Chapter One: “The Clod of Earth Awaits the Snow” — Part Eight
After that, Chitaira Kai apparently kept coming to the house, here and there. My daughter would report it on the days she visited. By the time I got home Kai had already taken her leave, so we hadn’t come face to face again. It was my daughter’s social life and had nothing directly to do with me, but being told she came today left a faint snag in my chest. I couldn’t quite tell what it was that nagged at me.
When Kai’s name began to creep into my daughter’s dinner-table conversation, I felt a faint stirring, as though I were picking up on the signal of something approaching.
“Chitaira-san always disappears somewhere during PE and never attends.”
“Oh…”
“Chitaira…”
My husband reacted to the name, setting down his chopsticks without saying anything.
“So the other day I asked her what she does, and she said she reads in the library.”
Didn’t the homeroom teacher or the PE teacher say anything. Perhaps they turned a blind eye with prior explanation, or perhaps there was some reason it suited everyone for Kai not to be in PE class.
I thought about it, but couldn’t come up with what that reason might be.
And then I wondered why I was thinking about Chitaira Kai so much, and tilted my head at myself.
The day after one such evening, a Saturday morning quietly filling with contentment. The kind where simply following the clouds across blue sky sends a cool breeze through the heart, a morning of genuine hope. By Sunday that brightness starts to cloud over, and come nightfall it sinks beyond the horizon just as the sun does. Hope is always that fragile.
After breakfast I go around the garden with my husband to water the plants and sweep out front. Living near the sea means the buildings and greenery are always being caught by the wind and salted. After a week with a strong-wind day in particular, the water brings down grimy dark soil heavy with iron, and the cleaning is a trial.
“But it does make me happy when the plants out front perk up.”
My husband finds pleasure in everything, and I know there is a great deal I ought to learn from him. Whether I have managed to learn any of it is another question.
“While you’re at it, if you’d wash the car too, I’d be happy as well.”
“With a car though, it’s hard to tell if it’s perked up, isn’t it.”
I can’t tell with plants straight away either, but perhaps he sees something I don’t.
I polish the car that almost no one but me drives, and look at it straight on. Is it happy, I wonder.
“How about a date when we’re done, Mama?”
“If walking as far as your workplace counts as a date.”
Saturday wasn’t a day off for my husband. I decided to combine the walk with some shopping.
I told my daughter, still wandering the house in her pyjamas, that we were heading out, then set off down the front street with my husband. Maron tagged along as always, pressed close to his side. On workdays Maron follows my husband as far as the onigiri shop and comes home with him when the day is done. Our dog has found where he belongs. If I’d seen that before we were married, I might have been jealous of Maron.
In front of the supermarket on the main road, with its red torii gate visible a little way off, my husband and Maron took up their waiting post. But first, he made a beeline for the trolley bay at the entrance.
“Let me push the trolley, just five seconds.”
“All right, all right.”
My husband tucked his left hand away and steered the trolley with one hand, gazing off into the distance.
“Onward, Daigoro!”
“Where is DAIGORO.”
“Within each of our hearts…”
“Ah… so that’s where Daigoro was all along…”
With all of that fully resolved, I left my husband and Maron behind and went into the supermarket alone. I thought they didn’t need to wait for me, but it was kind of them, so I waved as I went. My husband waved back; Maron only watched with those round eyes of his.
“Unchanging, you might say. Or perhaps just not progressing.”
He had done the same thing years ago in front of our daughter’s pram.
I worked through the shopping list my husband had given me before we left, putting things in the basket. With cooking almost entirely his department, keeping track of what was in the fridge and restocking it was something I left entirely to him. He genuinely enjoyed cooking and both my daughter and I loved his food, but working as we both did, with housework tilting so heavily toward him, I felt guilty about it sometimes. He said all of it was good exercise and he did it because he wanted to. And he said I seemed to enjoy work more than housework, so that arrangement was fine. Was my husband perhaps too good a person, even by my own husband’s standards.
I finished the shopping and came back outside, and my husband, who had been crouching down to meet Maron at eye level, looked up.
“Welcome back.”
Was that how he did it, getting down to Maron’s level like that, and that was why he was so loved. But I could easily picture what would happen if I crouched down the same way, Maron would just blink and stare up at me. He never barked at me or my daughter, but he didn’t pay us much attention either.
“I’m back. Is Daigoro still in your heart?”
“He is. I was contemplating the path of demons with Maron.”
“You do love it.”
