She glanced at him. “I don’t think either of us feels that way completely. I’m not sure that’s even what I want. But I don’t have a choice. And neither does he.”
As they passed rice fields in whose standing water crows and herons fed, Sedge watched the smoke from a farmer’s refuse fire turn part of the blue sky gray.
“Do you wish you and your wife had started a family?” she said after a moment. The question caught him off-guard, though it was natural to ask considering they’d been talking about her stepson.
“There were times I did,” he answered. “We talked about it but never made specific plans. But after what happened, it’s better that we didn’t.”
“Sometimes I wish Kōichi had taken Riku with him. I guess he always knew he’d have a better chance with other women if his son stayed behind. I feel sorry for Riku. More than anything, I suppose that’s the main feeling I have for him.”
Sedge didn’t know what to say. He pitied Riku, too.
“That must sound terrible of me,” she said after a moment. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s understandable. I’d feel the same way, and I’m sure anyone else would, too.”
“Riku probably knows deep down how I feel. I think it’s one reason he misbehaves so much. He can’t help it, you know. And I’m partly to blame.”
“Who says it’s fair to you to have to live like this?”
“But like I said, I don’t have a choice.”
She looked at him again. Sensing that she wanted him to confirm this, he gazed once more into the watery green expanse that stretched to faraway farmhouses. He could see she was stuck with Riku and that it was disruptive for them both.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” she said, as if she knew what he was thinking.
A new topic of conversation didn’t come easily. They arrived at Katano Kamoike bird sanctuary a few minutes later, having hardly said another word to each other.
Sitting on a bench side-by-side, they peered at the pond before them through telescopes mounted in the sanctuary’s indoor observation room. Speakers in the marshy grass captured the cacophony of frogs and various birds. Sedge aimed his telescope to the side, where several herons stepped gingerly through shallow water. A moment earlier, Mariko saw an osprey pluck a fish from the pond and disappear into the tops of the surrounding broadleaf trees. She had cried out, hoping the fish would wrest itself from the osprey’s grasp. She was now trying to identify all the birds at the pond’s far end, perhaps a half-kilometer from where they sat: ducks, cormorants, kites, and—based on a choice of three birds Sedge named—what she guessed was a golden eagle.
“There are garganeys and grebes out there, too,” he said.
“I don’t know what those are.”
He focused his telescope on an area closer to them. “Look through mine.” She scooted toward him and he leaned slightly into her. Her bare arms were soft and warm.
“How do you know them so well?” she said, her eye pressed to the telescope.
“Maybe I was a bird in a previous life.”
“I wonder what kind.”
He laughed. “Probably a working-class bird, like a sparrow or barn swallow. Something most people don’t get excited about.”
“You’re being modest.”
“In Japan, maybe I’d be a rare bird. But it would probably be common in America.”
She withdrew from the telescope and laughed, her shining eyes lingering on his.
Two young families entered the sanctuary. The noise of their children, excited more by the telescopes than by what they helped them see, hastened Sedge and Mariko’s departure.
“I was getting hungry anyway,” he said as they walked back to her car.
“I’m afraid I packed chicken for lunch.”
“It’s okay. The ospreys and hawks we saw won’t judge us badly.”
She drove them to a tall, wooded hill amid rice fields with no houses around. From the shoulder of a country road where they parked, he spotted an overgrown path to its top. A torii gate stood there with a weathered shimenawa rope stretched across it, indicating a Shinto shrine. She said that from the top, such a cloudless day would give them a perfect view of the sea.
“How do you know this place?” he said, lifting her cooler from the back seat.
“In high school, I once wrote a history paper on local Shinto shrines. I researched about a dozen before choosing this one. Its location and the spiritual feeling I had when I visited drew me to it. My mother drove me here on her day off work. She said it was one of the nicest shrines she’d ever been to. She loved the view of the rice fields and ocean, and the breeze that cooled us on the hot day we went. It made her happy to come here, and she was almost never happy. It was like she discovered a different world. We came here a few times, and our visits may be the nicest memories I have of her.”
“What made her unhappy?”
“My father.”
That was all she said about it as she led him up the hill. He could almost believe that Mariko’s childhood visit was the last time anyone had come here. Stepping in front of her, he brushed away the cobwebs hanging over the path. Somewhat out of breath, they made it to the torii and bowed toward the shrine at the end of a short approach.
When they reached the shrine, Mariko waved him to a narrower path he hadn’t noticed, which wound behind the shrine and through a copse of sugi trees. In a minute they emerged on the opposite side of the mountain, lower than where they’d been. Here the view opened even more. Despite the highway near the ocean, where cars were small as ants, he sensed that no one in the world could find them here.
“Riku told me once that the rice fields below, and the Daishōji River in the distance, are breeding grounds for herons this time of year.” She pointed to where she meant. “That’s another reason I wanted to take you here. Can you see them?”
Two or three herons stood in each field, and there were perhaps thirty fields altogether unfurling toward the sea. Even the river, miniaturized by distance, had herons circling above it. Sedge gazed out below them in wonder, then pointed further into the distance. “They must nest along the Daishōji where those trees cluster together.”
