teachers were all there already with the exceptions of the principle and the assistant principle, who came in one after another like Pachinko balls. Pachinko is this Japanese thing like pinball except without flippers, if you don't know. Mr. Goro took me once and I won a pair of rubber testicles with a clip to attach them to your cell phone. I sent them home as a gift to my dad.
When the Principle and the assistant principle had been seated they began the morning meeting. I understood about fifteen percent of the meeting and that fifteen percent didn't have anything to do with me so I watched the dragonflies dance outside the window. They landed delicately on the see-saws and swing-sets that made up the playground, alighting for a moment and then taking off again. That playground equipment must have supported a thousand kids in its time, I thought to myself.
The meeting finished and the teachers went about their assorted morning business. The day's schedule was out and I was only on it for the afternoon periods so I helped myself to another cup coffee and stretched back in my fun-sized office chair.
An hour later I was in more or less the same pose, stretched out to my full height and reading manga, which means Japanese comic books if you don't know. This particular one was about a woman who has six husbands, each one with a different superpower. They fight over her affections and get into all sorts of mischief but when there's real trouble they all band together and use their powers to save the day. I liked that. She was always getting more husbands, too. I had heard they were going to make a movie.
During the empty class periods I was alone in the staff room save for the office lady and the assistant principle. The office lady was this little old lady who smelled like mentholated lip balm and wore the sort of glasses that librarians in movies wear. You don't usually see those kinds of glasses in real life but she had them all the same. The assistant principle was a perpetually-suited balding guy with a habit of talking himself. Not little utterances here and there; he had a full-on running commentary on whatever he happened to be doing at the time. I dreaded the day that chance would have me end up in a bathroom stall next to him. For a long time I had thought that the assistant principle's name was Kyoto, like the city or the protocol, because everybody called him that. I thought all the assistant principles in Kuroyama had that name by some weird rural coincidence. It was only later that I learned that the word means "assistant principle". His name is Noguchi, which means "The mouth of," if you didn't know. Mouth of what? I didn't know the actual principle's name and I probably never will. As far as I could tell he spent most of the school days meditating in the mountains somewhere.
So it was just the office lady and the assistant principle and I and the sound of grasshoppers. I was reading my manga (A woman shows up who claims to already be married to one of the seven husbands, and she's got her own superpowers, how's the gang gonna handle this? Bet it involves a panty shot) when the assistant principle cleared his voice and used the most English I'd ever heard from him in the two years I'd known him:
"So, Mr. Jackson, do you like Kuroyama?"
Well, like I said, the guy had never spoken a full sentence to me before so I was surprised to say the least. "Sure, I love it here," I said. "If I didn't I certainly wouldn't have stayed so long." That was more or less the truth of the matter.
The assistant principle maybe didn't catch all of that but he got enough. "Kuroyama is… difficult to live? Very small," he added.
"Sure, it's small. There can be problems, like when I got snowed into a barn that time and had to sleep with the cows or when the convenience store runs out of chuuhais. But all in all I like it here."
He blinked and said, "Very small?"
"Yeah, Kuroyama's small. But it's… quaint."
He gave me a blank look that told me he didn't know that word.
"Rustic?" No luck there, either. "Peaceful? Charming?"
"Inaka," he said, which literally means "In the stomach." It's a Japanese idiom that means, "Far away and isolated".
I settled on "Yeah, Kuroyama is inaka."
The assistant principle seemed satisfied with that and went back to whatever he had been doing, providing running commentary as he did it. I've been asked the strangest things in Japan; one time a man asked me if it was true that foreigners don't wear underpants. I went back to my manga.
The bell rang and Miss Takahashi came in. I shifted myself into something of a more respectful position and put down the manga. Miss Takahashi, the second-grade teacher, was twenty-two and just about as cute as the sheets of vibrant stickers I used to bend little kids to my will. She came up to the middle button of my jacket and weighed about as much as it did. Miss Takahashi wore glasses and kept her hair in a tight bun at school; the few times I'd seen her dressed up for a night out I'd just about joined a nunnery.
