The Laws of Evening: Stories (8 page)

“One of them told me the results,” his father reported that evening. “Quiet fellow, very nice.” Sipping miso soup from a styrofoam cup, his father recounted the details of the cancer that had already metastasized to his stomach, lymph nodes, and lungs. “The doctor recommends,” his father said, “a small place in Fuji-no with round-the-clock medical staff…” He was tiring now, taking short, shallow breaths. “…and dietitians. That’ll work out best for everybody. It won’t be for long.”

If only he could have broken the news to his father. If only he could have caught the spontaneous reaction, however minute! He saw ahead to how his father would die, as courteous and restrained in his final hours as he had been in his life. Saburo had expected more: a brushfire that would drive some vague, crouching thing out of hiding. He had dreaded an onset of naked emotion, had pushed it off to the future when he would be better prepared, but never, he realized now, had he considered the possibility of it not happening.

That night, Saburo dreamed he came across his mother in the alley, playing jump rope in her apron with some neighborhood girls. Strands had come loose from her bun, and she was flushed, laughing. She noticed him and said brightly, “Ara, ara! Is it time already?”

“Mama! There you are!” Saburo cried out. Such relief surged through him that it lifted him out of sleep. As he lay awake in the dark, it took him several moments to comprehend that his mother had been gone for years.

Saburo did what he could. He ate well, three meals a day. He cut back drastically on his work hours. He curtailed his social life, although on occasion he lightened his routine by inviting a girl to accompany him to the movie theater. He deliberately chose comedy:
Teppan-gumi
or foreign films featuring Charlie Chaplin.

Nonetheless, the situation took its toll. The old track-and-field nightmare returned. Unable to fall back asleep, Saburo tossed and turned, seeing before him his father’s glass eye crusted over with yellow mucus, as it had once looked when a nurse forgot to wash it out with eyedrops. Or he saw him wearily close his eyes and whisper, “Thank you,” after a nurse changed his colostomy bag.

By now his father was installed in the recommended Fuji-no hospital for terminally ill patients. He had little strength—he had never quite recovered from the operation—and he fought to sit up, even to shift position on the bed. Still, he courteously attempted conversation. “How are you holding up, Saburo?” he asked each evening, as if his son were the ailing one. To save his father’s energy, Saburo did most of the talking. Then, running out of topics, he took to reading to his father from
History of the Cosmos,
a book he had found on his father’s desk at home. There was something soothing about reading aloud; all meaning dropped away, and he was borne along on a cadence reminiscent of boyhood, when his father’s voice had washed over him at the dinner table.

One evening the reading lulled his father to sleep. Saburo gazed at the drawn, wasted face. The hospital was silent—it might have been midnight instead of seven o’clock. If Saburo stared long enough in the eerie fluorescence of overhead lights, the pallid face with its sunken eye sockets became that of a corpse.

Above the blanket, his father’s hand twitched in sleep. It was the surreal quality of this moment—a tenuous balance of his father’s unconsciousness, the temporary absence of night nurses, the lingering effects of reading about an impersonal cosmos—that made Saburo reach out with one finger, and touch his father’s hand. Its folds were cold and surprisingly loose, like sea cucumbers he had once poked as a boy in the open-air market. The forearm was warmer, but so much smaller, so much more frail between Saburo’s fingertips, than eyesight had prepared him for. Saburo went on to trace the bony blade of a gowned shoulder. This felt like a violation and it made him nervous: was his father really asleep? Maybe he was conscious behind those closed lids. Maybe the touching bothered him but he was too polite, or too weak, to react. But Saburo couldn’t stop. He couldn’t help himself.

The physical contact dissolved some hard center of logic within him. And Saburo wondered, with sudden urgency, whether his father was really as self-sufficient as he had always assumed him to be. Might his father have hoped for a different reaction the day he talked of suicide? Might he have longed for closeness but not known how to go about it? Unlikely, but still…dangerous thoughts.

Saburo had made the best decisions he could, as his father had, surely, with all his careful ways. But warped by circumstance and changing worlds, compounded by time and habit, the results had come up short. It was inevitable. The longer one’s life, the more room it left for errors of calculation.

