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  Masako began passing the containers to Yoshie with a practised hand. A perfect square of rice emerged from the mouth of the rice dispenser and flopped into the container that Yoshie held beneath it. She then quickly weighed each portion on the scale next to her and sent it on down the line with a flourish.

  Beyond Yoshie was a long line of workers: one to even out the rice, one to add the curry sauce, one to slice the deep-fried chicken, another to lay it on top of the curry. Then someone to measure out the pickles into their cup, someone to add the plastic lid, someone to tape on a spoon, and finally someone to place the seal on the box. Each meal made its way down the line, assembled in so many small increments, until at last a curry lunch was complete.

  This was the way the shift always began. Masako glanced around at the clock on the wall. Barely five after twelve. Still five and a half hours of standing on the cold concrete floor. They had to take turns going to the bathroom, one at a time, with a replacement filling in on the line. You had to announce that you wanted to go and then wait your turn, which sometimes took as long as two hours in coming. They'd discovered long ago that to make the job as bearable as possible meant not only looking out for themselves but also working together as a team. This was the secret to lasting at a place like this without ruining your health.

  About an hour into the shift, they began to hear sounds of distress from the new woman. Almost immediately, efficiency began dropping on the line and they had to cut the pace. Masako noticed that Yayoi, trying to help out, had begun reaching across to take some of the newcomer's boxes, though today she'd seemed hardly able to handle her own. The veterans on the line all knew that smoothing the rice was a particularly tough job since it had cooled into a hard lump by the time it left the machine. It took a good deal of strength in the wrists and fingers to flatten the little squares of cold, compact rice in the few seconds the box was in front of you, and the half-stooping position made it hard on the back. After about an hour of this, pain would be shooting from your spine through your shoulders, and it became difficult to lift your arms. Which was precisely why the work was often left to unsuspecting beginners - though at the moment, Yayoi, who was anything but a beginner, was hard at work at the station, with a sullen but resigned look on her face.

  At last they were finished with the twelve hundred curry lunches. The women on the line cleaned the conveyor and quickly moved to another station for their next assignment: two thousand special 'Lunch of Champions' boxes. The 'Lunch of Champions' had more components than the curry lunches, so the line was longer, filled out by a number of Brazilians.

  Yoshie and Masako, as usual, took the rice spots. Kuniko, who was always quick to size up the situation, was saving the easiest job of saucing the fried pork for Yayoi. You took two pieces of pork, one in each hand, dipped them in the sauce, and then placed them in the box, sauced sides together. It was a good station, a bit shielded from the frenzy of the line, something even Yayoi could manage. Masako relaxed a bit and focused on her work.

  But just as they had finished with this assignment and were starting to clean up the line, there was an enormous crash as something heavy was knocked over, and everyone turned to look. Yayoi had stumbled against the cauldron full of sauce and fallen flat on her back. The heavy metal lid clattered away, rolling off toward the next conveyor belt, while a sea of viscous brown sauce spread out around them. The floor of the factory was always slick with spattered grease and food, but the workers were all used to the slippery conditions and this sort of accident almost never happened.

  'What the hell are you doing?!' Nakayama yelled, descending on them, his face pale with anger. 'How could you have spilt all this?!'

  'I'm sorry,' said Yayoi as some men with mops came running up, 'I slipped.' She made no move to get up, seeming almost stunned as she sat in the pool of sauce.

  'Come on,' said Masako, bending over her. 'You're getting soaked.' As she helped her to her feet, she caught a glimpse of a large, dark bruise on Yayoi's stomach where the shirt of her uniform was pushed up. Was this the reason she seemed so distracted? The contusion was unmistakable on her white stomach, like a mark of Cain. Masako clicked her tongue disapprovingly, but hurried to straighten Yayoi's uniform to hide the bruise from view. There were no spare uniforms to be had, so after a few moments to collect herself, Yayoi was forced to continue work with her back and sleeves covered in sauce. The thick liquid quickly congealed to a brown crust that didn't soak through the cloth, though the smell was overwhelming.

  -

  Five-thirty a.m. No overtime today, so the workers made their way back to the second floor. After they had changed into their street clothes, the four women usually bought drinks from the vending machines in the lounge and sat chatting for twenty minutes or so before they headed home.

