Читать книгу Evening Clouds - Junzo Shono - Страница 6

“OH, HERE IT IS!” ŌURA HEARD HIS wife say in the other room. “It’s called ‘sea tigertail.’”

“Weird name!”

“Never mind that. Hurry up and write it down.”

“Okay.” This voice belonged to Shōjirō, the third-grade boy. “Se-a ti-ger,” he sounded out as he wrote.

“Not just tiger. Tigertail.”

“Oh, right.”

“Be sure not to leave off the tail.”

Sea tigertail sounded like a fitting name for some seaweed, Ōura thought. Not that he had any idea what kind of seaweed it might be, but it didn’t surprise him that something growing in the ocean would have a name like that. Taking away the tail, though, gave it an entirely different ring. It sounded like some kind of ferocious sea beast prowling about the ocean floor.

If a beast like that came at you, it’d be all over. To begin with, you’d be under water and all loaded down with diving gear, so you couldn’t maneuver very well. The beast would probably chomp into your air hose and rip it apart with its teeth. It’d probably knock you around pretty hard.

If I went scuba diving and met up with a beast like that glinting its two blue eyes at me from among a tangle of seaweed, I’d definitely be quaking in my flippers, Ōura thought.

“We had some regular tigertail in our yard at the old house,” Mrs. Ōura was now telling Shōjirō.

“We did?”

“Uh-huh. With pink flowers about this big. Keiko’s mother gave us the original plants.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Sure you do. They were growing all along the fence. We started with only a couple of plants, and they gradually spread out. But never mind that. We need to hurry up on this or we’ll never finish. Let’s see. . . . I guess this would fall into the brown algae category.”

“Bro-wn al-gae,” Shōjirō sounded out again.

Brown algae, is it? Ōura thought. So that’s how they divide up the seaweeds. They classify them by color.

This was the first time he had heard the term “brown algae.” In fact, it was the first time he’d known anything at all about seaweed classifications, since he had never studied about them in school. To Ōura, seaweeds were simply a food he enjoyed at the dinner table: shredded kelp, which he liked to put on top of his rice (he and the children had been trying to steal from each other’s shares recently); salted kelp; wakame (just last night they had had a vinegared salad of thin-sliced cucumber and wakame); and hijiki simmered in a savory sauce with fried tofu. He relished all these varieties of seaweed as dinnertime treats, but he had never heard the term “brown algae.”

Right now, though, Shōjirō was having his mother help him with his summer-vacation science assignment. Their seaweed project had nothing to do with food.

“Next, number ten. What would this be?”

Mrs. Ōura sounded intent on finishing up as quickly as possible. School would be resuming in just two days, so this was no time to be fooling around.

“Maybe it’s this,” she suggested.

“Yeah, that looks right.”

“Must be. So it’s called tamaitadaki.”

“Okay, ta-ma-i-ta-da-ki.”

Tamaitadaki. It was another name Ōura had never heard before.

“This one belongs to the red algae category.”

“Re-d al-gae,” Shōjirō sounded out as he wrote.

Of course, Ōura nodded to himself. This specimen obviously has a red pigmentation, in contrast to the sea tigertail’s brown. There’s no telling what you can learn by keeping your ears open.

Shōjirō had sketched a rocky seabed scene on the top half of a large sheet of drawing paper, and he had taped the seaweed specimens to this so as to make them look like they were all growing on the ocean floor.

His mother had been the one who got out the watercolors and painted in the water and rocks. Adding a little color like that made it seem much more realistic, especially since the colors naturally came out lighter in some places and darker in others—just the way you’d expect rocks at the bottom of the sea to look. The haste with which she had dashed the colors on had had an unexpectedly felicitous effect.

The specimens had come from a beach on the Pacific side of the Bōsō Peninsula, where the family had gone on vacation at the beginning of August. Mrs. Ōura had been the one who gathered the specimens, and she was the one, too, who had brought them home in a plastic bag, carefully rinsed them off, spread them between layers of newspaper, and weighted them down with the big stack of comic books piled in the corner of Yasuo and Shōjirō’s room.

Then she was also the one who left the specimens that way and forgot to change the newspaper periodically, with the result that many of them had disintegrated and fused with the newsprint by the time she went back to get them. Partly by natural selection through this process, and partly by throwing out all the remaining ones with complicated shapes that looked hard to identify—though many of them were really quite pretty—Shōjirō ended up with thirteen different kinds of seaweed attached to his drawing of the seabed.