Miss Takahashi came in and I gave her my smile. She smiled back but she looked distracted, concerned. She looked concerned so I was concerned. She went to her desk straightaway and rummaged through the well-groomed drawers until the bell range again. She went back to her classroom, still looking concerned. I'd seen the lady's desk before; there's no way you could have lost anything in it, and believe me, her students had tried. I had the idea she probably had her grocery shopping planned out for the next year, she was so organized. I frowned and went back to my manga but my heart wasn't in it.
The next period Miss Takahashi was free as her kids got taken out for dodgeball by Murata, the ultra-butch maintenance guy who moonlighted as the gym teacher. She went back to her desk once again and gave it another once-over, adding her bag to the mix this time. She must have tagged and cataloged every one of the slim few motes of dust that occupied her space, and she still didn't find what she was looking for.
"Something wrong, Miss Takahashi?" I asked, all casual.
"Oh, Jackson-Sensei. Um. I'm not sure." Miss Takahashi had the best English I'd ever heard in Kuroyama and possibly anywhere. Of course she did; things would have been too simple otherwise.
"Anything I can do to help?" I got up and went to her desk, which stood across the quadrangle of the teachers' room and faced mine. I had a nice birds-eye view of her blouse but I studiously kept my eyes on her face. Miss Takahashi wasn't that kind of girl.
"It's about next week's English class," she said. "I can't find the alphabet cards."
Now, the tragedy of this school was that Miss Takahashi was a fluent speaker of English as well as an enthusiastic proponent of early language education. Her kids loved her, and like Kenta they all loved English class She was the best teacher I worked with in Kuroyama, and I only worked with her once a month at best. Our next class together was next week, when we'd be introducing the second graders to the shapes of the alphabet and a bunch of animals.
Miss Takahashi had been working on these cards for weeks, I knew. These were no ordinary flashcards; each one had a lavishly illustrated animal on it, corresponding to the letter of the alphabet. A for Ant, B for Bear, and so on. She'd even found an animal for X, the majestic Xeme (a kind of gull that lives in the Arctic, if you don't know. I didn't). Miss Takahashi was a great master in the medium of colored marker, and I knew she had put her heart and soul into those 26 cards. And now they were missing.
"You can't find them? Did you misplace them somewhere?" It sounded dumb as soon as I said it. She wouldn't have misplaced a hairpin, let alone those cards.
"I'm not sure," she said. "I must have." She ran a hand over her ear and the bun of her hair, something I'd never seen her do before. It was intriguing but I didn't have time to consider it at length like I would have liked to.
"Something wrong?" said the assistant principle, in Japanese.
"No, just discussing next week's English class," answered Miss Takahashi with a little bow.
"It's not English class, it's foreign pork chop," he said, which didn't make much sense so I had probably misunderstood it. It happens.
Miss Takahashi said "Sou desune," which means "I'm agreeing with whatever you're saying". You already kne
w that because I mentioned it earlier.
The little lady looked like she was about ready burst into tears, which I'm sure would have been extremely prim and tidy. I tried to help. "Did you bring them anywhere recently?"
"No. Yes! Yes, I brin- I brought them to Kuroyama Junior High School! I went there yesterday to observe a class of Takai-Sensei. I showed the cards to him." Takai-Sensei was the English teacher at Kuroyama JHS, a man with a lot of hair and a lot of teeth. I worked with him twice a week.
I said, "Ah. Perhaps you left them there? I could look around for them when I go there tomorrow."
"Ah! That would be fantastic!" 'Fantastic' was an English word that Miss Takahashi had a particular affection for, and she used it whenever possible. I liked that.
"I'm sure somebody found them," I said with a reassuring smile. It was possible. That wasn't what I was really thinking, though.
What I was thinking was, somebody stole the cards and I'm gonna find out who.
It was the only thing that made sense. Miss Takahashi, like I said, was more organized than the librarian of Alexandria. She would never have simply misplaced the cards. But theft? The kids at Kuroyama JHS were… well, they were teenagers, and while Kuroyama was hardly a rough town and Kuroyama JHS was hardly a rough school, some of the kids there certainly weren't winning any