Life Ceremony, page 13
As Sanae watched the stomach moving around the small cocoon, she stroked her own pale surface. The heart that had been within her until yesterday must have slipped out without her noticing, and now it seemed there was nothing inside.
Just then, she again felt something feverish vibrating outside.
She knew it was her own heart arriving.
“Welcome home,” she murmured, sticking her face outside the cocoon. The heart had been excreted, but had now come back. She had the feeling that she’d been waiting for this day for a long time.
Sanae could hear the heart beating quietly outside, along with the sound of air being sucked in. The moment it saw Sanae, it began trembling. She couldn’t help feeling happy at how alive her own heart was, and she reached out to pull it to her.
“D-don’t touch me!” the heart screamed, recoiling from her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sanae, are you okay?” she heard her stomach shout behind her. “Makoto, how many times do I have to tell you? Don’t come here anymore!”
“Yuka, t-this woman is weird. She’s wrong in the head!”
“You’re the weird one!”
“E-even when I’ve been loitering for hours, she doesn’t get suspicious and comes up to me smiling, as if it’s the most normal thing to do. What the hell’s wrong with her!”
Sanae couldn’t understand why her heart would say something like that. True, she was probably living in a parallel world, but her world and the world in which they were not internal organs but human beings were two sides of the same coin and could coexist in perfect harmony. Like pieces of a puzzle fitting perfectly together, residents of the two worlds could surely live together.
“What the hell are you talking about, you bastard! You’ve been sending me hundreds of emails every single day, you lie in wait for me, and I’ve had enough! I’m going to report you to the police. Get out of here right now!”
“Yuka . . .”
The heart started trembling violently. A transparent liquid began oozing out of it and dripping down.
“Look at me! This is how much I love you!”
The stomach screamed, and Sanae saw that blood was flowing from the heart. So it really was her heart, she thought happily.
“Stop it! Stay away from me!”
“Why do you keep saying that? I can’t control myself, that’s all.”
Sanae took a step toward her heart. “It’s okay, just come to me. You’ll feel so peaceful.”
“Sanae, you shouldn’t be so nice to this kind of guy. I’m going to call the police right now!” the stomach said in a low voice, and blood flowed even more fiercely from the heart.
“Just come to my world, okay? When you do, nobody will ever think of you as foreign matter again.”
“What the fuck . . .”
“Whatever parallel worlds we’re living in, as long as the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly together, we can all live together forever.”
Sanae enclosed the heart within her gray arms.
“Sanae, even a guy like this . . .” she heard the stomach murmur, as though impressed.
Sanae became engrossed in the beating of the heart that was struggling inside her. Unlike the organs that she’d felt to be somehow distant from her until now, this heart was now one with her. By coming to this world, she could finally become one with her own organ. She savored the heartbeat as she squeezed it with all her might, and in response the heart struggled even harder.
Sanae’s flesh began responding to its vigorous movements, as if to prove that she and the heart were now one. Sweat welled up out of her skin, and she could feel her temperature rising. She almost laughed out loud. Yes, we are just one creature! Her flesh was beginning to stir with life, in sync with the heart. The sweat that oozed from Sanae now was a slimy body fluid, quite different from the water she’d had inside until now. She could tell that her own body was being activated more and more each moment. The stench of her internal organs erupted from her mouth, and sticky sweat flowed from her whole body.
She squeezed the heart even tighter, as if applauding it, and the heart beat harder in response to her voice, setting her flesh trembling.
Eating the City
As I headed to get some lunch, the automatic door to the office building opened in response to my presence, and warm humid air immediately pressed in on me. It was still early spring, but the steaming hot air that enveloped me was more reminiscent of summer, and memories of childhood vacations suddenly rose up in the back of my mind. It was always the same when I detected the scents of summer. It would be the same for anyone, their sense of smell responding to the summer scent that linked back to memories of vacations, bringing up vivid, nostalgic scenes.