I laughed at the obvious sign of my husband’s latest enthusiasm, a period drama he’d been watching. Maron, as if he’d been waiting for my husband to stand up, kicked off the ground with neat little hops, full of energy.
“I’m easily influenced, I suppose.”
He arrived at this self-assessment mid-stride, as if it covered the walking itself.
“Seeing you bustle around made me think I should do something too, beyond the rental income.”
“And that led to the onigiri shop?”
“Watching you, yes.”
How watching me could lead anyone to onigiri, I had no idea. Had my head been triangular while I worked.
“I love how clever you are, so I was hoping some of that might rub off too.”
It was hard to accept a compliment said so plainly and openly.
Saying yes, I am clever out loud would itself be the most foolish thing I could say.
Being told I seemed refined, or clever — I had gathered over the years that my face gave that impression to people. I doubted both descriptions myself, but there it was.
I had never once looked at my face in the mirror and felt intelligence looking back.
“Am I clever…”
“You didn’t get a single item wrong at the supermarket today.”
“That felt like an insult that went all the way around and came back.”
He occasionally gets things wrong himself, he said, laughing at Maron weaving around his feet. The bar for cleverness in my husband’s eyes was apparently not set all that high, which was something of a relief.
I made mistakes sometimes too, for what it was worth.
“Oh, and obviously the beautiful part is wonderful too.”
“Thank you. I’m looking forward to finding out how long that lasts.”
He didn’t mean anything unkind by it, but naturally the opportunities for that kind of exchange had decreased since the days when we were young and consumed by each other. The time of whispering love freely, of being recklessly devoted, was far behind us now. Growing older made it inevitable, but watching the branches that had grown from a great trunk begin to dry out was a melancholy thing to look up at.
“I’ll still be saying it when you’re a hundred and twenty.”
“Am I going to live that long?”
“I’m dreaming of us all enjoying Final Fantasy 150 together as a family!”
“We might need to go looking for mermaid’s flesh.”
The easy, lightweight conversation with my husband felt good. It was a day off for me, which helped, but he was about to go to work, and I quietly marvelled at how cheerful he managed to be about it.
We turned at the corner bank, and with the level crossing coming into view in the distance, I brought something up.
“By the way, do you know the Chitairas?”
“Chitooo-ee-ra.”
“Pardon?”
I was startled by how smoothly his lips and tongue had moved.
“That’s what the name actually is. They’ve just made it sound Japanese.”
“Is that right?”
My husband let out a small groan and looked away.
“Sorry. I didn’t think you’d believe me.”
“Can I be annoyed?”
“Asking permission before you get annoyed is a very gracious quality.”
My husband picked Maron up for a good ruffle and a reset.
“Of course I know them. The ones with the house so stupidly big you’d need at least ten bakas to describe it.”
“That’s them.”
“Ten might not even be enough.”
“That much?”
“I was so surprised when our daughter mentioned the name at dinner yesterday.”
“Apparently she’s friends with one of them and she comes to the house a lot.”
“Seriously?”
My husband’s face creased with a pained expression I rarely saw from him at home.
“You don’t look pleased.”
“It’s not so much that I’m not pleased… the Chitooo-ee-ras come with a lot of rumours.”
His good nature wouldn’t let him simply say no outright, but the negativity was clear enough in his manner. And for someone as easy-going as my husband, it was quite unusual. What the name Chitaira carried in it, I, who lived in the same town, had no idea.
“What kind of rumours?”
“Hmm.”
His mouth twisted, and Maron, as if picking it up, let out a small adorable groan from within his arms.
“The content isn’t really fit to say out loud, so it’s hard to pass on.”
“That sounds rather frightening the way you put it.”
“Ungentlemanly rumours might be the polite way to put it. And even then, I’d take the details with a large pinch of salt, more doubt than belief really. It all sounds barely consistent with living in a modern country under the rule of law.”
There was an edge to the way my husband spoke, something sharp visible here and there despite the half-smile. A feeling that even listing it out between us was distasteful. He gathered his thoughts on that household without going into specifics.
“Simply put, they’d be the sort of people you’d do well to avoid, I suppose.”
“Hmm…”
My husband’s careful roundabout phrasing, born of consideration, meant the warning didn’t reach me then for what it was.
It would be a little while before I came to understand firsthand whether those rumours held any truth, but truly, I wish I could have spent my whole life without knowing. Yet from the day Chitaira Kai came to the house, any hope of that was already gone.