The students had seen Sedge every day for more than a week and wanted to know what he was doing there. He knew there were rumors, and he said he would answer honestly any question they asked in proper English. No one could manage it, though perhaps their reticence that day was only due to good manners.
On their second meeting, when again they wanted to know more about him, he explained in Japanese why he was there. No one asked follow-up questions, and from then teaching became easier.
One afternoon, Mariko approached him in the tea lounge. He was searching online for job opportunities, but also watching birds on the pond and in the garden beyond the window. She had replaced another worker after lunch.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been to your class. My coworkers tell me how helpful it is, and I’m envious they get to learn from you.”
“Are you still tied up every evening?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“That’s too bad.”
She looked around, clearly worried that others might overhear. No staff was within earshot, though Takahashi, who’d been coming and going all afternoon, occasionally turned toward them and watched. After an awkward moment she said, “It may be rude of me to ask, but would you consider teaching me outside of work?”
“Outside of work?”
“I have to return home as soon as my afternoon shift ends. The only way I could study with you is in the evening at my home. The problem is that Riku is usually there.”
It would be easier to teach her here, he knew. There would also be less risk of gossip. Wouldn’t people think it strange if the two of them—whose spouses had run off together—sometimes spent the evening in her house? Yet he also understood her desire to study where she could look after her stepson.
His concern about gossip was for her, not himself. Though he no longer reeled from the hurt Nozomi had inflicted on him, there was little chance of his becoming romantically involved again for a long time. He also hoped to decide on a plan to move forward soon, one that took him back to Kanazawa or to a much larger city like Kyoto, where he could start anew.
“Why don’t you suggest a study schedule and I’ll decide how I want to proceed.”
She nodded. “I told Riku that you have an affinity for birds. He does, too. I thought you might be able to talk to him about them.”
“I’d be happy to. What else does he like?”
“I don’t know if he likes it, but he gets in a lot of fights.” After laughing to herself she apologized. “It’s just that he came home yesterday with a bloody nose and black eye. And the new school year is still young. I’m sorry, I only joked about it because it’s on my mind.”
Sedge shook his head to show he wasn’t offended. “Is he bullied?”
“Some students at his school pick on him, but they’re learning to back off. I’m afraid he doesn’t have any close friends.”
Sedge hesitated before asking, “Does he miss his father?”
“Never. If his father tried to get in touch with him now, he’d have nothing to do with him. Kōichi used to punish him for any number of things, but as soon as Riku turned the tables on him and gave him a dusting up, he left us. I think he was planning to for a long time.”
Sedge hardly knew what to say. “What about his grandfather?”
“In general, my stepson doesn’t trust men.” She laughed at the uncertainty in his face. “You have nothing to worry about. He’ll probably spend most of his time in our kura, which we no longer use as a storehouse. He’s converting it into a livable space for himself. In any case, all he needs is for people to be nice to him, to treat him with a little respect. That may be overly simplistic, but he responds well to people like that.”
“I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep, but I’ll try to come over sometime. We can work out the details later.”
“Thank you. Please take as much time as you need.”
Four guests had entered the lounge and were sitting around a table. Sedge nodded in their direction before Takahashi noticed and scolded Mariko. Startled to see them waiting for her, she hurried away.
When she disappeared behind the kitchen door with the guests’ orders, Sedge returned to his room. What had made him hesitate at her suggestion that he teach her at her home? Had it really been because of what she told him about her stepson? Although he wasn’t eager to meet the son of the man who’d run off with Nozomi, Sedge hadn’t been able to tell Mariko no. He didn’t know what it was, but he found her intriguing.
5
Two weeks later, in the small office behind the front desk, Takahashi asked Sedge how many staff members attended his classes. He was paying them for the time they studied after work, and he wanted to make sure that everyone who attended earned this extra wage. Over the fifteen or so classes he’d taught, Sedge was aware of only two students with single absences.
Yuki stepped into the office as Sedge gave the students’ names.
“Good, that’s good,” Takahashi said. “Those two have a lot going on. Since they live farther away than the others, it’s okay if they don’t attend every class.”
Takahashi scanned the list again. He mentioned a handful of employees he hadn’t asked to attend class, most of whom only worked part-time. The only consistently absent full-time worker was Mariko.
“We’d like her to study, too,” Yuki said, “but she says she hasn’t found a way to manage it.”
“I spoke to her about it once and she said she wanted to learn,” Sedge said. He decided not to tell them about her request that he teach her at her home. “It sounds like her hands are full with her stepson when she’s not working.”
“Well, it’s not the end of the world if she can’t study, but I thought it would be useful to her. When I mentioned the classes in a staff meeting before you arrived, she was one of the most supportive of the idea. It’s too bad for her.”
“Her situation sounds complicated.”
The comment elicited more of her story from Yuki. According to her, when Kōichi was still around, certain domestic incidents compelled her to leave home for several days. With nowhere to go, Yuki and Takahashi let her stay at the ryokan—in the same room where Sedge now stayed, in fact. But her absence from home endangered Riku, who at that time was too young to defend himself against Kōichi. All he could do was try to appease his father by stringing together a thousand origami cranes, which for a time made Kōichi go easy on him. At Mariko’s urging, Yuki and Takahashi reluctantly took the boy in, too, treating them as they now treated Sedge—providing a room, meals, and access to the ryokan’s laundry facilities for free. But Riku had been a problem. He had inherited Kōichi’s unpredictable outbursts, and when they’d confronted Mariko about this, saying they couldn’t abide such behavior around their guests and staff, the two of them moved back home.
Mariko lived in a village on the way to Wagatani Reservoir. Yuki had heard that her parents had bequeathed their house to her before they died—her mother from cancer nearly ten years ago, her father from a heart attack shortly after that. Whereas her father had been a woodturner all his life, her mother had worked as a geigi in Awara Onsen, in Fukui Prefecture—she was apparently renowned for her dances and ability to play the koto—after training in Asakusa as a geisha. She retired in her late twenties to marry, then worked again as a kimono-maker in Yamanaka Onsen. Yuki and Takahashi had dropped by Mariko’s house a few times, most recently two years ago on their annual New Year’s visits to the homes of their long-term workers. Mariko had told Yuki that local men occasionally dropped by to check on her in Kōichi’s absences; it was hard to convince them that she wasn’t interested in their companionship and to make them leave, and their unwanted presence set off her stepson. He took his frustrations out on the kura, and she had to box up and move the valuable things she normally stored there because she feared he’d break them. She had a flowerbed and small vegetable garden, too, and when Yuki came by once she learned that the boy had trampled much of what Mariko was growing. Although Mariko didn’t live far away, Yuki hadn’t visited her home in a long time. Other acquaintances had stopped going there as well. Yuki hoped for Mariko’s sake that the boy would move out when he turned eighteen. Mariko had told her, however, that she was trying to persuade a local woodturner to allow Riku to apprentice part-time with him. Yuki couldn’t imagine the arrangement would succeed, but if the boy didn’t go off to college, he was likely to remain in her house for the foreseeable future.
When Yuki finished speaking, Sedge took a deep breath and said what he’d kept to himself before. He wanted to help Mariko now if he could. “I don’t know how serious she was, but she suggested I come to her house to teach her. I wonder if it’s not a good idea.”
Takahashi shook his head. “I wouldn’t recommend it. She’s a nice person, and one can’t help feeling sorry for her, but why potentially endanger yourself?”
“I imagine you’re making too much of it. The boy’s only sixteen.”