Until I left elementary school, it was our family’s custom for the three of us to get in the car, drive to my father’s childhood home in the countryside, and stay there for a week over the Obon festival. It was a typical country house, deep in the mountains of Nagano. We would drive up a narrow mountain road to reach the house, which had an entrance hall about the same size as a child’s bedroom and an atmosphere completely different from our house in Saitama. I was so fascinated by the old house that as soon as we arrived, I would immediately start running around and exploring, but with all the rooms connected by sliding paper doors, I would soon get lost and then burst in on the room where the adults were relaxing. They would scold me, but as soon as they let me go, I would be off again, running around and sliding doors open. Once I finished exploring inside, I played outside to my heart’s content until it was time for dinner. Then I was hungry, so would keep peeking in on the kitchen, where my mother and grandmother were cooking. I was a picky eater, but to my parents’ delight, I ate twice as much as usual when we were in the mountains. The vegetables Granny brought in from her vegetable garden were much sweeter than those we ate at home. Wondering why that was, I’d open my mouth wide and bite into vegetables that I never normally ate.
Absorbed in such universal memories of summer vacation, I went into the café next to the office. When my order arrived, I immediately opened the large sandwich, picked out the slices of tomato, and flipped them onto the plate. My colleague Yuki was eating raw tuna with avocado on a bed of rice, and laughing, she tucked her dyed-brown permed hair behind her ears.
“You’re doing it again, Rina. Why don’t you just ask them to leave it out from the start?”
“I did, but it was in there anyway.”
The menu at this place was popular for its fusion of Western and Japanese rice dishes and well-stuffed sandwiches, and the café was always crowded with women office workers. And it was true—the thick, freshly BBQ-grilled hamburgers were delicious, but I couldn’t help grimacing at the unappetizing smell of the vegetables stuck to the bread.
Normally we ate our lunch at work, Yuki with her homemade bento and me with a sandwich or rice ball from the convenience store. Today was payday, though, so we had decided to treat ourselves. I was fussy about food and didn’t really like going out to eat. When I was with work superiors, even now, at the age of twenty-six, I couldn’t bring myself to say I didn’t like certain foods and usually forced myself to swallow everything, but Yuki and I were the same age, and we got along well and often went out together, so I didn’t have any qualms about also removing the disgusting bit of lettuce and leaving it on the side of the plate.
“Not eating vegetables is bad for you, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I used to eat them more when I was a kid.”
“That’s funny. Usually you grow out of not liking vegetables!”
The reason I grew even fussier about food when I left my parents’ home in Saitama and started living alone in Tokyo was not that I didn’t like vegetables, but because the vegetables in Tokyo were horrible. I did sometimes leave vegetables on the plate at home, too, but the tomatoes and eggplants and other vegetables we were sent from the countryside, and the food from the nearby honesty stall, where they sold cucumbers and things, was always delicious. You have got a pampered tongue, haven’t you? Mom would often say, laughing at me, but they were completely different foods to me. Our local supermarket had a lot of precooked dishes and bentos, but there was only a small selection of fresh vegetables and wilted meager leaves sold in single portions. With this thought in mind, I bit into my sandwich and immediately noticed the unpleasant taste of the green juice from the tomato slices that had soaked into the bread. I grimaced and washed it down with cold water.
“I think I can eat fresh vegetables, though.”
“So why don’t you make a small vegetable patch on your balcony?” Yuki asked.
I shook my head. “That’s not going to work—I’ve killed at least three cactuses. And I don’t have the space for it anyway.”
“Oh, there’s a place near me that delivers pesticide-free vegetables direct from the farm. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? But they’re expensive, I guess.”
“That’s the problem. The tasty vegetables are all expensive, and the cheap ones taste awful. They have this unpleasantly weird kind of taste, don’t you think?”
“It doesn’t really bother me, to be honest.”
