by Misumi Kubo
Mom insisted, so Takumi and I took turns going into the bathroom to dry ourselves off. When I put the towel up to my face, the smell of the fabric softener Mom always used felt like the most comforting thing in the world. I took off my crumpled dress, and there was my polka- dotted bra. I unhooked it, and just as I tossed it into the clothes hamper, there was a huge peal of thunder and the lights went out. It was pitch dark, and I couldn’t see a thing, but I somehow managed to put my clothes on and then, feeling my way with my hand along the hallway, made it into the living room where Mom and Takumi, now wearing my brother’s shirt, were standing, looking out the window, at the rain pouring down the windowpanes. It was like the whole house was being given a good clean in a car wash. Mom squealed as she lifted a foot in the air. I looked down to see a stream of water flowing slowly into the room from under the door to the hall. Now it was my turn to squeal.
“Mom, we saw Yusuke standing on the balcony when we came in.”
Before I’d even finished speaking, Mom was away up the stairs, so fast it was hard to believe it was the same mother of mine who usually struggled so much for energy. Takumi and I followed. The door to my brother’s room was locked, so we went out onto the balcony from my room. My brother was sitting there with his legs crossed, the rain tipping down on him like a waterfall.
“Get inside, right now!” Mom’s voice was practically drowned out by the sound of the rain and the roaring of the wind. I grabbed my brother’s arm and pulled, but his body didn’t move an inch. It seemed like he had no intention of going inside.
“Those glasses are really dangerous with all this lightning.” Saying this, Takumi plucked Yusuke’s glasses off his face and threw them onto the bed in my room. My brother stood shakily to his feet. His white shirt stuck to his skin. He pointed toward the river and shouted with a smile.
“You see! I told you! In no time at all, the river will breach its banks and come for us. It will sweep this house away. We shall all be engulfed!”
At that moment there was a noise like a match being struck, and the pitch-black sky grew as light as if it was full of burning magnesium, like I’d seen in science class. Then there was this noise, like a bunch of enormous drums were being beaten all at once, and a thick, blue-white band of light dropped straight down into the center of the riverbank. We saw it touch the top of the big tree in the baseball field, and then, for just a moment, the outline of the whole tree was picked out of the darkness. The strip of light that ran straight down the tree divided itself into thin threads, spreading out in all directions across the ground.
Takumi threw himself on top of me, covering my body with his. I looked to my brother to see Mom had wrapped her arms around him and was clinging to him tight. He was staring dazedly at the flames rising up from the top of the tree. Takumi and I grabbed my brother’s arms and pulled, while Mom shoved him from behind. She made it inside the room last, and fastened the balcony door behind her. All four of us were soaked through and panting. Mom stood up shakily from where she was squatting on the floor, went up to my brother, and whacked him over the top of the head.
“I won’t let you die in this house, you hear? Your father built this place. He worked himself to the bone and built this house to protect you and Nana.”
Mom was standing with her hands on her hips in front of my brother, in a super-imposing way. I remembered how, before she came down with menopausal disorder, she’d often used this pose when she was telling me off for something or other. My brother had covered his head with his hands and was staring at the floor.
“I won’t have it, you hear? I won’t let you die before me!”
Mom’s shoulders heaved as she shouted, and she looked as though her whole body was going through the wringer. With each new bolt of lightning, the dark room would light up just for a moment. Between the noisy gusts of rain, I thought I heard a sniffling noise. At first I figured it was my brother, and looked at him. Then I realized. It wasn’t my brother that was crying, but Takumi, next to me. Soon enough, Mom and my brother noticed, too, and looked at him in surprise. It seemed like he was trying desperately to hold it in, but his shaking shoulders gave him away.
“I’m really sorry, I just, I cry at everything,” he said in a hiccupy voice. Mom looked at him, then at me, and a faint smile came across her face. Someone’s stomach let out a big rumble.
“That wasn’t me!” I said.
