Even before she opens her eyes, Haruka is met with the familiar smell of pastries, warming in the oven toaster. She rolls over, face and body sinking into the futon. As a child, Haruka would wake in the mornings, and rush out of bed, annoyed that Mama had gone downstairs without waking her. She would run down to find everyone sat around the kitchen table eating milk bread and brioche and drinking tea.
Ohayo!
Everyone would call. And Haruka’s heart would sing.
She goes downstairs but no one is there. Laid out on the table are a selection of fresh pastries left out by Baba. She has warmed up a tuna sweetcorn bun, Haruka’s favourite as a child, and left it wrapped in baking paper next to the sliced milk bread.
Haruka pours herself a cup of English breakfast, then pulls at the soft, plush sides of the bun. Usually, in the mornings, Haruka is too open-mouthed and hungover to eat. She never has the foresight to go to Little Mermaid or Pompadour the day before for fresh pastries. Haruka bites into the creamy centre, takes a sip of the hot, sweet tea. Sunlight streams in from the open shutters, making shapes on the table.
When Haruka was around six or seven, Mama had worked for a short while at the bakery by the station. Haruka loved to walk around the sweet-smelling bakery with a wooden tray and silver tongs, picking out the best buttery, glazed buns, watching the women in little baker hats wrapping and packing the pastries with quick hands. It was a treat whenever Haruka got to choose her pick of the buns. Usually, they took home a little of whatever was leftover. Wonky, smiley faces on apple cream pies and end-of-day anpan. Minute Maid cartons of vitamin juice just past their expiry date.
Haruka sits in her grandfather’s chair, looking out through the glass doors and into the garden. She imagines herself sitting in this chair ten years from now, tending the land every day, waking up on similar light-filled mornings, eating breakfast alone. She doesn’t think she would mind being away in the summer months, away from the unnatural heat of Tokyo. At this time of the year, the city pounds with the kind of heat that leaves you slicked in everyone else’s sweat. Dresses once opaque cling to embarrassing places, and the elderly die in airless rooms. Haruka could survive the summer months quite happily, away from that stifling closeness. But if she gave up the city, she would have to endure the winter months. The winters that had wrecked her mother in a way she could not comprehend as a child. Now, Haruka thought she understood a little of what Mama had felt, and she berated herself for all the times she had whined at her to get out of bed.
These days, the cold had a way of seeping into Haruka’s bones, her brain tissue, until her interior was as bleak as the exterior, grey and fruitless. She was certain she would die if she were alone in the house for even a single winter. With no one to talk to, no local ramen-ya san to revive her with a bowl of steaming noodles, no sweaty bars with sticky shots to keep her from feeling the cold blast after closing. No strangers to lie down next to when the loneliness came ripping through her chest.
Haruka walks to the sliding doors that lead out onto the engawa, the wooden terrace that runs the length of the house. The place where her mother had once covered her in biro one summer’s day. Looping patterns in black ink across her little body, until Baba found them and scolded them, demanding Haruka scrub herself clean immediately.
She pulls aside the glass and steps out onto the warming wood. The air is surprisingly cool and wet, and she can smell the call of the trees. Her mother’s chrysanthemums stand upright and waxy, the buds waiting to bloom. Haruka had often seen Jiji checking the leaves for disease, watering the soil, whispering words of encouragement. Haruka wonders if Jiji will live to see the flowers unfurl this year, if he will make it to the early autumn harvest. The knot in her stomach tightens.
She steps down onto the garden floor, ignoring the yellow plastic slipper shoes that belong to Baba. Haruka wants to feel the earth beneath her feet, the dry, closely packed soil that always had a way of working its dust between her toes.
When Haruka was younger, the natural world had been her solace. She would go on long, meandering adventures through the forests, acquainting herself with all the personalities of the woodland, observing the slow creep towards the changes in season. The receding frost, the buds, the exhale of flowers, the verdant green, followed by the turn of the trees, red, to brown, until the cold snap sat stubborn, heralding in the long snow.
Haruka looks over the vegetables, carefully planted by Baba. There are sweet potatoes, tomatoes, courgettes, pumpkins, daikon with their little purple flower heads nodding in the breeze. Haruka takes a bloom and puts it in her mouth, the taste peppery and honeyed. The clouds above are closing over and she can smell the promise of rain.
It starts slow. Small droplets accenting the quiet, pattering onto her bare, sleep-worn skin, then onto the ground. The raindrops darken the garden floor, then disappear into the earth. Haruka walks further, past the vegetable patches, past the plum tree where fired bones of cat and mother lie, out to the edges of the woods. Under the canopy of beech trees, she hears the quickening of rainfall, big splashes escaping leaves fall onto her arms and face as she tastes the rain, the ancient smell of beginnings and endings and the in between, the growing, the gone, back into the soil. Haruka runs over the twisted legs of trees, deep into the heart of the world. Pulling off her T-shirt, her shorts, until she is in her underwear, naked, belly out, running like the little girl she used to be. Past spicy-smelling fern plants, whose curled, caterpillar shoots she would pick and boil with Mama on spring evenings and devour, dipped in peanut paste.
The trunks of the beeches blacken, slick with rainfall, the living white lichen gleaming bright in the shade. Haruka’s wet hair clings to her face, her calves muddy and cut. She looks up and there is only rainfall and light as she lies down on the pine-moss ground. She feels muscles loosen. Noises, faces, words trapped under ligament and bones hiss out. It leaks out of her eyes and pores and breath. She laughs.
What would Mama say if she could see her now.
(I love you, my child. I love you, I love you.
Hold onto the things that you have forgotten.
Let go of the things that you remember.)