There was the sound of the channel changing.
That’s not possible. There’s nothing civilized, like a working TV, in my house. I probably just misheard. Thinking that, Sayuri hung her jacket on the wall of her house, which was a very old and worn mountain cabin. Age caused the nails to stick out from the wooden walls, and she hung her jacket on one of these. It’d be nice if she had a hanger, but every time she went down into town to buy one, she ends up forgetting.
The nail works just fine, though, so that’s okay. Sayuri was a fundamentally lethargic woman.
She tried to beat off the dirt and mud that was caked all over the work clothes that were hung on the wall. The filth wouldn’t come off, but she managed to get the leaves and spider webs that were stuck on. Well, that’s good enough for now. She retrieved a cigarette pack and lighter from the pockets of her work clothes.
This season is swelteringly hot. Midsummer heat filled the cabin, causing beads of sweat to appear on Sayuri’s skin. She was wearing just the shirt that was under her fatigues, and the pants that came as a set with those fatigues. If she took off any more layers she’d be in her underwear. A part of her actually wanted to do so, but it wouldn’t do to expose such a slovenly side of herself in front of her daughter.
Wiping off sweat with the back of her hand, Sayuri looked over at the corner of the room. “What are you doing?” she asked, not expecting an answer.
Her daughter sat on the wooden floor, which didn’t even have any carpeting laid out on it. She was Sayuri’s daughter by blood, and they looked similar in many respects, including their faces. But to Sayuri, her daughter was a hard to understand being.
What the heck is going on in her head? she thought, while her daughter spaced out in front of the broken TV that sat in the corner of the room. There was no answer. Sayuri wasn’t really expecting one, though, so she just lit a cigarette and proceeded to smoke it.
Blowing out a puff of smoke, she started thinking about what to do for dinner.
Halfway up the mountain that surrounded a town on all sides, Sayuri and her daughter lived together in a cabin. This entire area of the mountain belonged to the town’s richest family, the Kagamimoris, and the cabin was built for those who managed the area.
However, it was not originally meant for living in. Normally, the manager would have a house in town and only come up to use the cabin as a base of operations when he had business in the mountain. Sayuri was renting the cabin by paying the actual manager a small sum of money, and taking on various tasks normally carried out by said person.
By taking years to repair an old field that had been used by a family of farmers, she was eventually able to grow vegetables for the two of them to eat. Currently, she had a fair amount of vegetables stocked up, so she could just buy whatever she was missing from town. Sayuri would have no trouble surviving.
An entire day could pass with Sayuri just eating vegetables, tilling the field, and taking care of other errands. Those days would pass, one after the other, and eventually become a year. This would probably continue until she died.
Sayuri lived like a hermit, but she was satisfied with this lifestyle. For someone who’d already died once, it was fitting to live out their remaining years this way.
The only problem was her daughter, whom she couldn’t possibly abandon in the middle of the mountain. At the bare minimum, she made sure to provide her daughter with meals, and to take care of her in other ways. That being said, doing so was not exactly Sayuri’s strong point.
Sayuri was living in seclusion from the rest of the world for a variety of reasons, so she couldn’t really remember what parents were supposed to be like. Also, she’d had almost no contact with civilization in her youth, so she had no friends or relatives to rely on. It would be great if someone would adopt her daughter, but that also couldn’t happen due to some difficult circumstances— also, the girl’s father had already made another family. He probably wanted to hurry and forget both Sayuri and her daughter.
Her daughter wasn’t really a difficult child, and Sayuri ended up taking advantage of this. Basically she left her daughter on her own, although she would worry and nurse her back to health when she was sick, which was a rare occasion. That was also a form of love— Sayuri didn’t hate her daughter, she just didn’t have much interest.
The girl did come out of her own belly. But for some reason, the girl just didn’t feel like her daughter, despite the time they’d spent living together, eating together, and even sleeping together.
“Sorry, that really was broken, wasn’t it?” Finishing up the cigarette, Sayuri smothered the butt in the pot she used as an ashtray and put it out. There was a pottery studio on a nearby mountain that often threw out their failed products. Sayuri liked to bring home their discards to use around the house.
Also, sometimes someone would illegally dump their garbage nearby, too— the TV that her daughter was so enthusiastically staring at had been one of those things. The cabin had electricity, but nothing happened when you plugged the TV in, so it was probably broken. Her daughter had made a rare and passionate request for a TV, so she’d picked one up, but... Since it was thrown out, there’s no way it would work, now that she thought about it. Sayuri regretted having picked up something so useless.
“I can go ask the electronics store to fix it the next time I go to town, or I could just buy a new one, if it’s cheap enough. Which would you prefer?” Sayuri didn’t have any interest in TV; one could even go so far as to say she found it unpleasant. But it was rare for her daughter to pester her for something, and if possible, she’d like to give one to her as a present.
Even though she was— at least on paper— her mother by blood, up until now she hadn’t been able to give her daughter anything.
In the past, she’d felt like throwing up just from looking at the screen. But the smell of earth had sunk into her while she had been working on the farm, calming her mind and laying to rest her past weaknesses. Right now, she should be able to watch TV normally without feeling anything, as something that had nothing to do with her.
“Well, lugging that thing into town would be a pain, though,” Sayuri mused. “Since I picked it up after it was already thrown away, it’s probably useless to try and get it repaired, anyway. Maybe I should just throw that thing away again, and buy something better?”