Sweet Rain, Digital Wind: The Reversal of a Hundred-Year-Old Wagashi Shop - Overnight Bus Passengers and the Dawn of Zero Likes

Every time the bus swayed, the smartphone screen burned itself into the back of her eyelids. 28,000 yen take-home. Her final pay stub. Below it, the notification of acceptance for her resignation from Vortex Digital. Kaoru set the screen face-down. Resting it on her lap, she looked out the window. The darkness of the Meishin Expressway was uniform, and occasionally the late-night road lights flowed past before disappearing again. Six and a half hours from Tokyo to Kyoto on a night bus. Not knowing how to spend that time, Kaoru had kept staring at the small screen the whole way. (What am I throwing away, and where am I heading?) No answer came. SNS management was all about numbers. Follower count, impressions, engagement rate. Kaoru's accounts combined held over 100,000 followers and averaged 200 likes per post. When the numbers went up, her boss praised her. When they dropped, she analyzed the cause and implemented countermeasures. It was a simple, comprehensible world. Then came the call about her grandmother Hana's hospitalization. A mild stroke, her father said flatly. Few aftereffects, but she was ninety. There was no telling what might happen. Kaoru hung up, thought for thirty seconds, and told her boss she was resigning. She was surprised at how little hesitation she felt. The bus's vibration lulled her toward sleep. Kaoru closed her eyes. ✦ She stepped off at the Shijo-Kiyamachi bus stop at five in the morning. The April air in Kyoto was cold, and the sound of the Takase River spread thinly across the entire street. Kiyamachi-dori was empty of people, with only the signs of restaurants still lit and abandoned. Kaoru stopped. Tsukinosuke was there. A small machiya townhouse with a frontage of about two and a half ken. A gold-lettered sign peeling from rain and sunlight. The frayed edge of a noren curtain with only the warp threads remaining. The shop where her grandfather had shown her new wagashi every summer she visited as a child now wore this face. Without slowing her pace, but feeling something in her heart grow slightly heavier, Kaoru reached for the sliding door. It creaked on its hinges. Inside, the smell of dust. Faintly, the scent of something sweet lingered. Two empty glass display cases in the six-tsubo sales floor. A wooden counter beside them. Several photographs hung on the wall, black-and-white and color mixed together. Photos from the shop's heyday—overflowing customers, her grandfather's smile, arranged wagashi—were cruelly vivid when placed beside the current emptiness. The wall clock had stopped. Its hands pointed to 3:17 PM. (When did it stop?) Kaoru looked at the counter surface. Among the dust lay a white envelope. The address read "Tsukinosuke Seitaro." The sender: "Orimori Kimono Shop, Orimori Zenemon"—the landlord, her grandfather's neighbor to the south. Kaoru picked up the envelope and opened it. Total unpaid rent: 600,000 yen. Grace period: end of August. After reading it, Kaoru carefully folded the paper again. In half, then once more, and placed it in the counter drawer. She closed the drawer quietly. A small gesture necessary to keep from falling apart. (End of August. It's April now. Four months.) Or perhaps only four months. Kaoru rolled up her cardigan sleeves and put her smartphone in an apron pocket. First, cleaning. ✦ Making this shop "aesthetic" was far harder than she'd thought. In three and a half years at Vortex Digital, Kaoru had photographed glass-fronted office building entrances, sophisticated cafes in Minato Ward, pop-up stores in Shibuya. Spaces she knew how to shoot. Clean, organized, light falling exactly as calculated. Tsukinosuke was none of those things. Dust the shelves, and the glass case cloudiness becomes obvious. Polish the cloudiness, and the distortion in the old glass makes the reflections look wrong. Change the angle to avoid reflections, and the column's tilt enters the frame. Crop out the tilt, and the faded color of the noren curtain starts bothering you. "…" Kaoru sat down on the floor. She opened her smartphone's camera roll. Twenty-seven rejected shots. A person who'd managed SNS for an IT company, who'd grown an account to over 100,000 followers, couldn't take a single decent photo of her grandfather's shop. Objectively speaking, the situation was absurd. Whether it was funny—it wasn't. But it wasn't unfunny either. It was both and neither, a strange sensation sitting in Kaoru's chest. (The "charm" of an old shop becomes "just dirt" the moment you try to photograph it.) Kaoru took the twenty-eighth shot. Still rejected. ✦ She went upstairs. Opening the workshop door, the air—saturated with the smell of wood and sweet bean paste—welcomed her. A steamer, an anko-kneading table, a commercial refrigerator. Wooden molds lined the entire wall of shelves. Kaoru approached the shelves. Each mold was numbered. One through forty-eight, in order. Cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums, rabbits, autumn leaves, camellias. All small, with precise carving. These were for oshimono—the technique of pressing wagashi into wooden molds to shape dry confections. She'd heard about it from her grandfather. Some molds had been passed down since the late Edo period. Kaoru picked up