by Yu Miri
A bird crows, hidden somewhere in the trees; three sparrows perch on the old-fashioned lamp in the middle of the space, chirrup, chirrup, chi chi, chirrup…
The sound of the chainsaw pruning tree limbs around the statue of Saigō Takamori continues.
I can hear a lawn mower over near the baseball field, too.
The wind whips around, rustling through the leaves of the trees, and now I can see the tent city full of homeless people. It’s surrounded by a green fence with a tarpaulin over the grating. There’s a design printed on the tarp—of a blue sky with seagulls and big columns of clouds floating, a hill with two trees, a two-story house with a red roof and smoke coming out of the chimney and two white-spotted dogs running toward it, but there are no people in the design.
The three sparrows that were perched on the lamppost before have now gone. I am haunted by this day, today, and regardless of what I am now I would have liked to exchange a glance with someone, anyone, even a sparrow.
A burlap sack sits under the lamppost, next to a pile of dead leaves. It would only take a broom and a shovel to gather them and put them in the bag, but there is no broom, no shovel, and nobody, nobody, nobody…
No, someone is there. A man with a receding hairline, face up on one of the three sarcophagus-like stone benches surrounding the area. Purple sweatshirt, beige trousers, newspapers spread underneath him, covered with a green jumper. His hands are crossed over his solar plexus and his feet, clad in black shoes, are so perfectly close that they might as well be tied together. His eyes, lips, and Adam’s apple are motionless. I can’t hear him breathing in or out, so perhaps he is no longer alive. If he is indeed dead, it hasn’t been long—
By his feet is a large, transparent bin bag full of aluminum cans. Those three hundred cans are worth 600 yen. With 600 yen, you could go to a public bath, or to a manga café or internet café and have a shower, or get a hot bowl of beef on rice at Yoshinoya, or have a real coffee in a real café.
But you can’t sell the cans in this state. They have to be crushed one by one with a hammer. In the winter, it hurt because my hands were numbed by the cold, even with gloves on, and in the summer, the smell of the juice or sports drinks lingering in the empty cans clung to every part of my body, nauseating me.
The man looked so neatly turned out that people with homes would not have guessed it, but the fact that he was sleeping like the dead on a stone bench with a bag of cans at his feet told me that he was almost certainly homeless.
Shige always looked impeccable.
One time, I’m not sure when, exactly—it was cold so it must’ve been winter—I was heading back to my shelter with my bike after a day spent collecting cans and magazines, when Shige called me over to his hut for a drink, although he normally didn’t touch the stuff.
I pushed open the veneered door with a cat flap at the bottom, set my shoes to one side and went in. It was the first time I’d been inside someone else’s hut. I think it was the first time Shige had received a visitor, too, because he apologized for how small his place was and stroked Emile with an unjustified embarrassment. Emile purred loudly, his tail stuck in the air.
I noticed a clock and mirror hanging on the wall, as well as a calendar with certain days circled in red or blue, and I thought then that Shige must’ve worked in a council office or a school in his previous life; he was such a methodical person.
“It’s so cold, I thought we might drink the sake hot instead,” he said, putting a pot on his gas stove and filling it with water from a large plastic bottle, before adding the two single-serving containers of sake.
His shelves were full of books he’d picked up from the streets, but with only the dim flashlight hanging from the ceiling, I could not read the titles on the spines. And even if I had been able to read them, I don’t expect I would’ve known what they were.
“Sorry, I don’t have much in the way of snacks,” Shige said, setting out a plate of peanuts and dried cuttlefish. Then he turned to Emile, who was rubbing the edge of the table with his head and purring. “They say that if you feed a cat cuttlefish, it will paralyze it, and that’s no superstition. Cuttlefish and shellfish contain an enzyme that destroys vitamin B1, and if a cat eats a lot of either, a B1 deficiency will make it start staggering around. Heat destroys the enzyme, but dried cuttlefish will absorb up to ten times its weight in water in the stomach, which makes it difficult to digest anyway. It can cause vomiting and sudden gastric dilation, too, making their stomachs hurt. I have something much better for you, Emile,” he concluded, getting a packet of kibble and a can of tuna down from a bag of supplies hanging from the ceiling. Before Shige had even finished mixing the two in a saucer with a spoon, Emile began eating greedily.
“Watching him eat like that always makes me hungry. Around here, it’s all about Emile. When I get some money, first I buy food for him, and whatever’s left is for my own needs. This place is too small for two people, but it’s just the right size for one person and one cat.”
While we’d both been watching Emile eat, the pot had come to the boil. Shige tried to take the two bottles out quickly, but they were too hot to handle with bare hands.
“They say hot sake’s best at either body temperature or warmed by the heat of the sun, but I’m afraid this is so hot it’ll burn our mouths…” he said, putting on gloves. He grabbed the two bottles and removed their lids. “Well, let’s have a drink anyway.”
I stuttered a few words of thanks, holding the glass in my hands with the sleeves of my jumper pulled down for protection. Looking at the photo of bonsai on the reverse side of the label, I took a sip.
“Oh, that’s hot!” Shige said.
“This’ll warm us up for sure,” I said.
