A private room at Jiayang Yu’s restaurant. How quickly the explosive radiant significance of the place had faded into the background of Eiji’s microcosmos, how quickly the unworthy out-of-placeness he first felt there had disappeared. It had been replaced by the obliviousness of familiarity. He only spent idle lunches there when Minsuk couldn’t get away from work, and even then only when Kensuke or one of his other new friends invited him along, but during those weeks in Shijima this was a frequent alignment of affairs.
Fleeting cults of personality accreted around him and Kensuke in that small room, pulsing and shrinking, dissolving and reconfiguring. Other celebrities of the day. Like Kensuke had before him, Eiji came to regard these previously awe-inspiring names and the personalities that followed them with the same friendly indifference as the restaurant. The contrary, however, was not so. Even those who took for granted the power to wilfully make history had the stirring sense that they were in the presence of signifant personages during those casual small lunches that grew until the room was crowded with names that in later times would have read like a bulleted summary of that chapter in a history book. This was why they came. Some took it as spiritual inspiration, other as good afternoon entertainment, but they all felt full of that which they hungered for daily.
The group assembled this particular day was on the small side. With the exception of the poet, and certain details notwithstanding, they might have been called professional colleagues, but their relationship was not without a certain degree of something that might be called friendly intimacy.
Erimi Aoyama, the new commander of Nozomi, sat between Kensuke and Kyoichi Saitou on one side of the table, across from Eiji and Yuuhei on the other. With his duties for the day already seen to and a fair amount of weight in his thoughts, Eiji had gotten bleary-eyed with sake — less like the talkative inebriation that Kensuke was given to, though, than the crossarmed red-cheeked stare of Yuuhei Kurotou, who sat reticently burning cigarettes throughout the meal.
Though this demeanor had come to be regarded as suiting his scarred comrade, on Eiji it prompted questions, curious and then carrying a hint of concern. Dismissive during the appetizers, after the fourth round of drinks Eiji was describing the fact of Minsuk’s pregnancy and its ramifications in a quiet, shakey voice. Kensuke listened one hand gripped pensively over his mouth; Erimi furrowed her brow, bit her lip, crossed her arms. Yuuhei stared at the ceiling and smoked. Saitou sipped his shochu and chewed intermittent bites of squid. He offered no comments, no grunts or nods of listening, but the incline of his head kept one ear pointed at Eiji’s brief monologue for its duration.
Three days later, messengers representing the top Commerce Guild brass showed up at Minsuk’s restaurant discreetly after closing. Without explanation, they presented the proprietors with a package of upgrades to their commerce license, funding, and contract status, including a discount adjustment to their supplies-purchasing rights. In the course of their visit, as an aside, the Commerce Guild messengers suggested that certain exceptions and allowances could perhaps be made to the usual rules of apprenticeship, “considering Sayaka Hayashi’s condition and lack of viable options.”
And so the next morning, Minsuk discovered that she had been rescheduled to a more relaxed weekly pace (with room for adjustments if she wished to make them), as well as maternity leave when the time came, with the ability to pick up where she had left off in her apprenticeship without having to restart it completely.
Eiji, meanwhile, was suddenly cleared for a week of unexpected leave just before the first deployment of the new Reizei Units, at the same time receiving pre-cleared the documents necessary for Imperially-recognized marriage.
Neither having any living family or being particularly religious, they married in a small unadorned ceremony at an annex of the main temple in Shijima. For all the clamor around him at the luncheons, in attendance at Eiji’s wedding were only the four who had been there to hear the news of the pregnancy: Yuuhei, Kensuke Yamanoue, Kyoichi Saitou, and Erimi Aoyama. Minsuk’s side were three other commerce apprentices she had become friends with in Shijima, along with Ilwoong Kim and the trendy-haired Jaejin Cho of her old job. These latter two came from Hansilla; they had to temporarily close the café where the bride and groom had met to attend.
When the ceremony was finished, Eiji stopped them and paid his outstanding tab.
END OF CHAPTER
On to Chapter Four
