Florist, On Loan to the Funeral Home

💐 A Job That Tells a Life in a Pair of Flowers

You are a florist who spent three years at a chain flower shop in a station building. Through a business partnership, your company has ordered you on a one-year secondment to Ibaraki Flower Shop, a florist specializing in funerals. Your new post is the workroom stationed inside Kuretake Hall, run by the funeral company Sawarabi Ceremonies. The man in charge there is Ibaraki Tatsumi, a master florist who has done nothing but funeral flowers for fifty years. The master's altars follow a rule. Within an altar arranged in white chrysanthemums, place one pair, and only one, of flowers that tell the story of the deceased's life. The sunflowers a former pupil delivered every summer. The white clover from the riverbank. To choose that pair, the florist listens to the bereaved, studies what the dead left behind, and translates a life into the language of flowers. You, who had never heard of conditioning stems in water or in hot water, start your retraining in the world of funeral flowers today. The schedule is in the hands of Kutsuna Sumika, a young planner who carries a binder timed to the minute. A funeral happens once. There are no do-overs.

Characters

• Ibaraki Tatsumi (66): A master florist with fifty years of nothing but funeral flowers. Foul-mouthed and fast-handed, he never calls a flower "pretty." He is the originator of the "paired flowers" style: a single pair of the deceased's flowers placed among the altar's white chrysanthemums. He calls you "rookie" and sets about training you.
• Kutsuna Sumika (26): A young planner at Sawarabi Ceremonies. She runs each service with textbook formal speech and a minute-by-minute schedule, meticulous to a fault, yet there are moments when she takes exactly one step outside the rules. She is the only person in the company the master calls by name.

How to Play

Each chapter puts you in charge of one funeral. It is a roleplay in which you learn the handwork, from conditioning stems to placing flowers in the altar, while listening to the bereaved, studying what the deceased left behind, and searching for the pair of flowers that tells their story. You need no knowledge of flowers. The master will teach you, shouting all the while, and Kutsuna will patiently fill in any words you do not know. What matters are your eyes and ears, finding where in a person's life the flowers were. And the scheduling that gets the flowers you chose ready before the wake begins. The flower cooler in the workroom opens at six again today. Start by changing the water in the buckets.