The young man burst out laughing.
‘Gran, you’re merciless to your granddaughter! And here was I thinking grannies were supposed to spoil their grandchildren.’
‘You may find that I deviate somewhat from conventional standards.’
Tokié’s response seemed to send the young man into another fit of laughter. At which point the young woman tugged on his sleeve.
‘Masashi-kun … sorry, but I don’t feel well.’
At some point the young woman’s face had gone pale.
‘Ah, it must be the perfume making you sick. Should we move to another car?’
The young man put his arm around the young woman but then he turned back to Tokié.
‘Excuse us – she gets motion sickness. And those women’s perfume was awfully strong. We’re going to move to the next car.’
The housewives’ perfume still wafted, if only faintly, around the seats they had vacated but it did seem to have made the young woman ill.
‘No need to apologize, thank you again for your support despite your queasiness.’
The young woman raised her pale face. ‘No. To put it bluntly, I found those people terribly rude. But I was the meanie. What was I thinking, telling them they didn’t know how to apply perfume? I think I wanted to humiliate them.’
‘You’ve got guts,’ Tokié said. She decided against telling the young woman that she reminded Tokié of herself at that age.
‘Bye then.’
The young man gave a slight bow and kept his arm around the young woman as they walked towards the rear of the carriage.
The young man’s name was Masashi-kun.
It’s a pity that I didn’t ask the young woman her name.
Takarazuka-Minamiguchi Station
Masashi said goodbye to the rather unusual granny and her granddaughter and moved towards the nearby connecting door that led to the rear car of the train.
‘Are you all right, Yuki? Do you want to get off at Takarazuka and rest a bit?’
She shook her head as he helped her along.
‘No, now that the stink of perfume is gone, I’m fine.’
‘Do you want to sit?’
There were seats available here and there, although not two vacant seats next to each other.
‘I’m fine, it’s just one more station. I can stand with you.’
They had an unspoken rule for when the train passed over the iron bridge that spans the Mukogawa River – it didn’t matter whether they stood by a door or not, but they always faced the side of the train that looked out over the river.
The vast sandbank that was visible from there had gone back to being just a sandbank.
The first time they had ever talked to each other, there had been a giant kanji character assembled in stonework on that sandbank.
At the time, Masashi didn’t expect anything to come of their conversation on the train about the kanji character Yuki had spotted on the sandbank – the one that made her thirsty for a draught beer in a glass mug – and that most people paid no attention to. Masashi had seen Yuki, whose name he didn’t yet know, as a rival and assumed that she hadn’t noticed him. She was constantly snatching interesting books from under his nose at the library. Much to his chagrin, because she was definitely his type.
That day, as she was getting off the train at Sakasegawa Station she had said to him:
The next time we meet, we should have a drink.
The central library. You go there a lot, don’t you? So then, next time we meet.
So it turned out that he wasn’t the only one to have noticed. She had locked onto him as well. And from the moment he became aware of this, he was a goner.
He leapt off the train to rush after her and to invite her, breathlessly, to go for a drink now rather than later. Luckily she was free and happily took him up on the offer. They had also exchanged phone numbers – this all progressed so easily that it made him doubt his own luck.
The start of their relationship was perhaps even more mannerly than that of a couple of high-school kids. On Saturdays when they could both go to the library, they would meet up at Sakasegawa Station. One way they differed from high-school students, though, is that sometimes on their way back they would have a meal together that included alcohol.
Whenever they went to the library, the two of them always gazed down at the sandbank from the train.
生
It’s still there.
Yeah, there it is.
It appeared that someone was maintaining the kanji character: in summer, the grasses that would have overgrown it on the sandbank were weeded; sometimes if the stones had eroded and its outline had started to blur, it would be reassembled and fixed back up. It remained there, inconspicuously, for quite a long time.
But, after a typhoon and continuous rainy spells, the torrents caused the river to rise and cover the kanji character, so that now it again looked like any nondescript sandbank.
It’s gone now.
Yeah, totally gone.
It sure held on, didn’t it?
It lasted as long as it could.
It might have been around the time of this exchange that they had started spending time at one another’s apartments.
Library dates, sometimes followed by a meal.
It was only because of these occasional meals together that he came to realize that she enjoyed her drink. Not a huge surprise, since in their initial exchange she had talked about associating the kanji character on the sandbank with the word ‘nama’ and then craving a draught beer. And once Masashi had mustered up the courage to invite her out, the place where they ended up going was her favourite izakaya. The fact that a young woman had a local bar where she felt comfortable drinking alone was proof that she was a pretty serious drinker.
Masashi was no lightweight, but he did fear that he might lose if they ever played a genuine drinking game.
What’s more, it turned out she was the type who seemed to show no effects from alcohol. No matter how much she had to drink, on their way home she’d be straight as an arrow. There were never any unguarded moments – so their mannerly dates always stayed mannerly.
What finally caused her ironclad defences to crumble was the summer gifting season.
The office where Masashi worked had a tradition: they would collect up all the non-perishable gifts that were delivered to the company in the lead-up to the holiday and when the day of ochugen – July 15th – came around, there would be a lottery among all the employees to give away the goods. It was a decent-sized company that received quite a lot of gifts, which meant there were favourable odds of winning something.
Then, say, if a teetotaller won a case of beer, or conversely a drinker won fruit juice or higashi confectionery, the employees were free to do a ‘prize exchange’ after the draw.
This year, as chance would have it, Masashi won the prize most coveted by the drinking connoisseurs in the office. It was a magnum of saké from the famed Keigetsu brewery in Tosa, on the island of Shikoku. This was from a well-known client who each year sent fine saké from various regions of Japan.
Any other year, Masashi would likely have been glad to entertain offers for an exchange. He didn’t know much about saké nor did he have much occasion to drink it since he lived alone – he preferred beer, which he could drink without ceremony.
But this year, he had to fend off his superiors and his boss, who tried to persuade him to trade it. They were sure he wouldn’t be able to finish it by himself, but he convinced them that he wanted to develop a taste for saké and that it wouldn’t go to waste. In the end, he managed to bring home the sought-after prize.
The truth was he had no particular affinity for Japanese saké, not even this celebrated variety, and he rarely drank alone.