The Laws of Evening: Stories (7 page)

In the ensuing weeks, Saburo had a recurring dream about high school track. In this dream two runners were ahead of him but not by much, and it was only the first lap; he was positioned right where he wanted to be. But wait. The crowd was cheering too much for just the first lap. Then he knew, as one does in dreams, that he had made a mistake. This was not the 800. This was the 400.

Eventually, however, he was rescued by the memory of one long-ago Mother’s Day, when he had presented his mother with a necklace he had woven from sweet peas and clover. She had exclaimed over it, then added, “But the best present you can give me is good grades so that someday you’ll do well at the university and make your country proud.” What a letdown that had been at the time. But now her words glowed hot in his brain, and for the first time Saburo understood how loss could resolve itself through complex transfers of emotion. Back at school, subdued but focused, he immersed himself in his engineering studies.

His father, meanwhile, altered his domestic routine: Each night at six, he strolled to the
oden
cookery, where he chewed his dinner, calm and controlled as always; on Friday evenings he dropped off his clothes at the launderer’s. The rhythm of this new schedule suggested years of familiarity, as if no prior way of life had existed. Saburo remembered, with a pang, the seamless way his father had replaced their running sessions with paperwork. Over the next few months, when Saburo came home on his increasingly brief visits, he noted the gradual disappearance of his mother’s effects—with the exception of one framed photograph beside the family altar—leaving the house monkish and austere, a mirror of his father.

Saburo pondered the fact of his parents’ arranged marriage. Did that lessen the heartbreak? Once, his father, while turning down the volume of a
Madame Butterfly
aria swelling forth from the radio (he was not a fan of Italian opera, which was “full of ego”), had muttered, “True love, true love…who even knows what that means?” Saburo could not tell if a response was expected.

Yet years after his wife might have faded from memory, Saburo’s father mentioned her, if only in passing, each time his son came visiting: “Now your mother, on a day like this she would have loved sitting out here in the garden.” Saburo thought how much easier it would have been if their emotions—his and his father’s—had been realized, apportioned, and spent, in their entirety, over his mother’s lifetime.

At thirty, Saburo was doing well for himself. He held a respected position at a civil engineering firm. After years of saving he had purchased a Western-style condominium in the up-and-coming Kiji district, built over those fields where he had once run. A handsome man, with something of his Uncle Kotai lurking about the lips, Saburo attracted women with an ease he did not fully understand. It required little effort: some lighthearted banter, which came easily in adulthood, and on occasion a calculatedly mischievous grin. Given his unremarkable past, this was gratifying to his self-esteem. “Takes after Kotai-san,” said one elderly woman from his old neighborhood. But unlike his uncle, Saburo did nothing in excess, not even banter. Perhaps it was this restraint that attracted the women. At any rate, Saburo was in no rush to marry; there was plenty of time. Life was pleasant and under control. On weekends he swam laps with sure, unhurried strokes.

Around this time, his father’s glaucoma began giving him trouble. Over the decades its pressure had increased steadily despite medication, and several years ago a severe migraine required his right eye to be replaced with a glass one whose chestnut hue was a close, but not exact, match with the more faded brown of his left eye. Now his peripheral vision in the remaining eye had disappeared to the point where his father could see only what was directly before him, as if looking at the world through a narrow pipe. During one of his sporadic visits, Saburo saw how his father patted the air around him like a blind man. He proposed—in the same quiet way his father had once announced the running sessions—that he visit his father every Sunday, at which time he would take care of all grocery shopping and outside errands. Afterwards he would escort his father on a walk through the neighborhood streets, which were too dangerous now for a frail, half-blind man in his seventies. His father’s ready acquiescence, in contrast to his usual self-sufficiency, indicated how grave the situation must have been.

And so a new routine began. They strolled in the afternoons, through narrow alleyways where morning glory vines, their blooms shrunk to purple matchsticks in the afternoon sun, cascaded over old-fashioned bamboo lattices. It became second nature for Saburo to walk two steps ahead on flat surfaces; otherwise his father, with his tunnel vision, would lose track of him entirely. Occasionally in the alley they met a housewife who stopped her sweeping to bow watchfully as the pair passed: the younger man taking slow, tiny steps, the distinguished-looking old gentleman shuffling close behind him.

Now that Saburo was an adult, their conversations were no longer awkward. Any conversational opening inevitably led to a lecture on astronomy, thus little was required on Saburo’s part. He felt relaxed, self-assured in the knowledge of all he was doing for his father. At appropriate pauses, he made a comment over his shoulder (“That kind of magnitude is hard to grasp”) or asked a question (“And how was that discovery received by the scientific community?”). His father, he realized, had a passionate side. At rare intervals, when he was caught up in some obscure detail, the old man’s voice rose with fervor and he came to a full stop in order to make his point. Saburo pictured his father as a student in some university teahouse, robed in good-quality silks and ardently discussing science, ideals, the future of the world. It was a brief, fragrant whiff of that prewar world of which Saburo had never been a part.

Sometimes he discussed his own work—the new railroad they were currently building through the Hiei pass—or else he inquired after his father’s routine, which seemed to consist largely of scientific reading interspersed with eye exercises, radio news programs, and long sitting sessions in the garden. But as time passed, Saburo dwelled less and less on such mundane topics. He began looking forward to his father’s monologues, which at first he had tolerated out of filial duty. They filled him now with a sense of wonder, of vast sweeps of time and space and human endeavors and intellectual possibilities. They reminded him somehow of those open fields of his childhood. On his way home after these visits, riding the bus through the open-air market—which at that hour was cluttered and bustling in the warm red glow of paper lanterns—Saburo was keenly, inarticulately, aware of the sky beyond, purpling and darkening.

