by Yu Miri
I started going to Shinsekai, a cabaret, when I was around fifty. It had been three years since Kōichi had passed away.
I was working on a site for a new sports ground in Hirosaki. One evening, when my shift ended, I walked through the red-light district with its competing bars until the pink neon sign reading Shinsekai stopped me in my tracks.
If the version of me that existed a decade before had seen me then, he wouldn’t have believed it. I went in alone and was shown to a table. Nobody batted an eye at my muddy work clothes.
As I sat on the sofa waiting for the hostess, I stared at the white rose in the stem vase next to the ashtray on my table. Wondering if it was a fake, I pulled the flower out and lifted it to my nose when suddenly a hostess sat down next to me. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Junko.”
I hurried to return the rose to its vase.
“Do you like roses?” she asked. Her accent sounded like mine, and without thinking I answered back in dialect.
“I thought it was fake, I was just having a good sniff.”
Junko laughed, her waist-length hair shaking gently, and then she made me a whiskey with water. She was from Namie in Fukushima. We talked at random about home—about Ukedo Port, the Sōma Nomaoi, the nuclear plant she said her brothers worked at, Hamadōri—and the cabaret, dark already at the best of times, became pitch-black as a giant mirrorball began to turn, small flashes of light reflecting on Junko’s pale face and plump chest.
When you do physical labor you sleep like the dead, so I have no recollection of ever having a truly dreamlike dream, but Junko was like my dream woman.
“Dance cheek to cheek with me?”
“I don’t know how to dance.”
“Don’t worry.”
Junko took my hand and took me to the center of the floor.
The maroon carpet absorbed all sound of our steps. It was like my feet weren’t even touching the floor.
The music played, but it was even quieter than the night.
I listened carefully; I could hear the sound of my own heart beating and Junko whispering, “Put your arms around me.”
It was the first slow dance I’d had in my life.
Her eyes were moist.
Her hands were on my lower back.
Her hair was brushing against me.
Her earrings were quivering.
Her breasts were soft against my chest.
Her perfume smelled the same as the white rose on the table, a soft scent with a touch of lemon and the sea.
My whole body shook.
I felt I was at sea.
As I shook I felt simultaneously as if I were being unleashed and enveloped.
When I was in Hirosaki, I always went to Shinsekai.
I always asked for Junko. Sometimes I would wait until the club closed to drop her off by taxi at her apartment building, but I never paid to take her on a date, and I never crossed over the line from being just another regular customer.
At sixty, I decided to stop working away from home, and returned to Yazawa.
On my last day, I took a bouquet of white roses to Shinsekai.
Standing in front of Junko, I handed her the bouquet and said goodbye. “Thank you,” she said, pressing the white roses to her face, engulfing herself in the strong scent. Sadness welled up in my throat, but I didn’t cry. I pulled her pale arm from the bouquet and shook her hand, and her arm moved lifelessly.
And with that, I never saw Junko again. I never called or wrote. I don’t know if Shinsekai is still there or not, nor what Junko is doing, or even if she’s still alive…
“If you’d like some plants for your house then just take some, please.”
“I just don’t have time for plants. They need lots of care, you know? Oh, Tomoko’s father died suddenly, did you hear? Seems like it was quite a shock to her, she hasn’t gotten out of bed for ages, apparently…”
“That doesn’t mean she can’t leave the house at all, surely.”
“She might not come to the class reunion this year.”
“She’ll be there, I know she will. She got the award for perfect attendance.”
Another two women, also in their early sixties, chatted as they looked at a picture of centifolia roses—centifolia meaning ‘hundred-leaved.’
The centifolia rose, famously clasped by Marie Antoinette in a portrait, is called ‘the painter’s rose,’ and is in the first of Redouté’s series of paintings. Once too many petals grow the stamen and pistil will degenerate and die, so it can only propagate by grafting…
—
“You have a sideboard, don’t you? You could put it there.”
“In the Japanese-style room?”
“No, the altar room, of course.”
“We don’t have one. When my father died, mom bought a big old altar and told us about it afterwards. I was so annoyed.”
“I guess it’ll shake when there’s an earthquake and it might be a bit scary but what can you do?”
“I’d have to put it next to the TV.”
“If you put a sideboard next to the TV, the height would just about be right, too. The TV stand is adjustable, isn’t it?”
“Maybe I have something at home that’ll do.”
“I really think you should buy a proper sideboard.”
“Want to go look at some together?”
“Tomorrow?”
“No rush.”
—
Rosa centifolia mutabilis, unequalled rose: its round, bulbous groupings of blooms are as pale as a white woman’s skin, the outer petals alone red as if they had been swept with blush…
Rosa indica cruenta, blood-crimson rose of Bengal: chocolate-tinged red, the petals on the verge of falling, hanging down like a dog’s tongue… the noticeably serrated leaves are turned up, showing their grey undersides…
Rosa indica, the beautiful lady of Bengal: break open the red buds and the deep pink petals spill out. Its leaves heave like the pectoral fin of a sting ray, its large, downward-facing thorns the color of a blood blister…
—
As if they had been waiting for their oldest son, their tablet-carrier, to return home, my father died, followed by my mother. Both were over ninety so it was their time, I suppose. Our family grave was on top of a hill from which Ishida beach was visible. Their urns were placed next to Kōichi’s, lost at the tender age of twenty-one.
