He had sent Tokue a postcard saying that he and Wakana were coming to pay a visit. There was a chance it might not have been delivered yet, but he thought it unlikely she would be away from Tenshoen. He was fairly sure that if they just arrived things would work out somehow; he knew where she lived and if they did not find her at the shop they could go to her unit.
A canopy of inviting blue sky stretched across the woods at Tenshoen. Clouds of cherry blossom and gleaming chestnut leaves swayed in the breeze on the other side of the hedge.
‘The new school year starts soon and you’ll be moving up…It really does seem like spring now,’ Sentaro said.
‘Yep, spring’s here.’
‘The cherry trees are feeling at their best now too, I guess.’
‘Prob’ly.’
Wakana wasn’t being particularly communicative, so Sentaro decided to broach the topic himself.
‘I wanted to talk to you about something. About the canary…’
‘Marvy?’
‘Yes, Marvy. Tokue wants to let him go. She says she can tell he wants to be free.’
‘Um.’
‘You know Tokue wasn’t allowed to leave here for a long time, so I guess she understands what it feels like to be a bird in a cage. If he can fly, I think it might be better to let him go. If he has somewhere to go for food I’m sure he could survive in the woods here.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Wakana replied briefly, without even hesitating.
Sentaro was surprised at how readily she accepted the idea.
‘Also, you probably already know, but Doraharu is no longer.’
Wakana was walking behind Sentaro. ‘Yeah, I know.’ She paused a few beats before asking, ‘Why’d you quit?’
‘The owner didn’t think dorayaki were right for the times any more.’
‘I don’t have anywhere to go on the way home from school now.’
‘Surely not,’ Sentaro said.
‘Actually…’ Wakana drew closer.
‘What?’
‘I’m going to school part-time.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. So I can work during the day.’ The look in her eyes hardened for a moment.
‘Oh, is that so?’ Sentaro didn’t know what to say. He simply forged on. ‘Well, whatever happens, it’s up to you to make the best of it.’
‘That’s what everyone says. My homeroom teacher too. But nobody else is part-time.’
‘I suppose so,’ Sentaro said.
‘What about you? Did you go to a normal school? Did you study hard?’ she asked.
‘I went to normal school, but…’
Wakana made no reply and Sentaro looked back. He saw she was trailing her hand along the prickly hedge with a frown. ‘I’m the only one in my class who’ll study part-time.’
‘Oh…But you’ll…I’m—’
‘We don’t have any money. That’s why I have to get some work. That’s why I went to Doraharu – to ask for a job. But it was gone.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Me too. Tokue said before it’d be okay to work there. That’s why I was disappointed big time. And a bit mad too. Aren’t you going to make dorayaki somewhere else?’
‘Well, I’d like to.’
‘Yeah, I thought so.’
‘Wish I could open a shop with you.’
Sentaro was surprised at himself for saying such a thing, even if it was in jest. But in that moment, he felt as if he was throwing off his old self, the one who had withdrawn from the world ever since quitting Doraharu.
Wakana moved closer to Sentaro’s side to show her silent agreement. With her fingertips she tapped the bag slung from her shoulder.
‘I brought a present for Tokue.’
‘Really, what is it?’
‘Take a guess.’
Sentaro could not think of anything. He searched his mind and randomly came up with ‘A winter vest.’
‘Nope,’ Wakana teased him. ‘It’s already spring. Why would I get something like that?’
‘Okay, what? Give me a hint at least.’
‘It’s not food.’
‘I don’t know then.’
In the end Sentaro couldn’t guess. By now they had passed the hedge and reached the National Hansen’s Disease Museum. The cherry trees were in bloom here too, but the silence was pronounced, as always.
‘Ahh, here we are again.’ It wasn’t clear whether Wakana was speaking out of nostalgia or discomfort. They passed the statue of the mother-and-daughter pilgrims outside the museum entrance, and continued on the path along the edge of the grounds.
‘This blossom is amazing.’
‘Isn’t it? I feel like I’m in a dream.’