After the meal, I swallowed an array of supplements, knowing full well that it would be better to eat a proper meal. The bits of squashed tomatoes were piled up on the plate, discharging their sticky green innards into the scattered bread crumbs.
That evening, when I left work, the air was considerably colder than at midday. I took a shawl out of my bag and put it over my shoulders, glancing at my watch. Half past five. It was about the time we got busy in the kitchen when we were in the mountains in the summer, I thought nostalgically, for no reason at all.
Now that my grandmother was dead, nobody was living in the house, and there was even talk of demolishing it. Back then, though, the house in the mountains was especially lively during the Obon festival, and preparing meals for everyone was a lot of work. While all the women relatives, Mom and Granny included, prepared a huge amount of food, the children usually took a nap, tired out from playing. I would often watch TV, bored as my younger cousins were sleeping, and then Dad would take me out for a walk. We would go past the watermelon chilling in a narrow stream of water from a faucet and the old disused well, then out of the garden onto the mountain path. “Did you know that you can eat these, Rina?” he would ask, plucking a little food from the mountain—wild strawberries, maybe, or some small leaves. On either side of the path, pale and dark green undergrowth grew tangled together, with black thickets farther in. I was scared of big insects jumping out at me from all directions, and I shrank back, but Dad thrust his hand into the greenery with a practiced air and then passed me a piece of the mountain. As I bit into it, warm juice oozed out.
One day Dad picked up a stick in the garden. It was Y-shaped, thick and sturdy. “Oh, this is perfect,” he said, stroking it with a nostalgic look on his face. “You put a rubber band here and use it to shoot small stones. I used to do it all the time.”
I quickly took the rubber band from my ponytail and held it out to him. “Show me! Please?”
“It won’t work with that one,” he said, laughing. “But okay, I’ll try.” He went back inside the house to get a large, chunky rubber band and a small, thick scrap of cloth.
“What’s that bit of cloth for?”
“What? Oh, that’s where you put the stone.”
He sat on the veranda and took a gimlet out of the toolbox to make a couple of holes in the cloth; then he threaded the rubber band through them. He stretched and loosened the rubber band a few times, holding on to the cloth, then abruptly stood up and said, “Okay, Rina, let’s go.” He seemed strangely excited as he strode off quickly, leaving me to scamper after him.
When we reached the mountain path, he said, “Don’t make any noise as you walk,” and he gazed at the sky as if searching for something. Eventually he stopped and whispered in my ear, “There’s one! Be quiet and wait here for me, Rina, okay?”
He picked up a few pebbles from the path and left me there, crouching over as he went deeper into the grass. I held my breath as I watched him approach a large tree and put a stone in the cloth, then pull the band back like drawing a bow and arrow. Dad stretched the rubber band back as long as his arm, and I was about to warn him, terrified, that it might break at any moment, when he suddenly let go and the stone flew like a bullet into the branches. Birds flew up out of the tree all at once, and I was captivated by the sight. “How about that?” Dad said. “I haven’t lost my touch at all!” He walked calmly over to the base of the tree and picked something out of the grass, cradling it in his hands, so I couldn’t see very well what it was. Holding the object in one hand, with his free hand he held mine and started walking. I tried to see what he was carrying, but Dad’s body blocked my view.
“Grill this for Rina, will you?” he said when we got to the kitchen.
“A sparrow? Whatever next! Where on earth did you find that?”
My grandmother’s wrinkled face creased even more as she stood up, supporting her hunched back with one hand. She had a basket at her feet that contained the vast quantity of vegetables she had just picked for dinner.
“Come on, you help too!” Dad told me, so I sat between an aunt and an older cousin and started peeling some potatoes, but the work didn’t go very quickly as I couldn’t stop glancing over at what my grandmother was doing.
After a while my grandmother put something black on a piece of newspaper and handed it to me. “Watch out, it’s hot.”
“Give it a try, Rina,” Dad said.