Mom smiled. “I know it wasn’t,” she said. She went down the stairs, and I followed. The water was lapping against the bottom step, and all our slippers and sandals were floating their way down the hall. With water washing round my ankles, I moved down the pitch-black hallway, pulled a bunch of towels from the rack by the bathroom sink, and carried them back upstairs, where I handed them to my brother and Takumi. My brother was leaning up against the wall and Takumi against my bed, both of them hanging their heads. Mom came upstairs cradling bottles of water, tea, and juice, and a bunch of tins of food to her chest.
“I didn’t make any dinner today. I couldn’t get to the shops. I know a canned meal is hardly ideal right now, but please help yourself, Takumi.”
Mom peeled back the lids from a selection of cans—mackerel broiled in miso, grilled chicken, sweet corn, peaches—and placed them open on the floor. I took the plastic plates and forks out of the rucksack Dad had prepared for earthquakes and other emergencies and handed them out. I lit a scented candle and placed it down in the middle of where we were all sitting. Takumi started in on the miso-marinated mackerel that Mom had dished out onto plates. My brother picked up the can of grilled chicken and began shoveling its contents into his mouth at extreme speed.
“I think it was Yusuke whose stomach was rumbling,” I said meanly, but Mom darted me a look that meant stop it.
“This isn’t going to be enough, is it?” she said and went back downstairs, and I went with her, into the kitchen.
“I think this rice should still be okay.” As Mom opened the lid of the rice cooker, steam rose up, and beneath it I could see the white rice sparkling in the dark of the kitchen. The nori in the drawers under where the plates were kept had gone soft with all the moisture in the air, so we left it, and made just plain rice balls with salty dried plums in the middle.
Most of the rice balls were gobbled down by Takumi and my brother in record time. Watching the two of them silently making their way through the rice and the tins, Mom looked very pleased. The candle flame flickered, casting shadows of the four of us on the wall. The whole thing reminded me a lot of camping. After a bit, Mom went out onto the landing and shone the Maglite from the emergency rucksack down the stairs to get a better look at the first floor. It was too dark to see well, but it seemed as though the water level was rising even higher. The wind and the rain were showing no intention of easing up, and I had the sense that this house was going to be submerged, along with the entire town, just like my brother had warned. Because my stupid brother had left the balcony door wide open, his room was totally drenched, and so it was decided that we’d all sleep in my room.
“I’ll stay awake and keep watch, so you all go ahead and get some rest,” Mom said.
“We’ll take turns,” I said. “You can sleep first.”
I persuaded her to lie down on my bed, and Takumi, my brother, and I settled down on sheets and blankets laid out on the floor, with me at the foot of the bed and my brother and Takumi close to the door. I lay sucking on the rainbow-colored hard candies that I’d found in the emergency rucksack, turning the handle of the wind-up radio.
Interspersed with a scraping noise like someone running their nails down a wall, I could hear snippets of meaning: rainfall exceeding four inches per hour . . . The M—— River has exceeded the critical water level . . . 874 households in T—— City have been inundated above floor level . . .
Hearing the male presenter’s voice coolly announcing these facts, I suddenly started to feel scared, and turned the tuner knob until I found a music station. They were playing slow mus
ic, the kind we used to listen to in the car when we were with Dad. Every summer, Dad had taken us on vacation to a seaside town. I remembered how, after all the traffic jams, the car sickness, and the fights with my brother in the cramped back seat, I would catch a glimpse of the blue line of sea in the distance. Ignoring Mom’s warnings not to, I’d open the car window just a crack and race with my brother to see which of us could smell the sea first.
“Oh, this sounds familiar,” my brother said from where he was lying staring up at the ceiling.
“‘Summer Day Love,’ it’s called,” Mom said from the bed. I turned the handle of the wind-up radio again, as if I was reeling in a fish I’d just caught, and then set the radio down beside my head.
The station kept on playing the kinds of songs we had listened to in Dad’s car. At that time, I’d found the music boring, old-fashioned, and impossibly uncool, but now I could have happily listened to it forever. After a while, I heard Mom and Yusuke snoring lightly. The rain was still falling heavily, and the whole house seemed to be swaying in the wind. I heard a moaning sound, then saw Takumi turn in his sleep. His body was lying right alongside mine. I lifted myself up and looked at his face, which was down by my feet. In the light of the candle now placed on my desk, I could see it pretty clearly. He was sleeping like a baby.
