---
title: "The Art of the Elders"
chars: 131240
---
A single room in a certain tiny apartment.
In the kitchen that took up one corner of the roughly six-tatami room rang the crisp knock of eggs being cracked.
“Three eggs, there. Beat them well first.”
A mumbling voice went carefully back over each step. So faint was it that even the speaker’s sex was uncertain.
It wasn’t that the words were lost in the great chorus of cicadas still going strong even now, in September, nor that the walls of the old apartment were thin, nor that the even older metal fan was too loud—it was simply that Takeo, standing in the kitchen, spoke far too softly. And yet there was nothing small about Takeo’s build. Right up through high school he had played on the basketball team. He stood 196 centimeters tall, and though his weight had been climbing ever upward with his recent lack of exercise, it had yet to reach 100 kilograms.
Takeo’s back, as he lightly clicked the cooking chopsticks together, was bent well over. It wasn’t that he’d come down with back trouble at the age of twenty—the old basketball injury did twinge a little—but simply a way of carrying himself, ingrained from always ducking so as not to crack his head on the shelf.
The corner of the shelf, dangling from the kitchen ceiling as if by way of apology, had met so many heads over the years that it had worn to a faint roundness. The paint had peeled, and the splintered wood laid bare hung jagged as an icicle, sinister. For a man as tall as Takeo, it was as good as a weapon slung over his head.
Across Takeo’s stooped back ran a black band, from shoulders to waist, so that at a glance he might have passed for a ranked martial artist in his black belt. But Takeo’s black band was thin, and in any case no black belt is ever worn crossed slantwise over the back. The band was there for one purpose only—to hold an apron in place. Yes: Takeo was in an apron.
“Careful not to get it too hot, now.”
The apron—purple hydrangeas on a black ground—was one Takeo treasured as an “heirloom.” And it was not the apron alone that he had inherited. The teaching that one must always cook in proper dress and with proper respect had been drummed into him, and he had kept faith with it ever since. The face he wore as he murmured to the burner, as if impressing the words on himself, was in deadly earnest.
Holding a fair-skinned hand over the omelette pan, he judged the temperature by the heat that reached it. The gas ring was on medium, but Takeo tilted his head and turned the flame knob counterclockwise. The heat, it seemed, had been too high.
“Pour in a quarter, and once it’s half-set, start rolling.”
Sweat beaded on Takeo’s brow as he chanted the method for a dashimaki—a Japanese rolled omelette—like an incantation.
In a cramped apartment that trapped the heat all too readily to begin with, to keep at the omelettes since morning was to send the room’s temperature soaring and soaring. Already it was climbing toward the warmth of a human body.
Even so, Takeo showed no sign of stopping his labor of creation.
On the kitchen counter, five yellow cylinders—Takeo’s “creations”—stood in a row. Each omelette sat squarely in a single row upon a round plate so pristine it might have been brand-new, every one giving off a pale-yellow glow, its fine-grained surface so smooth you longed, despite yourself, to touch it. Not a single scorch mark anywhere.
The aroma drifting up was, without question, that of “a well-made dashimaki”—and yet Takeo was not the least bit satisfied. The result was not bad. But the omelette he was after was, somehow, still not quite this.
“Faithful to the fundamentals” was Takeo’s motto, and so, chanting aloud on top of it the recipe his body had already learned, he rolled the half-set egg, reaching for the masterpiece his own instinct promised.
Carefully, yet swiftly, he poured the last of the beaten egg from the bowl into the pan, and into the mid-yellow batter, bubbling and frothing, he slid the cooking chopsticks in from one edge.
Making no grand motions, rolling the egg in nothing but solemn silence, Takeo had come to hold both the purity of a shrine maiden and the delicacy of a taut piano wire.
“There—it’s done…!”
Setting the masterpiece he had only just completed onto a round plate, Takeo let his face break softly into a smile.
And that was the moment.
“BLAM!”
With a magnificent crash the rusted front door quite literally burst open.
Rebounding from the sheer excess of force behind it, the door came swinging back at furious speed.
“Yoo-hoo.”
Yet the iron door, deadly as a weapon, never so much as grazed the very person who had kicked it in. The bronze-colored slab came lunging, and a slender, wheat-brown arm caught it flat on the heel of the palm, as though it were no more than paper.
The face that popped into view was that of an endlessly sunny girl, its features clean and even, with a poised, dignified beauty. And yet in the brown eyes—the same brown as Takeo’s—glittered the keen light of a predator marking its prey, proof that here was no merely demure maiden.
“Ugh, it’s boiling. It’s hotter in here than outside, isn’t it?”
One hand pressing down the straw hat that suited her so well, the figure who had come bursting into the room wore a beige one-piece dress. Fanning herself with the straw hat in place of a folding fan, the very first thing she did—far from apologizing for having wrecked the door—was simply to “lodge a complaint.”
“Cooking again? Or are you getting yourself grilled, trying to feel what the ingredients feel? And anyway, what are you doing with the windows shut up tight, Cook-Oh?”
And all of it she declared in one smooth breath, without a single pause.
“Haaah…”
Takeo’s deep sigh dissolved into the chorus of cicadas. As he hung the hydrangea apron on the kitchen wall and tugged it side to side to smooth out the creases, a voice beside him pressed like a child’s: “Where are my chopsticks?” He drew a lacquered pair from the chopstick stand, rinsed them lightly under the tap, then blotted them dry with a paper towel and handed them over.
“Today’s Respect for the Aged Day, isn’t it? You’re the one who said we’d go show my omelette to the master, Yukie…”
The woman in the dress tossed the straw hat with a light flick onto Takeo’s bed, took the chopsticks between her rose-colored lips, and washed her hands as briskly as he had. Drying them on a paper towel, she flipped the balled-up sheet neatly into the bin beneath the sink, set the chopsticks down before a plate, and pressed her palms together.
“Itadakimasu.”
“That’s bad manners. —Not that you’re hearing a word of this.”
“M’not chewin’ with my mouth open,” protested Yukie, her cheeks already stuffed full of omelette.
“I never said you could dig in—but help yourself. You take the little things seriously, at least… Snow Woman.”
Walking to the center of the room, Takeo clacked the fan switch over to “high” and adjusted its angle. Aiming it straight at the kitchen would only invite complaints, so he set it to oscillate. Then, with the sun-bleached remote on the wall—once white, apparently, long ago—he switched on the air conditioner. The unit groaned as if a part might rattle loose, but since Takeo cleaned and serviced it twice a year, the cold air came through well enough.
“Oo you callin’ a monsderr!”
Glaring daggers over her mouthful of omelette, the woman in the dress was—whatever her monstrous strength might suggest—no yōkai; not really the legendary Snow Woman, for all that Takeo liked to call her one.
Her name was Yukie, and she was Takeo’s elder cousin. She served as assistant instructor at the karate dojo their grandmother kept, some two stations from his apartment. It was Yukie, they said, who had brought in remote lessons by video call; between those, outreach classes, and sales of her own original crime-prevention goods, the business was sailing along on a fair wind.
A minor local celebrity and a CEO, Yukie nonetheless mounted a raid on Takeo’s apartment nearly every weekend.
Gifted with both wit and beauty (not that Takeo would ever say so to her face), Yukie was still unattached. Whether it was really all right for her to be forever holed up at her younger cousin’s place, Takeo did earnestly wonder—but his cousin was the sort of “force to be reckoned with” who kicked open the doors of other people’s homes, relatives’ though they were. Should it ever come to that, it was the household she married into that one would end up fearing for.
“Yukie—are you visiting someone sick today?”
Driving the needless worry from his head, Takeo turned his attention to his cousin’s outfit.
Yukie’s clothes tended, if anything, toward the flashy. So Takeo thought—but this cousin of his, it seemed, was out at the very cutting edge of fashion. The gifted friends at the Kōda Academy of Culinary and Fashion Arts, where Takeo studied, all said as much with one voice, so it had to be so. Yukie, who dropped by the school often (to eat the cooking for free), was for some reason a great favorite there with men and women alike, for all that she wasn’t even a graduate.
And today, of all things, it was a prim and tidy beige dress. That she still contrived not to look plain was Yukie’s native gift. The last time something like this had happened, it had been the night a distant relative was in a traffic accident. Takeo could not shake the ominous premonition.
“’Snot that. Gran’pa likes dresses,” said Yukie, deftly juggling talk and food at once.
“That’s only because you usually show too much skin…”
“Did you say something?”
They were words he’d meant kindly, as her younger cousin, but they seemed to have landed otherwise. Takeo, who knew in his bones that an elbow or a kick could come flying even when he’d done nothing to deserve it, pressed no further and turned his eyes to the plastic shopping bag on the entryway floor. Between its pair of stiffly upright handles peeked a spray of chrysanthemums.
“Cook-Oh’s dashimaki really is delicious, after all.”
Having polished the first plate clean, Yukie already had her chopsticks in the second. The way she held her chopsticks, the way she sliced the omelette—Yukie’s form left nothing to fault. Though, granted, the mere fact that she was eating on her feet in the kitchen meant that no one, even to flatter her, could call it good manners.
Incidentally, “Cook-Oh” was the nickname Yukie had pinned on Takeo—a coinage she was proud of, fusing “cook” with the “ō” sound in his name.
“What are you spacing out for? Once I’ve eaten we’re leaving. Gran’pa and the others are waiting, you know.”
“…We’re really going through with this? I’ve got no confidence.”
Yukie, having polished off her second plate,
“Confidence is the sort of thing you only come by once you’ve been torn down a little. Sit and stew over it alone forever, and your cooking will only start tasting worse,”
she said, flinging out one of those persuasive lines she let slip now and then. Then, in a single bite, she bit off half of the third omelette.
“Coming from you, who got beaten black and blue by Gran’ma, I haven’t got a word to say back—hey, wait, what’s that fist for? Honestly. I’m getting ready, so wash the plates when you’ve finished eating.”
“Mm-kaay—”
“…Don’t tell me you intend to eat every last one?”
Takeo watched his cousin plunge into a fourth plate with a faintly recoiling eye. Munching away in bliss, Yukie had by this point stowed away the equivalent of a whole carton of eggs. Her lifelong big appetite was a legacy from their grandmother.
“The last one turned out well, so leave that one—agh! You’ve already eaten it!”
“Mm, fluffy and moist. The best of the lot. So-o don’t go sweating the small stuff! Your big sister has duly received every last bite of your omelette.”
Yukie thumped her slight chest and put her palms together. That he had never gotten to taste his own creation—a piece praised to the skies by Yukie, who was never anything but honest about food—struck Takeo as a real shame, and he rued it.
“And here I was, meaning to bring that very one along… well, nothing for it. I’ll pick something up on the way.”
Was there a supermarket around here, he wondered—and it was just then, as Takeo made for the entrance, that the door came toppling down onto his face.
“Ow-ow-ow…!”
“Making such a fuss over a little bump from a door, Takeo. And I could knock it flying with one fist.”
“And whose fault is it it’s broken…? Not everyone’s got monster strength like you, Snow Woman.”
“Oh my, Cook-Oh? Your arms I’d feel sorry for—so shall I snap those legs of yours clean in two for you instead?”
Such was the exchange between Yukie and Takeo as they left the apartment.
The two had settled on taking the train from the nearest station to their destination, but thanks to the town’s half-hearted stab at being a city, the public transport here ran at curiously thin intervals. As luck would have it, they made a train just sliding onto the platform, and now they rocked along on the slow local.
Yukie, all smiles as she nestled up against Takeo where he clung to a hanging strap, might well have looked, to a bystander, like one half of a fine couple. Indeed, with his other hand taken up by the shopping bag and no way to fend her off, Takeo could feel eyes on him from every side.
Sharpest of all were the stares from the priority seats in front of the standing pair—a cluster of youths in blue tracksuits, apparently on their way back from club practice.
On boarding, Yukie had planted herself squarely in front of the pack of boys at the very peak of adolescence. Thanks to which the tracksuits, all happy faces until a moment before, had curdled at a stroke into something dangerous the instant Takeo appeared.
Give me a break—and just as Takeo let slip what must have been his umpteenth sigh, the train began to slow.
“Heave-ho, then.”
Through the doors that slid open with a pneumatic hiss, an elderly woman came aboard, leaning on a cane. Chasing after her, a passenger in a coat slipped in. The old woman cast about for a seat, but on the holiday schedule the car was all but packed.
“Say—you lot.”
With a swift sweep of the car, Takeo, unable to stand it any longer, spoke up. The tracksuit fellows, riding high on their own chatter, ignored him, as though they hadn’t the slightest interest in the one on the strap who wasn’t the pretty girl. A few had plainly clocked the doorway of the car, but showed no sign of stirring.
“Do you even understand what a priority seat is for…? Hey—Yukie?”
“Never mind that. Cook-Oh, you keep an eye on my spot.”
Cutting her cousin off, Yukie clapped the straw hat down onto Takeo’s head, brooking no argument, and, skirt swirling, made for the doors. Bending to speak to the old woman who had boarded all hunched over, she took her by the hand.
The departure chime sounded, and the car lurched with a rattle. The man in the coat swayed and tipped, unnaturally, toward the old woman. His hand stretched out in her direction.
In that instant the beige dress flared, and slipped in between the old woman and the figure in the coat.
“WHAM!”
Yukie’s movement was smooth as a ballerina’s, her black hair floating up in a way that seized the eye. Takeo pictured his cousin as a prima donna—and shook the image off at once. Yukie was closer to a don—a boss, a leader of men—than to any madonna.
At the tremor of a “throwing technique” all but impossible aboard a train, every eye in the car swung their way.
“You were trying to steal her bag, weren’t you?”
The coated figure who had been standing now lay flipped onto the floor of the car, Yukie pinning him with her knee. The burly arm splayed across the floor thrashed as if to break free, but under Yukie’s hold it would not budge an inch. At the tips of the fingers straining toward it lay a squared envelope from a regional bank, banknotes peeking from within.
“N-no, you’ve got it wrong! The old lady toppled into me, and I was only trying to help—”
“Trying to weasel out of it? That won’t work. From the moment the old lady got on, you had eyes for nothing but her bag—never once glanced my way. You trailed her out after she’d drawn her money, didn’t you? Shall we have that envelope dusted for prints, if it comes to that?”
“I—no…”
Cowed by Yukie’s force, the man crumbled into stammering. Under the stares all around him, his face was turning paler and paler.
“Good grief… would you mind calling this in? And you’d best have a seat cleared before ‘that one’ comes back.”
Leaving the dumbstruck students with his request and his advice, Takeo headed over to Yukie.
“Ma’am, would it be all right if I had you check what’s inside?”
Picking up the envelope, he urged the flustered old woman to confirm its contents.
The man was still pinned flat to the floor. Yukie, wrenching that one arm up with a faint smile playing on her lips, was someone even Takeo, well used to her, had no desire to approach. It was no wonder the old woman’s hands were shaking.
When the old woman, having confirmed nothing had been taken, gave her thanks, Takeo turned his eyes back the way he’d come—and the students, meeting his gaze, were nodding hard enough to send their heads flying, pointing at their smartphones. They seemed to have called the police. And, for good measure, every one of them was on their feet.
The other passengers, too, seemed to have grasped what was happening, and were glaring at the man with hard-set faces. Witnesses, secured as well.
“Instructor. That’s about enough now. Your skirt—it’s riding up.”
Needless to say, a kick found Takeo’s face without an instant’s delay.
“Do you know what ‘holding back’ means, Snow Woman?”
Takeo rubbed his forehead and shot a sidelong glare at the straw hat beside him. Today, the number of times he’d had to keep walking while bearing the pain in his face was mounting up something awful.
“You should be grateful for those sneakers of yours, Cook-Oh. Any other day you’d have a stiletto heel dangling out from between your eyebrows.”
“Why, you—! And here I’d only been trying to be considerate… haaah.”
Takeo would have liked to be angry, but as ill luck would have it, his strength was so far spent that he hadn’t even the spirit for it.
After the two of them had handed the pickpocket over to the police waiting at the next station, and while Yukie was being showered with praise by the officers who knew her—“the true heir to Master Akie, no less,” and the like—Takeo, for reasons unknown, was questioned right along with the culprit. The officer who offered “because you’re our primary witness” for a reason had his cheeks twitching as he bit back a laugh, so it was surely on purpose.
Whenever Yukie pulled off some fine piece of work, the task of clearing up afterward fell to Takeo without fail. It seemed to have become an established custom among the police of this town.
From what he had heard, his grandfather Akio, long ago, had played this very same role. To Takeo—in whose ears the thunder of a grandfather solid as a great crag was still seared—it was a thing past believing.
After the cleanup, the old woman, by way of thanks, invited the two of them to a department store, and the pair, who had hit it off entirely (Takeo, predictably, was the bag-carrier), spent an hour in a café. What Yukie ordered was ice cream; the consideration she showed the old woman who was treating them was, if anything was, very like Yukie. Takeo’s own order, for the record, was a single iced tea and nothing besides, at Yukie’s own dictation.
From there, with one word—“My brother will carry them”—the two cousins helped the old woman with a week’s worth of shopping, rode back some two stations, and were now on their way home from delivering the bundle of shopping bags to her door. That the priority seats had sat conspicuously empty on the train along the way was, no doubt, all in his head.
Noon was long past, and the sun—grown shorter the very instant September set in—had begun to dip.
“What is it? Did you really hate helping out that much?”
“’Course not. It just doesn’t sit right with me, being run ragged by a Snow Woman.”
“Listen to you, Cook-Oh. Picked up a bit of nerve along with your cooking, did you?”
“…Somehow I can’t feel that as a compliment.”
