As Tatsuo put his lips to the water faucet in the schoolyard, he heard a voice above him say, “Ah!” and looked up to see a girl from his class. She was smirking down at him.
“Eiko just drank from that faucet. Won’t she be happy!”
“Shut up. Don’t be stupid.”
He ran off across the schoolyard, his mouth and chin still wet. The girl’s words had taken him by surprise, and he knew he was blushing.
Any number of times during the next class Tatsuo glanced over at Eiko, who was sitting by the window. When class ended, he followed her out into the hallway and called to her.
“Old Ginzō says he’s going to take me to see the fireflies. Do you want to come with us?”
“The fireflies? Like he used to tell us about?”
She hadn’t forgotten.
“Yeah. Ginzō said they’re sure to come this year. He says if we miss them this time, there’s no telling when we’ll be able to see them again.”
Eiko had always been a quiet sort. She stood there thinking it over for some moments, her eyes fixed on Tatsuo’s shoulder. This was the first time they’d spoken together, just the two of them, since they’d entered middle school.
“When are you going?”
“I don’t know yet. He says we should go right when they start planting the rice.”
“I’ll ask my mother.”
“She’s bound to say no.”
“No she won’t.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Though Eiko was not very tall compared to other girls her age, there had been a time when Tatsuo was even shorter than she. Now, however, standing face to face, he realized that he had overtaken her and was quite a bit taller.
He had a sudden urge to say something about Sekine. His friend, gone forever now, had been as taken with Eiko as he was, if not even more so.
“Sekine had a photograph of you,” he said. He was sure she wouldn’t think ill of Sekine for it.
“A photograph?”
“Yeah. He stole it from your desk.”
Eiko, apparently recalling the lost photo, lifted her eyebrows and gazed off into the distance. Tatsuo thought of the last time he’d seen Sekine, pedaling down the road in the midday sun, and suddenly felt he had nothing to hide from her.
“I have it now. The photograph. Sekine gave it to me. He said it was a token of our friendship.”
A few of their classmates appeared at the end of the hall, coming toward them. Tatsuo hurriedly said, “So, you do want to go, right?”
“Yes. I’ll talk to my mother.”
Tatsuo ran back to the classroom. Someone spoke to him, and when he replied his voice was shrill with excitement.
Shortly after the next class began, the school custodian came into the room and said something to the teacher. The teacher walked to Tatsuo’s desk and whispered, “Your mother’s waiting for you by the gate. You’re excused.”
Tatsuo’s first thought was that his father was dying. All the students’ eyes were on him as he left the room. Eiko’s face was a pale blur next to the window.
The trees around the schoolyard were covered with new leaves that quivered beneath the cloudy sky. All that could be seen of Mount Tateyama was its gray peak, scarcely distinguishable from the clouds through which it protruded.
Chiyo ran up to Tatsuo as soon as she spotted him. “Your father’s taken a turn for the worse,” she said. “The doctor says he probably only has another day or two.”
They walked to Nishi-cho and waited for the streetcar. The movie theater posters and department store windows stood out as especially bright and vivid on the busy, colorful shopping street.
Tatsuo wished that instead of going to the hospital he could walk along that street endlessly, secretly tailing people he’d never seen before, standing in bookstores reading and avoiding the shopkeeper’s eyes, or sitting in a nearly empty movie theater, concentrating on the film and chewing dried cuttlefish. It occurred to him now, for some reason, and for the first time ever, that to spend his time that way would be all it would take to make him happy.
After they’d boarded the streetcar, the words Father’s going to die ran through his mind to the regular rhythm of the wheels clacking over the tracks. And then he remembered Ginzō’s words—Not till his son’s grown up and he can die happy—and the photo of his bare-chested, eighteen-year-old father sitting beneath a cherry tree with his arm around his friend’s shoulder, squinting into the sun. The words and the picture were intertwined, forming a single, indivisible memory.
The streetcar picked up speed. Tatsuo held on to a hand strap and looked out the window at the quiet streets as he lurched from side to side. Death, happiness... An intense but nebulous sort of anxiety concerning those two concepts welled up inside him, and he had to suppress an urge to throw back his head and scream.
Through a small break in the clouds, early-May sunlight illuminated the roofs of houses. Sekine Keita’s drooping eyes and large, round nose kept flashing through his mind. He envisioned Sekine lying face-down in the deep, limpid water of the spillway, his entire body wreathed in tangles of water plants—envisioned it so clearly that it was as if he were actually seeing it. Interwoven with the violent jolt and sway of the streetcar were the delicate colored pattern on the wings of a butterfly and the fragrance of Eiko, who only moments before had stood peering at Tatsuo’s shoulder with faint beads of perspiration on her forehead.
