Takeru froze, but Ken didn’t notice. He kept on talking.
“It was his grandpa’s idea t’name him Yamato, they say. His grandpa was in the navy and wanted him named after the battleship.”
Takeru was no longer listening. He didn’t mean to say anything, but his lips moved, “Ken…”
“Yeah?”
“Were you good friends with my mother?”
“Me and your ma?”
Takeru nodded.
“Course! At your age we played ’gether nearly every day.”
Ken’s eyes narrowed, as though he were looking at something far away. Did he know that this scenery, steeped in memories, was something Takeru’s mother hated? Perhaps he did. His tone suddenly changed.
“Your ma ever mention me?”
Takeru thought for a moment, then, tilting his head, said simply: “I don’t remember.”
Ken sighed.
“Oh,” he said sadly. “Well, no surprise. It was more’n twenty years ago now.”
Takeru recalled the stifling heat of the apartment. Upstairs in an old wooden housing block, facing west. The largest window, opposite the entrance, looked out over what people called an orchard, surrounded by indistinguishable houses and other low-rise apartment blocks. He didn’t know what sort of trees were in the orchard. Some people said peach. Some said plum. Others said they were grapevines. They had been planted neatly at even spaces, and were about the height of an adult, but Takeru didn’t remember ever seeing fruit on them. In fact, he couldn’t remember them having leaves, just bare branches stretching out like the arms of people pretending to be monsters, scaring children. So, to Takeru the orchard wasn’t green. It was brown, the color of earth, dry earth. An assembly of blighted trees, standing neatly in line. In a way, they were stranger than monsters.
In the afternoon the sun came directly through the west window. It was hard to bear, especially without curtains, and they didn’t have any yet, though they must have been in Akeroma for over six months. His mother was too busy even to go and buy curtains.
The hall led into the kitchen, and beyond that were two tatami-matted rooms. In the farthest room were two unopened cardboard boxes against the wall. At first Takeru thought he might use them as a bed. It seemed like a good idea. But there were no cushions to put on top and use as a mattress, and of course a futon was more comfortable for sleeping anyway.
Takeru soon lost interest in the cardboard boxes, but his brother didn’t. His brother was two years older than Takeru, though a similar height. When he wasn’t asleep, he often sat quietly on one of the boxes. He sat bent forward, and now and then a thread of saliva fell from his open mouth. Takeru would look away, but sometimes he couldn’t fail to see saliva that had hit the floor. An ant crawling around on the tatami would occasionally fall victim to spit falling from the sky. It would writhe around, waving its legs and antennae. With the air so hot, the liquid quickly evaporated, but even so those ants must still have wanted revenge. Takeru wondered if his mother had known that. Though he spent so much time sitting on the hard boxes, his brother never slept on them. Even he knew they wouldn’t be comfortable.
There was no air-conditioning in the room and no electric fan. The window was always open, but that just made sleep more difficult. Instead of a breeze it seemed to let in only hot air and the noise of the air-conditioning units on the buildings nearby. At first the two boys had slept on a futon, but it soon grew damp with sweat, so they began to lie directly on the tatami floor.
Takeru continued to use the futon as a pillow, but one day he noticed black marks along its edge. He thought they were ants. Not wanting to be bitten, he tried to squash one with his finger. But no, it wasn’t an ant. It was some kind of mark. He stood up and turned the futon over. Both the futon and tatami mat beneath were covered in mold, growths of various sizes. He shivered. He dropped the futon and it fell to the floor with a soft thud. Wisps of cotton stuffing floated up into the air. He decided he’d never use the futon again. He wanted to do something about the mold, but he didn’t know what. He looked at his brother, who was sleeping on his stomach as always, his cheek flat against the unswept tatami.
There were black spots on his brother’s bare calf. Takeru shuddered. Was his brother developing mold too? He lifted his brother by the shoulders and turned him over. His body was light, far easier to maneuver than Takeru had expected. He looked at the dull-colored skin of his brother’s chest and protruding belly. To his relief there was no mold to be seen. The black spots on his brother’s calf must have been ants. Takeru was angry. He wanted to squash the ants, but they’d disappeared.