Nervously I stretched out a hand and took it. It looked more like a miniature mummy than a sparrow. As my grandmother watched, I bit into the charred meat. An appetizing fragrance burst out, and, being hungry, I opened my mouth wide for another bite, only to sink my teeth into bone.
My grandmother laughed. “It’s all bones, not much to eat!”
“Yeah, that’s true. But it’s tasty, isn’t it, Rina?” Dad said.
“Yes!” I nodded enthusiastically. I thought little birds ripened on trees like fruit did. Compared with the meat sold in packs, the meat you picked in the mountains was small and had a weird shape, but somehow the meat of a freshly picked sparrow still had a hint of life in it, with lots of flavors packed into the tiny body. I said the head was especially soft and tasty, and he laughed. “That’s the brain. It’s considered a delicacy that goes well with sake, so maybe you’ll be a drinker when you grow up!”
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could take evening walks and pick my own food, the way my father did in the mountains back then, I thought as I made my way home. There weren’t many trees in the streets around my office in Nihonbashi, and this made me long even more for the scenery in my memory. There were some flower beds, but these contained well-tended flowers, with signs giving their names, and they looked more like they were on display than just growing there. Today I’d felt like taking a different entrance into the subway station and was walking along the road when I saw a large, dirty plant pot that looked as if it had been forgotten there, alone among the flower beds. Thinking that a gardener would probably dispose of it before long, I went over to it and saw a small withered tree around which thick weeds were growing, almost bursting the pot. I noticed a somewhat early flowering dandelion and reached out for it. I hadn’t seen one of those for ages, I thought as I plucked the yellow flower. Seeing the hollow stem almost instantly brought back memories of playing with dandelions when I was little. I used to make toy waterwheels out of a stem and bamboo skewers, but now I couldn’t quite remember how I’d done it. Looking closely at the flower, I started walking again, and an elegant elderly lady coming from the opposite direction smiled as she passed me.
Realizing that picking a dandelion must have struck her as something a little girl would do, I suddenly felt embarrassed and shoved it into my bag as I quickened my pace and headed for the station.
When I got home and opened my bag, I saw the yellow flower, looking a bit crumpled. I’d completely forgotten about it after shoving it in there, and I hurriedly took it out. I filled an empty jam jar with water and put the dandelion in it. It must have sucked up some water through its stem, for it seemed to perk up a little.
The next day, Yuki and I had lunch as usual in an empty meeting room at work. I casually mentioned what I’d done the day before, and when I came to the part about my memories of dandelions and the house in the mountains, to my surprise she leaned forward eagerly.
“How I envy you that! I’ve always lived in Tokyo, and my granny and grandpa are both from here too, so I’ve never spent time in the countryside, and I don’t think I’ve ever played at picking flowers. And I’ve certainly never made a flower crown or a dandelion waterwheel. I just adore stories like this.”
“Really?”
“Really! It sounds so wholesome, the kind of thing people should be doing. I mean, I go to the gym once a week, but I don’t ever feel like I’m getting healthy. Going for a walk and picking flowers to decorate your room feels more luxurious than any aroma oil.”
“In the real countryside, I never picked flowers or anything like that. Although my Dad used to pick wild strawberries.”
“Wow, I love that even more!”
“I don’t know, though. I mean, they’re so laid-back there, and totally fine about doing things that are horrifying for city folks. Like, for example, when my Dad was little, he had a chicken, and he was really fond of it. But once it stopped laying eggs, my grandpa killed it and they ate it for dinner. Even Dad didn’t feel particularly sorry for it, and he ate some too, saying how delicious it was.”
Yuki laughed. “What’s wrong with that? That’s a natural process, after all. In the countryside you learn to appreciate life, don’t you?”
This had gradually been dawning on me as we talked. “I’ve heard that mugwort grows in Tokyo too, in parks and places like that,” I murmured as I munched on a convenience store bun. “Maybe I’ll try picking some. Homemade mugwort mochi is completely different from the ones you buy, you know.”