“When you were born...” Chiyo’s cheeks, normally rather pale, were for some reason bright with color today. “When you were born, your father put on his glasses and studied your palms and the soles of your feet. He kept staring at them, saying you had the same lines on your palms as he did, and he said it was hard to believe that those tiny feet would be walking around in leather shoes one day. And he wondered if he’d still be alive then. Fifty-two years old when he had his first child. He doted on you so much that people teased him about it, saying he was going to spoil you rotten.”
“He never let me beat him at sumo,” Tatsuo said, resting his head on the arm that held the strap. Though he remembered with fondness the day he and his father had drawn a circle on the ground and wrestled inside it again and again, he couldn’t help thinking it strange that his father had never let him win.
At the entrance to the hospital, a middle-aged nurse they’d come to know quite well was waiting for them. She said that Shigetatsu had begun snoring heavily at dawn and hadn’t opened his eyes since.
The nurse hurried ahead of them to the room. She took hold of the comatose Shigetatsu’s shoulders and shook him gently.
“I’ve tried to wake him like this several times,” she said, “but he won’t come to.” She shook him again and spoke loudly in his ear. “Mizushima-san! Mizushima-san, your wife is here. Your wife and son are here.”
Shigetatsu, who seemingly overnight had grown astonishingly thin, opened his eyes a crack. The nurse said, “Oh!” and looked at Chiyo and Tatsuo. And now Shigetatsu screwed up his face and began to weep. No sound, no tears, yet he was weeping uncontrollably.
Chiyo clasped his hand in hers and leaned over so that her ear was next to his lips. She thought she’d heard him mutter something through the silent sobs. This time she was quite sure she heard him say, “Haru...” Then he slipped back into unconsciousness. A wrenching anguish swept through every fiber of Chiyo’s being, and tears began to spill from her eyes. She clung to her husband and spoke at the top of her voice.
“Don’t worry. There’s nothing to worry about. Harue’s doing very well for herself. She’s happy. You don’t need to worry.”
Chiyo was certain that her husband had been trying to say the name of the woman he’d divorced so many years before. The tears just kept coming, coursing down her face and dripping from her chin faster than she could wipe them away.
Shortly before noon the following day, Tatsuo, who’d been dozing in his chair, woke to the realization that Shigetatsu was dead. Chiyo too had nodded off, and neither of them knew exactly when he’d died.
A couple of days after the service marking the seventh day since Shigetatsu’s death, two visitors came calling. One was Chiyo’s elder brother, Kisaburō, who ran a restaurant in Osaka.
Having taken a night train from Osaka, he arrived early in the morning. After hastily lighting a stick of incense before the black-framed photograph of Shigetatsu, he turned to Chiyo and said, “Sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral. Some business came up, and I just couldn’t get away. See, it turns out I’m finally going to open a restaurant in Shinsaibashi. It’s all set now. There were a lot of things to take care of, you understand.” He smiled broadly. “Shinsaibashi—not bad, eh? Surprised?”
Tatsuo disliked this uncle of his, whose unsmiling eyes always belied his affable grin.
Kisaburō set his cap on Tatsuo’s head and said, “Take your eyes off ’em for a little while, and just look how they shoot up, eh?” Then he swiveled his head about, surveying the big living room. “Even a place this size, when it comes to having to sell it, I suppose you practically have to give it away, yeah?”
His vocabulary was pure Osaka, but the way he accentuated and stretched out the ends of his sentences betrayed how deeply the Hokuriku dialect remained rooted in his speech. It was as much a part of him as the tic that cause him to blink incessantly.
“Does it look like you’ll be able to settle all the debts?” he asked Chiyo, who was preparing a tray of food for him. He’d made a point of telling her he hadn’t eaten breakfast.
“The house and the office are mortgaged,” she said, “but they ought to take care of the bigger debts, at least.”
“Well, there’s no gettin’ blood from a stone, right? The smaller debts, hell, they can just write ’em off as condolence money.”
Chiyo glanced at Kisaburō out of the corner of her eye. When Shigetatsu collapsed, this brother of hers hadn’t even offered to help with those so-called smaller debts.
