Wayside - 1920s Japan Dramedy

“Alright Luce.” Her uncle huffed. “Get us a pound of rice, and two potatoes if you see them!” Alfred peeked up from the book he had just pulled from a box tucked away in the corner of the front room.

Japanese to English Dictionary, Third Edition.

It had been two weeks since their arrival in Osaka and the place was still a pigsty, as Lucy’s mother would have called it had she been unfortunate enough to be alive to see the wreckage herself.

“And remember!” He pointed his finger towards her, a determined gleam in his eyes. “Haggle.”

Lucy scoffed as she pinned her hair up into her hat before stepping out the door.

“Yeah, with this generous ONE yen, I’ll see what I can do.” She drawled back with a roll of her eyes.

A pound of rice. Still hasn’t memorized the metric system, I see.

Really, how hard was it? Wasn’t he a farmer? It was far easier than kanji, but he couldn’t seem to learn that either. Maybe the saying “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” had some seeds of truth. She often forgot she was almost twenty years younger than her eccentric uncle. He was always acting like a rambunctious schoolboy rather than a grown man.

She bit back a snicker as she remembered the day he turned forty last year.

I’ll forever be thirty-nine! He cried triumphantly, a hand to his chest and his arm resting dramatically upon his forehead.

The memory made her sigh to herself as she strutted down the still unfamiliar street of their current home. Yuko had told her when they first arrived that the narrow street was known for merchants promoting their wares from dawn till dusk. Men and women were bustling about like fish in a school. One step in the wrong direction and Lucy might find herself face to face with a waresman trying to haggle her or a policeman eager to pounce and suspect her of some petty theft.

Lucy hated how the officers and passersby ogled her every time she made her way through town. She deduced after a few trips that it must have been because she was very obviously “not from here,” rather messy, and thus must not have had much money. She figured that they thought of her as an outcast, a poor lost soul that most likely had to connive for survival.

It was for this very reason Lucy tied her light-colored hair up and hid it beneath her patchy Sunday hat that she wore to chapel back home. She had hoped hiding her hair would protect her from the stares and murmurs she received on the daily, and to an extent it did, but her face still gave away that she didn’t belong.

Quite simply, she couldn’t win.

She turned a corner onto a new street, trying her darndest to locate a shop or a stall that had rice at a price within her pathetic budget.

Not mine. She chastised herself.

His budget. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t have crossed the country, let alone the Pacific.

There she went again, ruminating over things she no longer had control over or rather never had control over. It was getting worse by the day.

As time marched on and the seasons quickly changed from a warm spring into a scorching summer, Lucy was certain that they wouldn’t make it past May, but here they were. Despite her uncle’s mishandling of his inheritance, they hung on.

Their luck wasn’t running out and she hated it.

Her pity party was interrupted by the thundering voice of a man.

「Hey, hey, you, girl! You look like you could use a few!」

She turned towards the voice and saw three men, interestingly all of seemingly contrasting social statuses, sitting in an izakaya across the street. One of them in a dark blue uniform that Lucy had often seen men wearing in the fish markets beckoned for her to come over.

She did a double take and immediately felt a redness dust across her cheeks. Hands frantically moving up towards the nape of her neck, she felt her hair beginning to fall from its bun.

Shit. She quickly fixed her hair back up into her hat and almost tumbled over herself as waves of people continued their strolls, actively bumping into her as if she were invisible.

She had to keep moving, she didn’t have time to entertain. She started a brisk pace away from the izakaya and away from the men inside.