I didn’t tell him that I didn’t drink.
When my glass was about half empty, to where the words ‘A Cup of Happiness’ are on the label, Emile jumped up on Shige’s lap. He had finished eating and cleaning himself, and now lay down.
Shige stroked him, and his silence suggested that there was something he wanted to say that he couldn’t quite find the words for. His face was scarlet, so I assumed he was not much of a drinker either.
“Today is my son’s thirty-second birthday. We had him when I was forty after trying for a long time, and he’s an only child…”
It felt like a long wait until he next spoke. Being in an enclosed space, face-to-face with someone who was my age yet had had such a different life was terrifying to me. I looked over at the part of his shelter that served as something like the kitchen, at the frying pan and ladle hanging there, then I looked out the window cut out of the cardboard, drinking my sake. It was now cooler than either body temperature or if it had been warmed by the sun.
“He was ten when I left. I guess he has his own family now. I might even be a grandfather…”
He spoke as if he were taking a step back, rather than forward.
“I ran away because I had made a mistake. One that meant I couldn’t hold my head up in public anymore. People must’ve talked behind my wife and son’s backs, and I imagine that they suffered a great deal.” He squinted and suddenly looked much older.
I finished my drink while he was talking. Now that I had nothing left to drink, I felt uncomfortable—as if I was naked in front of him, but I had no desire to confide in him, to tell him that I was also born in 1933, or that my son would be forty-five if he were still alive.
I only struggled not to let drunkenness lead me into sadness.
The memories of the past that I could not get rid of were all contained in a box. And time had sealed the lid. A box whose lid is sealed by time should not be opened. Were it opened I would be plunged at once into the past.
“I’m sure they’re both angry with me. And they’re not the only ones I’ve caused trouble for…” He spoke hesitantly, as if he were delirious with fever, and he did not sound like himself to me.<
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“I can’t go home again, even when I’m dead. I’ve destroyed everything that could be used to identify me so that my family won’t be notified. When I die, I imagine that I’ll end up in an unmarked grave,” he said and sighed deeply, before straightening up and returning to his normal way of speaking.
“They say a typhoon is going to hit tomorrow. Have you made plans for where to go, Kazu?”
“No, I intend to stay in my hut,” I said, straightening my back, too, and accidentally sounding too formal.
He asked me then if I would join him at the library instead. He explained that the Taitō Ward Main Library was on Kototoi-dōri toward the Sumida River, and how to get there via Showa-dōri. I could read newspapers and magazines, watch videos or listen to records in the audiovisual section, or read books about history and culture. “Even if you stayed there all day, from 9am to 8pm, nobody would say a word to you about it,” he said; but something about the intensity with which he grasped the empty glass of sake between his long fingers frightened me. I said that I was not good at reading and left Shige’s hut.
I think he was looking for someone. Someone who would listen. If I had asked, I’m sure he would’ve told me anything. If I had shown him that I was ready to listen—or if we’d had one or two more cups of warm sake—he would have told me what mistake he’d made, and something like friendship could have developed between us; but those who hear another’s secret are obliged to share one of their own. Secrets are not necessarily hidden things. Events that do not bear hiding become secrets when one chooses not to speak of them.
I spent my life thinking about people who were not there. People who were not with me, people who were no longer in this world. I never felt entitled to speak of the absent to those who were there, even to my own family. I could not alleviate the weight of my memories of those who were absent by speaking of them. I did not want to betray my own secrets.
A month after the night I drank sake with Shige, I was gone.
Was Shige sad about it?
The old woman with hair like a white bird’s nest stood in front of the tent village, smoking a HiLite and talking. She said that Shige had been found cold in his hut—
When did he die, where was he buried? Someone must’ve sold the books in his hut to a secondhand shop, but where was Emile? Had another homeless person taken him in? Or had he been captured and euthanized by animal control?
I thought that once I was dead I would be reunited with the dead. That I could see, close up, those who were far away, touch them and feel them at all times. I thought something would be resolved by death. I believed that at the final moment, the meaning of life and death would appear to me clearly, like a fog lifting—
But then I realized that I was back in the park. I was not going anywhere, I had not understood anything, I was still stunned by the same numberless doubts, only I was now outside of life looking in, as someone who has lost the capacity to exist, now ceaselessly thinking, ceaselessly feeling—
The man lying on top of the stone bench still hadn’t opened his eyes. A cat appeared from out of nowhere and scratched its claws on the tree near the man’s head, but the noise did not seem to reach him.
That day—time has passed. Time has ended. But that time is scattered here and there like spilled drawing pins. Unable to take my eyes away from that glance at sadness, all I can do is suffer—
Time does not pass.
Time never ends.
A lukewarm, damp breeze licked over me, the limbs of the trees gently bowing, shaking drops of rain to the ground. Though there was still some time until dusk, the flow of people had suddenly stopped. Even the sound of chainsaws and lawn mowers now sounded like a part of the silence. Day by day the sunlight was getting stronger and the shadows of the trees shorter; soon it would be monsoon season and the cicadas would start to call.
