“There’re just no good eligible men our age in this town,” her twin sister, Tamayo, once said. “I mean there are some good men, but they’re all married.”

Mitsuyo’s friends who worked in town said the same thing. These friends, though, were all married, so their tone was different from that of her unmarried sister. “There’s a guy I’d love to introduce you to,” they’d tell her. “But unfortunately he’s already married. It’s a real shame…”

Not that she’d even asked them to introduce her to someone, but the truth remained that it took some courage, in a town like Saga, to be turning thirty next year and to still be single. Her three best friends from high school were all married, with children. One of them had a son who had already started elementary school this year.

“Excuse me,” the customer looking through the suits suddenly asked. He was holding up a mocha-colored suit.

“Would you like to try it on?” Mitsuyo smiled as she approached.

“So is this suit one of the ones that are thirty-eight thousand nine hundred yen for two?” he asked, pointing to the poster hanging from the ceiling.

“Yes. All of them are.” Mitsuyo smiled again and led him to the fitting room.

The man was tall, and must work out, she figured. After he put on the suit and opened the curtain Mitsuyo could see his muscular thighs bulging through the tight slacks.

“Don’t you think they’re a little tight?” the man asked as he looked at her in the mirror.

“Most slacks are styled that way these days.”

She crouched down in front of him to measure the length of the legs. The man smelled slightly milky, as if he might have a baby at home.

A man’s large legs were right in front of her. He was wearing socks, but still she could see the outlines of his toenails. Mitsuyo wondered how many men she’d knelt down in front of. When she first started doing this, measuring trouser legs, she’d hated it, feeling as if she were kneeling in submission.

All those men’s legs. Legs with dirty socks, with clean socks. Thick ankles, thin ankles, long calves, short calves. Sometimes men’s legs looked brutal to her, at other times strong and reliable.

Back when she was twenty-two or twenty-three and was called on to help measure trousers, she had the illusion that among all these men whose trouser legs she was taking up would be her future husband. She laughed at this memory now, but back then she held on to the hope that as she knelt before a man, pinning up a trouser leg, she’d look up and there would be the face of her future husband, gazing gently down at her. For a while she had this fantasy about each customer she served.

This was her first period of expectation about marriage, she realized now. But no matter how many trouser legs she shortened, she never saw the face of the man she was to marry.

The winter rain kept on falling, even after dark.

Mitsuyo closed out the register, turned off the lights in the spacious shop, and went to the locker room to change out of her uniform. Kazuko, already in her street clothes, said, “You can’t go home on a bike in this rain. We’ll give you a ride.”

Mitsuyo glanced at her tired face in the locker-room mirror. “That would be nice,” she said. But then she worried that the next morning she’d have to take the bus to work.

They left through the employee entrance, the rain continuing to pound down on the large parking lot. Behind the store, a fallow field beyond a fence smelled wet and earthy.

Cars hissed by on the wet highway, spraying water. The mammoth, brightly lit sign for the store with the name Wakaba was reflected on the rainy pavement and flickered in a dreamy way.

Mitsuyo heard a car horn and turned toward the sound. Kazuko was already in the passenger seat of her husband’s minicar, which was edging toward Mitsuyo.

Mitsuyo ran out from under the eaves, leaving her umbrella closed. “Thank you so much,” she said as she clambered into the backseat. It took only a few seconds, but her neck was wet and the rain was so cold it hurt.

“Another day, huh?” Kazuko’s husband, who wore thick glasses, said.

“Thank you for always helping me out,” Mitsuyo replied.

Mitsuyo’s apartment was in a corner of a rice field that had a watercourse running through it. It was fairly new, but had that tacky, instantly obsolete look of a place that was built only to be torn down in a few years. Drenched in the rain this evening, the building looked even more dreary than usual.

As they always did, Kazuko and her husband dropped her off right in front of her building. As Mitsuyo climbed out of the backseat, her sneakers sank with a squish into the mud.

Mitsuyo waved goodbye and splashed through the mud up the stairs. She was only on the second floor, but when she got upstairs the view made her feel as if she were at some scenic overlook. The scent of drenched soil, blown toward her by the wind, tickled her nose.

She opened the door to No. 201 and light filtered out from inside.

“Hey, I thought you were going to that party with the Chamber of Commerce,” Mitsuyo called out as she tugged off her wet, muddy skirt. The smell of the kerosene stove hit her, along with the voice of her sister: “It wasn’t mandatory, so I didn’t go.”

In the six-mat living room, her sister, Tamayo, was toweling off her wet hair. She must have just lit the stove, for the room was still cold and had the acrid stink of kerosene.

“I used to hate having to pour drinks for the men, but now the younger girls are pouring me drinks. Kind of makes me uncomfortable,” Tamayo said, standing in front of the stove.

“Did you buy anything?” Mitsuyo asked her, speaking to her back.

“No, nothing. It was raining and everything.”

Tamayo tossed her the damp towel.

“Anything in the fridge?” As she wiped her wet neck Mitsuyo opened the refrigerator.

“Did Mrs. Mizutani give you a ride again?”

“Yeah, I left my bike, so tomorrow I’ll have to take the bus.”

There was half a cabbage in the fridge, and a bit of pork, so she decided to sauté these and make some udon as well. She shut the fridge.

“Your skirt’s going to get wrinkled,” Mitsuyo cautioned Tamayo, who was sitting on the tatami in her damp clothes.

“So you think it’s really okay for a couple of twin sisters turning thirty next year to sit here enjoying udon?” Tamayo said, twirling some tororo konbu around her noodles.

Mitsuyo sprinkled some pepper flakes in her bowl. “These noodles are a bit overcooked,” she said.

“Twenty years ago the neighbors would have definitely looked at us like we’re weird.”

“Why?”

“Two women, twins, living alone in an apartment? Think they wouldn’t gossip about that?”

Tamayo, her long hair pulled back and fastened with a rubber band, noisily slurped down the noodles.

“Plus we have names that make us sound like a comedy team-Mitsuyo and Tamayo. The kids in the neighborhood would definitely have called us the Witch Twins.”

“The Witch Twins…” Half laughing, Mitsuyo felt a shudder of dread at the thought. This didn’t hurt her appetite, though, as she continued to down the noodles.

They lived in a 2DK apartment, two bedrooms plus a dining room-kitchen that rented for ¥42,000 a month. On paper it sounded like a nice place, but the two bedrooms actually consisted of two identical six-mat tatami rooms separated by a sliding door. The other residents of this cheap apartment building were all young couples with small children.

After graduating from a local high school, the twins had worked at a food-processing plant in Tosu City. They hadn’t planned to work in the same factory, but after they’d applied at several places only one had hired them. They both worked on the production line. They were assigned to various stations on the line over the three years they worked there, and over this time had watched tens of thousands of instant-noodle cups flow past.