“I’m taking medication.”
“Then I’ll buy you something else. Whatever you’d like.”
When Riku gave no more indication of what he wanted to do, Sedge walked past him, toward the brightly lit store.
“You intentionally led me to the statues of the cranes,” Riku said, coming up behind him.
“Don’t be absurd,” Sedge said, and tried to laugh. “Besides, you were following me, not being led.” The convenience store’s automatic doors opened and Sedge walked inside. Considering there was a festival one hundred feet away, surprisingly few people were in its aisles. He turned around. Riku was there. Irritated with him and feeling warm from the sake and beer he’d drunk, he attempted a smile and said, “And those were herons, not cranes.”
Riku closed the distance between them at the back of the store, where Sedge stopped to consider the small sake bottles lined on a refrigerator shelf. “Is there a brand you’re willing to try? Some of them are dry, others sweet. Sweet might be better if you’re not used to it. What do you say?” The glass display showed his and Riku’s reflections, but the condensation on it clouded their faces.
As Sedge reached for the refrigerator door, Riku shoved him into the glass and pinned him there, his shoulder in his back. Sedge could have easily escaped since Riku only had one hand at his use, but he didn’t move. A strange calmness pervaded him—a surety that harmony would prevail between them and in the end they would finally set aside their differences.
“I’d still have my fingers if you’d let me go with you to the bird reserve!” Riku shouted into his ear. “Whenever I see where my fingers used to be, I hear you telling me again I can’t go!”
Sedge winced at Riku’s accusation. “I know I haven’t been as good to you as I should have been. But I had nothing to do with what happened to your fingers.”
Riku leaned into Sedge harder. “I blame you for everything.”
Sedge never saw the rock Riku had been hiding crash down on his head—though right after it struck him he realized it had always been coming toward him.
He fell again into the refrigerator door, slumping to the ground with his hands covering his head. Blood oozed over his fingers, but there was little pain to speak of. He foresaw that coming next, and it did as Riku began kicking him wherever he had room to in the narrow aisle Sedge was sprawled in.
Customers began screaming, Sedge couldn’t tell how many or from where in the store, and mixed with those awful sounds was that of Riku half-shrieking with each kick he landed on Sedge’s body.
Sedge grabbed the foot Riku wasn’t kicking with, and when he pulled with all the strength he still had, Riku fell.
He landed on his injured hand. As he rolled around in pain, a store clerk dove on him. The man wrenched Riku’s bandaged hand behind his back to immobilize him, and Riku screamed.
The pain in Riku’s voice was the last thing Sedge remembered.
28
After the cherry blossoms had fallen and scattered the road to Yūyūkan, cosmos, irises, and fawn lilies bloomed in Mariko’s garden. From the carport to the mossy stone wall separating the house from the kura, she had divided the long flowerbed into two: the half closer to the street for flowers, and the half closer to the mountain for vegetables. Despite the limited area, she hoped to get as much of a yield from it as possible.
Though Mariko was often at the ryokan, tending both had become part of their daily routine. So was keeping the crows away, not only from their vegetables but also from the birdhouses Riku had left behind, which Sedge had fixed and placed around the yard. Birds occupied three of the four, but the one nearest the kura entrance remained empty. Sedge and Mariko planned to return them to Riku eventually, but it would be more difficult now that birds had made homes in them. Since it was spring, they could sit in the veranda or on the wooden bench beside the house and, if they stayed still, watch the birds. Sedge kept a list of them. Mariko wrote their names in Japanese, and beside these Sedge wrote their equivalents in English.
In May they discovered termites in the kura. One day they were inspecting the inside with the idea of renting it out as an artist studio or turning it into a guesthouse. A few days later, however, when they went back inside, they found the first floor covered with termite wings. They were thickest where the senbazuru ash had been heaped.
Months ago, Sedge had covered Riku’s boxes with a plastic tarp, but after the termite infestation he peeled it back and reorganized them. He wrote their contents on labels, affixed them to each box, then sealed the boxes with tape. Afterward, he hauled them to the second floor and stacked them in a corner. Whenever Riku needed them, Sedge and Mariko would transport them to Echizen. She didn’t want to transfer them before he asked her to.
Sedge also carried to the second floor the wooden post Riku had been given to make a kuhi inscribed with his own haiku.
When he came back to the first floor, Mariko sighed and looked around. “We’ll need an exterminator,” she said.
The next day two men from a neighboring village came, prying up the floorboards and poking around the dirt below. “With a stone foundation like this,” the older of the two said, “humidity gets trapped under the floor. Now that you’ve had an infestation, you could use a pesticide to repel them, but they’d come back every year. Pesticide might work in town, but here in the mountains I recommend bamboo charcoal.” What he suggested cost two hundred thousand yen.
“It’s more we’ll have to spend on renovations,” Mariko said after they left.
“Luckily,” Sedge said, “we’re both making enough money that it’s not the problem it would have been last year.”
“But your online store still hasn’t matched your sales in Kanazawa.”
“Every week it does a little better. And the renovations will be worth it.” He would only resume his search for an English-teaching job if the store he’d started failed.
She seemed to have forgotten that he’d recently received the remainder of the money Nozomi had taken from him. It had come through Takahashi, who’d invited Sedge to the ryokan twice in the last month, both times to share a bottle of sake and make what Sedge thought were attempts to reconcile their differences. On Sedge’s last visit, Takahashi told him that Nozomi was going away to Shikoku to walk all one thousand two hundred kilometers and visit all eighty-eight temples on the Shikoku Henro Pilgrimage. Takahashi wasn’t happy about her leaving again, but this time, at least, she promised to stay in touch.
A few days later Sedge took a stroll on the paved path along the Daishōji River. Near the end of it, with the Bashō Hut in view, he stopped. A woman in a sunhat and sunglasses stood before it, gazing at the large torii beside it and the path extending from there up the small mountain. For a moment, her outfit made her look much like Nozomi had at the hotel in Kanazawa where they’d last met.
The woman turned and began walking toward Sedge. Immediately he realized it wasn’t Nozomi. The hat and sunglasses had fooled him, but their bodies and gaits were nothing alike. Now that he could see her closely, it was almost laughable how different they looked. And according to Takahashi, Nozomi had moved last fall to Tokyo and was living temporarily with a relative.
The woman nodded hello as she passed him. If the river hadn’t been so loud here, he imagined she’d have heard his heart thumping.
And yet there was a sense of déjà vu in what had passed. He had seen Nozomi here, too, a month after Riku had attacked him at the festival. He had come across her at the same place, facing the Bashō Hut and not seeming to recognize that he stood nearby watching her.
At the time, not wanting to speak with her, he had nearly returned the way he’d come. Instead, he had kept walking toward Kurotani Bridge, one hundred feet past her, which would take him back to town. Walking by Nozomi he’d nearly spoken her name, but continued on.
Nozomi hadn’t looked at him when he passed by, and if she’d recognized him from behind she hadn’t called to him, either.
Halfway to the bridge, however, he’d stopped and turned around. She’d passed beneath the torii and was standing on the sloping path, as if trying to judge the difficulty of climbing it.
She had nearly slipped as she began climbing the path, but regained her balance and continued her ascent. A recent storm had dropped branches and leaves on the path, but she’d stepped over them nimbly, unbothered by the obstacles they posed.
The path turned and she’d followed it. A moment later she’d disappeared behind the trees.
Continuing along the path, Sedge wondered again how he could have mistaken the woman for Nozomi. Eight months had passed since he’d last seen her, and now they were divorced. He thought he’d like to meet her again in a few months when she returned from Shikoku. Would it be possible to tell her then that he forgave her?
