Seven, They Row Back Home

Someone had cleaned her grandmother’s house before Sayo and her mother got there.

The front door was unlocked. The floors had been wiped, the tatami swept, and the rooms smelled of soap. On the family altar there was a jar of fresh white chrysanthemums and a cup of water in front of a photograph of an old woman with her mother’s chin.

“Who did this?” Sayo asked.

“The neighbors.” Her mother put her shoes on the second shelf of the shoe cupboard, in an empty space that was the right size for them. “People here look after each other.”

Sayo had been born in this house and had lived in it until she was three. She remembered nothing about it. On the train she had looked Higure up on her phone: four thousand people on the east shore of a mountain lake, one high school, one police box, one festival in October. In the photos the lake was dark green, with steep wooded hills on every side.

Her mother knelt in front of the altar, put her palms together and bowed her head. She stayed like that for about a minute. In Tokyo, Sayo had never seen her pray.

When she stood up she was smiling. “You’ll like it here,” she said. “Everyone already knows who you are.”

At four o’clock a woman’s voice called “Excuse me!” from the gate.

Sayo was on her knees in the upstairs room with a suitcase open, trying to decide which drawer was hers. The chest had five drawers and all of them were empty and lined with fresh paper. She went down and found her mother already at the door.

There were three women at the gate, all about sixty, in cardigans and aprons. The one in front held a tray covered with a cloth. When her mother came down the step, all three women bowed from the waist and stayed down until her mother told them to please stop.

“Welcome home, Yoshie-san,” the woman with the tray said.

“Tamura-san. You didn’t have to do all this.”

“It was nothing. We were glad to.” Mrs. Tamura lifted the cloth. Under it were rice balls in neat rows, some wrapped in seaweed and some rolled in sesame, and a dish of pickled cucumber. “You’ll be tired. You won’t want to cook.”

Her mother took the tray and thanked them. Then Mrs. Tamura turned to Sayo and took Sayo’s hand in both of hers. Her hands were dry and warm.

“You won’t remember us,” she said. “But we remember you. You were this big.” She held her hand at the height of her own hip. “You used to sit on our step and eat persimmons.”

“I’m sorry,” Sayo said. “I don’t remember.”

“Of course not. Why would you.” Mrs. Tamura was still holding her hand. “Second year, isn’t it? Class B, with Kondō-sensei. He’s a nice young man. You’ll be fine.”

Sayo looked at her mother. The school had said it would tell her which class she was in on the first day.

“Thank you,” her mother said. “We’ll bring the tray back tomorrow.”

The women bowed again, not as low, and went off down the lane together. One of them looked back from the corner. Sayo raised a hand, and the woman bowed to her too.

They ate the rice balls at the low table in the main room, with the doors to the garden open. The garden was small and overgrown, and past the wall Sayo could see the tops of the hills going dark. Her mother ate quickly, looking out at the garden, the way she ate at home on nights when she was thinking about something at work.

“How did she know my class?” Sayo asked.

“Someone at the school, probably.” Her mother picked a sesame seed off her lip. “Everyone knows everyone here. You’ll get used to it.”

Sayo turned her rice ball over. In Tokyo, if a program about the countryside came on, her mother changed the channel. When Sayo was eleven she had asked if they could visit her grandmother for Obon, and her mother had said they were never going back there and sent her to do her homework.

“You said we’d never come back,” Sayo said.

Her mother laughed and reached for the pickles. “I said a lot of things in Tokyo.”

Sayo waited for the rest. Her mother ate a slice of cucumber.

“Why did we leave?” Sayo said. “When I was three.”

“Your father’s work.”

That was what her mother had always said, and Sayo had always believed it. But she knew the story of how her parents met. Her mother had told it to her at the kitchen table in Ōyama, more than once, laughing: a rainy night outside Shinjuku station, and a young salaryman who gave her his umbrella and walked home wet.

“Dad was already in Tokyo,” Sayo said. “You met him in Tokyo. At Shinjuku, in the rain. You told me.”

Her mother stopped chewing. Then she put her chopsticks down across her plate, stood up, and carried the plate into the kitchen, and Sayo heard the tap come on.

“I met him in Nagoya,” her mother said over the water. “He was on a posting there. Then he got a position in Tokyo, and we went to be with him. That’s all. It’s not a mystery.”