  'You weren't yourself today,' said Yoshie, turning to Yayoi. 'You okay?' Age and fatigue showed on Yoshie's face, made plain by the hard night's work. Yayoi took a sip of coffee from her paper cup and thought a moment before answering.

  'I had a fight with my husband yesterday,' she said. 'Nothing special about that, is there?' laughed Yoshie, glancing over at Kuniko with a conspiratorial look. Kuniko's eyes narrowed as she slipped a thin menthol cigarette into her mouth.

  'You and Kenji get along, don't you?' she asked in a noncommittal tone. 'He takes the kids out all the time, I thought you said.'

  'Not recently,' Yayoi muttered. Masako said nothing but studied Yayoi's face. Once you sat down and held still for a few minutes, the fatigue seemed to work its way through your whole body.

  'Life's long, and there are going to be times like this, highs and lows.' Yoshie, who was herself a widow, seemed anxious to dismiss the whole discussion with a platitude, but Yayoi's tone turned harsh.

  'But he's used up all our savings,' she spat out. The others fell silent, startled by this sudden admission.

  Masako had lit a cigarette, and as she took a drag she broke the silence. 'What did he use it on?'

  'Gambling,' said Yayoi. 'I think he plays baccarat or something.'

  'But I thought your husband was a pretty reliable guy. Why would he get mixed up in gambling?' Yoshie seemed amazed.

  'Don't ask me,' Yayoi sighed, shaking her head. 'I think there's some place he goes to play, but I don't know much about it.'

  'How much did you have?' Kuniko asked, unable to conceal her curiosity.

  'About five million,' Yayoi said, her voice fading to a whisper. Kuniko gulped and for a moment looked almost jealous.

  'That's terrible,' she muttered.

  'And last night he hit me.' Showing the anger Masako had seen earlier, Yayoi lifted her T-shirt and displayed the bruise. Yoshie and Kuniko exchanged glances.

  'But I bet he's feeling sorry now,' said Yoshie in a conciliatory tone. 'My husband and I used to fight all the time, and he was a brute. But yours isn't like that, is he?'

  'I don't know any more,' Yayoi said, rubbing her stomach.

  -

  It was already light outside. The day seemed to be shaping up like the one before it, hot and humid. Yoshie and Yayoi, who commuted on bicycle, said goodbye in front of the factory as Masako and Kuniko headed for the parking lot.

  'Not much of a rainy season this year,' Masako said as they walked.

  'We'll probably have a water shortage,' said Kuniko, looking up at the leaden sky. Her face was covered with grease from the night's work.

  'If things keep up like this,' said Masako.

  'What do you think Yayoi's going to do?' Kuniko asked, breaking into a yawn. Masako shrugged. 'If it were me, I'd divorce him. Nobody would ask any questions, not after he used up all the savings.'

  'I suppose so,' Masako murmured, but it occurred to her that Yayoi's children were still small, so it wasn't as simple as Kuniko made it sound. They were all heading home, but maybe it wasn't just Masako who wasn't sure where home was. They walked on to the parking lot in silence.

  'Goodnight,' Kuniko said as she opened the door of her car.


  'Night,' Masako answered, never quite sure it sounded right in the morning. Fatigue overtook her as she flopped down into the car, shielding her eyes from the morning glare.

  2

  Kuniko turned the key of her Golf and the roar of the engine echoed comfortingly through the parking lot. Nice to have a reliable car in a place like this, though last year she had spent more than two hundred thousand on repairs.

  'See you then,' Masako said, waving quickly as she put her own car in gear and pulled out of the lot. Though she had more experience than the rest of them and they tended to rely on her, she struck Kuniko as a bit cold. Kuniko bowed slightly and watched her go. The two of them were very different, and she found herself feeling relieved when Masako was out of sight. In general, when she said goodbye to her friends at the factory, it was as if a heavy veil fell away, letting the real Kuniko show through.

  Masako had stopped at the light just outside the parking lot. As Kuniko stared across the lot at the back of her scratched and dented Corolla, she wondered how she could put up with such an old car. The dilapidated state of the red paintwork suggested the car had already been driven well over a hundred thousand kilometres - and the bumper stickers promoting safe driving were really too tacky. She drove a second-hand car herself, but precisely because it was secondhand, she made sure it was nice-looKing. If not, then why not go get a loan and buy a new one? Masako wasn't bad-looking for her age and she had a certain style, ftut she should think a bit more about the impression she made.

