten minutes. Fortunately, there were no other customers right now. Might as well casually say something, partly for crime prevention, so Aya pulled her hand from her pocket, kicked the swing door open with her knee, and stepped out onto the shop floor.
Then, approaching from behind the woman crouched near the vibrators, inspecting the packages, she stopped just short, hesitating, her gaze darting. If she herself were the customer, and a clerk, even of the same sex, spoke to her while she was earnestly choosing a product, it would feel just awful.
But this was her job, family business or not. If a regular had said that to her, she supposed she’d do a little something.
“Excuse me, miss. If you’re having any trouble, I’d be happy to help, “
The moment Aya made her inquiry, trying to be as gentle and polite as possible so as not to agitate her, the woman’s shoulders gave a jolt, as if she’d been shocked with electricity, and she whirled around, eyes wide as if startled.
“A-ah, no, I-I’m fine! I can look on my own!”
No scent of criminality about her. So it seemed it had been a needless worry, and Aya quietly breathed a sigh of relief.
“Oh, I see. I’m sorry, you just looked troubled.”
“S-sorry. I was just, um, looking things up as I went, so sorry if I was in the way.”
The woman made her flustered excuses while her gaze wandered.
Her face was dyed red all the way to her ears, enough to make Aya feel sorry for her.
Following the flow of the conversation, Aya looked at that face for a few seconds, and then, almost without thinking, found herself staring at the woman, no, the girl’s, face. It was an unconscious observation, like catching sight of an exceptionally beautiful jewel.
She might be about the same age as Aya. She had remarkably lovely features.
Her eyes held a color like a night you could be sucked into, and her lips, which never lost their luster, looked very soft. Her glossy long hair reflected the pale pink lighting. Her height was average, about the same as Aya’s. She too was slender, but this girl gave a somewhat more delicate, fine-boned impression.
The hands peeking from her cardigan and the legs extending from her skirt were white. Maybe the indoor type.
After a while Aya came back to herself, but even a woman this beautiful buys these kinds of goods, she thought, genuinely impressed. Her voice was clear and she could hold a conversation. Her features were well-formed. She seemed like she’d never lack for company, and yet even so, she couldn’t stay free of masturbation?
Then, Aya’s visual information and her memory rubbed against each other somewhere, and she fell silent.
Aya, who rarely had the chance to face a customer in this sordid environment, hadn’t been looking directly at the woman’s face until now. But over the course of exchanging words, she gradually began to grasp the whole picture and the details bit by bit. The girl, too, holding the vibrator package, began staring hard at Aya’s face.
And then, as if to confirm something, she opened her eyes wide.
After a few seconds of silently staring at each other, suddenly, both their eyes wavered faintly.
First, the girl’s expression vanished. Then she went pale, then flushed bright red. Then pale again. A dumbfounded “Huh?” spilled from her mouth, and cold sweat began trickling down her face.
Aya, meanwhile, was speechless, expressionless. Her brain couldn’t process the information in front of her, and her thoughts ground to a halt.
Chewing over the information she’d taken in, one piece at a time, carefully, at last, in perfect timing, they said in unison:
“Mizuki-san?”
“Kayano?”
The identity of the female customer who had spent over ten minutes debating vibrators was an honor student attending the same high school as Aya: Kayano Yuki. Amid the silent staring match, the moans of the actress on the sample video kept echoing through the shop.