Even now, it was Mrs. Ōura who actually searched through the seaweed volume of Shōjirō’s illustrated encyclopedia to identify the varieties, and Shōjirō’s role was little more than that of a scribe, writing down whatever his mother said. He never questioned any of her conclusions.

The Ōuras had a tradition of going to the same Pacific-coast village every summer for a stay of two or three nights. Because of the distance from Tokyo, and because even those who made the long trip tended to go to the bigger and better-known beach in the neighboring town, the village where the Ōuras stayed always remained relatively quiet. Their first visit to the small inn there with daughter Haruko and son Yasuo had taken place ten years ago already—before Shōjirō was even born.

Thankfully, the small fishing village remained much the same now as ten years before. Even with the deeply tanned local kids and the visiting families from the city all swimming at the same beach, the crowds remained quite light. In the evenings, the beach emptied out completely.

The Ōuras had first visited this village at the urging of a friend who lived in the neighboring town—the one with the better-known beach.

“It’s a wonderful place. I guarantee the kids’ll love it,” he said. “There’s a fabulous beach right beneath the local shrine. A rocky reef protects just that part of the shoreline so you don’t have big waves crashing in, and that makes it perfect for swimming. You can walk out as far as you like along the reef, too, and it’s completely safe. There are lots of little pools among the rocks where you can catch goby, and you can be sitting there all wrapped up in fishing and suddenly look up and see the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean spreading out right before your eyes. Even the color of the water seems different.”

His enthusiasm persuaded the Ōuras to make the trip—father and mother, daughter and son. Haruko had started first grade that spring, and Yasuo was just three years old. Both of them fell in love with the place, exactly as their friend had predicted, and so did Ōura and his wife. They immediately decided to come again the following year.

In time, the family gained another member. Shōjirō, now working on his third-grade seaweed project, first made the trip when he was three. As evening fell on the day they arrived, he suddenly burst out:

“Time to go home!”

“We’re staying here tonight,” the others explained, but Shōjirō didn’t understand.

“I wanna go home. I wanna go home,” he insisted, his voice turning to tears. In all his life, he had never slept anywhere but in his own bed, under his own roof. He couldn’t comprehend the notion of spending the night somewhere else.

Suppertime was near, and in the adjoining rooms separated by nothing more than sliding doors, other families with hungry children were eagerly waiting for their meals to arrive just like the Ōuras.

That was when Shōjirō fell to pieces. The entire family joined in trying to comfort him, explaining why they weren’t going home, but nothing they said seemed to get through. He just kept on bawling, “I wanna go home!” The heart-rending distress in his voice made the depth of his unhappiness palpably clear. They had been on the move since very early that morning, leaving the house at an hour when they would normally have still been sound asleep in bed, and spending many long hours on the train to get to their destination. With this outburst from Shōjirō to top the day off, it had made Ōura feel as though they were a vagabond family wandering endlessly from town to town and village to village with no place to call home….

“Next, number thirteen,” Mrs. Ōura said crisply. “Hang in there, now. We’re down to the last one. Let’s see, what would this be? I remember seeing lots of this kind.”

“Yeah, there was lots.”

“Here it is. It’s kajime. Write it down.”

“Ka-ji-me.”

“It belongs to the brown algae group.”

“Bro-wn al-gae.”

Besides this “Learning about Sea Plants” project, Shōjirō’s summer vacation workbook contained an assignment titled “Coloring with Flowers.” He had already finished this assignment at the beginning of August, so he didn’t have to worry about it now.

Needless to say, his mother had helped him with that project, too; he had not done it by himself. They got some spiderworts from the yard (these were the only flowers they had in bloom at the time), and in a vase on the table were some gladiolus that Mrs. Satake from the house right below them on the hill had brought, so they had two kinds of flowers they could use. When they mashed the petals up in a grinding bowl, though, they discovered that the colors were too faint, so they added some blue origami paper to the spiderwort and some red origami paper to the gladiolus, finally managing to produce some “colored water.”

Once that was ready, Shōjirō got some lily and maple leaves from the yard and laid them on a sheet of drawing paper. The idea was to make a splatter painting of the leaves by dipping a toothbrush into the colored water and rubbing it against a wire sieve held over the leaves.

