The Laws of Evening: Stories (13 page)

What if someone today had noticed her heading toward the Temple of Pain? People would be interested. They would talk among themselves. She is no longer lady of the house, they would say.

Out in the street a motor scooter sputtered past, its noise gradually fading into the distant buzz of the open-air market. She should be getting along. Which way was it to the open-air market? Never before had Mrs. Kimura lost her way like this. She felt an onset of dread which, lately, was becoming familiar. She glanced over at the old man who clearly could not help her, being from Wakayama Prefecture. He was settled on the bench, still fanning himself. This is where I belong, his posture seemed to say. Without his marvelous voice the aged body looked smaller, dried up and scrawny like a grasshopper—yet with something of that concealed energy of grasshoppers, that ability to startle you with a leap bigger than their bodies were entitled to.

Now, with a slow movement, he lifted his arm and pointed at a shabby wooden temple about a hundred meters away. “I was circling the
hondo,
” he told her. Lined up along the temple’s veranda was evidence of a large attendance: glass jars, dozens and dozens of them, scrubbed clean of labels and crammed with homegrown carnations, sweet peas, dahlias. They seemed to belong to an intimate household whose owners could return at any time.

“At the administrative office,” he said, “I bought one hundred sticks blessed by a priest. Then I circled the
hondo
one hundred times, reciting the Lotus Sutra to myself. After each round, I dropped one stick in the box.”

Poor man. Mrs. Kimura, distracted from her own worries, nodded with sympathy. This ritual sounded strangely familiar. There had been something in her own past—what it was, she could not recall.

“I went round and round. And the process began to remind me of all the years of my life. How they’ve come and gone. You go around enough times, and it all gets blurred together. Isn’t that the way, madam? Things lose their shape.”

Mrs. Kimura sat up straighter but said nothing.

“But what’s the point now of clutching at all the dates and names and places? I thought, Let them go! Let them go! They’ve served their purpose.—Madam, while I was circling the
hondo
I paused to hear the cicadas. I stood and listened, and I felt an old man inside me, and a middle-aged man too, and a young man, and a boy.”

Overhead in the branches, one of the cicadas stopped shrilling, then started up again. Mrs. Kimura thought back to the evening several weeks ago, when she had sat on the veranda with her grandsons and sensed the difference in their minds’ respective capacities. Now, she felt her role reversed; this old man had captured something that still eluded her, although it was encroaching closer and closer from the edges of her mind.

“Imagine how cicadas would sound to Buddha,” he said, “after all his incarnations.”

Was he, then, a religious follower? “I don’t believe in reincarnation,” Mrs. Kimura said.

“Saa, I’m not sure myself,” he said, “what happens after death. But I see its pattern in this life. The ancient sages said we all have in us some larger consciousness that keeps growing, widening, with time. And they said: That is all that matters. Our bodies must evolve, and our minds must evolve, in order to accommodate it.”

It was not until the old man had left for his train that Mrs. Kimura remembered why the
hondo
ritual had sounded familiar. The memory came back to her untried, utterly unfamiliar, as if it belonged in someone else’s mind and was slipping into hers by mistake. It was strange, how certain pockets of memory disappeared early in life. A few of them were coming back through her dreams. Others remained missing; for instance, she could not recall a single moment of that period in childhood when she had been forced to learn how to write with her right hand.

It had been a muggy summer day—she was about six—when she and her parents had visited a temple and her father had circled a
hondo
. It must have been his cancer, Mrs. Kimura thought now. But on that day she knew nothing of this, and had become impatient waiting for him. While cicadas shrilled
meeeeee
up in the pine trees, her mother amused her with a Water Buddha in a corner of the yard. “Ahhh, he’s saying thank you, it feels very good,” her mother had said as she poured water from a bamboo dipper over the Buddha’s head, “the poor thing’s so hot and tired out in the sun.” Mrs. Kimura had watched the gentle stone face smiling through a film of cool water that flowed down the Buddha’s body into the tangled green weeds at its feet. Her mother poured over and over, and her father continued his interminable rounds.

They might have come to this very temple. It was not so implausible; her childhood town of Fukuma was no more than an hour away.

Mrs. Kimura pictured her father sitting on a bench, slumped and silent, and her mother bending over him saying, “Oto-san, here’s some tea…let’s rest here a little before we go home…” A few elderly people had sat nearby, discussing ailments and families and times long gone, slowly fanning themselves as if they had all the time in the world. One solitary old woman sipped her tea, holding the cup with both hands and smiling up eagerly at anyone passing by.