Just then, she again felt something feverish vibrating outside.
She knew it was her own heart arriving.
“Welcome home,” she murmured, sticking her face outside the cocoon. The heart had been excreted, but had now come back. She had the feeling that she’d been waiting for this day for a long time.
Sanae could hear the heart beating quietly outside, along with the sound of air being sucked in. The moment it saw Sanae, it began trembling. She couldn’t help feeling happy at how alive her own heart was, and she reached out to pull it to her.
“D-don’t touch me!” the heart screamed, recoiling from her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sanae, are you okay?” she heard her stomach shout behind her. “Makoto, how many times do I have to tell you? Don’t come here anymore!”
“Yuka, t-this woman is weird. She’s wrong in the head!”
“You’re the weird one!”
“E-even when I’ve been loitering for hours, she doesn’t get suspicious and comes up to me smiling, as if it’s the most normal thing to do. What the hell’s wrong with her!”
Sanae couldn’t understand why her heart would say something like that. True, she was probably living in a parallel world, but her world and the world in which they were not internal organs but human beings were two sides of the same coin and could coexist in perfect harmony. Like pieces of a puzzle fitting perfectly together, residents of the two worlds could surely live together.
“What the hell are you talking about, you bastard! You’ve been sending me hundreds of emails every single day, you lie in wait for me, and I’ve had enough! I’m going to report you to the police. Get out of here right now!”
“Yuka . . .”
The heart started trembling violently. A transparent liquid began oozing out of it and dripping down.
“Look at me! This is how much I love you!”
The stomach screamed, and Sanae saw that blood was flowing from the heart. So it really was her heart, she thought happily.
“Stop it! Stay away from me!”
“Why do you keep saying that? I can’t control myself, that’s all.”
Sanae took a step toward her heart. “It’s okay, just come to me. You’ll feel so peaceful.”
“Sanae, you shouldn’t be so nice to this kind of guy. I’m going to call the police right now!” the stomach said in a low voice, and blood flowed even more fiercely from the heart.
“Just come to my world, okay? When you do, nobody will ever think of you as foreign matter again.”
“What the fuck . . .”
“Whatever parallel worlds we’re living in, as long as the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly together, we can all live together forever.”
Sanae enclosed the heart within her gray arms.
“Sanae, even a guy like this . . .” she heard the stomach murmur, as though impressed.
Sanae became engrossed in the beating of the heart that was struggling inside her. Unlike the organs that she’d felt to be somehow distant from her until now, this heart was now one with her. By coming to this world, she could finally become one with her own organ. She savored the heartbeat as she squeezed it with all her might, and in response the heart struggled even harder.
Sanae’s flesh began responding to its vigorous movements, as if to prove that she and the heart were now one. Sweat welled up out of her skin, and she could feel her temperature rising. She almost laughed out loud. Yes, we are just one creature! Her flesh was beginning to stir with life, in sync with the heart. The sweat that oozed from Sanae now was a slimy body fluid, quite different from the water she’d had inside until now. She could tell that her own body was being activated more and more each moment. The stench of her internal organs erupted from her mouth, and sticky sweat flowed from her whole body.
She squeezed the heart even tighter, as if applauding it, and the heart beat harder in response to her voice, setting her flesh trembling.
Eating the City
As I headed to get some lunch, the automatic door to the office building opened in response to my presence, and warm humid air immediately pressed in on me. It was still early spring, but the steaming hot air that enveloped me was more reminiscent of summer, and memories of childhood vacations suddenly rose up in the back of my mind. It was always the same when I detected the scents of summer. It would be the same for anyone, their sense of smell responding to the summer scent that linked back to memories of vacations, bringing up vivid, nostalgic scenes.