I think if one were to count all the days I had spent with my wife, Setsuko, after thirty-seven years of marriage spent mainly away from home, it would not even add up to a year. Setsuko had given birth to and raised our two children, put her much younger brothers through university, seen Yoko get married, cared for our aging parents while working in the fields, and had steadily built up savings for us. We also had 70,000 yen a month from our national pensions, which we could live on until the time came, so after a discussion, we decided to have our rotting roof, walls, and plumbing repaired.
Yoko, who lived in Sendai, had three children, and during their summer and winter holidays, they would come to stay with us. The oldest was a fourteen-year-old girl, followed by two boys, eleven and nine. Our neighbors said how perfect it was to have one little princess and two wild boys.
The youngest, Daisuke, looked just like Kōichi when he was little, but neither my wife nor I ever said a word about it to each other.
—
It had been raining since the morning.
I couldn’t help remembering the day nineteen years before, when Setsuko and I had gone together, while Kōichi was being autopsied, to the flat where he had lived for three years and had laid on the futon where he died until the next morning.
It was the day of the forty-ninth day memorial service for Mrs. Chiyo from two doors down, and it was custom for the women of the neighborhood association to make the food for the receptio
n. Setsuko had been out since early morning to prepare.
In the evening, we changed into funeral wear and went to join the other mourners. The priest from Katsushiji temple led the service. We faced the altar, hands clasped in prayer, and chanted together the Sukhavativyuna sutra and the Nembutsu hymn.
Katsunobu, the chief mourner, had gone off to Tokyo looking for work with a group of other locals after graduating middle school, worked at Mitsubishi Electric’s factory in Ofuna, and returned to our hometown after retirement to live with his widowed mother, leaving his wife and children back in Kanagawa.
“It barely seems possible, but it has already been forty-nine days since she passed. My mother loved talking, and taking care of others, and I feel her absence most at dinnertime, but she had eighty-eight happy years thanks to all of you present here today, and I know that she has been reborn in the Pure Land now, which gives me some comfort.
“As you know, my family is in Kanagawa, and I will return to them once I’ve finished settling things here, but I will be back for the rest of the memorial services, so I hope for your continued friendship and support. We have only a small meal to offer you, but please, stay as long as your time allows. Thank you all for coming today.”
The meal began, and as we ate root vegetables stewed in soy sauce, kinpira gobō, pickles, potato salad, and onigiri with vegetables mixed in, Katsunobu and I drank so much sake together that I was unsteady on my feet. I don’t remember how I got home, but I went to sleep without any dinner, in the bed that Setsuko had laid out for me.
—
The sound of the rain woke me up.
Setsuko always got up early, so by the time I usually woke at seven, she was already done with the laundry and cleaning the floors, and the smell of miso soup and steaming rice would waft from the kitchen.
That morning there was no such smell…
I heard the sound of water gushing from the rainspouts.
It must be a rather big downpour…
The light leaking in through the curtains stained the inside of the house with rain.
I turned my head and saw Setsuko asleep next to me in her futon.
I reached out an arm to wake her. She was cold—
Her arm, peeking out from the top of the duvet, was cold.
In shock I got up, pulled the duvet back and tried to shake her, but rigor mortis had already begun to set in.
Struggling, I slammed my eyes shut, knitting my brows.
“Why?” The word slipped out of my mouth.
My heart was pounding violently, and the inside of my head was like an illuminated red void. I looked around the house hoping this was a dream, but everything was where it should be. This was reality. The sound of the grandfather clock that I knew so well reverberated through the house, but I was in such shock I could not count the number of chimes. I looked at the dial. The short hand was near the seven; the long hand was near twelve.
“It’s seven,” I moaned at Setsuko.
—
There was the wake, funeral, farewell ceremony, coffin, cremation, bone picking, the return of her remains, notification of death, gifts for the temple and neighborhood association, procedures to return her health insurance card and stop her pension, liquidation of her estate, the memorial service on the forty-ninth day after her death, laying her ashes to rest—as I did these things which I still could not come to terms with at all, one by one, everything connected with Setsuko’s death came to an end.
Opening the storage vault under the tombstone at the family grave, I shifted my father and mother’s remains to one side and placed Setsuko’s remains next to Kōichi’s, and at that moment the keening of a cicada somewhere in the pine trees above me rang out.
It was the first cry of a Kaempfer cicada, the first to emerge every year at the start of the rainy season.
I remembered how, a few days before she died, Setsuko had said while folding the washing, “I just have the feeling I’m gonna die when the cicadas are singing,” and I sunk to my hands and knees crying. Did she cry out, “it hurts, help”—would she have lived if I’d called an ambulance right away—but I had been drunk and sound asleep, and I didn’t realize that my wife, right next to me, was taking her last breath. It was the same as if I’d killed her, I thought.