The apartment was on the corner of the block, adjacent to an old concrete building that was being used by a construction company for offices and worker housing. Immediately opposite the window on the north side of the apartment was a grimy sliding window in the other building. It looked almost close enough for an adult to stretch out and touch. Its metal frame was damaged and had been taped. The screen was torn in one corner. At ground level, the gap between the buildings was strewn with empty cans and plastic bags. There were some rain-soaked newspapers and magazines too. The plastic bags quivered, so there must have been wind down there. But no breeze came through the window of the apartment. It had been left open morning, noon, and night and wouldn’t close. There must have been too much dust around the frame. An adult might have been able to close it, but it was too hard for a child like Takeru, and it would have been even more difficult for his brother. What if the two of them had tried together? But his brother never came over to give a hand when Takeru was battling with the window. He just lay there with his eyes closed, his bare belly rising and falling. It was hard to tell whether he was sleeping or awake.
How did they live, these two, after their mother had gone? They managed because there was always somebody there to reach out to them. Literally reach out.
One day, that window in the building next door opened and a black arm came out. The hand dropped a cigarette butt. The back of the hand was dark, but the palm was pale. A black face appeared at the window. Takeru couldn’t hide his surprise, and the man grinned, widely set teeth standing out white against his dark skin. Gap-toothed, thought Takeru.
Takeru had seen him before. He’d been wearing gray-green overalls the first time—it must not have been so hot then. Takeru had been on the way to a convenience store, waiting to cross the road where it ran under the highway.
The sidewalk on the far side of the road was being widened. A dusty, rusting truck was parked there, and the man was walking past it, pushing a wheelbarrow piled with pieces of asphalt ripped up from the road. He looked different than the other workmen. For one thing he was the only one wearing a helmet. It looked very big for his head. What struck Takeru more than that, though, was that his head seemed small for his body—he had a small head but very long limbs. Most remarkable of all was the way he walked, the way his body moved—to Takeru’s eyes it seemed to follow a different rhythm than the other men, a different kind of music. He immediately thought he must be foreign. The signal to cross turned green, and just as Takeru reached the other side of the road the man passed close by, now walking in the opposite direction, his wheelbarrow empty. Takeru noticed a smell as the man passed, as though the air were tinged with some kind of spice. He’d seen him again more recently, working on the demolition of a big old house on a busy road not far from the apartment. There’s the African, Takeru had thought. But he wasn’t African. Well, no. He was African but, then again, he wasn’t.
Takeru didn’t know that the man lived in the building next door. But when he thought about it, the blue truck with filthy mud flaps—the one that was always parked in front of the construction company office—was the same vehicle he’d seen that day on the side of the road. And he knew there were living quarters above the offices. A man who lived there had bought him a can of soda shortly after they’d moved in.
Yes. That’s right. That man, the one who bought him a soda, had rea
ched out a helping hand as well. He was from the north—Tohoku—but he said he’d been working in Tokyo for a long time. Takeru forgot his name but it would come back to him later, when he saw Hii-chan standing in front of the vending machine at the gas station in the village by the sea. Not that the man’s face had resembled Hii-chan’s in the slightest.
Sasaki had had thinning black hair, always combed back over his scalp, and a neat little moustache under his nose. He carried around the sweet smell of hair oil or eau de cologne, mingled with the clean smell of soap. He often bought Takeru a soda at the vending machine by the office entrance. He was soft-spoken and polite.
He said he had a grandson about Takeru’s age and that he often bought him soda too. He had to be secretive about it, though, he said, as his daughter would get mad if she found out.
“You’re a grandad?” asked Takeru, surprised. It seemed strange. Sasaki certainly wasn’t young, but he didn’t look old enough to have a grandchild.
