Avoiding the routes used by the airlines, the helicopter approached the airport from the northeast, steadily decreasing its altitude. Still avoiding his brother’s eyes, Onodera kept looking down. He saw the red, blue, gray roofs of close-packed houses. He saw a procession of grade-school children, wearing yellow caps, their figures wrapped in heavy winter clothes. A group of women, mothers apparently, accompanied them, guiding them across intersections. Since it was a clear, bright afternoon, quilts and washing shone white from open windows. A group of housewives in aprons, kerchiefs wound around their heads, seemed to be doing their shopping. And then, as the helicopter dropped still lower, a young mother pointed up at it, saying something to the infant she was carrying. . . . Such were the scenes that flashed by below him, a panorama flattened by the rush of the helicopter. As he watched, a gathering heaviness clogged his chest. I guess I’ve never really understood the weight of things like family and life, he thought. Now the meaning of those words for his brother, with his wife and two children, began to take form in his imagination with a painful intensity. His spirited wife, beginning to grow plump and gritting her teeth as she did her beauty calisthenics . . . the son in his first year of junior high . . . the daughter in the fourth grade, whom his brother, fond of children anyway, so doted upon that she could do no wrong in his eyes. The girl had finished second in a prefecture-wide talent contest, his brother had told him, and he had bought her a grand piano in place of the upright they had had, though his practical wife had opposed it.... Such was the joyful weight of family, of home that pressed heavily upon his brother’s shoulders.
And so it was that families like this, more than twenty million of them, led their family lives upon these islands threatened with oblivion.
This kind of flesh-and-blood human life with its specific gravity—these 20 million households—this was what had to be saved. The great effort of moving to a strange land where an uncertain future waited—could such a thing be carried out?
“Well, what are you thinking about? Let’s get out,” said his brother, tapping him on the shoulder as he unfastened his safety belt. “It’s still early, but should we get something to eat? Do you like blowfish?”
After dinner, Onodera and his brother went to a bar. His brother wanted him to stay at his home overnight, but Onodera said that he must return to Tokyo. His hotel was at the airport, and he had a reservation for the earliest flight the next day.
“Please forgive me for being unable to be at Mother’s funeral tomorrow,” he said to his brother. “I feel terrible about it. I imagine the relatives will have something to say. . . .”
“Don’t let it bother you. Leave things to me,” said his brother, putting down money for the bill and getting up. “Well then, I don’t suppose you’ll be coming back this way for a while?”
“No,” answered Onodera vaguely, oppressed by the thought of taking up again tomorrow that strange work that seemed to have no limits, “I don’t think so. But I’ll keep you up to date.”
His brother stopped at the door of the bar. He took a long, thin package from his breast pocket and handed it to Onodera: “Well, now is when I should give you this,” he said. “It’s a remembrance of Mother.”
Onodera took it and, instead of putting it in his pocket, stood holding it. Something welled up within him, but the words that came out had to do with something quite different from his thoughts.
“Brother, go to Canada. That’s the best thing,” he said once again, his voice ringing with fervor. “Believe me, it’s the best thing.”
“What an odd fellow you are!” said his brother, grinning broadly. He turned on his heel, and as he was starting to walk away, he said over his shoulder: “Instead of minding other people’s business, how about your own? Isn’t it about time you had a family? Single at thirty—you’re going to get shopworn, you know.”
They parted in front of the tavern, his brother taking Shinchihon Street toward Midosuji and he walking in the other direction, toward Sakurabashi. In the distance, the latest headlines were moving in flashing lights along the side of some building or other, the characters reading: “Fuji Hoei Crater Erupts.”
The freezing chill of the tag end of February gripped the streets, and some snow was falling, but the flourishing night life of Shinchihon Street was as vigorous at eight o’clock that evening as he remembered it from two or three years before. With March, the month all debts had to be paid, approaching, the street was jammed with the cars of banquet-goers and expense-account spenders. And there was one party on foot, the men drunkenly singing war songs. The young hostesses, bare shoulders showing for all their winter wrappings, gave cries of distress from time to time at the naughty antics of one of the drunks. One man staggered along by himself, bundled up in an expensive overcoat. A waitress, her sleeves showing that she was wearing more than one kimono, broke into a trot as though to warm herself. At one corner a young girl was selling flowers, her hair wrapped in a scarf. Street singers stood with accordions and guitars slung from their necks. Sushi and octopus stalls were set up along the street, and it was to one of these that the hostesses were leading their drunken patrons. Steam from the noodles cooking within poured out through the door curtains of a Chinese restaurant. As Onodera plodded on, he suddenly recalled, for some reason or other, that the Omizutori would soon be enacted at Nigatsu Temple in Nara. A shudder ran through him that had nothing to do with the cold. Were these annual ceremonies to end?
He felt his awareness dimming even as his fears and passion grew stronger. All the sake he had drunk earlier had had no effect at the time, but now he found himself overwhelmed. What had he done? Standing in the midst of that crowd before —had he cried out loudly? He suddenly feared that he might have done so. Crying out to passers-by, robbed of all control by his drunkenness . . . Worst of all, grabbing a man from the crowd, shaking him by the shoulders and bellowing: “Hurry up, get away!” Was this what he had done?
Caught between the shock of drunken release and the fear that, by force of that shock, he might have done something foolish, Onodera felt desolate. He hung his head as he walked. He felt himself bump into somebody. He dodged to one side and this time collided headlong with somebody else. When he tried to disengage himself, something that looked like a purse slipped from the hand of the other person, its clasp coming loose, and its contents spilling over the street.
“Ah . . .” said Onodera, shaking his heavy head, his features swollen. “Excuse me . . . please.”
When he bent over and tried to pick up the compact, handkerchief, lipstick, and the rest, he tottered forward, almost falling on his face, catching himself then, but this time nearly falling on his back. Finally, as he squatted on the street, he suddenly heard a voice call from above.
“Mr. Onodera . . .”
“Huh?”
Onodera made out a pair of shiny black women’s shoes somewhere below his hanging head. Higher up, he saw as he slowly raised his eyes, was a pair of black velvet slacks. And at that moment a hand gently touched his shoulder as he squatted there.
“How I’ve been looking for you!” said the owner of the hand in a voice suddenly filled with emotion. “I want to talk to you.”
Feeling as though his skull were on the verge of splitting, Onodera finally lifted his head and, with great effort, opened his swollen eyelids.
A woman’s strong-featured face was smiling at him. Her skin was dark and her hair was bound in a headband. It was Reiko Abe.