There was no question but that she had an original talent. Not only could she draw well, but her ideas and her point of view were different from those of other people. She had a clear image of precisely what she wanted to make, and it was not something she had borrowed from anyone else: it was always her own, and it always came out of her quite naturally. She pursued the tiny details of her image with all the intensity of a salmon swimming upstream through a great river to its source. She had no time for sleep. She loved her work and dreamed only of the day she could become an independent designer. She never thought about having fun outside of work: in fact, she didn't know how to do any of the things people did to have fun.
Before long, her bosses came to recognize the quality of her work and took an interest in her extravagant, free-flowing lines. Her years of apprenticeship thus came to an end, and she was given full discretion as the head of her own small section-a most unusual promotion.
Nutmeg went on to compile a magnificent record of accomplishment year after year. Her talent and energy caught the interest of people not only within the company but throughout the industry. The world of fashion design was a closed world, but at the same time it was a fair one, a society ruled by competition. A designers power was determined by one thing alone: the number of advance orders that came in for the clothing that he or she had designed. There was never any doubt about who had won and who had lost: the figures told the whole story. Nutmeg never felt that she was competing with anyone, but her record could not be denied.
She worked with total dedication until her late twenties. She met many people through her work, and several men showed interest in her, but their relationships proved short and shallow. Nutmeg could never take a deep interest in living human beings. Her mind was filled with images of clothing, and a mans designs had a far more visceral impact on her than the man himself ever could.
When she turned twenty-seven, though, Nutmeg was introduced to a strange-looking man at an industry New Years party. The mans features were regular enough, but his hair was a wild mass, and his nose and chin had the hard sharpness of stone tools. He looked more like some phony preacher than a designer of womens clothing. He was a year younger than Nutmeg, as thin as a wire, and had eyes of bottomless depth, from which he looked at people with an aggressive stare that seemed deliberately designed to make them feel uncomfortable. In his eyes, though, Nutmeg was able to see her own reflection. At the time, he was an unknown but up-and-coming designer, and the two were meeting for the first time. She had, of course, heard people talking about him. He had a unique talent, they said, but he was arrogant and egotistical and argumentative, liked by almost no one.
We were two of a kind, she said. Both born on the continent. He had also been shipped back after the war, in his case from Korea, stripped of possessions. His father had been a professional soldier, and they experienced serious poverty in the postwar years. His mother had died of typhus when he was very small, and I suppose thats what led to his strong interest in womens clothing. He did have talent, but he had no idea how to deal with people. Here he was, a designer of womens clothing, but when he came into a womans presence, he would turn red and act crazy. In other words, we were both strays who had become separated from the herd.
They married the following year, 1963, and the child they gave birth to in the spring of the year after that (the year of the Tokyo Olympics), was Cinnamon. His name was Cinnamon, wasn't it? No sooner was Cinnamon born than Nutmeg brought her mother into the house to take care of him. She herself had to work nonstop from morning to night and had no time to be caring for infants. Thus Cinnamon was more or less raised by his grandmother.
It was never clear to Nutmeg whether she had ever truly loved her husband as a man. She lacked any criterion by which to make such a judgment, and this was true for her husband also. What had brought them together was the power of a chance meeting and their shared passion for fashion design. Still, their first ten years together was a fruitful time for both. As soon as they were married, they quit their respective companies and set up their own independent design studio in a small apartment in a small, west-facing building just behind Aoyama Avenue. Poorly ventilated and lacking air-conditioning, the place was so hot in summer that the sweat would make their pencils slip from their grasps. The business did not go smoothly at first. Nutmeg and her husband were both almost shockingly lacking in practical business sense, as a result of which they were easily duped by unscrupulous members of the industry, or they would fail to secure orders because they were ignorant of standard practice or would make unimaginably simple mistakes that kept them from getting on track. Their debts mounted up so greatly that at one point it seemed the only solution would be to abscond. The breakthrough came when Nutmeg happened to meet a capable business manager who recognized their talent and could serve them with integrity. From that point on, the company developed so well that all their previous troubles began to seem like a bad dream. Their sales doubled each year until, by 1970, the little company they had started on a shoestring had become a miraculous success-so much so that it surprised even the arrogant, aloof young couple who had started it. They increased their staff, moved to a big building on the avenue, and opened their own shops in such fashionable neighborhoods as the Ginza, Aoyama, and Shinjuku. Their original line of designer clothes figured often in the mass media and became widely known.
Once the company had reached a certain size, the nature of the work they divided between themselves began to change. While designing and manufacturing clothes might be a creative process, it was also, unlike sculpting or novel writing, a business upon which the fortunes of many people depended. One could not simply stay at home and create whatever one liked. Someone would have to go out and present the company's face to the world. This need only increased as the size of the company's transactions continued to grow. One of them would have to appear at parties and fashion shows to give little speeches and hobnob with the guests, and to be interviewed by the media. Nutmeg had absolutely no intention of taking on that role, and so her husband became the one to step forward. Just as poor at socializing as she was, he found the whole thing excruciating at first. He was unable to speak well in front of a lot of strangers, and so he would come home from each such event exhausted. After six months of this, however, he noticed that he was finding it less painful. He was still not much of a speaker, but people did not react to his brusque and awkward manner the way they had when he was young; now they seemed to be drawn to him. They took his curt style (which derived from his naturally introverted personality) as evidence not of arrogant aloofness but rather of a charming artistic temperament. He actually began to enjoy this new position in which he found himself, and before long he was being celebrated as a cultural hero of his time.
You've probably heard his name, Nutmeg said. But in fact, by then I was doing two- thirds of the design work myself. His bold, original ideas had taken off commercially, and he had already come up with more than enough of them to keep us going. It was my job to develop and expand them and give them form. No matter how large the company grew, we never hired other designers. Our support staff expanded, but the crucial part we did ourselves. All we wanted was to make the clothing we wanted to make, not worry about the class of people who would buy it. We did absolutely no market research or cost calculations or strategy planning. If we decided we wanted to make something a certain way, we designed it that way, used the best materials we could find, and took all the time we needed to make it. What other houses could do in two steps, we did in four. Where they used three yards of cloth, we used four. We personally inspected and passed every piece that left our shop. What didn't sell we disposed of. We sold nothing at discount. Our prices were on the high side, of course. Industry people thought we were crazy, but our clothing became a symbol of the era, right along with Peter Max, Woodstock, Twiggy, Easy Rider, and all that. We had so much fun designing clothes back then! We could do the wildest things, and our clients were right there with us. It was as if we had sprouted great big wings and could fly anywhere we liked.