"How good of you to drop in," she said to Mitsuo with spirit. It was the red-haired woman who had led the first group of tomato buyers to the hothouse. Her fingernails matched the color of her hair. She smiled and said, "What'll it be?"
Koji decided to make conversation. "Nice to meet you."
Mitsuo put an end to pleasantries by interjecting, "We're starving." He stared at the woman's face. She'd taken great care with her makeup, and she wore false eyelashes. Her blouse, partly unbuttoned, revealed much of her chest, upon which a gold necklace dangled. Mitsuo's persistent stare made her look away. "Give us a menu."
She pointed to the wall and the long, thin pieces of paper on which the menu was written.
Koji called out happily, "Curry and rice, with coffee."
Mitsuo raised two fingers. She smiled an acknowledgment, at the same time narrowing her eyes. This caused her dark blue eyeshadow to spread slightly. Mitsuo and Koji slid down in their seats, stretching their legs as they read manga while waiting for their food.
The redhead brought two deep bowls of curry and said, as she set them on the table, "We serve liquor at night, you know. Come in sometime and reserve a bottle of whiskey." The earrings hanging from her earlobes twitched each time she opened her mouth. Mitsuo shut his manga.
"So your husband's looking after the kids?"
She pretended to be angry. "How rude of you. Actually, I don't have a husband. I run this shop with a friend of mine. We exchange shifts so we can take turns with the child care."
Koji asked for seconds on the curry and shoveled it into his mouth when it arrived. Mitsuo, smoking a cigarette, continued to glance at the woman where she stood behind the counter. She encouraged them a number of times to come drinking at night, and they nodded in response.
A siren blared and they rushed out to see what was happening. Over by the apartment complex an ambulance screeched to a halt. Women with children in their arms ran to meet it. From a balcony overhead, a woman leaned over as though to jump. The hair of the women and children who milled about was made candescent by the red of the ambulance's flashing light. The paramedics tramped into one of the buildings. The women standing about seemed relieved.
"Say, it's the guy from the tomato hothouse," a voice said.
Mitsuo raised a hand and waved at nobody in particular. Koji grinned, moving his jaw back and forth as though chewing gum. A woman was brought out of the building on a stretcher, a dazzling white blanket wrapped around her head.
The red-haired woman appeared beside him. "You're not planning to run off without paying your bill, are you?"
Mitsuo placed his hand on her shoulder. "A murder?"
"More likely she's ready to give birth. Happens all the time."
Mitsuo would have been happier to hear it was a homicide. It seemed like too much fuss just for having a baby. He paid the redhead the amount she mentioned. The ambulance drove off, the siren at full blast. The onlookers scattered into smaller circles to gossip.
Across the grass field, steam rose from the hothouse and enveloped it in a rainbow. Mitsuo thought about how he would like to harvest as many of the tomatoes as possible to free up nutrients for the remainder and allow them to flourish. Suddenly he observed a shadow in the hothouse, and ran as fast as he could toward it. The figure drew toward the door, as though having heard the approaching footsteps. When he saw Mitsuo, he waved. It was his father, dressed in baggy new work clothes.
"If you came just to make a show, you can go on home right now."
His father's lips cracked a smile. "You said you needed help, so here I am." He caught sight of Koji. "Oh, long time no see! How's it going?"
"Not bad. Haven't been going at it as hard as you, though."
Mitsuo ignored the other two and began working. His father and Koji bantered a bit more, then went off to separate sections, each carrying a container. Mitsuo stripped off his shirt, hung it over a pipe and switched on the radio. He imagined he could hear the plants telling him to get on with the harvesting business. The smooth growth of the fruit gladdened his heart, and he worked without thinking.
At three o'clock, they took a break and sat in a circle on a piece of cardboard, smoking cigarettes. Nearby, a large pile of tomatoes testified to their hard work. Mitsuo felt they'd accomplished a lot. Since he couldn't be bothered to buy something to drink, he gulped lukewarm water straight from a kettle, and handed it to his father sitting next to him. Matsuzo drank, water dripping from the corners of his mouth. Mitsuo leaned back, hands clasped behind his head, and closed his eyes. A red light penetrated his eyelids. A metallic taste lingered in his mouth, and he stretched his jaw muscles.
He said, "You know, there must be a hundred carp in that muddy river in town. I'm thinking about doing some late-night fishing."
"Great idea," Matsuzo said. "I'm an expert at cooking carp. Soup, sashimi, I can make anything with that fish. We'll have drinks at my place. Yes, indeed, carp is great for the health."
Mitsuo heard his father's voice from close range and realized he, too, was lying down. The thought crossed his mind to tell his father to ditch the woman, but he kept his mouth closed. Seeing her face or hearing her voice would be enough to ruin the taste of any drink.
Koji blurted out, "But if I eat carp and get all that extra energy, I don't know what I'd do with it."
Mitsuo thought how he would like to maximize the day's harvest. He would ship the tomatoes to the co-op tomorrow. He noticed the sap around his fingertips had turned black. Some of the apartment women came to buy tomatoes, and Mitsuo let Koji handle them. Judging from the animated sound of their voices, Koji was giving them a sweet deal.
Darkness crept across the land outside the vinyl. Matsuzo laughed and said he felt good, having built up a sweat. He left to catch a bus at the complex, carrying as many tomatoes as he could hold.
Granma sat erect, her knees atop a chair in the kitchen, listening to Mitsuo's account of the ambulance and the pregnant woman. When he finished, she closed her eyes, held her head upright, and performed an incantation for the safe delivery of the child, intoning the syllables from deep within her gut. Mitsuo was familiar with the chant, for Granma had been the village midwife. Her chanting meant she was in a good mood.
She enacted the birthing process. Placing straw rice-bags beside and behind an imaginary mother, she used an equally imaginary rope to tie the woman's hair to a pillar to restrict her movements. Next she drew the woman up from behind and squatted under her, using her own knees to spread the mother's. Finally, she squeezed her arms about the woman's abdomen.
"Yes, I helped bring hundreds of babies into the world. I gave birth to your father all by myself. It happened in midsummer. I was weeding the fields and began to feel sick. I waddled as far as the back door of the house and collapsed. The shock of the fall sent me into labor.
"My next four children showed me great concern and came out quite easily. One was born as I lay next to a crying baby, I remember. Village women never had any problems; it was always the towngirls who screamed their lungs out."
She squatted up and down on her chair and stretched her arms, periodically stopping to sip lukewarm tea. Part of what she drank she spat onto the table while Mitsuo and Tomiko ate. Tomiko frowned, and when her mother-in-law looked away, revolved a finger around her head to convey to Mitsuo her opinion of the old woman's mental condition.
"A lot of the women had no afterbirth, you know," Granma continued. "It wouldn't do for them to fall asleep, so I made them chew rice to keep awake. Sometimes I just slapped them on the cheek. A midwife needs to be as strong as any man.
"Sometimes they kept me on to take care of the afterbirth. I always buried it in a closet, beneath the tatami. You had to keep it hidden from the gods.