He watched her chew an onigiri rice ball wrapped in black nori seaweed. She self-consciously brushed back her hair from her face. When she took a sip of tea, she finally looked over to see who was sitting so near.
“Hiroshi!” Ayana laughed. “You startled me! Oh, I thought it was some chikan pervert.”
“Ayana! What a coincidence meeting you here. So close to the archives.”
“Why didn’t you call?”
“Thought I’d surprise you.”
“How did you know I would be here? Are you investigating me?”
“Just following up.” Hiroshi moved over to her bench. “You said you had lunch here most days.”
“Did you need something from the archive?”
“In a way.”
“Mattson’s documents?”
“Not exactly.”
“What then? Lunch?” She held up a rice ball.
“I just had ramen.”
“So, you need something, but you don’t.”
“That’s it exactly.”
“What’s the book?” Ayana nodded at the large book Hiroshi set in his lap, the one Jamie gave him.
He held the book up in both hands. “Oh, well, maybe I’ll show you later.”
“Secret?”
“In a way.” Hiroshi looked at the cherry trees at the edge of the wall. Their trunks were gnarled and mossy, twisting and bending, the older limbs bulging with younger limbs branching up towards the sky. “When are they supposed to bloom this year?”
“Are you going to sit here and wait for them?” she asked.
“I might. What about you?”
“I could sit here until then.”
Hiroshi looked up at the trees to see if there were any buds. “No buds yet.”
“Last onigiri rice ball.” She waved it back and forth.
“I might have half.” He unwrapped the plastic, bit off half and tried to hand it back, but she waved it back to him. “Why are there so many cherry trees here? Emperor planted them?”
Ayana spoke in a mock NHK documentary narrator’s voice. “Planted four hundred years ago, when this was Edo Castle, the hundreds of trees along Chidorigafuchi—”
“You’ve been watching too much television.”
“I have, actually.” She blushed at having too much time to watch TV in the evenings. “These are some of the oldest and most beautiful in Japan. They planted them right on top of the defensive perimeter for the Imperial Palace.”
“As good a place as any,” Hiroshi said. “Beauty and violence are so intertwined, aren’t they? Swords, moats, martial arts, they’re so lethal, they become beautiful.”
“Do you do kendo anymore?”
Hiroshi laughed. “I hadn’t even held a practice sword for years, but I guess I haven’t completely forgotten. What about you?”
“When I lived in America, I was one of the best at the dojo hall. But all the time I was doing kendo, I found out, my husband was cheating on me.”
“When you went to kendo?”
“Gave kendo a kind of bitter taste.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I quit for a while, but back here, I realized it was the only thing that kept me balanced.”
“Where do you practice now?”
“A dojo hall near my place.”
“I don’t even know where you live.”
“Not far from here, Kagurazaka.”
“Little Kyoto in Tokyo. Must be expensive.”
“I had a good settlement from my ex-husband. He was a big executive and…well…at least he didn’t cheat on the divorce terms. You said you did kendo recently?”
“Sort of. It’s complicated.”
“How complicated can it be?”
“Painfully complicated,” Hiroshi laughed. “It all comes back, though. I guess your body remembers.”
“Yes, bodies remember,” Ayana said and looked away.
The wind from the palace grounds and through the park blew in alternating layers of warm and cool, the last of winter and first of spring. They could hear the clunk and creak of rowboats in the moat, but not the rowing couples’ whispered conversations.
“I always like those little red things that fall after the blossoms are gone,” Hiroshi said.
Ayana laughed. “What are you talking about?”
“You know, the little red things that cover the outside of the blossoms.”
“You used to say nonsense like that all the time.” Ayana laughed. “The blossoms are the beautiful part.”
“The blossoms are okay…”
Ayana looked at the trees. “I like the moment right before they burst out full. You see them straining.”
“You’d have to climb up in the tree to see that, wouldn’t you?”
“Why don’t you climb up and take a look for me?” Ayana pointed to the row of large cherry trees whose branches reached over the water. “Take a close-up photo.”
“The water might be a bit cold if I fell.”
“Like that time in Kamakura.”
“Jumping in the ocean at sunrise.”
“After sleeping on the beach. It was cold on cold.”
“But we didn’t feel it at all, did we?”
“We were too young then.”
“Do you feel the cold more as you get older?”
“Right now, I feel like a walk.” Ayana hopped up, balled up the trash and looked at Hiroshi.
“Don’t you have to go back to work?”
“The books and documents aren’t going anywhere. I can be a little late. What about you?”
“The spread sheets and investment accounts aren’t going anywhere. I can be very late. Once around the Imperial Palace?”
“It’s a long ways, but why not?”
Hiroshi pointed both ways with his fingers down the curving row of cherry trees, gesturing to ask her which way she wanted to go.
Ayana swirled her finger once in both directions to tell him it was all a big circle and they would come back around to where they were supposed to be, no matter which direction they went first.
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About the author
Michael Pronko is a professor of American Literature and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. He has written about Japanese culture, art, jazz, and politics for Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, Artscape Japan and other publications for 20 years. He has appeared on NHK Public TV, Tokyo MXTV and Nippon Television. His website, Jazz in Japan, is at: www.jazzinjapan.com. His award-winning collections of essays about life in Tokyo are all available at online retailers and from his website: Beauty and Chaos: Slices and Morsels of Tokyo Life (2014), Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens: Essays on Tokyo (2014), and Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo (2015), in addition to three essay collections in Japanese. When not teaching or writing, he wanders Tokyo contemplating its intensity and reaching out for the stories to come.
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For more on the Hiroshi series: www.michaelpronko.com
Follow Michael on Twitter: @pronkomichael
Michael’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/pronkoauthor
Also in the Detective Hiroshi series:
The Last Train (2017)
Thai Girl in Tokyo (coming in 2019)
A book is a group project, and I have a large group that helped me with this one.
Thank you to my university for a sabbatical and support. Thank you to my students for teaching me more about literature than I could have learned on my own.
Thank you to my editors, CR, HZ, and NLF. Their input and help brought out so much.
Thanks to AA who read numerous versions.
Thank you to Paul Martin for his knowledge and insight about swords.
Obrigado muito to Marco Mancini for talk, design and energy.
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And a special thank you to my wife. For being there. Words can’t…but can a little.
br /> Michael Pronko, The Moving Blade
The Moving Blade Page 31