“Be sure to get your own,” Mrs. Ōura called after Shōjirō as he dashed off to get the toothbrush. Otherwise there was no telling whose he might decide to bring back.

Tiny droplets of colored water splattered across the drawing paper, dimly outlining the lily and maple leaves. When he was done, the white shapes of the leaves were surrounded by the blue of the spiderwort and the red of the gladiolus—and in some places by a blend of both colors. The finished picture had a kind of ambiguous feeling about it, looking on the one hand as though perhaps some important step had been left out, on the other as though this was about all that could be expected.

At any rate, he had completed the assignment.

With the seaweed project also done, Shōjirō had finished all of his summer homework, so he could now take it easy (though not for long, since vacation was down to just one more day). But his older brother in junior high was not yet off the hook.

“I’ve got a great plan,” Yasuo had announced out of the blue with about ten days of vacation to go.

Each morning from then on, he would get up one hour before everyone else to work on his assignments, and each night he would stay up one hour later. That way he could go on having fun during the day and still finish all his homework with three days to spare, so he could spend the last three days of vacation doing whatever he pleased.

Normally the end of vacation is an unhappy time, but by systematically finishing off his homework this way, he could reclaim three full days that would be entirely his own, no questions asked. Even as the flame of his vacation faded like a dwindling lamp, another minivacation would light up brightly before him. How could you beat that?

If Ōura had been asked, this was how he would have explained the thinking behind Yasuo’s plan. But only the boy himself could determine whether or not it really was such a “great plan.”

Yasuo seemed to be getting really charged up about his plan. Every so often a voice like the trail boss in a cattle drive emerged from his room:

“All right, men! Let’s move ’em out!”

Three days later, Yasuo asked his sister Haruko to trade rooms with him just at night. Being in the same room with Shōjirō was hampering his after-hours efforts to get his homework done because Shōjirō kept wanting to talk. It wasn’t much fun going to bed when someone else was staying up.

“Shut up and go to sleep,” Yasuo scolded, but to no avail. Shōjirō might be quiet for a short while after that, but then he would speak up again. Or he would do something else distracting. So Yasuo made an agreement with Haruko: each night, when it was bedtime for everyone else, Yasuo would go to Haruko’s room to work on his homework at Haruko’s desk, while she went to the boys’ room to sleep in Yasuo’s bed.

“This is going to be great!” Yasuo exclaimed the first night. “Haru’s room is so neat and quiet, I’ll be able to zip right along.”

But his outlook seemed to change when he was done for the night and turned out the light. He was used to talking with his little brother after he got into bed (Ōura could always hear them chatting back and forth from where he lay in his own room). Now he found himself without his usual conversation partner, all alone, in the dark.

“Aaah-ahh,” he tried yawning exaggeratedly but got no response. “Boy, am I getting sleepy!” he tried next, only to be ignored once again. After a brief silence, he got out of bed and knocked softly on the wall between the rooms. Shōjirō’s bed was right on the other side of the wall, but he failed to respond. He tried again.

“Hey, can you hear?”

There was still no answer. Both Shōjirō and Haruko had long since fallen sound asleep. Finally giving up, Yasuo went back to his bed (that is to say, Haruko’s). What else could he do? He would simply have to go to sleep.

In the morning, an alarm clock went off in Haruko’s room, and it kept on ringing and ringing. Finally Yasuo woke up and turned it off. By that time, Ōura was wide awake as well.

“When you use an alarm clock, you’re supposed to shut it off as soon as it starts ringing,” Ōura later scolded.

“Yeah, I know. I try, but I just can’t get my arm to move. I guess I’m still half asleep.”

That’s a fine excuse for disturbing everyone else’s sleep, Ōura thought, but since Yasuo did proceed to get out of bed and set to work each morning, he needed to be commended for the discipline he was showing in carrying out his plan. On the day before his “minivacation” was to begin, however, Yasuo made a chilling discovery. At the very bottom of the very last mimeographed worksheet for math he found instructions to also do from page such-and-such to page so-and-so in their regular workbook.

This additional assignment amounted to seven full pages, enough to throw in doubt whether he could finish all the problems even if he spent the next three days on nothing but math. Yasuo lost all heart.