In flat contrast to the slump-shouldered Takeo, Yukie walked along humming, plainly enjoying herself. The grown-ups called out to stop her—“Yukie!”—and the children who came crowding round with cries of “Big Sis Yukkie!” she heard out, all smiles. She was, for all the world, the hero of the town.
“Well—she is, sure enough, the ‘hero’s successor.’”
That Yukie was a celebrity in the town was not merely a matter of her being liked by all in her own right.
Watching the dazzling back of his cousin, Takeo found his mind turning to the “incident” of some ten years back—the one there was not a soul in the town who did not know.
＊　　＊　　＊
It was back when Takeo and Yukie were still in middle school—the days when Takeo, reluctant though he was, nonetheless kept going to the karate dojo of his grandmother, Akie.
It was not that Takeo particularly disliked his grandmother; it was simply that a dojo where he went out of his way to get himself hurt was a place he would rather not go near.
Akie, for her part, may well have had her own thoughts about this grandson of hers, who came to the dojo day after day without ever once saying “I don’t want to”—yet she said neither “Keep at it” nor “You may quit.” Whoever came to the dojo, she drilled them all alike. Family or no, she showed him, as a matter of course, not a shred of favoritism.
Those around him had it fixed in their heads that Takeo would one day carry on the line, and made a special case of him—but Akie would not stand for it. “Don’t go deciding a person’s future for them,” she said, wearing a rare look of anger.
Takeo would in time part ways with karate, yet he understands now that it was that clean, unbending conviction of Akie’s that had put the wind at his back.
His grandmother’s nature never altered, no matter whom she faced.
A fine illustration of this was the loan-shark scare in the summer of the year Takeo entered high school.
＊　　＊　　＊
She fits her subject within the frame, holds a single beat, and stills her breath.
In that instant the cry of the cicadas, the sound of the wind, all draw softly away, and the aluminum of the viewfinder against her cheek is cold.
Honing her spirit sharp as a marksman’s, she presses down the finger poised on the shutter button.
The very same fleeting exhilaration as the moment one takes aim at an opening in an opponent’s guard.
“Click.”
With that crisp, satisfying sound, the narrowed beam of light knits its image onto the film. The “moment” the photographer has cut loose is sealed away, film and all, in a case of darkness, to await its hour of developing.
“Whew—”
The early-summer air she had drawn deep into the pit of her belly was green and fresh, perhaps from having grazed the riverbank on its way. The practiced way Akie’s hand worked, cranking the dial with a grinding ratchet, looked nothing like that of a beginner not yet a month into the camera.
She turned her hand to anything and everything without a fault. That was Akie Sai—née Akie Higo—sixth-generation master of Goken-ryū karate.
“Well, now.”
Casting about for her next chance to trip the shutter, Akie looked out over the riverside, where six o’clock had only just come.
The sun had long since climbed to its height, and in the trees along the river an impatient cicada was hard at its vocal exercises. The people out walking, or walking their dogs, were for the most part acquaintances of Akie’s, and as they passed they called to her, and Akie returned each greeting.
“…She’s here again this morning, too.”
As she gazed at the morning scene, no different from any other, Akie’s eye came, all of a sudden, to rest on one spot along the riverbank.
Fitting the cap over the lens and stowing the antique camera in the pocket of her jacket, she turned her feet that way.
“Morning, Sae. Get yourself another fine one today?”
When she mimed the pressing of a shutter, Sae, turning to look back, gave a shy, bashful smile.
“Oh—good morning, Akie.”
Bringing both hands together before her skirt, Sae bowed. Her black hair, cropped to the shoulders, swung forward and grazed the collar of her sailor top. The spring camera slung from the faded leather strap at her neck swayed a beat behind.
“I won’t know until I develop it, but I think… I got it.”
Cupping the bellows-lensed camera softly in her hands, she nodded.
Sae’s turnout—the regulation long-sleeved uniform shirt done up neatly to the very button at each wrist—was, past all doubt, that of a model pupil. A girl who stood with the air of a lily of the valley and yet, in truth, ran as true at the core as a willow: so Akie had judged her, short as their acquaintance was.
And yet Sae was no model pupil. For she scarcely went to school at all.
“That’s the spirit. Those photographs you showed me the other day were good ones.”
The forefinger of Sae, whose face lit up in a flash, lay hidden beneath an adhesive plaster. The faint red seeping into the tape did not escape Akie’s eye, which, for all that she had come to sixty, betrayed not the least sign of dimming.
But Akie made no mention of it; returning her gaze to Sae, she thrust her hands into her pockets.
“It’s not as though you’ve a grandchild to scold you for wasting film, the way I have.”
Whether her photographs came out blurred or crooked was no concern whatever of Akie’s. What Akie loved was the very act of “tripping the shutter” itself.
Sae, too, knew Akie’s habit of pressing the shutter on and on without ever once developing a thing, and so she could do nothing but let her shapely brows droop and smile wryly.
“Akie, you have a grandchild? But you’re so young still—I would never have guessed, not for a moment.”
“No need to mind your words with me, Sae.”
Akie, sharp and immediate. Sae’s eyes went a little wide, taken aback.
Then, after a soft laugh, Akie went on:
“While you’re young, you ought to say things just as you think them. Grown-ups and all the rest of it—no need to trouble yourself over that. Staying honest with yourself is harder than you’d ever suppose. At your age, if you sit there reading everyone’s face over every little thing, you’ll only weigh yourself down… ah—listen to me, sounding high and mighty again. Just take it for an old woman’s rambling.”
Ha-ha-ha—and this time Akie laughed it clean away. At that summer-bright, heart-clearing smile, Sae’s own face softened.
“You’re… right. Being honest with yourself is hard, isn’t it. But I truly wasn’t just flattering you, you know? You really don’t look ‘sixty’ at all, Akie.”
Naming Akie’s age with a mischievous air, Sae came one step nearer to the smile Akie had wanted to see.
“Aren’t you the cheeky one, Sae. But it does make me glad. Not that flattering an old woman like me will get you a thing, mind… oh—that’s right. Would you hear out one small favor of mine?”
“…Yes?”—and to Sae, who tilted her head, Akie drew out her own camera and gave it a wave.
“I’d like to take a picture of you, Sae. And—it’s a great deal to ask on top of it, I know, but… won’t you let me develop it at your house?”
“Oh—at my house there’s… um…”
Sae, troubled in a way plain to see, the outer corners of her eyes drooping.
“So call it more of my meddling—let me meet your father while I’m at it, won’t you.”
Akie, watching the flustered girl with a smile that never left her, held her gaze unshaken.
“Um—my father, he’s job-hunting, you see! It’s only, well… he hasn’t quite the patience for it, or…”
“Never sticks with it—that the way of it?”
“That’s true, but I think it’s because he doesn’t want to be a burden to the people around him.”
“Being out of work is the very thing folk fret over most, after all.”
With Akie laying her finger so lightly on the heart of it, Sae could only open and shut her mouth.
“The job at the shopping arcade didn’t last the month either, I hear. As you’d know yourself, Sae—the terms there were really rather good, you know?”
said Akie, fluttering a hand. At her side, Sae hung her head, looking for all the world apologetic.
“Yes. And after you were kind enough to introduce him to it, too…”
As Sae began to bow her head, Akie shot up a forefinger—snap.
“No apologizing! I do it only because it pleases me to. …One moment, sorry. Let me make a call.”
Drawing the latest-model smartphone from another pocket, Akie pressed her palms together toward Sae by way of apology. Sae’s murmur of “How cool,” as Akie dialed with a fluid sweep of the hand, did not reach her.
Akie’s gallant profile—she seemed to be sending word that she would be home late—flicked a glance Sae’s way. Urged on, Sae fell into step beside her along the riverbank.
Feeling the sunlight strengthen, Sae was calling back to mind her first meeting with this somewhat forceful master.
The one to have struck up the talk had been—as, perhaps, one ought to have expected—Akie.
Easygoing, as she had been just now, yet never for a moment glib, without a particle of any wish to pry.
An unknown “auntie” who spoke in just such a way—that had been Sae’s first impression of her.
It was a little while after that that she found herself scolded by this Akie whose very name she had not known.
“…Sae? Sae, now—I’m speaking to you.”
“Y-yes!”
When Sae shook her head in a fluster, Akie—her call apparently ended—was peering in at her face.
“I’m sorry. What was it…?”
Sae drew her neck in. Akie was gently, worriedly rubbing at her shoulder.
“Sae—have you had your breakfast?”
“Yes. I made it properly before I came. Grilled fish, this morning.”
“I see. And that cut on your finger—did you come by it then, as well?”
“Hm? Oh—this, it was just a little nick, grating daikon,”
said Sae, scratching her cheek.
“My father, honestly—the daikon I was about to throw out because there was blood on it, he went and ate, saying, ‘It’d be a waste, when Sae made it.’”
“…Heard on its own, that puts your father clean past the doting parent and into something perverse.”
Letting out a breath of relief, Akie waved a hand—“It’s nothing”—at the puzzled Sae, and then,
“You don’t have to fret and see me off—I know the way. So go on now, off to school with you.”
and, taking Sae by the shoulders, she spun her clean around, about-face.
“Oh—but there’s the house to see to…”
“Leave that to me as well. And—come by the dojo after school.”
Turning back, Sae asked the reason of that dependable red-tracksuited back.
“Come, and you’ll see,” was all the red tracksuit gave, with a thumb thrown up.
“You needn’t sit through the lessons, but go to school you should.”
Soon after they had taken to talking on the riverbank in the mornings, Sae had been told this by Akie. They always parted before the school hour, and Sae had not so much as wandered about the town—yet Akie had seen clean through to her truancy. She kept an information network all her own, or so she claimed.
This “master’s information network,” whatever it might be, seemed to be quite the thing.
It was not that Sae disliked school. She had none of the transfer pupil’s usual trouble in settling into the class, nor were there any children who gave her grief. Everyone was kind.
It was only that Sae wished, if she possibly could, to stay on the riverbank forever.
Around the time the rainy season set in, Sae—only just moved to the town with her father—would often come alone, of a morning, to the riverbank close by their housing complex.
The morning sun caught in the ripples of the gently flowing water, and along the bank—a carpet of light—there walked a couple in running gear, a mother with a small child in tow. The child ran on ahead and, sure enough, went tumbling. But the child was strong: rising alone, without a tear, it dashed off once more.
I am not strong, the way that child is.
Sae’s mother had been a photographer. Not one with any dazzling record to her name, but the sort who took, say, the pictures that went on the town’s website. Sae, who loved her mother’s plain, unadorned photographs, had come before she knew it to learn the camera at her mother’s side, and to long after the same road her mother walked.
The old spring camera that Sae carried always at her side had likewise been the treasure of that mother, who had refused digital, stubbornly, to the very end.
Her mother, surely, would have caught this very scene within her frame.
So Sae thought, and went on photographing the riverbank—developing the film in a plain, makeshift darkroom she had put together out of cardboard and aluminum foil.
The first one to whom Sae showed that very first shot was, of course, her father.
Her father gazed at the photograph with a sorrowful smile, then, without a word, stroked Sae’s head.
From that day on, Sae gave up developing her photographs.
After school, when Sae returned home, her father was nowhere to be seen.
Today was no interview day, and supper was Sae’s turn.
“A note left for me…?”
Noticing the memo atop the low table that stood in for a dining table, Sae took it up.
“‘To Sae. Come to the dojo. Your father is here as well. We will see to supper on our end.’ …Akie.”
At the end of the message—which read for all the world like a kidnapper’s note—came a signature in careful block script. It was the first time Sae had seen Akie’s hand, yet somehow she thought it just like her. That mannish, forthright cadence was exactly the thing.
“And here I’d meant to make us a nice packed supper…”
Sae puffed out her cheeks—yet her expression was bright.
She wrapped several changes of clothes for her father from the drawer into a bag, and fetched the camera from her room. She could hardly have taken it to school, so she had left it at home.
Slinging the worn old strap firmly about her neck, Sae set out for Akie’s dojo.
“Da… d…?”
The first thing Sae saw upon reaching the dojo was her father—in a training gi that sat strange on him and, by any reckoning, ill-worn. His stance was cowed enough for even Sae’s amateur eye to catch. The white belt swaying as if to proclaim surrender only threw his craven crouch into sharper relief.
Facing him stood Akie. It was the first time Sae had seen Akie without expression, and even the face she wore when scolding was, beside this, the less fearful of the two. Her black belt was cinched so tight it might have been one with the gi from the very start.
“Ah—”
A dull thud against the tatami shook the ears of Sae, standing all unguarded there at the entrance. A clean fall, somehow—the sort that leaves one strangely lightened.
Having “thrown” the father with the greatest of ease, Akie turned her eyes their way. It was Akie’s everyday face now.
“Sae! Come on in.”
Beckoned by Akie, Sae gave a timid bow, then slipped off her outdoor shoes and set foot on the boarded floor that framed the tatami. Trodden by countless feet and polished smooth, the wood shone glossy in the westering light. The cool of it, coming through her socks, drew her spine up straight.
“Oh—so you’re the little lady of that good-for-nothing dad the master hauled in. Here now, off with your socks too—”
From where he had sprung there was no telling, but a well-built man in a gi, seemingly still in his twenties, was calling to Sae from close at hand. His face was, to put it charitably, a hard one.
“Kenji—!!”
—and all at once the hard-faced man pitched face-first into the tatami. All Sae saw was Akie’s foot, raised high over the man’s back—Akie having crossed the room before anyone could mark it.
“Bam!”
A blow whose sound was beyond all comparing with the one before shook the dojo. At an impact like some bomb going off, Sae half-found herself picturing an ambulance.
“That mouth of yours—looks as if it wants a thorough hammering back into shape.”
Flipped onto his back with the greatest of ease by a single toe of Akie’s, Kenji—“Gimme a break”—was already sitting cross-legged once more. Across his broad forehead the imprint of the rush matting lay in a grid, like the pattern seared onto a waffle. Noticing that Sae was watching, he threw up a thumb and grinned.
“Making eyes at the girl, are you!!”
Straight into that Kenji’s belly drove Akie’s heel. Thumb still raised, Kenji twitched his limbs like a dead frog.
“Honestly… my pupil’s gone and disgraced himself, hasn’t he, Sae.”
“N-no,” said Sae, shaking her head, all the while stealing uneasy glances at the utterly unmoving Kenji.
“S-Sae… Papa’s…”
It would be a little while yet before Sae’s father, laid out spread-eagle across the tatami, was noticed by his daughter at all.
When Sae had first brought home the middle-aged woman who called herself a karate master, her father, Makoto, had been more than a little wary—half suspecting his daughter had been taken in by some shady group here in their new town. What was more—perhaps because Sae had mentioned he was between jobs—the woman had told him, with a peculiarly earnest face, to be sure to speak up whenever he found himself in a bind.
And so, when—half by way of gathering what information he could—he let the master’s name drop at the employment-office counter, the clerk there gave him a merciless dressing-down.
It was a scolding on a par, no less, with the one his late wife had given him the time he’d promised to spend the day with Sae, forgotten it clean away, and come home drunk. To wit: “Akie is a hero to this whole community, and to distrust her is the very same as distrusting your own self.” And after lecturing him up one side and down the other, the clerk declared in dead earnest that leaning on the master’s connections would be the faster road by far. Even as the thought came—Isn’t that abandoning your own post?—it was not in Makoto’s nature to say it aloud.
She struck him, now, as less a mere karate practitioner than some local personage of influence—and yet, for all Makoto’s mounting suspicion, his daughter Sae, quite to the contrary, took more and more to speaking of this master at home. Sae’s face at such times wore a calm he had not seen on it in a long while. I very nearly went and left out the one thing that mattered again, thought Makoto. For his wife had often told him that he “left out the thing that mattered.”
It was for that reason that Makoto had, of his own accord, gone down to the dojo, about two months back. Akie asked him little, found him a few jobs, and told him, “I’ve already had a word with them.” A person of humble bearing—and yet Makoto felt in her an air that brooked no argument.
And so, when he came away having quit the job Akie had found for him, he steeled himself, in all honesty, to leave the town.
It was not that he had quit because the work was hard. It was that, left as he was, he stood to cause trouble for his colleagues and his customers. Do what he might, he could not put his heart into it; whatever he set his hand to, his spirit would not rise—as though it were all being drawn away into some hole that had opened in his heart. Ever since his wife had passed, this had been the foremost reason Makoto could never hold to a job for long.
But newly moved in, Sae’s transfer to her new school only just settled, the savings the move had eaten into galling enough as it was, Sae seeming to have taken to this town—and while he turned such things over, time alone slipped by.
It was then that Akie, arriving at the house out of the blue, put it to him: “Won’t you come to the dojo?” To Makoto, who pressed his forehead to the floor and begged, “Only spare Sae, whatever else you do,” Akie said only, “That is for you to decide.”
With—had Sae been there to see it—the very look she would have described as “Akie biting back a laugh.”
“…and that is how it stands. I’d like Makoto to lend me a hand with this and that around here,” Akie explained to Sae. At her side, for reasons unknown, sat Kenji cross-legged—“Comes with meals and a wage, y’know,” thumb raised—and got rapped on the head by Akie for it. Makoto, kneeling in seiza beside them, kept stealing looks at his daughter’s face. Ever since Akie had drawn the three of them into the kitchenette, saying she wished to talk, Sae had held her tongue.
“Dad… has my father agreed to this?”
Sae’s expression, as she fixed her gaze straight on Akie, was in deadly earnest.
“That was how I took it, at any rate.”