Sayo got up and went as far as the kitchen doorway. Her mother stood at the sink with her back to her, rinsing a plate that had nothing on it.

“So you lived here without him,” Sayo said. “For three years.”

“I had you here. My mother was here.” Her mother turned off the tap and shook the water off the plate. “It was complicated, Sayo. Married people’s things are complicated.”

Sayo went back for her own plate and brought it in. Her mother was drying her hands. She had changed her blouse while Sayo was upstairs, to a soft grey one Sayo had not seen before, and she had put on lipstick.

“Are you going out?”

“I’m going to see some old friends,” her mother said. “I won’t be late.”

“It’s our first night,” Sayo said.

“That’s why they want to see me.” Her mother touched Sayo’s cheek with the back of her fingers, which she did when she had already decided something. “Lock the door if it makes you feel better. Nobody here does.”

Sayo locked it after her. Then she went up to the room with the five empty drawers, put her clothes away, and lay on the futon with her phone. She messaged her one friend from her old class, who sent back a picture of the ramen shop near the station with the captionwithout you. Sayo turned off the light.

She woke when the front door opened. Her phone said 0:42. She heard her mother take off her shoes, and then the stairs, and then her door slid open a little way.

“You’re awake.”

“You smell like a temple,” Sayo said.

“Go to sleep,” her mother said, and slid the door shut.

On Thursday of her first week, at lunch, the desks in 2-B were pushed together in groups of four and five, and none of the groups had a space.

Sayo stood by her own desk with her lunch box. A girl from the group nearest the window, Arisa Kudō, who had lent her a pencil on Monday, got up and came over.

“The vending machines are by the gym,” Arisa said. “If you want tea. The one on the left has the cold barley tea. The one on the right is broken but it still takes your money.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s no trouble.” Arisa smiled, went back to her group, and sat down.

Sayo went to the vending machines. She bought cold barley tea from the one on the left and stood by the gym wall with her lunch box under her arm, looking at her phone.

“You’re the Tokyo girl.”

A girl in the same uniform was standing at the corner of the gym. She was small, with her hair cut short and uneven at the back, as if she had done it herself, and she had a melon bread in a plastic bag hanging from one finger.

“I’m Sayo.”

“I know. Mikumo Sayo, 2-B, desk by the door. I’m in 2-B too. Third row from the back.” The girl tipped her head toward the corner. “Come on. We eat round the back.”

Behind the gym there were three concrete steps up to a fire door that was always locked. A boy and a girl were sitting on the top step. The boy was thin and had ink on the side of his hand. The girl had her hair in a tight ponytail and was eating rice with chopsticks out of a plain aluminum box.

“This is Jun,” the short-haired girl said. “That’s Mai. I’m Hotaru.”

Jun said hello. Mai looked at Sayo’s bag, which was a canvas tote with a small leather tag from a shop in Shibuya, and then at Hotaru.

“She’ll want to go back to Tokyo by summer,” Mai said.

“Mai,” Hotaru said.

“What? Look at her bag.”

“It was a present from my father,” Sayo said. “He sent it for my birthday.” She sat down on the bottom step and opened her lunch box. Her mother had made rolled egg and spinach with sesame, and cut a sausage into the shape of an octopus, which she had not done since primary school.

Hotaru sat on the middle step and tore the bag of melon bread open with her teeth. “Is it true the trains come every two minutes?”

“On the Yamanote line,” Sayo said. “Not on ours.”

Jun looked up from his lunch. “Which was yours?”

“Tōbu Tōjō. Out of Ikebukuro.” She waited for him to ask where that was. People from other lines in Tokyo usually did.

“The express doesn’t stop at most of those,” he said. “Which station?”

“Ōyama.”

Jun nodded and went back to his rice. “The express doesn’t stop at Ōyama.”

It didn’t. Sayo had stood on the Ōyama platform since she was small and watched it go through without slowing down. She turned on the step to look at him. He was picking a bit of fish off a bone, with his inky hand curled round the box.

“Have you been?” she said.

“I’ve never been on a train that goes more than one stop,” Jun said. “I just read the timetables.”

