The Ten Loves of Nishino

by Hiromi Kawakami

  “Nishino,” I called out for the first time.

  Nishino kept humming. It sounded like the folk song, “Song of the Seashore.” Next to him, Minami chanted, “If I wandered along the seashore tomorrow––”

  From the veranda where I sat, I joined in softly.

  If I wandered along the seashore tomorrow, I would remember things from long ago.

  “Nishino, this song is a little too appropriate for you,” I called out, this time trying to sound as cheerful as possible. Nishino sat up slowly. He-heh-heh, he chuckled.

  “Natsumi, I’m here,” Nishino spoke in a clear voice as he beckoned me.

  “Yes, here you are,” I said, ignoring his gesture and standing up in the spot where I was.

  “Because I promised. I promised you, Natsumi, didn’t I?”

  Nishino sounded just like himself. His voice had that distinctive, slightly indulgent tone.

  Minami wore an expression of astonishment as she sat in the deck chair, hugging her knees.

  “Did you ever have a daughter?” I asked from afar.

  “I never married.”

  There were plenty of dragonflies and butterflies darting about now. Some of them even alighted on Minami’s shoulders or arms. A light breeze stirred the wind chimes.

  “Minami, dear, you’re so pretty now,” Nishino’s eyes squinted with affection. “I wasn’t able to fulfill my promise to take you out on a date.”

  “I never made that promise!” Minami pouted her lips.

  “I wouldn’t have taken you out for a par-fay-ee, it would have been a more grown-up date.” As always, he drew out the word par-fay-ee.

  “Mr. Nishino, I never liked parfait,” Minami said mischievously.

  “I knew that.” Nishino reached out a hand and gently patted Minami’s bare arm. The dragonflies and butterflies that had alighted on her all dispersed at once.

  “Nishino.” I called out his name softly, and he sat up straight again, holding his hand out toward me.

  “Come, Natsumi.” He looked at me with puppy-dog eyes.

  “No, I’m fine here. I don’t need to come over to where you are,” I replied quietly.

  “Come here, Natsumi. I’m lonely.”

  “I’m lonely too.”

  “Minami, dear, you don’t look like your mother. You’re very pretty, Minami, dear, but your mother, Natsumi, is a beauty,” Nishino said, his tone shifting.

  That was just like Nishino. Minami laughed to herself. “I have my father’s eyes, my mother’s nose, and my grandma’s mouth,” Minami recited in a murmur.

  “Mom, stop wasting time in there and come here—no doubt Mr. Nishino will be gone soon enough.”

  The lush hydrangea leaves seemed to rustle in concert with Minami’s voice. Barefoot, I stepped into the garden. Pebbles stuck to the soles of my feet. The seeds on the wild grasses grazed my calves.

  “Is your husband well?” Nishino asked, sitting with his heels tucked neatly under him.

  “Every day is peaceful and quiet.”

  “What more can one ask for?” As Nishino spoke these words, Minami sneezed. He comes all the way here after he died and the two of you are making small talk? she said as she continued to sneeze three times in a row.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said as I approached Nishino, and rubbed my cheek against his.

  “A promise is a promise!”

  “I didn’t know you were so conscientious.”

  “Not when it comes to my body, but always when it comes to my heart.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit, have you? I said, pecking him on the cheek. Nishino looked as if he might cry, but he didn’t.

  “I’d like to be buried in this garden,” Nishino said sincerely.

  “No way,” Minami murmured with a smile.

  “She’s right—no way,” I agreed.

  That’s enough, Nishino, I said inside my head. I’m just happy you’re here.

  “Well, then, at least make me a grave.” Nishino’s tone sounded just like when he used to order a parfait, all those years ago.

  “A grave?” Minami retorted with surprise.

  “Like one for a goldfish. That would be nice.”

  I looked at Nishino’s face. His expression was the one he’d often worn when he was alive, like that of a child being scolded by his mother.

  “Alright,” I replied, and Nishino took me gently in his arms.

  Nishino stayed in the garden until just before the sun set.

  I went back to the kitchen and fried up dinner. Minami remained by Nishino’s side the whole time. As I was disposing of the cooking oil, I heard Minami cry out.

  He must have left, I thought.

  A moment later Minami appeared in the kitchen, her gaze fixed on the floor as she murmured, “He’s gone.”

  Yes, he’s gone, I said to myself. I searched for a set of pincers at the back of a drawer. I pulled out a big wooden box filled with smaller boxes of somen noodles, selected one of the smaller boxes, and used the pincers to remove the nails at the four corners. I took apart the box and set the littlest rectangular plank on the counter. I went to get the calligraphy set that Minami had used in middle school, and on top of the counter I ground the ink. Then with a thick brush I wrote out, “Here lies Nishino.”

  I went out into the garden and beside the graves of our goldfish and cat, and thrust the plank into the ground.

  Back then, I really did love you, Nishino, I said like a prayer, my palms held together as I crouched before the grave. Minami squatted next to me.

  We remained still, our eyes closed and hands in prayer. Then we both looked at each other.

  Sometime, let’s go out for a par-fay-ee, I said to Minami as I stood up slowly. Minami nodded, without a word.