They were all gone now, and Mrs. Kimura had taken their place. That afternoon could have happened just yesterday, a heartbeat ago. Was it an illusion, or was today’s weather, even the time of day, exactly the same, right down to the ominous black shafts of shadow the
hondo’
s pillars threw across the sand?—as if nothing had really happened in the meantime, as if she had blinked once, like Urashimataro, and found decades gone.

For a fleeting instant her mind was vast enough, strong enough, to inhabit both afternoons at once. Maybe those ancient sages had experienced something similar, hovering between one consciousness and another. And Buddha himself, after all those lives—a tree, a worm, a bird, a dog—was now all dimensions in one,
was all
—and something of this was coming to her in these newfound dreams, and in the twilight evenings when she reclaimed young Jiro from the past. She knew her mind to be strengthening, widening, in a way neither little Terao nor Saburo nor Harumi nor Jiro could hope to understand.

She rose from her seat and walked over to the Water Buddha, which was still standing—as she had known it would be—in the far-left corner of the yard. It looked unexpectedly dilapidated, a little worn statue with features blurred by the years. She gazed at the smooth face, almost alive in the flickering shade of the sycamore tree. It was a face spent of passion after so many incarnations, suspended in some vast, unfocused awareness that radiated from its simple features. Mrs. Kimura, squatting before it as if it were a small child, recognized in its smile her own sorrow of things passing.

“There, there,” she said to the Water Buddha, lifting the dipper and scooping up water from the blue plastic bucket beside it. The water slid down the warm stone, raising a sharp whiff of moss as it sank into the ground.

T
HE
K
ASHIGAWA
district, two hours away from the Endos’ home in Tokyo, was an isolated farming community with two claims to distinction: indigenous harrier monkeys up in the hills, and a new restaurant—Fireside Rations—which served “rice” made from locally grown yams. This restaurant had been featured in an
Asahi Shimbun
article about the trendy resurgence of wartime food, also known as nostalgia cuisine, and it had received special mention on NHK’s thirty-minute
Rural Getaways
show. City dwellers, jaded by French and Madeiran cuisine, were flocking out on weekends to try it. It seemed a fitting place for Dr. Kenji Endo; his wife, Sumiko; and Dr. Ogawa to toast the start of a new primate field study.

This field study would be Kenji’s last. Sumiko had insisted on it, quoting the doctor about the seriousness of his arrhythmia. “There’s enough work for you at the university,” she said, “where you’ll have access to phones and doctors.” Kenji had conceded with ill humor. Even now, at odd moments, that decision pressed hard on his chest, where he felt his heart galumphing under the skin. He was lucky, he supposed, to have this last project, a mere thirty-minute drive from this small town of Kashigawa. It would require almost no physical exertion; he had deliberately confined his mirror experiments to the provisioning area where monkeys came to feed.

Tonight, dressing for dinner at the Red Monkey Inn, Kenji stood behind his wife, who was fluffing her hair before the vanity mirror, and faced his own reflection. It pleased him that at fifty-eight he still looked good, belying the heart condition that, despite medication or perhaps because of it, had drained him over the past three months (“What happened to those pompous monologues of yours?” a close friend had joked recently). He was permanently tanned from years of working in the wilds of Borneo and Madagascar, and beneath his pressed spring suit he retained the lithe frame and hard calves of a trekker. Unlike Dr. Ogawa, whom they were meeting tonight, Kenji still had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair that he parted in a dashing side sweep each morning. His only visible symptom of age was a tendency to walk or stand with knees slightly bent: the first sign of a curved back, according to his secretary at the university. He always caught himself, therefore, and corrected it immediately.

“I’d forgotten,” his wife remarked, “how common yams are in Kashigawa. I’m surprised we didn’t get one in our welcome basket.” She smiled enigmatically at her reflection, turning her profile this way and that. Sumiko had grown up on the west side of this district, in a small hamlet long since swallowed up by postwar suburbs. Secure in her own sophistication, she often amused their city friends with anecdotes from her rural childhood.

“The monkeys today sure liked them, ne?” Kenji said. Ordinarily, he discussed primates for hours on end—anytime, with anyone—but lately this tendency had abated. He found himself economizing in other ways as well: if he needed a book from another room, he put off rising from his chair until it was time to use the bathroom; he sat silent in the chair while working through a complex thought process, rather than pacing the room and talking aloud as he was accustomed. He sensed how this slower pace hampered his creativity, his greatest asset, and this realization also lay heavy on his chest. For so long now, his mental agility—augmented by his affiliation with the nation’s most elite university, and a long and respected publishing career—had cleared his every path like a red carpet. As a young man, naturally, he had battled hard for advancement. But that was decades ago; until the advent of his arrhythmia, he could barely remember how it felt to be thwarted.