Mai snorted into her rice. Hotaru asked whether people in Tokyo really didn’t say good morning to each other, and whether there was a convenience store on every corner, and whether Sayo had ever seen anyone famous. Sayo said people said good morning to people they knew, that there were three convenience stores within five minutes of her old apartment and she had worked at one of them, and that she had once seen a weather presenter buying socks.

“Which one?” Hotaru said.

“The one with the glasses.”

Hotaru made a face, put on a deep, slow voice, and said, “Tomorrow, a front moving in from the west.” Jun laughed so hard he had to put down his chopsticks. Even Mai smiled.

When the bell went, Hotaru stood up and brushed crumbs off her skirt. “Same place tomorrow,” she said, and went inside without waiting for an answer.

Back in the classroom, Arisa leaned across the gap between their desks while everyone was getting out their maths books.

“You probably shouldn’t sit with them,” she said quietly. “Their families...”

She stopped.

“What about their families?” Sayo said.

“It’s just old stuff.” Arisa straightened her books so their edges lined up. “Don’t worry about it. Really. It’s fine.”

Kondō-sensei came in and said good afternoon, and everyone stood up and bowed. When they sat down, Arisa was facing the front. Three rows back, Hotaru was drawing something in the margin of her textbook.

The strap on Sayo’s bag broke on the bridge in the middle of May.

It had been raining since lunch. The bridge crossed the river just before it ran into the lake, and the wind came straight off the water. Sayo had her umbrella in one hand and was trying to keep it from turning inside out, and when the strap came away from the canvas the whole bag dropped onto the wet concrete and tipped over. Her maths book slid out into a puddle. Her pencil case burst open.

She crouched and started grabbing pencils. Someone big crouched beside her.

He was a boy in the same uniform, with his school jacket pulled over his head in place of an umbrella. He had a wide face and very short hair, and he was picking up her pens one at a time.

“Your book,” he said. He lifted it out of the puddle, held it by the spine so the water ran off, and then wiped both covers on the front of his shirt. His shirt was already soaked through. He held it out to her. “Sorry. It’s still wet.”

“It’s fine. Thank you.”

“You’re the...” He stopped to put the pencil case back together.

“The Tokyo girl,” Sayo said.

“...one who sits with Kiriya,” he finished. “I was going to say.”

Sayo felt her face get hot. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.” He looked at the bag and at the strap hanging off it. “I’ll carry it.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s broken,” he said. He picked it up and held it against his side under one arm. “Where do you live?”

“Past the post office. By the lake road.”

“I go that way,” he said.

They walked, with him on the outside nearest the road, and when a car came past fast through a puddle he turned his back so the spray hit him. He was a head taller than her and much wider. His name was Tetsuo Ōba, he told her, and he was in 2-A. He spoke slowly, finishing each sentence before he started the next one, and every few sentences he looked at her face quickly and then looked back at the road.

“Are you in a club?” Sayo said.

“Weightlifting,” he said.

“Is that the one with the big... with the bar.”

“Yes. The bar.” He seemed to think about whether to say more. “My dad coaches it. Last month I did a hundred and ten kilos clean and jerk.”

Sayo tried to picture it. At the convenience store in Tokyo the rice came in ten-kilo sacks, and she had needed both arms to get one onto the bottom shelf.

“Over your head?” she said.

“Over my head.” He shifted her bag to his other arm. “For my weight class it’s good. It’s more than my dad did when he was seventeen. He lifted more later, at the nationals.”

They came to the end of the bridge, where the road turned and ran along the lake wall. Sayo was on the inside now, next to the wall, and she could hear the water slapping against the concrete below it. In the rain the lake was grey, and the far shore was hidden.

“Do you like the lake?” he asked.

“It scares me a little,” Sayo said. “I can’t swim very well.” She had lasted one term in the swimming club in middle school, most of it in the shallow end.

He nodded as if that was a reasonable answer. “It’s very deep in the middle. Nobody swims out there. Even the fishermen don’t go in the water.”

A white pickup came along the lake road behind them and slowed down. It had OHBA CONSTRUCTION painted on the door and a stack of steel pipes in the back. It pulled up beside them and the passenger window came down. The man driving was as wide as Tetsuo, with gray at the sides of his head and a sunburned face.

“You’re Yoshie-san’s girl,” he said to Sayo. He smiled. “Thank you for walking with my son. That’s kind of you.”