The avenue of trees lining the path was a magnificent sight. It seemed to Sentaro as if the trees had absorbed all surrounding light in order to shine it down on them from above. He saw other people, perhaps neighbourhood residents or former patients, out enjoying the spectacle.
‘Do you know where Tokue lives?’ Wakana asked.
‘I’ve never been there. But I know the address, so if we don’t find her at the shop we can check the map.’
‘Hmm,’ said Wakana with a doubtful nod.
As usual there were people gathered in the vicinity of the shop, passing the time of day. All were elderly. Many of the men wore sunglasses.
Sentaro peeked in through the open door. It was the time he had written on the postcard, but he didn’t see Tokue anywhere. ‘Looks like we’ll have to find her at home,’ he said.
Then Wakana gently prodded Sentaro’s elbow. ‘That lady over there is looking at us – we met her last time, didn’t we?’
The woman whom Sentaro remembered from his last visit rose from her seat at the farthest table.
‘Ah, it’s Miss Moriyama.’
Sentaro and Wakana nodded in greeting to her and waited as she slowly made her way over.
‘Hello. So we meet again.’ Sentaro deliberately spoke in a bright tone.
‘Ahh…’ Miss Moriyama faltered.
‘We came to see Tokue. I only just sent the postcard to say we’re coming so it might not have arrived yet.’
‘Ahh…’ Miss Moriyama covered her misshapen lips with one hand as she attempted to get words out. Then, at a complete loss, she closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Mr Tsujii. I took delivery of the postcard. Would you mind sitting down for a bit, please?’
Though gently expressed, there was no refusing her request. Sentaro and Wakana exchanged glances as they sat down in the seats Miss Moriyama indicated.
‘Mr Tsujii and…’ she paused, ‘Wakana.’
‘Yes, but that’s a nickname.’
‘I, ah, want to tell you something…’
‘What?’
There was a moment of silence. ‘Dear Toku passed away.’
Sentaro’s jaw dropped. He jumped to his feet. Wakana made a startled movement.
Sentaro felt as if an invisible fist of all the unseen forces in the world – wind, time and space – had suddenly struck him in the chest. He made stuttering sounds, unable to form words.
Miss Moriyama did not take her wizened eyes away from his face. ‘Toku gave me your contact address before. But I don’t know where it went. So last week I went to the shop, and found it was an okonomiyaki shop now. I asked the young man there if he knew your phone number, but he said he had no idea. I was in quite a pickle, I didn’t know what to do.’
Sentaro held his face in his hands, unable to speak. Belatedly, he bowed his head in thanks to Miss Moriyama.
It was all he could do to get the words ‘I’m so sorry’ past his lips.
‘It was ten days ago. When she passed away.’
‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true,’ Wakana repeated pleadingly.
‘I went to see her at home the day before. She looked exhausted. But she insisted it was only fever and didn’t want to go to the clinic. So I stayed with her. That was when she gave me a letter, just in case. I told her if she was that bad she should ask you
to come here, but she didn’t like the idea. A letter would be fine, she said, whatever happened.’
Sentaro shook his head. He couldn’t believe it.
‘Toku thought of you like a son, you know. It was pneumonia.’ She spoke bluntly, but her tone was not accusing.
Sentaro wanted to say something, but no words would come. Wakana sat rigidly next to him.
‘We gave her a private send-off. It would’ve been nice if you were there, but your workplace had changed and it seemed you had things going on. Anyway, it was all so sudden.’
Sentaro shook his head again.
‘Can I ask, err, about Tokue’s—’ His lips shook as he tried to get it out. ‘Tokue’s—’ he tried again, but broke down.
Miss Moriyama pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. Then she answered the question Sentaro had been trying to ask. ‘She’s…she was laid to rest in the charnel house. With her husband.’
‘Oh, I see,’ he managed to mutter, but then could not hold back any longer. He put his elbows on the table and covered his face as the tears trickled out. Wakana sat beside him, looking down and swallowing convulsively.