If things had been different he might have told his father, as other sons surely did, “I admire you more than anyone I’ve ever known. For your intellect, for your great dignity.” If such words were possible, he would have felt only the clean, sharp arrows of pain; there would have been a rightness to it all, a bittersweet perfection of a setting sun. What Saburo felt now bordered on nausea, which had always terrified him. He had thrown up only two or three times as a child, but he still remembered that instant of panic when it all came rising up, unstoppable—too strong a flood for one narrow windpipe.

His father’s eyes opened. “Saburo?” he whispered.

“I’m here, Father,” Saburo said. He stilled his hand, keeping it over his father’s icy hand. It occurred to him that his father would not be able to feel this. Poor circulation in the extremities, the nurse had told him, causes numbness.

“Aaa, it’s you…,” his father said.

“Father,” Saburo began. He stopped. His Adam’s apple was constricting, shot through with the ache, long-forgotten yet familiar, of impending tears. He waited until it subsided.

“Father,” he said in a rush. “I’m not good at saying fancy things.” His throat closed up again, and he sat helpless.

His father’s good eye had turned toward his son’s voice, the pupil shrunken to pinpoint from glaucoma medication. Saburo felt a great mute pain open out in his chest. It reminded him of track days: anguish escalating unbearably in oxygen-deprived lungs, the blind rush down the homestretch on legs that were too slow.

O
NLY AFTER
the last tour bus had rumbled out of the parking area into Shimbonmachi Boulevard did the temple grounds revert to what they had been when Japan was a poor country. The nine temple buildings, which in daytime held themselves aloof and historical behind government-issued iron railings, seemed now in the empty hush of twilight to deflate, to sink back to earth among the darkening pines, taking second place to the emerging sounds of nightfall: outbursts of crows in the gnarled branches; gurglings of pigeons waddling over deserted flagstone paths, searching the cracks for something overlooked. In this dusk Sono strolled alone, occasionally passing a robed monk raking gravel beside the path.

She had lived in this neighborhood for almost eighty years. When she was small—no, even as recently as when her daughters were alive—children had played here freely, their nimble brown legs chasing each other up and down the long wooden verandas of the temple buildings or climbing the pine trees in search of crows’ eggs. Decades ago, one of the Uemura boys had fallen out of a tree, pecked in the face by a frenzied mother crow appearing out of nowhere.

Her twin girls, Haruko and Natsuko, had played near the
jizo
—stone statues of child Buddhas. Ten of them stood smiling in a small dirt clearing, their faces half rained away; most dated back to the Edo Period in the seventeenth century. An amateur historical society had collected these relics in the 1930s from remote farming villages in the outlying Hiezan hills, only to abandon them here in the temple grounds in the crisis of the Second World War. To this day the
jizo
stood—or so Sono assumed—hidden from sight behind a thatched groundskeeping shed, awaiting administrative action.

Once she had caught Haruko and Natsuko playing there, no taller than the statues: offering them water and flowers, just as Sono did each day before the family altar at home; laying out tiny mud balls skewered on pine needles. Even their dolls sat propped up against the
jizo,
smiling above bright red bibs torn from rice paper: imitations of the religious cotton bibs that the statues wore.

“S’a s’a, come away from there!” Sono had said sharply. “Right now! Don’t get too close!” Leading away the reluctant children, one with each hand, she tried to explain. “In the old days,” she said, “people from the hills would make a
jizo-san
for babies whose ashes couldn’t be buried in a family plot like everybody else. It’s all too sad to explain, but I’m telling you: there’s bad karma in those statues, ne? It’s best to just keep away completely. Do you understand? Bad spirits are hanging around there.” And, as the little girls’ eyes flew up to hers in protest, “Ara! You don’t believe me? I’m telling you the truth. Those spirits are sad and lonely and full of ill will, because nobody chanted sutras for them, and now they can’t leave the earth to go on to the next world. You keep playing there, and their bad luck’s going to follow
you
…” Sono bent down to whisper the ominous “you” into Haruko’s ear—for she was the leader of the two—and the child jerked back slightly in alarm. “Is that what you want?” She had pictured them coming home with unsavory spirits trailing behind them, like mangy stray dogs.

Sono was not a superstitious woman by nature; deep down, she knew they were just old wives’ tales. But during wartime, it seemed important to take precautions. So much was at stake, balanced on a scale that could tip at the slightest touch: the twin girls, born frail to begin with and now verging on malnutrition since the food rationing; Sono’s husband, still fighting with the ground troops in Burma; those prized Chinese chrysanthemums he had left behind in her care always wilting at the slightest shift in temperature; her entire teetering world of present and future.

