The Laws of Evening: Stories (6 page)

But that is only part of the reason. Since her ignominious arrival here following her first husband’s death and the bombing of her hometown, Hanae has always resented O-Shige. At first it was overt; she simply refused to familiarize herself with the city, in the same way a hostage would refuse to know his captor. Nowadays her antipathy is more unconscious; she vaguely pictures the unfamiliar areas as the desolate, war-ravaged neighborhoods of the forties. She still wakes from occasional nightmares in which she is wandering lost through silent, dilapidated streets where sorrowful ghostly forms float in and out of slatted wooden doorways. At any rate, through all these years Hanae has remained loyal to Kobe by the sea: to its carefree, cosmopolitan air before the war (aaa, those ballroom dance halls!), to the memory of strolling on a grassy cliff with Shigeru, gazing out at the sparks of light swarming over the water’s green surface.

Hanae’s immediate world, therefore, covers a two-kilometer area bounded at one end by Asahi Middle School, which her children once attended, and on the other, the Chinese herbalist at the end of Daruma Boulevard. Over the years, this neighborhood has not changed as rapidly as the rest of the city. Strolling home from the bathhouse, savoring the faint breeze on her freshly scrubbed skin, Hanae passes prewar homes still standing behind leaves of persimmon and bamboo, their wooden planks dark and weathered. Along the neighborhood’s periphery, new office buildings, apartment complexes, and bus routes have sprung up. These recent developments have added to the
zatsu-on,
or background noise: a distant drone punctuated by a car horn or bicycle bell. It is a remote world out there, hazardous to aged pedestrians; Hanae knows its secrets only through television.

Living alone in her traditional Japanese home, open to the elements, Hanae has learned to value
zatsu-on
. The house provides no buffer against outside sounds such as the
k’sha k’sha
of alley gravel, by which she recognizes each neighbor from the force and rhythm of his footsteps, or, in early morning hours, the burble of pigeons. Hanae’s sister, Tama, has a retirement home in Akashi—near Kobe—an expensive Western-style condominium on the third floor. Once, when Hanae went there to visit, she had shut the brand-new front door behind her and had the distinct impression of having sealed herself into an airtight box.

“If I lived in a place like that,” Hanae often tells her friends at the public bathhouse, “I’d be senile by now, without a doubt.” Sound connects her to life. This evening, she hears the melancholy
toohfu, tofu-tofu
of the tofu vendor’s horn and thinks, as usual, Aaa, right now people are cooking supper. Later on tonight, when she lays out her futon, it will comfort her to hear old Mr. Kishi plucking away at his shamisen over in Murasaki Alley and always stumbling at the same point in the score.

A doctor on the NHK show once said that the quality of your life depends upon what links you maintain to life-enhancing forces.

Hanae’s links are not merely auditory. Aside from the bathhouse, there are her daily strolls through the open-air market as well as her children’s occasional visits. And there is the world of the past with all its happy memories, deliberately culled to keep down the bad hormones. There is the world of the dead, with which Hanae connects morning and evening through prayers at the family altar. There is the hope of longevity, which stimulates her each day when she turns to the NHK channel; her television is placed right next to the family altar (on a lower stand, of course, as is fitting). And there is her tiny garden, which for decades has been a source of pleasure and solace.

Daigo was the opposite, always shutting himself up like that in his dark office. Shortly before his diagnosis, back when Hanae was first discovering the health show, he had sighed and asked, “Why bother watching that? You know we’re all going to die anyway.” Now, knowing science as she does, she feels his cancer makes sense—he had refused to embrace those very links that might have kept him alive. In his last days, delirious from morphine, he had cried out, “There is no god! Anywhere!” and sobbed hoarsely for a minute or two until his drugged mind drifted off somewhere else. She cannot forget that. There is a lesson for her there.

More and more now, Hanae is on the lookout for mystical life-enhancing forces all around her. The precursors to the Shinto religion were shamans who spent the majority of their waking hours invoking, and revering, magical powers. They called those powers
kami,
that strange wisdom that presides over yeast rising or a fetus unfurling. The shamans believed everything was inhabited by
kami
—pine trees, rocks, a cooking fire, a handful of rice. She considers this now, slowly chewing her supper at the low table: innumerable vitamins and minerals and calories in each mouthful, mysteriously programmed to empower different parts of her body and mind. They can even join forces with other nutrients, as in the case of vitamin C and iron, for increased effectiveness. The NHK doctors, by validating such fantastic possibilities, have exposed her to a new realm of wonders. Aaa, they too are priests in their own right! Afterwards, waiting for sleep under her futon, Hanae ponders what she has learned from the show: that her body will repair itself as she lies here unconscious, digesting leftover food and knitting back together the minute muscle fibers torn during movement; that her nervous system, through cycles of dreams, will resolve emotion and memory into increasingly healthy patterns; each cell knowing, without her intervention, exactly what to do.

