Takako heard Ichiko shouting for Taneko all the time. Because Ichikos
voice was so loud, Takako often picked up bits and pieces of information
about goings-on in the Chiba household. Some days she even knew what
they were having for dinner.
The story of Ichiko’s fight with the owner of the tofu store was famous in
the neighborhood. Ichiko had insisted that some tofu her maid had brought
back was spoiled, and flew off on her bicycle to complain. The argument
grew so violent that a crowd formed outside the store.
The tofu store’s owner got excited and shook a knife at Ichiko. She filed
a complaint at a police box on her way home. A policeman led the owner of
the store to her house and made him apologize.
“My, you’ve got a nice house,” the store owner said.
Judging from Ichiko’s indifference to the crowd, and from the rudeness
of her shouts, he must have expected quite a different kind of house.
“When he brought out that knife!—To tell the truth, I was so terrified I
thought I’d start trembling. But I stood my ground!” Ichiko said afterward,
as if it were all a joke. “But you know, thinking back on it now, it must
have been a tofu knife, right?”
Her audience always laughed, so Ichiko would start laughing first.
Takako had even heard Ichiko telling the story to the delivery boy from
the fish store, and to the man who collected money for the newspaper. She
would be in her sitting room and would hear Ichiko teUing the story in the
kitchen of her own house.
It wasn’t at all uncommon for Ichiko to answer salesmen who came to
the kitchen door by shouting out to them from inside the house, and then to
keep them waiting for a long time. She left them alone for so long that
Takako worried something might be stolen.
