Shokuba no Hana ("Office Flower")

(The following is an excerpt from one of my novels.)

Every Wednesday morning, at a kiosk of a train station, Noriko would buy the latest issue of Trabayu ( a job hunting magazine targeting at women), fresh from printers. She would even leave home at six, almost an hour earlier than usual. She scanned the magazine’s help wanted ads at a nearby coffee shop, knowing that she would be facing ample competition.

Having hit thirty, she felt deeply ambivalent about her future. Male superiors and coworkers tirelessly inquired into her marriage plans. You’re still single? This question would haunt her as long as she remained confined to the secretarial pool. She ached to craft a new identity outside the corporate world on the thirty-sixth floor, where challenging jobs remained beyond women’s reach. Smaller firms may be more willing to take women seriously, she tried to convince herself as she poured tea in a dark corner of the office.

Perusing the ads, Noriko sighed. Her age posed an obstacle in her job search. Virtually all ads set age limits, sometimes as low as twenty-three; openings for women past thirty were few. Many ads also contained pictures of attractive female employees in their twenties. Below each smiling face were the woman’s age and message: I love my job. We need your smile. Why don’t you join us? How could Noriko ignore those youthful smiles that belong to twenty-somethings who painted their nails pink every weekend? It was as if these ads collectively had conveyed a message to older women: Stay away from the job market. The door was slammed in her face.

Once, Noriko saw an ad of a small public relations firm seeking two or three employees “thirty-five or younger." She immediately called the firm from a pay phone at a train station.
“We have been already bombarded with phone calls,” replied the receptionist.

When Noriko arrived at the firm for the informational session, she found the room overflowing with nearly a hundred women, many in their thirties. She handed in her resume to a recruiter who promised to call that evening. At home, she sat frozen by the phone, which never rang. When she called a few days later, still clinging to her optimism, the receptionist coolly announced that the positions had been closed. Several weeks later, a thin envelope arrived containing an obligatory rejection letter.

Noriko tirelessly sent out her resumes. One start-up software company invited her for an interview. Soon afterward, she donned a suit and climbed the stairs to the second floor of a rundown building, where the company was located. The next morning she took an elevator to her office on the thirty-sixth floor and shook her head. What was I thinking? She asked herself as she faxed a document to the firm's Brussels office. When a job offer arrived in the mail a few days later, she ripped the letter.

How ironic, she thought. She worked with men who toiled at the cost of private life in exchange for a status symbol as members of the glittering corporate world with branch offices scattered across the world. I work for Sumida, these men gloried in that name as they handed out their business cards. What they did within the company did not matter; it is a sense of belonging to a powerful institution that mattered. Unable to break away from the corporate mold, they chose to ignore what lay in the shadow of the big name: long hours, periodic transfers including overseas assignments, work-related socializing and other constraints that could totally absorb one’s personal freedom.

These men are products of a brand-oriented Japanese society, where names matter --where people flock to France to buy Louis Vitton bags and Yves St. Laurent dresses. Noriko found herself part of the big-name culture. Like corporate warriors who proudly wore their company’s lapel pin, she, too, had been poisoned by elitism of an establishment corporation. Trapped in a thankless job, she nonetheless clung to the public image of Sumida Trading Company.

One Afternoon

I took a bus from the courthouse to a law school, where I was going to spend a couple of hours doing research for an employment discrimination case. Dressed in a silky blouse and clutching a briefcase, I sat down on a hard chair on Metro Bus 74. This dusty old bus almost made me feel nostalgic for immaculately clean buses I used to take back in Japan, replete with soft a female voice announcing each stop and politely thanking passengers.

As soon as I took a window seat, I pulled out the draft of the memorandum on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which I was supposed to give my boss the next day. I started reviewing it while savoring the afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows.

But I was unable to focus, feeling a little tired from attending two pre-trial conferences that morning. Looking up from the stack of papers in my lap, I studied a handful of passengers on the two o’clock bus. A plump woman wearing an orange wide-brimmed hat. A young father cooing to his toddler. A blond girl chewing gum in her Seattle Central Community College sweatshirt.

“How old is she?” The woman in the orange hat asked the father, who was sitting across from her. He was starting to tickle the red-haired girl on his lap.
“How old are you, sweetie?” He repeated the question in an overly sweet voice. The girl giggled.
“She’ll be two next month.” He said. “We’re gonna have a big birthday party for you, aren’t we, Madeline?” He told the woman about his mother and stepfather in North Dakota, who planned to attend the party. His mother was sewing a purple mini dress for her only grandchild. Purple was Madeline’s favorite color.

The bus soon left the downtown area full of skyscrapers. It eventually started driving through the B. District. It is known as the hippiest and strangest place in town, filled with ethnic restaurants, antique shops, tattoo shops, cafes, taverns, theaters. I saw a group of twenty-something men with spiked hair drinking coffee outside a Starbucks. I smiled to myself. I found it both refreshing and amusing to leave the world of lawyers temporarily and place myself in the larger society, where almost no one knows what Res Judicata or the Fourteenth Amendment is –and couldn’t care less.

Looking at my blouse and briefcase, I laughed at myself soundlessly. The first year of law school, when I had repeatedly consulted a physician, who ultimately prescribed a tranquilizer for my sleep disorder triggered by stress. The muggy summer afternoons when I had sat frozen at my computer, typing cover letters to law firms while my forehead glistened with sweat. Suddenly, those days felt impossibly distant. Even the employment discrimination case, which had come to dominate my life, seemed to have slipped out of mind. I felt a new longing for simple things in life –maybe fixing a sandwich, maybe setting flowers in a vase.

But the moment the law school building came into view, I was pulled back into reality. I put on the face of a lawyer as the bus approached the stop in front of the seven-story C. Hall, where aspiring lawyers analyzed the Uniform Commercial Code and practiced for mock trial competitions.