‘It’s good you came, though. It just shows that Toku’s thoughts reached you. Yes, it’s good…Why don’t you come and see where she lived? Would that be all right?’
Sentaro nodded silently.
‘Yes,’ Wakana said hoarsely.
28
Miss Moriyama led Sentaro and Wakana back along the road with rows of houses, turned a corner and stopped at the entrance to a grassy courtyard. It wasn’t that far from the shop. A nameplate on the side of the row building read ‘Green Wind’. They followed behind Miss Moriyama, walking on stepping-stones across the garden, past three identical units to the fourth one at the far end.
She opened an unlocked sliding window door. ‘You don’t mind going through the back, do you?’ she asked. ‘That’s what we always did.’
The timber frame around the entrance was worn down and white with use. They could see through the glass into a room with blue carpet flooring. A familiar birdcage was on the floor next to the window, but there was no Marvy inside. Sentaro darted a furtive glance at Wakana when he noticed. She was staring at the empty birdcage with tear-filled eyes.
‘Come in, please.’
It was a small six-mat room, roughly ten square metres in total. A sink and refrigerator could be seen in what was presumably the kitchen at the back. The wooden-plank ceiling looked as though it had been made from scrap wood. Yellowed plasterboard walls were stained dark in places. The only visible furniture was a chest of drawers, a writing desk, a chipboard box used for stowing books, and a small television. Bedding and other belongings were probably stored out of sight in the wall closet.
‘Is this where Tokue…in here?’
‘No. She passed away in the clinic ward. But it was so sudden. I really didn’t expect it.’
At Miss Moriyama’s urging, Sentaro and Wakana removed their shoes, leaving them in the garden, and stepped up into Tokue’s room. The kitchen area looked dim but it was sunny near the window.
There were several photographs on top of the chipboard box.
‘This is Toku with her husband, Yoshiaki,’ Miss Moriyama said, and brought her face up close to the photograph while she fumbled with her crippled fingers to pick up a stick of incense as an offering.
‘Tokue was so pretty.’ Wakana’s voice was thick, as if she had a stuffy nose.
It’s true, thought Sentaro.
The photographs were all black-and-white, probably taken when Tokue was in her twenties. The old-fashioned hairstyles gave them the appearance of scenes from an old film. Tokue looked vibrant, and not at all as if she were suffering from illness. With her shapely nose and eyes full of life, she resembled the young girl Sentaro had seen in his dream. She was casting a tender smile at the man standing by her side and he was clearly showing his adoration of this radiant young woman.
The photographs were confirmation of what Sentaro had heard from Tokue: her husband was a great deal older. The nape of his neck and the slope of his shoulders suggested a delicate, weakly constitution, which only confirmed what Tokue had told Sentaro. There was just one thing, however, that did not match with what she had told him. According to Tokue, her husband was tall, like a palm tree, so Sentaro had pictured a tall man, but the man in the photograph was of average height, and only slightly taller than Tokue.
This observation was no more than a momentary distraction as Sentaro’s thoughts soon took another direction. Tokue looked so alive in the photograph, he choked up again when he thought of the ordeal that overshadowed the lives of this smiling couple.
Sentaro and Wakana lit sticks of incense to place in front of the photos and put their hands together in prayer.
‘If it’s all right with you, there’re a few things I know Toku would be glad for you to have.’ Miss Moriyama indicated a wooden box next to a small oven in the corner of the kitchen. It was crammed with utensils for making confectionery.
‘We thought about dividing these up amongst ourselves to remember Toku by, but we’re all getting on as well, and it’s quite possible we could take something then keel over the next day.’ Miss Moriyama smiled thinly at them.
‘That’s why it’s better for someone like you to have them, Mr Tsujii. Everything in this room will be disposed of at the end of the month. It’ll all disappear.’