Until I left elementary school, it was our family’s custom for the three of us to get in the car, drive to my father’s childhood home in the countryside, and stay there for a week over the Obon festival. It was a typical country house, deep in the mountains of Nagano. We would drive up a narrow mountain road to reach the house, which had an entrance hall about the same size as a child’s bedroom and an atmosphere completely different from our house in Saitama. I was so fascinated by the old house that as soon as we arrived, I would immediately start running around and exploring, but with all the rooms connected by sliding paper doors, I would soon get lost and then burst in on the room where the adults were relaxing. They would scold me, but as soon as they let me go, I would be off again, running around and sliding doors open. Once I finished exploring inside, I played outside to my heart’s content until it was time for dinner. Then I was hungry, so would keep peeking in on the kitchen, where my mother and grandmother were cooking. I was a picky eater, but to my parents’ delight, I ate twice as much as usual when we were in the mountains. The vegetables Granny brought in from her vegetable garden were much sweeter than those we ate at home. Wondering why that was, I’d open my mouth wide and bite into vegetables that I never normally ate.
Absorbed in such universal memories of summer vacation, I went into the café next to the office. When my order arrived, I immediately opened the large sandwich, picked out the slices of tomato, and flipped them onto the plate. My colleague Yuki was eating raw tuna with avocado on a bed of rice, and laughing, she tucked her dyed-brown permed hair behind her ears.
“You’re doing it again, Rina. Why don’t you just ask them to leave it out from the start?”
“I did, but it was in there anyway.”
The menu at this place was popular for its fusion of Western and Japanese rice dishes and well-stuffed sandwiches, and the café was always crowded with women office workers. And it was true—the thick, freshly BBQ-grilled hamburgers were delicious, but I couldn’t help grimacing at the unappetizing smell of the vegetables stuck to the bread.
Normally we ate our lunch at work, Yuki with her homemade bento and me with a sandwich or rice ball from the convenience store. Today was payday, though, so we had decided to treat ourselves. I was fussy about food and didn’t really like going out to eat. When I was with work superiors, even now, at the age of twenty-six, I couldn’t bring myself to say I didn’t like certain foods and usually forced myself to swallow everything, but Yuki and I were the same age, and we got along well and often went out together, so I didn’t have any qualms about also removing the disgusting bit of lettuce and leaving it on the side of the plate.
“Not eating vegetables is bad for you, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I used to eat them more when I was a kid.”
“That’s funny. Usually you grow out of not liking vegetables!”
The reason I grew even fussier about food when I left my parents’ home in Saitama and started living alone in Tokyo was not that I didn’t like vegetables, but because the vegetables in Tokyo were horrible. I did sometimes leave vegetables on the plate at home, too, but the tomatoes and eggplants and other vegetables we were sent from the countryside, and the food from the nearby honesty stall, where they sold cucumbers and things, was always delicious. You have got a pampered tongue, haven’t you? Mom would often say, laughing at me, but they were completely different foods to me. Our local supermarket had a lot of precooked dishes and bentos, but there was only a small selection of fresh vegetables and wilted meager leaves sold in single portions. With this thought in mind, I bit into my sandwich and immediately noticed the unpleasant taste of the green juice from the tomato slices that had soaked into the bread. I grimaced and washed it down with cold water.
“I think I can eat fresh vegetables, though.”
“So why don’t you make a small vegetable patch on your balcony?” Yuki asked.
I shook my head. “That’s not going to work—I’ve killed at least three cactuses. And I don’t have the space for it anyway.”
“Oh, there’s a place near me that delivers pesticide-free vegetables direct from the farm. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? But they’re expensive, I guess.”
“That’s the problem. The tasty vegetables are all expensive, and the cheap ones taste awful. They have this unpleasantly weird kind of taste, don’t you think?”
“It doesn’t really bother me, to be honest.”
After the meal, I swallowed an array of supplements, knowing full well that it would be better to eat a proper meal. The bits of squashed tomatoes were piled up on the plate, discharging their sticky green innards into the scattered bread crumbs.