On this particular evening, however, Kenji was in fine form. He was eager to talk. His thoughts sprang up, keen and full-bodied, like stringed notes plucked by a koto master. He had felt this way for two whole days now, and he harbored a secret hope that his heart problems were receding as mysteriously as they had once appeared. Luckier things had happened in his lifetime. “Did you notice,” he said, “how they peeled the yams with their incisors, then washed them in the stream?”

“Aaa, aaa,” Sumiko agreed, “you showed me.” She powdered her nose, leaning in close to the mirror. “Like miniature housewives,” she said, “with those little black dexterous hands.”

There was an emotional hardiness about Sumiko that Kenji assumed came from her country stock or—more likely—from being married to him. He had always appreciated this quality in her, like a rope on which he, the mountain climber, could entrust his full weight. “I’m a research widow,” she had mourned jokingly in their early years, as Kenji departed for one exotic locale after another. “Wave bye-bye to Papa-san,” she told their toddler, Toji, carrying him in one arm and demonstrating with the other. After Toji entered high school, she immediately joined several women’s committees; the experience had added a gloss of poise to her unruffled core. “A charming woman!” people often said of Kenji’s wife.

“Their food washing is learned behavior,” Kenji told her. “It’s one of the brightest discoveries credited to Japanese researchers.”

“Aaa,” Sumiko murmured, blotting her lipstick with a tissue.

“Because it’s proto-tool use, you see, which is a key component of human culture.”

This afternoon’s tour of the site had been brief, just to confirm all was in order. Dr. Ogawa and his assistant, who were actually here on a project of their own, had been kind enough to set up Kenji’s freestanding mirror for him, the two men lugging it up the dirt trail and propping it securely in the middle of the clearing. The monkeys would have unlimited access to this mirror before official tests were performed; this would allow plenty of time for them to establish familiarity with it.

“In the first mirror study eleven years ago,” Kenji explained to Dr. Ogawa later that evening at the restaurant, “a few orangutans actually showed signs of self-recognition. The same with chimpanzees. An exciting discovery! But then that study of Japanese snow monkeys, headed by my friend Itakura—do you know Itakura?”

Dr. Ogawa, who dealt with physiology rather than cognitive behavior, did not. But he had run across articles.

“Well, anyhow, that study was a disappointment. The monkeys interpreted the reflections to be either other members of the same species or else meaningless images. So the obvious question is—”

“Is there a rift between monkey and ape,” Sumiko provided, rummaging in her handbag and pulling out a handkerchief.

“—soh soh, exactly. Whether it indicates a major evolutionary discontinuity.”

“Fascinating,” breathed Dr. Ogawa’s assistant.

“I think it’s pretty early for a conclusion like
that,
” said Dr. Ogawa.

Kenji halted him with a raised forefinger, nodding. Absolutely, he said. There were so many unexplored variables. Some apes, such as gorillas, showed no self-recognition whatsoever. He personally suspected some correlation between a species’s level of aggression and its concept of self. “Wouldn’t aggression be the natural result,” he said, “of a capacity for self-awareness being developed and adapted for survival?” These Kashigawa monkeys represented a strain of macaque which was, with the exception of baboons, one of the most ferocious in the entire primate family. He hoped this characteristic would make for some interesting findings.

“On what grounds?” Dr. Ogawa asked.

“It’s still a hunch at this stage,” Kenji said. A good many such hunches had paid off during his career. Much of this, he knew, was sheer luck, but surely some of the credit went to a scientist’s gift for inventiveness, for subconscious mental connections. He loved telling the story of Einstein, whose theory of relativity had begun with a childish fantasy of riding on a beam of light. “I have some latitude to explore as I go,” he now said.

“Aggression studies must be ‘in’ again,” Dr. Ogawa said grimly. “Psychologists, sociologists, they’re all whipped up about it.”

Kenji laughed. He felt invincible tonight, closer to his old self than he had been in a while; he was conscious that every good hour, indeed every good minute, was ensuring his odds of recovery. “Our nation has a hunger to understand,” he explained, forearms leaning heavily on the dinner table as if it were a podium, “given our experience with the most destructive war in modern history, what seed within humans made it possible. We can look back now from the safe distance of time. Even this wartime cuisine—I think it’s all part of the process.”

