by Hiro Arikawa
‘There’s a greenhouse in the corner of the school grounds. I wonder if anyone’s using it.’
The greenhouse had been on Yoshimine’s mind ever since he had transferred to the school.
‘I’ve never even thought about it. You interested?’ Satoru asked.
‘My grandmother’s crops are all outdoors. I’ve never worked in a greenhouse.’
‘You really are into farming, aren’t you?’
Yoshimine thought that was the end of the matter, but Satoru brought it up again later.
‘I looked into the gardening club thing. They stopped a few years ago, because membership numbers fell. But if you’re interested, the science teacher said he’d run it, even if it’s just the two of us. And we can use the greenhouse.’
Two things surprised Yoshimine. One, that Satoru had actually looked into it. And two, that he was planning to take part himself.
‘You want to be in the club, too?’ Yoshimine asked.
‘I’d like to give it a try.’
‘But you’re not into gardening or anything like that, are you?’
‘I wouldn’t say I’m not interested. I just haven’t had anything to do with it up till now. I’ve never known any farmers.’
‘Really? Nobody? Not even, like, your grandfather or your grandmother?’
A total city boy, Yoshimine thought, but Satoru waved a dismissive hand.
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘My parents didn’t have much to do with their relatives. My grandparents on my mother’s side died when she was still young, and my father didn’t seem to get on with his parents that well. The first time I met them was at my parents’ funeral, and we didn’t talk much.’
Yoshimine understood now why Satoru’s aunt had taken him in. If your parents died and your grandparents were in good health, it’s likely that’s where you’d go. Pretty unusual for a single woman to take a young boy in.
‘I reckoned this might be my only chance to give it a go,’ Satoru said, laughing. ‘I’ve dreamed about living the country life. Like in Miyazaki’s film My Neighbour Totoro, do you know it?’
And so the two of them revived the gardening club. Yoshimine’s grandmother also invited Satoru over to their home to experience life on a working farm.
Satoru was a latchkey kid, since his aunt worked all day, so he began to go over to Yoshimine’s home, and sometimes stayed over for the weekend.
‘I hope you will be good friends,’ Yoshimine’s grandmother said to Satoru – what grandmothers typically say when other children come to play. ‘I always wonder if Daigo – she called him by his first name – ‘is getting on with the other children at school. I hope he isn’t being bullied.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that. I don’t think there’s any chance Yoshimine would ever be bullied.’
‘What d’ya mean?’ Yoshimine said, poking him in the ribs.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ Satoru said, poking him back.
His grandmother, who had been worried that Yoshimine might not make any friends in his new school, was overjoyed when he brought Satoru home. Very soon, she started calling him Satoru-chan.
‘Shall I buy a video game or something you can play with Satoru-chan?’
She asked this because she was concerned that he might be getting bored, always helping out in the fields.
‘I already have some,’ Yoshimine replied, ‘and so does Satoru.’
Satoru genuinely enjoyed helping out in the fields – it was a kind of pastoral hobby.
‘We’re doing the gardening club at school together, too, and I think he really likes farm work,’ Yoshimine explained to his grandmother.
‘Really? Then that’s fine,’ his grandmother responded. ‘At any rate, you’ve made a good friend here. So I won’t worry about you.’
His grandmother didn’t just say this once, but at every opportunity. As if reassuring herself.
‘I guess Grandma still sees me as a little kid,’ Yoshimine said, a trifle embarrassed.
With Satoru being so good-natured, and her grandson’s best friend to boot, Yoshimine’s grandmother fussed over him, and Satoru grew very attached to her.
‘You’re lucky,’ he told Yoshimine. ‘I wish I had a grandmother like yours.’
He’d never been close to his grandparents, and seemed to enjoy having a relationship with an elderly person.
‘If you’re okay with an old woman like me,’ Yoshimine’s grandmother told him, ‘then consider this like your own grandmother’s house.’