  The dragonflies and the butterflies had also left the garden. Far in the distance, I could hear the tinkling of a bell.

  IN THE GRASS

  I buried fourteen candles.

  With a small shovel that was starting to rust, I dug up the moist earth.

  At the back of the vacant lot, about thirty steps from the way in, past the overgrown weeds—in summer they got as tall as me—there were several trees. A magnolia. A camphor too. Those are the only two kinds of trees that I know. The branches of the rest of the trees in the cluster—whatever kind they were—stretched toward the sky, and in autumn they dropped little acorns.

  The weeds thinned out a bit under the trees. I used the shovel to dig up the earth in this spot, where the weeds were sparse. By the roots of the camphor tree, I laid the fourteen short, thin candles in a hole about ten centimeters deep. I covered the candles with the earth I had dug up. Once the candles were no longer visible, I carefully leveled off the ground, then I stamped on it with the bottom of my shoe.

  I continued to trample upon the ground until no one could tell that the candles were buried there or even that a hole had been dug. I stepped back a little and looked at the trodden earth. The slightly uneven surface of the ground.

  “Hmph,” I muttered, grabbing my schoolbag that I had left in the weeds. I put the shovel in a plastic bag and shoved it into my schoolbag. I pushed my way roughly through the weeds and left the vacant lot. I could hear the sound of autumn insects here and there. I walked straight home.

  I turned fourteen yesterday. The candles had been on my birthday cake. Last night, I had blown them out with one breath. At the same moment I blew them out, my father had clapped his hands. Then my father and I cut up the cake and ate it in silence. We stuffed our faces with buttercream rose petals.

  When I did speak—to say “Tastes good”—my father raised the corners of his mouth and nodded. But the truth was, it wasn’t any good at all.

  This was the fifth time just the two of us were celebrating my birthday. My mother left home the week before I turned ten. The fo
llowing week, I celebrated my birthday, just my father and me for the first time. The cake my father bought was sort of crude, compared to the one my mother had always got for me. The birthday cake my mother bought was a softer sponge cake, heaped with fresh whipped cream and sprinkled with chocolate. The number of candles on it was not my age, but for some reason, always precisely three. She made a special trip on the train to a pastry shop on a big shopping street, to pick up the cake, which she’d ordered in advance.

  My father didn’t try to explain why my mother had left. He hadn’t spoken a word about my mother since. But one day my aunt Namiko, my father’s sister, let something slip, so I knew that apparently my mother had run off with some other man.

  Of course I never said anything to my father about the fact that I knew my mother had run off with someone else. As far as I was concerned—and my father as well—she did not exist. From that day forward. And forever after.

  I had known about the vacant lot for a long time. During summer vacation when I was in first and second grade, the boys would get up early in the morning and go there to catch the stag beetles that gathered on the trees at the back of the lot. I’d be right there with them, catching those little creatures with what looked like antlers on their heads. In those days, there were quite a number of vacant lots around my house—the lot where I buried the candles had been just one of many.

  Over the past several years, the vacant lots dwindled as new homes were steadily built. The number of stag beetles and rhinoceros beetles also dropped considerably. Now that lot is about the only space left that’s as wide open as this.

  Soon after I started middle school, it became my habit to stop at the vacant lot on my way home. I rarely saw anyone else there. I guess not even the elementary school kids played here anymore. It was just a deserted tract of land with the occasional leaping grasshopper.

  The first thing I buried in the vacant lot was my goldfish, Tara.

  I had kept Tara in a bowl by the front door. The bowl had previously been home to two goldfish I had gotten at a Shinto festival.

  One was a pop-eyed goldfish, the other was a red goldfish, and I had scooped them both up from a night-stall vendor. I carried the plastic bag that held both fish, and on the way home we stopped at a tropical fish shop where my mother bought me a round fishbowl. The edge had a wavy shape, and the glass was a very pale blue.

  The goldfish from the festival were named A-suke and B-maru, and I fed them every day. A-suke was the pop-eyed one, and B-maru was the red one. My mother and I came up with their names.

  However, A-suke and B-maru had short lives. It may be that I overfed them. Or perhaps in the night-stall vendor’s water tank they were already in poor health. Three days after bringing them home, A-suke was floating belly-up in the bowl, followed the very next day by B-maru.

  Those third and fourth nights, I cried and wailed. On the morning of the fifth day, my eyes were so swollen my father took one look at me and said, “Shiori, your face—it looks like the goldfish put a curse on you.”

  “You’re so stupid, Dad!” I yelled, and my mother gave me a stern warning.

  “What kind of behavior is this, calling a parent stupid?” she had said.

  When I came home from school that day, there was a goldfish—bigger than both A-suke and B-maru had been—swimming around in the bowl by the front door.

  I flew into the kitchen to ask my mother about it. “What’s up with the fish by the front door?”

  “I bought it at the tropical fish store,” she answered logically.

  Had I asked my father, no doubt his reply would have been something like, “A-suke and B-maru loved you so much, Shiori, that they united in heaven and came back.”

  “Will this one last very long?” I wondered.

