Perhaps there were other reasons, but after Yoshino moved to Fukuoka she rarely came home. Once, when Yoshio told her to come back on a Saturday, she’d flatly refused, saying she had to entertain customers. Yoshio was sure she’d at least come back for New Year’s, but just the other day his wife had informed him that Yoshino planned to take a trip to Osaka with friends from her company at the end of the year.

“ Osaka? What’s she going there for?” Yoshio growled.

His wife half expected this reaction. “Don’t yell at me. She said she and her girlfriends are going to some place called Universal Studio or something.” She strode off to the kitchen to begin making dinner for the two of them.

“Why in the world didn’t you let me know about this earlier?” Yoshio yelled at her as she shuffled away.

Pouring soy sauce into a pan, Satoko said quietly, “Yoshino’s an adult. She hardly ever gets a vacation, so when she does we should let her do what she wants.”

When Yoshio had first met his wife she’d been so pretty she could have been selected Miss Kurume, but after she’d had Yoshino she put on weight and now looked nothing like her former self.

“When did you find out about this?”

As he yelled this, the door chime at their shop rang. Clicking his tongue, Yoshio plodded out to the front. His wife hadn’t replied, but he could well imagine his daughter telling her to keep it a secret from Dad that she’d already bought a plane ticket, and Satoko replying, as if it was all too much trouble, “Okay, okay, I get it…”

In the shop stood an elementary school boy from the neighborhood, who until recently always came with his mother. The boy was as cute as one of those chubby little helmeted samurai dolls, but the back of his head was as flat as a cliff, the result, no doubt, of his mother letting him lie too long on his back as a baby.

Still, Yoshio was happy that there were still a few neighborhood children like this who came to get their hair cut. Once they got into junior or senior high, boys started to care too much about their appearance and either let their hair grow long or stopped coming to his shop, claiming that the haircuts he gave were out of style. Before he realized what was happening, local boys were making appointments in salons in Fukuoka and traveling there on weekends to get their hair styled.

The other day there’d been a meeting of the local barber and hair-salon union and when Yoshio mentioned this trend, the female owner of the Lillie Salon, who was drinking shochu, butted in. “You’re lucky you work with boys,” she said. “With girls, the ones in elementary school are already going to get their hair cut in salons in Fukuoka.”

“I remember you were pretty precocious, too, back when you were a kid,” Yoshio joked. “So you can’t just say it’s kids these days.” Yoshio and the woman were the same age, so he felt comfortable kidding her.

“Back in my day, we didn’t go to salons in Fukuoka,” the woman replied. “We stood in front of the mirror, curling iron in hand, for two or three hours, doing it ourselves.”

“The Seiko cut, I’ll bet.”

Yoshio laughed and several people sitting nearby, glasses in hand, joined the conversation. “You’re talking twenty years ago, aren’t you,” one of them said.

Yoshio was of a slightly older generation, but still he knew that Kurume had produced a phenomenally popular female singer, Seiko Matsuda. In the early 1980s, Yoshio mused, this young girl’s clear singing voice really had transformed drab Kurume into something bright and glittering again.

Yoshio had been to Tokyo himself only once, when he was young, as part of a third-rate rockabilly band, his hair slicked back with pomade. He and his bandmates took the night train to Tokyo and checked out the wide pedestrian-only streets of Harajuku.

On the first day there he was bowled over by the crowds. By the second day he was used to the masses of people, but felt a growing sense of inferiority and irritation at being from a country town, and he started picking fights with some of the kids dancing in the Harajuku streets. His rough, dialect-laden challenge didn’t faze the young Tokyoites, though, who calmly asked him to get out of the way. He remembered, too, how when they were searching for a bar written up in a guidebook, Masakatsu, their drummer, muttered a heartfelt comment: “You know, Seiko Matsuda is really something. To come from Kurume and make it here in Tokyo.” Yoshio always remembered these words. And how right after they got back home, Satoko announced that she was pregnant with Yoshino. They weren’t married yet.

Now he stood in front of his shop, which at least seemed like it was paying off; all of a sudden in the evening people came in for haircuts, one after another. The first was a man from the neighborhood who’d retired from the prefectural office the year before. With his retirement pay and pension he seemed to be well off, for he’d recently purchased three miniature dachshunds, each one of which went for ¥100,000. Whenever he went out for a walk, he’d carry the three little dogs in his arms.

Just as the man tied up his three yappy dogs outside and sat down to have his thinning hair trimmed, a junior high student, also from the neighborhood, came in. Without a word of greeting, he plopped down on the bench in the back of the shop and was soon lost in the manga magazine he’d brought with him. For a moment Yoshio considered calling in his wife to have her help out, but he would soon be finished with the dachshund owner so he told the sullen boy, “I’ll be finished soon-please be patient.” When he and his wife married, she commuted to a barber school in Fukuoka and got a license. Their dream was to open a second shop, but the economy in the ’80s was already starting to sputter, and besides, after Satoko’s mother died three years ago of a stroke, she claimed that touching other people’s hair reminded her of touching a corpse, and she stopped working in the shop altogether. Still, when it rains it pours. As Yoshio was in the middle of shaving the retiree, a third customer came in, and he had no choice but to ask Satoko for help.

“I’m kind of busy,” she replied sullenly.

“What do you mean you’re busy? I’ve got customers waiting here.”

“I’m in the middle of gutting these shrimp.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“It’s better if I do it now…”

Yoshio had given up on her even before she finished replying. In the mirror the man he was shaving gave him a sympathetic smile. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard an exchange like this between them.

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait just a little bit longer,” Yoshio said to the junior high student. Still absorbed in his manga, the boy barely noticed.

“She’s a barber’s daughter, not that that makes any difference.” Shifting the scissors in his hand, Yoshio clicked his tongue. His eyes met those of the customer in the mirror.

“My wife’s exactly the same,” the man said. “If I ask her to take the dogs for a walk, she gets all hot and bothered and says, ‘You have no idea how much work it takes to run this house! You think I’m a maid or something?’”

Yoshio gave a forced smile at the customer’s words, but couldn’t help but think that taking this retired civil servant’s dogs for a walk, and a barber asking his wife to help cut customers’ hair, were entirely different things.

The rest of the day they had a steady stream of customers, eight in all, including a man who wanted his white hair dyed, until they closed up at seven p.m. It was as if all the regulars who came once a month decided to come on the same day, and Yoshio was kept running from one to the next. Satoko had finished with the shrimp, but had gone out shopping, so he couldn’t ask again for help.

After the final customer left, and Yoshio was sweeping up the hair from the floor, he thought how nice it would be if-not every day, but at least once a week-they had this many customers. His legs and back were about to give out from standing for so long, but the leather bag he used instead of a cash register was full of thousand-yen bills, more stuffed than he’d seen it in a decade.