Yoshimine never teased his friend about his obvious envy of his grandmother. He knew that Satoru tended to keep his distance from his aunt and had no other relatives he could become close to.
‘Come over any time. My grandmother likes you a lot, too.’
One afternoon, during class, Yoshimine was feeling uncomfortably hot. He glanced out of the window and saw heat shimmering up from the ground. It was the time of year when the temperature was often over thirty degrees.
He suddenly pushed his chair back and stood up, causing a stir of excitement in the class.
‘Yoshimine! What do you think you’re doing?’ his teacher scolded.
‘Nothing,’ Yoshimine said casually, and walked out of the classroom.
‘Hey!’
At times like these, it was Satoru’s role to step in.
‘What do you mean, nothing?’ he called.
‘I’ll be right back.’
It was Satoru, not their teacher, who ran out of the classroom after him.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked Yoshimine, when he finally caught up with him.
‘The greenhouse. I forgot to open the vent this morning. It’s so hot now, the plants are going to boil.’
Inside the greenhouse, they were growing tomatoes and other vegetables, as well as tending some orchids, a hobby of the science teacher. Tomatoes don’t do well in the rain so the roofed-in environment was perfect for them, but this region generally had a temperate climate and when it got too hot in the summer they suffered.
‘Why not wait until break? It’s only another thirty minutes.’
‘But it’s the hottest time of the day. We have to cool it down as soon as we can.’
‘You could have pretended you had to go to the bathroom or something! It’ll be your fault if they close down our club.’
‘Then you go and explain.’
‘Jeez,’ Satoru muttered, and made his way back to the classroom.
‘Yoshimine’s been attacked by guerrillas!’
Satoru’s report had the classroom in uproar.
Though Yoshimine threw the class into chaos on such occasions, before the summer vacation they got a bumper crop of tomatoes and other vegetables and were able to save their teacher’s orchids as well.
When he was sharing out the vegetables with Satoru and the teacher, Yoshimine ended up taking a portion of tomatoes that was a little larger than the others. Yoshimine’s grandmother’s outdoor-grown tomato plants had been hit hard by the long rainy season and hadn’t yielded quite what she’d hoped.
‘Take more. There are just the two of us in our house, so I don’t need so many,’ Satoru said, and Yoshimine burst out laughing. There were only two in Yoshimine’s home, too, and one of them was extremely old. Satoru had a comeback for that: ‘But you eat much more than I do.’
In the space of one semester, Satoru had learned a lot about farming, and had picked up on the fact that Yoshimine wanted to grow greenhouse tomatoes as a sort of insurance policy against his grandmother’s tomatoes failing. Grateful, Yoshimine went ahead and took three or four extra, dropping them happily into his bucket.
‘I’m going back home the first week of the summer holiday,’ Yoshimine said.
‘I get it,’ Satoru answered instantly. ‘I’ll take care of the greenhouse while you’re gone.’
Their first crop was in already, but there were a lot more that would ripen later.
‘This is the first time you’ve been home since you
came to this school, isn’t it? Hope it goes okay.’
Satoru understood the situation, which is why he didn’t just say, Oh, that’s nice. Yoshimine’s parents weren’t taking any time off work to see their son; he was just putting in a token appearance. ‘If they ripen while you’re away, I’ll take some tomatoes over to your grandmother’s.’
Yoshimine’s grandmother gave him a lift to the airport in her little van, and he flew back to Tokyo.
Nobody was there to meet him at Haneda airport.
He boarded the airport shuttle for the ride home, to a condo in a residential suburb. After a whole semester at his grandmother’s, the apartment seemed even smaller and more cramped than before.
His parents were as preoccupied as ever.
About three days after Yoshimine had arrived home, both his parents, surprisingly, came home from work early. His mother cooked them dinner, a rare thing, and the three of them sat down together to eat.
After dinner, his mother made them tea. The whole thing had Yoshimine confused.
