A couple of days before the end of the year, Ōura bought a large case of satsuma tangerines and stored them in Haruko’s room. They normally bought satsumas in smaller quantities, but Ōura and his wife had decided to get a whole case this time so that they could all enjoy them to their hearts’ content throughout winter break. In the back of their minds, they were also hoping this small luxury might serve as a little bit of a release for Haruko.
Once they started eating them, though, the satsumas in the box disappeared with astonishing speed, and Ōura realized they probably would not last through the break.
One evening Mrs. Ōura asked the boys to go get some satsumas for her, and off they raced to Haruko’s room. They soon came back looking quite disgruntled and bearing no fruit, only a single sheet of construction paper that said:
The satsumas deposited herein comprise a valuable asset of the Ōura Empire, and unauthorized entry into this vault by the general populace is hereby strictly prohibited. Anyone wishing to supplement a vitamin G (gluttonic acid) deficiency must first gain authorization from Finance Minister Haruko, and they must hold the satsumas up in humble gratitude as they exit the room. So pound that into your thick skulls!
“This is the problem with putting Haruko in charge,” Yasuo and Shōjirō burst out at the same time.
The day before Haruko was scheduled to come home, Mrs. Satake from next door brought by some rice in a paper sack.
“My sister in Sendai sent us some of their new crop,” she explained. “I’m afraid it isn’t very much, but . . .”
“Since Haruko’s coming home tomorrow,” Mrs. Ōura said after their neighbor had gone, “maybe I should use this to make up a batch of rice jumble.”
“Sure. That’s a great idea,” Ōura nodded.
When it came to food, this couple was always quick to agree. “Rice jumble” referred to a country-style rice salad from Shikoku that Ōura’s mother had always made on special occasions. She would mix up a large batch in a great big sushi tub. It was quite different from the style of rice salad generally favored in Osaka, where Ōura and his siblings grew up, but everyone in the family loved his mother’s recipe and boasted that no one else could make rice salad the way she did.
After they were married, Mrs. Ōura made a point of helping out whenever her mother-in-law made the recipe in order to learn exactly how she did each step and how to get the seasoning right, but try as she might, she could never quite duplicate Grandma Ōura’s flavor. She knew for certain that the correct proportion of rice to vinegar dressing was ten to one, but the difficulty lay in getting the amount of salt right.
“When I watch her adding the salt,” Mrs. Ōura would say, “it always looks like a whole lot. I can’t help thinking she’s putting in way too much.”
The dressing also contained a small amount of sugar, but the secret to getting just the right flavor apparently lay in the proportion of salt to vinegar. No matter how many times Mrs. Ōura watched her mother-in-law add the salt, she could never quite get her own vinegar sauce to taste the same.
Of course, it wasn’t as if she were off by a long shot, so her rice jumble came out tasting fairly close to her mother-in-law’s. In fact, some batches managed to come out virtually identical. But other times she herself had to declare the results a failure; she’d think she was doing everything exactly the same way, but the outcome would be different from one occasion to the next.
Grandma Ōura, the only person who could make rice jumble just right, had passed away eight years ago at the age of seventy. The younger Mrs. Ōura could no longer ask for another lesson in how to make the dressing; she had to muddle through as best she could, based on what she had already learned. To Ōura, so long as his wife’s rice jumble tasted more or less like his mother’s, that was good enough. She could carry on the tradition.
The next morning Ōura heard Yasuo say “Bye, Mom!” as he headed out the front door. Moments later, Haruko’s voice rang out, “I’m home!” She had come home by night train, arriving at Ueno Station in Tokyo before daylight that morning.
“My goodness, you’re home early!” Mrs. Ōura greeted her at the door. “Welcome back. Did you see Yasuo?”
“Uh-huh, in front of the Satake’s.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Yeah, he asked me how many times I had to go to the bathroom.”
Still lying in bed, Ōura burst out laughing.
Even though Haruko claimed she’d only managed to get about an hour’s sleep on the train the night before, she still had plenty of energy to talk about her trip.
Perhaps because relatively few schools chose the Hokuriku area as a destination for class trips—Haruko’s school had never gone there before this year, either—the inns had pulled out all the stops to make them feel welcome everywhere they went. For their meals they’d been served a medley of local delicacies (though never any crab), and everything had tasted delicious. She had also finished off all the pickled plums she took along. When she got done talking about food, she bubbled on about how beautiful it had been to see the early-morning sun streaming through the stand of enormous cedars at Heisenji Temple, and about looking up at the stars from the window of their train and exclaiming over how bright they were (though she thought the stars here, on the Ōuras’ hill, were just as bright), and so forth, with one subject leading to another.
Among her many anecdotes, she told about their bus having a flat tire. They were driving along the highway approaching the city of Kanazawa when they suddenly heard air hissing out of one of the tires and the bus coasted to a stop. Incredibly, it came to a halt right smack in front of an auto repair shop. What better place could there have been to have a flat tire? (Getting the flat repaired put their bus about thirty minutes behind the others, but the way Haruko told the story, that wasn’t nearly as important as the lucky spot where the flat had occurred.)
Another story: One of her classmates had been asked by his parents to buy them a bamboo strainer someplace—it didn’t matter where, just an ordinary bamboo strainer for household use. In places like that, way off in the country, you could still find nice, practical basketry, his parents had told him, and that was what they wanted him to bring them. He didn’t need to buy them any other trinkets or treats, just a plain old bamboo strainer.
No matter how nice a strainer he might find, Haruko wasn’t so sure it was a good idea for a present. For one thing, it would be a considerable hassle to carry around. In the end, though, their group never went to any stores that sold simple household items like that, so the boy managed to get through the trip without having to buy one.
After rattling on for a spell, Haruko took out the presents she had bought at Unazuki Hot Springs in the Kurobe Gorge, their last overnight stop. They were two specialty foods from the gorge: pokeberry shoots pickled in soybean paste, and rice candy wrapped in bamboo leaves. Mrs. Ōura promptly made an offering of the presents by placing them on top of the piano in Ōura’s study.
The Ōuras did not have an ancestral altar in the house, so at times like this, the top of the piano served as a substitute spot for offering food to their ancestors before partaking of it themselves.
“Shall we try the rice candy?” Mrs. Ōura said after a short while. Unwrapping the bamboo leaf, they each popped a piece of the candy into their mouths. It was chewy, and clung to their teeth when they bit into it. It stuck fast and wouldn’t let go.
“Well, well,” Ōura chuckled as he tried to free the candy from his teeth. “Better be careful, or we’ll lose our false teeth.”