No sooner had Kisaburō finished eating than he complained that he hadn’t slept a wink on the train and asked her to lay out a futon for him in the bedroom. A few minutes later he was snoring.
The other visitor arrived shortly before noon. Although they’d never met before, as soon as Chiyo laid eyes on the sixtyish woman standing at the door, she knew it was Harue. Fifteen years ago, Harue had refused to meet her, and Shigetatsu hadn’t pressed the issue. That had been fine with Chiyo, but it meant that she had no idea what had passed between the two of them when they parted. Shigetatsu had told her nothing. She was all too aware, however, of how it must feel to have your husband abandon you for a pregnant mistress.
Harue’s black-dyed hair, impeccably arranged, and her subdued and elegant beige kimono testified to the fact that, just as rumor had it, she was comfortably well off.
“I heard about it the day before yesterday,” she said, and knelt before Shigetatsu’s photograph.
“So you’ve gone and died,” she muttered. “Died a pitiful pauper. All I can say is it serves you right. You got what you had coming. I came all this way just to tell you that.”
She turned to Chiyo and smiled brightly. “Forgive me. None of this is meant for you, Chiyo. Just him.”
Chiyo was tempted to tell her that the last thing Shigetatsu had done was to call out her name, but she decided against it. Perhaps he hadn’t been trying to say “Harue” after all, but something else entirely. Though Shigetatsu had always spoken his mind, it seemed to her that he’d never been one to reveal what was truly in his heart. Why had he parted with his wife of twenty years to marry her? Was it really only because he wanted to be a proper father to his child? Or had he, in fact, been in love with her? She turned these questions over in her mind as she sat face to face with her predecessor.
Harue took a pair of glasses out of her handbag, put them on, and looked at Tatsuo, who was sitting beside her.
“How you’ve grown!” she said, smiling. “I’ve never met your mother before, but this is the second time I’ve met you.”
Chiyo looked up at her, startled.
“He said he hadn’t told you about it,” Harue said, returning Chiyo’s gaze. “When Tatsuo was two, he brought him to Kanazawa, so he could show him off to me.”
Chiyo had been caught completely off guard. “He did?”
“He seemed so happy. ‘My only child,’ he said. It was kind of ridiculous, really. I had dinner with them at a place near the station. It was like being a real couple, a real little family, and it made me feel so sad... He told me to start a business of some sort and handed me a roll of cash—more or less the same amount he’d given me when we divorced. And he told me about an old inn that had gone out of business and was up for sale. So, really, it was because of him that I got started doing what I’m doing now. He said he would come visit me again, but I asked him not to. I thought he’d come anyway, but I guess he took me at my word. I never did see him again.”
Harue murmured that at this point it all seemed like a half-forgotten dream, and looked down at the back of her hand. “I’m sixty-three now myself,” she said, then peered solemnly through her glasses at Tatsuo.
Chiyo and Tatsuo accompanied her to the streetcar stop. Harue didn’t say a word on the way, but Chiyo noticed how she kept looking at Tatsuo. Somehow it didn’t feel right to part with her like this; so much remained unsaid. Chiyo was about to make some meaningless remark when the streetcar arrived. Without even stopping to think, she gave her son a little push and said, “Tatsuo, escort her to Toyama Station.”
When they arrived at the station, Harue asked him to ride as far as Takaoka with her.
“Takaoka?”
“Is it too far for you?”
“No... No, it’s all right, but... ”
“It’s only one stop by express.” Harue smiled brightly and tugged at his arm. “Please come with me.”
As the train was crossing the Jinzū River, Harue asked him if he liked school. Tatsuo said he liked some subjects and didn’t like others. She nodded, a big smile on her face, and that was pretty much the extent of their conversation. She seemed content to drink Tatsuo in with her eyes.
When the train reached Takaoka, Tatsuo got off and walked back down the platform to Harue’s window. She reached out with both hands and took hold of his arm. There was a sob in her voice.
“If there’s ever anything I can do for you... My money, my business, what good are they to me? They’re all yours for the asking.”
Harue wept as she wrote her address on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Other passengers and people on the platform gave them curious looks. When the train started up, Tatsuo trotted along beside it.
“Let’s meet again!” she called out to him. “Let’s meet again!”
That night, Kisaburō tried to convince his sister to move to Osaka. Outside on the riverbank, insects were singing.
“I’m opening this restaurant in Shinsaibashi, right? Surprised the hell out of everybody. A business like mine, location is everything. You get the right location, you got it made, you know? It’s been a long, tough haul, though, I’ll tell you.”
