The Fireflies, organized as a security squad, were busy too, with preparations for their Spirit Festival, and didn't have the energy left over to take charge of the parking lot, so the task fell to some older youths who were continuing the local Village Association group; they too were unpaid volunteers.
The Kansai headquarters leader, Mr. Soda, arrived in the Hollow at the end of July. He invited Dr. Koga, Ms. Asuka, and Kizu for dinner at the Mansion, where he was staying during the conference. On the day of the din- ner there were none of the city folk around the dam or on the flagstone path, and in the midst of the loud buzz of cicadas and the cries of wild birds, Dr.
Koga and Asa-san appeared in the parking lot from the road leading to the prefectural highway. Rather than turn to wave to Kizu in his studio window, they looked out at the giant cypress tree, its leaves stirring with the faint breeze blowing in from the woods around the lake.
When Kizu saw the well-bred city boy Dr. Koga with a linen sports coat on, he put on a lightweight jacket himself. As a present for Mr. Soda, he took a watercolor he'd done of the view of the chapel and monastery from the north shore, put it in a frame, and left the house.
When Kizu got down to the dam, Dr. Koga and Asa-san-the latter all dressed up in a summer-weight wool skirt and navy blue blouse-were talking with one of the Technicians, who was setting up the microphones in the reviewing stands. Several of the Fireflies were sitting on the dam itself, undoing a huge coil of cable and threading it through plastic tubing to keep it waterproof. Apparently they were going to run an electric line underwater out to the island with the huge cypress.
Kizu and the others walked down to the tents, crossed over the surging waterway, and took a flagstone path that ran all around from the traditional gate in the long wall to the main house. When they arrived at the main gate, shaded by the lush overhanging leaves of the camellias, a smaller side door in a corner of the main gate was open to the inside.
With Asa-san leading the way, they ducked through the side door. On the broad concrete floor was something they'd heard about from Asa-san on the way over, a gold-and-copper alloy pipe-afuigo, as they called it-to carry smoke from the sunken hearth that now was faintly glowing. Mr. Soda was standing on the wooden floor below that and led the three of them over to the natural stone flooring, where they removed their shoes. With his pinstripe dress shirt and gray vest, all Mr. Soda needed was a coat and jacket and he'd be ready for a business meeting, though his collar was casually open.
"Hey, looks like your blood pressure's not acting up," Dr. Koga said, as if speaking to a good buddy. "So you prefer staying in the annex more than the main building? I guess this was originally a place for people to live in, wasn't it. You have a large kitchen, too. This fuigo pipe running out of the oven is nice.
"It's like a pipe in a pipe organ, don't you think? It was specially ordered, and since Former Gii named it, I've respected his wishes," Mr. Soda responded, turning to greet Kizu and Asa-san. "I'm glad you could come. Koga and I were in the same class for our first two years of college. The guys who were going on to medical school were all kind of snobbish and someone like me in engineer- ing found it hard to get along with most of them, but Koga was okay."
On the left-hand side, in the back of the concrete floor, set off at a gentle right angle, was a sink and a stove. A large man was working there, bathed in the reddish light coming in from the west window, but Mr. Soda didn't introduce him, instead leading his guests to the side around the sunken hearth.
Kizu passed the watercolor painting to Mr. Soda, who turned his stylishly crew-cut head and taut face toward it with a word of thanks. He didn't give any opinion about the painting, though, which Kizu found totally refreshing.
Mr. Soda told about how as a young man he and Dr. Koga were on the same rugby team at the Komaba campus of Tokyo University and how Koga was fast enough to break through his opponents easily but wasn't brave enough to attempt a goal and would just keep running, all bent over.
"The first one to make a touchdown in the church, though, was Koga, who was the one who invited me to join," Soda went on. "He had those troubles with his mother, and went through a terrible time until his aunt took him to see Patron."
A complex expression showed on Dr. Koga's face, but he said nothing.
They could hear the sound of the cicadas that came out at twilight, and a twilight bird call Kizu was familiar with: a gray thrush, perhaps. The naked beams of the building loomed darkly above them; beyond the packed dirt floor of the proportionally large kitchen was a long window from which one could doubtless see the waterway they'd crossed on their way here. The wind blew in through the shutters. The air was moving enough to raise a sound from the gold-copper alloy fuigo.
The man who'd been working in the kitchen preparing dinner brought over a series of small plates on a shallow wooden box, something Kizu knew was called in the local dialect a morobuta. The man, past middle age, wearing a white collared shirt and cotton khaki trousers, turned out to be the former principal of the junior high school who'd done the trimming around Kizu's house. Asa-san hurriedly brought over the lacquer trays stacked up in back and lined up on them the dishes that her husband passed her.
Mr. Soda stood up and went over to the kitchen to a bucket of water and lifted up one of two bottles of sake inside it, provided by the activist sake producer whom Kizu and the others knew. The four-go bottle appeared to have been frozen and then thawed out, and the label had come off, the only bit of decoration the wire cap that held down the pressure built up by the fermentation.
"Tonight we have steamed chicken with a sesame sauce, chilled tofu with grilled eggplant, which we eat here with soy sauce, and then chopped bonito," the former junior high principal said, sounding as if he was some- one who liked to talk a lot but was purposely keeping his words to a mini- mum. "I'll be preparing some salt-grilled fresh-water trout as well, and for the final dish a specialty of this region, grilled sea bass in chilled miso paste.
You eat this over rice, so I brought over mortars along with the rice."
"He's been studying cooking shows on TV to prepare for tonight," Asa- san explained as she laid several small dishes of condiments beside each of the trays.
"Please have as many helpings of rice as you'd like," her husband said.
"The sake tastes really good when it's like sherbet so we kept it in the freezer, but the mouth of the bottle sometimes gets stopped up--that's why I've laid three chopsticks at each place setting, so you can use one to unstop the bottle if need be."
They watched his broad back as the former junior high principal went back to retrieve the trout.
"My husband has some curious ideas," Asa-san said. "Believe me, we don't ordinarily put three chopsticks down for each person."
4
What Kizu found interesting was that Mr. Soda and Dr. Koga, seated respectively on the north and east side of the sunken hearth, said a silent prayer before eating. Since he'd come here and had meals with church members, Kizu had never noticed this custom before. Perhaps the Kansai headquarters was actively preserving the way things were done in the church before the Somersault.
Next Mr. Soda poured a good amount of sake, now melted into some- thing less viscous than sherbet, into each of their matching cups, cups used for dipping sauce for soba noodles, a set he'd purchased as part of what came with the Mansion. After they'd downed this he filled each cup again, and everyone understood that was all they were going to get.