“Of course,” she wrote back immediately. “I’m sorry to cause you so much trouble.”
He lay his head on his seat-back and closed his eyes.
8
Rain poured down the following Sunday as Sedge trudged up Yugekai Road. After passing Kagari Kisshōtei, the last ryokan on the main drag, he veered left down a steep path to Kōrogi-machi. He could hardly see where he was going. Crossing the wooden “Cricket Bridge,” he didn’t stop to watch the river roar by beneath the dense branches of trees below. He glanced at the stone kuhi at the end of the bridge and remembered the engraved Bashō verse flowing down its flat surface that Nozomi once taught him.
By the night’s fishing fire
a bullhead in the waves
choked with tears
He hurried by it, Nozomi unwelcome on the edges of the memory.
On the other side he ascended a flagstone path to a back road, which turned and led past an eel restaurant and a cafe, an old samurai house, and another moss-covered kuhi, nearly black with rain, with a Bashō haiku flowing down it, too. Despite holding a large umbrella, by the time he reached Mariko’s house his shoes, socks, and the bottom third of his pants were soaked.
Lit from inside, her house cast stripes of light at his feet through the vertical kōshi slats on its first-floor windows. Perhaps two hundred meters ahead, the road entered a forest; the half-dozen houses before it were quiet and dark and, aside from numerous potted plants in front of them, might have been uninhabited. He rang Mariko’s doorbell.
A shadow appeared and grew more distinct as it neared the door’s clouded glass. The door slid open and Mariko stood there, a strange sight dressed in a light sweater and thin pleated skirt rather than the ryokan’s kimono. She stared at him open-mouthed—either astonished that he had come, or that he was half-drenched from the rain.
“Hello . . .”
His English jarred her from whatever vision had frozen her in the doorway. She ushered him inside, sliding the door open further for him to enter. She shook out his umbrella and leaned it against the front wall.
“My feet are soaking wet,” he told her before peeling off his shoes and socks at the wooden step leading up from the genkan. “Do you have a towel I can dry them off with?”
“Of course. Just a moment.” She removed her own footwear and walked quickly into her house.
The genkan was freshly swept, and a heavy wooden cabinet lined the wall to his right. Atop it was an empty vase, two ceramic guardian lions, and an iron incense burner, all of which wore the sheen of antiques. On the wall above them hung a square board with two lacquered Noh masks—a horned devil and a white-faced hag. Behind the wall was a bathroom, with a wooden stairs across from it; straight ahead was a tatami room; to the left of that were two similar rooms, but larger. To the immediate left was a room with its sliding doors pulled shut, and beyond that a kitchen. Nearly every room was lighted, which lent the house a cheerful atmosphere despite the rain. He saw no sign of the stepson, and no indication of Mariko’s husband’s former presence.
Mariko hurried back with two small towels, one for his feet and one for the sweat beading his face.
“Is it just you here?” he said after a bit of small talk about the weather.
“Riku’s in the kura behind the house. But he’ll come in soon. He has homework still to do.”
Sedge glanced toward the back of the house but couldn’t see outside.
“Does he study English at school?”
She laughed. “English is required at every Japanese school. But that doesn’t mean he speaks it. Don’t let this offend you, but he detests the subject. To be fair, though, he detests all his school subjects. He’s tried to quit going many times.”
Sedge gave her back both towels. “He has no interests academically?”
“I wouldn’t call it an academic interest exactly, but he’s keen on local history, and also the woodturning, lacquerware, and pottery local craftsmen make. And like I told you, he’s keen on birds.”
“Has he always been?”
“Since moving here, I guess. He and I have helped injured sparrows and crows we’ve come across. One day maybe you’ll see the birdhouses he’s made and hung outside the kura. Unfortunately, because he’s always coming and going, and making so much noise inside, birds don’t want to live in them.”
Sedge followed her into the front room where a dining table stood. The sliding fusuma doors between the connected rooms and wooden-floored veranda had been removed, making the area more open, and the tatami flooring was in places worn and discolored. The fusuma that remained, both before the Buddhist altar at the back of the second room and that separated the first tatami room from the one beside the stairs, had large holes in them, as if someone had kicked or punched them. As he sat at the table he spotted holes in the plaster wall of the second room’s inset alcove, too. Two were sloppily replastered, but two had been left untouched, suggesting they were more recent.
“Does he birdwatch?” he said, his eyes returning to the veranda, at the end of which a roll-curtain had been raised. Beyond the window was a shin-high, mossy stone wall—the edge of a long, waterlogged flowerbed—but with it dark outside and bright inside, the reflection of the house’s interior made it difficult to see anything else.
“Not really. But he’s learned to recognize the birds he sees around here. For years he’s had a thing for senbazuru—making and stringing together a thousand origami cranes. In fact, when he was eight or nine years old, he made his first senbazuru and with a teacher’s help sent them to schoolchildren in Fukushima. That was before I’d met Kōichi.”
Sedge remembered Takahashi telling him about the one thousand origami cranes the boy had made and given to his father. He wondered if what Takahashi told him referred to this incident instead. There was a world of difference between doing such a thing to lift the spirits of disadvantaged kids and wanting to appease an angry father.
“He knows you’re coming tonight. He was curious about your name. He looked it up in his dictionary and saw that the kanji for your name in Japanese is the same first kanji in the name of our village.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She disappeared into the kitchen. “Can you drink mugi-cha?”
“Of course. Thank you.”
He approached the Buddhist altar, its exterior lacquered black and easily as tall as himself. It stood open and gleamed inside with gold leaf. His gaze fell on the altar’s votive objects, the ornate religious carvings along its top and sides, and two small hanging scrolls in back, one with a painting of the Buddha and the other of a kneeling, heavily robed priest. The Buddhist names of several deceased ancestors were written on small wooden mortuary tablets to one side.
Sedge had lifted his eyes to the transom overhead, where wooden carvings of winged bodhisattvas flew among clouds—two of which were missing—when Mariko returned carrying a small lacquered tray.
“Is this altar yours or your husband’s?” he asked.
“Mine,” she said softly. “Actually, it belongs to my brother in Kyoto. But because I inherited our parents’ house when they died, and the altar has been here as long as I remember, I agreed to take care of it.”
“I didn’t know you have a brother.”
“He hasn’t come back for five years. He and Kōichi don’t get along.”
