Fishbone

by Wengeresque Development, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The defect that October was a burr. It sat on the inside lip of the bore of a brake-caliper piston, for a 250cc motorcycle, and it was a fifth of a millimetre high, and it tore the rubber seal when the piston went in. The customer had found eleven in a lot of four thousand. The customer was in Iwata, forty minutes away, and had telephoned twice.

On Thursday after the day shift the quality circle of Enshū Seiki's second plant met in the canteen, eight men in grey work jackets round two tables pushed together, with tea in plastic cups and the smell of cutting oil on their hands. Sugiyama Tōru, the section chief for quality control, stood at the whiteboard and drew the fish.

He drew it as he had drawn it a few hundred times in twenty-six years: a long horizontal spine with an arrow at the right-hand end, and at the head of the arrow a box, and in the box the problem. Burr, bore lip, piston 41. Then the four big bones slanting back from the spine, and on each the word that every quality circle in Japan wrote there. Man. Machine. Material. Method.

"Machine," said Kawai from the lathes. "The tool's worn."

"The tool was changed on Monday."

"Material, then. The new bar stock from Nagoya."

They filled the bones. It took an hour and a half. At the end of it the cause was almost certainly a deburring station on the night shift, where a contractor's man fed the pistons past a rotary brush and was supposed to look at each one under a lamp before he put it in the tray. Nobody said that the man was not looking. They wrote inspection lamp: angle on the Machine bone, and night shift: fatigue? on the Man bone, with the question mark, and went home.

Sugiyama stayed and rubbed out the board. Then he took a defect report from the pile, turned it over, and drew another fish on the back of it, small, in pencil. In the box at the head he wrote: No goals.

Enshū Seiki FC had scored four goals in eight matches in the second division of the prefectural works league. Until the summer they had had two good forwards, both from the machining section. In July both had gone to trials with the new professional clubs that were being put together for the league that would begin in May, and one had been taken on, and the other had come back and asked to be moved to the despatch bay, and did not play any more.

On the Material bone Sugiyama wrote pitch: river ground, hard. On the Method bone he wrote long ball to nobody. On the Machine bone he wrote nothing, because he could not think what the machine of a football team was. On the Man bone he wrote nothing either, and looked at it for a while, and folded the paper into his jacket.

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The contractor's dormitory stood on the road out towards Takatsuka, two storeys of prefabricated flats with the stairs on the outside, and a car park of grey gravel lit by one sodium lamp. Sugiyama drove past it every night. On Saturday he drove past it at a quarter to six, with the lamp already on, and stopped.

There were ten men playing football in the car park, five against five, with two beer crates stood on end for each goal. They were Brazilians, from the voices. Some wore the white Enshū Seiki work trousers with the blue stripe and some wore shorts, though it was not warm. The ball was an old one, with the panels coming away.

One of them, a small man in a yellow vest, was left-footed. Sugiyama watched him for ten minutes with his engine off and a cigarette he did not light. The small man did not run very much. He stood, mostly, and when the ball came to him he did something with it that made the man marking him take a step in the wrong direction; then he was past. Twice he went past two. Once, close to the crates, instead of shooting he stopped the ball dead with the sole of his foot, so that the goalkeeper, who had already dived, lay on the gravel looking up at it.

Sugiyama got out of the car.

The one who spoke Japanese was a tall man called Wagner Higa, who had learned it from his grandmother in São Paulo, so that it came out old-fashioned and soft, like the speech of a woman from a village in Okinawa sixty years ago. He worked days on the presses. He knew who Sugiyama was by his jacket.

"That one," Sugiyama said. "The yellow."

"Ricardo. Tamashiro Ricardo. He's on nights. Deburring."

Sugiyama asked whether Ricardo would like to play for the company team on Sunday afternoons.

Wagner called across. The small man came over with the ball under his arm, and the two of them spoke in Portuguese for longer than seemed necessary.

"He says Sunday he sleeps. Night shift is eight to eight. Sunday morning he comes off."

"The kick-off is at two."

More Portuguese. Ricardo looked at Sugiyama while Wagner talked, not rudely, the way a man looks at a part to see where it was machined.

"He asks how much."

"Nothing," said Sugiyama. "There is a bento. And afterwards the bath at the company. The big bath."

Wagner translated that, and Ricardo laughed, and said something short.

"He says, the big bath," said Wagner, "that's different."

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The river ground lay on the flood plain of the Tenryū, below the embankment, a field of brown grass and pale grit with a cinder track round it and no stand. On the first Sunday in November the dry wind was blowing already off the Enshū sea, the one they called the Enshū karakkaze; it took the ball whenever the ball went higher than a man.