mold number one. A cherry blossom. Heavy. A completely different density from a smartphone, settling in her palm. The wood's surface was darkened from use, worn smooth only where fingers had gripped it for decades. Seventy-five years of her ninety-year-old grandfather gripping the same spot. (…Is my SNS marketing even in the same dimension as this?) The question scattered like mist before it could fully form. Maybe she was afraid of the answer. Maybe she judged it wasn't time for one yet. Kaoru herself didn't know. She returned the mold gently. She turned off the workshop light. As she descended the stairs, she noticed the sound of the Takase River entering through the window. ✦ Her grandparents were due back in the afternoon. That was all the time she had. Kaoru sat on the raised platform behind the counter and opened her smartphone. First, she created an Instagram account. Her fingers moved across the username field. "tsuki_no_suke_kyoto" She rewrote the bio many times. "A 110-year-old traditional wagashi shop in Kyoto. I want to share my grandfather's handwork"—deleted. Too long. "Founded 1914. Seasonal fresh wagashi delivered"—deleted. Same as every other shop. "Kyoto, Kiyamachi. A 110-year-old wagashi shop"—deleted. It said nothing. She finally settled on: "Founded 1914. A wagashi shop in Kyoto's Kiyamachi." Seventeen characters. She couldn't cut more. Adding anything more felt like lying. The shop hadn't proven what it was yet. Writing anything extra felt wrong. (…My hesitation shows through.) Kaoru smiled bitterly. Still, she pressed post. The first photo was the shop's exterior with morning light streaming in. Not the twenty-eighth rejected shot, but the thirty-first retake. Technically sound composition and exposure. Hashtags: "Kyoto," "wagashi," "traditional," "machiya," "Kiyamachi"—twelve total. Her finger touched the post button. She remembered three and a half years ago. The day she'd first set up an SNS account for a client. The same kind of tension bloomed in her chest. But it was different. (Back then, if I failed, my job just ended. This time—) She pressed. Nothing appeared in the notifications. ✦ One hour later. Likes: zero. Kaoru set the phone down and wiped the glass case with a cloth. She didn't really need to, but she couldn't sit still without doing something. Two hours later. Likes: zero. Kaoru pulled out an old tea set from the back of a shelf and made tea. Green tea. Something her grandmother had left. Three hours later. Zero. Kaoru knew from SNS management basics that the first hour after posting was most critical. The window where the algorithm decided whether to expose the new post to users' feeds. Without engagement in that window, the post essentially died. As a specialist, Kaoru heard this silence clearly. She understood exactly what it meant. Six hours later. Kaoru set her smartphone face-down on the counter. She took a sip of cold tea. (In Tokyo, 200 likes per post on average. Now, the entire internet is ignoring me.) Absurd, she thought. Objectively, it was comedic. But she couldn't laugh. Couldn't cry either. Just something heavy and quiet sinking to the bottom of her chest. Outside the window, the Takase River flowed. A bird landed on a power line and flew away. ✦ As night gave way to dawn, Kaoru opened the photo she'd posted again. Technically correct. No compositional problems. Proper exposure. All necessary hashtags. But— (Something's missing.) She couldn't articulate what the "something" was. In three and a half years at Vortex Digital, Kaoru had specialized in moving numbers. Low engagement rate? Change the copy. Stalled follower growth? Adjust posting frequency. Everything could be reduced to numbers. Not now. What was missing couldn't be expressed in numbers. Analytics tools probably wouldn't find it. She didn't know what it was. Or maybe she did, but wasn't ready to admit it. Kaoru set the phone down and rested her cheek on her hand. The Takase River's sound grew slightly louder in the morning air. Light from the window began illuminating the stopped clock's face. The hands remained at 3:17 PM, unmoving. No one knew when it had stopped. (I just have to keep going.) Less a thought than a confirmation. There was no option to retreat anymore. The 28,000 yen salary, the Shibuya office, the pleasure of rising numbers—she'd left it all behind. All that remained was the unpaid rent envelope, the zero-like post, the stopped clock, and the shelf of wooden molds saturated with seventy-five years of her grandfather's handiwork. The notification came then. The follower count changed from "0" to "1." Kaoru looked at the screen twice. Someone had followed her. She didn't know who. Just a username. Still zero likes. But someone was there. This photo had reached one person somewhere in the world. Kaoru stared at the "1" for a long time. Back in Tokyo, "1" would've been rounding error. Only five-digit numbers mattered. But now this "1" had a strange weight, a strange solidity settling in her palm. Like the weight of that wooden mold. Kaoru opened the window slightly. The April morning air and the sound of the Takase River entered together.

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Episode 1

Name: Sweet Rain, Digital Wind: The Reversal of a Hundred-Year-Old Wagashi Shop
Author: Novelia

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