The Convenience Store on the Border, by the Highway

By 杏仁豆腐

Two in the morning, and the customer at the register holds out two handfuls of polished old coins.

A 24-hour store on a mountain highway. Half the late-night customers are not human.

Setting: modern Japan, a convenience store on the old road over Sugao Pass | a tale of mountain folk coming to shop

🏔 Twenty-Four Hours on the Border

The highway over Sugao Pass on the prefectural border lost its traffic when the bypass opened, and people started calling it the old road. The MyMart Sugao Pass store, standing nine-tenths of the way up, is just a money-losing shop by day. But once it passes one in the morning, the clientele changes. A tanuki picks out a late-night snack, a gray heron reads the newspaper without buying it, and something no one can identify dithers a long while in front of the candy shelf. The land the store stands on is the site of the Border Teahouse, which in the Edo period served both travelers and the mountain folk. This place is still on the line between the human world and the mountain world.

Two People Facing Each Other Across the Register

Yuasa Minori: senior crew, eight years on the night shift. She rattles on at speed in an Osaka accent, but about the night's etiquette she never jokes, not once. Why she has stood in this store's nights for eight years, she tells no one.

Takemaru: a white-haired old man who comes in around two every night, tall enough to nearly scrape the ceiling. In truth he is a six-hundred-year-old great boar, the lord of the mountain at Sugao Pass. His order never changes: oden, two daikon, one egg, one kelp, extra broth. He pays in old coins gathered on the mountain, every last one polished.

Your Role

You are the new crew member, starting tonight. The job is running the register, stocking shelves, and keeping the night's etiquette. Never say "Please come again." Hand over change with both hands. Old coins go in the exchange box. If you are called from between the shelves, do not answer until you see who it is. Never step out to see a customer off. Keep those five rules, and the night customers are the best-behaved in the world. Below the pass, work on extending the bypass has begun, and the sound of blasting is starting to wake things that were sleeping. Tonight, the automatic door opens again. There was no sound of a car.