During the hot weather, Hanae had weeded and watered her garden right after breakfast, when the air was cool and her heart still buoyant from the ballroom music. Now that autumn is here, she waits till after lunch, when it is warmer. The smell of burning leaves wafts through the pale midday light of the alley. She has placed her portable radio–cassette player on the edge of the veranda, and koto music, turned to low volume, is trickling into the garden where she works.

Hanae’s tall fluffy chrysanthemums are in full bloom, white and yellow and lavender, each flower as big as her hand. Most of the other flowers have gone the way of summer. The garden has a restrained, ascetic quality; gone is that wanton, wasteful lushness of summer growth. A new arum lily, a mere bud, has poked up amidst the browning, stiffening leaves, its waxy white petals still as fresh and firm as those of summer.

Freshly turned soil, according to a recent medical study, gives off beneficial minerals that, if regularly touched and inhaled, significantly strengthen one’s immune system. This new bit of knowledge pleases Hanae immensely. She weeds and waters, solemnly inhaling the smoke-scented, beneficial minerals from the earth and fresh oxygen from her plants. She exhales carbon dioxide, which in turn nourishes the plants. Shafts of sunlight stream through the red maple leaves and press upon the back of her neck like warm fingers, infusing her body with vitamin D, which will strengthen her bones in concert with the calcium from today’s lunch. Her stomach, meanwhile, is still digesting her meal—eleven different varieties of food—and vitamins are flowing through her digestive tract, being sorted and chemically altered and absorbed.

She recalls an educational television show in which a string of highly magnified cells bobbed slowly through the capillary of a leaf, as if in a trance.

This particular melody—reedy, punctuated by precise pluckings of the koto—is quite lovely. It evokes the spirit-summoning music of a shrine rite. Each cell of the music goes bobbing through the capillaries of her own mind, floating in a stream of good hormones. The melody seems to arise quite naturally from this somnolent afternoon, instead of from the cassette player on the veranda.

As a girl, Hanae used to take lessons in koto. But only now, especially in this last month or so, has she begun truly basking in its elegance and profundity. She admires the way each note has space in which to breathe, to reverberate within the mind, acting as syncopation to the mute mystery of things, as bird-song underscores the silence of a forest. Nothing can approach koto; certainly not Western music that, for all its dramatic surging and crashing (like that tiresome Beethoven, who gives her a headache), captures but life’s surface, the turbulence of waves above a deep sea.

Hanae senses all this fleetingly, immersed beneath the surface of past sorrows thrashing above her with muffled sound. She senses with a certain awe how perfectly the music’s pace matches that of the afternoon, and of digestion: the dappled leaf shadows moving over the earth like dark cells, the entirety of this garden harmonizing and fusing—plants, with carbon dioxide and sunlight; soil, with water from her plastic can; herself, with all the
kami
that have only now begun revealing themselves but have always existed, shifting and rotating in slow timeless patterns, like dancers of a classical age.

In the end, being alive is what matters.

S
ABURO’S FATHER
belonged to that generation which, having survived the war, rebuilt Japan from ashes, distilling defeat and loss into a single-minded focus with which they erected cities and industries and personal lives. Reflecting on this as an adult, Saburo felt it accounted at least partially for his father’s stoicism. This was conjecture, of course. When Japan surrendered he had been only six, too young to remember what his father was like in peacetime.

Saburo’s memories of the surrender included his uncle Kotai being brought home, delirious with hepatitic fever, from Micronesia. He lived for only a few weeks, unconscious the entire time and nursed round the clock by Saburo’s parents. One of the visitors to their home was Uncle Kotai’s sweetheart, a pretty girl of nineteen on whom Saburo had a crush. She wiped away her tears with a handkerchief patterned with cherry blossoms and announced brokenly that her life was now over. Saburo was impressed. “Big Sister really loves Uncle, ne!” he said later that day to his parents at dinner.

“The grief didn’t hurt her appetite,” his mother said curtly. She was referring to the rationed tea she had served at lunch, as well as to a certain fish cake that had been purchased, after two hours of waiting in line, for their family dinner.

In a dispassionate voice, Saburo’s father explained that the amount of energy you have is limited, just like your food, and that when you love a sick person you have to make the choice of either using up that energy on tears or else saving it for constructive actions such as changing bedpans and spoon-feeding and giving sponge baths. “In the long run, which would help your uncle more?” he asked.

Saburo supposed the constructive actions would.

“That’s right,” his father said.