Sugiyama had written the team sheet at home the night before, at the kitchen table, in kanji, as he always did. For Ricardo he had no kanji, and so he wrote him in katakana, Ri-ka-ru-do, the way the plant wrote the names of the contractor's men on the shift boards.

He put him on the left wing, because Ricardo had said through Wagner, in the car park, ponta esquerda, and Wagner had said "left wing" in Japanese and touched his own left foot.

They lost 3–1 to the works of a paper mill from Fuji. Ricardo had the ball perhaps twenty times. Each time he took it towards the touchline, and went past his man, and sometimes past a second, and then he was at the corner flag with the ball and nowhere to send it with his left foot but into the side netting, or behind the goal, or into the wind. Morimoto, the right-back and the captain, who had run a lathe for nineteen years and had never in that time been seen to cross the halfway line, shouted at him from the other side of the field. He shouted one word, over and over, because it was the one word he thought a foreigner would understand: "Pasu!"

By the second half Ricardo had learned it. When Morimoto shouted, Ricardo shouted back, "Pasu!", and pointed at him, and kept the ball.

In the bath afterwards the team sat along one wall of the big tiled pool, under the steam, with their towels folded on their heads. Ricardo and Wagner sat at the other end, by the hot tap, where nobody else had gone.

"He plays for himself," Morimoto said, not loudly.

"He isn't a foreigner," Sugiyama said. "His grandfather was from Okinawa."

Morimoto considered this. "Then he plays for Okinawa," he said, and the others laughed, and at the far end of the pool Ricardo, who had not understood a word, laughed too, a little after them, and slid down until the water was at his chin.

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On Tuesday Sugiyama went to Personnel, on the second floor of the office block, and asked whether a contractor's man on the night shift could be moved to days.

The man in Personnel was called Hattori, and he and Sugiyama had joined the company in the same April, a long time ago. He took off his glasses to answer.

"He isn't ours. He's the contractor's. The contractor sends us so many men for so many hours, and we pay the contractor, and what the contractor does with them is the contractor's business." He put the glasses on again. "And I'll tell you something else, since it's you. Iwata is cutting orders fifteen per cent from January. Maybe twenty. The motorcycles aren't selling. When we cut, we cut the contractor's hours first. That's what the contractor's men are for."

"I know what they are for."

"Then don't take one to the bath," said Hattori, kindly.

That night Sugiyama did not go home after his shift. He ate in the canteen, and sat for an hour in his office with the ledgers, and at eight o'clock he walked down to the deburring station where the night shift was coming on.

Ricardo was there in white trousers and the blue cap. He did not see Sugiyama, or did not show that he did. The pistons came to him along a roller track from the lathes, and he took each one, and offered the bore to the rotary brush, and turned it a full turn against the brush, and then held it under the lamp.

The lamp was badly placed; the circle had been right about that. It hung straight overhead, so that it lit the face of the piston and threw the inside of the bore into shadow. The man on the other station, a Brazilian twice Ricardo's age, looked into the bore for perhaps a quarter of a second, the time it takes to decide nothing is there, and put the piston in the tray.

Ricardo did not look into the bore at all. He tipped each piston towards himself, away from the lamp, so that the light went in at a slant and lay along the inner wall; and he did not look at the piston but just past it, at the lip, where the light caught. Three times in the twenty minutes that Sugiyama watched, he set a piston aside on the bench to his left instead of putting it in the tray. On his bench at the end of the night, Sugiyama learned the next day, there were nine.

The next week Sugiyama telephoned the contractor's office in Takatsuka and asked whether the contractor could supply a man for the final visual inspection on the night shift, which was a seated job, at the end of the line, under a ring lamp with a magnifier. He named the man. The contractor said that a contractor's man on inspection was irregular, and Sugiyama said that it was, and the contractor said that it would cost the same, and Sugiyama said that he knew.

He did not tell the quality circle. In the defect figures for November the burrs that reached Iwata went to nought and stayed there, and on the Man bone of the fish, in the circle's file, somebody rubbed out the question mark after fatigue and wrote resolved.

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On the river ground on the third Sunday Sugiyama sent Ricardo out on the right.

Ricardo stopped on the cinder track with his boots in his hand. "Na direita?" he said. "Eu sou canhoto."

"He says—" Wagner began.

"I know what he says." Sugiyama took the defect report out of his jacket, the one with the fish on the back, and turned it over to the front, which was blank except for the printed columns, and drew on it with a pencil against his knee: the halfway line, the edge of the penalty area, a stick man out on the right touchline. From the stick man he drew an arrow, not down the line, but inward, slanting across the face of the area towards the far post.

"Esquerdo," he said, which was the only word of Portuguese he had learned that week, and tapped Ricardo's left boot with the pencil.

