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The badly creased paper
cover and a few permanently dog-eared pages don’t put
me off at all. At $1.98 plus
tax at Book Blow-Out in the mall, the book is a
steal! (Retail price new: $12.99 plus
tax.) I rush home with my new purchase
and eagerly settle down for a read.
After picking a squashed bug or old sneeze off the flyleaf with my thumbnail, I
dive in on page 1. But first, the inscription inside the front cover demands a
look: ‘To Patty on her 12th birthday. Love, Miriam.’ Really, this difficult
Japanese novel doesn’t strike me as an appropriate gift for a 12-year-old,
birthday or no birthday. What was Miriam thinking, and is she dense? The plot
thickens, and I haven’t even started the book.
I’m on page five,
and already I have double vision from all the yellow highlighter
streaks. WTF? I
guess I was so eager to save money that I didn’t notice this
little defect back at
the store. Also, it would appear that Patty, or more
likely someone older than Patty
such as her parent, unloaded the demanding
book, and a college student snatched it up
cheap for class – a strangely indiscriminate student too, to highlight so much. Am I
missing something in my
reading, or is the sentence ‘Children of the village were
skiing in the fields’
really that important? And a lot of other blinding yellow
sentences seem just
as trivial. I’m worried.
The pages of this book
are amazingly dry. Some are fracturing when I turn them,
and I can almost feel them
sucking the moisture out of my fingertips. Flipping
back to the front, I find that
the book was printed in 1972. For paper, that’s
old. Book Blow-Out had another copy
of the book, much newer and nicer, for only
a dollar more, and maybe I should have
got it. But I didn’t because I wanted to
maximize my cost savings.
The longer I hold the book open, the more I notice a fetid odor. Subtle
at
first, it reminds me, as I keep on turning the pages, of the time that drunk
stranger who sat beside me on the bus belched in my face after puking in the
aisle. Just how many previous owners has this book had? It doesn’t seem
possible
that 12-year-old Patty and one college student could have imparted a
stench like this
to the pages. I lay the book on the air duct grate in my
living room floor, pages
fanned open, and let it breathe for an hour. I also
give it a shot of spray
disinfectant, just to be safe.
I am about to learn how well the young
geisha picks the Japanese guitar when–
crap!–a dried and mostly faded tomato sauce
or chocolate stain, deposited on
page 97 years ago by a gross pig of a reader,
interrupts her performance. Her
ornamental sash, I’m glad to report, escapes
defilement. But I’m only hoping
this is tomato sauce or chocolate. What if it’s the
remnant of an explosive
nosebleed from a previous reader who had HIV? Is it still
infectious? Anyway, I
can’t make out several words in this revolting and possibly
hazardous
paragraph, and quickly skim it. Now I don’t know if the powdered girl can
shred
or only play three chords.
Tucked between pages 115 and
116, in almost the exact middle of the book, I
find a sales receipt dated February
12, 1984. Obviously, it functioned as a
bookmark. That some reader, who I assume was
the last before me to crack the
book, gave up halfway through showing a lack of
perseverance. That he or she paid
$6.99 plus tax for a lawn chair at Wal-Mart shows a
lack of style.
Pp. 198-199. Cat hair (?).
Pp. 225-226.
Cracker crumbs (?).
P. 274. Anti-geisha, feminist marginal note. It’s a
thought I hadn’t
considered, but is it truly perceptive? The more I think about it,
it seems to
represent a complete misunderstanding of the author’s culture. I press
on, but
something about that note galls me. Almost done!
The last six
pages are missing. That’s it. This thing goes in the trash, and
I’m off to Borders
for a new edition. I’ll finish the book in the café, leave
it on the table when I’m
done, and only pay for a coffee. This will increase my
total expenses by the price of
a coffee, but still: I save!
