Читать книгу Evening Clouds - Junzo Shono - Страница 7

“I SUPPOSE SHE’S AT THE INN EATING dinner about now,” Ōura had repeated every night.

“I suppose so,” his wife had given her same reply.

Haruko was in eleventh grade, and her class had departed on a school trip to the Hokuriku region barely three or four days after the start of the fall term. The usual family of five had become just four.

Yasuo had been able to complete only three of the seven pages in his math workbook before classes resumed, and as if that and the music assignment weren’t enough, he discovered that he had missed an art project as well. Rushing out to cut down a small tree on their mountain, he began carving a totem pole, and he was still hard at work on it when Haruko went merrily off on her school trip.

“Lucky stiff,” he said.

“Yeah, lucky stiff,” Shōjirō echoed.

It seemed unfair that they had to go to school when Haruko was away on a trip having fun.

“But, you know,” Mrs. Ōura countered, “Haruko easily had the most homework to do over the summer—lots more than either of you. But did you ever once hear her complain? She did her assignments without a peep. And she often helped out around the house, too.”

“She played baseball with us.”

“Uh-huh, because you couldn’t have a game without her. She was always paying attention to what needed to be done, and she would heat the bath, or go to the store, or do the ironing, and in between times she also managed to play ball with you guys. Not to mention that besides doing all that at home, she went to school now and then to help with watering and weeding for her gardening club. That was an important contribution, too.”

Yasuo and Shōjirō could but listen in silence. Their mother was right, of course. They should have kept their mouths shut.

The school had sent home a copy of the itinerary, listing all the places Haruko’s class was scheduled to go, so Ōura and his wife could look at it and know exactly where she was at any given moment: right now she was visiting the aquarium at Tōjinbō; now she was touring downtown Kanazawa. But they spoke without reference to proper nouns:

“I suppose she’s at the inn eating dinner about now.”

They didn’t need to look at the itinerary to know there could be no mistake about that much. The name of the hot springs she happened to be staying at on any particular night was incidental; what mattered was that she had made it through the day’s scheduled activities and arrived safely at her lodgings. With that thought, they could breathe a sigh of relief.

“Do you suppose they might be having crab tonight?” Mrs. Ōura sometimes asked. The crab from that part of the Sea of Japan was supposed to be especially good, but the Ōuras had never had the occasion to sample any themselves.

Before sitting down to write each day, Ōura gathered up a fistful of pencils and headed for Haruko’s room, where the family’s pencil sharpener sat clamped to his daughter’s desk. For some reason the atmosphere in the room felt different to him after she had departed on her trip.

The difference hit him the moment he entered the room each morning.

It wasn’t as if she was going to be away for a month or two; the excursion was to last a mere five days. And yet, from the very first day she was gone, the room felt different.

What a strange feeling! Ōura thought as he pushed his pencils into the sharpener one after the other and turned the crank.

Haruko had left the room in perfect order, everything neatly in its place. As always, a stuffed tiger and rabbit sat on top of her bookcase flanking an adorable little doll Haruko had made.

The stuffed tiger and rabbit went back a long way in this family. At their old house, when the children were still little, bedtime often meant a squabble over who would get to take the stuffed tiger to bed. Shōjirō, being the youngest, always got the rabbit, but Haruko and Yasuo constantly fought over the tiger, arguing about whose turn it was that night.

Hoping to put an end to these altercations, Mrs. Ōura had started keeping track with the children’s initials on the calendar, but even so, one of them would forget to take the tiger to bed one night, and they’d quarrel over whose turn it was the next.

“Why did they fight so endlessly over a silly toy like that,” Ōura had often wondered. But he could tell by their voices that it was a very serious business to them.

In the end Mrs. Ōura invariably got called in to make a decision.

“It’s not fair!” Yasuo would scream when he lost out and had to give the animal up.

That stuffed tiger had now been liberated from the children’s disputes and rested quietly on top of the bookcase. He lay with his large head drooped to one side as if to say, “My job is done.”

This was exactly how the room was on normal days when Haruko went to school. Except for the school bag now sitting on the floor by her desk, nothing had changed. And yet, quite palpably, the atmosphere in the room felt different.

Most mornings, Mrs. Ōura woke Haruko and Yasuo up at the same time, fed them their breakfast, and sent them off to school. As they went out the gate, Ōura would hear a shrill finger-whistle from the street out front—Yasuo’s signal to Teruo, the ninth-grade boy at the Satake’s next door, that they were on their way. (For their family baseball games, Teruo and Yasuo made up one team, and Haruko, Shōjirō, and Ōura made up the other.) Teruo would then emerge to join Haruko and Yasuo on their way to the train station.