Sentaro knelt next to the wooden box and stretched his hand out to touch the cooking utensils Tokue had used in the Confectionery Group. There was a copper pot and a wooden spatula for making sweet bean paste, along with a silk mesh strainer for turning bean paste from coarse into smooth. There were attachments for branding patterns on rikkyu manju, the sweet bean paste buns served with green tea, a mould for making yokan adzuki bean jelly, and a steamer for making dango, sweet rice ball dumplings. There were also many utensils for Western-style confectioneries: bowls in various sizes, tart trays, pound-cake tins, a palette knife, and a beater. Inside a plastic bag was a collection of metal tips for a cream-piping bag.
Sentaro recalled what Tokue had said about making sweet bean paste when she first came to Doraharu.
I’ve been making it for fifty years.
He remembered it clearly, along with the fleeting glimpse of pride in her face when she spoke.
He touched the utensils lightly with his fingertips. ‘These have seen a lot of use.’
He held the aged wooden spatula out to Miss Moriyama. ‘I really think it’s better for them to go to the Confectionery Group.’
She shook her head. ‘The Confectionery Group hasn’t been active for the last ten years or more.’
‘What? But I thought…’
‘Once we were allowed to leave here, we could buy whatever we wanted. If we want cake we can buy it at the supermarket. There wasn’t the need any more for everyone to get together to make cakes.’
Sentaro nodded dumbly.
‘Toku always took an active lead, so I think she was sad when things got like that.’
‘She wanted to keep cooking, I suppose. Sweet things,’ Sentaro said.
‘Yes. Oh, there’s also—’ Miss Moriyama broke off and clamped her mouth shut.
Sentaro lined up all the items on the floor. Then he picked out several and wrapped them up in a cotton towel lying in the kitchen.
‘Thank you. I’d be grateful for these.’
When would he ever stand in front of a griddle again? He couldn’t be certain that day would come. Nevertheless, he would keep these cooking utensils to remember Tokue by.
When Sentaro had finished and sat down in the main room once again, he saw Miss Moriyama had placed a biscuit tin on the table.
‘This is it.’ She opened the lid to reveal a bundle of writing paper. ‘She gave me this letter before she was taken to the clinic ward. There was something she wanted to apologize to you about, and if she didn’t come back I was to pass this on.’ Miss Moriyama held the exposed notepaper o
ut to Sentaro. He exchanged glances with Wakana. ‘It’s not finished. That’s what she said.’
Sentaro took the letter from her.
‘If it’s all right with you, why don’t you read it here, where she wrote it? It took her quite a while to get it all down. You know how slow she was at writing.’
Sentaro nodded, and opened up the letter. Once again he saw that familiar wavy handwriting, each stroke of each character painstakingly drawn.
Dear Sentaro,
Please excuse me if I skip formalities. By the time you read this, the cold weather should be letting up. I thought about not writing this letter in case I come across as an old woman repeating the same thing over and over, like a broken record, but this cold is getting worse and I worry whether I’ll ever get to see you and Wakana again. So I decided to write because I want to apologize, and there’s something else I simply must tell you.
First, I must apologize for letting Marvy go quite early on, even though I promised to look after him. The more I listened to his chirping, the more I realized he was asking to be let out. I hesitated when I thought about Wakana, but having suffered myself from not being free to go outside, I felt there was no reason to keep a living creature with wings locked inside a cage.
Maybe Marvy won’t survive once he’s away from human protection, but when I saw him staring up at the blue sky and singing, ‘Let me out, let me out,’ I couldn’t stand it any more, and decided to set him free. Please tell Wakana I said sorry and pass on my apologies.
When I was little I didn’t have any special dream about what I wanted to do when I grew up. It was wartime, and we were all more preoccupied by a vague kind of anxiety about simply staying alive. But after I became ill and realized that I would never be able to go out into society again, I started dreaming about what I wanted to be, which was hard.
As I told you before, I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I like children, and I liked learning. I studied at the school here in Tenshoen, and when I grew up I taught lessons, after a fashion, to the children who were patients here.
But if I’m really honest, all I ever wanted was to go outside that fence. I wanted to go out into society and work at an ordinary job. I wanted that for the same reasons everyone does – to be a useful member of society and make the world a better place.
Sweet Bean Paste Page 13