With his carefully laid plans shattered, Yasuo went back to sleeping in his own room—and to jabbering on and on with Shōjirō after their light was out.

“Simmer down and go to sleep!”

Ōura and his wife had to yell at the boys two or three times each before they finally settled down. The next morning the alarm clock no longer echoed through the house.

Yasuo said nothing more about the workbook. Ōura couldn’t tell whether he had recovered from his shock enough to start chipping away at it a little at a time, or had simply given up on it and cast it aside. In stark contrast to how fired up he had been earlier, the final days of his vacation would apparently pass by without any clear sense of purpose.

“Could there be other assignments you’re forgetting about?” Mrs. Ōura asked.

“No.”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mrs. Ōura had good reason to wonder, given what had happened on the last day of winter vacation. After spending the entire day playing and then watching TV after dinner, Yasuo said “good night” and went to his room only to come back a few moments later.

“I was supposed to write a composition,” he said.

That was in grade school, but now Yasuo was in junior high. They didn’t assign compositions like that in junior high, so Ōura thought it was probably pretty safe to assume he was in the clear this time.

The last day of vacation passed without further incident, but when Yasuo returned from the opening day of the new term, he reported to his mother:

“I found out we had a music assignment.”

“See. That’s why I asked you the other day.”

“Other people didn’t know about it, either. I wasn’t the only one.”

“It’s because you don’t pay attention. But never mind that. What’s the assignment?”

“We’re supposed to listen to some music and write our impressions.”

“What kind of music?”

“He didn’t say.”

“But there’re lots of different kinds of music. He must have said something.”

“Hunh-unh, it doesn’t matter,” Yasuo said blithely.

Their voices carried through the house, and Ōura now emerged from his study.

“It’s homework for school, so I doubt it can be just anything,” he said. “I’m sure your teacher expects it to be serious music.”

“I think so, too,” his wife agreed.

“It should be Mendelssohn, or Schubert, or Johann Strauss, or someone like that.”

“Definitely.”

Which gives a pretty good idea of the elder Ōuras’ taste in music.

Mrs. Ōura had already put away the morning paper, but she got it out again to check the broadcast listings. Since the Ōuras did not own a record player, at times like this they had to rely on radio or television.

When they were first married, shortly after the end of the war, the couple had owned an old hand-cranked player along with a few records—though only a very few.

The world had changed dramatically over the years, ushering in the age of stereophonic sound, but the Ōuras still had only that old player that had to be wound up with a crank. Since the kind of records the machine could play weren’t being made any more, for all practical purposes it was the same as not having any record player at all, and they had finally had the junk man take it away at the time of their move three years ago.

Mrs. Ōura finished looking through the listings. “Just when you need it, there’s nothing listed,” she said.

“There must be something.”

“Well, there is this one, but I don’t know.”

“What is it?”

“At nine o’clock they’re playing something by Mozart called The Impresario. It says it’s an opera.”

“The Impresario?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.”

“Neither have I.”

Though Ōura had said he didn’t think he’d heard of the opera, it wasn’t as if he knew Mozart’s other operas all that well either.

“Isn’t something like the Light Cavalry Overture listed anywhere?”

“I don’t see it. That’d be perfect for an assignment like this, but . . .”

“That’s okay,” Yasuo said. “I’ll listen to the one you mentioned. The Imp-whatever.”

“Impresario,” his mother corrected, and then added, “It could be interesting.”

“Yeah, it could be,” Ōura agreed. “If something like this hadn’t come up, I might never have had a chance to hear it, either. Maybe I’ll listen in.”

“Please do,” his wife said.

A few minutes before nine that evening, Ōura went to the boys’ room. Haruko had agreed to lend Yasuo her transistor radio and had just finished tuning it to the right station. Yasuo had cleared just enough space among the piles of clutter on his desk to spread open his notebook.

“Thanks,” Yasuo said. “I can handle the rest.”

“It’ll come on as soon as this program is over,” Haruko said and left the room.

Yasuo sat squarely facing his desk, busily working something with his fingers. Shōjirō was sprawled on his stomach on his bed, reading a comic book.

“You’ll want to start writing as soon as it gets going,” Ōura said. “Are you ready?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ll only have one chance.”

“I know.” Yasuo did not move. Ōura sat down on Yasuo’s bed.

“What’s that stuff you’re playing with?”