Some mornings, Mrs. Ōura would instinctively shut off the alarm in her sleep and wind up rushing around in a tizzy after waking up just in the nick of time. Even on days like that, Haruko always left her room in perfect order.

There was a reason behind Haruko’s impeccable tidiness. She had had her fill of messy rooms at the old house, where she had shared a room with Yasuo. No matter how hard she might try to keep things in order, it was a losing battle so long as she had had to share space with Yasuo.

They had called that room “the children’s study,” but along with Haruko and Yasuo’s desks, it had in fact contained a good many other things that had nothing to do with studying. To one side stood Mrs. Ōura’s dresser, and, next to that, her sewing machine. Further cluttering the room were a pair of large, rattan easy chairs (though they were very comfortable to sit in); a second dresser holding the children’s shirts and socks; and, stacked in one corner, two large suitcases too big to be of any use except as a place to store some bundles of cotton for use as futon filler. The room hardly deserved to be called a study.

The children did do their homework there, to be sure, but otherwise it had become a gathering place for anything that did not fit into some other room or closet.

As if this did not already make it a tight enough squeeze for getting in and out of the room, Yasuo had the unfortunate habit of claiming as his own almost anything around the house that had outlived its usefulness. Had he limited his junk-hound instincts to interestingly shaped bottles and elegant cookie boxes (he did indeed ask for such), it might not have been so bad, but he also asked for things like worn-out pen nibs and beer bottle caps—the more the merrier.

“What’ll you ever do with a thing like that?” Ōura would ask, but Yasuo insisted on having it, and stashed it away in one or another of his desk drawers. As a result, his drawers were stuffed to overflowing with odds and ends that had no imaginable purpose or reason for preservation, and since the concept of throwing something away apparently remained utterly alien to him, the profusion of junk spilled out onto his desktop and the floor as well.

He indulged in very much the same habit when he was out of doors. If he found an unusually large cane of flute bamboo somewhere along his way, he had to drag it home no matter how far. If he found a steel bolt lying on the pavement, he could not just let it lie. He even picked up camellia seeds to bring home.

Back in the fourth grade, Yasuo once found an ornamental marble horse minus all four of its legs on his way home from school and came in the door bubbling with excitement. You could tell it was a horse because its head remained intact, but otherwise it would probably have been impossible to make out what it was supposed to be.

“I found it lying in the middle of the road,” Yasuo explained.

How had a broken ornamental horse wound up lying in the middle of the road? Ōura couldn’t help but wonder. What sort of person had it belonged to, and how had it lost all four of its legs right from the base? What had the owner hoped to achieve by displaying a horse like that in his home?

The world certainly had all kinds of people, he thought. And it was certainly filled with all kinds of inexplicable things. A feeling he didn’t quite know how to describe came over him, and, for once, he did not permit Yasuo to bring his newfound treasure into the house, ordering him instead to take it back where he had discovered it.

It did no good for Haruko to try to create and maintain an orderly environment for herself so long as she had to share space with her junk-hound brother. She began to dream of someday having a room of her own, no matter how small it might be. How happy that would make her!

When the family moved to their hilltop home three years ago, her dream finally came true.

Her new room had a cupboard that jutted out over the foot of the bed nearly half the width of the room, and she had to be careful not to sit up too quickly and bash her forehead on the corner, so the room could hardly be called spacious. But with the door closed, it had something of the charm of a small cabin on an ocean liner.

Most important of all, no more did she have to put up with someone else’s piles of junk. She could decorate the room to her own taste, and keep it as tidy as she pleased.

When the movers hauled Haruko’s desk into this room for the first time, it had looked completely out of place surrounded by the spanking new walls and woodwork. She had been using that desk since first grade, and it was plainly showing its age.

“We really should get you a new one,” Ōura said. “It’s looking pretty cramped for you.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I like my desk.”

“Well, I suppose we could ask you to put up with it until you start high school.”

“No, really, it’s okay. It has personality. I like it.”

“It certainly does have that,” Ōura agreed.

The finish had long since worn off in the places where her hands and arms rubbed most frequently on the desk top, revealing the bare wood grain beneath. Countless scratches, large and small, crisscrossed the surface, interlaced with the traces of childish doodling.

A year after their move, Shōjirō started school, and a new desk joined Yasuo’s in the next room. With the two desks set side by side, Shōjirō’s turned out to be slightly taller than Yasuo’s.