His father, seated opposite him at the dining table, spoke first, a serious look on his face.
‘We have something important to tell you.’
His mother came over and sat down next to his father. This couldn’t be good.
‘The thing is, Mum and I have decided to get divorced.’
Ah – just as I thought, Yoshimine said to himself.
He had known that someday it would come to this.
‘Daigo, do you want to come and live with me, or your mother?’
He looked at his parents’ expressions and was forced to confront a reality he couldn’t avoid.
His parents waited expectantly, each hoping he would choose the other.
‘I’m sorry.’ He was finally able to squeeze out the words. ‘I can’t decide right now. I want to think about it a little more.’
His parents were clearly relieved that they wouldn’t have to deal with the problem straight away.
‘Can I go back to Grandma’s place tomorrow?’
Confronted with the fact that neither parent wanted him, he no longer had any idea how he was supposed to behave.
Naturally, they didn’t stop him, and he flew back the following day. The airline took good care of unaccompanied children, and he was actually grateful that his parents weren’t there to see him off.
His grandmother came to pick him up at the airport and drove him briskly back home in her small van.
‘Mum and Dad said they’re getting divorced.’
‘Is that right?’ his grandmother replied.
‘I don’t know which one I should live with.’
‘Well, it doesn’t really matter, because you can live with me.’
Yoshimine felt a huge lump in his throat.
‘You have a good friend here, too, Daigo, so it’s all okay.’ You have a good friend here. It’s all okay, his grandmother murmured, over and over, as if reassuring herself.
His grandmother had known what was going to happen from the moment her grandson had first come to live with her.
The lump in Yoshimine’s throat grew bigger and by the time they arrived home, it had started to hurt.
‘I’m going to run over to school.’
He changed into his uniform. Even in the holidays, they weren’t allowed at the school unless they were wearing it.
‘Why don’t you wait until a bit later? It’s the hottest time of day now.’
‘I’m worried about the greenhouse.’
Shaking off his grandmother’s objections, Yoshimine rode his bike to the junior high. As he pumped the pedals he felt the lump in his throat sink to the pit of his stomach.
Satoru’s bike was parked in the bicycle racks.
Inside the greenhouse, Yoshimine found him happily plucking tomatoes and cucumbers.
‘Hey.’
As Yoshimine stood in the doorway to the greenhouse, Satoru let out a funny-sounding ‘What the—? Weren’t you supposed to come back a little later?’
‘Yeah, stuff happened.’
They washed the vegetables in the sink, and in the shade of the school building Yoshimine told Satoru what had happened. Out of the corner of his eye, Yoshimine watched the baseball team doing fielding practice in the shimmering heatwaves radiating from the schoolyard.
‘When they left me with Grandma, I didn’t think anything major was going on, since my parents had always kind of left me to my own devices. But it’s turned out to be a big deal.’
So the form teacher’s sympathy was justified, after all.
‘They were planning to get divorced all along. And they wanted me to understand that. I’m such an idiot.’
Satoru had been listening in silence, but now he broke in. ‘That’s not true,’ he countered. ‘You were just trying not to think about it.’
Yoshimine felt that lump in his throat again. Get over it, he urged himself.
Daigo never gives us any trouble, and that makes things so much easier.
If I had been a bad kid who did give them a hard time, then what would have happened?
Ever since he was little, he had known his parents were both overly fond of their jobs and weren’t particularly interested in him. Which is why he tried his best to be the kind of child who wouldn’t require too much of their time and effort, the kind who wouldn’t get under their feet.
Being a kid who never gave his parents any trouble would at least stop them being in a bad mood and keep things settled on the home front. In that way, Yoshimine, who was always the one holding the fort, could breathe easy.
And the few times that the whole family was together, things did go smoothly. But maybe all he’d done was to prioritize what was easy in the short term.