That evening, when I left work, the air was considerably colder than at midday. I took a shawl out of my bag and put it over my shoulders, glancing at my watch. Half past five. It was about the time we got busy in the kitchen when we were in the mountains in the summer, I thought nostalgically, for no reason at all.
Now that my grandmother was dead, nobody was living in the house, and there was even talk of demolishing it. Back then, though, the house in the mountains was especially lively during the Obon festival, and preparing meals for everyone was a lot of work. While all the women relatives, Mom and Granny included, prepared a huge amount of food, the children usually took a nap, tired out from playing. I would often watch TV, bored as my younger cousins were sleeping, and then Dad would take me out for a walk. We would go past the watermelon chilling in a narrow stream of water from a faucet and the old disused well, then out of the garden onto the mountain path. “Did you know that you can eat these, Rina?” he would ask, plucking a little food from the mountain—wild strawberries, maybe, or some small leaves. On either side of the path, pale and dark green undergrowth grew tangled together, with black thickets farther in. I was scared of big insects jumping out at me from all directions, and I shrank back, but Dad thrust his hand into the greenery with a practiced air and then passed me a piece of the mountain. As I bit into it, warm juice oozed out.
One day Dad picked up a stick in the garden. It was Y-shaped, thick and sturdy. “Oh, this is perfect,” he said, stroking it with a nostalgic look on his face. “You put a rubber band here and use it to shoot small stones. I used to do it all the time.”
I quickly took the rubber band from my ponytail and held it out to him. “Show me! Please?”
“It won’t work with that one,” he said, laughing. “But okay, I’ll try.” He went back inside the house to get a large, chunky rubber band and a small, thick scrap of cloth.
“What’s that bit of cloth for?”
“What? Oh, that’s where you put the stone.”
He sat on the veranda and took a gimlet out of the toolbox to make a couple of holes in the cloth; then he threaded the rubber band through them. He stretched and loosened the rubber band a few times, holding on to the cloth, then abruptly stood up and said, “Okay, Rina, let’s go.” He seemed strangely excited as he strode off quickly, leaving me to scamper after him.
When we reached the mountain path, he said, “Don’t make any noise as you walk,” and he gazed at the sky as if searching for something. Eventually he stopped and whispered in my ear, “There’s one! Be quiet and wait here for me, Rina, okay?”
He picked up a few pebbles from the path and left me there, crouching over as he went deeper into the grass. I held my breath as I watched him approach a large tree and put a stone in the cloth, then pull the band back like drawing a bow and arrow. Dad stretched the rubber band back as long as his arm, and I was about to warn him, terrified, that it might break at any moment, when he suddenly let go and the stone flew like a bullet into the branches. Birds flew up out of the tree all at once, and I was captivated by the sight. “How about that?” Dad said. “I haven’t lost my touch at all!” He walked calmly over to the base of the tree and picked something out of the grass, cradling it in his hands, so I couldn’t see very well what it was. Holding the object in one hand, with his free hand he held mine and started walking. I tried to see what he was carrying, but Dad’s body blocked my view.
“Grill this for Rina, will you?” he said when we got to the kitchen.
“A sparrow? Whatever next! Where on earth did you find that?”
My grandmother’s wrinkled face creased even more as she stood up, supporting her hunched back with one hand. She had a basket at her feet that contained the vast quantity of vegetables she had just picked for dinner.
“Come on, you help too!” Dad told me, so I sat between an aunt and an older cousin and started peeling some potatoes, but the work didn’t go very quickly as I couldn’t stop glancing over at what my grandmother was doing.
After a while my grandmother put something black on a piece of newspaper and handed it to me. “Watch out, it’s hot.”
“Give it a try, Rina,” Dad said.