Kisaburō went on to explain that now that he had two restaurants, he needed someone to manage the old one.
“That’s where you come in, Chiyo. You used to deal with customers at that place in Kanazawa, right? I know there are lots of people with experience, but if it’s not somebody you’re close to... Look, you’re my only sister, right? And I’ve got no kids. Sure, that makes things easier in some ways, but it takes a lot out of life, too, you know?”
Chiyo balked at taking such a plunge. Kisaburō lowered his voice and pressed on, trying to persuade her.
“I may have paid Shigetatsu back all the money he lent me when I opened the place in Osaka, but I still owe him a debt of gratitude. Think it over. Tatsuo’s got to go to high school next year, and if he wants to go on to college too, I’d like to see him do it. But how much money can a woman of almost fifty earn washing dishes? Come to Osaka and help me with the restaurant. I’ll make sure Tatsuo goes to high school, and college too.”
It would, of course, be to Kisaburō’s advantage to have someone he could trust running the old restaurant while he devoted himself to the new one.
“I appreciate the offer, but...”
“What difference does it make where you live? I know it’s hard to leave a place you’re used to, but, hey, Osaka’s a great town.”
He tried to convince Tatsuo as well.
“You can move during summer vacation, study hard, and apply to a high school in Osaka. The big city’s different from the country, you know. Everything’s at a higher level, so you might not be able to catch up right away. I’ll fix things up for you, though. There are all kinds of good private high schools there. Tatsuo, I’m telling you, you and your mother should come live with me. There’s a lot going on in Osaka. And you should see the view we have of Tsūtenkaku Tower!”
Tatsuo stood up without replying and went to his room. He opened the drawer of his desk and took out the little box Sekine had given him. Underneath the photo of Eiko and the agreement with Ōmori he put the piece of paper Harue had given him. Then he sat down in his chair and gazed at Eiko’s smile.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance this year. It’s goin’ to happen, all right. I guarantee it.”
Ginzō had stopped by Tatsuo’s house as he was pulling his cart home from work.
“Really?” Tatsuo said excitedly. “How do you know?”
“An old friend of mine from Ōizumi came by my house the other day. He said there’s always a few fireflies down by the river where he lives, but this year he hasn’t seen a single one.”
“What? Not even one?”
“That’s why this is the year. It was like that the other time too. Means they’ll all come together in one big swarm. No doubt about it.”
“When should we go?”
“Well, it happens when they’re mating, right at the end of the firefly season.”
Ginzō looked up at the evening sky. Bats were flitting about over the riverbank. In a hushed tone of voice he suggested they plan for the following Saturday. By then, he said, the rice-planting would probably have begun.
“We’ll take dinner with us and make a picnic of it. If it rains, we’ll call it all off. It’s Saturday or bust. If we don’t see ’em, we don’t see ’em. No regrets.”
Chiyo soaked a hand towel in cold well water, wrung it out, and offered it to Ginzō, saying, “You always work so hard. You’re perspiring. Sit down and take a breather.”
Ginzō took half a cigarette from his pocket and inserted it in the narrow bowl of his long, slender pipe. “This year’ll be the seventh anniversary of my son’s death,” he told her.
“Already? You don’t say.”
Ginzō, whose wife too had died some years before, lived with his daughter and her husband. His son Genji, a carpenter, had fallen to his death from the roof of a house he was working on. It was hard for Chiyo to believe that it had been seven years. Genji, she recalled, had been engaged to be married when he died. His fiancée was the daughter of a stonecutter in Tonami. Chiyo remembered the girl’s smooth, healthy skin and her vibrant singing voice. Genji had brought her by the house to announce their engagement, and the girl had sung a number of traditional Tonami folk songs for Tatsuo and his friends. Chiyo would never forget the way the girl had smiled and said she was offering the songs as a “getting-acquainted gift.” Less than ten days later, Genji was dead.
“I wonder what happened to the young lady.” Chiyo was going to add that she supposed she was married and had children by now, but the words caught in her throat as a vivid memory came back to her: Genji’s blood-drenched hair and face, and the way Ginzō had clung to his broken body, blood soaking into his own clothes, and would not be torn away.
Ginzō said he hadn’t told anyone at the time, but “that rascal Genji had gone and knocked the girl up. She didn’t even realize it till some time later. I went to Tonami and kneeled right down on the floor apologizing to her parents. I got a letter later on sayin’ she’d had an abortion, and that was the last I heard from her.”