Ricardo looked at the drawing for a long time. Then he looked at Sugiyama, with the same look he had given him in the car park, as if checking where a thing had been machined; and then he went out and stood on the right.

For the first half hour it was worse. Coming inside from the right on his left foot, he went straight into the two centre-backs, who were big men from a cement works and had nothing else to do but wait for him. He lost the ball nine times. Behind him, on the touchline, Morimoto stood at right-back with his arms folded, and every time Ricardo came inside, the opposing left-back came inside with him, and the whole of the right touchline in front of Morimoto lay empty, forty metres of brown grass with the wind blowing up it.

At half-time, behind the goal, out of the wind, Sugiyama crouched by Morimoto and drew it again on the same paper. The stick man. The arrow coming inside. Then, from behind the stick man, a second arrow, straight up the touchline, into the space.

"That's me?"

"That's you."

"I'm a defender."

"When he comes inside," Sugiyama said, "who is in front of you?"

Morimoto looked at the paper and did not answer.

He did not go the first time, early in the second half. Ricardo came inside, and the left-back went with him, and the empty grass opened, and Morimoto stood on the edge of it with the paper in his head and his feet where they had been for nineteen years. Ricardo lost the ball to a centre-back and, getting up, looked back over his shoulder at Morimoto, and did not shout anything.

The second time, a quarter of an hour later, Ricardo came in off the line, slowly, the ball close to his left foot, and the left-back came with him, and then Ricardo stopped. He stood with his foot on the ball, as he had stood in the car park in front of the beer crates, while the cement-works men waited for him to choose. He did not look at Morimoto. He waited.

Morimoto went. He went up the right touchline like a man running for a train, with his elbows out. Ricardo rolled the ball with the outside of his left foot into the space in front of him, so gently that it seemed to stop of its own accord a yard ahead of Morimoto's boot. Morimoto had no idea what to do with it. He had not been that close to a goal since he was a schoolboy. He hit it from the corner of the six-yard box with the toe of his right boot, at an angle from which no shot should have gone in, and it struck the goalkeeper's shin and went in off the inside of the near post.

They lost 2–1. Nobody on the river ground remembered that afterwards, or not first.

In the bath, under the steam, Morimoto got up from his place on the long wall and walked through the water to the other end, by the hot tap, holding his towel on his head with one hand, and sat down next to Ricardo.

"Pasu," he said, and pointed at himself.

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In January Iwata cut its orders by eighteen per cent. The contractor's hours were cut first, as Hattori had said they would be. Ricardo kept the inspection seat through February, because the inspection seat was cheaper to keep than the burrs, and Sugiyama put this to his manager in those words and in no others; but in March the contractor wrote to say that eleven of its men in Hamamatsu, Ricardo among them, would be sent from the first of April to a plant in Gunma, at Ōizumi, where there was work, and that a man would be supplied for the night inspection as before.

Enshū Seiki FC finished the season seventh of ten in the second division. In the last nine matches they scored sixteen goals. Morimoto scored three of them, all from the right-hand side of the six-yard box, all with the toe.

The last match was on the twenty-eighth of March, against the works team of a piano factory, Tenryū Gakki, on the river ground, in a wind so strong that the corner flags bent like fishing rods. The professional league would open in seven weeks. In the bars on the way down to the station there were posters for it already, with the club colours of Shimizu, orange, and the date in big white figures.

Sugiyama wrote the team sheet the night before at the kitchen table, in kanji. When he came to the seventh name he stopped, and got up, and found the contractor's roster card for the night inspection, which he had brought home in his briefcase, and looked at the line where the contractor had copied out the family name from the extract of the grandfather's family register that the immigration office had required for Ricardo's visa. The contractor had copied the characters carefully, as a clerk copies something he cannot read. The grandfather had brought them from Okinawa in a ship, eighty years ago, and the family had carried them down three generations in Brazil without using them for anything.

He wrote them in. Tamashiro. Two characters: a jewel, and a castle.

At half past one, in the changing hut by the cinder track, he pinned the sheet to the board. The players crowded round it the way they always did, reading their own names first. Ricardo stood at the back, behind Morimoto, and looked at it over Morimoto's shoulder, and then at Wagner.

"He says, where is he?" said Wagner. "He can't find himself."

Morimoto put his finger on the sheet. He put it on the seventh line, on the two characters, and held it there.

Ricardo leaned past him and looked for a moment at the two characters his grandfather had carried from Okinawa. Then he took his boots off the bench and went out into the wind, and walked to the right touchline, and stood on it; and when the whistle went he took one step off it, and then another, inside.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Wengeriānō Prōgressūs per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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Wengeresque Development Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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