Death and the Flower

by Kōji Suzuki

  It seemed cruel to continue asking a man about his dead girl. But Fujimura’s expression remained unclouded and his speech was smooth and calm.

  “Sounds like you’re a good dad.”

  He demonstrated how he picked her up at the daycare. After greeting the staffer at the entrance, he’d clap twice and call out, “Yoko.” His baby girl, playing in a corner of the classroom, would turn around upon hearing her father’s voice and gleefully crawl towards the entrance. Fujimura would throw his arms wide open and wait patiently. Her daughter’s face would grow bigger and bigger until she lunged into his arms.

  As Fujimura described the scene, he reflexively spread out his arms. There was nothing but a glass table in front of his eyes. On it was ice and bottles of whiskey and mineral water. But that wasn’t what his eyes were taking in. Rieko didn’t doubt that he was seeing the face of his one-year-old daughter recognizing and eagerly approaching him.

  “So cute,” Fujimura mumbled.

  Rieko stared at his profile in disbelief. Were she in his position, she would never have been able to visit her memories with such composure.

  Her daughter’s weight, which Rieko felt on her back, was real. Every time she turned her head, the sling strap bit painfully into her shoulder. When she imagined losing that presence, what welled up inside her was fear more than sorrow, a pain like her body being ripped to shreds. It wasn’t anything so gentle as sorrow.

  Suddenly feeling as though she couldn’t get enough air, Rieko loosened the sling strap and took a deep breath. She wanted to change the subject as quickly as possible. “Let’s have another drink, the three of us.”

  Arms still weakly held aloft, Fujimura looked as though his mind was still wandering in another dimension, but he came back to his senses when he heard Rieko. “So how’s work lately?” he asked, changing the subject himself.

  “It’s going all right,” Rieko nodded. When it came to whether her boutique was doing well, she could confidently answer in the affirmative. With caring for Kiko taking up so much of her time she couldn’t be at the store as much as before, but a partner she’d hired was markedly increasing their sales.

  “You must be quite the businesswoman.” Apparently having heard how Rieko had transformed her mother’s simple sundries store into a first-class boutique, Fujimura was trying to get her to spill the details of her success story.

  “It’s all thanks to everyone who helped me.” Rieko actually believed this—that she had been fortunate. Every time she needed assistance, someone was always there to lend a hand.

  Feeling certain that the helpers were men, Fujimura tried to make her confess the number of men she’d been with. His fugue-state gaze from just a moment ago had vanished without a trace and his eyes danced between Rieko’s knees and hips. He didn’t buy Rieko’s assertion that she’d only been with one other man besides her husband prior to her marriage. He warmly admired her body and seemed lost in free fantasies.

  It was obvious that raging sexual urges were screaming through Fujimura’s body. Rieko found it comical yet flattering at the same time. When he tried to act on his impulses and reached out, Kiko’s innocent face blocked his way. Seeing Fujimura retract his hand as if he’d smacked into a wall made Rieko laugh out loud.

  “Sorry this didn’t turn out the way you expected.”

  “What do you mean? I came all the way from Tokyo just so we could chat like this.”

  “Liar.”

  After two more hours, Kiko still showed no signs of falling asleep. The next day was going to be a rainy Sunday, and neither Rieko nor Fujimura had reason to worry about time. They spoke slowly and unhurriedly about work, children, the future.

  Kiko, ever sleepless, had her eyes wide open keeping watch. In this test of endurance, it seemed Fujimura didn’t stand a chance. His very desire was on the verge of wilting.

  Then, just as soon as the man stopped seeing the woman as a sexual object, the distance between them mysteriously shrank. Liberated from his one-track thought process, Fujimura was able to focus on better understanding his companion.

  The rain was still pouring, and even with the space heater cranked high it didn’t do much to warm the room.

  Kiko fell asleep with a nearly audible thud. It was almost dawn. It had been quite a long while since Rieko had conversed with a man until daybreak. Even with her ex, she’d never stayed up until dawn just to talk. She wondered for a moment if their both having a disabled child had kept the conversation going. That was true about her ex, too, so she didn’t think that was the reason.