I looked up at the ceiling, stretched my arms and legs, and let out a huge sigh. It had been a long day. And this, I thought, this was my summer vacation—the summer vacation of my fifteenth year. I was still a virgin in an A cup, and now I was trapped inside my own room by the rain. Sleeping next to me was Takumi, who was depressed because someone had spread photos and videos of him having cosplay sex with a housewife all over the internet and he couldn’t get hard any more, and who also happened to be the person I liked the most in the whole world. I turned to the left, so my face was right beside the sole of one of his bare feet. Then I stuck out my tongue and licked it. It tasted kind of salty. Once the rain stopped, I thought, I’d have to go and return the towel and the raincoat and stuff to Takumi’s mom. Then, I’d march up to Takumi’s room, sit on top of him, and punch him. I’d sit smack bang in front of him with Ryota, and down a whole can of tangerine juice in one go. I didn’t care if he started to hate me. I’d keep going to his room until I felt satisfied, I decided. I kissed the sole of his foot. Then I shut my eyes and felt myself falling straight into a deep sleep.
“How on earth did this wind up here?” Dad smiled in amazement as he picked up a plastic potty from where it was lying in our garden and flung it into a garbage bag. Our garden was in a total state, full of all kinds of crap the river had carried here. Around Dad went, picking each thing up with his rubber-gloved hands. The night of the crazy rain, he had driven all the way back here from Tohoku. He was so worried that he couldn’t get in touch with us, so when he’d opened the door to my bedroom and found me, Mom, Yusuke, and Takumi all lying there snoring, he felt kind of angry in spite of himself. He smiled as he told me that.
It’s been decided that, starting in September, my brother will go live with Dad. He’s going to take a break from college and work for a while in the factory. Since the day of the storm, my brother has started coming out of his room and spending more and more time in the living room. He’s started eating Mom’s cooking like before, or rather in even greater quantities than before, so that his body, which was all skin and bones, has rapidly filled out again.
Now, he was watching a program on the TV called Total Eclipses Around the World. He looked so serious and into it, and I could see Mom and Dad throwing worried looks in his direction, so I called out, “Hey, this isn’t giving you funny ideas again, is it?”
“No, no, no! It’s nothing like that, I assure you,” my brother said, blushing like crazy.
I’d sat down Mom on a stool and was dyeing her hair, which was going pretty gray. I daubed the dye around her temples and her part, taking care not to get any on her scalp.
“Hey, Yusuke, you’re the only one who’s not doing anything,” I said. “Why don’t you make us some lunch? Anything’s fine, curry or whatever you can do. There’s rice already cooked.”
Hearing this, my brother stood slowly to his feet and looked at me. “How does one make curry?”
“There’s some roux in the cupboard. It’s all written in the instructions on the packet. A person who can’t make curry from a packet isn’t going to make it to the 2035 eclipse, you know!”
Mom slapped my backside.
For the next few minutes, we heard a whole variety of noises from the kitchen: crashes, and thuds, and ows, and ahs. Then silence. After a while, I smelled something burning. I ran into the kitchen and saw the largest pan we owned filled to the brim with curry, bubbling over furiously. My brother was sitting on the chair in the kitchen, absorbed in some book. I turned the hob off, and thrust a ladle right down to the bottom of the pan. Just the texture of it told me that the curry was burnt beyond any possible salvation.
“You’re such an idiot!”
Hearing this my brother finally took his eyes off his book and looked up at me.
“I think the same thing about myself sometimes,” he said, dead serious.
Although the curry tasted of little except burned matter, and although the carrots and potatoes that were supposed to be lumps had now dissolved into mush, we ate it for lunch anyway.
“Hey, this is perfectly edible!”
“It’s actually pretty good!”
