The room was ideally suited to playing the harmonica. There were no noises from outside to disturb us, no telephone ringing, no one to come calling, and the sound spread to every corner. We could shut ourselves in for as long as we liked—the old man was sleeping downstairs in the tatami-mat room. Closed off as it was, the hidden room could become stuffy, and it was sometimes difficult to breathe by the end of a long tune, but then we would stand together near the ventilator fan and take deep breaths.
When we had played every song we knew, we set the harmonica back on the bed and turned to the last of the objects that had been hidden in the statues. R opened the plastic bag and emptied the white pills into his hands. The bag was yellowed and had turned brittle with age, but the contents seemed unharmed.
“Is it medicine?” I asked.
“No, it’s called ramune. I’m impressed that your mother tried to preserve something as ordinary as this.” The tablets were round and dusted with white powder, with a slight depression in the middle. He picked up one of them with great tenderness and slipped it suddenly between my lips. Startled, I covered my mouth with my hands, as R grinned.
It was so sweet it burned, but as soon as I moved my tongue to try to taste it, it dissolved instantly.
“Did you like it?” he asked. The flavor had been so sudden and powerful that I merely nodded, unwilling to open my mouth and risk losing the lingering sweetness. “It’s a lemon-flavored candy. When we were children, all the stores sold them and there were countless ramune on the island, but now there are only these few left here.”
R popped one of the remaining tablets in his mouth. No doubt it dissolved as quickly as mine had, but he continued to sit quietly and stare at the few left in his hand. I’m not sure how long we sat there in silence.
“Let’s share the rest with the old man,” he said at last, returning the remaining pills to the plastic bag.
That evening R told me the stories associated with each of the three objects. The ferry ticket, the harmonica, and the ramune were lined up neatly over the bed. When we lay down, I had the feeling that the bed was even narrower than it had been when we were sitting on it. It seemed to gather up around us without leaving any extra space.
It must have been getting very late, but I had no way of knowing since the clock on the shelf was hidden by R’s shoulder. The old man had replaced the latch on the trapdoor, and it glittered in the lamplight. The ventilator fan continued to turn.
“There was a pasture on the northern island,” he began. “A place at the base of the mountains where they raised cows and horses and sheep. For a fee, you could take a ride on a pony. One of the young women who worked on the farm would hold the bridle and lead you once around the pasture—but it was all over in a few minutes. I would call out to the girl to slow down and make the ride last, and just once she actually took me for a second lap. There was a cheese factory in the middle of the pasture. I used to feel sick whenever I went near the place. As soon as I saw all that cheese churning in that huge tank, I’d started imagining what it would be like if I fell in. Still, the pasture was a wonderful place and I would play there all day long, breaking off only to get back to the dock by five o’clock. The ferry made just four round-trips a day, but the dock on the northern island was as lively as a market. They sold ice cream, popcorn, baked apples, candy… and ramune. Anything a kid could want. The sea would glow in the evening just as we were sailing back from the north, and as the sun dipped toward the horizon, it would seem so close you could reach out and grab it in your hand. Compared to the northern island, ours always seemed a little quiet and lonely, with the mountain shrouded in haze. I kept my ferry ticket in the back pocket of my pants, carefully folded to make sure I didn’t lose it, but it always ended up crumpled and crushed from the pony ride.”
R talked on without a pause. It was wonderful to hear him, as though he were reading me a thrilling fairy tale or playing delightful music. From time to time I would raise my head to glance over at the three objects lined up on the bookshelf, but they seemed to be dozing—so very peacefully that it was almost impossible to believe that they were the source of all these stories. I rested my cheek once more on R’s chest.
He told me he had once played the harmonica at a school concert when the conductor’s baton snapped in two and everyone burst out laughing, interrupting the performance. How his grandmother used to produce ramune from the pocket of her apron and feed them to him one after the other, until one day they made him sick. How his mother scolded her. How his grandmother had died from a disease that wastes away the muscles of the heart.
Listening to stories about things that had disappeared usually tended to overexcite my nerves. But there was nothing disagreeable about these stories. And though I wouldn’t have been able to recount much of what R told me, it didn’t bother me in the least. Much as I had done as a girl during those secret times with my mother in the basement studio, I was content now to simply listen innocently to everything he said—like a child with the hem of her skirt spread, waiting to receive God’s chocolate from heaven.
Chapter 23
The next Sunday, I decided to visit my mother’s cabin with the old man, since R had said she might have left more sculptures there that concealed secrets.
I called the place a cabin, but it was really nothing more than a rough hut that she had used in the summer as a place to sculpt. No one had set foot there since her death, and I suspected it would be in ruins after the earthquake.
The old man and I filled our backpacks with canteens of water and our lunch and left the house early in the morning. We took the train to the base of the mountain and then walked an hour along the road by the river, reaching the cabin just before noon.
“This is terrible,” said the old man, resting his backpack on the snow and wiping his face with a towel he had tucked in his belt.
“Worse than I’d imagined,” I added, sitting down on a rock by the river and taking a sip from my canteen.
The cabin was barely recognizable as a building. It was difficult to tell where the door had been, and it looked as though the whole thing would come crashing down at the slightest touch. The roof was caved in from the weight of the snow, the chimney had broken off, and brightly colored mushrooms were growing from the moss that covered the walls.
We decided to eat our lunch and rest for a while before setting to work. But not for too long. We didn’t want to get home late, since the Memory Police tended to take note of anyone lingering outdoors after dark.
We pulled away the boards of what must have been the entrance and made our way inside. The floor was littered with nails and knives and chisels and carving tools and all kinds of sharp objects, and since our path was blocked by a fallen beam, we made our way cautiously, shining a flashlight as we went.
“What’s that?” I called, my voice rising nearly to a shriek. I had spotted a small lump under the worktable—something that seemed different from the rest of the rubble around us, soft and damp, almost slimy, but with spiky bits sticking out here and there, a shape that was melting in on itself… and giving off a terrible stench. The old man directed the flashlight toward it.