Saburo’s father had not fought in the war. He was barred from service because of his glaucoma, which was discovered during his military recruiting exam. So he stayed home while the war claimed the lives of his best friend, then his cousin, and last of all his brother-in-law Kotai. Growing up, all Saburo understood of glaucoma was that it consisted of some sort of elevated pressure within the eye. “Your father has to keep calm,” was his mother’s constant refrain. “Don’t you dare upset him, or his eye pressure will go up.” It seemed to young Saburo that this condition was in some insidious way a result of the war, not unlike those radioactive poisons pulsing within survivors from Hiroshima.

At Uncle Kotai’s funeral Saburo had overheard a woman say, “At least in his short life he was never thwarted.” He understood later that Uncle, the babied youngest son of a wealthy family, had no profession save those of martial arts champion and dandy. He drank too often, laughed too loudly, used too much hair pomade. Saburo had very few memories of him or of their former wealth, which had been lost in the Tenkan bombing, forcing Saburo’s family to move into the merchant district. He did recall that once when he had gotten a nosebleed as a little boy, Uncle Kotai stopped it instantly by giving a hard chop with the side of his hand to a specific vertebra on his nape. “Aaa, be careful!” Saburo’s mother had wailed, watching with both hands pressed to her mouth. Uncle Kotai used another trick when Saburo tried to tag along on one of his outings. “Let me come, I want to go too!” he had demanded, squatting at his uncle’s feet and clutching fistfuls of his long
yukata
. With a rumble of amusement, Uncle Kotai reached down to press some secret nerve between thumb and forefinger, and Saburo’s fists miraculously unclenched.

Seen across the gulf of the war that separated them, this lost uncle held for young Saburo all the magic of a lost era, a magic emanating from the smallest of details: a photograph of Uncle and his well-dressed friends sitting around a heavily laden banquet table, heads thrown back in laughter, or his mother’s nostalgic recounting of Uncle’s outrageous pranks. The aura of careless abundance often wafted up around him, faint and nebulous. Yet running through this wonder was a hard thread of moral disapproval. Uncle had it coming. Saburo had overheard his mother telling a neighbor that Uncle Kotai had been born in the year of the rooster. Roosters, as Saburo knew, finished their crowing early in the day.

When Saburo joined the track and field team in his first year at Bukkyo High School, the sport was enjoying a popularity it had not known before the war. At the time, few schools could afford baseball bats or gymnastic equipment. And there was something in the simplicity of the sport—the straight path to the goal, the dramatic finish line—that stirred the community to yells and often tears. On Sundays entire families came outdoors to cheer, thermoses of cold wheat tea slung across their chests. They sat on woven mats and munched on rice balls, roasted potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and pickled shoots of
fuki
gathered up in the hills.

“So what distance are you running?” Saburo’s father asked at the dinner table.

“Eight hundred meters,” Saburo said. He would have preferred a long-distance event, which commanded the most respect. But he had watched those runners stagger toward the finish line, eyes rolling back in their heads, some even vomiting in the grass afterwards—and he had been afraid. Sprints came next in popularity, but Saburo was not particularly fast. Two laps around the track seemed the most appropriate distance.

“Eight hundred meters? Nothing else?”

“I just want to focus on one,” Saburo said, “and perfect it.”

His father nodded in approval.

Saburo’s father was old, much older than his mother. His gray hair, ascetic cheekbones, and scholarly decorum (he was professor of astronomy at Nangyo University) commanded both respect and distance. When sitting down beside his father at the low dining table, Saburo encountered moments of readjustment similar to entering a temple from a busy street. Dinner-table conversations, more often than not, were monologues on the moons of Jupiter, the Andromeda nebulae, or various theories on cosmogony. Chewing his food slowly—a habit from rationing days, when the rule had been one hundred times—Saburo let the academic words flow through him like water through a net. What he heard was his father’s voice: a voice like the universe, regulated and unknowable, with the endurance of silent planets rotating in their endless, solitary orbits.

Something about the running must have struck a chord with his father, although as far as Saburo knew, he had not been a track man in his youth. At any rate, the following evening at dinner his father made an announcement. “On the days you don’t have practice,” he told Saburo, “I’ll be taking you out to Kaigane Station to clock your runs.”

Saburo’s mother looked up from scooping rice into a bowl. “Maa, Father, what an excellent idea!” she said. She then turned to her son, surprise and pleasure still in her face. “Saburo, thank your father,” she said. Saburo was not altogether happy with the arrangement; his devotion to running was not that strong. Nonetheless, he was suffused with a quiet manly pride that he tried to mask with an expression of nonchalance. “So nice, ne—a father and son, doing things together!” sang Saburo’s mother, expecting no reply and getting none besides a good-willed “That’s right” from her husband. Dinner that night felt very much like a rite of passage, and Saburo’s mother served up the mackerel with a gravity reserved for celebratory red snappers.

