by Eto Mori
I totally understood how he felt.
While my days at school grew brighter, life with my host family continued in darkness. My relationship with the mother didn’t change a whit after that letter of hers, and the father worked constant overtime just as he had before. In addition to that, annoyingly, Mitsuru had apparently decided that it was more fun to come hassle me than ignore me.
“I hear you finally started studying?” He poked his head into my room to spew his venom again one evening about two weeks after I got over my cold.
“Don’t just come in.” I turned around for a second, thinking it was Prapura, and quickly turned my back again when I saw Mitsuru’s grinning face.
“Oh-ho! You’re really studying?” He didn’t so much as bat an eyelid at my protest. “Whoa. This is a rare sight. It’s like, I dunno, you never see this kinda thing in the wild. Mind if I take a pic?”
“Do whatever you want.”
“As if. Idiot. Like I’d want a picture of you. Anyway, I heard your synthesized score is horrible. Sort of pointless putting up a fight at this stage of the game, though?” He just kept coming at me.
“It’s, like, ninety percent pointless,” I declared, confidently. “But that’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?” he sneered.
“None of your business.”
“Tight-lipped as ever. Not to mention, you’ve always been so frickin’ stubborn. You’re like a wild boar—once you start running, you got no brakes. I hear you’ve got the lights on every night until like three or four in the morning?”
That was true, but I didn’t answer him. I was thinking about something else totally.
I haven’t actually seen Prapura lately . . .
“Well, I don’t care, but Ma’s worried about your raging-boar style. I think she thinks you lost your mind after they asked you to try for a public school, like you’re backed into a corner and the pressure’s too much for you. You’re such an idiot. You just jump in with both feet, even though you’re totally not used to studying like this. You don’t have any balance, you’re always taking things to the extreme. Rein it in already. Those bags under your eyes get any darker, you’ll make the air in this house even harder to breathe. Just stop it.”
I ignored him and continued to flip through my vocabulary cards.
“And,” he added, “would it kill you to be nice to Ma for five seconds? She’s totally on edge lately. This isn’t easy for her, either, you know.”
“I can’t be nice to her.”
“What?”
“But I won’t make trouble for her, either,” I said. “If I don’t get into public school, I won’t go to a private school. I’ll take a gap year.”
“Are you seriously that stupid?” he groaned. “Who even takes a gap year before high school in this day and age?”
I was indeed that stupid. But I was also dead serious. “It’s fine. I’m a spirit out of sync with this day and age, anyway.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve never been right for this modern Heisei era.”
“Uh-huh.” He rolled his eyes. “So then what era are you right for?”
“The Jomon era, the hunter-gatherer days.”
Mitsuru burst out laughing. “That far back? Idiot. Would a Jomon-era spirit cry when someone stole its twenty-eight-thousand-yen sneakers?”
“Sh-shut up!” I snapped. “A Jomon person’d cry if someone stole their terra-cotta statues. It’s the same thing. Those sneakers were my terra-cotta statues. They were priceless.”
“Those terra-cotta statues are from way after that, from the Yamato era, you dolt,” he informed me, haughtily. “They didn’t exist in the Jomon. You really would be better off if you just died and got reborn, huh?”
“You go first.” I threw my vocab book at him and he dodged it deftly, laughing loudly as he left my room. And in a bit of perfect meddling, he told the parents about my intention to take a gap year.
First thing the next morning, the mother was crying all over me. “Please, Makoto. Forget about what we said before. We’ll work the money out somehow. Please don’t worry about it. You just focus on getting into whatever private school you think you can.”
But I wasn’t about to say yes to this. For one, I didn’t love it when people unilaterally changed what they wanted from me. And besides, I had my own ideas.
Basically, this was where I was coming from. Prapura said my homestay had a time limit of one year. At this point in time, nearly three of those months had passed already. High school was another four months off. Which meant that no matter what high school I went to, it worked out that I would be attending it for a mere five months. Public school was one thing, but it was ridiculous to move on to a private school and pay that kind of exorbitant tuition for that period of time.
My reasons were perfectly sensible, but unfortunately, these reasons couldn’t be an explanation to anyone other than me. Not a single person in my life was going to take me seriously when I told them I only had another nine months to live. In which case, my only option was to keep my mouth shut and study as hard as I could, so that I somehow managed to get into public school.
And that’s exactly what I did. Kept my mouth shut and studied my brains out.
Studying was just boring. It wasn’t hard at all, not compared with a marathon or a soccer match or something. The ongoing lack of sleep might have been hard on my body, but it was nothing when I thought about the pain of the night when I was attacked in the park.
The only really hard part of the whole thing was that I didn’t have the time to paint anymore, although I couldn’t say it was entirely because of the studying that I stopped showing up for art club. I was also avoiding Hiroka and Shoko.
I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the whole thing with Hiroka, and it definitely wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her. But I had no idea what I would even say to her after all that. My heart sank when I thought about how she could twist me around her little finger without even trying. And it didn’t upset or excite me the way it used to when I spotted her at school lately. If things could just sort of fizzle out like this, I was basically fine with that.