“No. I’m asking my father, not you, Akie,” said Sae, her tone firm. Makoto, thus put on the spot—“M-me?!”—could do nothing but dither. Glancing in turn from his daughter, to Akie, to the face of Kenji (who for some reason had balled a fist as though cheering him on, awaiting what came next), he found that in the end the one to throw him a lifeline was, as ever, Sae.
“I’m grateful for your kindness, Akie, but I can’t have my father pressed into anything against his will… Dad—are you going to be doing odd jobs at this dojo?”
“Odd jobs, she says—” Kenji began with a snort, but Akie pulled him up short by the ear.
“I don’t mind it in the least, Sae. Better than staying out of work and being a worry to other people, if I can be here—”
“That’s not it!!”
The force of her rising sent Sae’s folding chair clattering over. At the sight of her face, fighting down tears, Makoto caught his breath.
“You’re always going on about ‘other people,’ Dad—but what about you? When Mom died, you cried every night, didn’t you. And there was nothing I could do, and it ate at me… That’s why I thought I’d take pictures with Mom’s camera, and turn them into keepsakes.”
“I’m sorry—for making you worry, always. But you see, Sae. Whenever I caught sight of you holding Emiri’s camera… it made me sad.”
“That’s no way to put it! Sae’s thinking of you, man!”
“…Kenji. Don’t go putting in your oar.”
Beside Kenji, who had kicked back his chair and shot to his feet, the master reproved him, quietly. From that closed-eyed face nothing of what she felt could be read.
“Kenji is right. To think a thing like that—I’m the worst there is. But, Sae—”
Drawing his chair back, Makoto rose and stood facing Sae. He laid a hand softly on his trembling daughter’s shoulder, and with the other touched the old camera that turned its lens toward them.
“You have already faced the fact that Emiri is gone. Your looking out for me—that is a part of it too, isn’t it. But I still… I still cannot face it straight on. I felt as though you and Emiri both had gone off and left me behind, and I hadn’t the least idea what I was to do.”
“That’s not so, Dad.”
At his daughter’s voice Makoto raised his face, and there before him were a pair of round eyes, a little red at the rims.
Eyes just like the one he loved, and holding a weakness like his own—and, beyond both, a brightness that was neither of theirs.
“I have never once thought of Mom as gone. Mom is here—always. Not in the camera alone. Mom is inside you, and inside me, too, Dad. So no one is being left behind… not by me. And not by Mom, either.”
Wiping the corners of her eyes, Sae took Makoto’s hand in hers.
“So, Dad—what I want is for you to do the things you love again, the way you did before. You do have a way of worrying people, it’s true—but it’s all right. Because I’m here… no—I’m here, and Mom is too.”
“Sae…!”
Pressed between the two of them as they leaned close, the camera looked for all the world as though it were rejoicing.
“Now that’s a beautiful story…”
Before the father and daughter locked in their embrace, Kenji gave a long, snuffling sniff. With a sidelong glance at her pupil—streaming copiously from both eyes and nose alike—Akie promptly took down the roll of kitchen paper that hung on the door by the sink and passed it to him.
“Well, then.”
As Akie got to her feet and made to leave the kitchenette, Sae called her back, uneasy.
“…Akie?”
“Sae, Makoto—will the two of you stay and have supper?”
“Oh—um…”
Sae looked to Makoto, and her father nodded back at her.
“Master. Please—let me work here!”
“Dad…”
“Makoto—this is a dojo. In a dojo, a place for the tempering of body and spirit, there is no such thing as a post of employment… but if you’ll lend a hand in the course of your training, I’ll see to it you’re paid a small stipend.”
Akie’s face, as Makoto bowed his head, was grave. A dojo is no workplace. It is a place for the piling-up of discipline—so her keen eyes declared.
Before the stern expression of the master who taught pupils by the dozen, Makoto bowed his head once again.
“Then—I ask that you take me on as your pupil.”
“Understood. But I’ll grant you no special treatment, so be prepared for that.”
Turning next to face Sae, she asked:
“And what about you, Sae? You’re more than welcome to stay the night here along with Makoto.”
“No,” said Sae, shaking her head.
“I’ll go on back home. There’s the tidying to see to, and with the two of us both away… it would only be lonely, I think.”
Sae looked down at the camera. Akie nodded.
“So it would. Then once supper’s done, off home you go with Makoto. After school, I’ll send Kenji round to fetch you.”
“Maaaster!”—and Kenji’s eyes shone like a child’s.
“I’ll be quite all right on my own, truly. There’s no need to go to the trouble of coming to fetch me.”
“Aw, come on…”
Paying no mind to Kenji, forever soaring high one moment and sinking low the next, Akie shook her head afresh.
“As the one who’s ‘taking Makoto into her charge,’ I’ve a responsibility, you understand. And of late there seem to be some odd sorts skulking about. On this I’ll not give way.”
Perhaps grasping that there would be no talking her round, Sae gave a small nod.
Makoto turned to Kenji and bowed his head.
“Kenji—I place my daughter in your care.”
“Y-yes, sir! I’ll make her happy, you have my word!” And Kenji, snapping ramrod-stiff, returned a bow bent to a perfect right angle.
It was just then that there came a crisp, satisfying click.
As the grown-ups turned to look, there was Sae, who had been peering through the viewfinder, her cheeks flushed pink.
A dojo is not a school. Ever since karate took on its aspect as a sport, it had come to be regarded—by all save those with the will to “forge” themselves to the very last—as something more like an old-fashioned gym. Akie’s dojo wore both faces at once.
In the dojo, broad as a school gymnasium, the near half at the front was given over to the children’s class and to the beginners’ lessons taught by Akie’s younger sister, Harue. Children though the pupils were, teachers and taught alike were in deadly earnest. What lent the dojo its fitting measure of tension—an air taut as a string drawn tight—lay at the far end. There, guttural cries of the kiai and the sound of bodies striking the tatami rang out.
First-time visitors to the dojo would, for the most part, go round-eyed at the sight of dan-holders and small children doing karate side by side. Little wonder that some child, at the sheer force of the black belts’ sparring, might burst into tears. And little wonder, too, that the face of a mere onlooker who had by no means resolved to enroll should stiffen.
But this, too, was a conviction of Akie’s.
The children could watch, right up close, the techniques and the movements of veteran, seasoned hands. The fervor of a battle-worn old master, tempered by discipline piled upon discipline, was a thing one could never begin to feel through a television screen and the like. The “aura” that pours off one who has mastered the heights would linger in the heart, even should one return to a life with no ties to karate at all. That it might serve some purpose someday—so Akie hoped.
And for the dan-holders as well, the situation of being “watched” at their training was a spur.
Not that every last one of them had thrown up both hands in favor of it, of course. But the objections, too, Akie had reckoned into her plans. With a single word—“Anyone who can’t keep his focus for the mere fact of being watched is expelled”—the old guard fell silent as one.
In point of fact, ever since they had come to be “watched,” the showings of the school’s pupils at their dan examinations, and in the tournaments they entered, were splendid. The upperclassmen’s results served as a lure, more and more took up karate, and Akie’s dojo became a place brimming all the more with a quiet vitality.
Sae’s father Makoto, now a pupil of the school, was of course a beginner. He was a man who had kept to the culture clubs alone, the whole way through university. As for anything athletic—just as Kenji said—there was simply no word for it but a pity.
And yet, after a mere few days, Makoto put in a request: not for the beginners’ lessons, but to be allowed onto the “far side” of the dojo, where the dan-holders gathered.
“Makoto, that I cannot allow. And all the less so if you’ll give me no reason for it.”
Morning practice and lunch done with, Akie—having demonstrated for Makoto, who had asked to be taught how a gi was folded—knitted her brows.
Before her knees as she sat in seiza, she folded the jacket in two and bound its middle fast with the black belt. Then, once again, another turn round. Now the belt might be lifted and it would not come undone.
Last, she set it down before Makoto, arranged so that the embroidery on the belt showed. Beside it, a brown belt wrapped—with only the barest gesture of effort—a lump that looked for all the world like a wrung-out floor-rag.
“It’s only… there are a great many children, aren’t there. And so they take fright at me, or…”
Stealing glances all the while at Akie’s face, Makoto set about undoing his own gi.
Makoto’s gi, as it happened, was one lent to him by his senior pupil (a good deal younger than he, for all that), Kenji; and just now Makoto had on the polo shirt and slacks Sae had brought over from home for him. The shirt was very nearly free of creases, and the crease of the trousers pressed just so.
But of this there was not the faintest sign that Makoto had taken the least notice. He had gone so far as to crumple down the collar—stood up so crisply—complaining that it was hot. When he rolled his short sleeves up into a makeshift tank top, even Akie could not stand by, and said a word; but she was not so meddlesome as to fuss, point by point, over how a grown man past thirty and nearing forty chose to dress.
Besides which, Akie—who had watched all manner of people in her time—knew well that he was not one to mend his ways for being told.
“A middle-aged fellow like me, people shrink away from, or… Even Sae looks away from me now and then, you know.”
As ever, Makoto went on repeating his “floor-rag wringing” of the gi. So little progress had he made that one might well doubt whether he had watched Akie’s example at all.
Or rather, in plain truth, he was most likely “seeing nothing” whatever. Makoto’s eyes were forever trained on “somewhere.” Somewhere that was, at the very least, not “here.” She could hazard a fair guess where—but merely to point it out would be to miss the mark.
“Don’t go laying it on your child!!”
Akie’s bark set the early-afternoon dojo trembling. On the tatami only a handful, with matches ahead of them, were drilling on their own; the place was thin of people. A few gazes gathered, then drew back at once. In their wake followed the whistling of the senior pupils’ strikes.
“Wagh?!”
Makoto, putting on a reaction that might have been lifted straight out of a textbook of reactions, met her eyes as though he were seeing a ghost. Even so, it was better than his mind being off elsewhere.
Planting a fist on the tatami, Akie turned to face the polo shirt that had all but collapsed in fright.
“Makoto. Will you not give over making others your stand-in?”
“A—a stand-in?”
“Then I’ll say it straight out. Makoto—just how long do you mean to keep on running from what is real?”
“Wh—”
“No need to pull that face, as though I’d read your very mind—I can tell well enough. Sae said as much to you herself, didn’t she.”
The instant his daughter’s name was spoken, Makoto’s face went rigid. His hand upon the tatami trembled, ever so faintly. Was it the discomfort of having a thing he’d wanted kept hidden thrust before him that made him look away—or was it anger at that very thing?
“…What has Sae to do with any of this? Don’t go dragging my daughter into it.”
“True enough. Were it a thing I could do, I’d half a mind to take that child into my own home. Only—Sae would never say yes to it, not for all the world.”
“Well, of course she wouldn’t! What are you talking about, Master?! Sae is my daughter. The nerve of it—”
“Then why is it that you keep away from her?”
Without so much as a glance at Makoto, who had half-risen to his feet, she took up his gi. The end of the brown belt she had been touching all unawares. On the name graven into its embroidery, for a moment, far-off days went racing through Akie’s mind.
This belt, to begin with, had not been Kenji’s either. Kenji had held his dan rank since his teens. A dan-holder, by the rule, wears the black belt. The brown belt is the token of the step just before rising into the ranks. And yet this belt would never change to black.
“I’m not… keeping away from her.”
“You bolt your breakfast and are done with it; while Sae’s at the dojo, you’ll not so much as speak to her. Even at supper you scarcely say a word, do you. And the walk home—is it not much the same?”
“That’s not… I’m only busy, is all…”
“I’m grateful you’ll even lend a hand with the office work, Makoto. But if your staying on here is what makes things hard for Sae, then I’d have to send you on your way this very moment.”
Calling to mind the belt’s former owner, Akie drew the folded gi’s sash tight with a firm tug.
Looking up at Makoto, who stood stiff and rigid as a post,
“It frightens me—that before long Sae will take the whole of it on herself, and break beneath the weight. That is my worry.”
“That’s… once I’ve found proper work and our life is on a steady footing, then surely Sae, too…”
“Get up and come at me, why don’t you!”
“Wh—what?”
To the round-eyed Makoto, Akie flung the gi—“Quick now, on with it”—and planted herself square before Makoto, who had only just managed not to let it fall.
“No, hold on—I don’t quite follow…”
That alone was enough to freeze Makoto where he stood, as though bound hand and foot by some unseen force. On the tatami Akie was stepping lightly, loosening her body. Battle-readiness, as they call it.
“No need to fret—I’ll do you no real harm. Though you may come away with a bruise or two, mind.”
“I’ve had my fill of being thrown… Kenji’s been at me with it all the time of late…”
Muttering all the while, Makoto made to open up some distance. A wind sliced past the side of his face.
“Wagh!!”—and Makoto came down hard on his backside.
“So you’ve learned to dodge, have you. Perhaps that Kenji’s grown a mite better at the teaching, too.”
Akie let fall her high-kick stance and laughed. Her eyes, needless to say, were not laughing. Had that kick found its mark, it would have been a concussion beyond all doubt.
“Ow-ow-ow… I can’t so much as break a fall yet—that’s cruel of you, isn’t it!”
Rubbing the small of his back, Makoto glared. In that same instant Akie’s smile spread wide.
“There’s a fine look in your eye, Makoto. That’s just as it ought to be. Hold your tongue, and all you do is scatter your poison over everyone round you. You wish for Sae’s happiness—do you not?”
“Of course I do! Sae is my—no, Sae is the daughter of Emiri and me!”
Face twisting, Makoto rose to his feet. The hand he stretched toward the gi was trembling, yet without a moment’s hesitation he threaded his arm through the sleeve.
Akie sent a glance to one of her senior pupils, who had for some little while been quietly watching how matters stood. The pupil gave a nod and dashed off toward the kitchen.
To stint oneself before one who earnestly means to face you would be the height of discourtesy. And so Makoto had to be made to face them both—the pain of the body and the pain of the heart alike.
“Face forward.”
His belt tied, Makoto lifted his face. His eyes had Akie firmly in their hold.
There on the tatami, the two of them bowed to each other.
Of late the world had turned a good deal more dangerous.
The school-gate railing, in the old days as good as nonexistent, now stayed shut right up to the last minute of dismissal. Or rather, the main gate that led through to the grounds would not open even at dismissal time. The students went home by way of the side door beside the gate.
“…On account of that van, is it.”
Before the nameplate that bore the school’s name, Kenji rubbed his chin. The spring camera left in his keeping swayed, like a thing in miniature, against the sturdy breadth of his chest.
Recalling his own schooldays, Kenji fell to musing—for all the world like a man who, at barely twenty, fancies he has grasped how mean and hard the world has become. Whether for that reason, or simply that his looks had never troubled him to begin with, he stood wholly unmoved—even beneath the openly suspicious eyes of the homebound students who dropped their voices to whisper, “Isn’t that the one from the staff room…?” and of the parents come to collect them.
“Reckon they’ll not go prowling near the dojo, at least. And if they did, the master’d turn ’em to scrap iron soon enough… Oh—here she comes.”
Fighting down the urge to wave, Kenji—just as though a sparring bout were upon him—set his feet shoulder-width apart and drew himself up straight. There was no call to go so far as to clasp his hands behind his back, yet it lent him, for all that, the bearing of a man awaiting his adversary at a duel.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting, Kenji.”
Sae, coming at a trot, dipped into a quick little bow before him. Her short hair streamed loose, wisp by wisp, on the summer evening breeze.
“N-no, not at all—g-good work today… no, I mean—w-welcome, home, m’lady.”
Kenji, who for some reason had slipped into the refined speech of old Kyoto, would not so much as try to meet Sae’s eyes. That his face had gone every bit as crimson as the dusk was, in all likelihood, lost on none but the pair of them.
That no one broke in upon this exchange of pure, textbook “youth” being played out before the school gate was, naturally, because Akie had squared matters with the school beforehand. Had the photograph she’d handed the principal—one that marked out Kenji’s identity like a wanted poster—not been posted on the staff-room wall, then a “gi-clad man with a camera slung at his neck,” hard-faced as he already was and muttering away with narrowed eyes, would long since have been reported to the police.
“Yes. I’m home. Oh—you brought the camera along again today, didn’t you.”
“S-seeing as it is Sae’s treasure and all… H-here, please, do take it.”
Kenji slipped the camera’s strap from about his neck. For all the shiftiness of his speech, the hands that passed it over were gentle beyond measure, and kind.
“Thank you ever so much. And I’m sorry for being so selfish… It’s only that without it, somehow, I can’t seem to settle.”
“I—I know just how you mean. Ah—no, when I say I know, that is to say…”
“I see! So you can’t settle either, can you, Kenji—not without your gi on!”
The evening sun lit Sae with a radiance almost divine as she asked it, her smile dazzling. Her mother’s keepsake camera hung at her neck—and before the smile of a girl so pure, so guileless, so innocent of all suspicion, could there be a soul alive who could throw back a “that’s not it”?
Even were he to be taken, thereby, for the sort who grows uneasy without his karate gi on—yes, even then.
“…W-well, it’s true enough this gi means a great deal to me. Though the master’s forever bawling at me to ‘cinch on a black belt!’ mind you.”
Ducking his head despite himself, Kenji cast his eyes about. He hardly supposed Akie was truly there—yet his master’s gaze he felt always close at hand. Less a keeping-watch than a hand forever pressed to his back, urging him on; and that was the very reason he could hold his spine drawn straight and true.
Turning their backs to the setting sun, the two of them began, slowly, to walk—neither one leading the other.
“But even so, it’s all right… isn’t it.”
It was Sae who murmured it, her eyes set ahead. Down the school road the setting sun lit up, the lively voices of students went racing.
“The things that matter—only you yourself can ever truly know them. Even if some other person tells you to ‘leave it behind,’ it’s not so simple as all that.”
