My New Boss at the Yokai Pharmacy Is a Fox Who Cannot Lie novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Stay Still While I Measure
Haruna starts her first night at a pharmacy that appears at midnight, and her first prescription is for the owner's fever.
The flyer on the lamppost said, "Night pharmacist wanted. Licence required. Patients are unusual. Sleep not guaranteed."
Haruna Sakamoto read it twice under the streetlight.
She was twenty-five, she had quit the drugstore chain eleven days ago, and she had not slept more than four hours a night since February.
Unusual patients sounded fine.
The address was a dead-end alley behind Nishiki Market, and she reached it at ten to midnight.
The alley ended in a plain brick wall.
Haruna checked the flyer again.
It said, "Wait until midnight. Do not knock."
She stood in front of the wall with her pharmacist's coat folded in her bag and her thermometer in her pocket, feeling stupid.
At midnight exactly, the bricks ahead of her did not move.
A wooden door was simply there, with a round paper lantern burning beside it.
Over the door hung a carved wooden fox.
Its tail tip was a dull grey.
Haruna pushed the door open.
The room smelled of dried mugwort, ginger and cedar.
A long counter ran down one side, and behind it rose a wall of tiny drawers with brush-written labels.
A girl in a yellow raincoat sat on the counter, swinging her white sneakers and eating a rice ball.
"You came," the girl said, with her mouth full. "She said you would, and I said nobody would, and now I owe her a bun."
"I'm here for the pharmacist job," Haruna said.
"I know. I'm Tsukumo." The girl pointed her rice ball at the back. "The boss is behind the curtain. She doesn't get up much on the first night."
Haruna put on her white coat and went through the curtain.
A woman sat on a stool in the lamplight with her elbows on a low table.
She was tall even sitting down, and her hair was silver-white, tied low at her neck with a red cord, and so long it pooled on the floor.
She wore an indigo haori over a white shirt, and her feet were bare.
When she looked up, her eyes were amber, the colour of tea held to a lamp.
"Haruna Sakamoto," the woman said. "Licensed three years. Tsukumo looked you up in the public registry this afternoon."
"You checked me before I even came in?"
"I check everyone who reads the flyer." Her voice was low and unhurried.
"I'm Kuzunoha. This is my shop. Sit."
Haruna did not sit.
She was looking at the woman's face.
Kuzunoha's cheeks were flushed a deep, even red, and a thin shine of sweat sat on her lip.
Her breathing was slightly too quick.
"Excuse me," Haruna said. "Are you feeling all right?"
"I'm feeling as I always feel."
"You're running a fever."
"I usually am."
Haruna had spent three years watching people tell her they were fine.
She took her thermometer from her pocket.
"Stay still while I measure your fever," she said.
Kuzunoha's eyebrows rose.
"That's not part of the interview."
"I'm a pharmacist. You're a patient. It's part of everything."
Behind her, Haruna heard Tsukumo's rice ball stop halfway to her mouth.
She stepped close and brushed the silver hair back from Kuzunoha's ear.
Kuzunoha's skin was burning.
It felt like holding her hand next to a kettle.
Kuzunoha held still, which was strange, because Haruna had expected her to argue.
Her amber eyes stayed on Haruna's face the whole time.
The thermometer beeped.
Haruna read the number and read it again.
"Forty-one point eight," she said. "You should be in a hospital."
"Hospitals don't treat me."
"Then you should be in bed."
"The shop opens at midnight and closes at first light," Kuzunoha said. "I have not missed a night in forty years."
"Do you take anything for it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Ask me something else."
Haruna frowned.
That was not an answer, and the way Kuzunoha said it was not a joke.
"Fine," she said. "Is this normal for you?"
"Yes."
"Is it getting worse?"
Kuzunoha was quiet.
Then she said, "Yes."
She said it plainly, with no flinch.
"Thank you," Haruna said. "That's the first honest thing anyone's told me this month."
Something shifted in Kuzunoha's face, too fast to name.
"I cannot tell a lie," Kuzunoha said. "It's the oath on the sign over my door. If I lie in this shop, I turn to stone. So I say what's true or I say nothing."
Haruna thought of the carved fox over the door, with its grey tail tip.
"That's a very inconvenient oath," she said.
"It makes for good medicine."
Kuzunoha took a brush from the table, wrote four lines on a slip of paper and folded it once.
She held it out between two fingers.
"Your first prescription," she said. "Not mine. Yours."
Haruna unfolded it.
It was written in neat black ink, in a doctor's formal hand.
"Patient: H. Sakamoto, 25. Sleeps four hours or less. Rx: sleep, nightly, beside another person. Dispensed by: K."
Haruna looked up.
Kuzunoha's amber eyes were steady, and her flushed face did not change.
"I mean every word," she said.
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