Shoko, on the other hand, was in the same class as me, so I saw her every day. But things had been awkward and uncomfortable between us ever since she came to visit me. She’d chased after me so persistently before, but now she kept her distance (naturally). If our eyes did happen to meet, she would quickly look away. It seemed like it really was her fictional Makoto Kobayashi that she liked, as seen through her rose-colored glasses. I did feel kind of bad for crushing her beautiful ideal, though, and I tried to stay out of her way as much as I possibly could.
And so I pulled back from the world of oil painting and warped into the land of entrance exams with that blue painting still only half finished.
This life was more painfully dull than I had even realized, apparently. Bombarded by kanji characters and an endless parade of numbers, my colorless days were starting to make me feel empty and monochrome.
So maybe it was because my life was so painfully bland that I couldn’t reject this sudden invitation when the father came to me, one morning in early December. “This Sunday, it looks like I’ll be able to take it easy for the first time in a while. I was thinking of going fishing. How about it? Why don’t you come along, Makoto? If you’re not interested in fishing, you can just sit next to me and sketch or something.”
I twitched in reaction to the word sketch.
“I know this little place where the water’s nice and clear. The air’s fresh, the view’s wonderful. I’m sure you could draw something nice.”
The father deftly appealed to my desires. I’d been wanting to draw some landscapes for a while now.
Even so, I held my ground out of stubbornness. “But I have the exams.”
“Come on, now.” He smiled. “You need a change of pace every so often, right? It’s a known fact that you do better after a break, and that goes for both st
udying and work. So? How about it? Why not just give it a go? It’s not that far in the car, and it’d be nice to take a drive. Plus, a nice clear stream in winter, all crisp and sharp, just lovely. All right! We’ll head out Sunday morning.”
The plan was somehow settled before I knew it, before I had even given any kind of real answer.
I kind of got the feeling he’d backed me into a perfectly laid trap. I headed out of the house for school, feeling unsatisfied with how the whole thing went down, a little grumpy somehow.
On my way home, I scraped together what little remained of my allowance and bought a sketchbook.
10
Early Sunday morning, December 6, 6:30 a.m.
The curtains had just started to shine with the light of daybreak, and when I opened the window, the sky looked like a perfect blue canvas. A foundational layer of blue with nothing painted on it yet. The few faint clouds I could see drifting above the apartment block off in the distance made it look like someone had taken an extremely fine brush to the scene.
What a beautiful day. I exhaled a white breath, mixed emotions welling up in me. The moment I pulled the curtains back, the possibility of the outing being canceled due to rain vanished. It touched a nerve when I thought about the inevitable look of glee on the father’s face, but on the flip side, there was a part of me excited enough about the trip that I’d woken up early.
I still had plenty of time before the 7:30 departure. It took me no time at all to get ready. I went back to my room, closed the curtains, opened them, opened my new sketchbook, closed it. I couldn’t settle down. Finally, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at the ceiling.
“Prapura?” I said, quietly, but there was no answer. “I got something I want to talk to you about.”
No answer.
“How are my bangs today?”
I kept speaking to him and he kept not showing up. Now that I was thinking about it, I realized it had been more than three weeks already since I’d seen his face.
Hey, Prapura. Where’d you run off to? You skipping out on your job? Or does this mean your role as my guide’s finished now?
I’d kind of had this vague sense that things were changing lately, what with Saotome guiding me to the shoe store and the father guiding me off somewhere today. Which is, in fact, why I was scared.
Where exactly were these earth people taking me?
With the father behind the wheel, the navy Toyota Caldina pulled away from the city on the two-lane street, and then out onto the four-lane national highway until it merged onto the six-lane expressway to leave the prefecture itself, eventually carrying us onto a twisting mountain road.
The whole “it’s not that far by car” was a complete lie; the entire trip easily took three hours. I never once opened my mouth. Instead, I leaned up against the window of the passenger seat and pretended to sleep, but before too long, I really did fall asleep.
When I opened my eyes, the car was driving through a small town in the valley. Fields spread out in the space between mountains, houses dotted the land between them, and the road was unobtrusive, as if trying not to disturb this tranquil scene. The village was so quiet. From time to time, I’d catch sight of signs for onsen hot springs or karaoke parlors, but for some reason, I never found the actual buildings for these places. Eventually, the signs disappeared, too, and just when the world around us was becoming increasingly desolate, the father stopped the car on the deep shoulder of a gravel road.
“Well, around here’s good enough, I guess,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. But the gravel road was surrounded by thick stands of trees, and I couldn’t see the merest hint of a river.
Welp, I thought as I opened the passenger door. An unspeakable chill slammed into me, numbing my whole body, like someone’d just sprayed me with ice water.
“You have to wear some proper warm clothes,” the father said, sagely, now of all times, as he pulled his fishing gear out of the trunk. Perhaps he also realized how too-little, too-late this piece of advice was; he pulled his scarf off and pushed it toward me.