From around the corner appeared a woman, perhaps a student, wearing blue jeans and a white, short-sleeved blouse, who slowed in front of a poster for the Ueno Mori Art Museum, gave it a glance, then, with a glum look, walked off toward the station.
The poster showed a large drawing of a pink rose. The bloom, which fanned out layer after layer like a cabbage’s leaves, grew redder toward the middle, leading one to imagine that the center, hidden by those petals, was as red as a scraped knee. And on the yellowish, supple stems and the calyces of the buds that had not yet opened, the artist had drawn the points of little thorns.
In the gift shop in the lobby of the Mori Art Museum, ladies in their sixties and seventies walked around the rose-patterned handkerchiefs, coin purses, postcards, sticky notes and fans, perusing, picking things up, and purchasing them.
The exhibition displayed pictures of roses by Redouté, a French court painter active at the start of the nineteenth century; it showed 169 of his works in total.
Two women, looking at the paintings without paying much attention, walked slowly as they spoke about something completely unrelated to roses, guided by the signs in the museum.
“Life has taken a strange turn for me, these last few weeks. Takeo won’t let anyone else get involved. Takeo manages everything, you know. I haven’t been looking after him so I have no say, and it costs money to put someone in the hospital, he says.”
“Well, I think he’s right about some things, certainly. But being right isn’t all there is to life.”
“I thought about asking him but I know he wouldn’t listen…”
“I mean, you say it’s your husband’s family, but at the end of the day, that’s still not your own family.”
“That’s what he said, that it wasn’t a stranger’s business. So I said, am I a stranger then?”
“You are. I mean, you’ve got no blood ties.”
Rosa gallica purpuro-violacea magna, the bishop rose: deeply colored, tinged with black, the outer petals of this rose turn up once past its peak, while the inner petals, just beginning to bloom, are purplish red...
“Are you going to go to Nagano again?”
“Back to Yatsugatake? No, never again. I can’t. Takeo and I always went together, anyway.”
Rosa pumila, the rose of love: at the center of this five-petalled purplish-pink flower are its yellow stamen, shining like a torchlight...
“He calls me up just to insist that he doesn’t have dementia.”
“Well, if he did, he wouldn’t call then, would he.”
“But honestly, he’s like a shadow of himself. He orders me around like a subordinate. ‘Mieko, put the kettle on!’”
“Life’s a rich tapestry.”
“It’s awful, and for everyone around him too, it’s just—”
Rosa gallica versicolor, “rosa mundi,” the dappled rose of Provence: red and white striped petals like a tulip, the yellow pollen of the stamens coats the still unopened petals in the middle, lending them a pale yellow tinge...
Rosa gallica regalis, rosier grandeur royale: spreading unevenly, undulatingly, the pale pink petals are numerous, forming a luxurious tuft that hides the center of the flower...
“Takeo sent us a set of boil-in-bag pouches of curry and stew. Now, what do you think that was for?”
“It’s a bit early for Bon presents.”
“The wrapping said ‘in gratitude.’”
“In gratitude? For what? Maybe he’s trying to say that he wants to settle this thing once and for all. I mean, you two have been separated for nearly six months now, no?”
“It was S&B curry, the ones that are kind of restaurant-style.”
“What’s the line from that ad? ‘Holiday food’s fine but don’t forget the curry?’”
“That was House curry. Anyway, I thought, why not keep them, you never know when the next big earthquake might hit.”
“It goes really well with an onigiri.”
“Curry and an onigiri?”
“Oh, it’s delicious!”
Rosa alba regalis, great maiden’s blush: colored white with the merest hint of pink, its petals turn in toward the center, increasing in depth as if they are being sucked in...
Rosa alba flore pleno, the rose of the House of York…. the pure white rose’s petals emit a pearlescent luster. In the War of the Roses the House of York carried this rose, the explanatory panel says, but the two ladies just flapping their jaws pass by the paintings of roses, their eyes glazed and downcast.
“You know, you really should have a proper talk with Takeo sooner rather than later.”
“But I’ve got our son and his wife in the house, and the grandkids too.”
“Well, then, keep him away when the kids are there. Have him over in secret when nobody’s there, or have him meet you at a café or somewhere else.”
“It’s really not the kind of conversation you can have in a café.”
“How about the park, then? You talk as you walk around Ueno Park, and then you don’t have to worry about anyone else watching you.”
“We’re not teenagers, it would look ridiculous.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“No, you know, I have to do it at home, it’s the only way…”
Rosa gallica flore marmoreo, the marmoreal rose of Provence: its double petals with a color somewhere between orange and pink are speckled with white like a fawn...
Rosa inermis, the thornless whirlpool rose: its color is ambiguous and could be described as apricot or raspberry. The petals open carelessly, making it look much like the paper flowers stuck to classroom blackboards at graduation; five or six sheets of tissue paper put together, folded in peaks and valleys like an accordion, bound in the middle with a rubber band, then each sheet opened up...
There were no roses my hometown. The first rose I ever held was a white one, at Shinsekai.
While in Tokyo, I worked nonstop with no regard for my personal appearance, never drinking or gambling, never chatting to female salesclerks as much as I should have, thinking that any Tokyo woman would laugh at my accent.
