Mr. Ichiro

“Mr. Ichiro, why are you sad?”

“Because someone took all my happy away.”

“Can’t you make yourself some more happiness?”

“Thank you Timmy,” said Mr. Ichiro after a pause. He continued on his way down the stairs to his ground floor apartment, but all that day he could not get Timmy’s words out of his thoughts.

That evening as he sat alone finishing his rice and eggs, he decided to take Timmy’s advice. He thought deeply about how he might conjure some new happiness for himself. He cast about in his memories and tried to remember what happiness tasted like. He looked at the few pictures on his sideboard and then went in to the back room.

He searched in his cupboard and eventually found what he was looking for, a small black notebook that his daughter had kept for half a year.

He had always hesitated to touch it, to read it. Even though she was dead he felt he was desecrating some sacred bond by opening it. He knew that there were spare pages at the back and he knew there were little bits of gold, little spots of happiness in the front.

Slowly he read his daughter’s diary from the last year of her life. She had stopped once they knew the disease would win. But still there were moments of sunshine, rays of light that she had left, written in her tight neat script, and he tore out a page from the back of the book and wrote down some of the sentences that made him smile.

Today dad tried to plait my hair. He was awful, but he did try very hard.

Today dad cooked dim-sum, my favourite. I ate almost all of them.

The last page was one she had torn out and he had later stuck back in. It was a list of items with names next to them and at the bottom a note from her.

I have decided to give away all of my things. When I am dead give these items to these people. You always said it was better to give, I hope that my last actions can be my best.

Mr. Ichiro cried again.

The next day Mr. Ichiro put that piece of paper in his pocket as he went about his work and when he had a moment, and remembered, he would take the piece of paper out and read a line or two and it would make him smile.

Very few people noticed the change in Mr. Ichiro. Not even Timmy, for a while, until one day, as Timmy was running down the stairs and Mr. Ichiro was fixing the bannister, Mr. Ichiro held out his hand for a high five. Timmy smiled and slapped it as hard as he could, without stopping his run. He smiled a lot and as he reached the next landing he looked back and saw Mr. Ichiro smiling back at him.

“Did you find some happy, Mr. Ichiro?” called Timmy.

“Yes,” he said, “you would be surprised what you find when you are a janitor. The things you can dig out of nooks and crannies.”

Timmy didn’t know what a cranny was, but he had his own favourite nook, and it was a safe place, where he often found his own happy. He was pleased Mr. Ichiro had found something to make him smile.

Mr. Ichiro was a creature of habit. He would often perform the same actions at the same time on the same days, six days a week. Although he was available, the residents of the small appartment block where he was janitor were loath to disturb him on the Saturdays that he gave himself as his one day of rest. It was then with a certain amount of sadness that Mrs. Poppelwell approached Mr. Ichiro’s door on Saturday morning. She knocked twice and waited, fiddling with her bag.

Mr. Ichiro answered the door and bowed, a little head nod to her.

“I am really sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but I think there is a problem with the elevator. There is a clunking from the roof that was not there yesterday. I have just travelled down 3 floors and stopped because I didn’t want to travel any further. I took the stairs the rest of the way down,” she explained to Mr. Ichiro’s silent and patient face. He nodded to her.

“Thank you for informing me, Mrs. Poppelwell, I shall look at it immediately.

“Oh no,” said Mrs. Poppelwell, “I don’t know if you need to look at it right away, but perhaps today would be helpful.”

“Thank you,” repeated Mr. Ichiro, “I will look at it right away.”

Mrs. Poppelwell had nothing more to say, so she nodded, said “Thank you Mr. Ichiro,” and dismissed herself.

Mr. Ichiro closed the door, grabbed his tools and set off for the elevator. He climbed four flights of stairs to find it, waiting patiently as a machine should.

He entered it and rode it all the way down to the ground floor, noticing the unusual clunks and squeaks from the roof.