I refused it. A hand-knitted scarf was just too tacky, and it wasn’t like it was so cold I couldn’t stand it. It was indeed chilly out here, but the verdant air was so clear, it more than made up for the low temperature.
“Okay, then. Let’s get going.” The father gave up on trying to get me to take the scarf and wound it back around his neck before stepping into the trees.
I followed with my sketch tools in one hand. We walked down a gentle slope, brushing away the branches that blocked the path forward. There were still droplets of morning dew on the leaves, and when I looked up, the sunlight filtering through the branches dazzled my eyes.
After about ten minutes, the view opened up to reveal the river that was apparently our destination, a small, clear stream flowing soundlessly across a desolate field. Bathed in the morning light, the surface had a green patina to it, and I felt a pang of disappointment at the possibility that the water was stagnant. But taking a closer look, I saw that the coloring came from the plants swaying back and forth just beneath the river’s surface. The water itself was so crystal clear, I could see all the way down to the sand of the riverbed. A majestic forest sprawled outward from the shore on both banks, while the shadow of a snowcapped mountain rose up above the stream.
I had to admit that the view was really something. It wasn’t the sort of scene that would make a perfect picture from every side, but I could probably turn it into a picture with the right angle and composition. It was maybe even the ideal spot for sketching. But . . .
“Can you actually catch anything here?” I turned cold eyes on the father, who was already clutching his fishing rod at the river’s edge. I couldn’t see any sign of fish, and anyway, there were too many plants in the water for fishing.
“Whether or not I catch anything is secondary,” he announced. “I’m here to lie around by the river and enjoy the view. That’s how your dad fishes. The fish don’t matter at all. Ha ha!”
The father seemed serious about ignoring the fish. He’d come all this way to catch something in the river, but he hadn’t brought a bucket or a cooler. He settled himself down heavily by the edge of the river, lowered his rod into the water—no bait on the hook—and just spaced out. Every so often, he’d grin to himself, although I had no idea what was so funny.
What a strange man. Paying him no mind, I looked for a place to sketch and then laid out my picnic tarp in a sunny spot with a good view. I sat down and quickly opened my brand-new sketchbook. Within five minutes of setting my pencil to work, a chill came creeping in from all sides, starting at the tips of my fingers and crawling up my arms, from my toes to my thighs, my butt to my stomach. Drawing outdoors in the middle of winter was harsh. Even so, I enjoyed the sketching itself, and before I knew it, I was utterly absorbed in the work.
The clarity of the river.
The majesty of the trees.
The breeze playing on my skin.
I still didn’t have the ability to really bring these to life in my drawings, but from time to time, when I drew the leaves on the tree, I could almost touch them on the page, and when I sketched the quiet current, I felt my fingertips sink into that cool water.
It was like the leaves of the trees pushed a heavy weight away, like the water of the river cleansed my insides and something started flowing again. I finished the rough sketch, and as I added pigment and hue with my watercolors, I could feel my body steadily growing lighter, the extra weight pressing down on my shoulders lifting. Maybe I was even more tired than I’d thought from all the studying.
My brush moved along at a good pace, and every few minutes, the father came over to peer at the painting as it unfolded in my sketchbook. He’d push his scarf on me again every time before he turned and headed back to his own spot.
At the end of the morning, I’d finished one painting, and he hadn’t caught a single fish.
“You only do landscapes then, Makoto?” he as
ked me at lunch, as we spread out on my picnic tarp the food the mother had packed for us. “You don’t do portraits?”
“No.” I shook my head and warmed myself up with coffee from the thermos.
“Why not?”
“I hate people,” I replied, curtly, and instantly I saw Saotome’s face in the back of my mind, so I added, in a small voice, “Generally.”
“Hm. You do?” Nodding and humming his agreement, he picked up a rice ball and polished it off in four bites. He then tossed some fried egg, a wiener, and a mini hamburger into his mouth one after the other before finally turning back to me.
“I generally hate people, too.” The smile on his face was cheerily blithe. “For a while, I really hated them, you know.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, without much enthusiasm, and threw some fried chicken into my mouth. The flavor of soy sauce spread out across my tongue, and as I enjoyed the lingering aroma, I reached out for a rice ball.
“Do you know why I asked you to come fishing today?” the father asked, as he crunched on some pickled daikon.
“I do.”
“Huh. You do, then?”
“I said I do. You pretended we were going fishing so you could get some time to talk to me.”
He stopped his daikon-crunching. “So you’re onto me.”
“Saw right through you.”
Father-son fishing trip equals talk time. I figured he had this kind of sitcom-style ulterior motive in planning this whole outing.
“Well, that makes this all that much easier, then.” He looked somewhat relieved. “You’re exactly right. We came out because I wanted to talk to you, Makoto. I’ve been holding off on sitting you down in the hope that you might come to me yourself, but I’ve been thinking lately, what if I wasn’t waiting for you so much as running away from you? Not to mention, it’s hard on me to see your mom in such low spirits these days.”