Saburo’s father never attended Saburo’s track competitions; he left that to his wife. But he always inquired after the results at dinner, showing more interest in his son’s times than in his rankings—a good thing, since Saburo never placed especially high. The boy never thought to question his father’s absences or to complain. His father was simply different. He was old. He was an academic, whereas Saburo’s friends’ fathers were grocers and merchants. If he got excited, his eye pressure would go up.

But from that evening on, each time Saburo came home on nonpractice days, his father was waiting, still dressed in his Western-style lecture clothes: white short-sleeved shirt and gray trousers, creased and starched. They sat gingerly side by side in the streetcar as it bumped and clattered through the bustling fish vendors’ district, the smells and raucous vendor calls floating in through the windows. It was awkward and silent in the streetcar, just the two of them. Saburo’s mother, with her cheerful chatter, so often served as their buffer. Saburo stole a glance at his father, who was carefully holding both their tickets ready in one hand, even though there were still a dozen stops left to go. He wished his father were like his friends’ fathers: sun-browned, guffawing men who ruffled children’s hair with affectionate ease.

The streetcar rattled on until there was no more open-air market, only an asphalt road slicing through kilometer after kilometer of rice paddies. Kaigane train station was the final stop on the route. As a result of postwar cutbacks the train came through only once a day now, so in the evenings the station was deserted.

Only here, with silence stretching over the open fields like a vast extension of his father’s presence, did Saburo feel complete harmony between them.

Saburo took his place at the makeshift starting line exactly 800 meters south of the platform (they had measured it out on the first day, using a 100-meter ball of string). His father waited back at the platform, a slight, gaunt figure next to the metal station billboard. As he peered at his wristwatch, clutched in both hands, Saburo raced toward him on the asphalt. A sea of rice plants, dyed red from the sunset, undulated on either side. On those spring evenings, the sharp green smell of growing things stung Saburo’s nostrils as he sucked it in, and pierced his lungs like frosty air. His elongated shadow floated beside him with effortless strides, like a long, fluid ghost. If he suddenly stopped running, his shadow might have kept on going.

“Two-forty-nine,” his father said. Saburo panted, leaning over with hands on knees, waiting to regain his wind so he could run it again. Somewhere in the paddies, frogs were croaking.

“Are you pacing yourself?” his father asked. “Remember, it doesn’t matter who’s in front of you. Beating your own time’s all that matters. You can do that with practice. So don’t be affected by those other runners. You just keep on improving, slow and steady.” Everything his father did was slow and steady. Saburo pictured how he might run: rationing each breath, timing each footfall, looking neither left nor right at anything else around him.

Saburo quit the team after one year, in order to devote his second and third years to tutoring sessions for college entrance examinations. His father said gravely that it sounded like a fine idea. Despite his relief—he had never really liked the running or its accompanying pressures—Saburo felt guilty over ending their sessions, which he sensed his father had enjoyed and wished to continue. He had the sad premonition they would never again have a similar experience. As it turned out, the sessions could not have continued anyway; within a year, Kaigane Station’s activity increased, along with the upswing in Japan’s economy, and the surrounding fields gave way to construction sites for future buildings.

Over the next few years prosperity continued, bringing with it an increase in motorbikes and automobiles—menaces in the cluttered, swarming alleyways of the merchant district. Saburo’s mother was a casualty of one such motorbike as it made a sharp turn around the corner near the seaweed grocer’s. She died several hours later on the hospital operating table.

Saburo was nineteen at the time, home from the university for New Year’s vacation. He and his father took a taxi to Shinjin Municipal Hospital as soon as they heard of the accident. Mutely they waited on a bench in the hallway, faces blanched from the blue fluorescent light. The doctor finally arrived, told them “nothing could be done to save her,” lingered a respectable interval, then hurried away to his duties.

Saburo turned to his father. He was hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, gazing down into his dangling hands, which showed the beginnings of liver spots. He seemed to have forgotten his son’s presence. “Father—” Saburo said. There was no response. The awkward streetcar rides flashed into his mind, and in that moment of panic he understood himself to be on the verge of something he had feared, subconsciously, all his life. Lifting his hand, Saburo rested it on the middle of his father’s back. Despite the gravity of the situation, his gesture felt illtimed and melodramatic. There was no response through the scratchy wool of his father’s sweater. Saburo lowered his hand to his side.

When they got home from the hospital, Saburo’s father stopped before the calendar hanging above the kitchen counter, above a bowl of water in which kelp strips were still soaking for that night’s dinner. With a black ballpoint pen, his father drew a big firm X over the box for the twenty-eighth day. “December twenty-eighth,” he said, retracing the X over and over, with growing force. “This was a bad,
bad
day.” Each time Saburo passed the calendar, that black X jumped out at him from an otherwise empty month, the tips of four neat triangles curling outward from where the ballpoint pen had sliced through the paper.