Nonetheless, when her girls contracted food poisoning from sharing a spoiled red bean bun; when the food poisoning eventually subsided, only to trigger some mysterious new fever that surpassed 43 degrees despite the ice water baths; when the delirious children died in her arms within a week of each other, four months after their sixth birthday, Sono understood that
jizo
were not to blame. There were many new diseases in Japan now. Wounded soldiers were coming home after being exposed to bacteria from strange, unsanitary lands: Burma, mainland China, the Philippine Islands. In addition this was June, rainy season—when such bacteria would be most rampant, when the air lay on your skin like damp laundry all month long and mildew bloomed overnight, black and green and ashy pink: between ceramic tiles, on the edges of dish towels wrung out to dry, inside day-old clumps of dearly gotten rice.

By the time they had transferred her husband’s name from the list of Missing in Action to Killed in Action, the
jizo
were no longer an issue.

Occasionally when Sono walked with her cane through the temple yard in the failing light, past the temples and that little shed behind which the
jizo
no doubt still stood in their faded red bibs, she thought of Haruko and Natsuko. After this many years, it was like peering down through a cloudy pond at something whose outline had melted away. Once in a long while, though, it would stir. A slow bubble would float up to the surface and burst, releasing an image so achingly vivid that, even now, her heartbeat quickened with astonished recognition….

Two small, identical girls with square bobs, glancing up in guilty surprise as they squatted before their mud balls: a streak of dirt along Natsuko’s chin, their round cheeks stained pink from the autumn wind.

Sono was not, in her own view, a religious woman. However, each morning and evening she placed rice and water before the family altar, burning half a stick of incense each time and chanting sutras in a practiced, efficient voice. The flowers at the altar she changed once a week. Whatever her own doubts might be of the afterlife, it was not her place to impose them upon her loved ones and deprive them of sutras that might make all the difference to them, wherever they were. The altar tablets—miniature bronze headstones with four tiny clawed feet, consecrated each September by a monk—had taken on increasing significance over the years, as the essence of her husband and children faded from the surrounding alleys and even from these very rooms.

After the sutras, Sono often addressed the tablets as if they were people—but only those of her husband and daughters, lined up in front near the rice and water, not those of her in-laws and her husband’s other relatives, crammed together to the back. “After breakfast today,” she might say, “I’m taking the bus over to the Takashimaya department store. You watch over me, ne? Stop me if I start any impulse spending.”

“You should be spending more time around people,” a widowed neighbor told her at the public bathhouse, scrubbing her back for her while she sat on a plastic stool. “What about the senior citizens’ center, O-Sono-san? It’s right off Shimbonmachi, near the open-air market. It’s free.”

“Saa, I don’t know,” Sono said. On the other side of the dividing wall rose a sudden burst of men’s laughter. She glanced up as always, knowing there was nothing to see but steam pouring over the tiled wall from the other side, as echoes of the men’s laughter hung bobbing from the high domed ceiling.

“But, O-Sono-san! I highly recommend it.
We’ve
all been going to the moss gardens at Ten-jin-san, playing croquet, learning sumi-e painting…this spring we even went up to the Hiezan hills to see the gorgeous cherry blossoms. We soaked in the mineral baths there! The government
pays
for it. It’s free. You should make an effort, O-Sono-san, especially now that Akimi’s gone and you’re all by yourself.”

Akimi was Sono’s niece who, for over forty years, had been living in Sono’s house. She had moved in a few years after the death of Sono’s husband. Akimi was widowed also, a gentle woman with three small boys; she and Sono had been companions all these years, raising the boys together and living frugally off their husbands’ pensions. But recently Akimi’s elder son had taken a wife, and his mother had gone to live with them, as was fitting, somewhere in Aomori Prefecture.

“The truth is,” Sono said, yawning from the heat of the steam, “I feel like it’s too late in life for me to be taking an interest in all these kinds of things.”

“Ara, O-Sono-san…,” her friend said disapprovingly. Sono felt the pressure on her back change from solicitous stroking to a brisk scrub, as if to scour her passivity away. “What an unhealthy attitude, with all due respect. Maa, the doctors on that NHK health show are always saying! They’re saying: talk to young people, join the social groups. Get a little pet! Keep yourself involved, that’s what they’re saying. Right up till the last minute, ne? When we get old we should never, never be allowing ourselves the chance to brood.”

