Kōji’s eyes were dry and bloodshot, and in spite of himself, he stared hatefully at Yūko. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Ippei’s footsteps climbed the stairs. Strange footsteps, once heard, instantly recognizable.
Protecting his right arm and leg, his left hand clung to the handrail as he came ponderously up the stairs. It felt like he would never arrive. It seemed to Kōji like the stairs went on forever, ascending higher and higher.
Yūko stood up, and opened the sliding door to the guest room just a crack. Even during the summer, the door was properly closed in order to partition the two rooms; the partitioning wall was covered with things such as Kōji’s desk and a small chest of drawers. Having not been opened for some time, the sliding door creaked and began to warp slightly in its frame, but she slipped adroitly through the gap and went into the twelve-mat guest room, closing the door behind her.
Kōji shut his eyes. He was lying with his head pointing north, and he was afraid of catching sight of Ippei over the edge of the mosquito net as he passed by the veranda.
“Yūko… Yūko,” called Ippei, as he walked along the wide veranda.
“I’m in here.” Her voice came trippingly from the dark, musty-smelling twelve-mat guest room.
With his eyes closed, Kōji followed only their conversation.
As the night wore on it started to get a little blustery outside. The wind, dissipated now as it sifted through the mesh of the net, played lightly on his skin, and all the more made him acutely aware of the oppressive heat.
“Cold,” said Ippei. There was a needlessly assertive tone in his voice as he emphasized the word, almost like a stout, heavy stick tapping around in the darkness.
“Cold? It’s not cold. You mean it’s cool, don’t you?” Yūko was saying.
“Cool… I want… to sleep here.”
“Eh?”
“It’s cool. Here. I want to sleep here… from tomorrow,” said Ippei.
Before they set to work protecting the greenhouses against the approaching typhoon, Kōji and Teijirō spent the whole of the next day busily loading plants into the truck that had arrived, as it did at regular intervals, from Tokyo Horticulture. Tokyo Horticulture had a number of greenhouses around the Izu Peninsula with which it placed direct orders. The president had recommended that Yūko choose the area around Iro Village, since it was conveniently located to join the chain of their direct-order greenhouses that lay in range of the truck route.
In this way, in exchange for being paid by check each month, what was tantamount to a fixed commission by the head office, the greenhouse could do business without the fear of its prices being knocked down at market or the unfavorable competition from the foliage plants supplied direct from Osaka or the roses sold by Tokyo rose growers.
The three-ton truck from Tokyo Horticulture stopped by two or three times a month without fail, and then returned again loaded up with fifty or sixty potted plants each visit. Depending on the season, it would sometimes take as many as a hundred pots. In the summertime, it was mainly foliage plants and orchids. Unable to compete with the produce from areas around Den-en Chofu, the Kusakado greenhouse would ship the cheaper plants, such as gloxinia, to Numazu. These plants were removed from their pots and packed in boxes, and then Kōji took them by handcart to the port.
With great difficulty, the truck climbed sluggishly up the slope as far as the entrance to the Kusakado greenhouse. Yūko was concerned with looking after the drivers, giving them presents of things such as Ippei’s Italian-made ties and English socks, together with a grandiose explanation of their origin.
When it was time for the shipment, Kōji always felt sad at parting with the plants he had cultivated with so much tender care. The cymbidium, with its leaves similar to those of pampas, displayed an elegance as though it had caught some kind of disease-like “beauty,” through the form of its flowers, which float in the air like a sudden vision—a characteristic of orchids, together with its pale purple brushed petals, and lips with purple flecks scattered on a yellow background. To a greater or lesser extent European orchids had that same feel about them. The light red flowers of the dendrobium afforded a glimpse of dark purple in the depths of their tubes, yet they did not attempt to keep their bashfulness in the shade, rather, they seemed to explicitly reveal it. The Hawaiian anthurium was lurid red like synthetic resin with a rough feline tongue projecting from it. A seaweed-like delicate appearance of tiger tail contrasting with the tough nature of its dark green spotted leaves bordered with pale yellow. The large oval leaves of the Decora, an improved variety of rubber plant. The Ananas, with its audacious green bromeliad leaves sporting horizontal black stripes. The lady palm with a profusion of glossy leaves growing from thin hairy stems…
All these had left Kōji’s care and were now lined up on the dirty truck like a group of cold, silent prostitutes taken away by the police. Kōji dreamed of the worlds infiltrated by his dispersed flowers and leaves. He imagined a society of dazzling immensity and grotesque pitch-dark complication where these flowers and leaves hung, as if they were little ribbons secured here and there over its body. The flowers were mere caricatures there. These flowers and leaves would scatter and infiltrate shrewdly, like germs, a variety of entirely useless places in society for the purposes of practical sentimentalism, hypocrisy, peace and order, vanity, death, disease…
After loading the truck, Kōji placed the wrapped gloxinia on the handcart and hurried to the port to make the last shipment of the day. It was getting cloudier, and the wind had started to rise.
He loaded the plants onto the boat and watched it as it departed from the quayside. He noticed that the stern lines of some fishing boats moored nearby were creaking more than usual with a high-pitched whine. The quay where he stood was bright in the sunlight. The sun was shining from the pale blue sky in the west through a cleft in the thick clouds. Far off, some shining clouds drifted tranquilly in the not-so-large clear sky, as if it were a painting enclosed in a frame. The shape of the clouds was like a gabion stuffed with copious amounts of light…
When Kōji got back, Teijirō was in a real fluster. He had heard on the radio news that the typhoon was approaching much more quickly than expected.
Determined to work through the night, they set to the difficult task of sticking long, stout plywood sheets, which they had prepared specially, diagonally across the window frames of the greenhouses, and then further protecting the glass panes by hanging straw matting over the top.
After what had happened the previous night, Yūko avoided Kōji and obdurately did her best not to speak to him. Her attitude repeatedly hampered their busy work. But Kōji worked on diligently without complaint—a little like an unheeded child engrossed completely in the task in front of him. If anything, this state of rejection was necessary in order for him to find some value in his work.
Buffeted by the moisture-laden wind, which intensified as night came on, Kōji found the continuation of his earnest, silent labor agreeable. This work had been “bestowed” on him; it had been the same sort of labor that had delivered the prisoners from resignation to their oppressive fate.
The night wore on. Having progressed more quickly than he had expected, Kōji set about working on the roof of the last greenhouse to finalize their work. Climbing from the top of the ladder onto the roof, he straddled the ridge—taking care not to step on the glass panes—and took hold of the long plywood panels that Teijirō handed to him. To help them with their work, all the fluorescent lights were ablaze in the greenhouses, and the resultant brightness lent the garden an otherworldly appearance.