“He’s carrying my bag,” Sayo said. “The strap broke.”

“Tetsuo. Give the young lady her bag and get in.”

Tetsuo held out the bag. Sayo took it. His father watched her take it, still smiling, with his arm along the open window, and Tetsuo kept his eyes on the door handle. He opened the passenger door, folded himself into the seat and pulled the door shut, and the pickup drove on along the lake road, past the turn to her street, and out of sight.

On Monday after school Sayo came out of the gate with Hotaru and saw Tetsuo ahead of them on the pavement, with his sports bag over his shoulder.

She raised her hand. He looked at her. Then he stepped off the curb, crossed the road between two parked cars, and walked away along the other side toward the lake.

Sayo put her hand down. He had looked straight at her before he crossed.

“Ōba-kun?” Hotaru said. “Did you want to talk to him?”

“He carried my bag on Friday. In the rain.”

“Huh.” Hotaru watched him go with her head on one side, the way she watched teachers before she did their voices. “Everyone says he’s a bit slow.”

On the bridge he had wiped her maths book dry on his shirt, and finished the sentence she had tried to finish for him. “He talks slowly,” Sayo said.

“That’s what I said.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Sayo said.

Hotaru laughed. “All right, Tokyo,” she said, and bumped Sayo with her shoulder.

He crossed the road every day for the rest of that week. The Tuesday after that, it was sunny, and he was standing at the school gate with his bag at his feet, looking at the ground. When Sayo came out he picked up the bag.

“My dad said not to walk with you,” he said, before she could say anything. “I asked him why. He didn’t say.”

His father had smiled at her from the pickup window and thanked her for walking with his son.

“So you stopped,” she said.

“For a week.” He looked at the road. “Then I thought, if he doesn’t say why, it isn’t a rule. It’s just him wanting it. So I’m walking you home.” He paused. “If that’s all right.”

“Won’t he be angry?”

“He’s at a site in Kawanobe until seven,” Tetsuo said.

It took her a second to understand that this was a joke. By then he had already started walking, and she had to hurry to catch up.

In August the shaved-ice stand by the bus stop on the lake road stayed open until eight, and Sayo and Hotaru bought one each, strawberry and melon, and took them to the lake wall.

The wall was a long concrete step with the water on one side and the road on the other. They sat with their legs hanging over the water side. It was still hot. The cicadas in the hills had not stopped since morning. Out on the lake, a single fishing boat was moving very slowly toward the landing below the shrine hill, and the water around it was flat and shiny.

“No,” Hotaru said. “Again. From the beginning.”

“One, the boat,” Sayo said. “Two, the oar. Three, the white sleeve. Four, the stone—”

“Four is the stone. Five?”

“Five, the deep,” Sayo said.

“No!” Hotaru put her spoon in her mouth and laughed around it. “You always do that. Five is the rope. Six is the deep. You can’t go into the deep before they’ve tied the rope. It doesn’t make sense.”

“None of it makes sense. It’s a song about a boat.”

“It’s a counting song. It’s for little kids. You sing it while you’re skipping.” Hotaru held up her free hand and folded her fingers down one at a time as she sang. Her voice was thin and true, and she sang it to the same tune children used for every counting song, the one that went up on the third note and down on the fifth. “One, the boat. Two, the oar. Three, the white sleeve. Four, the stone. Five, the rope. Six, the deep. Seven, they row back home.”

“Seven, they row back home,” Sayo repeated.

“Good. Now the whole thing.”

Sayo sang it. She got five and six the wrong way round again, and Hotaru laughed so much she nearly dropped her melon ice into the lake, and Sayo laughed too, mostly because Hotaru was laughing. A man walking his dog on the road behind them looked at them and then away.

When they had stopped, Sayo scraped at the red syrup at the bottom of her cup.

“Do you live with your parents?” she asked. “You never say.”

“My grandmother. She does alterations. Hems, zips.” Hotaru pulled her knees up onto the wall. “My parents belong to the shrine.”

“What does that mean?”

“They work up there. They live up there. There are rooms behind the hall.” She pointed with her spoon at the hill across the bay, where a line of red torii gates climbed through the trees to a roof Sayo could only just see. “I see them at New Year. And Obon.”