“You don’t leave it behind, though.”
“Eh?”
Sae looked up at the gi beside her, a full head taller than herself. The profile bathed in the sunlight was smiling as though abashed. Kenji’s smile was the face of a criminal, so the folk at the dojo said. And yet not once had Sae ever found it frightening.
“You make it a part of your own self. So that when you close your eyes, it’s near as near right there before you. Do that, and there’s no such thing as losing it—it’ll hold you up your whole life through.”
“A part… of me.”
Sae repeated Kenji’s words back, as though chewing them slowly over.
Noticing that she had cast her eyes down, Kenji bowed his head in a fluster, for all the world as if he’d committed some mortal sin.
“I—I’m sorry, Sae! I never meant to wound you, honest I didn’t, only—”
“…That’s not it.”
This time Sae shook her head hard, side to side. Steadying the spring camera with one hand, she wiped at the corners of her eyes with the other.
The eyes Sae turned up to Kenji were brimming, overflowing with something that shone.
“Thank you, Kenji.”
“Sae…?”
“I’d gone and overlooked the one thing that truly mattered. But I’m so glad your words let me see it, Kenji.”
“D-did I really say anything so grand as all that?”
“Yes. You did.”
At the girl’s firm nod Kenji pressed her no further. Whatever it was he had said, if it had served her smile, that was enough. And this girl who never let her smile fade—Kenji found her, simply and helplessly, dear.
“W-well then, shall we be off? It’s near time we saw to supper.”
“Yes, let’s. Oh—before that, might we stop by the house just once? I’d like to fetch a change of clothes for my father. And this—I’d like to have it mended, as well.”
Sae lifted the camera.
“You’re sure? If it’s on account of what I said, you needn’t trouble over it…”
“No, it isn’t that. This camera was something precious to my mother. It would be dreadful if it broke. And to keep it without ever once using it—that isn’t right either, I think. Besides… I believe she’s watching over me.”
Slowly Sae spun out her words, as though making sure of each one.
Her road had only just begun—yet surely she would walk it with strength. Of that, Kenji felt, he could speak with his chest thrown out proud.
“Let’s all take one together sometime, Sae. Everyone from the dojo, and you and your father besides. Your mother’d be glad of it too, I’ll wager.”
“Yes—let’s!”
A summer dusk lingers long.
Even by the time Sae and Kenji reached Makoto’s apartment, an orange glow still wrapped the two of them round, loath to let go.
The apartment the father and daughter rented was an old two-story place, set down in the middle of a residential quarter. Round about stood a good many houses in the old style, single-family homes—though many, Kenji had once heard from Akie, had changed hands under the strain of a falling birthrate and a graying population.
When Sae’s greeting rang out as she ran up the stairs to fetch her things, an old woman who seemed to be the landlady came down them.
“Evenin’ to ya!”
To Kenji, who had bent into a bow at a perfect right angle, the landlady turned a pair of goggling eyes. She ought to have known him by sight—he’d seen Sae off any number of times—but perhaps Kenji struck her as altogether too dubious, for never once, this time no more than before, did she return his greeting. Kenji was well used to it, nor was he one to let such a thing bother him.
Which was why, spoken to as they passed each other, Kenji was taken quite aback.
“…You’d be the lad from Higo’s place, would you not?”
Thrown for an instant by the name Higo, Kenji then recalled it was Akie’s maiden name, and nodded.
“Yes, I’m a pupil of the Goken-ryū dojo, but…”
“Taken an outsider in, has she?”
“…An outsider?”
Kenji did not flinch at the landlady’s question, sharp as a kitchen knife. He was far too well used to being loomed over by others for that.
Only—at the old woman’s words he felt an unease past all naming, and narrowed his eyes.
“The man himself’s not a bad sort—but he’s the kind that gets taken in, that one. Before ever he moved here, he’d been followed. Tailed, he was.”
“What’s all this about?” Kenji asked, but the landlady only muttered under her breath and would give no answer. Her eyes, he fancied, flicked for an instant toward the second floor, and the ill feeling in Kenji swelled the more.
“Mind yourself, lad. These parts are Higo’s turf—but she’s getting on in years, that one. She can’t cast her eye about the way she once could.”
A warning, delivered from the landlady’s bent and crooked back. Too vague by half, the words almost as though she were making sport of him—and yet the old woman’s words clung to Kenji’s ears and would not let go.
Her way of speaking was the very opposite of Akie’s—and yet it carried a weight much like his master’s words.
“W-wait, please! That—that’s to say…”
He made to go after the landlady, who had turned her back and was walking away, but a voice calling his name brought his feet to a halt.
“Kenji?”
“Ah… Sae. Welcome back.”
Sae, come back down the stairs, followed Kenji’s gaze and tilted her head.
“Is something the matter with the landlady…?”
“N-no, we only passed the time of day, that’s all.”
Kenji scratched hurriedly at the back of his head, papering over the moment. His instinct was telling him he ought to put the landlady’s words to Sae and be sure of them—yet, as she stood there clutching her tote bag, saying “Is that so” with a puzzled air, Kenji could not bear to sadden her, not for so much as an instant.
“Come, come—let’s get on back to the dojo. It’s growing dark, after all.”
“It’s still light out, though, Kenji.”
Laughing—hah, hah—Kenji all the same set a hand to Sae’s back and hurried her along.
On any ordinary day it was a thing he could not have brought himself to do though his life were threatened for it—but no such thought was in Kenji’s head now. He felt only that from somewhere, out of nowhere, a clinging gaze had ringed the two of them about, and Kenji thought of one thing alone: that he must, whatever else, get Sae away from this place.
Kenji was not mistaken in what he thought. Nor in his intuition, either.
If there was one thing alone that Kenji had misjudged, it was this—that not every foe comes at you “from the front.”
Two long shadows, drawing away from the apartment.
As though it had been waiting for those shadows to withdraw, an engine coughed and turned over—brrrm—and from a parking lot some two houses down from the apartment, a single van rolled slowly out toward the main road.
Look closely at the boxy body and you saw that the banana-yellow stripe down its side was no paint job, but slapdash work done in stick-on automotive decals. Fixed on, too, was the logo of a courier firm that sounded plausible enough yet did not exist—“Hasuka Home Delivery”—and the van had every appearance of being “out on its rounds.”
“They were there, Yaz.”
The driver flicked a glance up to the rearview mirror. On the back seat, which by rights ought to have been piled high with parcels, sat a bearded man.
“Good. Move out.”
At the bearded man’s satisfied murmur, the van drove off just as it was.
The next morning. In the father and daughter’s apartment, sounds of pain had been carrying on since first light.
“Dad… are you all right?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine… ow-ow-ow…”
No sooner had he said it than Makoto’s face twisted, and, held up by his daughter, he lowered himself onto the dining chair by careful, creeping inches. For all the world like a man with a wrenched back.
“You’re not fine at all… Did you rub in that ointment Akie gave you?”
“I did, I did. I’d not be able to walk otherwise.”
Round the waist of the earnestly nodding Makoto was wound a broad belt that might well have passed for a bellyband. A so-called “back-support belt.”
“Akie has a cruel streak in her, hasn’t she. Even when I got cross with her she kept that prim, unruffled face on the whole time.”
In the kitchen, seeing to breakfast, Sae was a touch out of sorts. The clatter of the dishes was louder than its wont.
“Sae. This is my own doing. The master said we ought to leave it at a single round, and it was I who begged her—‘please, once more’—over and over. I’ve none but myself to blame.”
Gingerly straightening his spine and bending it by turns, Makoto set out his explanation.
He had said as much to Sae any number of times since the evening before, but the sight of her father having to be hauled up off the tatami at the dojo by two people at once seemed to have shaken her badly. That his mild-natured Sae should round on that very Akie, and fly at her without the least timidity, was as much a surprise to Makoto as it was, in a small way, a joy. Perhaps reading what was in Makoto’s heart, Akie had heard out Sae’s protests in silence.
Makoto had made up his mind to thank Akie when he went to the dojo that day.
“Still, to beat you up like this, Dad, when you’ve not a scrap of the athlete in you—it’s going too far.”
“Ha ha… I wonder if that’s a thing I ought to be glad to hear.”
Before Makoto, the corner of his cheek twitching, a rice bowl came down with a thump.
“And here I’d always thought Akie was a rather gentler sort of person.”
Setting out the miso soup and the grilled salmon, Sae made her way back to the kitchen. The fragrant smell of the salmon, wrapped in the gentle steam of the miso soup—it was the most peaceful hour of the whole day, this hour of the morning.
Makoto called Sae back as she returned to the table, and then slowly shook his head.
“I’ve never in my life met a kinder person than the master.”
Seeing Sae take her place at the table, Makoto went on.
“Oh, she’s hard, no mistake—especially where karate is concerned, and with anyone whose heart isn’t set right. Merciless, you might even call it. But that, I do believe, is for the other person’s own sake. It’s consideration—the genuine article… Er—what’s the matter, Sae?”
Sae was gazing at Makoto with a face full of wonder—eyes, for all the world, as though she were looking upon “a man made over new.”
“Dad, you’re… saying rather fine things, somehow.”
“…Come now, Sae. That’s as much as to say I’m a good-for-nothing of a father, is it not.”
“That’s not true… is it?”
Sae looked away, said “Itadakimasu,” and took a sip of the miso soup.
The next instant—hot!—out shot her tongue, and she fanned at it with her hand.
“Ha-ha! Still can’t take it hot, can you, Sae—same as ever.”
“Ju’th eat up! You’ll be wate!”
“All right, all right.”
Glared at by cheek-puffed Sae, Makoto too took up his chopsticks. The ache in his lower back, it seemed to him, had eased somewhat from before.
How long had it been since a morning such as this?
“Itadakimasu… ow, hot!”
Only, the miso soup was hotter that morning than ever it was wont to be.
“I’m off, then, Sae.”
“That’s early, Dad.”
Finishing their breakfast at very nearly the same moment, Makoto left the clearing-away to Sae and rose from the table.
His back still hung heavy, a dull throb in it, but it had grown a good deal easier. The cleaning, and the folding of the gi—that much he could manage; but the training he had no choice but to beg off.
“They look after me in no end of ways as it is, and useless as I am to begin with, the least I can do is take the lead on the odd jobs.”
Makoto reached toward the navy tailored jacket that hung on the entryway wall—and quick, from the side, he was beaten to it.
“I’ll run it to the cleaner’s next time. Here—arms out.”
“Ahh, no—the cleaning fee, it’s a waste.”
Doing just as he was bid, he held his arms spread wide, and Sae fed them through the sleeves.
It may have been mere chance—but the way her hands drew the jacket onto him, beginning from the left arm, was astonishingly like Emiri’s, to the very life.
“Dad? This was a birthday present from Mama, wasn’t it? You have to treasure it—you mustn’t be careless with a thing like this.”
In that way she had of scolding, too, she was like her mother, and Makoto only nodded, saying nothing.
“…Thank you, Sae. You’re right. I must treasure it.”
Sae, come round to face him, stood scarcely different from Makoto in height. Makoto was no tall man himself, yet somewhere along the way those dear eyes had come to meet his own at the very same level.
“There—that’s got it.”
At the nod those dark-brown eyes gave, Makoto felt, before he knew it, the urge to catch her up tight in his arms. A child grows quickly, they say—but when had his daughter become the more grown-up of the two of them?
“Because I can’t pull myself together—is that it.”
“What’s that, Dad?”
His muttering had plainly been caught after all; Sae tilted her head.
On her bob-cut head Makoto set his fist, with a soft little tap.
“…No. It’s nothing.”
Even so, he could not go on leaning forever on his daughter. He had been coddled quite enough; if he did not smarten himself up before long, he had the feeling he would be in for a scolding.
And so Makoto held back the embrace, and drew his spine up straight.
“Your dad means to give it his all too—so you go and do your best at school, Sae.”
“Mm-hm!”
“…Ah—but, if you would rather not, there’s no need to force yourself to go…”
“I’ve said I understand. You’re leaving early, aren’t you?”
“All right, all right… don’t shove, Sae. I’m o-o-off—”
“Off you go, then!”
“Right then… I’d best be making a move myself before long…”
Having all but driven Makoto out of the apartment and got the breakfast things cleared away, Sae looked up. The clock in the living room stood at the hour to leave for school. Ever since Makoto had taken to going to the dojo, Sae had gone no more on her morning walks.
She no longer felt, as once she had, the pull to stand gazing out over the riverbank, and her mornings had grown busy besides. When she had spoken of it to Akie, the woman had laughed: “Walks’ll keep till you’re old and gray, won’t they.”
Ding-dong.
No sooner had the entry chime sounded than, hard upon it, a man’s voice rang out: “Hasuka Home Delivery!”
“A delivery, at this hour? Did Dad go and buy something, I wonder…?”
Now and again Makoto would order sundries or books by post. Since their moving here the frequency had fallen off—but perhaps, she thought, he had bought something he needed at the dojo.
“Coming!”
When Sae opened the door, a good-natured-looking deliveryman, in work overalls with an armband, bowed his head to her.
“Good morning. Sorry to trouble you—this would be the home of Mr. Makoto Tsukishiro, would it?”
“Yes… that’s right, but…”
A faint sense of something amiss came over Sae at the deliveryman gazing so straight into her eyes. If it were the address he wished to confirm, he need only look at the slip on the box; and Makoto’s surname was a rare one. Many a person misread it as “Tsukijō”—yet this man, holding out his ballpoint pen, had said “Tsukishiro” right the first time.
“Ah, good, then. Your signature, if I may—”
Whether he knew of Sae’s disquiet or no, the man gave a bright little smile and waited on her signature. Making as though to sweep back her hair, she stole a glance to the floor below, and there stood a van bearing the very logo that was on his overalls.
It was a name she did not know—but that was no proof in itself that no such courier existed. That the delivery trade was short of hands, Sae knew well enough.
“…Here. Thank you very much.”
He tore the slip away with a practiced air, and when Sae took the smallish box from him, it was lighter than she would have thought—so light that she half fancied there was nothing inside it at all.
“Much obliged—”
Whipping off his cap in a bow, the deliveryman went briskly down the stairs. The apartment’s staircase was a steep one—so steep that even Sae, who lived there, would all but lose her footing were she not careful. Watching his back as he swung up into the van, the thought slipped out of her unbidden.
“He’s light on his feet, that one, isn’t he.”
She shut the door and set the parcel down on the dining table. She would have liked to carry it through to Makoto’s room, but if she did not leave the house soon she would not be in time for the start of class.
Just as she turned her back on the parcel, meaning to get herself ready at last—the cardboard box began to ring.
“Wh…?”
Sae froze at the muffled, lilting little electronic tone. Look about her as she might, there was nothing that could have made such a sound.
When she had started high school, Makoto had made her a present of a mobile phone, but once the household grew hard-pressed she had, at her own asking, let the contract lapse. Makoto kept a phone for the job center to reach him by—but that, of course, was not in the house now.
“It’s not… a bomb, is it…?”
In a film Sae had watched long ago, opening a box had set off a tremendous blast. What sprang to her mind on the instant was her mother’s camera, there in her own room.
“Would it shatter the window glass, I wonder…”
Across her mind flitted the figure of a film star bursting through the glass by a hair’s breadth and making his escape.
She was on the point of straying off into whether she would break a bone were she to leap from her bedroom window, when the electronic tone stopped short, all at once.
“…Hello? Mr. Tsukishiro? This would be Yaz here, from Hamachi Finance, you understand.”
Imaginative though Sae was, she was not so green as to suppose the box had spoken.
And what was more, the owner of the voice, who had named himself Yaz, bore a name she knew. Makoto had said once, some while back, that the man had “done a great deal for him,” or something of the sort.
Opening it with fear and trembling, she found within the box a silver PHS handset, a small liquid-crystal screen set into its face, half buried in packing foam. On the emerald-green display, the curt words: “Caller Withheld.”
“…Um, hello?”
“Oh? The wrong party, is it. My apologies. Do forgive me—”
“No—wait! I’m Makoto Tsukishiro’s daughter. Did you have some business with my father?”
“The young lady, is it? How do you do. Ahh—what a relief! I had been so anxious, not able to get through to your father, you see. The truth of it is, young lady—your father, a while back…”
By the moment the color drained from Sae’s cheeks. The clock on the wall swung its second hand as if in warning—but the lone occupant of the house stood frozen, and did not stir.
About the same time, in the parking lot of a derelict house not far from the apartment, a single van sat at rest. In the hand of the bearded man—a mobile phone wedged between shoulder and cheek as he talked—was a wad of decals, only just now peeled away and crumpled up. The other man, in work overalls, shrugged off his jacket, flung it into an old oil drum made ready beforehand, and drew a box of matches from his trouser pocket.
The instant the bearded man tossed the decals in, up leapt the flames from the drum with a whoosh.
And the bearded man’s jaw curled into a leer as he swung up into the van—stark white now, every last trace stripped from it.
“Makoto! Bring us the flask.”
“Makoto, might I trouble you to fetch the gi?”
“Father-in-law—! No—that is, Makoto, I’ll see to it myself!”
Such were the words flung at Makoto—by Akie, by the assistant master Harue, and by Kenji—as he was sent on one errand after another and set running about the dojo. Atop the folded gi he had balanced a water flask, and it swayed and tottered. Makoto gave his thanks to Kenji, who caught the flask a breath before it fell, and tucked the stacked gi under his arm.
“Thank you, Kenji. It’s my work to do, so I’ll see to it myself.”
“But it’s written all over your face how much your back’s hurting, y’know?”