  They stood up pretty much simultaneously.

  “Let’s get some sleep.”

  Two futon sets were laid out in one of the tatami rooms.

  Kiko slept breathing softly on Rieko’s right, and Fujimura, changed into pajamas, lay on her left.

  “Your efforts were in vain. Sorry, Mr. Babysitter from Tokyo,” intoned Rieko, trying to stifle a laugh.

  “The whole time I was driving to Shimizu from Tokyo, I was standing at attention.”

  “You can drive standing?” Rieko asked, absurdly, not grasping his meaning.

  Fujimura gave her some time to process his remark, leaving it up to her imagination.

  “Oh, God. Don’t say things like that in front of the baby.”

  “Yep, stood the whole way here, after I stopped on Tomei to call you. I thought about you the whole time. And that’s not all. I’ve been up these past five days, every day and night. You’re killing me.” It looked as though he really was in agony. “Killing me …” he repeated three more times. “I’m so exhausted from being up all the time that I’ve gone limp.”

  “Silly.”

  Sleep was sneaking up. Rieko turned towards Fujimura and asked, “Hey, can I put my feet in?”

  Fujimura didn’t respond.

  He probably wasn’t sure what she meant, so she explained, “I have poor blood circulation. My feet stay frozen even when they’re under the covers.”

  “Go ahead,” Fujimura said, his voice gone sleepy. Rieko moved so her body was at an angle and stuck her lower legs under his covers. Her feet must have been icy because he gave a small jolt, but he covered her feet with his calves to gently warm them. This was the first time their skins had touched.

  “Come hang out again, Mr. Foot Warmer.”

  There was no reply. Fujimura was already fast asleep. Even though she had made the first move, he was slumbering after simply warming her feet. She tried wiggling her toes to tickle his calf, but there was no reaction. His leg muscles were completely soft.

  His sleep breathing, at first regular, was soon interrupted by rough snoring. Rieko reached out above her pillow and groped about in the darkness until she could slide open the window and storm shutter a crack. She sat up. The watery rays of morning sunlight gave Fujimura’s face a pallid hue. His snoring didn’t seem like it would subside anytime soon. Kiko slept peacefully, utterly undisturbed by the noise, but Rieko wasn’t so lucky. She was strangely wakeful, so she leaned on her elbow and stared into Fujimura’s face for a while.

  Utterly exhausted, he slept like a log. His brows were deeply furrowed, and occasionally he mumbled something from his slackened lips. He had to have been making efforts to appear cheerful while he was awake. Asleep and unguarded, true emotions came to the fore, the heart mercilessly writ on the dreamer’s visage. His brimmed with suffering. What was he dreaming about? Who was he seeing?

  Rieko burrowed under the futon until it covered her shoulders and lay on her back. She wasn’t sleepy anymore—not because of the snoring, but because Fujimura’s grieving heart kept snagging her attention and keeping drowsiness at bay. If it were possible, she wanted to salve his wounds, even a little. It crossed her mind that if they’d embraced, naked, his face might have been a little more tranquil.

  Fujimura died on Wednesday, four days later. Before she could feel any shock, Rieko recalled the expression on his face early in his sleep. Manifestly, his vitality had seemed to be receding. P
erhaps for that reason, when his employer, the apparel manufacturer, called to inform her that he had died in an accident, Rieko found herself strangely accepting of the news.

  They gave her the new sales rep’s name, and she offered some vague reply and hung up. After a while, though, growing curious about the circumstances of Fujimura’s death, she called back the company to find out the time and place of the accident.

  On the first Tuesday of every month, Rieko took her daughter to a university hospital in Tokyo for a checkup. Rather than exams per se, it functioned more like a counseling session full of useful info for a parent with a hearing-impaired child. Rieko hadn’t missed a single session yet, and the next one was next Tuesday. Fujimura’s accident scene was fairly close to the university hospital. She should have enough time to lay some flowers. While they had only spent a single night in each other’s company, she could still vividly recall his warm legs. She felt it was somehow her duty to see where exactly that warmth had been snuffed out.