Dr. Ogawa, a middle-aged medical man with little regard for trends of the masses and even less for culinary fads, drank his Asahi beer and looked skeptical. He was here on a project of his own: collecting DNA samples for a study of pathogens and sialic acids, a process that led him and his assistant far out into the hills with their stun guns. Dr. Ogawa vaguely reminded Kenji of alpha male apes he had studied in the past. Not in any aggressive sense, but rather in the quiet force of his linear focus, that unrelenting, almost brute push of each thought to the very end. Kenji looked forward to some interesting debates. He knew from a colleague that Dr. Ogawa was fairly well known within physiology circles.

“Sohh sohh, wartime cuisine,” sighed Dr. Ogawa’s assistant, a weary-eyed graduate student whom Dr. Ogawa perversely addressed by the babyish nickname of Kana-chan. “We’re simply inundated with it,” he said, with a prim moue of distaste comically identical to Dr. Ogawa’s.

Kenji laughed out loud at this, slapped his thigh. His exuberance had been rising all evening. His heartbeat was returning to normal—yes! he could sense it, with that intuition for success that had seldom failed him in the past. “You’re absolutely right!” he said generously. Speaking of war cuisine, he told the table, two
okonomiyaki
places had sprung up in his own neighborhood. Kenji, having grown up in the city during the war and the occupation that followed, remembered those crispy pancakes: meager substitutes for rationed rice, their flour content barely enough to bind together leftover scraps of cabbage or turnip stems. Nowadays, of course, such ingredients were upgraded for modern consumption.

“Rock shrimp! Calamari!
Filet mignon!
” Kenji crowed. “They’ve missed the entire point!”

His audience laughed appreciatively, the assistant most heartily of all.

“Way before your time, Kana-chan,” Dr. Ogawa teased, patting the young man’s shoulder. Kana-chan flushed and stopped laughing.

Their waiter approached. In the muted candlelight (Kenji took out his reading glasses), they peered down at the identical bowls set before them. Yam rice, the waiter said, was unique to this region. First, yams were mashed. Binding glutens were added, and the mixture was strained through a large-holed colander into boiling water. The resulting noodlelike strands, once cooked, were chopped into rice-size bits. These were bleached, then finally roasted.

“All that work,” murmured Sumiko, “just so they could pretend they were eating rice.” The rice had a chewy, nutty texture not unlike that of brown rice, although its flavor was largely masked by salt and azuki beans.

From nowhere, a familiar tiredness hit Kenji. The shock and disappointment of it paralyzed him; he had put so much faith in this comeback. He sat still, feeling himself descending in slow motion beneath the bright surface of the dinner conversation, as if to the bottom of a sea.

With this underwater sensation, which so often accompanied his fluctuations in blood flow, he gazed dully at his wife sitting before him. She was eating slowly, pensively, deep in a world of her own. He recalled her saying once at a dinner party that her own mother, who had died when Sumiko was in middle school, used to reminisce about eating yam rice while she was pregnant with Sumiko. He wondered if his wife was remembering this now. It was strange how these small shifts in blood flow could open him up to the sadness of things, like a receding tide exposing sea creatures crumpled on the sand. His wife’s way of eating this dish struck him as profound, an acknowledgment of all the loss and longing that had created it.

“Think of all the labor they could have saved,” Kana-chan was saying, “if they’d just baked their yams instead.”

Tiredness poured in from all sides now, like sand into a hole, infusing Kenji with an unaccustomed sense of disadvantage. The new generation, he thought. Never gone hungry, never had a familiar world jerked out from under their feet. Before this young mind, as hard and green as an unripe peach, Kenji felt unaccountably uneasy.

“Irregular heartbeats have various causes,” Kenji’s doctor had told him at the beginning. “For example, minuscule heart attacks can build up scar tissue over time, which interferes with electrical impulses.”

“But I have excellent arteries. My blood pressure, my cholesterol, everything’s in a good range!”

“Well, then,” the doctor said—briskly, as if nipping a pointless argument in the bud—“yours must be hereditary. These flaws do crop up in later years, and we can’t always explain them.”

It was unnerving to think how confidently he had stridden through life, utterly ignorant of what defects lurked in his genes. Today, months later, Kenji mulled it over again, sitting at the edge of the dirt clearing and observing the macaques. Five or six of them, sated from a lunch of yams, loitered thirty meters away, grooming each other or strolling about on all fours. Directly overhead the sumac leaves rustled, intermittently letting in a blinding flash of sun. Kenji closed his eyes—it was just for a moment, the monkeys were nowhere near the mirror—and orange flooded his eyelids, the warmth pressing down on his face and body like a blanket. He felt great solace in the midst of this loudness that was nature: the back-and-forth of birds, the drilling of a woodpecker, the alternate drone and
chi-chi-chi
of insects, the grunt of a monkey.