“Ha-ha. I’m all right. Come now—if I don’t get a move on, the master’ll…”
“Kenji! Don’t go getting in the way of another’s work! If you’ve time to stand about idling, you’ve time to spar with me!”
Kenji flinched with a little squeak and hunched his neck down into his shoulders; Makoto clapped him on one of them—“Here, take this along”—and passed him Akie’s flask. Watching the young man’s back as he trotted off, Makoto understood now, as once he could not have, that this too was a kindness of Akie’s. With Akie wearing her master’s face there was no telling her any such thing, and so he gathered the gi up afresh and pressed on ahead.
“Is Higo about?”
Having delivered the gi, Makoto was scouring the sink in the little kitchen when, at his elbow, the back door swung open without so much as a knock. At the old woman who raised her face—calling for Akie, with all the ease of one long familiar with the place—Makoto’s hands went still. She too, it seemed, had not looked to find Makoto there. Her sunken eyes flew wide for an instant, then slid aside.
Something has happened to Sae—a father’s intuition set the alarm bells ringing.
“Landlady…? What brings you here?”
“…I had business with Higo, is all.”
At the look on Makoto’s face—for he did not know it was Akie’s maiden name—the landlady let out a sigh of resignation.
“You’ve callers, you have. Hard-pressed as a life may be, a money-lender is a thing to choose with care. And it’s all very well the girl being a good child—but to let a pack of shifty sorts like that into the house…”
“Sae!”
At Makoto’s back as he bolted off, the color gone clean from his face, the landlady let slip a sigh, as much as to say, well, well. That she had come here at all was proof the matter was not so very pressing—but in that state he would hardly have taken it in. Makoto’s flustered rush was just as the old woman had reckoned it would be.
From the sleeve of her apron she drew out a mobile phone of the very newest make, and as she walked toward the dojo she called up photographs with a nimbleness of finger to shame any schoolgirl. The van with the courier’s decals stuck upon it, and the driver’s face; footage looking down from above upon the driver and Sae at the handing-over of the parcel; and then, taken through a telephoto lens, the man burning the uniform and the figure in the business suit at his phone—one after another they slid past.
Making her way down the corridor, the landlady halted before the tatami, and her eyes met Akie’s, who had that very moment finished a sparring bout.
“Senior Superintendent Bandō.”
“Give over. It’s ancient history, that. Never mind it—Higo.”
“Yes,” said Akie, drawing herself up with a nod, and waited on Bandō’s words with respect in her eyes. It was a thing every one of the old-guard pupils knew: that before Bandō, the onetime career officer, Akie could not hold her head up. In her younger days she had been much in the woman’s debt, so they said—but there was not a pupil bold enough to ask the particulars.
“Those shifty types that have been prowling hereabouts of late—I’ve found them.”
“Where are they now?”
She held the mobile phone aloft, for all the world as though it were a police badge.
“At the home of that pupil of yours.”
A figure in a karate gi went tearing through the streets. Through the shopping arcade, past the flank of a great shopping center still going up—Makoto ran. The cicadas had set up their crying, and near noon the heat was climbing toward a true midsummer’s day. Makoto, who wanted for exercise at the best of times, had his brow awash with sweat already. And having bolted the dojo barefoot besides, he scraped the soles of his feet raw on the asphalt, so that every step was as a step through hell.
Even so, Makoto did not slacken his pace. The pain, and the stabbing looks of those about him, were nowhere in his head; the figure of his only daughter, and that alone, drove him on.
A few days before his wife died, Makoto had been quarreling with her over some trifling thing. Memory bends itself to one’s own convenience: rack his brains as he might, he could not now recall what the cause of it had even been. All he remembered was that, as she went from the room, Emiri had said, “Sae looks up to you, you know. Don’t you go disappointing that child”—so most likely he had come home drunk to insensibility, been taken to task for it, and lost his temper. The strain between them dragged on, and in the end she was gone. That had been his last conversation with Emiri.
Each time it came back to him, Makoto’s body shook at his own foolishness. To turn his face from what was real, he had thrown up his work and leaned on drink. And the one who, through all of it, never once cast him off, who held him up without fail—that was Sae. His daughter was, by a long way, the more grown-up of them. And yet she was still only sixteen.
And so it was his charge, his mission, to keep that child safe. Together with Emiri, from this day on, and always.
“Sae!”
Stumbling on the apartment stairs, all but crawling, he hauled himself up to the second floor and threw his whole weight against the door to force it open. It was not locked; Makoto pitched headlong into the room, and Sae came rushing to him in alarm.
“Dad?!”
“Sae… are you all right…?”
“Mm.”
Following the gaze of his daughter, her eyes cast down, Makoto found the “guests” he had come for. Two men in business suits sat facing one another at the dining table in the living room; of them the bearded one, Yaz, turned about as if in surprise. The other, his eyes taking Makoto’s measure the while, put his lips to a glass of barley tea poured out on the table.
“Well, now. Mr. Tsukishiro! Gone and turned yourself into some manner of martial artist, have you, in the while since last we met?”
“What have you done to my daughter?”
“Dad, it isn’t that. The two of them, they’re…”
“Never mind—leave this here to your father.”
“Now, now—don’t go making such a fearsome face. We were but enjoying a cup of the young lady’s tea. Won’t you have one yourself, Mr. Tsukishiro? Don’t stand about over there—come, come and join us. Ahh—it’s good, this!”
Steadied on his feet by Sae, Makoto walked to the middle of the room, and, letting not a crack show in his hard-set face, went on.
“Isn’t it beyond all decency, forcing your way into a man’s home? I’ll pay back what I owe, every bit of it. So—”
“Mr. Tsukishiro.”
Yaz rose from his chair with a languid sway and thrust a hand into his suit pocket. That good-natured smile of his did all the more to drive on the uneasy air of the room.
To Makoto—who was reckoning how long he might hold the pair of them off, once he had gotten Sae clear away—Yaz held out a single sheet of paper. On the loan note, in the “change of address” box, a line had been drawn through the address Makoto had written in.
“This apartment of yours is No. 5-9, 4-chōme—‘Heights Boris,’ is it not? There’s no such lot in 3-chōme, and no ‘Heights Urbance’ to be found anywhere.”
The loan note was right enough, true, down as far as the district name—but the lot numbers past that were wrong. Of the apartment’s name, too, only “Heights” was correct.
“No, that’s—that was…”
Yaz cut across Makoto, whose eyes were swimming, and heaved a great, showy sigh.
“Mr. Tsukishiro, come now. We’ve no wish to doubt a customer of ours, and getting a lot number wrong—why, that’s common enough. But to be ‘put off the scent’ clear down to the very name of the apartment—well, there it is. We too are running a business here, you understand.”
—and one more sigh. He was as good as charging Makoto with having written it wrong on purpose.
“Still and all, the young lady is very quick on the uptake—she even offered to write it out in her father’s stead. But we could hardly have a minor doing that sort of thing, now. We set great store by trust, our firm does, you see. And so we have been waiting on your coming home. Ahh—a truly clever young lady she is.”
Nodding away all the while, Yaz settled back onto his chair. He had, it seemed, not the least mind to leave. Yaz’s silent partner, sipping still at his barley tea as before, held the air of the room heavy and oppressive.
“Say, Dad. Why did you never tell me you had borrowed money? We’ve savings, haven’t we?”
It was Yaz who answered in Makoto’s stead. Taking a sip from his glass, a thin smile spreading on his lips, he turned the upper half of his body toward father and daughter.
“There, there—it’s a pitiful thing, to scold your father so. All of this too was done with thought for your own good, you know. Isn’t that so, Mr. Tsukishiro?”
Averting his eyes from the leering Yaz, Makoto let out a short breath. It was only natural that Sae should have her doubts. He had entrusted nearly all the housework to her, yet he had never once shown her the bankbook; the household money he had always handed to Sae directly, note by note.
And so it was his part, and no one else’s, to answer his daughter. He would not have a money-lender do the talking for him.
“There are savings, Sae. But that money is for your future. When I married your mama—when I married Emiri—we made a promise. That the money the two of us had put by would be spent for your sake, and yours alone.”
“Boo-hoo. What a truly touching little tale! And so it comes to this—that it is we who keep the Tsukishiro household afloat. Unemployment insurance being the merest pittance, and all.”
At Yaz’s words there was nothing Makoto could do but clench his fists. Had he not sunk into self-disgust, had he only striven to find steady work, these men would never have come forcing their way into the new life he had built. Yaz had the right of it: petty evasions did nothing but make his plight the worse.
“Yaz. About the address—the fault was mine.”
As Makoto bowed his head—“I am sorry”—Sae turned to him a face that was half worry, half astonishment. Not since her mother’s death had she seen Makoto own himself in the wrong.
“The money I will pay back, to the very last of it. So please—for today, I must ask you to leave.”
“Come now, Mr. Tsukishiro. We’ve no thought of pressing you for it by force. Ours is a long acquaintance, after all. If you truly ‘cannot’ pay, why, there’s no help for it. But—Mr. Tsukishiro. You—you can pay, can’t you?”
Turning only the upper half of his body their way, Yaz rose without haste and set his collar to rights. At his throat, glimpsed for an instant, showed an ash-blue mark. The salesman’s smile was on his lips, but the unblinking eyes did not smile at all.
Sae caught the sound of Makoto swallowing as he raised his face. She could see how tense her father was.
“The savings… I cannot touch.”
Over Makoto’s voice, refusing with resolve, broke a violent noise—a pounding on the dinner table.
Bang!
“Enough of your fine talk! You borrow a thing, you pay it back—that’s common sense, that is, ain’t it! Eh?”
The drained glass toppled with the blow and went rolling across the table. Shielding the flinching Sae behind his back, Makoto edged step by step toward the entryway.
“Now, now—we’re not done talking yet.”
Cut off by Yaz, who had got there ahead of him, Makoto felt the sweat run down his brow. With the way out barred by Yaz, and Yaz’s partner bearing down from the front in heavy, tramping strides, the hand of Sae’s that he gripped behind him trembled, small and faint.
“Quit your yammering and cough up the cash, now! Or else—”
The partner’s words never reached their end.
Crash!!
With a shock as of a car plowing in, the apartment door blew inward into the room. Striking the near-standing Yaz full in the face, the door came down over the man in his business suit and bore him under it. And one of the hinges that flew loose caught Yaz’s partner square on the forehead, a clean and ringing hit.
“Or else—what, exactly?”
The one who flung out the words, in a voice pitched a notch lower and brimming with authority, was Akie in her gi. She stood planted in the doorway like a temple guardian, arms folded. With the light at her back, there was about her something very near the divine.
And from beside this Akie, a shadow came looming, sliding into the room.
“Saaae!”
“K-Kenji?!”
“You’re not hurt?! I’m sorry I’m late! I’ll never leave you on your own again!”
The figure in the gi that came running in a straight line to father and daughter had a face in a dreadful state, all sweat and tears. Yaz, whom he had blithely trodden on as he came in, let out a groan.
“Yaz?! Oi. The lot of you—who the hell are you?!”
Giving his head a hard shake, Yaz’s partner spat out his bluster.
“Don’t go thinking you’ll get away with a stunt like this! We know where you live, remember!”
“That would be a threat, that.”
“And I’ve got it all down nice and clear”—so said the apartment’s landlady, ducking in through the doorway from behind Akie. Raising a palm-sized voice recorder up from her bent-over frame, she worked the button on its rim with a practiced hand. At the “proof of the threat” that played back crisp and clear, Yaz’s partner—the middle of his forehead an angry red—let his mouth fall agape.
Putting the recorder away and casting an eye at the fallen Yaz, Bandō turned, goggle-eyed, to Akie.
“You’ll pay for the repairs, and no mistake. Honestly—what age will you have to reach before that hot blood of yours cools down?”
“My thanks, Senior Superintendent.”
“S-Senior Superintendent?!”
As if to bar the way before Yaz’s partner—who started, quite literally, up off the floor with fright—Kenji stepped a pace forward. Perhaps grasping at last how badly the odds stood against him, the man heaved a great sigh and plumped himself down cross-legged on the floor. Without so much as a glance his way, Akie bowed her head lightly; and Bandō, after running her eyes one last time over Sae and her father, each in turn, took her leave.
“Kenji—lend that man a hand.”
“Yes.”
Past Kenji, who lifted the door aside and helped Yaz to his feet, Akie walked over to the father and daughter, still frozen where they stood.
“Akie—thank you so mu—”
Smack!
What came flying at the relieved Sae was the flat of a hand—and a sharp word of rebuke.
“There’s a limit to carelessness, Sae. Letting strangers into the house—and here I’d thought you a child with a little more sense than that.”
To the girl who clapped a hand to her cheek and stared wide-eyed, Akie, her face still stern, went on—
“The landlady told me. You went to her for advice, didn’t you? She warned you off, so why wouldn’t you listen? A telephone turning up by post—if that isn’t a fishy thing, there’s no such thing as fishy. Once something’s happened, child, it’s already too late.”
“I heard that Dad had gone and written an important document wrong, and I thought I had to do something about it…”
When Akie looked at Yaz—settled into a chair now with Kenji’s support—the bedraggled figure in the business suit shrugged, bold as brass: “Ask the man himself.”
“Master. The fault is mine. It all comes back to my own want of resolve—that is what brought this on.”
Biting his lip in chagrin, Makoto turned to face his daughter.
“I promise you it will never come to this again. So—Sae—will you promise me, too, that you won’t do anything so reckless?”
“Mm. Dad—Akie—I’m sorry.”
At the girl’s little dip of the head, Akie too could only let out a sigh of relief.
Into the scene of the three of them, a voice thick with sarcasm threw its cold water.
“So sorry to break in on so touching a scene. But—Mr. Tsukishiro. Granting that we, too, were guilty of some rudeness, and that on both sides we agree to let that point pass without question—even so, the contract yet remains.”
“You force your way into a person’s home, and you’ve still the nerve to say—!”
“Kenji!”
Checking her hot-blooded pupil, the master put a question to the debt-collector, flat and even.
“For the rough handling, you have my apology. The cost of your treatment I shall pay myself.”
“Ah, thank heaven for a reasonable party! What your connection to him may be I couldn’t say, but this pupil of yours owes us a debt, you understand. Why, don’t they always say it in the action pictures—a debt is a thing to be paid back in full, every last bit of it?”
“A dressed-up story and the real thing are two different matters. Were this a film, you two would be cast as the villains. And my own part in it would be to place a call to the police—would it not?”
At this riposte, delivered without so much as a change of color, Yaz’s own face went taut.
Upon the debt-collector so cornered, Akie unfolded her arms and let her expression soften all of a sudden.
“That said, there is reason in what you have told me, too. A pupil’s responsibility is the master’s responsibility as well.”
“The black belt, through and through! Then—your signature and seal here, if you would, as joint guarantor. Ah—a thumbprint will do quite as well.”
Hurriedly he drew document and pen from the inside pocket of his suit and spread them on the dinner table. The way he set a round ink-pad down beside them—that quickness to switch tack was, perhaps, the mark of a professional, one had to grant.
“Master, no—you mustn’t. The money is mine to pay, properly, I—”
“Yaz, was it—the name you gave?”
Taking up the pen, she turned back to the man in the suit, who could not quite keep the smile from his face.
“Y-yes.”
“Might I have your business card? And then a line in writing, if you please—a pledge to the effect that ‘henceforth I shall not approach Mr. Tsukishiro or his kin’—with the name of your companion there, and of your firm, set down as well. A thumbprint, of course, will do quite as nicely.”
Before Akie’s broad grin, Yaz stood frozen, and for a good while could not stir a muscle.
*     *     *
“Grandma Akie really went and took on that debt, didn’t she. And her always going on about how a person’s own affairs are their own to answer for.”
“Are you stupid, or what?”
—so said Yukie, who until a moment before had been stuffing her cheeks with chestnuts got from the roast-chestnut seller. Sharp of ear, the elder cousin had caught Takeo’s muttering; and on the road toward their grandfather’s house, she had been drawing out of her younger cousin the episodes of their childhood, cutting in now and then to round out the tale.
For all the goddess-like smile she turned upon outsiders, this was the way she spoke to her own flesh-and-blood cousin.
“Yes, yes. I’m the extra bundled in with the town’s hero, that’s all.”
Having palmed off the whole of the luggage onto Takeo and polished off her great bag of roasted chestnuts, Yukie went with a light step, humming a tune besides. One hand holding down her straw hat, her dress swirling about her, she was sight enough, and no mistake, to turn the heads of the passersby. In the twilight, where the heat still lingered and the cicadas kept up their clamor, Yukie’s artless little melody soaked in like cold, clear water.
“Those shady collectors knew where Sae and her family lived, remember? If Grandma hadn’t paid them off then and there, who’s to say when the pack of them would’ve come round again? And a written pledge is a mere formality, nothing more.”
Stuffing the bag of chestnuts into the trouser pocket of her pout-lipped cousin, she raised a forefinger, for all the world as though lecturing some pupil who wouldn’t be told.
“And besides—Makoto, afterward, took on job upon job to pay Grandma back, and earned the money to move on top of it. So he did take responsibility himself, in the end.”
“But still—did they really have no choice but to move away? Big brother Makko and the rest of them, I mean.”
“He used to play with you no end, didn’t he,” said Yukie, a sly grin spreading over her face.
“And Sae doted on you too—so at the end there, Cook-Oh, you were bawling your eyes out, weren’t you.”
“You were too, Snow Woman.”
Sailing splendidly past Takeo’s retort, Yukie gazed off into the distance.
“Sae’s university was a long way off, too, and for a while there were dodgy cars prowling about, so there was no help for it. Well—Kenji was with them, so there was nothing to worry over.”