“Maybe I should trim the legs to make them the same height,” Ōura said, but he immediately thought better of it. If he did a bad job of sawing, he might make the legs uneven and end up destabilizing a perfectly solid desk, and then his tinkering would have done more harm than good.

It would of course be nicer if the two desks were the same height, but just because Yasuo’s was slightly lower surely didn’t mean he would lose face as older brother. Ōura decided to leave well enough alone.

But now that Shōjirō had a brand-new desk, Haruko’s desk looked even scrubbier than before. There was no escaping the irony that the tallest of the siblings, and the one who actually used her desk most for its intended purpose, had the smallest and most beat-up desk. It just didn’t seem right somehow.

On the other hand, this was the natural result of having bought desks for each of the children in order, as his or her need arose. The children grew taller with each passing year, but the desks remained exactly the same size as when they were first purchased. It was unfortunate, but there really wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.

Another year went by, and Haruko began high school.1

“Now we definitely have to get Haruko a new desk,” Ōura said to his wife.

“Yes, I think so, too. It’s a bit much to expect her to keep on using that old thing when she’s in high school.”

Ōura went to Haruko. “We’re going to buy you a new desk. To celebrate your starting high school.”

“That’s okay. I like this one.”

“Why?”

“It’s still perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Don’t you bump your knees?”

“No, the kneehole’s plenty big.”

Ōura sat down to try it out. His knees slid right in under the desk. There wasn’t any room to spare, but there was enough.

“Whadda ya’ know!”

“See? I told you.”

Ōura was amazed at how accommodating a desk built for grade schoolers could be. Here he was, a full-grown man who had finished grade school thirty years ago, and yet he could still sit down at this desk and use it.

But this was no time for marveling at the desk’s remarkable utility. The occasion called for celebrating, and they wanted to give Haruko a present. They may have asked her to put up with a grade schooler’s desk through junior high, but to keep her at that same desk even in high school might make it hard for her to keep her passion for scholarship burning.

“Well, they say a gift becomes more precious when you have to wait for it. We’ll get you a new desk one of these days.”

So Ōura had said, but another full year passed and Haruko entered eleventh grade without any further action. Gifts may be more precious when one has to wait, but the season for celebrating had by now slipped completely away.

Standing in his daughter’s room while she was away on her school trip, Ōura gazed pensively at the old desk. He realized for the first time that the desk no longer seemed out of place against the room’s walls and woodwork; it seemed to blend in perfectly with its surroundings. Sitting there without calling particular attention to itself, it helped give the room a composed, friendly atmosphere.

We can’t take this desk away from her now, Ōura thought. We’d best leave well enough alone.

He remembered going with his wife to buy the desk at a department store ten years before. It would have been in April, the year after they had moved from Osaka to Tokyo with their two small children. Among the large selection of desks on display for entering first-graders, they had chosen this one because it looked sturdy and dependable. They also liked its neat, trim finish, which was neither too dark nor too light.

Haruko was still at the age, then, when she begged for stories. Ōura could never think of any good stories to tell, so he would have to make something up:

“Once upon a time, a great big fish came crashing down from the sky.”

A beginning like that would get his daughter all excited, but then more fish would come falling from the sky, and the story would be over.

With Haruko still at such a tender age, buying her a desk for study had had a sobering effect on Ōura. Thoughts of ten years hence had not even crossed his mind.

Haruko still had a fondness for funny stories, but now she collected her own and brought them home to tell the rest of the family. One night during dinner (this was when she was still in junior high), she had this one to tell:

“In social studies today,” she began, “one of the boys suddenly shouted ‘Fire!’”

Ōura and his wife both looked at her in alarm.

“The teacher was writing some stuff on the blackboard, and we were all copying it into our notebooks, when suddenly I heard this really loud shout right next to me. I was so startled, I almost jumped out of my seat.”

“Where was the fire?” Mrs. Ōura asked with obvious concern.

“At first everybody thought maybe a fire had broken out at some farmhouse nearby, and the guy had been gazing out the window and saw the smoke or something, so we all automatically looked out the window. But we couldn’t see any sign of smoke outside, and there wasn’t anything burning inside the classroom either.”

“That’s strange,” Ōura said.

“If a fire had broken out a ways away from the school, you’d think that someone who was actually near the fire would raise the alarm first, but we hadn’t heard anything like that, and besides, in that case, no one in the classroom could have known about it, right?”

“That’s what I’d think,” Mrs. Ōura said.

“Our teacher just stood there at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand looking puzzled, and the rest of us started looking around at each other not knowing what to think.”

“What about the boy who yelled?”

“He turned real red and hanged his head.”

