No more yanking out her license, no more strange looks from other people.
She didn’t tell her husband about her problem. She knew he’d only decide that it meant she was
unhappy with their marriage. He was overly logical about everything. He didn’t mean any harm
by it; that was just the way he was—always theorizing. He was also quite a talker, and he didn’t
easily back down once he had started on a topic. So she kept the whole thing to herself. Still, she
thought, what her husband said—or would have said if he’d known about the problem—was off
the mark. She wasn’t dissatisfied with their marriage. Aside from her husband’s sometimes
excessive rationality, she had no complaints about him at all.
Mizuki and her husband had recently taken out a mortgage and bought a condo in a new building
in Shinagawa. Her husband, who was now thirty, worked in a lab in a pharmaceutical company.
Mizuki was twenty-six and worked at a Honda dealership, answering the phone, getting coffee for
customers, making copies, filing, and updating the customer database. Mizuki’s uncle, an
executive at Honda, had got her the position after she graduated from a women’s junior college in
Tokyo. It wasn’t the most thrilling job she could imagine, but she did have some responsibility,
and over all it wasn’t so bad. Whenever the salesmen were out she took over, and she always did
a decent job of answering the customers’ questions. She had watched the salesmen at work, and
quickly grasped the necessary technical information. She’d memorized the mileage ratings of all
the models in the showroom and could convince anyone, for instance, that the Odyssey handled
less like a minivan than like an ordinary sedan. Mizuki was a good conversationalist, and she had
a winning smile that always put customers at ease. She also knew how to subtly change tacks,
based on her reading of each customer’s personality. Unfortunately, however, she didn’t have the
authority to give discounts, to negotiate trade-ins, or to throw in free options, so, even if she had
the customer ready to sign on the dotted line, in the end she had to turn things over to one of the
salesmen, who would get the commission. The only reward she could expect was a free dinner
now and then from a salesman sharing his windfall.
Occasionally it crossed her mind that the dealership would sell more cars if it would let her do
sales. But the idea didn’t occur to anyone else. That’s the way a company operates: the sales
division is one thing, the clerical staff another, and, except in very rare cases, those boundaries are
unbreachable. But it didn’t really matter; she wasn’t ambitious and she wasn’t looking for a
career. She much preferred putting in her eight hours, nine to five, taking the vacation time she
had coming, and enjoying her time off.
At work, Mizuki continued to use her maiden name. She knew that in order to change it she’d
have to change all the data relating to her in the computer system. It was too much trouble and she
kept putting it off. She was listed as married for tax purposes, but her name was unchanged. She
knew that this wasn’t the right way to do it, but nobody at the dealership said anything about it.
So Mizuki Ozawa was still the name on her business cards and on her time card. Her husband
knew that she was still going by her maiden name at work (he called her there occasionally), but
he didn’t seem to have a problem with it. He understood that it was simply a matter of
convenience. As long as he saw the logic of what she was doing, he didn’t complain. In that
sense, he was pretty easygoing.
Mizuki began to worry that forgetting her name might be a symptom of some awful disease,
perhaps an early sign of Alzheimer’s. The world was full of unexpected, fatal diseases. She had