He turned his key in the elevator control panel and set it to ‘off’, and then after he had walked up every floor and put little signs out that said ‘elevator out of service, with apologies,” he returned to his apartment and fetched his little ladder. He propped it in the middle of the elevator and climbed up a few steps to open the maintenance hatch. He climbed up a few more steps until he could see through the hatch and on to the roof.

Instead of the dusty empty top of an elevator he expected, there were a number of things strewn around. It almost looked as if animals or even a person had been living there. There were discarded sweet wrappers, a coat, a potted plant and a briefcase.

Mr. Ichiro reached out a hand and rattled the briefcase experimentally against the roof of the elevator and nodded to himself. He was certain this was the cause of the noise. He took down the briefcase and the coat and placed them in his apartment. He placed the potted plant in the lobby where it would get some light and returned with a bin bag to clear the dust and detritus from the roof of the elevator.

Then he rode it to the top of the building and stopped at every floor on the way down to remove the elevator out of use signs. The disturbing rattle was gone.

Once he had disposed of the bag of rubbish he returned his tools and ladder to his flat. He tidied them away and stood looking at the briefcase and the coat which he had left next to the wall.

The coat looked approximately his size and the small black case was a travel case. It had wheels on the bottom and an extendable handle so you could pull it behind yourself.

Mr. Ichiro wondered how it had landed on top of his elevator. Perhaps it was put there by someone, but then who? Could it have fallen from a passing aeroplane and broken through the ceiling and landed on the top of the elevator? He had not checked for a few days, but he felt sure he or one of the tenants would have noticed damage to the roof.

He pulled a piece of paper out from the back of his daughter’s notebook and wrote on it, carefully and in big letters ‘Briefcase found, contact Mr. Ichiro.’ He posted it to the resident’s noticeboard and set off to check the roof. There was no damage.

For a few weeks there was no answer to the notice on his notice board and in fact no one talked to Mr. Ichiro about the notice at all, until Timmy asked “What is in the briefcase you found?”

“I do not know,” said Mr. Ichiro, offended by the suggestion that he would look inside, “it is not mine.”

“I would have looked inside to check if there was a name,” said Timmy.

Mr Ichiro smiled. “That is not a bad idea Timmy.”

So that evening, once he had finished his work, Mr. Ichiro sat at his small table and opened the briefcase. Inside was money. No name, no address, no explanation, simply $20,000 in unmarked, non-sequential bills.

Mr. Ichiro looked at it for a long time. He counted it. He counted it out, on to his table, and counted it back in. He counted it back out and searched the briefcase thoroughly for any pockets, zips, any false or hidden compartments, any trackers or indications of where it might have come from. He did not know exactly what he was looking for, but by the time he was finished he was certain he would have found it. The briefcase was pristine, unscratched and looking fresh from the assembly line, even the wheels showed barely any marks or use at all.

Mr. Ichiro counted the money back, closed the briefcase and put it away in the cupboard beneath his sink. He sat down and began to think and when he had thought for a very long time he went to bed.

More weeks passed and Mr. Ichiro received no contact about the briefcase. He scoured news articles but could find no call for information, no information at all about the loss of $20,000. Finally enough time had passed where he felt able to do something.

He had known quite quickly what he was going to do with the money if this happened. It had seemed obvious to him.

Very early one Saturday, when he was on his own time and not the company’s time, he took the briefcase out from underneath the sink and opened it once more, and there was the $20,000 just as he had remembered.

He separated them out to 20 piles of $1,000 and put them in to 20 envelopes. 20 envelopes of $1,000. In to each he placed a simple card which said ‘with thanks’ and had no other writing on it (he wished there to be as little evidence as possible). Then, when he knew there was no one else in the building awake, he headed to the lobby and placed the 20 envelopes in the 20 mailboxes of each of the 20 units. 20 families, 20 residents, 20 lives or more, would receive $1,000. And hopefully, he thought to himself, each would find a little bit of quiet relief from these $1,000. A little bit of happy, for every one.