Takeru nodded.
“Course! At your age we played ’gether nearly every day.”
Ken’s eyes narrowed, as though he were looking at something far away. Did he know that this scenery, steeped in memories, was something Takeru’s mother hated? Perhaps he did. His tone suddenly changed.
“Your ma ever mention me?”
Takeru thought for a moment, then, tilting his head, said simply: “I don’t remember.”
Ken sighed.
“Oh,” he said sadly. “Well, no surprise. It was more’n twenty years ago now.”
Takeru recalled the stifling heat of the apartment. Upstairs in an old wooden housing block, facing west. The largest window, opposite the entrance, looked out over what people called an orchard, surrounded by indistinguishable houses and other low-rise apartment blocks. He didn’t know what sort of trees were in the orchard. Some people said peach. Some said plum. Others said they were grapevines. They had been planted neatly at even spaces, and were about the height of an adult, but Takeru didn’t remember ever seeing fruit on them. In fact, he couldn’t remember them having leaves, just bare branches stretching out like the arms of people pretending to be monsters, scaring children. So, to Takeru the orchard wasn’t green. It was brown, the color of earth, dry earth. An assembly of blighted trees, standing neatly in line. In a way, they were stranger than monsters.
In the afternoon the sun came directly through the west window. It was hard to bear, especially without curtains, and they didn’t have any yet, though they must have been in Akeroma for over six months. His mother was too busy even to go and buy curtains.
The hall led into the kitchen, and beyond that were two tatami-matted rooms. In the farthest room were two unopened cardboard boxes against the wall. At first Takeru thought he might use them as a bed. It seemed like a good idea. But there were no cushions to put on top and use as a mattress, and of course a futon was more comfortable for sleeping anyway.
Takeru soon lost interest in the cardboard boxes, but his brother didn’t. His brother was two years older than Takeru, though a similar height. When he wasn’t asleep, he often sat quietly on one of the boxes. He sat bent forward, and now and then a thread of saliva fell from his open mouth. Takeru would look away, but sometimes he couldn’t fail to see saliva that had hit the floor. An ant crawling around on the tatami would occasionally fall victim to spit falling from the sky. It would writhe around, waving its legs and antennae. With the air so hot, the liquid quickly evaporated, but even so those ants must still have wanted revenge. Takeru wondered if his mother had known that. Though he spent so much time sitting on the hard boxes, his brother never slept on them. Even he knew they wouldn’t be comfortable.
There was no air-conditioning in the room and no electric fan. The window was always open, but that just made sleep more difficult. Instead of a breeze it seemed to let in only hot air and the noise of the air-conditioning units on the buildings nearby. At first the two boys had slept on a futon, but it soon grew damp with sweat, so they began to lie directly on the tatami floor.
Takeru continued to use the futon as a pillow, but one day he noticed black marks along its edge. He thought they were ants. Not wanting to be bitten, he tried to squash one with his finger. But no, it wasn’t an ant. It was some kind of mark. He stood up and turned the futon over. Both the futon and tatami mat beneath were covered in mold, growths of various sizes. He shivered. He dropped the futon and it fell to the floor with a soft thud. Wisps of cotton stuffing floated up into the air. He decided he’d never use the futon again. He wanted to do something about the mold, but he didn’t know what. He looked at his brother, who was sleeping on his stomach as always, his cheek flat against the unswept tatami.
There were black spots on his brother’s bare calf. Takeru shuddered. Was his brother developing mold too? He lifted his brother by the shoulders and turned him over. His body was light, far easier to maneuver than Takeru had expected. He looked at the dull-colored skin of his brother’s chest and protruding belly. To his relief there was no mold to be seen. The black spots on his brother’s calf must have been ants. Takeru was angry. He wanted to squash the ants, but they’d disappeared.
The apartment was on the corner of the block, adjacent to an old concrete building that was being used by a construction company for offices and worker housing. Immediately opposite the window on the north side of the apartment was a grimy sliding window in the other building. It looked almost close enough for an adult to stretch out and touch. Its metal frame was damaged and had been taped. The screen was torn in one corner. At ground level, the gap between the buildings was strewn with empty cans and plastic bags. There were some rain-soaked newspapers and magazines too. The plastic bags quivered, so there must have been wind down there. But no breeze came through the window of the apartment. It had been left open morning, noon, and night and wouldn’t close. There must have been too much dust around the frame. An adult might have been able to close it, but it was too hard for a child like Takeru, and it would have been even more difficult for his brother. What if the two of them had tried together? But his brother never came over to give a hand when Takeru was battling with the window. He just lay there with his eyes closed, his bare belly rising and falling. It was hard to tell whether he was sleeping or awake.
How did they live, these two, after their mother had gone? They managed because there was always somebody there to reach out to them. Literally reach out.
One day, that window in the building next door opened and a black arm came out. The hand dropped a cigarette butt. The back of the hand was dark, but the palm was pale. A black face appeared at the window. Takeru couldn’t hide his surprise, and the man grinned, widely set teeth standing out white against his dark skin. Gap-toothed, thought Takeru.
Takeru had seen him before. He’d been wearing gray-green overalls the first time—it must not have been so hot then. Takeru had been on the way to a convenience store, waiting to cross the road where it ran under the highway.
The sidewalk on the far side of the road was being widened. A dusty, rusting truck was parked there, and the man was walking past it, pushing a wheelbarrow piled with pieces of asphalt ripped up from the road. He looked different than the other workmen. For one thing he was the only one wearing a helmet. It looked very big for his head. What struck Takeru more than that, though, was that his head seemed small for his body—he had a small head but very long limbs. Most remarkable of all was the way he walked, the way his body moved—to Takeru’s eyes it seemed to follow a different rhythm than the other men, a different kind of music. He immediately thought he must be foreign. The signal to cross turned green, and just as Takeru reached the other side of the road the man passed close by, now walking in the opposite direction, his wheelbarrow empty. Takeru noticed a smell as the man passed, as though the air were tinged with some kind of spice. He’d seen him again more recently, working on the demolition of a big old house on a busy road not far from the apartment. There’s the African, Takeru had thought. But he wasn’t African. Well, no. He was African but, then again, he wasn’t.
Takeru didn’t know that the man lived in the building next door. But when he thought about it, the blue truck with filthy mud flaps—the one that was always parked in front of the construction company office—was the same vehicle he’d seen that day on the side of the road. And he knew there were living quarters above the offices. A man who lived there had bought him a can of soda shortly after they’d moved in.
Yes. That’s right. That man, the one who bought him a soda, had reached out a helping hand as well. He was from the north—Tohoku—but he said he’d been working in Tokyo for a long time. Takeru forgot his name but it would come back to him later, when he saw Hii-chan standing in front of the vending machine at the gas station in the village by the sea. Not that the man’s face had resembled Hii-chan’s in the slightest.