Sayo looked across the water at the roof. Hotaru lived on that side of the bay. She could have walked up there after school any day she liked.

“That’s all?” she said.

“That’s how it is up there.” Hotaru shrugged and dug her spoon into her ice. “What about yours? Is your mum still going out every night?”

“Every night. She comes back after midnight smelling of incense.” Sayo put her empty cup down on the wall. “She says she’s seeing old friends. She sings when she cooks now. She did that when I was little and then she stopped, in Tokyo. And she laughs on the phone. I don’t know who with.”

Hotaru had stopped eating. She was holding her spoon over the cup, watching Sayo’s face.

“Does that bother you?”

Sayo thought about it. “She’s happier than she was in Tokyo. I should be glad.”

“But.”

“But she won’t tell me where she goes.” Sayo looked at the water. The fishing boat had reached the landing. Two men were pulling it in by a rope. “In Tokyo I had people I ate lunch with. I didn’t see any of them on weekends. I didn’t really want to.” She stopped and started again. “This is the first place I’ve had a real friend. That’s all. I’m glad about that.”

Hotaru looked down into her cup. She took a spoonful of the melon ice and ate it slowly. Then she put the cup down beside Sayo’s.

“Sing it again,” she said. “You still have five and six the wrong way round.”

On the second Friday in September, the last message from her mother was the one she had sent at 7:40 that morning, while Sayo was still brushing her teeth:Eat properly.

Tetsuo walked her as far as the gate. The front door was unlocked, and she thought she must have forgotten to lock it that morning. She made curry, because it was Friday and they always had curry on Fridays, with the cubes from the yellow box and grated apple stirred in at the end, the way her mother did it. She set out two plates and two spoons, and at half past six, when her mother usually came in, she put the rice cooker on keep-warm and sat at the low table with her homework.

At eight she messaged:Curry’s ready. Where are you?

At nine she called. A recorded woman’s voice said the phone was switched off or out of range.

She typed another message, deleted it, and went to the entryway and turned on the light.

Her mother’s slippers were on the step, lined up side by side. Her black work shoes were in the cupboard, on the second shelf. Her white sneakers were gone. On the hook by the door, where they had hung the keys on the first day, both sets of keys were hanging: Sayo’s, with the cat charm, and her mother’s, with the little brass bell from a shrine in Tokyo.

Sayo went down the corridor to her mother’s room and slid the door open. The futon was folded in the corner. On top of it were the navy skirt and white blouse her mother wore to the town office, folded, and her work bag. The hook where she hung her small cloth shoulder bag on weekends was empty.

She went back to the main room and called Hotaru. It was a quarter to eleven.

Hotaru answered at once. “Sayo?”

“My mum’s not home. Her phone’s off. She left her keys.”

“I’m coming,” Hotaru said, and hung up.

Hotaru lived on the shrine side of the bay, fifteen minutes away by bicycle. Ten minutes later Sayo heard a bicycle bell at the gate. When she opened the door Hotaru was there in jeans and a dark jacket, with her hair tied back and her bicycle light still on.

“Did you call anyone else?” Hotaru said.

Her father was in Fuchū, and it was nearly eleven. He would only ask whether she wanted to come to Tokyo.

“Who would I call?” she said. “Should I call the police?”

“The police box is shut at night. Noda-san lives in the back, but if you wake him up for this he’ll just tell you to wait till morning.” Hotaru took off her shoes and came in. On the way past she looked at the two sets of keys on the hook. “We’ll go first thing. I’ll come with you.”

They sat at the low table. Sayo called her mother’s phone again and got the same recorded voice, and put the phone face down on the table. Hotaru looked at the two plates and the rice cooker with its orange light on. “Have you eaten?”

“I was waiting.”

Hotaru got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with rice and curry on both plates. She put one in front of Sayo and sat down with the other. “Eat,” she said.

Sayo ate some of it. It was good. She had put in too much apple. Hotaru ate all of hers and then sat with Sayo while she tried the number of her mother’s office, which rang with no answer. Around two Sayo lay down on the tatami with a cushion under her head, and Hotaru turned off the big light and left the small one on.

At some point Sayo woke and saw Hotaru in the kitchen doorway with the second plate, covering it with plastic wrap.

“For when she gets back,” Hotaru said, and put it in the fridge.