  Once March rolled around, the weather suddenly became spring-like and the days grew calm. On her previous trip to Tokyo the month before, it had been terribly cold and rainy, and she’d been forced to use taxis throughout to make her way around the city. With the first signs of spring, though, it felt like walking around an unfamiliar city a little might be nice. At around 2 p.m., after the checkup counseling, Rieko took a cab to Senzokuike, looked for a florist, and headed to the location of the accident on foot.

  Fujimura’s accident had occurred a week ago on the first gentle left-hand curve past Ring Road No. 7.

  As Rieko pushed the stroller, Kiko’s head lolled back and forth. Listening to the faint sounds of an unfamiliar place through her hearing aid, she was on the verge of falling into her afternoon nap.

  “After turning from Ring Road No. 7 onto Nakahara Street, you’ll see a big furniture store. It happened right in front of it,” Fujimura’s boss had said, tactfully explaining the geography.

  Before Rieko even noticed the furniture store, she spotted a bouquet of flowers at the foot of a tree along the edge of the road. There it was, the exact site of the accident. The flowers were already wilting. If they’d been left shortly after the accident, they’d have been doused in gas fumes for a week. After placing her newly purchased bouquet beside the old one, Rieko pressed her hands together before her face.

  It’s a gentle curve, but there were no skid marks from the brakes …

  Those words had kept coming back to her and made her want to see the site herself. Fujimura’s car had left no streaks on the road prior to crossing over the center line and slamming head-first into an oncoming truck. It was past eleven in the evening but he hadn’t been drinking. Rieko couldn’t help but wonder about Fujimura’s death.

  He suffered severe blunt force trauma. He died almost instantly.

  He hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.

  She stood on the curbstone so she could see the left-hand curve from Fujimura’s point of view. On that weekday afternoon, Nakahara Street bustled with traffic, but when the flow of cars periodically halted in sync with the lights, the yellow center line stood out distinctly. The street curved gently to the left on a slight slope. She imagined the street at night. Past eleven, traffic would be sparse. Illuminated by headlights, the center line was a boundary separating the world into this side and that side. What did Fujimura see beyond the yellow line?

  Rieko suspected that he might have committed suicide. Maybe “suicide” was too strong a word. He probably just made a simple mistake while driving his car. Yet, she felt like she’d glimpsed his temptation, his sudden desire to cross that line. Two weeks ago on Saturday, he’d had the chance to make love to Rieko but had fallen fast asleep instead. Might the black thing that had sidelined his sexual urge, that same perverse temptation, inserted itself into his driving?

  Grief over losing a child would persist deep down no matter how cheerfully one behaved on the surface. His son, too, had been born with a congenital heart defect. The same tragedy could easily repeat itself.

  Rieko shook her head. She tried putting herself in Fujimura’s position, but her mind furiously turned down the attempt—it was too tortuous even to imagine.

  They came for him, Rieko mumbled to herself. Then it struck her—maybe they didn’t “come” for him, but he had “gone” instead. Fujimura hadn’t been able to pick up his daughter after dropping her off at the daycare. He was now clapping, calling out “Yoko” and spreading his arms wide, most likely picking her up on the far side. She had no trouble picturing Fujimura’s face as he hugged close his approaching daughter.

  May he be beaming as he embraces her, Rieko prayed.

  She felt a sense of satisfaction at having seen something through to the end. She walked back down the street and hailed a cab right before the intersection. She collapsed the stroller and held her sleeping baby in her arms, climbed into the backseat, and told the driver her destination.

  “Tokyo station, please.”

  After the taxi made the gentle curve, thanks to the slight slope Rieko could see a patch of blue sky peeking through the windshield.

  Avidya

  I parked the car on the side of the road simply because I wanted to see the color of the water. The route had a succession of gentle curves, and even driving slowly, glancing down at the river would have compromised my focus. I decided it would be safer as well as more time-efficient to stop instead and have a good look at the river.