“He dozed off and dreamed about a fire, I bet,” Ōura suggested.

“There’s a girl in my class who falls asleep and doesn’t wake up even when class is over,” Shōjirō broke in.

“A girl does that?” Yasuo said. “Wow!”

“So go on. Tell us what happened,” Mrs. Ōura pressed, eager to hear the rest of the story.

“Our teacher called the boy who yelled and the boy sitting next to him to the front of the class and demanded an explanation. The other boy was red and hanging his head, too. They said they’d been playing a game where they pinched each other on the arm, gently at first and then harder and harder, to see how hard they could pinch before it really hurt. With each pinch they were whispering ‘Fine’ to show they were still okay, but then all at once the second boy pinched a whole lot harder, and I guess the first boy’s ‘Fine’ turned into a cry of pain that somehow sounded more like ‘Fire!’ to everyone else who didn’t know what was going on, including our teacher.”

Haruko had an eye for funny things at home as well as at school.

One day Shōjirō finished his math homework and went to have his mother check it for him as he always did. Mrs. Ōura said she couldn’t interrupt what she was doing, so he asked Haruko instead.

Haruko started checking the answers carefully, one by one. Then all of a sudden she burst out laughing.

“What?” Ōura asked.

“Take a look at this,” she said, handing him Shōjirō’s work sheet and pointing to the problem:

“Seven tulips have bloomed. There are six more buds getting ready to open. How many blooms will there be when all of the buds have opened?”

Shōjirō had written out the equation 7 + 6 = 13.

“So what’s wrong?” Ōura asked in puzzlement.

“Of course his work and the answer are right, but look below that.”

Under the equation was a space marked “Answer” and in that space Shōjirō had written “13-tsu.” Because the story problem had used the all-purpose counting suffix -tsu to indicate the units when speaking of the seven tulips and six buds, Shōjirō had unthinkingly done the same for the answer—even though -tsu is only used with single-digit numbers.

Sometimes Haruko played a role in the silliness herself. During her last year in junior high, January was a particularly stressful time for her. Entrance exams for high school were right around the corner, and the light in her room burned late every night.

She had such a grim look on her face all the time that Ōura decided to try to cheer her up.

“You’ll pass, you’ll pass. Stop worrying so much.”

“I just know I won’t,” she said flatly.

Ōura had meant it as encouragement, but her response came back with such conviction that even he began wondering if maybe she wouldn’t pass. Suddenly he felt quite deflated.

A couple of days before the end of the year, Ōura bought a large case of satsuma tangerines and stored them in Haruko’s room. They normally bought satsumas in smaller quantities, but Ōura and his wife had decided to get a whole case this time so that they could all enjoy them to their hearts’ content throughout winter break. In the back of their minds, they were also hoping this small luxury might serve as a little bit of a release for Haruko.

Once they started eating them, though, the satsumas in the box disappeared with astonishing speed, and Ōura realized they probably would not last through the break.

One evening Mrs. Ōura asked the boys to go get some satsumas for her, and off they raced to Haruko’s room. They soon came back looking quite disgruntled and bearing no fruit, only a single sheet of construction paper that said:

The satsumas deposited herein comprise a valuable asset of the Ōura Empire, and unauthorized entry into this vault by the general populace is hereby strictly prohibited. Anyone wishing to supplement a vitamin G (gluttonic acid) deficiency must first gain authorization from Finance Minister Haruko, and they must hold the satsumas up in humble gratitude as they exit the room. So pound that into your thick skulls!

“This is the problem with putting Haruko in charge,” Yasuo and Shōjirō burst out at the same time.

The day before Haruko was scheduled to come home, Mrs. Satake from next door brought by some rice in a paper sack.

“My sister in Sendai sent us some of their new crop,” she explained. “I’m afraid it isn’t very much, but . . .”

“Since Haruko’s coming home tomorrow,” Mrs. Ōura said after their neighbor had gone, “maybe I should use this to make up a batch of rice jumble.”

“Sure. That’s a great idea,” Ōura nodded.

When it came to food, this couple was always quick to agree. “Rice jumble” referred to a country-style rice salad from Shikoku that Ōura’s mother had always made on special occasions. She would mix up a large batch in a great big sushi tub. It was quite different from the style of rice salad generally favored in Osaka, where Ōura and his siblings grew up, but everyone in the family loved his mother’s recipe and boasted that no one else could make rice salad the way she did.

After they were married, Mrs. Ōura made a point of helping out whenever her mother-in-law made the recipe in order to learn exactly how she did each step and how to get the seasoning right, but try as she might, she could never quite duplicate Grandma Ōura’s flavor. She knew for certain that the correct proportion of rice to vinegar dressing was ten to one, but the difficulty lay in getting the amount of salt right.