“Certainly am,” he said. “Will your mom get annoyed if she sees me buying you soda?”
“I think it’ll be okay,” said Takeru.
Because there’s probably no chance of her seeing—is that what Takeru meant?
“Come to think of it, I haven’t seen your mom recently. Is she busy?”
Takeru nodded.
“She’s a beautiful lady,” said Sasaki.
Takeru wondered if Sasaki had ever really seen her. Perhaps he was thinking of someone else.
“She’s kind!” Takeru said.
What made him say that? He sounded angry, though Sasaki didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he just pretended not to notice.
“Very, very kind,” said Takeru, as though telling himself.
“Is she now?” said Sasaki. “I wonder how old she is. I’d guess about the same age as my daughter…”
Takeru thought for a moment.
“I think she’s about thirty,” he said vaguely.
“She must have gotten married very young. My daughter married when she was nineteen. She’d just had a baby.”
“Can people have babies before they’re married?” asked Takeru.
“Babies are born whether their parents are married or not,” Sasaki replied, laughing.
Takeru laughed too, to be polite, not knowing what was funny.
Sasaki carried on, in a sadder voice.
“Once she was married she had another baby very quickly, and then right after that she got divorced.”
Takeru wanted to know more about Sasaki’s grandchildren.
“Do the children live with their mother?” he asked.
“They all live in my house,” he said.
Sasaki took a cell phone from his pocket and showed Takeru the photo on the screen—his daughter and two grandchildren. His daughter was plump, with dyed-brown hair and narrow eyes. She didn’t look much like Sasaki. The boys were chubby too. Their heads were shaved, and they wore matching Pokemon T-shirts (Takeru immediately recognized the monster as Raikou). They looked a lot like their mother.
Sasaki put the cell phone back in his pocket and glanced at the vending machine.
“Does your kid brother want soda too?”
“He’s not my kid brother…”
No matter how many times Takeru told him otherwise, Sasaki kept thinking Takeru was the elder brother. It’s true that Takeru was slightly taller, and when the two brothers walked together it was Takeru who kept looking back anxiously. It was Takeru who took out the soda cans when they thumped down into the dispensing bin of a vending machine, and it was his brother who waited to be given one. It wasn’t just soda that Sasaki bought them. He often got sweets or ice cream for them at the convenience store or supermarket. It was Takeru, of course, who took charge of the plastic bag, and who took something out of it to give to his brother. It was Takeru who, placing the treat in his brother’s hand, made him hold it against his chest to keep it from falling. But his brother was the older one and Takeru the younger one.
After a while Sasaki didn’t seem to be around anymore. Takeru had often heard him say he was old and wanted to stop working. He must have gone back up north to Tohoku—Aomori, maybe, or Iwate—and be living happily with his daughter and grandsons.
With Sasaki went Sasaki’s hands—the hands that passed drinks and snacks to Takeru—small strong hands with thick fingers formed by years of hard manual labor. And just about the time those hands disappeared, that black arm stretched out from the building next door, that big long-fingered hand.
The strong-featured dark face at the window smiled.
“Konnichi-wa,” its owner said, Hello.
He continued speaking for a bit, but the only word Takeru understood was Konnichi-wa.
A furrow eventually appeared between the man’s eyebrows. He pointed to himself and very slowly said: “Joel.”
Takeru, probably staring in amazement, pointed to himself and said: “Takeru.”
Joel disappeared for a few moments. Then, coming back, he leaned out of the window and stretched his hand toward Takeru. It was like a big black flower. The long fingers reached close to Takeru’s face. They held a plastic bag, and inside the bag were rolls of bread.
At first Takeru didn’t understand.
“Tabete,” said Joel, Eat. He swung the bag gently. It rustled.
Takeru clasped the bag with both hands.
“Arigato,” he said quietly.
Joel’s long-lashed eyes gleamed happily.
To make sure he was understood, Takeru, very shyly, almost inaudibly, spoke again:
“Thank you,” he said in English.
Joel’s smile broadened.
