He pulled out the packet and asked Mrs Snake, “Can I offer you this? It doesn’t quite qualify as a thank-you present or anything, but still.”
The sardines, as it turned out, were a favourite of Mrs Snake’s, and she seemed genuinely delighted with the gift. So much so, in fact, that Taro felt a bit embarrassed. “Thank you so much, thank you really so much!” she said over and over, as she climbed up the stairs.
Inside his flat, Taro studied the key that Mrs Snake had returned to him. He’d bought the mushroom key ring from a vending machine. There were several different kinds of mushroom key rings dispensed at random, and all came in little plastic capsules. This one was shimeji. He recalled that he’d had another key ring too—in the shape of a king oyster mushroom. Taro tended to lose things, so he’d attached the mushroom key rings to his keys to make them easier to find. Maybe the king oyster mushroom key ring had got pulled off, but there was no loose metal ring or anything. He thought to himself how it might be a good idea to attach some kind of a bell to his keys so he would hear it ring when they fell.
Taro slipped the ready-made meal of chargrilled beef and rice that he’d bought in a convenience store into the microwave, and opened a can of beer. Then stepping onto the balcony to fetch the towel drying there, he looked towards the Dragon Flat at the far end of the second floor. He could see that lights were on. It was three days since he’d seen the woman on the balcony, and he hadn’t caught a glimpse of her since.
The dried sardines had been a gift from his colleague Numazu, who’d brought them back from Okayama, where he’d gone on business on Tuesday. He had taken off the Monday before to have a long weekend visiting his in-laws in Kushiro, in the east of Hokkaido, from where he’d brought back salmon jerky. Numazu had recently got married, and as his wife was an only child, he’d taken her surname as his own. It was an unusual surname that Numazu was quite fond of, and he immediately ordered a set of business cards with his new name. This was rather different from married colleagues of theirs who still used their maiden names at work. Taro hadn’t got used to calling Numazu by his new name yet.
At lunch, Numazu struck up a conversation with Taro. He was totally happy about his name change, he said, but he hadn’t considered the fact that adopting his wife’s surname meant he would have to be buried in her family grave. He had always expected that he’d end up buried alongside his family in the port town in Shizuoka Prefecture where he’d grown up (there was a city in Shizuoka actually called Numazu, but the town that Numazu came from was not it). His family’s plot was on the grounds of a temple surrounded by sloping mandarin fields that spent much of the year bathed in brilliant sunlight, so when Numazu saw his wife’s family grave—in the middle of a forest that would no doubt be freezing in winter—he felt sad. “If I was a woman, I wonder if I’d find it any easier to accept being buried with the family I’d married into,” Numazu said. “I can’t shake the feeling that it might be pretty uncomfortable, surrounded by the remains of people I don’t know.”
Taro thought about this, then he said, “Things are more flexible these days. You have options about where you can get buried. Like, there are forest graveyards now, where each person has a tree instead of a gravestone, and stuff like that. In my family, we divided up my father’s remains and scattered some of them.”
“In that case, I want to be buried in the garden of the house where I grew up. The dog I had when I was a kid is buried there. Cheetah was his name. I’d like to be buried next to Cheetah.”
Numazu then went on to tell Taro about Cheetah, a mongrel with cheetah-like black spots around his eyes that his brother had found and brought home. Cheetah loved chicken bones and would follow Numazu all the way to school. When Cheetah got older, he had problems with his hips, and couldn’t be taken for walks, but still lived to a ripe old age. He’d also got much bigger than anyone imagined, and digging the hole to bury him in had been no mean feat. As Numazu rattled off this eleven-year life history in the space of five minutes, he began to tear up.
“You know,” Taro said, changing the subject, “if you can make out the shape of the bones when a person is buried, it’s classified as illegal disposal of a body. You have to grind the bones up into powder before you bury them, or scatter them.”
“Did you?”
“It was a real struggle, actually. The bones were so hard.”
“I would have thought they’d be very brittle after they came out of the oven.”
Taro’s father had had good, strong bones and hardly a filling in his teeth. A while back, the government had launched the 80-20 Campaign, encouraging people to live into their eighties with twenty of their real teeth intact. Taro’s father had seemed like he was on target for it, but he died just before turning sixty. That was almost ten years ago. That meant it was almost ten years that Taro had been living in Tokyo.
To pulverize what was left of his father’s bones, Taro had used a mortar and pestle about the size of a sugar bowl. When he moved to Tokyo from his parents’ home in Osaka, he brought the mortar and pestle with him, and it was still in his flat now. Throughout the three years he’d been living with his wife—they’d divorced three years ago—the mortar and pestle had been stored in the cupboard where plates and bowls were kept. “Don’t you think you should find a better place for something as precious as that?” his wife had said to him several times. “I’m going to end up using it for food one of these days.” The mortar and pestle never got moved. Taro was a disorganized person, and he worried that if he moved it, he’d forget where it was. He also worried that if it wasn’t somewhere visible, he would forget that his father was dead. Sometimes he got the feeling that he’d already forgotten—about his father’s death, and about his existence too.
“I wonder what I should do,” Numazu had gone on. “If I wait till I’m dead to think about that stuff, it’ll be too late. Kushiro is so cold. It’s really wild and beautiful, but it’s bloody cold. I really can’t stand the cold.”
Taro was about to say that he wouldn’t feel the cold when he was dead, but it suddenly struck him that Numazu wasn’t actually wanting a conversation. He was just voicing the thoughts passing through his mind, and not looking for an answer. There were two other people in the office at that point, and they were without a doubt listening to what was being said, but neither of them uttered a word.
Taro tossed the salmon jerky from Numazu onto the shelves which had originally been for books but which now held dishes. Then, he peered around the cups and glasses on the third shelf to be sure that the mortar and pestle was still there. He’d bought it in a houseware store two days after his father died. He’d come to realize that it was a mistake to grind up his father’s remains with such a thing. The mortar was lined with narrow grooves, a little too perfect for ashes to get stuck in. Taro was loath to rinse them away, though, so to this day those little furrows, like scratches made with a comb, still had some fine white powder in them. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it must be there.
His father’s cremated remains had been divided between the family grave in his hometown and the Buddhist altar in his mother’s home. Some, which Taro had taken with him and ground up finely, had been scattered off a cape in Ehime Prefecture where his father had often gone fishing.
Carried by the wind, washed away by the waves, those finely ground ashes had soon disappeared. They had been the particles of the same bones whose powder was now stuck inside the mortar. What parts of his father were they? Taro wondered. Had those hard, white pieces of bone he’d put into the mortar really started off in his father’s body? It was crazy to think that those same bones that he’d ground up in there had once been sitting around, walking about. One time, in primary school, Taro had split his forehead open on a metal pole and his classmates had all come up to him, one after another, to stare at the wound. They said you could see bone. Taro himself, though, had never got to see it. He still felt sore about that now.