“That’s a silly rule. It’s better to agree to be respectful.”
“But she’s like my father: there need to be rules, and the rules must be obeyed.”
“She’s nothing at all like your father. You know that.”
Sedge listened to Mariko’s footsteps above while Riku wandered to the table to inspect his cooking.
When they all sat down to eat, Riku told them what he’d learned at school that day about Matsuo Bashō. “Everyone in Yamanaka Onsen knows he spent time here in the seventeenth century. But all those kuhi in town with his poems on them are hard to read, and most of my classmates aren’t interested in literature. But today our teacher showed us his route when he walked all over the country writing poems. He spent time not just here, but also in Kanazawa, Komatsu, Yamashiro Onsen, and Echizen. He even wrote a poem about Natadera temple.”
A docent at the local Bashō museum, a woman born in Natamachi where Natadera stood, once proudly explained to Sedge the poet’s haiku immortalizing the temple’s white rocks. “But one thing I don’t understand is why he walked all over Japan,” Sedge said. “Why did he bother traveling for months along that ‘narrow road to the deep north’? It might have been interesting at times, but most of his journey had to have been unpleasant, and dangerous, too, with bandits in so many places. And didn’t he die on his last trip?”
“Wasn’t it to get inspiration?” Mariko asked. “He must have found it, otherwise he wouldn’t have written so many famous poems.”
Sedge accepted Mariko’s answer, but he didn’t think it explained Bashō’s perseverance in such difficult times. What had set him upon his first journey, all alone at times and probably without real expectations of what it would be like? It must have looked to outsiders like suicide at the time, or hopelessly irresponsible. He turned to Riku for his opinion.
“He did it to escape the pain and sorrow of this world,” Riku said, his tone dismissive of Sedge’s questions. “At least that’s what my teacher said.”
“I forgot he was a devoted Buddhist,” Sedge said. “A Zen Buddhist, wasn’t he?”
But Riku was already on to something else. He had apparently memorized some poems as a class exercise, for he began to recite several that were attributed to the period Bashō stayed in Yamanaka Onsen.
“My favorite Bashō haiku has nothing to do with his time here.”
“Which one is that?” Sedge said.
Riku recited this one, too.
In the late spring rain
A crane’s legs
Grow ever shorter
“I’ve seen this happen in the fields,” he said. “It’s hard to believe he wrote about something I’ve seen many times here. It makes me want to write haiku, too.”
When Riku had said all he wanted, Sedge turned to Mariko and asked if earlier she’d fallen asleep upstairs.
“I did. I dreamed about you, actually.”
Riku lowered his soup bowl from his mouth and said, “What about?”
To Sedge she said, “It was very realistic. I dreamed that you left us.”
Riku glanced between the two of them. In a low voice he said, “Why would he do that?”
“In the dream, he decided to leave for some reason. It wasn’t just that, though. He was leaving and said he would never see us again. We kept telling him it wasn’t necessary, but he only nodded and insisted that it was. Right when you called me, Riku, you and I were watching him on TV. The news was reporting something he had done, and everyone was celebrating. But it wasn’t the local news we always watch. He was in a big city far away.”
“Most dreams don’t mean anything,” Riku said.
“The funny thing is,” she went on, ignoring Riku’s remark, “I was crying when I woke up. Everyone on TV acted so happy for him. But in my dream I’d burst into tears.” She looked away for a moment. “Now that I’ve told you about it, the dream is losing its vividness. How strange.” A short, startled laugh escaped her.
“You’re putting too much stock in that dream,” Sedge said, shaken by what she’d described. He imagined that Nozomi’s return had provoked it. He couldn’t ask if she’d appeared in it, too. “Even if you’ve taken me in temporarily, I have no plans to leave soon.”
“But you will eventually,” Riku said.
“You will,” Mariko said. “I didn’t realize it until just now. Not the full reality of it, anyway.”
“How am I supposed to defend myself from what you saw in a dream?”
Mariko laughed, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry. Riku, we shouldn’t make him feel bad. After all, he cooked a great dinner for us, didn’t he?”
“I like your cooking better.”
Sedge laughed, too. “I promise to stay long enough to perfect my cooking in both your eyes. That should be worth something.”
Riku finished his dinner quickly and without a word left the house.
“I upset him,” Mariko said. “He’s fond of you, you know.”
Sedge wiped Riku’s place with a napkin. “I don’t remember myself being so sensitive at his age. Or at your age, either.”
“Neither of us wants to be left behind again,” she said. “You understand, don’t you?”
Sedge nodded. He understood that worry all too well.
Sometime after midnight, lying on his futon and thinking of the quiet night he’d spent downstairs alone, he saw a message light up his phone. It was from Mariko.
