Life Ceremony, page 14
I’d been half joking, but Yuki nodded seriously. “Try it! Getting some exercise and picking vegetables must be doubly good for your health, right?”
I looked at my lunch. A big sweet bun and a sandwich. I hadn’t had any vegetables at all this week. I was conscious of the high-calorific content of this food, too. I didn’t feel like eating the limp vegetables from the convenience store or the supermarket, but I could imagine myself eating mugwort that I’d picked myself.
“Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe it would help me get over my dislike of vegetables a bit.”
“If you make some mugwort mochi, let me try them, okay?” Yuki said, laughing.
“Of course,” I said. Now I really wanted to eat some homemade mugwort mochi and recalled the nostalgic taste as I stuffed the last of the dry sandwich into my mouth.
The next day after work, I was in the locker room getting changed when Yuki came in a little late and looked a bit surprised at my outfit.
“Hi, Rina. Oh, you’re dressed lightly today.”
“Oh, hi, Yuki.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going out looking for mugwort today?”
“Yep, and getting some exercise while I’m at it.”
“I see—if you do find some, be sure to let me have a taste!”
I waved goodbye and left the locker room, straightened my back, and started walking. I had a plastic bag from the convenience store ready in my pocket. When I was still at my parents’ home in Saitama, we sometimes went to pick fern and bracken shoots on vacant lots in early spring. There probably wouldn’t be any fern shoots, but I’d be happy with some mugwort. And even if I couldn’t find that, I was bound to find some dandelions. I knew they were edible, but hadn’t ever eaten them, and they didn’t look so appetizing, so I wasn’t thinking of actually having any for dinner that night, but I wouldn’t mind a little taste. I wasn’t exactly serious about it, I just thought I’d have a bit of fun while getting some exercise.
First I went to where I’d found the dandelion the day before, but I couldn’t find any others there. I picked the remaining leaves and peered into the flower beds, which were thick with weeds, to see whether there was anything worth picking, but I didn’t know what any of the weeds were, so I decided to leave them.
As I put the dandelion leaves into the plastic bag, I noticed an office lady around my age eyeing me curiously. I quickly walked away, thinking that if anyone from work saw me doing this, it would be a bit difficult to explain. Just then a truck belching exhaust fumes drove past. I looked at the gray smoke spreading over the sidewalk and quickly opened the bag, took out the dandelion leaves, and threw them into the trash can at a convenience store I happened to be passing. Of course you couldn’t eat plants growing by the side of a busy road. I’d been stupid for assuming unthinkingly that any dandelion would do, and I set off again in search of some clean dandelions.
I looked around in several parks. In one large park there were some shacks that looked as though they were occupied by homeless people, and when I thought of people living and relieving themselves in this park, I didn’t feel like touching the earth, let alone eating anything from it. In a small children’s playground, apparently where office workers came for a break, there were cigarette butts and empty coffee cans lying around. Naturally I couldn’t eat anything that had come into contact with garbage, so I walked a bit farther and finally came to a park where there wasn’t much trash, only to see signs saying take your dog poop home!” suggesting that it was popular with dog walkers. Looking for edible wild plants in the city was ill-advised after all, I thought, but I couldn’t quite let the idea go, so I set off again, determined to find just one clean dandelion. I needed to find a park where there weren’t any homeless people and that wasn’t popular with dog walkers. I wandered around several children’s playgrounds before realizing that I had come as far as Tokyo Station, so I decided to have a look in the Fountain Park.
It had been marked in green on the street map, so it came as a surprise to find that it was actually a concrete park with a number of large fountains and no greenery in sight. Somewhat disappointed, I looked around and saw that the concrete was enclosed by some raised beds that had exposed earth in them. They looked well-tended, without many weeds, although there were a few growing up around the plants. I wandered around, crouching over to see whether I could spot any dandelions. It occurred to me that I probably looked weird looking in the flower beds without even glancing at the fountains, and I quickly took a look around, but I saw only a few foreign tourists taking pictures. Tourists might think I was weird, but they probably wouldn’t go so far as to complain, I thought, so I went back to hunting among the weeds, my face even closer than before.
This was a long way from the scenes in my head of picking mugwort on the empty lots near my family home and gathering chestnuts from the nearby prefectural park. I was more like a scavenging crow. Far from feeling enriched, I cut a pitiful figure, and worried about people seeing me, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and decided to finish up quickly and go home.
I’d gone halfway around the edge of the park when I finally spotted a group of dandelions. I looked around again and, to avoid getting dirt under my nails, took out another small plastic bag that still contained crumbs from my lunch. I thrust my hand inside it and grabbed a fistful of flowers and leaves. Still with my hand wrapped in the bag, I plucked all the dandelions within reach and put them into the convenience store bag. Feeling like a pickpocket, I quickly stuffed it into my purse and started walking to the subway station. It was getting dark, and I could no longer see any people in the park. I had worn light clothing, thinking it was spring, but the night air was unexpectedly chilly and my shoulders felt cold.
I hurriedly threw my shawl around me and got onto a subway train, but my shoulders and hands still didn’t warm up. When I got back home, I switched on the heating and put the bag on the low dining table.
