They drank in silence, gazing out the window at the pond and the night that had long ago settled around it. Takahashi glanced at the registration counter several times, and Sedge anticipated an excuse to cut their conversation short. Finally, Takahashi turned back and, finishing the sake in his glass, bent his head over the table and sighed again deeply.
“It would be nice if Mariko were here, don’t you think? I’d like to sit back and let her pour for us.”
Sedge didn’t know how to respond. Was Takahashi taking him into his confidence, or was he setting him up so he could knock him down a notch?
“She works enough as it is.”
“Yes, she does,” Takahashi agreed. “If anything happened to Yuki and I was left on my own, Mariko would be top of my list to replace her.” He laughed, though Sedge didn’t feel like he’d made a joke. When Sedge frowned in distaste, Takahashi said more seriously, “She’s a sight for sore eyes, anyway. It’s one reason I like her working where I can see her. I assume you feel the same way, otherwise you wouldn’t come here every day. Or keep teaching at her house after I asked you not to.”
“Is it really any of your business what I do?” Sedge said.
Takahashi glanced up from the table at Sedge, his face set hard. When he sat up again, his features returned to normal.
“Another reason I invited you here for a drink,” Takahashi went on, not bothering to answer the question, “was because of things I’ve heard about your English classes.”
“Oh?” More than what Takahashi had said about Mariko, the comment caught Sedge off-guard.
“I had a staff meeting before any of this with my father happened. I guess it was a week and a half ago. I asked how everyone’s English skills were progressing, and though it was a casual question, one I didn’t really expect serious answers to, the floodgates opened. All I heard were complaints. One or two staff members said you prepared well, but everyone agreed that they didn’t want to continue with your classes.”
Sedge looked out the window again. The darkness over the pond had deepened suddenly. “I see. But why did no one approach me about this? I would have been happy to make changes.”
“I wondered the same thing. They said you were unapproachable.”
Sedge couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing had ever indicated that his students were dissatisfied with his classes, and he constantly asked them for feedback. Three weeks ago, after he’d finished his first month of teaching, he had even given them a short survey to fill out anonymously and return to him. Their only complaints were that the class met late and that the classroom was either too hot or too cold. He distrusted what Takahashi said. His skepticism grew as he recalled Takahashi telling his mother during their last visit together that he’d been doing an excellent job of teaching his staff.
“I don’t know what to say. Maybe I can have a heart-to-heart talk with them next week and try to meet their expectations better.”
“Yuki and I think it’s too late for that. Once the staff makes up its collective mind, it never goes back. We’ve decided that tonight’s class was your final one.”
Sedge stared at his empty sake glass. “That’s not premature?”
“I’m afraid not. I think the students might have felt this even from your very first class.”
Sedge knew he was lying now. He guessed what was coming next, and he looked up at Takahashi as the anticipated words tumbled from his mouth.
“Since we’ve reached this decision about your classes, and you’ve been here long enough to get back on your feet—long enough to form a serious relationship with Mariko, I understand—we think it’s better if you leave the ryokan. Yuki suggested one week from today, but I’ll give you a few days more.”
“Of course,” Sedge said, trying to swallow the tremor in his voice. “I’ll start looking for a new place immediately.”
“We’re glad you understand. It’s one of those things that can’t be helped.”
Sedge stood as Takahashi poured himself another glass of sake. Standing over him, Sedge calculated that by the time he moved out he’d have lived here for nearly two months of the four they’d promised him. He could hardly complain. Had they not been so generous with him, he didn’t know where he might be now. He was doing his best to remain positive.
“Again, I’m sorry about your father. If you decide there’s anything I can do . . .”
Takahashi set down his glass and bowed to him.
As far as Sedge was concerned, they had nothing left to talk about.
“Good night,” he said.
Takahashi echoed his words, which floated over Sedge’s shoulder as he left him alone in the lounge.
13
Sedge stayed up past one a.m. emailing friends as far away as Kyoto, Tokyo, Fukuoka, and even Sapporo, hoping they might have leads for jobs and places to stay. Eventually he fell asleep, but even by the next afternoon he hadn’t received a single reply.
His breakfast came as it always did, and though he remained grateful for it, it was of a different quality now: a hard-boiled egg, slice of toast, and coffee. It was more than enough; even so, it proved his time here had come to an end. That Takahashi or Yuki had instructed the kitchen to do this struck him as unnecessary. He didn’t need reminding that this was their ryokan and they were in charge.
Over the next few days most of the staff kept their distance from him, and his dinners came to resemble his breakfasts. The most uncomfortable development was that Mariko had again been transferred, and he had no chance to see her in the tea lounge. Even the bicycles stored in the parking garage were fitted with cheap chain locks, whereas before they’d been left unsecured and anyone could borrow them. He had been one of the only guests to make use of them. With the weather, especially in the afternoons, marked by torrents of rain, he couldn’t make it to the places he most liked to go.
Sunday, however, was sunny. After being told that the ryokan’s bicycles needed maintenance and couldn’t be used, Sedge found a tourist office that rented them, and he paid to use one until tomorrow.
His intended destination was the bird reserve he and Mariko had gone to. He knew it took an hour to ride to the sea, and since the reserve was only a mile before it, he thought he could make it there and back without exhausting himself, and with time to wash and eat before teaching her.
Although the way to the reserve wended through a string of rural villages and towns, he avoided the major roads as much as he could, riding down asphalt paths between rice fields. All the while he worried about what he would do when he left the ryokan in less than a week. He could probably rent an old apartment in town with what little money he had, but it would only prolong his situation and perhaps leave him with nothing, finally, as the long winter approached.
The afternoon grew hot, forcing him to stop once for cold tea at a vending machine in the shade of an abandoned community center. Along the way were irrigated rice fields that mirrored the bright summer sky.
At one point, however, perhaps halfway to the bird reserve, he spotted a gray-white mass thrashing about on the shoulder of a road. When it paused, as if tired, he realized it was a heron.
He looked around for help, but there was no one in the surrounding fields. A small service truck was parked up ahead, and a tractor stood with its wheels half-sunk in the corner of a nearby plot, but whoever the vehicles belonged to was nowhere to be seen. On an afternoon as hot as this, anyone smart would be indoors. There was a reason, he understood now, why he hadn’t seen anyone else bicycling.
On his phone he looked up the bird reserve, but when he dialed it he couldn’t get through. He tried Mariko’s number, too, but she didn’t answer, and over the next few minutes she didn’t call back.
Four crows on a telephone wire stared down at the injured bird. Beyond them, an equal number of hawks circled in the sky. A vehicle must have struck the heron within the last half-hour, but in that time none of these birds had finished it off. If he left it, however, he expected they would.
He spotted a cardboard box on a dike two rice fields away. After shouting a warning to the crows, he ran to check its condition. Though not as stiff as new cardboard, he hazarded that it was sturdy enough to hold the injured heron. As luck would have it, a pair of muddy work gloves had been left twenty feet away. They were small, but he pulled them on enough to protect himself if the bird attacked him with its sharp beak.