“Chotto matte!” he said, Wait a second. He disappeared again.
“Nonde,” he said, coming back, Drink. He held out a two-liter bottle of Fanta Orange.
His long fingers reached almost all the way around the bottle.
“Thank you!” said Takeru, hugging it to his chest. He might have been holding a baby.
Joel appeared at the window often after that, and passed Takeru bread, rice balls, and drinks. Takeru didn’t really know how to react, so he always accepted them in silence. Well, not exactly silence: he never forgot to say thank you or arigato. He and his brother savored every mouthful. No. They gobbled it all down like animals.
Takeru had no idea why the African man next door would be so kind to them. Perhaps all African people were like that. There’d been a boy named Daisuke Jones in sixth grade at Takeru’s school in Momono. He had coffee-colored skin and curly hair, and everyone called him DJ. Takeru and DJ were in a group of kids who walked to school together. DJ was always very kind to the younger children. He sometimes gave Takeru and the others rides on his shoulders. He was 180 centimeters tall and it felt amazingly high up there. When the children called him the Tokyo Sky Tree, which was then being built, he said no, he was the Sears Tower. He told them proudly that his daddy came from the city where President Obama used to work.
But Joel wasn’t African. He had said so himself. No, Takeru didn’t understand what Joel said. But one day Joel had shown him a map through the window. He unfolded it from a travel guide he’d gotten a hold of somewhere. The map showed a lot of islands in the ocean. In the area that Joel pointed to were names like “Haiti” and “Jamaica,” and, in bigger letters, “Gulf of Mexico” and “Caribbean Sea.” The coast of Africa was far away on the right-hand side of the map, all the way across the Atlantic.
The name Haiti reminded Takeru of Heidi, the little girl from the Swiss Alps. He also thought of Haiji, a classmate of his in first and second grades at Momono Elementary. Their names may have been similar, but Haiji was a big boy with a sharp, tanned face. He looked nothing like apple-cheeked Heidi, with her bright-colored clothes. They both had high-pitched voices, though, and laughed a lot. They both ran fast.
Takeru had heard of Jamaica of course. That was where Usain Bolt came from. In a way slim long-limbed Joel looked a little like Bolt to Takeru.
Th
e semester after the Beijing Olympics, the boys at school were always striking the bow-pulling pose before running during breaks or in P.E. class.
Takeru did it too, of course, not that it made him run any faster. Some of the older boys did it before their races on Field Day that autumn, and the spectators all cheered. Takeru hadn’t been chosen for the relay and always came last or second-to-last in his individual race. I hope my mother doesn’t see, he thought. But there was no chance of that. She had never come to a field day. Not once.
There were no school lunches on Field Day. Takeru’s mother didn’t give him a packed lunch, though. Instead, he was given some money to buy something at a convenience store. He didn’t tell anybody he didn’t have his own packed lunch. So how did anyone know?
When he arrived at the classroom that morning, Haruka Yuasa came over to him. She was a quiet girl, with short hair and round glasses. People said her grandparents owned the fields around the school. According to girls in the class who’d been over there to play, her family had a very big house. The grounds were vast, they said, with a storehouse and barn, and an officially protected keyaki elm that was over two hundred years old. The house also had a very rare old-fashioned veranda. Takeru had no clear image of what a veranda was then. He would suddenly remember Haruka one evening when he was having supper on the veranda at Mitsuko’s house. He’d feel a lump in his chest and want to cry—not knowing whether it was from happiness or sadness. Although he was in the same class as Haruka, they’d never been paired up or even put in the same group. He couldn’t remember speaking to her more than once or twice before.
“Takeru,” she said, coming up to his desk, “this is for you.”
She spoke in a hushed voice, as though confessing something she didn’t want anyone else to hear. Takeru looked down. On the desk she’d put something wrapped in a furoshiki cloth, tied firmly at the top. It was the shape of a small box.
“Lunch,” she said.
Lion Cross Point Page 4