The Restaurant Closed Today
"Haaaaah..."
I let the sigh spill out of me while Maru dried my hair. It felt unbelievably good. She had to possess some kind of genius for hair-drying; otherwise there was simply no way it could feel this refreshing.
Sluuurp.
I drank my banana milk and soaked in the little heaven of it. Banana milk after a bath, I could say with complete confidence, tasted better than any other drink in the world.
"Hana, feels nice, doesn't it? Your hair's all dry, so let's get dressed!"
Maru, still toweling my hair a moment ago, was already changed and ready to go.
"Okaaay~"
I did as she said, pulled something from the closet, and put it on. It was only a hoodie and a pair of long pants anyway—nothing worth making a fuss over. Stepping out of the bathhouse, which had been quietly wonderful, left me with an odd, empty feeling.
I should have roasted myself longer in that hot tub. I'd been so scatterbrained that I'd rushed the whole bath and called it done.
"Bye-bye~"
I waved to the part-timer at the entrance and slipped out, dropping the empty banana-milk bottle into the trash on my way.
"What kind of bath is this color supposed to be?"
"Green tea, isn't it? The water's green."
"Oh my, oh my! Would you look at that pretty color! I guess our neighborhood bathhouse is putting in bath salts now."
The ladies who climbed into the tub Hana had just left, so the story went, came out with skin that had turned the clock back.
"Mmm..."
Home from the bathhouse, I lay sprawled on my stomach across the bed. After baking myself in all that heat, the tension had simply drained out of my body. I'd already done everything I needed to do today. All that was left was to watch TV and fall asleep—or knock out my school homework.
The homework was easy enough that half an hour would finish every last problem, so I wasn't worried. No adult on earth fretted over third-grade worksheets. Upper elementary, maybe, or middle school—those might have questions an adult who hadn't sat through a lesson in years would find thorny. But I was a third grader. Third-grade problems were nothing but simple questions you could solve with ordinary common sense.
Lying there on the bed, I must have drifted off. I felt my awareness blink out for an instant, then snap back at the voice calling me awake.
"Hana~ time to go eat!"
Maru, back from the bathhouse, was calling me in a neat, tidy outfit. Had she changed? The clothes she'd worn to the baths had suited her better, I thought. Then again, the gulf between clothes meant for office life and clothes meant for stepping outside was just one of those unavoidable sorrows of the working adult.
"Hup!"
I wiped the drool from my mouth and checked the time. It felt as if I'd only just gotten back, and yet two hours had already gone by. Time really did fly. I hadn't done a thing, and the day was already trying to end. Eating dinner always left me with the feeling that the day was over.
"Coming right now!"
I called back to Maru, shucked off the clothes I'd put on earlier, and changed into my dinosaur pajamas. Evenings were a good time for them. Few people were still working in the building then, so my one-of-a-kind dinosaur pajamas were perfectly acceptable. Afternoons called for ordinary clothes, but mornings and evenings, comfortable dinosaur pajamas were unbeatable. That was why I tended to live in them at both ends of the day.
"Hana, you like those dinosaur pajamas that much? Not even thinking about trying another pair?"
"Yeah!"
To me, the dinosaur pajamas were as good as a second skin. I could keep wearing them even when summer came, because our building blasted the air-conditioning until there wasn't a warm corner left in the place. And I never wore them outside to begin with, so it hardly mattered.
We took the elevator down to the first floor, and an unexpected sight was waiting for us. The restaurant where you normally had to stand in line to eat stood deserted, without a soul in front of it.
I was puzzled, but the reason wasn't hard to find.
"Huh... wait. They're closed today for an inspection...?"
The restaurant had shut its doors. This can't be happening. That meant no delicious dinner at all. I hopped in place and spun circles around Maru.
"Maru! What do we do!"
"It's all right, Hana. Tonight we'll cook it ourselves."
Our floor had all kinds of facilities, and among them was a kitchen where you could make your own food.
"How about pasta?"
"I love pasta!"
It was one of my favorites. Maru ducked into a convenience store and started picking out ingredients. I trotted along behind her, slipped one drink I'd been wanting into the basket, and successfully paid for it along with everything else.
Growing plants took a great deal of care and effort. Of course, some of them clung to life as stubbornly as weeds, surviving even when you forgot to water them and went so far as to spray them with pesticide. Rice was no exception. Raising it demanded patience and devotion in no small measure.
You transplanted the seedlings, once they'd grown to a decent size, into a flooded paddy—and that was nowhere near the end of it. Weeds had to be pulled before they stole the nutrients. Pests and every manner of insect that gnawed at the stalks had to be dealt with. For the sake of a single rice crop, there was an absurd amount of work to do. Even in the modern age, with all its advanced farming technology, that rule still held. Rice farming needed human hands.
The rice that grew from Hana's teeth was different. Up through raising the seedlings, it was much the same. The moment those seedlings were set into a water-filled paddy, though, the rest of the process was dramatically skipped. Disease and pests didn't so much as slow it. Weeds that tried to sprout had their nutrients stolen by the rice itself and could barely grow at all. And the whole cycle was compressed to a startling degree. Ordinarily you planted in spring and harvested in September or October. Hana's rice shot upward day by day, as if someone were filming it at dozens of times the normal speed.
The farmers invited in as agricultural consultants could hardly believe their eyes. Ever since the gates had appeared, strange phenomena had a way of happening with no one able to explain why, and this could be counted as one more of them. Even so, for people who had spent their entire lives on nothing but farming, the sight was a shock.
Word would reach the public eventually. Kim Sehee could say with certainty that the moment footage like this hit the internet, botanists would come running with fire in their eyes. The cherry tomatoes were the same, and so was the coffee: in yield alone, these plants fell behind nothing else that grew. The great drawback was that they refused to grow once they left a certain range of the host plant. From Kim Sehee's point of view, that drawback could just as easily be an advantage. Spies and ordinary people alike could try to raise the seeds themselves and still fail to get the result they wanted. They might even sink still more money into the research and come away with nothing. Picturing her rivals pouring cash down a dry well, she felt a smile tug at her mouth. Few things were sweeter than watching someone else waste their effort.
She therefore had no need to worry about the inevitable loss of commercial value once rival firms tried to copy the product. There was no better news than that.
Today, as on every other day, Kim Sehee watched her people working the fields. She had hired laborers on a separate wage to devote themselves to the farming, and assigned staff to manage them. The work didn't require security clearance, so ordinary people could be brought on and put straight to it. The result of all that diligent labor was that they had filled the volume the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs had asked for. Over at the Ministry, they were surely waiting with their necks craned for the moment Kim Sehee deigned to call. Without the rice she supplied, rice in the Republic of Korea would be nowhere to be found. The chaos would be enormous. Public condemnation would fall on them, of course, and the officials responsible might well be demoted one after another.
"At this point, it should be fine to give them a call."
She said it while looking at the rice heaped to the rafters of the warehouse. Every last sack of it was money, and the thought alone put her in a good mood. From a businesswoman's perspective, there was nothing finer than earning money by working the earth. These days, admittedly, Kim Sehee herself could no longer tell whether she was a farmer or the president of a major corporation.
Lately, putting on a straw hat and patrolling the fields had become part of her daily routine. Cherry tomatoes setting fruit, coffee berries hanging in heavy clusters, rice turning gold as it ripened—just watching it was enough to leave her content. She didn't know whether farmers felt this way. Surely, though, they felt something very much like what Kim Sehee was feeling now.