“When I watch her adding the salt,” Mrs. Ōura would say, “it always looks like a whole lot. I can’t help thinking she’s putting in way too much.”

The dressing also contained a small amount of sugar, but the secret to getting just the right flavor apparently lay in the proportion of salt to vinegar. No matter how many times Mrs. Ōura watched her mother-in-law add the salt, she could never quite get her own vinegar sauce to taste the same.

Of course, it wasn’t as if she were off by a long shot, so her rice jumble came out tasting fairly close to her mother-in-law’s. In fact, some batches managed to come out virtually identical. But other times she herself had to declare the results a failure; she’d think she was doing everything exactly the same way, but the outcome would be different from one occasion to the next.

Grandma Ōura, the only person who could make rice jumble just right, had passed away eight years ago at the age of seventy. The younger Mrs. Ōura could no longer ask for another lesson in how to make the dressing; she had to muddle through as best she could, based on what she had already learned. To Ōura, so long as his wife’s rice jumble tasted more or less like his mother’s, that was good enough. She could carry on the tradition.

The next morning Ōura heard Yasuo say “Bye, Mom!” as he headed out the front door. Moments later, Haruko’s voice rang out, “I’m home!” She had come home by night train, arriving at Ueno Station in Tokyo before daylight that morning.

“My goodness, you’re home early!” Mrs. Ōura greeted her at the door. “Welcome back. Did you see Yasuo?”

“Uh-huh, in front of the Satake’s.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah, he asked me how many times I had to go to the bathroom.”

Still lying in bed, Ōura burst out laughing.

Even though Haruko claimed she’d only managed to get about an hour’s sleep on the train the night before, she still had plenty of energy to talk about her trip.

Perhaps because relatively few schools chose the Hokuriku area as a destination for class trips—Haruko’s school had never gone there before this year, either—the inns had pulled out all the stops to make them feel welcome everywhere they went. For their meals they’d been served a medley of local delicacies (though never any crab), and everything had tasted delicious. She had also finished off all the pickled plums she took along. When she got done talking about food, she bubbled on about how beautiful it had been to see the early-morning sun streaming through the stand of enormous cedars at Heisenji Temple, and about looking up at the stars from the window of their train and exclaiming over how bright they were (though she thought the stars here, on the Ōuras’ hill, were just as bright), and so forth, with one subject leading to another.

Among her many anecdotes, she told about their bus having a flat tire. They were driving along the highway approaching the city of Kanazawa when they suddenly heard air hissing out of one of the tires and the bus coasted to a stop. Incredibly, it came to a halt right smack in front of an auto repair shop. What better place could there have been to have a flat tire? (Getting the flat repaired put their bus about thirty minutes behind the others, but the way Haruko told the story, that wasn’t nearly as important as the lucky spot where the flat had occurred.)

Another story: One of her classmates had been asked by his parents to buy them a bamboo strainer someplace—it didn’t matter where, just an ordinary bamboo strainer for household use. In places like that, way off in the country, you could still find nice, practical basketry, his parents had told him, and that was what they wanted him to bring them. He didn’t need to buy them any other trinkets or treats, just a plain old bamboo strainer.

No matter how nice a strainer he might find, Haruko wasn’t so sure it was a good idea for a present. For one thing, it would be a considerable hassle to carry around. In the end, though, their group never went to any stores that sold simple household items like that, so the boy managed to get through the trip without having to buy one.

After rattling on for a spell, Haruko took out the presents she had bought at Unazuki Hot Springs in the Kurobe Gorge, their last overnight stop. They were two specialty foods from the gorge: pokeberry shoots pickled in soybean paste, and rice candy wrapped in bamboo leaves. Mrs. Ōura promptly made an offering of the presents by placing them on top of the piano in Ōura’s study.

The Ōuras did not have an ancestral altar in the house, so at times like this, the top of the piano served as a substitute spot for offering food to their ancestors before partaking of it themselves.

“Shall we try the rice candy?” Mrs. Ōura said after a short while. Unwrapping the bamboo leaf, they each popped a piece of the candy into their mouths. It was chewy, and clung to their teeth when they bit into it. It stuck fast and wouldn’t let go.

“Well, well,” Ōura chuckled as he tried to free the candy from his teeth. “Better be careful, or we’ll lose our false teeth.”

If his late father were to try a piece from the box on top of the piano, he’d no doubt say exactly the same thing.

1 High schools in Japan include grades ten through twelve.