Tatsuo hopped on his bicycle and rode to Eiko’s house. The Tsujisawa Dental Clinic sign was already lit up. Two or three patients were waiting in the office on the first floor. Tatsuo rang the bell at the side door and stood there stiffly. Eiko’s mother, Hatsuko, opened up and said, “Tat-chan! How are you?”
Hatsuko had come to Shigetatsu’s funeral, but this was the first time in years that she and Tatsuo had had occasion to speak.
“Eiko’s here. Come on in.... Well, don’t just stand there. You always used to walk right in and make yourself at home, remember?”
Eiko came down the stairs. “Tat-chan,” she said, giggling. “Come in,” It wasn’t like seeing her at school; there was the same air of familiarity about her as when they were little.
Tatsuo stepped inside the doorway and told her that Ginzō had fixed the date.
Hatsuko was apparently opposed to letting her daughter go with them. Eiko nudged her from behind and said, “Mother?”
“But you’ll be out so late. I know Ginzō’s going with you, but... Well, he’s so old.”
“My mother’s going too,” Tatsuo lied.
Hatsuko exchanged a long look with her daughter, then finally relented.
“Well, I have to admit that firefly hunting suits a young lady better than studying for entrance exams. If Chiyo’s going with you, I suppose there’s nothing to worry about. And Tatsuo was nice enough to invite you, after all.”
All she asked, she said, was that they try not to stay out too late.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing all those fireflies myself,” she added. “But one of our assistants just quit on us, and we’re so busy...” Hatsuko made a face and disappeared through the door to the kitchen.
“I’ll pray for good weather,” Eiko said softly. She seemed awfully grown up at that moment. And then, quite unlike her usual quiet self, she began chattering away about all sorts of things. When Tatsuo eventually said he had to be going, she gave him a querulous look and blurted out, “Sekine Keita was a thief.” Her entire face, even her ears, flushed red as she said it.
Tatsuo too blushed. “I’ll give you the photo back.”
“ ‘A token of our friendship’! Who ever heard of such a thing?” Eiko looked down at the floor and didn’t raise her head even when Tatsuo excused himself and left.
Instead of riding straight home, Tatsuo steered his bicycle left and right at random, pedaling blindly through the streets.
“So you used me as bait to get Eiko to come.” Chiyo looked at him with a wry smile. It was the first time Tatsuo had seen her smile since his father’s death.
“What d’you mean, ‘bait’? I just thought you might like to go with us.”
“Well, that was very thoughtful of you, Mr. Smooth-talker, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got a million things to do. I have to write a letter to Kisaburō, and—”
“Are we going to move to Osaka?”
Tatsuo had asked her this question any number of times, but Chiyo had yet to give him a definite answer. She was, in fact, still undecided, although they had to clear out of the house by the end of June. There were plenty of places to rent, but it would be foolish to waste money on a rental if they were going to end up taking Kisaburō’s advice. She’d received two letters from him since his visit, both of them urging her to take him up on his offer, so clearly he was serious about it. And Chiyo wasn’t completely opposed to the idea. It was true, as he’d said, that she couldn’t make much of a living as a kitchen worker. Even if Kisaburō was really only interested in exploiting her situation, it would probably be a better life than working in the newspaper’s cafeteria and barely managing to scrape by. Nonetheless, Chiyo was hesitant to leave the town she knew so well, and to put herself in the position of being dependent upon a brother she didn’t wholeheartedly trust.
“What do you think?” she asked Tatsuo. “About moving to Osaka.”
“It’s all right with me.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
Chiyo didn’t believe for a minute that it was really “all right” with Tatsuo, and she didn’t like the idea of tearing him away, at his tender age, from the place he’d grown up in. But Tatsuo, for his part, had already resigned himself to the move. From the moment his uncle had first suggested it, he’d had a strong hunch that Osaka was in their future. He was convinced they’d end up moving there though neither of them really wanted to.
Half the money Ōmori Kametarō had lent them had gone for the hospital bills and the funeral, and by the time the more pressing of the smaller debts had been paid off, there was hardly anything left. A long, hard road lay ahead.
There were voices at the front door. Eiko and her mother had arrived.
“Here she is, all ready to go,” Hatsuko called out. “We’re a little early, I’m afraid.” She smiled and said, “This weather is a bit of luck, isn’t it?”
The sky was extraordinarily clear that day.