After the business with the debt-collectors, Kenji and Sae began formally seeing each other, and taking that as his cue, he left the dojo for the path of a firefighter. Sae tried to hold him back, but Kenji’s resolve was firm. What had happened in Kenji’s past Takeo did not know; but the look on Akie’s face as she saw him off, proud, with “It’s about time,” is seared into his memory even now.
Last year, upon her graduation, the two of them were happily made man and wife; Takeo and Yukie were invited to the reception too, and the sight of the newlyweds’ radiant faces—and of Akie heartening a Makoto who would not stop weeping—left its mark. Makoto, for that matter, is said to have founded a consulting firm after Sae married. Drawing on his own experience of being helped by Akie, he means to lend a hand to single fathers and mothers in straits like his own—so Akie told Takeo and the others, her face all aglow.
“Ahh—honestly, Kenji’s a lucky one, meeting such a good person. Risa’s glad of it too.”
As Yukie gave a great stretch, the evening breeze went streaming softly through her hair.
It was a name he was hearing for the first time, but that it had to do with Kenji’s past even Takeo could guess. Say what one might of her, this cousin of his was warm-hearted through and through. She was relieved, no doubt of it. The calm face lit by the setting sun told the whole of it. To go prying would be a graceless thing.
“Oh, that’s right—”
His cousin’s consideration was so much wind to her; and as she nodded in that overdone way of hers, Takeo’s instinct warned him of something unpleasant on its way. At the bag-carrier gone stiff, the evening cicadas jeered, shrilling away.
“It was after Sae and the rest moved away, too, that Cook-Oh woke up to cooking. Fell head over heels at first sight for that stunning ‘lady’ who turned up at Grandpa’s shop. Quick to let your eye wander, aren’t you. Your big sis worries, you know?”
“…Shut up.”
That Takeo could manage no better reply than a grade-schooler’s was because his cousin’s jab had struck home. And on top of that, the recollection of how it had all played out afterward left him too mortified to make a sound.
Even now, looking back, he could scarcely believe it: that day, Takeo—only just turned middle-schooler—had gone and fallen for the person he’d chanced to run into at his grandfather’s shop. And what was more, what could he have been thinking, he had gone about broadcasting it to all and sundry himself, and in the end had mounted his charge, only to be shot clean out of the water. The words that person spoke to him he has never been able to forget. “You’d do better to give it up. You like girls, don’t you?”
Yes—that person was, biologically, male.
True enough, the person was well-built and strong, so that Takeo too had taken them for someone sturdy and robust. And yet, from their very first meeting, there had been a softness in the person’s manner, and the brisk, deft way of moving spoke of an inner strength. Whether the China dress worn for reasons of their own, and the hair done up in a bun, were to Takeo’s taste or not is another question; but that Takeo came to feel a kind of yearning admiration at that wholehearted figure, there is no doubt of it. He could never bring himself to say it aloud—but Takeo, who knows his own weakness, holds that person, even now, in his heart’s sincere respect.
Just as Yukie was in dead earnest considering whether to tease her cousin—sulky, and red in the cheeks, the evening sun perhaps to blame—still further, she was brought up short by a hail from a shaven head in a bow tie and sunglasses, one whose strained, too-high voice was plain for anyone to hear.
“Oh myyy? If it isn’t Yukkie!”
A baritone voice that seemed like to carry into every corner of the street flung both hands aloft in wild delight.
“Mii-chan!” “Ngh—”
The shaven head, giving off a light near divine, came skipping along lightly, and the hands it fluttered maiden-like were thick and fleshy. The fingers, with rings sunk deep into them, might have been a nobleman’s; and a waistline fit to burst swelled out a shocking-purple dress shirt that looked to have been made to special order.
The baritone voice, bearing down with a force to send even a grown man fleeing, slowed with unexpected smoothness—and then flung itself upon Takeo, the “little brother” of that strikingly ill-matched pair, who had been averting his eyes.
“Grown even lovelier while my back was turned, haven’t you—I could just die of envy!”
“H-hang on, Bimiko… can’t… breathe…”
“It’s you, Mii-chan—your skin’s got such a glow, I’m the envious one! I’d half a mind to have you let me in on the secret.”
“Taking in plenty of good things—that’s the secret!”
Sliding the sunglasses down to wink, she might have stepped straight out of some yakuza picture. “Eating really is what matters, isn’t it,” said Yukie, her eyes shining, for all the world like a sister to her—no, like kin. These two had got on uncannily well from the first. And their manner toward Takeo was, as a matter of course, no different—especially since the day Yukie had come to know of his confession.
Mii-chan—he, or rather, she—goes by the name Bimiko. Something over ten years after striking out on her own, she had, last year, at long last managed to get her name changed. To alter the sex and the name on one’s family register, in this old and set-in-its-ways country, is a thing harder than shifting a boulder. And beyond the system itself, there had been no end of battering from those around her—so Takeo has heard from Yukie.
Bimiko’s calling is that of a food mentor—and a celebrated one, a household name besides. Takeo takes her for a food critic, but having once come to grief for saying so, he holds his tongue on the point. As a rule she makes her rounds of the eating-houses of the capital and the greater cities, leaving behind opinions she never wraps up to spare a soul. Just as a certain famous gourmet reviewer once had it—that Bimiko’s critiques are so many detailed analyses—the establishments that took her counsel to heart and refined themselves accordingly saw, one and all, their custom climb like a soaring kite, or so the story goes. Reputation begot reputation, until now she serves as a mentor for that restaurant guide renowned for the awarding of its stars, and flies the whole world over. Her time abroad taught Bimiko how much it matters to take pride in what sets one apart; she rose above the slander and the spite, and won at last the recognition she had so long yearned for—that of being a woman. Hiding away not the least particle of herself, she has given courage to a great many, and enjoys a charismatic renown.
That Bimiko—of all people—should turn up in their hometown for the first time in years was reason enough for Takeo’s astonishment.
“W-weren’t you supposed to be in France…”
From Bimiko’s hand hung a tall, narrow gift bag. Even without being able to read the cursive lettering printed on its heavy, matte-finished luxury paper, he could guess well enough what was inside.
“*Exactement.* Burgundy’s Chablis is simply exceptional!”
Caught in her chokehold as he was, Takeo never once let go of the grocery bag: he didn’t dare imagine what would become of him if he wasted good ingredients in front of this particular woman. The strength in those log-thick arms was, true to her looks—or perhaps because of them—no mere gourmet’s grip. And Takeo’s nose, thoroughly accustomed by now to being doted on by that very gourmet, caught a familiar scent.
“Star anise… and goji berries?”
“Finally figured it out, did you?! Honestly, dense as ever, Sakura-boy. I very nearly choked you out completely and had Maman cook you up.”
Finally letting him out of her hold, she gave the coughing Takeo a great whack on the back, her booming laughter rolling on. Frankly, the stares from passersby stung, but the moment they caught sight of Yukie, every face relaxed into understanding—proof enough of just how frighteningly well-connected his cousin was.
“Guh—…did you go to my mother’s restaurant?”
“Sure did. Karyū’s mapo tofu hasn’t changed a bit. The Sichuan peppercorn is used just exquisitely—even through the spice, the fragrance of soybean comes through. And the silken tofu goes down so smoothly. It’s a different animal from the Sichuan original, but it suits the Japanese palate just right.”
Arms crossed, she looked for all the world as though she held the power of life and death over her listener—yet her comments were every inch the professional’s. Even Takeo, who’d grown up eating this dish, couldn’t have told you the soybean’s own flavor within the tofu. This, after all, was the very Bimiko who had made even Akio—Takeo’s grandfather, once hailed as the Iron Chef of Chinese cuisine—call her palate “a gift from the heavens.” She was no mere eccentric in sunglasses with nothing going for her but a loud voice.
“Maman was lamenting about you, you know.”
With that, the eyes behind her sunglasses turned on him, sharp. He couldn’t actually see them, but he could tell he’d been pierced through all the same. Letting out a short sigh, Takeo shifted his grip on the grocery bag.
“I’m not taking over the restaurant. I just cook as a hobby. …I could never become a professional.”
“Is that because your big sis once called you ‘half-hearted,’ hmm?”
At Bimiko’s words, Takeo had no comeback at all. The grocery bag dug sharply into his hand.
“…Someone with your talent wouldn’t understand, Bimiko.”
“Oh? Hasn’t Master told you?”
Unfolding her arms, Bimiko stroked her shaven head. The lines creasing her brow spoke of genuine surprise. Yukie, too, seemed at a loss, tilting her straw hat to one side.
“What about Grandpa?”
“Heh heh. Sounds just like Master, doesn’t it. So, are you and Yukkie headed to Master’s place too?”
Unable to keep up with the turn the conversation had taken, Takeo furrowed his brow. “How do you even know that?”
“Honestly, you dense boy. Today’s Respect for the Aged Day, isn’t it. Well, Master’s still plenty young, mind you.”
“Then don’t tell me…”
As Takeo took a step back, Bimiko caught his shoulder in a firm grip.
“In the bag: eggs, chestnuts, shiso, and shimeji mushrooms. Hmmm—our Sakura-boy really is a creature of Japanese cuisine through and through, isn’t he. It’s been a while; I think I’ll let myself enjoy this one.”
“You’re coming along too?!”
“Obviously,” said Yukie, and a chop came down square on the crown of his head.
“Ow, ow… why is it always me…”
“You two really do get along, don’t you. Well then—as we walk, your big sis will tell you a story from the old days.”
The wink she gave from behind her sunglasses was, as ever, full of force.
*     *     *
Among Akio’s relations there was a *young man* named Tomohide Ajika.
Relations though they were, the family lived far off, and Akio—Tomohide’s distant uncle—saw her only once or twice a year, at a memorial service or during Obon. To Akio’s eye, she was a quiet, well-mannered youth of sturdy build. Still, one thing nagged at him: the way she reacted whenever her old-fashioned parent, beaming with pride, would knock back a cup of sake and say, “You’ll grow into a fine man yet”—as though she were holding something back.
That Tomohide should come crashing into Akio’s life all at once was on a morning when snow was fluttering down. Akio was in the kitchen seeing to the prep work when he heard a noise at the back door. Wondering if it might be a stray cat, he looked—and found Tomohide crouched there barefoot, wearing nothing but a thin hoodie. On cheeks flushed red as frostbite, frozen tears had left their tracks.
He wanted to hear the whole story, but Akio had a restaurant to run.
Karyū, at the time, was five years out from its opening—just reaching the point where regular customers had finally begun to settle in. Let his guard down here, and everything he’d built would vanish in an instant. Karyū was the restaurant Akio had built after leaving his salaryman’s life behind. For the sake, too, of his wife—who had been exasperated by the idea yet gave her blessing all the same, and who then, as though she’d timed it to the very moment the restaurant found its feet, was carried off by illness—Karyū was a place he had to keep running, whatever it took.
Luckily, Tomohide bore no visible injuries, and answered questions clearly enough. She wouldn’t say why she’d come, and Akio didn’t ask. He pressed a cup of hot kudzu tea into her hands, showed her around the family quarters upstairs, and by the time he’d returned to the shop, the only two staff he had were already busy cleaning and prepping.
When the lunch rush had passed and Akio went upstairs bearing a plate of fried rice cobbled together from leftovers, he found Tomohide scrubbing the floor. She seemed not to notice Akio, who blinked at her and started to ask, “You doing all right now?”—and when her wiping-cloth reached the end of the hallway and she looked up and saw him, she let out a shriek—“Eek?!”—and the fright knocked the strength clean out of her legs. Between the two of them, dumbfounded, a stomach gave a low growl.
“…I see.”
Sitting formally across from Tomohide in the bedroom of the family quarters, Akio, having heard the whole of her story, could find no other words. At Tomohide’s feet sat an emptied plate that had held the fried rice, a teacup, and the freshly laundered hoodie folded neatly. She was now dressed in a polo shirt and slacks borrowed from Akio, her fists clenched tight on her knees, her face set as stiff as someone awaiting judgment.
“Did your father say he’d never let you cross the threshold of that house again?”
“Yes. And that if I went running to my grandparents, he’d come drag me out of there too.”
“What about your friends? You told me, at Obon, that things were going well at school.”
“That was a lie.”
Akio, arms crossed, raised an eyebrow sharply.
“You’d been lying to your family?”
“…When I started high school, there was a friend I’d stayed close with since middle school. I worked up the nerve to tell them the truth, and by the next day, the whole class had shut me out.”
“So that’s why you couldn’t tell your parents.”
“Yes. Though in the end, it came to the same thing anyway.”
Tomohide gave a short, self-mocking laugh, and Akio pressed her further.
“What do you want to do from here? You’ve no intention of keeping up with judo, I take it. So what, then?”
“I want to learn to cook. I decided just now, eating this fried rice.”
“Anything tastes good when you’re hungry enough. Deciding your future on a passing feeling is—”
“No.”
Picking up the plate, Tomohide’s face brightened, as though savoring the aftertaste all over again.
“It’s the balance. The finely minced cucumber was crisp and fresh, and it made the richness of the pork fat really stand out. The carrots, diced small—were they parboiled first? I can taste the sweetness in them. Oh, and there were dried shrimp in it too. I’d never had them before, but they had such a good bite, such a deep flavor. It matches the freshness of the corn, though I felt it was almost competing with the sweetness of the carrot. But the rice—fried up firm, nice and loose—brought all the ingredients together as one. It’s so light that you could eat as much as you wanted. To think all that could come from nothing but salt and pepper.”
Setting the plate back down on the tatami, Tomohide turned to face Akio again. Her face was filled with a quiet resolve.
“That’s why I want to try making food this warm and delicious myself. Please—let me work here.”
Akio’s expression stayed hard as she bowed her head before him. After closing his eyes for a moment, as though lost in thought, what came out of the proprietor’s mouth were harsh words.
“Tomohide. I’ll say this plainly—I think the same as your father does, too.”
Her body went rigid. Even so, she did not lift her head.
“Honestly, I don’t understand it myself. That your… character, so to speak… isn’t a man’s. I want you to know that plainly. But it’s no different from you not wanting to lie to yourself.”
If it’s sympathy you’re after, I can’t give you that, Akio told her—and Tomohide clenched her teeth. Sitting up abruptly, she let her voice rise, as though expelling everything she’d been holding in.
“I don’t need sympathy. I’ve made my peace with not being understood! I just can’t stand being denied. Simply because my heart is that of a woman, to have all of me denied—that I cannot forgive.”
“So what will you do about it? Prejudice is everywhere you look. When I started this restaurant and went to the bank for a loan, they made a face at me and said, ‘You were a company man before, weren’t you.’ It was written all over their faces: *could this man really cook, could he really run a business?* There are more people out there who’ll deny you than you can count. If you can’t forgive it, are you going to take revenge on the whole world?”
“I won’t do anything like that. I’ll send my message through cooking instead. ‘That dish you’re so happily enjoying—a queer made it,’ I’ll say.”<!-- TN: 「オカマ」を未訳イタリック体で残さず、再専有された英語の蔑称 queer に置換 (原文の挑発・奪還のニュアンス保持のため)。識別語彙のため著者・翻訳チームでの最終確認を推奨。 -->
A smile had risen at the corner of Tomohide’s glaring mouth. It was not a careless smirk of self-mockery, but the bold, unflinching smile of someone who, faced with hardship, had steeled herself into a defiant *just you watch me*.
When a young person who had made up her mind wore a face like that, it was only right that an elder should test her mettle.
“Then show me results, Tomohide. Cooking hangs entirely on whether the other person’s satisfied. However fine you think your work is, one word—‘it’s terrible’—and it’s over. Whether you get angry that the customer’s being unreasonable, or reflect that your own skill fell short, that’s up to you. If you want to be recognized, then go and convince them.”
“Yes! Then—”
Still, it was also an elder’s job to put a pin in a face lit up so brightly. Holding up a hand to check her, Akio’s expression turned a shade sterner.
“That said, I can’t approve of you leaving home the way you did. Whatever your father says, you can’t just go on quietly staying here at my place.”
“But my father—!”
“What of it, if you got a beating? If you want to make something of yourself out in the world, being denied outright is common enough. Everyone out there is swallowing back their frustration with tears and fighting like mad. You want to live honestly, true to yourself, don’t you? Then you’d better be able to at least declare as much to your own parents.”
Tomohide hung her head, looking as though she could hardly bear it. Akio glanced at the wall clock in the bedroom; it was time for the lunch break to end.
Standing, he looked down at her with a distancing coldness.
“I’ve got the restaurant to see to. Until closing, you’re free to use the house however you like. Come nightfall, I’ll telephone your father myself. If you haven’t made up your mind by then, I’ll send you back.”
At Akio’s firm “Understood?” she nodded, still looking down.
Just as he was leaving the room, the proprietor left these words behind.
“That fried rice wasn’t just salt and pepper. Analyze what I made all you like—but assumptions have no place in cooking.”
*     *     *
“Whoa, Grandpa was strict!”
“Wasn’t he though? I cried my eyes out from frustration after that, you know.”
So went the familiar sisterly back-and-forth between Yukie and Bimiko, same as ever. For what it’s worth, Yukie simply walked along beside them, while Takeo, for some reason, found his right arm caught in a vice grip. It made for miserable going, and on top of everything, it was hot.
The sun had dipped low by now, though the temperature showed little sign of easing. Tonight, too, looked certain to be another tropical night.
“That’s the signature dish, the ‘Chinese Fried Rice,’ right? Did that even have corn in it? I’d heard the secret ingredients were kelp and dried sardines, but…”
“Aaah! I wish you’d said that back then!”
