T’s Violet Leaf

Lunch breaks on workdays were always rather dry. Gray.
I would buy a rice ball from the convenience store, sit at my office desk, and zone out while eating.
Or I’d walk to the Chinese restaurant conveniently close by and order their lunch special.
Or I’d get a sandwich at the fast-food place where the clerk wears that cute little hat.
It was usually solved very simply — an hour so gray and insignificant that it could hardly be called a meal.

Today, instead of food, I wanted a cigarette. So I walked to the shared smoking area near the station.
And there, I was swept up in a kind of impulse —
the same impulse that made me order that huge bowl of salad yesterday
at the brunch café where women with big rolling suitcases come to eat.

After payday, I become bold in my spending.
Having money offers the most effortless escape from ordinary life.
If I don’t learn to restrain myself from the urges that money brings,
I’ll end up returning to that nightmarish frozen-food routine from a few weeks ago.
So I pulled myself together, paid a reasonable amount at a food truck, and bought a lunch box.

Lunch boxes have their own virtue: they make you look for a place to sit —
to stare into space or read a book.

But in a district crowded with luxury hotels and men in immaculate tailored suits rushing past,
a place to sit and rest is rare.
One could even say cafés were invented as substitutes for chairs.
Modern people pay to rest, and they do it at cafés.
(I’m heavily biased when it comes to coffee, so I don’t hold that against anyone.
I only wish coffee vending machines would return, so even with little money
one could still buy a cheap, hot cup.
Where have all the coffee vending machines gone?)

Since I had overslept this morning and missed my coffee,
I was in an agitated, restless state.
So I bought a convenience-store coffee, not forgetting the cream,

and headed for the bench behind the office

— the one belonging to a company whose name I’ve never learned.

There, my colleague T was eating her lunch.
T has a special talent: she makes her conversational partner feel at ease,
and yet the topics never run dry.
I sat beside her, and we chatted about how dull our weekday lunch menus were, always the same.

I learned that the book she has been reading for a year is 1Q84,
and that her Japanese mother is not a big fan of Haruki Murakami,
so T reads his novels only in English.

What struck me most was that her book had been cut in half.
Not metaphorically — literally. She had sliced it with a knife and carries the halves separately.
In her own way, she divided the first half and the latter half of the story,
determined to finally finish a book she had long struggled to get through.

On the back of the book, she had lined with a violet leaf,
and the cut edges were wrapped with tape of the same shade.

For the first time in a while, I was moved by a thing.
There is something strangely sacred about cutting a book in half.
And when such sacredness meets the smallness of everyday life, it resonates —
like stumbling upon a coffee vending machine in a back alley you always walk past.

Between an exquisitely crafted paper knife and an old-fashioned butter knife,
it’s always the butter knife that moves me — like the one in Antoine Vollon’s painting.

The transparent purity of objects with a clear purpose,
black coffee with cream,
and the gray lunch hour —

There are far more colors in the world than we think we know.
Some of them don’t appear as colors at all at first —
they arrive as a whisper, a small tremor at the random lunchtime.

The world, which pretends to be made of routine,
sometimes reveals a corner of its violet leaf, asking without words:
Are you awake?