  Kuniko popped one of her husband's cassettes into the stereo and a shrill female voice filled the car with a cloying pop tune. Beginning to feel the heat, she ejected the tape. At the best of times, she wasn't really interested in music anyway. She had only put it in to mark her liberation from the night's work and to test the gadgets in her car. Adjusting the vents on the air-conditioner in her direction, she put down the top of the convertible, watching as it slowly withdrew like a snake shedding its skin. She loved this kind of moment when something ordinary could be made to seem dramatic and exciting. If only her whole life could be that way.

  Still, she thought, going back to Masako, why do you suppose she always wears jeans and her son's old shirts? Come winter, she added a sweatshirt or some ratty sweater, over which - worse yet she'd throw on an old down jacket with patches of tape to keep the feathers from spewing out. That was really too much. It made her look like one of those scrawny trees at Christmas: her skinny shape, the slightly dark skin, the piercing eyes, the thin lips and narrow nose - no excess anywhere. If she would only use a little make-up and wear something expensive, more like Kuniko's own clothes, she'd look five years younger and quite attractive, it really was a shame. Kuniko's feelings toward the woman were complicated, part envy and part antipathy.

  But the real point, she thought, is that I'm ugly. Ugly and fat. Peering into the rear-view mirror, she felt that wave of hopelessness which always swept over her. Her face was broad and jowly, but the eyes that peered back at her were tiny. Her nose was wide and sloping, but her mouth was small and pouty. Everything's mismatched, she thought, and it all looks hideous after a long night shift. She pulled a sheet of facial paper from her Prada make-up pouch and patted around the shiny areas!

  She knew how things worked. A woman who wasn't attractive could not expect to get a high-paying job. Why else would she be working the night shift in a factory like this? But the stress of the job made her eat more. And the more she ate, the fatter she got. Suddenly feeling furious with everyone and everything, she jammed the car in gear, released the brake, and stomped on the gas. She checked the mirror as the Golf shot out of the parking lot, delighted at the little cloud of dust she left behind.

  She turned on to the Shin-Oume Expressway and drove toward the city for a few minutes before turning right in the direction of Kunitachi. Beyond the pear orchards on the left, a tight cluster of old apartment blocks came into view. The place Kuniko called home.

  She hated living there, truly hated it. But at the end of the day, given what she and Tetsuya, her live-in partner, earned, it was all they could afford. She wished suddenly that she were a different woman, living a different life, in a different place, with a different man. 'Different', of course, meant several rungs up the ladder. These rungs on the ladder were everything to Kuniko, and only occasionally did she wonder if there was something wrong with her incessant daydreams about this 'different' life.

  She pulled the Golf into her designated space in the parking lot. The other cars were all sub-compacts, all domestic. Feeling particularly pleased with her own imported model, she closed the door with a loud slam. Serves them right if it wakes somebody. Still, if one of the neighbours started shouting, she knew she'd be forced to offer an apology. For the time being, she had to make do here as best she could. She rode up to the fifth floor in the graffiticovered elevator and then picked her way down the passage strewn with tricycles and Styrofoam boxes to her own apartment. As she unlocked the door and let herself into the darkened room, she could hear a harsh snore, like the sound of an animal sleeping in there; but she was so used to the sound, she barely noticed it. She pulled the morning paper from the mailbox and put it on the dining-room table they'd bought on credit. Other than the TV listings, she never read the paper. It seemed a waste and she'd often thought of cancelling the subscription, but she did need the classifieds. She extracted the 'Help Wanted, Female' pages from the reams of real estate ads and set them aside, intending to look through them carefully later on.

  The room was warm and humid. She turned on the airconditioner and opened the refrigerator. She could never get to sleep, as hungry as she was, but there was nothing to eat. She'd bought potato salad and rice balls at the supermarket last night, but they were nowhere to be seen. No doubt Tetsuya had eaten them without giving it a second thought. Angry now, Kuniko yanked at the tab on a can of beer. Opening a bag of snack cakes, she turned on the television, changed the channel to a morning talk show, and sat back to listen to the celebrity gossip while she waited for the beer to take effect.

