“It’s not fair!” Yasuo would scream when he lost out and had to give the animal up.
That stuffed tiger had now been liberated from the children’s disputes and rested quietly on top of the bookcase. He lay with his large head drooped to one side as if to say, “My job is done.”
This was exactly how the room was on normal days when Haruko went to school. Except for the school bag now sitting on the floor by her desk, nothing had changed. And yet, quite palpably, the atmosphere in the room felt different.
Most mornings, Mrs. Ōura woke Haruko and Yasuo up at the same time, fed them their breakfast, and sent them off to school. As they went out the gate, Ōura would hear a shrill finger-whistle from the street out front—Yasuo’s signal to Teruo, the ninth-grade boy at the Satake’s next door, that they were on their way. (For their family baseball games, Teruo and Yasuo made up one team, and Haruko, Shōjirō, and Ōura made up the other.) Teruo would then emerge to join Haruko and Yasuo on their way to the train station.
Some mornings, Mrs. Ōura would instinctively shut off the alarm in her sleep and wind up rushing around in a tizzy after waking up just in the nick of time. Even on days like that, Haruko always left her room in perfect order.
There was a reason behind Haruko’s impeccable tidiness. She had had her fill of messy rooms at the old house, where she had shared a room with Yasuo. No matter how hard she might try to keep things in order, it was a losing battle so long as she had had to share space with Yasuo.
They had called that room “the children’s study,” but along with Haruko and Yasuo’s desks, it had in fact contained a good many other things that had nothing to do with studying. To one side stood Mrs. Ōura’s dresser, and, next to that, her sewing machine. Further cluttering the room were a pair of large, rattan easy chairs (though they were very comfortable to sit in); a second dresser holding the children’s shirts and socks; and, stacked in one corner, two large suitcases too big to be of any use except as a place to store some bundles of cotton for use as futon filler. The room hardly deserved to be called a study.
The children did do their homework there, to be sure, but otherwise it had become a gathering place for anything that did not fit into some other room or closet.
As if this did not already make it a tight enough squeeze for getting in and out of the room, Yasuo had the unfortunate habit of claiming as his own almost anything around the house that had outlived its usefulness. Had he limited his junk-hound instincts to interestingly shaped bottles and elegant cookie boxes (he did indeed ask for such), it might not have been so bad, but he also asked for things like worn-out pen nibs and beer bottle caps—the more the merrier.
“What’ll you ever do with a thing like that?” Ōura would ask, but Yasuo insisted on having it, and stashed it away in one or another of his desk drawers. As a result, his drawers were stuffed to overflowing with odds and ends that had no imaginable purpose or reason for preservation, and since the concept of throwing something away apparently remained utterly alien to him, the profusion of junk spilled out onto his desktop and the floor as well.
He indulged in very much the same habit when he was out of doors. If he found an unusually large cane of flute bamboo somewhere along his way, he had to drag it home no matter how far. If he found a steel bolt lying on the pavement, he could not just let it lie. He even picked up camellia seeds to bring home.
Back in the fourth grade, Yasuo once found an ornamental marble horse minus all four of its legs on his way home from school and came in the door bubbling with excitement. You could tell it was a horse because its head remained intact, but otherwise it would probably have been impossible to make out what it was supposed to be.
“I found it lying in the middle of the road,” Yasuo explained.
How had a broken ornamental horse wound up lying in the middle of the road? Ōura couldn’t help but wonder. What sort of person had it belonged to, and how had it lost all four of its legs right from the base? What had the owner hoped to achieve by displaying a horse like that in his home?
The world certainly had all kinds of people, he thought. And it was certainly filled with all kinds of inexplicable things. A feeling he didn’t quite know how to describe came over him, and, for once, he did not permit Yasuo to bring his newfound treasure into the house, ordering him instead to take it back where he had discovered it.
It did no good for Haruko to try to create and maintain an orderly environment for herself so long as she had to share space with her junk-hound brother. She began to dream of someday having a room of her own, no matter how small it might be. How happy that would make her!
When the family moved to their hilltop home three years ago, her dream finally came true.
Her new room had a cupboard that jutted out over the foot of the bed nearly half the width of the room, and she had to be careful not to sit up too quickly and bash her forehead on the corner, so the room could hardly be called spacious. But with the door closed, it had something of the charm of a small cabin on an ocean liner.
Most important of all, no more did she have to put up with someone else’s piles of junk. She could decorate the room to her own taste, and keep it as tidy as she pleased.
When the movers hauled Haruko’s desk into this room for the first time, it had looked completely out of place surrounded by the spanking new walls and woodwork. She had been using that desk since first grade, and it was plainly showing its age.
“We really should get you a new one,” Ōura said. “It’s looking pretty cramped for you.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I like my desk.”
“Well, I suppose we could ask you to put up with it until you start high school.”
“No, really, it’s okay. It has personality. I like it.”
“It certainly does have that,” Ōura agreed.
The finish had long since worn off in the places where her hands and arms rubbed most frequently on the desk top, revealing the bare wood grain beneath. Countless scratches, large and small, crisscrossed the surface, interlaced with the traces of childish doodling.
A year after their move, Shōjirō started school, and a new desk joined Yasuo’s in the next room. With the two desks set side by side, Shōjirō’s turned out to be slightly taller than Yasuo’s.
“Maybe I should trim the legs to make them the same height,” Ōura said, but he immediately thought better of it. If he did a bad job of sawing, he might make the legs uneven and end up destabilizing a perfectly solid desk, and then his tinkering would have done more harm than good.
It would of course be nicer if the two desks were the same height, but just because Yasuo’s was slightly lower surely didn’t mean he would lose face as older brother. Ōura decided to leave well enough alone.
But now that Shōjirō had a brand-new desk, Haruko’s desk looked even scrubbier than before. There was no escaping the irony that the tallest of the siblings, and the one who actually used her desk most for its intended purpose, had the smallest and most beat-up desk. It just didn’t seem right somehow.
On the other hand, this was the natural result of having bought desks for each of the children in order, as his or her need arose. The children grew taller with each passing year, but the desks remained exactly the same size as when they were first purchased. It was unfortunate, but there really wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.
Another year went by, and Haruko began high school.1