As I watched Mom and Dad piling compliments on the first meal my brother had ever made, I thought there really was something kind of weird about them. Still, despite all their praise, they didn’t eat very much of it. I, on the other hand, was so hungry that I had a second helping of what had to be the most disgusting curry I’d ever eaten. From the TV, which had been left on, we heard a voice say, “The next total solar eclipse visible in Japan will take place in 2035.”
How old would I be in 2035? I wasn’t smart, and I couldn’t do the calculation quickly. But even if the world was going to end then, I was going to stick around until that point. I’d have lots of mind-blowingly amazing sex (hopefully with Takumi), and lots of babies (hopefully Takumi’s). They could just try to stop me. As I thought that, I took my third helping of curry. My brother shot me a look like I was some kind of bizarre, exotic species of animal he’d never seen before. A dragonfly came flying in from somewhere, perched on the index finger of my hand that was holding the spoon, and then flew off again. It wouldn’t be long before summer was officially over.
4
A Goldenrod Sky
BACK WHEN I WAS in elementary school, I went on a school trip to the local transportation museum.
I remember how all the boys in our class stood with their noses pressed up against a glass case, totally enraptured by the model railroad inside. The case was about the size of the tatami-floored room I slept in. Inside it was a diorama of a miniature town with a river gently snaking through it and a set of mountains behind it. Encircling the town was a golden train track. The town had a station, a shopping arcade, a hospital, a factory, a bridge, a bus stop, and lots and lots of houses with little pointed roofs.
Around me, my friends were pointing excitedly at the trains racing by, globs of spit speckling the glass as they shouted out, “It’s an 100-Model Shinkansen!” and, “Look, look, a Super Azusa!” and “An eight-carriage Naha!”
What I was staring at wasn’t the trains, though, but the tiny people dotted about the town. A man in a suit carrying a briefcase, a station worker cleaning the platform, a mother pushing a stroller, construction workers mending the roads, a farmer tending his field, and schoolkids with big leather backpacks on their backs—the town contained all kinds of people.
Then I glanced toward the river and noticed the figure of a man in a gray shirt and black trousers lying facedown right in the middle of the road. A bright yellow train, the kind used for cleaning the tracks, raced along the sharply curved railway track right next to the man and off into t
he distance. I stared at that man for a long time. I felt like I’d seen that outfit, the gray shirt and the black trousers, somewhere before. Then I realized. I was pretty sure it was the same thing my dad was wearing in the photo of him holding me as a baby. He’d died not long after that.
The lights in the miniature town gradually dimmed, marking the shift from evening to night. The utility poles, the stations, and the windows of the pointy-roofed houses all lit up in orange.
As if from afar, I heard our teacher calling out for us to gather round, that it was time to go. Even after my friends dashed to the exit, I stayed on, staring at that facedown figure. It seemed as though, among all the people in the town with their specially allotted roles—station worker, businessman, mother, schoolchild—only the man spread-eagled on the road was without a proper part to play.
The teacher came up again and said in a low voice, “Come on, Goldie, let’s move it.”
His fist came flying at my head.
Goldie is what everyone calls me. It’s a bit of a long story, but basically it comes from goldenrod, which is the name of a kind of weed that grows down by the riverbank. The goldenrod plants are really tall, and I was the tallest in the class, and it has these yellow flowers that are exactly the same color as the sweatshirt I was always wearing. I can’t remember precisely when it happened, but at some point the name stuck, and even the teachers started using it. As I rubbed the part of my head that had been thwacked, I took one more look at the man lying down before I walked away. He looked like he might be having a tantrum slap-bang in the middle of the street, lying there sobbing and refusing to get up. You’re a grown-up, I thought as I walked away. You’re supposed to be a grown-up, so just pull yourself together.
In front of the station is a strip of shops—a supermarket, a couple of convenience stores, fast-food restaurants, and a secondhand bookstore. Walk a little farther, and you find an arcade with shops of the same kind you’d find if you got off at any station on this train line, and some relatively new residential areas with apartment buildings and houses. In the gaps between these, you find the odd pear orchard. Encircling this plain old town, with nothing much to distinguish it from any other, is a band of low mountains.