I made some tea and sat at the table sipping it, staring at the bag as I warmed up. The green leaves stuck to the inside looked transparent and a bit limp, not at all like anything edible. I thought about throwing them away, but having come this far, I thought I might as well do something with them, so I took them out of the bag.
The flowers didn’t look edible, so I chucked them into the wastebasket in the sink. The leaves were completely wilted: even a convenience store salad looked fresher than they did. Washing them carefully, I was about to put them back on the chopping board, but then had second thoughts, and I spread the plastic bag out on the chopping board and laid the leaves on it.
I’d had the image of eating dandelion leaves as tempura, but I had only an electric stove that didn’t get hot enough for frying, and I didn’t feel like going to all that trouble anyway. The leaves looked bitter, so I decided to put them in miso soup to make them more palatable. I was uneasy about not cooking them enough, so I decided to boil them first, then add the miso.
As I started cutting them up with a kitchen knife, a dark green liquid seeped out. The smell they gave off was not the sort of smell you get when cooking, more like the weeds I’d been made to pull up in the yard at school. I was overcome with the sensation of playing in the mud, not cooking. I doubted whether I would actually be able to eat them.
Anyway, I put the leaves into the pan of boiling water. I felt a bit like a witch making a potion. The color rapidly seeped out into the hot water, turning it into something that looked like fabric dye. It was a bit scary, so I threw away the colored water and added fresh water several times, cooking the leaves carefully, and by the time I finally decided to add the miso, they were utterly frazzled. As I stuck the spoon into the miso, I hesitated, feeling like I was throwing precious miso into the trash. Telling myself it would be more wasteful to put only a little in and end up making a weak, unpalatable soup, I took out a big scoop and dissolved it in the pan.
When it was more or less done and I put some in a bowl, it could have passed for miso soup with spinach. But it also looked like sewage water with trash floating in it.
I served myself some rice from the rice cooker, which had been left on all day, and put it on the table next to the soup. I felt like a kid playing house, and I had absolutely no appetite. To start with, I ate only the rice, but then I summoned my courage and took a sip of the soup.
The moment I put a lump of green in my mouth, the sight of the gray concrete fountain park I’d been in earlier came back to me. I almost spat it out at the thought that what I was eating was part of that park.
The overboiled greens had no taste and felt like bits of wet tissue paper stuck to my tongue. I had a vision of the people who had been walking around the park, and then I had the urge to vomit and quickly spat it out into a tissue. It was trash after all, I thought, seeing the wilted dandelion leaf in the middle of the white tissue paper. I threw the contents of the pan into the sink and took a pack of natto out of the refrigerator. I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat that either and ended up leaving half. I brushed my teeth meticulously and gargled repeatedly, but I couldn’t get rid of the sensation of that tasteless leaf on the surface of my tongue.
The next day, Friday, I started to feel unwell at work and ended up having to lie down in the tea room. Yuki brought a thermometer from the admin department and took my temperature. It was 38.5C. My normal temperature was on the low side, so just seeing those figures made me feel dizzy.
“Surely it’s not because you ate some mugwort, is it? Do you have a stomachache?”
“No. Don’t worry, I didn’t eat any . . . actually I didn’t find any after all. Seems I just caught a cold walking around in the chilly weather.”
I fudged my answer, not wanting anyone to know about the pathetic figure I’d cut yesterday.
Yuki looked contrite. “Oh, no. I feel partially responsible for having put strange ideas into your head. I wish I hadn’t said anything. Have you told the boss yet?”
“Yes. He told me not to overdo things and that I could go home.”
“Well then, leave everything to me. Take care of yourself, and have a good rest, okay?”
I thanked Yuki for being so thoughtful, went to tell my boss that I was going home early, and left the office on shaky legs. I was sitting on the train, my head bowed, feeling awful, when I noticed that an ant was clinging to the hem of my coat. I’d been wandering around in a daze, so maybe the hem had brushed against a planter or something. I brushed the ant off with my fingertip, then closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
Somehow I managed to make it home. I took some medicine and went straight to bed, but I couldn’t shake off the chills. I felt so stupid for having gone to so much trouble in the cold to pick some junk that ended up being disgusting to eat, and then catching a cold in the process. I didn’t even have the energy to make some rice gruel, and I had no appetite anyway, so did my best to sleep in order to be better by Monday.
Lying there in the dim room, I began to have the sensation that I was floating. My apartment was on the first floor, so the sounds of the street rang out in the room, and every car that went by brought me back to my senses. Hearing the sounds of engines and people talking, I thought back to the house in the mountains from my childhood summers.
When you were in that house, you could hear the rustling of the trees and the chirring of insects, which made you feel the overwhelming power of the outside world. You were living amidst the presence of various other creatures. The sensation of living quietly in that little gap was pleasant, breathing air that that was blended with the breaths of countless other creatures. As a child, I too had exhaled the carbon dioxide warmed by my insides, quietly suffusing the air with my own presence.
After dark, in order to alleviate the heat a little, we would open all the windows, but even though the windows were screened, we had to make sure the place was pitch-dark before opening them, or little bugs would manage to get in somewhere. We would feel the outside world, with the faint sounds of living creatures moving around and the air that had been set trembling by the movement of the trees, pressing in on us.