Eiko stood shyly beside her mother, her hands clasped behind her back. She wore a dress with a pattern of small yellow flowers that made her fair complexion all the more striking. Tatsuo sensed a certain maturity about Eiko today, an air of knowing something that was far beyond him, and he felt awkward and self-conscious standing face to face with her.
“I’ve been preparing the food since noon,” said Hatsuko. She was holding a water bottle and a heavy-looking bundle of stacked, individual picnic boxes.
“You really shouldn’t have done that. Letting me get away with just making the rice balls. And after Eiko was practically strong-armed into coming along!”
“Nothing of the sort! You’re being kind enough to take her with you, and the least I can do is supply the food. I must say, though, having a daughter this age, you get awfully nervous thinking about what can happen if she’s out too late. That’s why I was so worried at first. I felt a lot better when I learned that you were going along too, Chiyo.”
Chiyo gave her son a look, then smiled at Hatsuko. “Well, it sounds like quite a sight—all those fireflies. I couldn’t help thinking I’d like to see it once myself. I think I’m even more excited about it than the children.”
“You see fewer and fewer lightning bugs these days,” Hatsuko said. “There used to be scads of them, even around here. The new pesticides are a real boon to the farmers, I know, but...”
When Hatsuko was taking her leave, she urged them to bring back “lots and lots” of fireflies.
Shortly after she’d gone, Ginzō appeared at the door wearing a new happi coat stiff with starch. He beamed when he saw Eiko.
“Just look what a beauty you turned into! The last time I saw you, you were runnin’ around in a little girl’s frock.”
His easy, gentle manner drew Eiko out.
“And you’re still wearing those happi coats. Even when you’re not working!”
“You bet. This one’s special. My very best goin’-to-town clothes.”
Chiyo had been in her room, changing. When she came out, Ginzō looked at her and said, “You’re comin’ too, Chiyo?”
“I didn’t have much choice!”
There was something almost girlish about her today.
Ginzō pointed at the large flask hanging from his hip. “This is saké. I remembered to bring a flashlight too, but we’ll need a vinyl sheet to spread on the grass.”
Along with the water bottle, picnic boxes, and rice balls, it added up to a sizeable load, and they decided to strap everything to the back of Tatsuo’s bicycle. Quite a bit of daylight remained when the four of them set out, heading south along the riverbank. Beneath the clear blue sky, the Itachi River sparkled and glistened as never before, like a ribbon of silver brocade.
As they made their way upriver, passing wooden bridges at regular intervals, the gently twisting current grew gradually deeper. Almost before they knew it they were in unfamiliar territory. The town began to thin out here, taking on the atmosphere of a sleepy village.
“Just this side of Namerikawa, there’s a river called the Jōgangi. It empties into Toyama Bay, just like the Jinzū, though it’s not as big. Anyway, its headwaters are up in the Tateyama Mountains, and since the Itachi River is a branch of the Jōganji, that means that in the springtime even our little Itachi is mostly made of Tateyama snow.”
Since the other three were acting as if they’d taken a vow of silence, Ginzō did his best to keep the conversation going, but after a while he too clammed up.
The sun began to sink as they plodded on. Beside them, a black kite came swooping down from the sky, skimmed across the reddening surface of the river, and plucked out a small fish.
Once they’d passed through Ōizumi, the river dipped beneath the railway tracks of the Tateyama Line and began to grow deeper if somewhat narrower. Fields opened up on either side, and farmers who’d spent a busy day in preparation for the planting could be seen heading home across their flooded paddies.
Surveying the muddy fields, Tatsuo suddenly remembered the sound his father had made when he asked him about the fireflies. Scarcely able to form words, Shigetatsu had responded by stuttering something that sounded like “Shoo.” Maybe he hadn’t been trying to send Tatsuo away after all but telling him when the fireflies would appear—just before the planting of the rice shoots. Now, of course, there was no way of knowing for sure if Shigetatsu been trying to say “shoots.” Tatsuo remembered his father’s contorted, weeping face and the horrible way he’d seized hold of his belt.
When Chiyo admitted that she was getting a little tired, all four of them came to a halt. They’d already hiked a considerable distance, and Tatsuo’s side ached from pushing the bicycle. Ginzō proclaimed a short rest period and sat down on a rock beside the road.
“I haven’t walked this much in I don’t know how many years,” he said. “And I can’t say I don’t have a feelin’ it might be the last time.”
With each change of expression on Ginzō’s sun-browned face, his wrinkles turned and twisted so dramatically you half expected to hear them creak.