An exception to this companionable routine came several days after a quarterly eye checkup. His father’s range of vision had dropped, not by one-half to one point as expected, but by two points and a quarter. “If I go blind now, at my age,” his father remarked gravely as they shuffled their way along the alley, “I plan to end my life.”

Saburo froze. With anyone else he would have said all the right things: “Don’t be silly! There’s always something to live for! I love you and I’m here for you!” He was good at such gestures, especially with women. But someone like his father must not be insulted by such clichés. This was not a cry for pity but a non-negotiable decision related out of courtesy. Saburo knew his father must have pondered this alone for months, weighing the pros and cons in his academic fashion.

After a few minutes Saburo asked, “How would you do it?”

“With a gun. Very simple, just hold it to your ear and pull the trigger.”

“Not something easier,” he asked tentatively, “like gas or sleeping pills?”

“Those don’t work right away. Someone finds you halfway through, then they’ve got you in the hospital, making a big fuss. You come out of it half paralyzed, brain-damaged.”

Saburo said nothing. They walked silently. The alley was deserted, and the early autumn sunlight slanted down, reddish, at a low angle. They approached the Sunemuras’ olive tree, whose branches leaned out over the old-fashioned adobe wall of their garden and shaded the alley. Waiting for his father to reach his side, Saburo cupped his hand behind his father’s sweatered elbow as they passed beneath the olive branches, steering him around the slippery black pulp of overripe olives that had dropped onto the cement. He did this every time they passed the olive tree, although his father’s refusal to lean on him, to physically acknowledge the assistance in any way, made Saburo remove his hand the moment they were in the clear.

“That’s life, Saburo.” His father’s voice was as grave and modulated as ever. “And your time will free up. There’s nothing wrong with that. You need more than a busy job and a sick parent.”

They walked. From somewhere in the distance came a faint smell of burning leaves.

Then his father launched easily, noncommittally, into a deploration of this week’s radio series on Mars. “Life…on…Mars!” he said dryly, mimicking the radio host’s dramatic tone. “Hehh, they can’t even present simple facts without dramatizing them all out of proportion.”

Only now did Saburo notice that the underarms of his own imported linen shirt were damp with sweat. He thought he had outgrown this terror from the day of his mother’s death, when he had reached over to touch his father’s back. His mother would have known what to do. Mother…. Once when Saburo was in the first grade, she had gripped his face between her hands and, driven by some intense, private emotion, kissed the top of his shaved head with furious pecks.

After the visit with his father, on the bus ride home, Saburo reviewed the situation realistically. Outsiders would not understand their exchange. They would not see that his father, far from begging for sympathy, would have considered it out of place. The truth was that there was an understanding; they had no need for embarrassing displays. Saburo thought of the railroad they were drafting at work, its parallel rails never touching, yet exquisitely synchronized, committed in their separateness as they curved through hill and valley. That, he was comfortable with. That, he could do.

His father’s cancer, a year later, came as a complete surprise. The possibility of another disease had never occurred to Saburo; there was simply no room for it. It began when his father telephoned him early one morning, his voice fainter than usual yet admirably steady, to say he had terrible stomach cramps and could Saburo escort him to the emergency room? Never before had his father called him at home. “No need to bother you,” he always said. “It can wait till Sunday.”

Doctors sedated his father for the rest of the day; they took X rays and informed Saburo that a large tumor was obstructing his colon. An emergency colostomy was performed. “Terrible!” said one doctor around Saburo’s age, shaking his bristly head and peeling off his rubber gloves. “The cancer’s spread all over the place. The white cell count is incredible! Why wasn’t it caught before?”

“My father doesn’t like doctors,” Saburo said.

The young doctor made a knowing grimace. “That generation, well,” he said.

Waiting for his father to regain consciousness after the operation, Saburo stood before the window in the little hospital room, alternately peering back over his shoulder at his father’s bed and gazing out at the city below. The landscape had changed since he had been here last. In his youth, dusk would have melted those distant hills to smooth lines like folded wings. Tonight, against a fading sky of pink and gray, the sharp black silhouette of the hills bristled with crooked telephone poles. The hills themselves were spattered with mismatched lights.
The rate of progress,
he recalled someone, somewhere, saying.

“What happened?” his father murmured within the first few minutes of coming to. Saburo had to bend over to hear him. He was attached to an oxygen tube, an IV, and an ancient machine with rather grimy indicator knobs. The machine filled the room with a soft, continuous roar.

“Everything’s taken care of, Father,” Saburo said. He explained about the colostomy.

“I don’t have to use this bag for the rest of my life, do I?”

The truth was his father had only a few months left to live. That news could wait till tomorrow. “I’m afraid you will, Father,” Saburo said.

“Oh…” A sigh like a deflating balloon, then silence.

The following day Saburo had no chance to break the news; specialists were performing tests most of the day. For lunch, Saburo ate a plate of curry in the hospital cafeteria. Through the glass wall, he watched nurses striding by in the hall, clipboards pressed against their chests. The sight of them—the very smell of this place—stirred up memories of his mother’s death; he was conscious now, as he had been then, of his utter uselessness. From now on, it was the nurses and doctors who would do everything, to whom his father would turn for help.
Which would help your uncle more?
he remembered his father saying.