My grandmother came to see me every day after that.
The hospital was pretty far from home, I thought, but she would laugh lightly and tell me it wasn’t much trouble since she drove herself. Here was a grandmother you could count on. Although—stuff at home was probably getting neglected at least a little bit, and she must have been worried about my grandfather, Ryohei, who’d been getting a little senile lately…I felt terrible regardless. Thank you, Grandma—I couldn’t help expressing my deep gratitude in my heart.
The effects of the pleural drainage were going according to schedule, and on my third day in the hospital, the pain had pretty much subsided, too. The problem that arose then was sheer boredom. I still couldn’t even walk around on my own.
For one thing, my body remained linked to a machine via a tube. Additionally, I had an IV drip twice a day. It was pretty tough even getting to the bathroom, and of course, I hadn’t been able to shower for a couple of days.
My room was a small one-person deal that included a little coin-operated TV, but even if I turned it on, they only air boring shows in the middle of the day. Should I give up and watch anyway, or read one of the books that my grandmother brought for me, or listen to music…? This was how I passed the time that no one would have called relaxing: in idleness.
On my sixth day in the hospital—April 25—a Saturday afternoon, Reiko came to my room.
“I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to come see you, Koichi.”
She told me apologetically that she got home from work late during the week no matter how hard she tried, but of course, I understood that perfectly well. If I complained about it, I’d have been the one who needed to apologize.
With as much cheerfulness as I could manage, I told her about my condition and how I was recovering. About the lead physician’s prediction, which I’d received that morning, that if everything went well I’d be discharged early next week, and at the latest definitely sometime that month…
“Then you should be able to go to school after Golden Week, huh?”
Reiko turned her eyes to the window. I was sitting up in my bed, so my gaze naturally followed hers.
“This hospital is built on a hill near a mountain called Yumigaoka. At the eastern edge of town…well, look. What you see over there is a bunch of mountains to the west. There’s also a place called Asamidai over there.”
“What weird names.”
“Yumigaoka, because you can get a gorgeous view of the setting sun, and Asami, because you get a gorgeous view of the sunrise. I guess that’s where the names come from.”
“But the name of the town is Yomiyama, right?”
“There’s a mountain that’s actually called Yomiyama north of here. The town is in a basin, but the entire thing consists of gentle hills running south to north.”
I didn’t have a complete grasp of the fundamental geography of the town yet. Maybe Reiko had noticed, which had prompted her simplistic tour. Maybe she thought, seeing the view out the window, that this presented the perfect opportunity.
“Do you see that over there?” Reiko raised her right hand and pointed. “That green bit running all the way north to south. That’s the Yomiyama River that runs through the middle of town. On the other side of it, do you see? That’s the field at school. Can you make it out?”
“Oh…uh…”
I lifted the top half of my body off the bed and squinted in the direction Reiko was pointing.
“Oh, that wide, white spot?”
“That’s it.” Reiko turned back around toward me and smiled faintly. “That’s Yomiyama North Middle. The school you’ll be attending.”
“Interesting.”
“You went to a private school in Tokyo, right? One of those escalator schools with integrated middle and high schools?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You might feel a little out of place at public school…But you’ll do fine, won’t you?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“You’re going to be behind on the work for April, what with this sudden hospitalization.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about that. At my last school, we were already halfway done with the stuff for third-year middle school.”
“Well, well, impressive. Studying’s going to be such a breeze for you.”
“I don’t know if it’ll be that easy.”
“I suppose I’m obligated to tell you not to get cocky.”
“Did you go to that school, Reiko?”
“Yup. I graduated fourteen years ago, I think it was. Now you’re going to figure out how old I am.”
“So then my mom went there, too?”
“Yup. Ritsuko came out of North Middle, too. There’s also a school called Yomiyama South Middle in town, which is South Middle. Some people also call North Middle ‘North Yomi.’”
“North Yomi? Oh, I get it.”
Reiko, dressed in a black pantsuit and beige blouse, had a slender build and a fair-skinned, slender face. Her stick-straight hair grew past her shoulders.
With that haircut, her features seemed somehow to resemble my mother’s, whose face I knew only from photographs. When that realization struck me, every atom of my heart began to ache helplessly, as if infused with a flush of fever. I said that I’m bad at talking to Reiko face-to-face like this because I get nervous; that’s eight-tenths of the problem, and this was probably the root.
“I guess if you’re not worried about the schoolwork, then the problem really will be the difference in how they do things at public school. You’ll probably be confused about some things at first, but I’m sure you’ll get used to it soon enough.”
And then Reiko told me that once I came home from the hospital and could start attending school, she would tell me “the North Yomi fundamentals.” Then her eyes fell to the paperbacks on my bedside table.
“Huh. I didn’t know you liked these kinds of books, Koichi.”
“Oh, uh…I guess.”
There were four books in all. They were both long books broken into two volumes: ’Salem’s Lot and Pet Sematary by Stephen King. I’d finished the first volume of Pet Sematary right before Reiko came by.
“In that case, I’ll tell you about the ‘Seven Mysteries’ of North Yomi, too.”
“‘The Seven Mysteries’?”
“Every school has them, but North Yomi’s are a little bit different. It’s gone up to more than eight since I went there. You’re not interested?”
Honestly, I didn’t really care about real-life ghost stories like that, but…
“No, you’ve definitely got to tell me,” I replied, crafting a smile for her.