“We can’t give up this easy, though,” he said. “I’m prepared to walk all night if I have to. Till we find those fireflies.”
Only Eiko chimed in. “Me too,” she said softly.
“All right, now listen,” Ginzō announced, in a scolding tone. “Would you all mind talkin’ a little more? It feels like a funeral procession.”
They laughed at this, and a family of farmers walking through the fields turned to look at them.
“I’m too tired even to talk,” Chiyo muttered, and it was scarcely an exaggeration. She felt as if the weariness that had been building up for so long was being wrung from the core of her being with every step.
“Do you really think the fireflies will be there?” Eiko asked hopefully.
Chiyo could see that the swell of Eiko’s breasts and the curve of her hips were already those of a young lady. There was something frightening about this, and she looked away.
Ginzō said that a bit farther on they’d come to a grove of trees, and suggested they eat dinner there. They all got to their feet.
“It’ll be dark soon,” he said, gesturing toward the sun on the horizon.
It sank out of sight in no time at all. In the golden afterglow of sunset, the uneven patchwork of dark clouds on the horizon was infused with a sublime vermilion hue, while the flamelike rays of light that flashed through the violet sky overhead were as red as sparks from dying embers—a mad, extreme sort of red, the color of a thing raging against its own extinction.
“Do you really think they’ll be there?” Eiko asked again.
“I’ve got a hunch they will, and my hunches don’t generally lie,” said Ginzō. “This’ll be a night to remember for the rest of your life.”
They walked another healthy stretch. As Ginzō had said, the Itachi River, curving to the left, cut into a thick stand of trees. From there they could see that the road ahead shrank to a narrow footpath, too narrow even to push a bicycle along. Tatsuo decided to leave the bike there, under the trees. Now that the sun was down, the wind had grown chilly, and it was pitch dark in the grove. They spread the sheet out over the tall grass and sat down with their legs stretched out before them. Ginzō hung the flashlight from the branch of a tree. The chirping of insects was louder here, and the sound of the river was like a rumbling deep in the earth. The lights of houses dotted the fields in the distance, considerably lower than the ground they were sitting on. Without even realizing it, they’d followed the path up a gradual slope. From here, it slanted up an elevated section of riverbank, disappearing from view beneath dense tangles of undergrowth.
“Where do you suppose we are now?” Eiko said.
“Well, we’ve come quite a ways since passing Ōizumi, so...” Ginzō groped about his person, looking for something. “Damn. I forgot my watch.”
Neither Eiko nor Chiyo had brought one either. Nor, of course, had Tatsuo.
“We’ll have to return the same way we came, won’t we? We’d better turn back soon,” Chiyo said. She was concerned about getting Eiko home in time. Even if they headed back right now, they probably couldn’t get her there by nine.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m a little late,” Eiko said, with a pout. “We still haven’t got to the place where the fireflies are born.”
“They’re not bein’ born,” Ginzō said. The sweet smell of saké was in the air around him. “They come from all over to one spot, and that’s where they mate.”
“Let’s walk another thousand steps.” This was the first full sentence Tatsuo had spoken since they’d started out. “If we don’t find the fireflies within a thousand steps, we’ll give up.”
“But what if they’re one thousand five hundred steps away?” Eiko whimpered. Everyone laughed.
“All right. We’ll walk fifteen hundred steps,” said Ginzō. “If we don’t find ’em by then, we’ll give up. Decided.”
An owl hooted above them. Chiyo looked up, and even as she did so she inwardly made a solemn vow to herself. If, after fifteen hundred more steps up this dark, lonely path, they didn’t find the fireflies and had to head back home, she and Tatsuo would stay in Toyama, and she’d go to work in the cafeteria kitchen. But if they did come across that magical swarm, she’d take Kisaburō up on his offer and move to Osaka.
Her knees were trembling slightly as she stood up. Who wouldn’t want to witness the dazzling dance of the fireflies she’d heard old Ginzō rave about? A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle they might or might not be lucky enough to see. A fairytale vision on which she was now betting her entire future.
The owl hooted again. When they took their first steps, all the insects around them fell suddenly silent. Hovering above that deep, dark silence was a pale, bluish moon. One by one the insects started up again, their songs twining upward as if from the depths of the earth.
The path rose more steeply now. Soon the water-covered paddies were far below them, glistening in the moonlight, and the sound of the river had grown distant and muffled. They followed the flashlight beam, picking their way up the narrow, overgrown path.