Maybe so, Sono thought, and as she was brooding about it July rolled along, and with it the fiftieth anniversary of her husband’s death. At two o’clock on Tuesday the twenty-first, she attended an official thirty-minute sutra chant at a temple on the other side of town. The twins’ fiftieth had been taken care of a month earlier. Now no more anniversaries were required. Sono rode home on the bus that afternoon feeling curiously devoid of emotion, the gong’s aftermath still wavering in her ears. She had done them all: first, third, seventh, thirteenth, thirty-third, fiftieth; each anniversary breaking yet another link binding the spirits to this earth, until they rose up and away like helium balloons. She had done her duty. Now they were far away in a safe place, out of danger beyond any possible doubt.

Sono was taking a shortcut home through an empty section of the temple grounds when exhaustion suddenly struck. She dropped her parasol and gripped her cane with both hands—a sturdy bamboo, fortunately, with a broad rubberized base. She felt gravity dragging at her knees, threatening to bring her crumpling down onto the flagstones. The curved handle of the cane shook in her hands. Sono focused hard on a line of small black ants wending their way across the flagstones, carrying in their jaws what appeared to be grains of sand, and eventually the danger passed.

She was shaken, and needed to sit down. But there were no benches. Tourists were encouraged to linger only within the old-fashioned teahouse outside the main gate, which sold cold wheat tea and miso dumplings at outlandish prices. Too far away. The groundskeeping shed was just a few meters off the path—hadn’t there once been a bench near the
jizo,
under a tree? Sono picked up her parasol and shuffled through the gravel to the thatched shed, going around it, then following the short dirt trail, just as she had done decades ago but much more slowly now, forging past long summer grasses that leaned over and caught at her stockings with their jagged edges.

She stayed on the bench longer than was necessary, absently pressing her handkerchief to the perspiration on her face and neck. The sun still shone strong. From the surrounding pines, cicadas were shrilling
meeeee;
the sound shimmered endlessly in the still summer air. It was about four-thirty, and women’s thoughts all over the neighborhood were turning to evening: to cooking dinner and to greeting husbands, to heating water for the predinner baths. The ginkgo leaves directly above her hung motionless, and beneath them Sono sat suspended.

What now? Croquet at the senior citizens’ center? At the thought, a flash of protest rose within her. This final period of her life should be more than a pitiful appendage to middle age. Surely it had a significance of its own. If she carried into evening the laws of afternoon—more activities, more people, more duties, beyond all bounds of reason—something crucial would pass her by. Sono did not articulate these ideas but she sensed them, and she sat musing till the ground before her became crisscrossed with the
jizo
’s long shadows.

After that, Sono visited the
jizo
often. She shortened her daily walks and sat under the ginkgo tree instead; her feet were growing heavier lately, a burden to lift off the ground. Now in late summer these deserted grounds were especially pleasant, with the sun setting and cool fingers of breeze beginning to steal across her skin. By the time she dropped onto her bench, the sun would be below the horizon, although some of its warmth still lingered in the stone seat. The sky was then milky green, or sometimes grayish blue, like an oriole egg. Whatever its color, it was illuminated by some mighty light shining behind it, and against this unearthly sky the black branches of the temple yard trees were etched with startling clarity. One tree on a distant hill had no leaves—had it been in a fire? Branches grew straight out from its trunk, naked and curved like the arms of a Balinese dancer: one tip pointing up, the other down, as if poised in exquisite anticipation.

Here she was never lonely.

Sono did occasionally visit the senior citizens’ center with her friend from the bathhouse, and she laughed and enjoyed herself. But entering her silent house afterwards was such an adjustment, and each time she sensed anew that these outings—cheerful distractions—did not really match the direction in which her life was headed.

Sono’s days now revolved around her evenings in the temple grounds. She ate dinners early and stopped watching the news, in order to have more time to sit on the bench. Here her mind floated freely, from one idea to the next: the wisdom hidden in a certain childhood ditty, or the image of the sky as one giant oriole egg. Seldom in her adult life had Sono had this luxury of completely uninterrupted thought, and as the summer passed, the ease with which she navigated through the world of the abstract increased, even as the strength in her legs diminished. It was like learning to swim: gliding through this new element with growing skill and strength, venturing out into new depths, hastening back to the safety of shore and then, emboldened, heading out again.