Okayama City’s Minami-ku, where they lived, was an area that had rice paddies spread all across the plains in the past. The irrigation channels had been made to supply the fields with the water necessary to grow the rice, and now, with most of the rice paddies turned into housing, these water channels remained, stretching over a wide area.
Emiko usually walked along the highways to be safe, but as long as you avoided the times where students and workers were walking them, the back streets weren’t all that dangerous. It felt nice, seeing the water.
It had been a long time since she’d last admired the trees in gardens as she walked. Vivid winter flowers decorated each of the houses.
“Are those pansies? But they’re a bit small. Violas maybe?”
As she stopped and looked at the flowers planted together in the gardens, a little bird flew right before her eyes. It was a Japanese white-eye, who stopped at the camellias deeper inside the garden. The bird stuck its beak inside the flower, drinking its nectar. Emiko smiled as she watched it, only for a bulbul to come and chase it off in an instant. In nature, it seemed that physical size had a direct link to strength.
“Poor dear. Life must really be hard for little birds.”
Restarting her walk, she found another bulbul in a different house’s garden. It was hanging from a mandarin tree, opening a hole in a fruit’s skin to eat the flesh inside.
“Oh, it’s eating a mandarin. But I guess there must be less for them to eat when it gets cold.”
Emiko watched it eat for a while until it flew away. But then she was surprised when another white-eye came out, as if it had been lying in wait, sticking its beak into the hole in the mandarin and beginning to eat while keeping a careful eye on its surroundings. Could it have been waiting for another bird to put a hole in it? It seemed that the white-eye was putting the bulbul to work for it.
“Nature is amazing. I always head straight to the supermarket, but…”
She’d thought that she knew almost everything about the area, having lived there for so long, but she hadn’t known anything about these animals living so close to her.
“Oh my, here?”
Between the tiles on a house’s outer wall, Emiko found a chrysalis about the size of her pinkie fingertip. When she knelt down to look at it, there were even more underneath. They must have been keeping themselves safe from the wind and rain in that little gap. She felt as if she’d found out where all of the butterflies she’d see appearing out of nowhere in spring came from, and things became more enjoyable, little by little.
“This must be all thanks to that book from Tokyo.”
Once she started thinking about how all of these little beings lived their lives, she realized that her own life was just a tiny part of the activities cycling on Earth. Emiko was astonished by how Sayaka noted all of these things that she herself hadn’t thought of in decades. When she considered that, unlike her generation who had worked themselves so hard trying to have even a bit of a better life, people nowadays paid such careful attention to feel and think about so many things as they lived. It was so novel.
Back when Mayumi was a child, she’d been the sort to always notice the small things. Emiko had forced her own loose views on her, thinking that life would be hard for her like that, saying that she didn’t have to think about those things and that everything was fine. She had pressured her to act cheerfully. Could she not have raised her in another way, respecting her sensitivity? Her intent had been to empower her to live and grow strong, but how had Mayumi as a child taken her mother telling her not to sweat the small stuff?
“Ishiie-san?”
Hearing someone call out to her, Emiko looked up. The head of the engineering firm two houses down was looking at her with worry.
“You okay there?”
“Hmm? Ah, yes, I just found something interesting here.”
“Something interesting? Here?” he repeated, confused.
When he said that he was worried she wasn’t feeling well, seeing her crouched down to the side of the road, a smile spread across her face.
“I had just been looking at the flowers and thinking about how pretty they were, only to see bulbuls and white-eyes flying about.”
“Oh, I see. My mistake.”
She told him that she was exploring the neighborhood today, instead of walking along the highway like she usually did, and he let her know that the house next door to him had bell tree dahlias blooming.
It made her fed up with herself, wondering where in the world she ever looked while she was walking. She’d lived here for so long, and yet there were so many things she’d never stopped to look at.
Restarting her walk, Emiko passed by a house that was getting demolished. She tried to remember what sort of house had stood there before. With the water canals left from ages past, their town was peaceful. It used to have more rice paddies, but most of them had transformed into housing before she even realized it. As the people of the area grew older, fewer and fewer people would live here. There were still new homes being built at the moment, but it wasn’t as if those properties could be turned back into rice paddies just because they didn’t need the land anymore, and there was no one to manage them either.