Struck hard on the back, Takeo staggered. It was about two stops still to their destination, and he was starting to worry whether his body would hold out until they reached Akio’s.
“…You used to be so much gentler.”
The complaint slipped out with his sigh before he could stop it, and the baritone voice answered back, cool as anything.
“That’s because I didn’t know how to be around people back then. Don’t you think I was awfully standoffish, though?”
“You were holding back at first, weren’t you, Mii-chan.”
His cousin’s gaze, so meaningfully fixed on him, left Takeo with a bad feeling that refused to go away. Better to make himself scarce, and quickly. The instant he slipped free of Bimiko’s grip, Takeo put some distance between them and turned back to face the pair.
“…I’ll swing by the restaurant first. I need to get the food ready to bring to Grandpa’s, too. Bimiko, want me to carry your gift along?”
“Well then, guess I’ll take you up on that.”
“Sure.”
Shifting the grocery bag into one hand, he took the fancy paper gift bag from Bimiko. At the care he took, supporting its bottom as he tucked it under his arm, Bimiko’s eyes narrowed in pleasure behind her sunglasses.
“So you’re planning to make a run for it, are you, Cook-Oh?”
Yukie set her hands on her hips. Takeo, after a quick glance at his cousin, brought his eyes back around to Bimiko.
“No need to wait on me—please, go on ahead to Grandpa’s.”
“You must be worn out from the day,” he added, his voice fading as he said it, and dashed off. As Yukie stood watching her cousin’s back, looking for all the world as though a fox had bewitched her, the tough-looking sunglasses reached out and gave her shoulder a pat. Thump.
“Sonny’s grown up quite a bit, hasn’t he. You don’t need to worry so much, surely—not as his big sister?”
“Huh?”
Caught out, her inner thoughts seen straight through, Yukie let her eyes waver—a rare thing for her. Only at moments like this did the strong, unwavering eyes she’d inherited from her grandfather let slip a glimpse of the anxious, age-appropriate eyes of an older sister.
“I’d bet that boy is trying to carve out his own path, in his own way. He might look like he’s teetering on the edge, but sometimes, just watching over him matters too.”
The reason Yukie had grown so close to Bimiko in the first place was that she’d come to her once for advice about Takeo. Unable to find anything he wanted to do, he’d come home from school every day looking gloomy, and Yukie had tried every trick she could think of to cheer her younger cousin up—only to find Takeo pulling further and further away instead. At her wits’ end, she’d mustered her courage and gone to speak to the person who, at the time, had been training under their grandfather at his restaurant: Bimiko.
Bimiko, too, had worried over Takeo—whom she had, in form at least, *turned down*. Before she’d come to Akio, grandfather to the both of them, she herself had been every bit as unable to see a way forward, anxious in just the same way. Akio had said outright that he couldn’t “understand” Bimiko’s nature, and her days at the restaurant held more hardship than ease. Even so, she’d sensed trust behind Akio’s harsh words, and with customers and neighbors cheering her on here and there, her anxiety had gradually thinned away.
So perhaps she had been laying her own image over Takeo’s. To Bimiko, none of it could ever feel like someone else’s trouble.
“I can’t shake the feeling that I took away Takeo’s place to belong…”
“You mean the dojo?”
The evening sun cast its shadow across her fine-featured face as she nodded.
“I don’t think that’s it, myself. I believe I’ve told you this before, but I asked the boy straight out, myself. ‘What do you think of your big sister?’ I said.”
Gently, with a large, smooth-skinned hand, she turned Yukie’s shoulder to face her square on.
“And you know what he said? ‘My sister doing karate is the coolest thing there is.’ That’s what he told me. He was embarrassed about it, sure, but he looked me straight in the eye when he said it. He’s rooting for you, you know.”
“…I never knew.”
Yukie’s eyes went wide, and before long, they welled with tears.
“Oh, there, there.”
From her trouser pocket, she drew a neatly folded designer handkerchief and pressed it into Yukie’s hand, then whisked off Yukie’s straw hat and fanned it before her, as if by chance, to shield her face. It was a quiet kindness, screening Yukie—dabbing at her eyes—from the gaze of passersby.
“Thanks, Mii-chan. But that’s the first I’ve heard of any of that, you know?”
“Oh myyy. Your big sis let that slip, didn’t she. The boy asked me to keep it quiet—think you can keep a secret?”
“Of course! A promise between girls is absolute!”
Sniffling, Yukie flashed a smile bright enough to dazzle.
*     *     *
“…I’m home.”
As he ducked under the shop curtain, a familiar scent tickled his nose; it had been only a month since he’d last come home for Obon, yet somehow it felt like much longer to Takeo—and though it was technically business hours, the restaurant had closed specially through lunchtime today, so there wasn’t a customer in sight.
“Takeo? What are you doing here?”
Wiping her hands on her apron, his mother came out to greet him wearing a look of mild surprise; with no customers around, she’d already changed out of her kitchen whites into something more relaxed, and with no sign of anyone else about, the staff must have already gone home for the day.
“Ah—well, I just figured I’d stop by, sort of…”
He’d let them know he was coming to the gathering at Grandfather’s house, but he hadn’t mentioned stopping by the restaurant; Takeo himself had only just decided to come here, so his answer came out uncertain.
“I see. Here I figured you’d been roped into carrying Yuki-chan’s bags again.”
“Well, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.”
Takeo gave a wry laugh, and his mother Sakurako answered it with a bright, breezy smile.
Looking away, Takeo let his eyes wander to the table in back, where a whole row of dishes lined a large hors d’oeuvre platter—every one of them Grandfather’s favorite, and every one of them a signature item on the menu besides.
“The kitchen’s free, you know.”
Sakurako pointed over her shoulder. She’d seen right through what her son was thinking.
“Then I’ll borrow it for a bit.”
Walking toward the back of the shop, Takeo handed the gift bag over to Sakurako.
“This is from Bimiko—for Grandpa, she said.”
“Bimiko…?”
Sakurako tilted her head, the name not quite landing. When Takeo added, with a note of irritation, “Tomohide. You know, the Food Mentor”—her face finally showed a flicker of recognition.
“That woman’s here?”
There was a trace of distaste mixed into her expression. The instant Takeo saw that look on his mother’s face, he felt something cold settle low in his stomach.
“…Never mind. I’ll cook at Grandpa’s instead.”
“Wait, Takeo.”
“What?! She went out of her way to bring a gift and come see Grandpa! Making a face like that about it—doesn’t that shame you at all?”
“It doesn’t.”
At his mother’s flat, unhesitating shake of the head, Takeo was left speechless.
“Do you have any idea how much that woman hurt you? And you’re still carrying it around, even now…”
“That was a long time ago!”
The grocery bag let out a taut, straining creak, as though it might tear apart any second.
“I’m not dragging around a thing. Between Grandpa and you, I’ve already been taught more than I could ask for—so how can you make a face like that about her!”
“Then why are you running away?”
Sakurako’s voice remained perfectly calm throughout. If anything, that only backed Takeo further into a corner.
“…I’m not running away.”
“Then face your family.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“I regret how angry I got when you first said you wouldn’t take over the restaurant. Your father told me afterward that you have your own path to walk.”
It had happened back when Takeo graduated from high school. At the celebration, when the topic of the next successor happened to come up, Sakurako had seized the moment to bring it up with her son—only for Takeo to flatly refuse. With relatives all around, Sakurako had ended up raising her voice without meaning to, and the result was that Takeo, the guest of honor, walked out.
Ever since, Takeo had kept his distance from his family home, and rather than going on to university, he’d been paying his own way through vocational school with part-time work.
As far as his mother Sakurako was concerned, a son off studying at a vocational school was, in the end, no different from a child throwing a tantrum. And on top of that, declaring “I won’t take over the restaurant”—that amounted to nothing more than stubbornly turning his back on reality.
“What does any of that have to do with you disliking Bimiko?”
“It’s not that I dislike her. It’s just—she turned down your feelings, and then put you down like that on top of it, and I can’t stand watching you suffer over her.”
“That’s not it at all.”
Takeo let out a sigh and turned to face his mother. Her son’s eyes, a full head higher than her own, were the very image of her late husband—stubborn, single-minded, unshakable, gone too soon.
“Bimiko, shining like that after finding what she was meant to do—she dazzles me. I love cooking, sure, but not enough to call myself a real professional. Just like she said—I’m half-hearted about it. I want to find what I really want to do too, the way she did. Something that helps people, something I can be proud of.”
*     *     *
Three months had passed since Tomohide had come to live under Akio’s roof.
At first, Tomohide’s father had come storming in, shouting, meaning to drag her home, but—unable to overcome his child’s resolve, who had laid her own feelings bare and declared she wouldn’t set foot in that house again until she’d made something of herself—he settled for making Akio promise to haul her back by force the moment she caused him trouble, and trudged off looking defeated; Akio never said a word about it, but Tomohide could sense, if only dimly, that there’d been real friction with the relatives over her, and though it was a mystery to her why he would go this far for someone who wasn’t even his own child, what burned stronger still was her resolve to repay his effort with everything she had.
“You’re not suited for cooking,” Akio told her—this was in early spring, once she’d grown used to odd jobs around the restaurant and had held a kitchen knife a handful of times.
“Why… would you say that?”
“You seem to be good at analysis, but that’s exactly what’s throwing off your hand. You think too much with your head. Just because something’s too salty doesn’t mean adding sugar fixes it. It might be correct in theory, but that doesn’t mean it holds up inside the wok.”
Having tasted the fried rice Tomohide had stir-fried, Akio set his spoon down on the counter. Beside the wok, the plate of fried rice sat with a single bite taken out of it, its shape crumbling apart as though it hurt just to look at—an expression the cook herself couldn’t help but share.
“Does that mean… it isn’t good?”
“No, the taste isn’t bad. If anything, it’s almost too well put together. Exactly the way I taught you.”
Though his words sounded like praise, Akio’s expression was clouded. Tomohide couldn’t make sense of it either.
“But I don’t feel any individuality in it. There’s no doubt you made this, but it might as well be something bought off a shelf.”
Holding up a hand to stop Tomohide as she started to speak, Akio went on.
“I’m not about to spout some spiritual nonsense about cooking being all heart. If sheer willpower were enough to make good food, this restaurant would’ve been thriving long ago. …Tomohide. Aren’t you afraid to make your own cooking?”
“Afraid…”
“I know you’re trying to learn my cooking. But to make it as a professional in your own right, being merely skilled isn’t enough. You have to make the person eating it understand—through the food itself—that you made it.”
“That’s what I’m lacking, you’re saying.”
Taking off her bandana, Tomohide’s eyes were red. Between helping around the restaurant, practicing her cooking, and working part-time at a nearby supermarket so as not to burden Akio, her days were full; the exhaustion had to be considerable, and thoughts of her father surely never left her mind. Tomohide was doing well. Though he’d never say it aloud, Akio could say with confidence that his choice had been the right one.
Telling this very Tomohide “you’re not cut out to be a cook” was a painful thing to do. If she’d only been half-heartedly aiming to become a chef, he never would have said such a thing; if her skill improved, he could simply let her stand in the kitchen, and if she wanted to open her own restaurant one day, he could simply send her off with his blessing.
But Tomohide’s resolve was anything but half-hearted.
Whenever she helped around the restaurant, the eyes she fixed on Akio’s hands were nothing short of dead serious; even on nights after closing she’d stand in the kitchen tossing the wok, notebook never far from reach, and on her few days off she’d read cookbooks and beg Akio for tastings, listening closely to every word of his opinion; nearly everything she earned from her part-time job went straight into ingredients and seasonings, to the point that Akio, unable to bear watching any longer, had bought her a new coat come New Year’s—her devotion was every bit as fierce as, if not fiercer than, the passion Akio himself had once poured into opening this very restaurant.
If only her skills hadn’t improved, sending her away would have been the easy path. But Tomohide’s hand at cooking was, without question, growing better. Keep honing that skill, and becoming a chef in her own right would be no mere dream.
“What you’re lacking is resolve.”
“I have all the resolve I need!”
“Very well then. Tomorrow, you’ll stand in the kitchen. When an order comes in for something you know how to make, you’ll pick up the knife in my place. I won’t say a word to the regulars. And if a customer notices—I’ll apologize to you.”
“Apologize? There’s no need for—”
The sun had long since set on this spring night. Tomohide’s voice was swallowed up by the engine of a passing car outside. Looking at Akio, arms folded, Tomohide’s hands twisted deep creases into the bandana she clutched.
“But if a customer goes home without ever realizing *this isn’t something I made*—then you’ll have to reconsider everything. However much your skill improves, I can already see you hitting a wall.”
I want to cook, Tomohide had said. But that wasn’t *the thing she truly wanted to do*.
Akio set a hand on Tomohide’s trembling shoulder.
“The truth is, you’re standing in that kitchen because you feel you owe me something, aren’t you? If so, that’s more than enough already.”
At those words, Tomohide’s head snapped up. The pained look on her face, as though she’d just been rejected outright, was just like that day she’d been curled up at the back door.
Which was exactly why Akio kept his expression unchanged and asked.
“Not the making of the dish itself, but grasping, on instinct, how it could be made better—that’s what you understand, isn’t it? It’s a gift I don’t have. And it’s also a talent the world needs.”
“That can’t be—”
“I’m not just saying this to make you feel better. The day you came here, you analyzed my fried rice, didn’t you—said the carrots and the corn were fighting each other. You might have noticed I dropped the corn after that. Because you were right. Orders for the fried rice have been climbing lately, haven’t they? That’s thanks to your advice.”
Akio’s hand tightened. Looking up, Tomohide saw the Iron Chef’s eyes lit with an unusual excitement, unmistakably pleased.
“Listen. These days, critics only care about themselves. All they ever offer are safe, harmless comments calculated to please their readers. But any real cook is dying for an objective take on their own cooking—craving it, even. All the more so when it actually hits the mark.”
Once before, someone claiming to be a critic had visited Akio’s restaurant—and a famous one at that, known for a sharp tongue, which made feeling uneasy about it only natural. Without any advance notice, the critic had wandered in alone, given the proprietor no more than a token greeting, ordered some three dishes, and, having polished them off in short order, left just as abruptly as he’d come.
Which was why, when the gourmet magazine’s publisher called some days later asking permission to run the piece, Akio could only shake his head in disbelief; still, thinking it might help the restaurant, he gave his consent, only to find the article amounted to a few dry, bloodless lines about “a gem crafted by the Iron Chef who left the corporate grind behind.” He supposed he ought to be glad he hadn’t been panned—but honestly, he’d have taken an honest, candid opinion of his cooking over being dubbed “Iron Chef” any day. That kind of professional judgment was worth far more than anything a customer could offer.
“Your cooking is good. You must be getting used to making it by now, too, so I know it takes courage to change direction. But Tomohide—that gift of yours can help a great many people. I want you to make something of yourself by putting it to use.”
“But a critic—that’s just not something I could ever…”
“You understand the struggle of the one doing the cooking. That’s exactly why your words won’t stay skin-deep. You wouldn’t be just another critic. In today’s terms, I suppose you’d call it… a mentor.”
At her Master’s unfamiliar use of a loanword, Tomohide let slip a small laugh. Her eyes were still red, but they were full of strength now.
Drawing in a sharp breath, the young woman’s expression had cleared to something bright.
“Yes, Master!”
*     *     *
“And that’s the story of how Food Mentor Bimiko was born, you see?”
“Grandpa’s the one who came up with ‘Food Mentor’?! I never knew…”
“Master had thought it all through for me, in his own way. He’s not the type to fuss over titles, but he told me afterward that ‘you need one if you’re going to put yourself out there.’ Almost like he’d seen the katakana-word trend coming.”
Seated on the half-empty holiday train, Bimiko’s sunglasses swayed gently against her chest. The Food Mentor’s eyes, smiling with a touch of nostalgia, followed the passing scenery as though gazing back at days gone by.
“So if Mii-chan became the Food Mentor… that means you failed Grandpa’s test, doesn’t it?”
“My, Yukkie doesn’t hold back, does she. But yeah, that’s right. The mapo tofu I poured my whole soul into—the customers ate it right up, happily. ‘This is Karyū’s mapo,’ they said. That was the first time being thanked left me feeling frustrated instead of glad. Well, it’s what got me to let go of it, so I guess it all worked out in the end.”
The city lights, blinking on one by one, traced streaks across the train window. Beside Bimiko, her thick arm resting on the windowsill, the hand gripping the straw hat looked as slender as a twig. The voice of the sun-tanned girl in the dress, still carrying the scent of summer sunlight, sounded somehow as though it were mourning the setting sun.
“I wonder if I could ever get strong like that too.”
Saying “of course you can” would have been easy. But Bimiko, turning her eyes gently toward her, said nothing, only silently urging her to go on.
The reason she normally wore sunglasses wasn’t because she didn’t want to show her face, nor out of any airs, and certainly not because sunlight actually bothered her eyes. The eyes speak as loudly as the mouth. Even for Bimiko, who could stand tall and speak her mind before any number of cameras or Iron Chefs alike, keeping her true feelings from showing in her eyes was no easy feat.
Eyes that speak as loudly as the mouth are honest ones.
And for someone trying to summon up the courage within them, nothing is more necessary than an honest pair of eyes.
“I think about it sometimes. Whether I could ever become someone strong and kind, like Grandma Akie—someone everyone can rely on.”
“Master’s younger sister, right? The one Yukkie’s mom took over from?”
Yukie gave a small nod, her profile steeped in the deepening indigo of night.