Nervously I stretched out a hand and took it. It looked more like a miniature mummy than a sparrow. As my grandmother watched, I bit into the charred meat. An appetizing fragrance burst out, and, being hungry, I opened my mouth wide for another bite, only to sink my teeth into bone.
My grandmother laughed. “It’s all bones, not much to eat!”
“Yeah, that’s true. But it’s tasty, isn’t it, Rina?” Dad said.
“Yes!” I nodded enthusiastically. I thought little birds ripened on trees like fruit did. Compared with the meat sold in packs, the meat you picked in the mountains was small and had a weird shape, but somehow the meat of a freshly picked sparrow still had a hint of life in it, with lots of flavors packed into the tiny body. I said the head was especially soft and tasty, and he laughed. “That’s the brain. It’s considered a delicacy that goes well with sake, so maybe you’ll be a drinker when you grow up!”
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could take evening walks and pick my own food, the way my father did in the mountains back then, I thought as I made my way home. There weren’t many trees in the streets around my office in Nihonbashi, and this made me long even more for the scenery in my memory. There were some flower beds, but these contained well-tended flowers, with signs giving their names, and they looked more like they were on display than just growing there. Today I’d felt like taking a different entrance into the subway station and was walking along the road when I saw a large, dirty plant pot that looked as if it had been forgotten there, alone among the flower beds. Thinking that a gardener would probably dispose of it before long, I went over to it and saw a small withered tree around which thick weeds were growing, almost bursting the pot. I noticed a somewhat early flowering dandelion and reached out for it. I hadn’t seen one of those for ages, I thought as I plucked the yellow flower. Seeing the hollow stem almost instantly brought back memories of playing with dandelions when I was little. I used to make toy waterwheels out of a stem and bamboo skewers, but now I couldn’t quite remember how I’d done it. Looking closely at the flower, I started walking again, and an elegant elderly lady coming from the opposite direction smiled as she passed me.
Realizing that picking a dandelion must have struck her as something a little girl would do, I suddenly felt embarrassed and shoved it into my bag as I quickened my pace and headed for the station.
When I got home and opened my bag, I saw the yellow flower, looking a bit crumpled. I’d completely forgotten about it after shoving it in there, and I hurriedly took it out. I filled an empty jam jar with water and put the dandelion in it. It must have sucked up some water through its stem, for it seemed to perk up a little.
The next day, Yuki and I had lunch as usual in an empty meeting room at work. I casually mentioned what I’d done the day before, and when I came to the part about my memories of dandelions and the house in the mountains, to my surprise she leaned forward eagerly.
“How I envy you that! I’ve always lived in Tokyo, and my granny and grandpa are both from here too, so I’ve never spent time in the countryside, and I don’t think I’ve ever played at picking flowers. And I’ve certainly never made a flower crown or a dandelion waterwheel. I just adore stories like this.”
“Really?”
“Really! It sounds so wholesome, the kind of thing people should be doing. I mean, I go to the gym once a week, but I don’t ever feel like I’m getting healthy. Going for a walk and picking flowers to decorate your room feels more luxurious than any aroma oil.”
“In the real countryside, I never picked flowers or anything like that. Although my Dad used to pick wild strawberries.”
“Wow, I love that even more!”
“I don’t know, though. I mean, they’re so laid-back there, and totally fine about doing things that are horrifying for city folks. Like, for example, when my Dad was little, he had a chicken, and he was really fond of it. But once it stopped laying eggs, my grandpa killed it and they ate it for dinner. Even Dad didn’t feel particularly sorry for it, and he ate some too, saying how delicious it was.”
Yuki laughed. “What’s wrong with that? That’s a natural process, after all. In the countryside you learn to appreciate life, don’t you?”
This had gradually been dawning on me as we talked. “I’ve heard that mugwort grows in Tokyo too, in parks and places like that,” I murmured as I munched on a convenience store bun. “Maybe I’ll try picking some. Homemade mugwort mochi is completely different from the ones you buy, you know.”
