The Name Beside the Red Notebook
“If there is anything you do not want discarded, write it here,” Takumi said.
Sachiko looked at the empty line and put down her pen.
Takumi had agreed to act as Sachiko’s appointed agent. They were reviewing two separate documents at the small table in her rented flat. One concerned ending the lease after her death. The other concerned the belongings she would leave behind.
Sachiko had filled every box except one.
“Nothing,” she said. “Everything can go.”
Takumi turned the second document toward himself. It recorded a different choice. Belongings could be discarded, or an item could be sent to a destination Sachiko specified.
He did not point that out again. Sachiko had understood him the first time.
Instead, Takumi looked around the room. The shelves held ordinary things: two chipped cups, a radio with tape over the battery cover, three cookbooks swollen by steam. A red notebook lay beside Sachiko’s elbow.
“Is that one of the cookbooks?” he asked.
“No.” Sachiko placed her hand over it. “My daughter wrote it.”
Takumi waited.
“Mei was nine,” Sachiko continued. “She wrote down what she thought I put in the soup. Most of it was wrong.”
“Did you correct it?”
“For thirty years.”
Sachiko opened the notebook. The first pages were written in a child’s large, uncertain letters. Smaller notes crowded the margins in Sachiko’s hand. Some ingredients had been crossed out so many times that the paper had worn thin.
“Mei wanted it when we closed the café,” Sachiko said. “I told her she had left the work to me, so the recipes were mine.”
“Do you still think that?”
Sachiko closed the notebook. “That is not what this form asks.”
“No,” Takumi said. “The form only asks what you want done.”
Sachiko picked up the pen again. She did not write a letter or an apology. On the empty line, she identified one item—the red recipe notebook—and wrote Mei’s destination beside it.
“Everything else?” Takumi asked.
“Everything else can go.”
Years later, after Sachiko died, the lease ended. A period passed before the remaining belongings were handled. Takumi found the red notebook in the kitchen drawer, exactly where Sachiko’s instructions said it would be.
He checked the name and destination twice. Then he packed the notebook to be sent on. Before sealing the parcel, he smoothed the worn first page and read Mei’s uneven title once more. The other belongings followed Sachiko’s separate instruction.
At his next meeting with a tenant, Takumi placed the two documents apart rather than stacking them together.
He explained the first one, then the second. When he reached the line for belongings that should not be discarded, he left the pen on the table.
“There is no need to fill this in quickly,” he said. “Deciding what can go and deciding what should reach someone are two different decisions.”
The real work behind the story
Some landlords hesitate over older people living alone.
According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, landlords may refuse applications from older people living alone because they worry about ending the lease and handling belongings when there is no clear heir or the heir’s location is unknown.
The model clauses separate the two mandates.
The model clauses separate the mandate to end the lease from the mandate to handle belongings.
Belongings can be discarded or sent onward.
The appointed agent is entrusted with disposing of belongings or sending them to a specified destination after the tenant’s death.
Disposal waits for time and lease termination.
The appointed agent disposes of belongings other than items designated not to be discarded only after a period has passed and the lease has ended.
The model clauses are voluntary.
The model clauses are not legally mandatory to use.
The story is fiction. All characters, companies and events in it are invented. “The real work behind the story” is based on the sources linked above.