  Tur n it down!' Tetsuya yelled almost instantly from the bedroom.

  'Why?' Kuniko answered. 'It's time for you to get up anyway.'

  'I've still got ten minutes!' he yelled again, and Kuniko felt something hit her arm. Looking down, she saw a disposable lighter that Tetsuya must have thrown. The skin on her arm was turning red. She picked up the lighter and went to stand over the bed where Tetsuya was sprawled.

  'Shithead. Do you know how tired I am?'

  'What?' he said, a look of foreboding on his face. 'I'm the one who's tired.'

  'So you think that gives you the right to throw this shit at me?' She flicked the lighter and held it near his face.

  'Cut it out!' he wailed, knocking her hand away. The lighter shot across the room, rolling along the tatami, as Kuniko gave a stinging slap to Tetsuya's hand.

  'Listen, you asshole! I've about had it... . You look at me when I'm talking to you!'

  'Fuck off,' he said. 'It's too early.'

  'Shut up, you. And I suppose you ate my salad, too.'

  'Keep it down, okay?' said Tetsuya, scowling. He was a size smaller than Kuniko and much more delicate. The year before last, when he'd finally found a regular job at a hospital, he had been forced to cut his shoulder-length hair, but it made him look even seedier. Kuniko hadn't liked it at all. The Tetsuya who had wandered the streets of Shibuya hadn't been any brighter, but at least he'd been cute. She'd worked in a video-game arcade in those days, also in Shibuya. She'd been much thinner then and able to attract a man like Tetsuya easily enough, though the credit line she'd run up decking herself out in clothes and accessories meant that she was still scrambling today.

  'You ate it,' she said. 'Admit it and apologise.' Without warning, she jumped on top of him, using her weight to hold him down.

  'I told you to stop it!' he shrieked.

  'Admit it and I'll let you go.'

  'Okay, I ate it. I'm sor
ry. But there wasn't anything else when I got home.'

  'So why didn't you get something yourself?'

  'I know, I know,' he pleaded. He twisted his head away as Kuniko slipped her hand between his legs, but he was still soft.

  'So, not even a morning hard-on now?' she taunted.

  'Get off me! Get off You're heavy - do you know how much you weigh?'

  'How dare you!' Kuniko shrieked, wrapping her thighs around his thin neck. Tetsuya tried to cry out, to apologise, but no sound emerged. She grunted and at last rolled off him. Their sex life of late had been nothing but disappointments. Though he was younger than she was, he was all but useless. As she stalked back to the other room, she could see him slowly sitting up.

  'Now I'm going to be late,' he moaned. She ignored him and lit a cigarette as he emerged from the bedroom in a T-shirt and gaudy boxers, rubbing his throat. He took a cigarette from her pack of menthols on the kitchen table.

  'Those are mine,' she said. 'Leave them alone.'

  'I only want one,' he muttered.

  'Fine, that'll be twenty yen,' she said, sticking out her hand. Tetsuya let out a sigh, knowing from her tone that she wasn't joking. Keeping one eye on him, Kuniko went back to watching TV. Fifteen minutes later, he left for work without a word, and Kuniko lay down on the bed, fitting her larger form into the narrow depression he had left.

  -

  It was nearly two o'clock when she woke up. Turning on the television, she had a cigarette and watched the talk shows as she waited for her body to come to life. The afternoon shows were almost indistinguishable from the morning ones she'd watched before going to bed, but she didn't care. She was hungry, so she went out to buy something without even washing her face. Near the entrance to the apartment complex was a convenience store that happened to sell her factory's boxed lunches. She picked up a 'Lunch of Champions' and checked the label: 'Miyoshi Foods, Higashi Yamato Factory, shipped at 7.00 a.m.' No doubt about it, it had come off their line. She'd had one of the easiest jobs, putting in the scrambled egg, and still Nakayama had yelled at her to cut down on the portion. He really was an asshole. She'd like to scramble him one of these days. But last night's shift had been an unusually easy one. As long as she stuck close to Yoshie and Masako, she could have her pick of the cushy jobs. She chuckled softly.