Miracle Apples

Chapter 20

Kimura started doing part-time work from about this time. He felt the orchards were showing signs of improvement, but the family finances remained in dire straits. Their circumstance worsened by the day. Unless he found work and earned some cash, they would find themselves on the breadline.

The main reason he finally started casual work, though, was a matter of pride. Having made an awful mess in the apple orchards, going to work would have been sending out a message admitting defeat. It would have been painful for him to have others think he’d taken on part-time work because he couldn’t make a living out of apples. People had always gone to do seasonal work in the cities, so there was no stigma attached to that, but doing casual work locally was something he couldn’t bring himself to do. Kimura was more deeply hurt by criticism and gossip than he imagined. Whatever anyone else said, he was an apple farmer. He could live by apples alone. He was hardly the type to do part-time work. Or so he’d always thought.

Since climbing Mount Iwaki and finding the answer, this peculiar sense of pride had vanished entirely. If feelings of pride arise in response to the way in which others see us, then he’d become oblivious to what others thought of him. He was prepared to do anything to have the apple trees bear fruit. Since returning from Mount Iwaki, he’d stopped sitting on the apple boxes in the middle of the night. There was a vast amount to be done before there would be an apple crop, but he no longer worried about what needed to be done. When work in the orchards finished, he now slept at nights.

He thought he’d do part-time work at nights. But finding a job in a rural town is by no means easy.

The first place he worked at was a pachinko [1] parlour in Hirosaki. It was the first time the earnest Kimura had been into a pachinko parlour in his life. He’d never even seen a pachinko machine. It was daring. The primary task of staff in a pachinko parlour is to respond to complaints from clients. Balls get stuck between the pins, balls go into a pocket but the balls you’ve won don’t come out, balls aren’t coming out of the machine in the first place … Complaints are non-stop. The key to the business is dealing quickly and appropriately with problems, and keeping the customers happy. It’s all down to the staff.

If the complaint is justified, and there is something wrong with the pachinko machine, they have to deal with the problem promptly and, without a fuss, make up for any loss the customer has suffered whilst ensuring the parlour doesn’t end up out of pocket. Even if a complaint is spurious, you must be able to deal sensitively but firmly enough with the customer so as not to annoy them.

It was all too much for Kimura. He’d didn’t know what to do when called over by customers, and instead of appeasing them would often end up rubbing them up the wrong way. His long-suffering boss let him have an old pachinko machine that was going for scrap. He told him he wanted to practice on it at home. He ended up learning how a pachinko machine worked, but showed no signs of improvement as an employee. He may have been able to understand apple trees, but the customers’ feelings were beyond him.

Given the boot after eight months, the next place Kimura found work was in a downtown cabaret. He started cleaning the toilets part-time. When the place closed down for the night, he’d go from bar to bar cleaning toilets, earning five hundred or a thousand yen.

It was a tough job, but he stuck at it so that at least he could buy things for his family. One night a cabaret manager asked him if he’d be interested in working in the club. When there were few customers, he’d try and attract them into the club, and when it was busy, he’d act as a waiter. Cabarets were an unfamiliar world. He didn’t know that you used different glasses for whisky on the rocks and whisky with water, and didn’t even understand the slang used by staff. Yet he somehow managed to bumble through each day and the customers indulged him.