The Hemo Bookshop in Wudu was tucked deep in an alley. The wooden plaque above the door had been darkened by rainwater. I pushed the door open. A copper bell rang once. Tsukago followed behind me.
The bookshop was very quiet. The air held a smell of old paper and wood. The glass dome ceiling overhead was stained with a layer of water marks. Raindrops struck the glass, the sound half swallowed by the glass, the remaining half bouncing between the bookshelves.
The shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, every layer crammed with books. The gold stamping on the spines had faded. Some spines had already split, exposing the yellowed pages within.
The livestream camera automatically framed the strip of light between the bookshelves and the low table. Tsukago walked to the window and moved the nearly dead pothos off the windowsill.
Outside the window was a narrow alley, the flagstone path gleaming wet from the rain. An orange cat was curled on the windowsill, its tail swaying gently, its eyes half closed.
[chat] Bookshop
[chat] It's so quiet here
[chat] That cat is so well-behaved
[chat] Rain with a bookshop is perfect ✨
I walked along the bookshelf, my fingertips brushing across a row of spines. The books in the deepest layer were coated with a thin dust. The titles were pressed into cloth covers, the gold stamping worn down to nothing more than a faint groove.
I pulled one book out, and the entire row beside it wobbled. Before I could reach out to steady them, the row of books slid off the shelf and hit the floor one after another, covers spread open, pages folded beneath them, like a line of pushed-over dominoes.
Tsukago had just walked over. The scattered books piled up in a small heap at her feet. She looked down at the open books, then up at me.
"Sister, what you knocked over wasn't books. It was a retirement home for old literature. The gold stamping on these spines has faded into age spots."
"You're one to talk. You nearly shoved that pothos out into the alley just now." She crouched down and picked up the topmost book. It had landed cover-down on the floor. The glue in the spine had long since aged, and the pages crackled when she opened it.She used her palm to press the bent pages flat one by one, pausing halfway through.
"Someone drew lines in this book. Pencil lines, very light."
The orange cat jumped down from the windowsill, padded across the pile of books, its tail brushing across an open title page. It walked to the small door of the bookshop owner's back room and curled up on the threshold.
I crouched down and picked up the scattered books one by one. Some had landed cover-up, exposing their faded titles. Some had landed back-cover-up, the price still marked in a currency from the 1980s.I stacked them neatly on the lowest shelf, not sliding them back into their original places.
Tsukago still held the book with the penciled lines. She turned it to the title page. Someone had written a line there in pencil, just as light as the underlining.
She did not read it aloud, just closed the book and placed it on top of the stack.
The bookshop owner came out from the back room. He wore a dark gray cardigan, his hair gray-white, a cup of steaming tea in his hand. He glanced at us, then at the empty space on the shelf, and turned the desk lamp on the counter up a little brighter.
"That row of books has been waiting to fall for a long time. The glue dried out years ago. When no one touches them, they stand. When someone touches them, they lie down.
You didn't knock them over. They knocked themselves over."
Tsukago picked the book with the pencil lines off the top of the stack and placed it on the edge of the counter. She nudged it toward the owner's hand until the corner of the book was perfectly aligned with the edge of the counter.
．Then she pulled a poetry collection from a nearby shelf and flipped through it. She stopped in the middle and read two lines aloud softly, her voice half covered by the rain. I only caught two words: riverbank.
[chat] Sister just knocked over the books
[chat] What book is that
[chat] Daughter is so quiet
[chat] The rain sounds so nice ✨
The orange cat's tail suddenly stopped swaying. Its ears pricked up. It rose from the threshold, its tail standing straight as a line, and turned its head toward the narrow alley outside the window.
The rain curtain hung like a gray-white sheet of cloth beyond the glass. The wall across the alley was covered in ivy, its leaves trembling under the rain. There was no one in the alley. Only rainwater poured down the drainpipe, splashing onto the iron grate of the sewer.
——Some things aren't absent.They just turned a corner right before you looked.
The orange cat stared for a while longer, then slowly lowered its tail and curled back onto the threshold. Its tail began to sway again, its eyes half closed, as if nothing had happened.
Tsukago walked to the window and glanced into the alley. She didn't ask what the cat had been looking at. She just reached out and stroked the cat's ears. The cat did not open its eyes. A low rumble came from its throat.
She slid the poetry collection back onto the shelf, turned around, and leaned against the windowsill. "A bookshop is a good place. Every book is a person standing on a page, talking. When they're done talking, they stand there and wait for decades, waiting for the next person to open them. Some books wait their whole lives, until their spines split, still waiting."
"And that poetry collection you just opened. How many years has it been waiting." She thought for a moment. "The title page says 1983. This girl wasn't even born yet. It was already waiting."
Outside, the rain let up a little. The water stains on the glass dome slowed their movement, and the patches of light swayed gently between the bookshelves.
Tsukago walked over to the counter and looked down at the old book lying open. The page showed a woodcut print of a river running through a small town. There was a bridge over the river, and on the bridge, someone holding an umbrella.She looked at it for a long time, then lifted her head and looked at the owner.
"Does this river still exist." "It does. But the bridge was torn down. The person with the umbrella is probably gone too. But the book is still here."
Tsukago nodded and didn't ask anything else. She pulled a pencil from the pen holder beside the counter, wrote a line on a sticky note, folded it into a small square, and tucked it into her pocket.
The rain stopped. The water stains on the glass dome no longer flowed. The patches of light settled into place, spreading a quiet glow between the bookshelves. The orange cat jumped down from the threshold, stretched, and walked over to rub against the leg of the low table.
Tsukago gathered her things from the low table. The copper bell rang once, and the door closed behind us. The light inside the bookshop shrank back between the shelves. The orange cat jumped back onto the windowsill, its tail swaying gently.
The flagstone path in the narrow alley had been washed clean by the rain, gleaming with a gray-blue light. The ivy leaves still held droplets of water. The light at the mouth of the alley cut tiny, tiny rainbows onto the droplets.
Tsukago walked beside me, her pace a few beats slower than when we'd entered. The corner of the note in her pocket poked out slightly. The pencil marks showed faintly through the back of the paper, but I couldn't make out what she'd written.