The vibrant sound of rushing water drew gradually nearer as the path swerved back to the left. They rounded a turn and saw the moonbeam-dappled surface of the river below them; and then, all at once, they froze in their tracks. They weren’t more than four or five hundred steps from the grove, on a high embankment. Below them, at the edge of the river, was a cloud of thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of luminescent dots that flitted and blinked and twirled in the darkness.
It wasn’t the fairytale scene they’d expected. What they saw, suspended over the basin of a well-hidden waterfall, was an eerie, desolate dance of ghostly phosphorescence. It was as if an immeasurable silence and the stench of death had condensed into particles of light that aspired to heaven, rising up in brilliance, dimming as they fell, and shooting upward again, like sparks from a frozen fire.
The four of them stood there in awed silence.
Finally Ginzō muttered, “Well? Was I right?”
“It’s... fantastic.” Chiyo spoke as if in a trance. “It wasn’t a lie, was it.” She sat down on the grassy bank, taking no notice of the evening mist that soaked her clothing. It wasn’t a lie... The words resounded inside her. Under the spell of the slowly pulsing mass of light that glowed a pale and sorrowful green, she began to realize that nothing, none of the things that had come to pass, had been anything but the truth. Sitting on the grass, she felt cold all over. She hugged her legs and rested her chin on her knees.
“Look at them!” Eiko’s breath, as she whispered in Tatsuo’s ear, seemed to flow into him.
“They’re mating,” Ginzō said. “They’re makin’ next year’s fireflies.” He was panting slightly, as if in a mild delirium.
“Do you want to go down near them?” said Tatsuo.
“No!” Eiko seized hold of his belt, holding him back. “No, don’t. Let’s just watch them from here.”
“Why?”
Eiko didn’t answer. Tatsuo started down the bank.
“Tat-chan, don’t! Please don’t go down there.” Even as she tugged on his belt, pleading with him not to go, Eiko followed him down. Up close, the undulations of the swarm were like slow-moving swells on the ocean. Each individual firefly would radiate a tiny burst of brilliance, then slowly fade to black before lighting up again. Collectively they formed a single silent, lonely, pulsating entity.
Tatsuo and Eiko stood in the bottom of the hollow at the edge of the river. The wet grass soaked them to their knees.
Tatsuo turned and looked up the embankment. With the moon behind the trees above him, he could see nothing but darkness. He knew that Ginzō and Chiyo were sitting on the grass up there, but his eyes offered no proof. He could barely even make out Eiko’s profile, though she was right there beside him, still holding on firmly to his belt. He wanted to speak to her, but the words didn’t come. He inhaled her fragrance, his flesh on fire.
A strong gust of wind rustled through the trees and sent a wave of fireflies curling toward them. The wave broke over their heads and showered down upon them like ocean spray.
Eiko screamed, contorting her body.
“Tat-chan, don’t look!” Nearly in tears, she lifted the skirt of her dress and fanned the air with it. “Turn the other way!”
Countless luminescent points swirled around her, infiltrating her dress from above and below. Her pale skin seemed to glow, illuminating her outline in the darkness. Tatsuo gazed at her, breathless, as another, bigger wave of tiny lights surged toward them, along with a rushing, whishing sound. Whether it was the sound of the fireflies or of the river, Tatsuo couldn’t say, but there seemed to be millions of them now—where had they all come from? It was as if they were emerging in an endless stream from Eiko herself, as if she were giving birth to them.
Riding the wind, one wavelet of fireflies swept over the embankment to where Chiyo and Ginzō were sitting.
“Ah... I’d just like to fall asleep, right here.” Ginzō sighed and stretched out on the grass. “Call it the end of the line.”
Chiyo, too, felt as if something had come to an end. The faint sound of a shamisen reached her, and she held her breath to listen. Perhaps, she thought, it came from some faraway village, someone playing in a Festival of the Souls celebration—but no, it was much too early in the year. She shook her head and tried to ignore the sound, but it didn’t stop. Like the sound of wind at night, or a sound in a dream, the faint, rhythmic plinking of strings reverberated in some hidden recess of her heart.
She stood up unsteadily and walked across the grass. It was well past the time they should have started back. Taking hold of a tree branch, she leaned out over the embankment to peer down at the river, and an astonished cry escaped her throat.
The wind had stopped suddenly, and down in the still, quiet hollow beside the river, the otherworldly lights of countless fireflies had coalesced into a single, incandescent form with the contours of a human being.