“Talking about the old days with Takeo today got me thinking. I don’t have any confidence I could ever become like Grandma Akie. I’ve always looked up to her, chasing after her back this whole time, but she just keeps getting further away. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
Bimiko didn’t look at whatever it was that Yukie, so like a child of the sun, had lowered her eyes toward. Because Bimiko knew that anxiety always lurked behind the kind of strength that stayed bright, considerate of others, never forgetting to smile.
Her profile, fixed on the green floor lit by fluorescent light, looked as fragile as a small child’s—as though she might shatter at the slightest touch. Seeing Yukie like this for the first time left Bimiko a little startled, and, at the same time, relieved.
A heart that never voices its weakness is bound to break eventually. And the stronger the heart, the less likely, oddly enough, it is to notice.
And the strong, without exception, always carry within them the anxiety of facing themselves.
“You keep searching.”
At the words, delivered with a distancing edge, the girl’s head snapped up. The privilege of being the elder was being able to show composure at a moment like this. So Bimiko, too, kept her posture half tilted back, and met those frightened eyes with a level gaze.
“The answer’s inside you, Yukkie. But finding it is as hard as picking out the secret splash of soy sauce hidden in a spice-heavy curry.”
“I’m not strong, not like Mii-chan.”
“No”—this time, the denial came instantly. Straightening her posture a little, Bimiko went on. Just then the train car, entering a tunnel, rattled and shook. Clearly enough to carry over that noise, she loaded her words with conviction.
“Strength is something built up, piece by piece. Even your karate, Yukkie—that’s the fruit of all that practice, isn’t it? Nobody starts out strong, and nobody goes without ever losing their way.”
“But I don’t have the first idea how to go on from here.”
“You give people strength, Yukkie. People like that are just like the first one into the tunnel. They’re the first to dive into the pitch dark, ahead of everyone else—but they’re also the first one to find the light.”
Life isn’t kind enough to hand you a lucky signpost right when you’re struggling. And when you’re standing in a darkness so thick you can’t see an inch ahead, even a signpost right in front of you goes unseen.
So there’s nothing to do but move forward, trusting not in some signpost, but in the belief that there’s a light.
“I know good and well just how strong Yukkie really is. Your cousin does too, I’d bet, and Grandma as well. But if Yukkie still wants proof of it, just look around you. Isn’t everyone relying on you already? Didn’t you do something worth being proud of again today, too?”
“How did you know that…?”
It was nice, seeing her so honestly surprised. Bimiko flashed her a spectacular wink, then left it simply at, “Big Sis has her sources, you know.”
The train car emerged from the tunnel, and the muffled sound inside it slipped away into the evening. Outside the window, the town had turned entirely the deep indigo of dusk.
A xylophone chime rang out, followed by an announcement calling the station name.
“We’ll be there soon. Now then, Yukkie—here’s a piece of advice from me.”
At the sudden formality in her tone, the girl in the dress straightened her spine and turned to face her properly. That she could carry herself this naturally was proof enough that Bimiko’s confidence in herself was hardly misplaced. Biting back the urge to look pleased with herself—a restraint built from hard-won experience—she opened her mouth, dead serious, as one senior woman to another.
“Don’t be afraid of losing your way. The outcome isn’t everything. It’s the process that makes you stronger.”
And another thing, she added, crossing her legs now as one professional to another. Just how much practice it had taken to strike this pose without a trace of awkwardness—the future Master before her, swallowing hard, would surely understand well enough.
“Keeping things safe and inoffensive with people? That’s just goat water without a lick of pepper in it.”
“…What’s that supposed to be?”
The train began to slow. Bimiko rose to her feet with a deliberate flourish, and Yukie stood up after her. Seen up close like this, that youthful glow of skin was, purely and simply, enviable.
So she landed a light flick right between Yukie’s furrowed brows. Though it was dodged on reflex.
“Honestly. Sharp as ever, aren’t you.”
“Hey, come on, tell me, Mii-chan! What’s that goat-whatever thing, anyway?”
“Heh heh. Secret. Go ask the Sakura boy. I taught him plenty from my travels, after all. And if he’s forgotten… well, that’s a punishment right there.”
“Sounds fun. Then I’ll help out too!”
The kind of talk that, if Takeo had been listening, would have made his face twitch without fail.
Walking off the train side by side, the backs of the two of them looked, for all the world, like real sisters.
*     *     *
It wasn’t out of any spite on Bimiko’s part that Takeo came to be called “half-hearted.” It was Bimiko—back when she was still called Tomohide—who took care of Takeo, who’d been a bit down ever since Bimiko came out.
Tomohide, by then, had already come of age, and had left for the city to test her own skills—off on something like a warrior’s training pilgrimage. Her Master, Akio, had invited her to Takeo’s high school graduation celebration, but she found herself unable to decide whether she ought to show her face there. Whatever the reasons, it was a fact that she had hurt Takeo, and with nearly five years gone by now, she had no wish to go peeling open an old wound at this late date. She didn’t imagine he was still carrying it, even now—but weighing how the world outside might see it, she thought perhaps she really shouldn’t go home after all. It was all out of concern for Takeo’s future.
When Bimiko called her Master to decline, it was Takeo, his voice now fully changed, who picked up the phone.
“…Takeo-kun?”
“Ah, Tomohide—no, wait, that’s wrong. Sorry. M-Bimiko-san…?”
“Tomohide’s fine, really. It hasn’t even changed in the family register yet, after all.”
“…Yes.”
The voice answering over the phone was, in every way, a grown man’s now. She could picture him there, searching for the right words.
“But I’ll call you Bimiko-san. Since you wanted to change it—your name, I mean.”
“You remembered, huh. Thanks.”
Happiness got the better of her, and her mouth ran on ahead—even as she caught, beneath his words, the confusion he couldn’t quite hide.
“Master told me you’d graduated high school. Congratulations. University now? Or did you get a job?”
“…A fashion school.”
In Takeo’s brief silence, she realized she’d said too much. Bimiko shut her eyes without meaning to.
By the time she thought *this was a mistake*, a low voice had already driven straight from her ear through to her heart.
“…If it’s Grandpa you’re calling for, I’ll go get him.”
“Wait.”
Even Bimiko herself didn’t know why she’d stopped him on impulse. Proof enough that her mind had gone utterly blank, and no words would come.
All she knew for certain was that things couldn’t be left like this. If she didn’t talk to him now, she’d never get the chance again.
On nothing more than that near-instinct, Bimiko spun out halting words. Luckily, his breathing on the line hadn’t changed.
“Takeo-kun, what happened to your dream of becoming a chef?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It does matter! You loved cooking so much! You were going to learn from Master and take over the restaurant—”
“I don’t want to hear that from you!!”
This time, it was Bimiko’s turn to fall silent.
“You threw away your own dream too, didn’t you?! I loved the fried rice you used to make me. Watching you talk about cooking, so happy—it made me happy too. And then you went and gave up standing in a kitchen! I’m not about to let someone like you lecture me about dreams!!”
“Don’t get the wrong idea!”
Her own true voice, one she hadn’t let out in ages, echoed in her head like some distant memory. Forgetting they were even on the phone, Bimiko shot to her feet and spat the words out. That’s how furious she’d gotten. Whatever intention she’d had of apologizing to Takeo had flown off somewhere, forgotten.
“I really did find the thing I truly wanted to do! Cooking’s what taught me that! Listen here, Takeo—think whatever you like, that’s your business. But don’t you go deciding for yourself that I threw away my dream! The only ones who get to say a thing like that are the ones who tossed their own dream away themselves.”
“That’s not me!”
“Then go and prove it!”
The hand gripping the receiver was creaking under the strain.
“Don’t you run from this, Takeo. Didn’t you pick that fashion school because you could still switch over to a culinary track? With feelings that half-hearted, you’ll end up regretting it. Put a hand to your chest and ask yourself, honestly. If the answer’s that you’re fine with who you are right now—then I won’t say another word.”
Quite the high-and-mighty thing to say, Bimiko thought even as she said it. Part of why she’d gotten so angry was that Takeo’s words had hit their mark. However you looked at it, the fact remained that she’d let go of the cook’s path. To say she never once wondered what if she’d kept on cooking would be a lie.
Since coming up to the city, she’d taken on work as a Food Mentor exactly once—and that only because her boss at her part-time job had asked her to taste his daughter’s cooking. The flavor hadn’t been bad at all, but Bimiko could never forget the look on father’s and daughter’s faces once she’d pointed out a few things. In the end, it was Bimiko who ended up quitting that part-time job. Society isn’t kind enough to let you get by so smoothly on your own.
The choice of going back home had crossed her mind more times than she could count. Each time, she thought of Akio, who had sent her off so willingly, and used it to spur herself on. There were times, too, when she thought of her father and drew strength from her own anger.
That was exactly why Bimiko didn’t want Takeo to go through the same struggle she had. Takeo was still young. There’d be no end to the things he’d agonize over about his future. When that time came, she didn’t want him making a choice that would leave regret clinging to him. Because Bimiko knew all too well just how painful it is to keep moving forward while something keeps tugging at you from behind.
A life without regret is like a dish that every single person who tastes it calls delicious. Chasing after it is fine and well, but achieving it is next to impossible.
And still, if you mean to reach for it, it takes a resolve to match.
“You don’t have to rush the answer. But be honest with your own feelings. That’s the one and only thing I’m asking of you.”
Which was exactly why she had to steel her own resolve too. Forcing a decision on the other person alone was a coward’s way of doing things.
Into the phone that gave no reply, Bimiko left a message to pass along.
“Sorry for calling so late, Takeo-kun. Could you tell Master, for me—‘I’ll keep at it out here a while longer’?”
“…Yes.”
“Thanks. You keep at it too!”
The instant before the phone clicked dead felt, to Bimiko, like hours on end.
Even once the flat drone of the dial tone started up, it was a while yet before she could bring herself to set the receiver down.
Through the thin walls of the cheap apartment, the evening cicadas’ cries rang out, mournful.
*     *     *
He coated the frying pan with a thin film of oil, holding his hand over it the whole while to carefully gauge when it had warmed through. It wasn’t the rectangular pan he was used to, so the feel of it was different, and difficult. Even after some ten attempts, he still hadn’t gotten the hang of it.
Standing in the kitchen with an expression of intense concentration, as if in prayer—his mother Sakurako watched her son’s figure from a table a little way off inside the restaurant. Outside, the sun had fully set, and the dinner hour for her retired father-in-law was slipping past. She probably ought to make at least one phone call, but Sakurako meant not to move until her son was satisfied.
Perhaps there was something on his mind he hadn’t put into words—Takeo, having only said “let me borrow the kitchen,” had done nothing since but face down his frying pan. Several times he finished one, tilted his head, and started over completely from scratch. On the prep counter, a yellow mountain of tamagoyaki had piled up.
The usual Sakurako would have butted in long before now. That she stayed quiet and let him do as he liked wasn’t out of exasperation, nor simple doting on her son. It was because she’d suddenly realized—she had never once watched over something her son was doing this quietly before.
Ever since her husband had died suddenly in an accident, Sakurako had thrown herself into running the restaurant with everything she had. From the moment he lost his son, Akio—who was also her father-in-law—had fallen into a grief that was anything but ordinary, in no condition at all to stand in the kitchen.<!-- TN: 原文は「雄桜」表記(存命かつ本編で調理する主人公と同名)だが、義父=秋雄の誤植と判断しAkioと訳出。著者・編集に原文相違の確認を推奨。 --> Her mother-in-law Akie and other relatives had sometimes tried to comfort her, telling her to close up the shop and rest for a while, but Sakurako had flatly refused. More than any concern for the restaurant, it was because she couldn’t stand how frustrating it all felt.
Her husband, standing in the kitchen alongside his father, had been so full of life, so radiant. Even having lost her husband, she couldn’t let the way he’d lived be lost along with him. She was the only one who could leave that image behind for their son.
But perhaps she’d clung to that too stubbornly. Perhaps, in wanting so badly for him to live the way his father had, she’d only been forcing it on him.
A back is something you let be seen—not something you force into view.
Looking at Takeo now, standing in the kitchen, earnestly facing his cooking, she could tell he’d been watching that back closely all along. She’d simply been too desperate, too consumed, to ever slow down and really look—but it had gotten through to her son properly, all this time.
“…Done.”
Takeo murmured it, looking at the dashimaki he’d set on the plate. Somewhere along the way, her son’s profile had grown dignified, grown into a man’s. His smile shone every bit as bright as the golden roll before him.
“Want to take it up to Grandpa?”
“Yeah.”
Rising to her feet, Sakurako’s steps were light as she headed for the kitchen to show him where the plastic wrap was kept.
On a sudden impulse she looked up, and her eyes met—
—her husband’s, in the family photo hanging on the wall at the back of the shop. For the first time, she felt sure he was smiling.
*     *     *
“Takeo’s taking forever.”
“Oh my, Yukkie—worried about your cute cousin?”
“It’s not like that at all. I just want to watch Cook-Oh get his cooking torn to shreds.”
“So you want to see family torn up over it, is that it, Yukie?”
Coming down from upstairs, Akie hurled the sharp remark at her granddaughter, who stood washing glasses in the kitchen. Her hair had gone entirely white, and she’d grown somewhat thinner, but her eyes, seeming to see clean through to one’s heart, hadn’t lost their edge. One hand at the small of her back, she took the last few steps unhurriedly.
“N-no, that’s not it, Master.”
Crestfallen, Yukie hung her head—yet her spine stayed perfectly straight. Even outside the dojo, what’s been drilled into the body doesn’t change.
Even Bimiko, arranging plates beside Yukie, always felt a certain tension in Akie’s presence. That there were people in this world who could command dignity simply by being there—that was something she’d learned thanks to Akie.
Lifting the stack of plates—enough for everyone—with ease, Bimiko decided to throw her just a little bit of a lifeline. In this house, of course, she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses.
“Yukkie just loves Takeo-kun’s cooking, after all. Tsundere might be all the rage these days, but being honest with yourself matters too, you know?”
“O-kaaay.”
What a half-hearted reply, Akie seemed to think, exasperated, as she turned her eyes over.
“Sorry, Tomohide. You came all this way, and here we’ve got you helping out.”
“Not at all. I hardly ever visit as it is, so if not for times like this, I’d have no way to pay you back.”
Akie was one of the few people who’d shown Bimiko real understanding. That said, she kept right on calling her by her “old name,” insisting that “changing a name your parents gave you is nothing to be praised for.” Bimiko understood her reasoning well enough, and since she said it plainly, to her face, it didn’t bother her.
What weighed on her mind was upstairs.
“Master Akio still hasn’t…?”
“Won’t come down. Honestly. How long does he mean to keep dragging this out.”
Akie sighed, but her eyes were fixed on something far away. She looked, just then, as if she’d suddenly aged. Bimiko didn’t need it spelled out to know who stood at the far end of that gaze.
Setting plates out on the table, the bow-tied Food Mentor went on.
“Wounds of the heart take time. I’ll bring some food up to his room later.”
“Whether he’ll even show his face is anyone’s guess.”
She’d heard from Yukie on the train—for years now, Akio hadn’t been willing to see his grandson Takeo. The last time Bimiko had seen him, he’d seemed fine, but apparently he’d suddenly withdrawn into himself since. Takeo, too, had reportedly agonized over it a good deal.
Knowing Akio’s character, it was hard to imagine he simply didn’t want to see his grandson’s face. After all, he talked with Yukie normally enough. It was easy enough to understand why Takeo, who’d been so attached to him since he was small, would be hurt by it.
It was nothing more than a guess, but Bimiko felt she understood the cause.
It was probably because Takeo had come to resemble his late son far too closely. For all his wavering, Takeo was trying to walk the path of a cook. And picturing his grandson standing in the kitchen just so, Akio’s heart ached all over again.
And yet, people have no choice but to move forward. Shutting your eyes to it does nothing to ease the pain, and what’s lost never comes back. Time only ever passes on—it never once returns.
Akio, too, surely understood as much in his head. It’s only that the wound ran too deep for him to look at head-on.
To the man who’d once reached out a hand to her when she was lost in the dark, it was now Bimiko’s turn to lend her strength.
Just as Bimiko was turning her Master’s image over in her mind, the front door rattled open with a clatter.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Grandma, is Grandpa around?”
Takeo came in, a furoshiki-wrapped bundle of hors d’oeuvres in one hand, and in the other a small plate holding two golden strips of tamagoyaki. Only a few hours had passed since they’d parted ways, but his face looked refreshed, as though something had lifted clean off him.
“He’s upstairs. Well then, shall we go ahead and eat first? Sakurako, Yukie—give me a hand.”
Casting a glance at Takeo’s tamagoyaki, Akie immediately began issuing brisk instructions. There was no word for this kind of quick thinking but masterful. The gap that experience makes isn’t so easily closed.
“Looks like you’ve made something you’re proud of, Takeo-kun.”
“Yeah. I think it turned out well. …Um, Bimiko-san, could I get your opinion on it? As, well—a professional.”
“Oh my.”
Caught off guard, she couldn’t muster an immediate response. This was the first time Takeo had ever come to her of his own accord, asking for her opinion. It wasn’t only Bimiko, either—even Sakurako, dishing out food at the table, blinked in surprise.
Takeo’s eyes were serious. Then she, too, had to show sincerity in kind.
Still, there’s an order to things.
“Sure, of course. Although—”
Takeo waited anxiously as Bimiko trailed off. Clearing her throat lightly, she continued.
“Let’s have Master try it first, shall we? Something you’re this proud of, Takeo-kun—I’m sure it’ll delight him.”
This time, it was Takeo’s turn to widen his eyes. His hesitation lasted only an instant before the young man gave a firm nod.
“Got it.”
Those who are the elder must always be the ones who guide the way.
(The End)