It’s jam-packed, I thought, and could think of no other word to describe it, so jam-packed was this shop I was seeing for the first time.
The old man who works there is in his seventies, with a full head of hair though it has long since turned grey. He has a wooden chair and a wooden desk, where he sits with his back to a shelf crammed full of corrugated cardboard boxes. He sits there lost in thought, gazing absent-mindedly at something or other, until a customer comes in and asks for a certain type of bulb. Then, without hurrying, but without dithering either, he slowly pushes his chair back and gets to his feet, gropes along the shelf until he gets to the right section, slides one of the boxes out as though removing a brick from a wall, sets it down on the desk and flips back the worn-out lid, then shuffles over to a different shelf to fetch a small plastic pouch which he opens with care, taking his time, then slips his right hand into the cardboard box and grabs a handful of fingernail-sized bulbs which he drops one by one into the plastic pouch, its round opening ready to receive, like putting rice puffs into the mouths of an eager baby sparrow, as I happened to hear another customer remark one time when I was waiting my turn.
Even if you rushed over to Omusa on urgent business and hurriedly told the old man what you needed, time flowed at his pace only, so customers would end up having to kill time by ogling Omusa’s jam-packed interior or snacking on some boiled eggs from the shop next door. The old man, though slow, moved with great concentration, and this measured economy of his kept the customers from trying to rush him. Those who were particularly impatient might grumble a little, but they never asked him to hurry up, and they never took their business elsewhere. The boxes at Omusa had been there for so long, they contained bulbs that could no longer be found anywhere else. If you looked closely enough you could see that some of the boxes had little pen marks on them, but the majority were unmarked, yet somehow the old man at Omusa was never thrown; no matter what kind of bulb you asked for, his slow steps would take him in a direct line to the correct section of shelf.
Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows (tr. Jung Yewon)