After my grandfather died, my grandmother came just once to visit us in Saitama. We put her in the car and set off for Tokyo to do some sightseeing. My mother and I gazed out the windows, happy to see the night views of Tokyo for the first time in ages. My grandmother was watching us, her eyes crinkling in amusement. “It’s quite different from the mountains, isn’t it?” my father said, to which she responded, “It’s no different at all. Here they just waste too much electricity, otherwise it’s much the same,” and laughed.
I thought at the time that my grandmother’s take on things was far more sensible than mine, and I’d wanted to be like her. Roads probably all looked the same to her whether they were made of gravel or concrete.
I pushed back the duvet, my arms covered in sweat, and opened my eyes a crack. In the dim light I saw an ant crawl out from under my coat, where I’d dropped it on the floor. I thought I’d flicked it off in the train, but it must have clung to the inside of the hem. Normally I’d have been repelled by it and would have either thrown it outside or squashed it, but I remembered being fine with the much bigger ants that had often been crawling around the house in the mountains, so I decided to just watch it. It must have been years since I tried living with nonhuman creatures I found in my home instead of immediately getting rid of them. In the mountains, everyone calmly carried on eating, even with grasshoppers jumping around on the dining table. We had the sense of living together with creatures of various sizes. When my grandmother came to Tokyo, she might have been perfectly aware of the presence of poor-looking insects crawling around on the asphalt and the feeble rustling of the trees on the streets, which we usually didn’t notice, diluted as they were by the artificial noises.
I could hear the voices of some people outside, but they were speaking in a foreign language, so I didn’t understand what they were saying. As I listened, their voices began to resemble the calls of animals. In my mind they overlapped with the night presences I had sensed on the other side of the torn window screens during those childhood summers, and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.
I slept pretty much constantly for more than two days, and when I finally woke up and looked at the bedside clock, it was five in the morning. I pushed away the damp duvet and got up. My fever had gone down, and it looked as though I would be able to go back to work today.
During this time I’d ingested only liquids and a small amount of jelly and hadn’t eaten any proper food. Now that my appetite had returned, I checked the refrigerator. All that was in it was some frozen rice, so I decided to go to the convenience store and changed out of my sweaty pajamas into a sweatshirt and pants. Just then I felt something tickle my little toe, and I looked down to see the little ant climbing onto it. When I realized that it had been hanging out in my apartment all this time, I didn’t feel like killing it, so I went to the front door with it still on my toe, crouched down, and gently pushed it off. Maybe it instinctively knew where the outdoors was, since it made a beeline for the door and started running back and forth beside it. I opened the door for it, and feeling a little concerned about where it would go, I put on some sandals and went outside too.
The ant moved quickly over the concrete. As a memory came back to me of the way I followed ants like this when I was little, the ant entered the roughly half-meter gap between my apartment and the fence.
Weeds grew thickly here, mixed in with cigarette butts and empty cans perhaps thrown from an upstairs window. I tried to find the ant among the weeds, but it had already disappeared. Instead, I saw two dandelions with wide, spreading leaves squeezing their way up through the tall weeds. The nearest flower was quite big and surrounded by some twenty overlapping leaves almost twenty centimeters long. I crouched down and touched the leaves, feeling how fresh they were, plump with moisture. Suddenly I was overcome by a raging hunger.
I knelt down and grabbed the base of the closest dandelion, intending to pull it out by the root. I pulled with all my strength but was met with unexpectedly strong resistance, as if in a tug of war with the ground, but as I pulled harder, the stem tore away unsatisfyingly quickly. I saw a thick, pure white forked root peeping out of a gap in the soil and realized that the plant was growing quite deep.
I stuffed the torn leaves into the pocket of my sweatpants and crouched down even more, pushing my upper body into the gap to reach the other dandelion. It wasn’t as big as the first one, but it was still quite large and the ground had a firm grip on it. This time I carefully dug away the surrounding soil with my hands and pulled at it, taking care not to be too rough so that it wouldn’t break in half. After a while, the surrounding earth cracked and mounded, and the root slipped out, flailing like a fish. This root was more than twenty centimeters long. It looked like a burdock root, and the smell of fresh soil rose up from the hole it left. Even so, when I peered into the hole, it looked as though there was still some root left in the soil. A small bug crawled out of the scattered earth and wandered around. Holding the dandelion with the root dangling down, I went back into my apartment and immediately began to wash it. Together with the other dandelion in my pocket, the leaves and flowers half filled a colander. Suddenly I noticed the leaves I’d left on the sink earlier, and since only five days had gone by, I threw them in too.
My hunger was so fierce I could hardly bear it. I cut the leaves and stem with a kitchen knife and threw them into a pan of boiling water, flowers and all. Little by little the water turned green and a smell rose up similar to cooking beans. Unable to wait any longer, I picked out a piece with cooking chopsticks and bit into it. As I broke the stem with my teeth, a faint green flavor somewhere between mustard spinach and rapeseed shoots spread in my mouth, along with a slight bitterness.
