The whole night passed and I still couldn't come up with the solution to the riddle. I just wasn't getting it, so I tried the puzzle on my father when I saw him at breakfast. When I explained that it had been presented to me by an American friend I'd met on the Internet, he was irate.
"After going to all the trouble of getting an expensive computer, you might at least use it for something a little more meaningful."
Amid the disapproval, though, a look of pleasure stole across his sleepy face. For a man of his years he was an unusually keen conversationalist; on our local shopping street it was common knowledge that the appliance shop man was fun to talk to.
"So, what's the answer?"
"Said he'd tell me tonight. Maybe you can think it over if you have any free time at the shop."
If he had any free time—at our appliance shop there was basically nothing but free time. The clientele had been lost to the big stores, and now the shop was surviving on orders for repairs and replacements from customers who were old friends. My father's main job was sitting at the desk and taking phone calls, and he spent most of his time watching TV or looking through magazines. He could have had more work if he'd been willing to do installation jobs contracted out by the big stores, but he scoffed at the idea of doing subcontract work for his competitors. He sometimes joked that, since he'd reached the salaryman retirement age, he was trying not to work anymore. Scott's thinking puzzle would be a good way to kill some time.
But after giving it very little thought while slurping up his miso soup, my father seemed to have hit upon a solution.
"Suppose the gun that the bar guy pulls out is a water pistol, then it makes sense, right?"
"Why does it make sense if it's a water pistol?"
"The customer orders water. He squirts water right in the guy's face. Come into a bar, don't even order a real drink, that's what you get, type of thing."
"But the customer thanked him."
"Well, the bar guy probably looked pretty ticked off. The customer with the water all over his face, he was scared, so he just said thank you and got out of there."
"Even if he was scared I don't think he'd say thank you, though."
My father had thought up a story that was characteristic of him, but I wasn't sold on it. When I said it was kind of odd that the barman conveniently had a water pistol handy, he got a little cranky.
"If you've got nothing better to do than find fault with my answer, think up one of your own. Your parents can't do everything for you, you know."
Right about then my mother got home. She works part-time early in the morning at a food factory near our house. She must have overheard us talking as she came into the living room from the front hall, and she jumped right in, taking my father's side.
"First of all, Shota, if you want to put your mind to work, use it studying and not on all that stuff. It's costing a lot of money to send you to college."
"That's right. Get the credits so you can find a job doing something respectable."
From out of nowhere I found myself on the receiving end of a lecture. My mother believed that if you just got good grades in school, the rest of your life would somehow take care of itself, while my father's standard line was that running a business on your own was a terrible struggle, so I should get a job with a big company.
As for me, I had finally been freed from the rat race of entrance exams and become a college student, and here in the second month of my first year of school I didn't feel much like thinking all the way ahead to my employment prospects. I added some tea to the rice remaining in my bowl, and, shoveling it into my mouth, finished breakfast and got out of there in a hurry.
"Okay, I'm off to do some serious studying."
I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. I didn't have any classes until the afternoon, but walking around the campus would be better than enduring a morning sermon. My mother called out from the living room.
"Are you working today? What about dinner?"
"I'll get some ramen or something somewhere—I've got the late shift."
If I worked in Akihabara until closing time I'd be getting home around ten o'clock, so I'd have to get something to eat to tide me over. I had joined something called the Ramen Appreciation Society at school, so I had plenty of information about well-known ramen shops around the city.
The place where I worked was a big appliance chain store. I think they hired me because they thought the son of an appliance shop owner would know the basics. When I told my father, though, he claimed I had gone over to the side of his competitors, and whenever the subject of my job came up he could usually be counted on to make some snide remark.
"It's not like you don't have enough to live on. Slaving away into the night for part-time wages—it's crazy."
"A lot of things cost money, like my cell-phone bill and the loan for my computer, plus I have to save up for our club trip."
When it came to these kinds of nonessentials, family policy required that I pay my own way, which is why I was working part-time, but my father's personal opinion was that "only an idiot works to get money for fun and games." For a businessman, he took a dim view of working hard to earn money; when I got accepted to the economics program at school, he just made a face. That aspect of his nature may have had something to do with the fact that his business was going downhill.
I said goodbye and left the house. I headed for the train station, passing storefronts with their aluminum shutters halfway up, as they always were. The shutter over our shop's front window stayed down because the shop didn't do any over-the-counter business anymore. There were more than a few stores on the same street that were permanently shuttered because they'd gone out of business. Nobody even called this a shopping street anymore—it was usually called Shutter Street.
On the crowded train to school, a headline on an overhead advertisement for a weekly magazine warned of corporate takeovers financed by overseas funds. I didn't know the details but they seemed to be saying that, faced with huge amounts of capital, individuals were powerless. In the end, as our languishing appliance shop and shuttered local shopping street seemed to testify, the world was apparently a place where the winners were the ones with the most capital. Maybe it was like my father said, that even if you went to work for a big corporation you were just one small cog in the profit-making machinery. Thinking about it made me feel helpless about my future.
I'm not sure if it's because I grew up with a father who shunned money-making or because I've been hearing about the collapse of the bubble economy and the bottomless recession on the news ever since I was a child, but the subject of money evokes ominous feelings in me. I entered the economics program because it was the only program that would accept me, but I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for academic work that revolved around money. The economic climate seemed to have improved over the past several years, but I couldn't help feeling that, in a world where takeover artists and stock manipulators made all the big money, the traps had been set and were waiting to be sprung.
Lately it had become fashionable for individuals to get involved in investing, and some of the older students at school played the stock market and currency markets. When I heard they made hundreds of thousands of yen I was envious, but that was nothing—there were apparently people out there making hundreds of millions. Some won and others lost, and if that's all it was about, it seemed pointless. In economics, they say capital movements invigorate economies, but in the end it seems as though it's the people who are controlled and manipulated by the money. What path was I going to follow in a world like that, I asked myself, and got no answer whatsoever.
Then I remembered Scott. If I talked to him about these things and got his take on all these smoldering doubts of mine, what kind of story would his imagination conjure up for me?
Edited by Japan Echo Inc.