  My mother thought for a moment. “I don’t know, but I asked the man at the store to select a fish as strong and healthy as possible, so I think it may live a long life—but there’s no way to be sure.”

  “I hope it lives a long life,” I said, and my mother nodded.

  Because the fish was red and about the size of a tarako cod roe, my mother named it Tara.

  Tara died the year after my mother left. It had been just over two years since she brought it home. I didn’t like the idea of burying Tara in the garden, so I brought it to the vacant lot, and buried it there. With the same shovel I would use for the candles, I buried Tara near the entrance to the lot.

  It was toward the end of autumn, so the weeds had grown sparse. As I shoveled, alone, I murmured over and over, “I pray for the soul of Tara.” I hated saying the name Tara. It reminded me of my mother. But it wasn’t Tara’s fault that it had that name.

  I didn’t know whether or not just over two years was a long life for a goldfish.

  Since Tara, I’ve buried numerous things in the vacant lot.

  Eleven candles. A toy ring. The boxwood comb from my mother’s dresser. Twelve candles. Painkiller tablets. Thirteen candles. A frog figurine. A chipped mug.

  Some things were connected to my mother, some weren’t. I remember where I buried each and every one of them.

  The week after I buried the fourteen candles, I got a letter.

  When I opened the shoe cupboard at the end of the school day, there was a white rectangular envelope inside. It was not an envelope that I or the other girls in my class usually used—not one of those made of paper that was crisp to the touch, in shades of tea, grass, and peach—this was a business envelope, the kind an adult would use.

  On the front of it, “Ms. Shiori Yamagata” was written vertically in black felt-tip pen.

  I turned it over and saw the name “Toru Tanabe.”

  I didn’t recognize this name or the handwriting. I mean, the only handwriting I was familiar with was that of the teachers and the characters they’d write on the blackboard, and the scrawls of Toko and Chie in the notebooks that we lent to and borrowed from each other. The characters that spelled out “Ms. Shiori Yamagata” were large and vigorous.

  I put the letter in my bag and went to the vacant lot.

  Even though summer was long gone, the lot was still overgrown with weeds. I sat down on the rock that had always been beside the magnolia tree and opened the letter.

  Ms. Shiori Yamagata

  Please forgive me for writing this letter out of the blue.

  My name is Toru Tanabe, I’m a eighth-grade student in Homeroom C.

  You and I have never been in the same class together, but I noticed you just after the matriculation ceremony.

  Would you like to see a movie together sometime soon?

  I’m in the Science Club.

  My hobby is wireless radios.

  I thought you might be surprised if I suddenly asked you out, so I wrote you a letter first.

  If it’s alright, I’ll ask you out the next time I see you.

  Sincerely,

  Toru Tanabe

  The opening “Ms. Shiori Yamagata” and the closing “Toru Tanabe” were written in blue ink; the rest of the lines were in black. I read the letter over three times. I wondered whether he had added the names in blue after writing it.

  I wasn’t the type of girl who was enormously popular with the boys. Not like Chie, for instance, who had a new boyfriend every few weeks, or like Toko, who had Kitabayashi and was always getting a lift home from school with him, riding double on his bicycle. I had gone out with boys before—to an amusement park or to the movies—but none of these dates had ever amounted to any kind of serious relationship. We would go out once or twice, and that would be the end of it.

  I knew I could be a bit brusque. The truth was, I didn’t really get what was so fun about hanging out with boys. Chie, with her constant rotation—that kind of thing I could understand—but Toko, who had decided on the one guy, Kitabayashi, and spent all her time with him—that was a mystery to me.r />
  “You’ll understand, Shiori, once you find a guy you’re crazy about,” Toko had said.

  “Do you really think so?” I’d replied, but somehow I had the feeling that I would never be like her.

  I could imagine Toko’s life story—she would fall perfectly in love with a guy, marry him, have children, then they would have her grandchildren, and eventually she would die peacefully, surrounded by those children and grandchildren. My life story would probably play out quite a bit differently. The man I loved and children too might very well appear at some point, but their arrival would perhaps be strange and unexpected, and then again, they might never materialize at all.

  “You’re only in eighth grade, Shiori—how can you go on about these things?” Toko had laughed.

  “You know, we’re not as simple as you think, Shiori,” Chie had said, slightly miffed.

  I neatly refolded the letter from Toru Tanabe and put it back in the white rectangular envelope. I liked Toru Tanabe’s letter, quite a lot. If he did invite me out, I knew that I would nod to him in acceptance. Although I couldn’t be bothered to think about what would come after that.

  We’d probably hang out once or twice—see a movie, have tea together, go to an arcade. We might take a leisurely walk along the river or on some other pleasant street. But that would be the end of it.

  As for Toru Tanabe, and other boys I hadn’t yet met, they still weren’t any more distinct to me than all of the grasses growing here in the vacant lot. I let out a sigh, and stood up to leave.

  I saw Nishino in the vacant lot the day after I went to the movies with Toru Tanabe, which was a Monday.

  Nishino and I had been in the same class since our first year in middle school. He didn’t really stand out. He was about average height, his grades were about average too. For sports, I think he played tennis, or maybe baseball. I don’t remember exactly.