“This? Some wax clay.”

“Why are you working it so hard?”

“To soften it up.”

“Soften it up?” Ōura was about to say something else when the science program that was on before the opera ended. “All right, here goes. Listen carefully so you can really follow what’s going on.”

“Okay.” Yasuo gently placed the lump of soft wax on his desk. He had sculpted it into the shape of a small jingle bell.

First a commentator came on to explain when and how the opera had been written. He launched right in with “A hundred and something-or-other years ago in the year seventeen hundred and something…,” but the date went right by Ōura. Yasuo still sat facing his desk exactly as he had before when he was playing with the wax.

“There, did you get that?” Ōura said. “He said Mozart wrote the opera on a commission from the emperor.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s all you need to know. Hurry up, now, write it down. ‘This opera . . .’”

“This opera,” Yasuo repeated as he began to write.

“The emperor in this case would be the emperor of Austria, but I guess you don’t have to say that. Just say ‘the emperor.’ Part of the trick is to keep it simple.”

“. . . was commissioned by the emperor.”

“Do you know how to write ‘commissioned’?”

“Is this right?”

Ōura craned his neck to see. “That’s right, that’s right. Pretty good. I thought you might not know it. Right, ‘was commissioned by the emperor.’ Mozart was working on The Marriage of Figaro at the time, but as soon as he got this commission, he set Figaro aside and completed The Impresario in a very short period of time.”

“The guy said in two weeks.”

“Did he say that? Good listening. Then you can make that ‘He completed The Impresario in just two weeks.’ I guess Mozart was pouring all his energy into The Marriage of Figaro when he suddenly got this commission, so he wanted to get it out of the way as quickly as he could. Since he couldn’t put it off until later, and he couldn’t very well refuse the emperor, either, he dashed it off all in one spurt. And the reason the emperor wanted the opera was that he was going from his palace in Salzburg to spend a night at a palace somewhere else. Did he say just one night? Probably not. It was probably for a more leisurely stay. After all, he’s the sovereign. Maybe the opera was performed only one night.”

After a time the commentary came to an end and the singing began. The director of a small opera house in Salzburg has yet to begin preparations for the fall season, which is just about to open. He has lost all desire to mount any performances, wishing instead to return to his home in the country where he can live a quiet, pastoral life.

“This definitely sounds interesting,” Ōura said.

“Uh-huh.”

“An opera director who wants to quit and go home to the country—it’s a clever premise.”

“Am I supposed to write that?” Yasuo asked.

“No, no, you don’t need to put that down. ‘The setting is Salzburg, the time is before the music season starts in the autumn, and the opera director wants to quit his job and go home to the country.’ That should be enough. In any case, we can worry about the story later. Right now we need to listen. Shōjirō,” he said, turning to the younger boy. “You need to get to bed.”

“Okay,” he replied, but kept on reading.

“Shōjirō!”

“Okay, okay.” This time he put his comic book away on the shelf and went to say “Good night” to his mother.

A banker comes to call on the impresario at his office. He tells the reluctant director that the bank would like to put up the money for him to produce a show.

“And so long as you’re doing a show,” he adds, “I’d like to recommend a singer—Madame So-and-so, a good friend of mine. She’s waiting right outside.”

The lady who enters is a once-celebrated prima donna, no longer in her prime. After boasting immodestly about her numerous credits, she says she wants to sing the lead role and declares how much she expects to be paid. The director has no choice but to assent.

Then the banker speaks up again. “I’d like to recommend another singer—my good friend Mademoiselle So-and-so. She’s waiting right outside.”

“This guy seems to know a lot of women,” Ōura murmured, sounding almost envious.

Now a young woman enters. She, too, is swollen with vanity; she, too, says she wants to sing the lead and declares how much she expects to be paid. The director feels compelled to assent.

The first singer then returns and starts ranting, “How dare you offer an upstart like her more than you’d pay me? What an insult!”

“What are you talking about?” the young singer retorts. “This is no part for an old granny to play.”

Another man from the theater steps in to try to soothe tempers, leading to a humorous trio.

“This is the climax. Be sure to write about this part.”

“What should I say?”

Yasuo had not written anything more in his notebook, so the page remained mostly empty. Shōjirō tossed restlessly in his bed. With his father and brother working on homework, he was having trouble falling asleep.