  After the Chuo Expressway’s Ina Interchange exit, the road split into northbound and southbound routes. The former led to Chino, and the latter through Hasemura and Misakubo, eventually intersecting with the Tokaido corridor. Our destination was a log cabin, apparently built on the remains of an abandoned school, in a settlement known as Ura located near the Southern Alps past Hasemura. Soon after turning south, one could see the long, thin Sanbi Reservoir stretched out along the dam. Running parallel to the road, the lake-like reservoir eventually thinned into a narrow river. There was a sign for the Mibu River before the bridge, and the character for “bu,” meaning peak, had aroused my curiosity as to the color of the water.

  My two daughters in the backseat had apparently fallen asleep simultaneously, and I could hear the sounds of their even breathing. Just a short while ago, the car had been filled with their high-pitched chatter as the eldest, having just entered elementary school, read out the phonetic spelling of every single sign and shop name she could see out the window, while her sister, just four years old, parroted everything. Their voices were earsplitting, and no matter how many times I scolded them for being noisy, there wasn’t a single minute of silence.

  When I turned back to glance between the seats I saw my daughters fast asleep, collapsed on top of each other. My wife, trapped in the back seat with her chest and knees pinned underneath the girls in what must have been an uncomfortable position, stared at a map. She directed a tired-looking face towards me, seemingly unperturbed by the sudden stop.

  “I’m just getting out for a second to take a look,” I stated and got out of the car.

  The heat outside was intense. The cicadas cried in chorus, the sound traveling from the surrounding mountains into the valley below like an avalanche, loud enough that the swaying of the undergrowth in the cedar forest seemed a response. Indeed, it was strange to see the rustling in the absence of wind. As I got closer to the riverbank and glanced down on the water, gooseflesh rose up across my body. This area near the foot of the Southern Alps lacked the aura of a sacred place, yet even the hairs on my cheeks stood on end. I felt apprehensive as if I sensed something on the other side of the mountains. With such thoughts in mind I surveyed the water’s color. Since the fountainhead was in Mt. Senjo the water was very clear, but it was just an ordinary blue hue. Last year and the year before, when I rode my motorcycle from Yoshino to Kumano through the pass at Mt. Omine, the color of the water as it meandered along the bottom of the ravine was a vibrant green. It could have been the water itself or c
omponents of the stones on the riverbed that imparted the tint, but only in the depths of the Kii Peninsula did water reveal such a mysterious color.

  Since then, whenever I drive through mountains and happen upon a river, I stop to check the color, but I have yet to see water as profound, limpid, and green.

  I went back to the car and closed the door, accidentally using too much force and slamming it shut. I turned back to check for a reaction from my daughters, but they showed no sign of waking. Since leaving the apartment in Tokyo early in the morning they’d been carrying on quite boisterously, so it was no wonder they were now deep asleep.

  “I wonder how much longer we have to go,” my wife inquired about the remaining time on our journey, probably sensing that our destination was close at hand.

  “We’ll be there within the hour,” I answered, glancing at the clock on the dashboard. It was just past 3:00 p.m.

  “We have to get there by five,” my wife insisted, worried about not getting there in time to prep dinner.

  “Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Really?”

  “So long as we don’t get lost.”

  The kindergarten my elder daughter had attended had about fifty students per class. Because of the relatively small size, many of the parents actively mingled with one another, and every summer a volunteer group of guardians led a several-days-long trip where the kids learned how to cook. My elder girl had graduated and entered elementary school that April; some families moved away and others were enrolled in different elementary schools, and we feared that these parental activities would cease. But since we had an organizer and volunteers, the Camp School was able to continue. This year, the organizer, who happened to be my former colleague and a good friend, lent us all his log cabin so we could hold the camp for three nights and four days. Due to work, however, our family had to make our way there a day later than everyone else.

  The other five families had already arrived at the campground the day before. As this was the first time the cabin would be used this summer, they were likely hard at work cleaning the interior and preparing the cast-iron heated bathtubs. It would be awkward for us to arrive just in time to eat dinner after the other families had done all the work. I could understand why my wife wanted to get there in time to help cook dinner, at least.