After the sutras from the priest, once we had all offered incense in order of relation starting with me and the interment ceremony was over, Setsuko’s brother Sadao offered me some words of comfort. “No matter how we grieve, the dead will not return. You two had those last seven years together, just the two of you, like a honeymoon. You should think of how happy Setsuko was.” But I kept chewing over what my mother had said when Kōichi died: “You never did have any luck did you?”
She did complain sometimes about her back or her knees hurting, but Setsuko took pride in being a hard worker and having a strong body, and now she was dead at the age of sixty-five—why did it always have to go this way—an anchor of indignation sunk to the bottom of my heart, and I could no longer cry.
—
My daughter Yoko was worried about me, so she sent my granddaughter Mari, who had just started work as a nurse at an animal hospital in Haramachi, over to visit occasionally; and in the end Mari, saying she was worried about me too, moved out of her apartment and in with me.
She brought along Kotaro, a small brown dog with a long body and who barked a lot. Mari said he had been left chained to the fence around the animal hospital. She had made a flyer looking for someone to foster him and pinned it on the noticeboard at work, but nobody came forward to take him in, so Mari had taken him home herself.
Mari was a good girl. Every morning she made me toast and fried eggs or ham and eggs. She was especially sweet when she turned her head to look down at the dog, sitting patiently at her feet, to talk to him or give him a smile. At seven in the morning, she’d put the dog in the passenger seat of her car and drive down Highway 6 to Haramachi. She often didn’t get back from work until late, so I made my own lunch and dinner. Cooking and cleaning were no trouble for me after years of dormitory living when I’d been working away from home, but soon after Bon was over, I found myself unable to sleep. Kōichi and Setsuko had both been taken in their sleep—at night, when I laid down in my bed, I felt a chill over my body, my saliva felt sticky, my tongue sour. All the nerves running through my body were tensed, and I didn’t feel ready to sleep. Realizing that my hands were becoming numb, I closed my eyes and tried to calm my breathing, but having my eyes closed scared me. I was not afraid of ghosts. Nor was I afraid of death or dying. I was afraid of living this life not knowing when it might end. It did not seem possible to resist this weight pressing down on my entire body, nor to bear it.
It was a rainy morning.
“Oh, it’s muggy,” Mari said, half-opening the screened window. A damp wind and the sound of rain came rolling in. The smell of rain in my nose, I ate the scrambled eggs and toast that Mari had made, then said goodbye to her and the dog from the entrance hall as they drove off. She’s just turned twenty-one, I thought. She shouldn’t be tied down here with her granddad.
“Sorry for leaving so suddenly. Grandpa’s gone to Tokyo. I won’t be coming back to the house again. Please don’t come looking for me. Thank you for always making me such nice breakfasts,” I wrote on a piece of paper to leave for her; then I took the black carry-all I’d used for work out of a closet, and put my personal belongings in it.
At Kashima Station, I got on the Jōban line and I got off at Ueno, the last stop. When I surfaced from the Park Exit ticket gates, it was raining in Ueno, too. The crossing light was green, so I didn’t bother with my umbrella and crossed the road. I looked up at the night sky. I saw the rain falling from the sky in large drops, and my rain-drenched eyelids quivered. I decided to wait the night out under the awning of the Tokyo Cultural Hall, but as I listened to the sound of rain hitting regularly against the gr
ound, exhaustion came over me, and I fell asleep with my bag for a pillow.
That was the first night I spent sleeping rough.
—
Rosa multiflora carnea, flesh-colored rose that blooms in tufts: its pink flowers, small and round like the bells that children chime at school concerts, bloom as if gathered together, the flower’s receptacles hanging heavily...
—
Rosa pimpinellifolia flore variegato, hundred écu d’argent burnet: its slim receptacle, closely crowded with black thorns like a hairy caterpillar, stretches out proudly, crowned with regal stamens. Half of its single-layered white petals are copper-red, as if they had been soaked in blood...
—
Rosa dumetorum, the thicket rose: this five-petaled rose, with its pale apricot, heart-shaped petals, like a butterfly just taken to the wing...
—
The backgrounds have been left blank, nothing drawn. One cannot tell when or where each rose is blooming, whether it is in a garden or a flowerpot; whether it is sunny, or cloudy, or raining; whether it is morning, or noon, or night; whether it is spring, or summer, or autumn. Redouté, the man who painted these roses, died over one hundred and seventy years ago. And the rose bushes that he studied are more than likely no longer living either. But once, somewhere, those roses were in bloom. And once, somewhere, a painter lived. And now, through these pieces of paper divorced from the reality of the past, like fantastical flowers that do not exist in our world, these roses bloom.
—
“You know that beef stew place over there? I went a while back and they weren’t open.”
“They close on Tuesdays, you know.”
“We should go sometime for their ‘lightweight’ breakfast special.”