There’s a proverb that says a child is the glue that keeps a husband and wife together. A child who was never any trouble might keep things peaceful from day to day, but when push came to shove, that child would finally come unstuck.
Maybe the kind of kid who needed more parental affection and made trouble would have been the glue that would have held their marriage together.
Enough.
Yoshimine shook his head hard to put a stop to the thoughts spinning around in it. There’s no use thinking about something that can’t be undone. It’ll just let this lump grow bigger. It’s already pretty big.
‘Still,’ he said aloud. ‘Parents get divorced all the time.’
He tried to say it casually, but the tail end of his words wavered.
‘You had it a lot harder than me, didn’t you, Satoru?’
‘But I never once experienced my parents acting like I was a nuisance, because they were gone.’
There was nothing Yoshimine could say to that. The lump in his throat burst at long last.
When his sobbing finally subsided, Satoru asked, ‘Want one?’ and held out in his soiled fingers a luscious red tomato.
REALLY, NOW, I thought, looking at Satoru.
I was out of the basket. Not sure why, but Satoru had left the door open, telling me to come out whenever I felt comfortable, but the thought of that tabby kitten with the stupid name, Chatran, invading my space was unbearable, truth be told.
Hey, tabby. You know your owner was abandoned by his parents, too. But the tabby was so engrossed in playing with his toy mouse he didn’t hear me. When are you going to realize how pointless it is to play with a fake mouse, eh?
Having a decent conversation with an itty-bitty kitten this young was out of the question. He was of the age when he’d eat, leap around a bit, then suddenly flop down asleep in the middle of whatever he was doing, as if his batteries had run down.
Even when he was in the middle of saying something, if a breeze made the curtain flutter he would drop everything and leap at it. Was I that silly when I was his age? I think I had a bit more sense than that. Well, cats mature emotionally at different rates. I felt sorry for the poor kid, compared to a rare, wise cat such as myself.
Stitching together his fragmen
ted history, I gathered that this orange tabby was the runt of the litter, and when his mother had moved home, he hadn’t been able to keep up and got left behind.
A fact of life in the feline world. Kittens that are awkward to bring up, or slow, are easily abandoned. No matter how hard she tries, a mother cat has only so much milk, and she won’t waste any on a lethargic kitten.
One of my siblings was like that. Overshadowed by the rest of us, it was the kind of kitten you were never sure was there or not, and one day we suddenly noticed it was gone, as if it had never existed.
This orange tabby was on the small side for his age; to be honest, not the type you’d expect to make it in life. Yoshimine had done a great job bringing him up. And despite him being the ill-mannered kind who’d grab you by the scruff of the neck the first time he met you, Yoshimine hadn’t just looked the other way when a troublesome kitten turned up, so it was clear to me he was an individual who had a lot of love to give.
Even people who are big and strong are sometimes thrown in the gutter. If he’d been a cat, Yoshimine would have been the top priority in the litter.
Okay, be that as it may …
You probably shouldn’t have made it, little kitty, yet you’ve been given a new lease of life, so shouldn’t you show some gratitude to Yoshimine for that? Yes, you. I’m talking to you.
The orange tabby looked as though he was listening for a moment, but then, clearly not getting what I was saying, he started to play around with my tail. Hmm. Guess I’ll have to simplify this a bit.
Tell me, do you like Yoshimine?
I seemed to have got through. As he chewed on my tail, he nodded. Hey, that hurt. I flipped my tail up.
If you like Yoshimine, don’t you want to make him happy?
The orange tabby grabbed my tail again and recommenced chomping with his mini jaws.
I told you, that hurts! I flipped it up again.
You do know Yoshimine wants cats to catch mice for him, don’t you? So, if you can become a real cat who can catch mice, I’m sure Yoshimine will be very pleased.
The orange tabby stopped his chomping for a moment. I seemed to have struck a chord.
But the way you’re behaving, forget it. You’re useless. You couldn’t even catch a lizard, let alone a mouse.