After a time the commentary came to an end and the singing began. The director of a small opera house in Salzburg has yet to begin preparations for the fall season, which is just about to open. He has lost all desire to mount any performances, wishing instead to return to his home in the country where he can live a quiet, pastoral life.
“This definitely sounds interesting,” Ōura said.
“Uh-huh.”
“An opera director who wants to quit and go home to the country—it’s a clever premise.”
“Am I supposed to write that?” Yasuo asked.
“No, no, you don’t need to put that down. ‘The setting is Salzburg, the time is before the music season starts in the autumn, and the opera director wants to quit his job and go home to the country.’ That should be enough. In any case, we can worry about the story later. Right now we need to listen. Shōjirō,” he said, turning to the younger boy. “You need to get to bed.”
“Okay,” he replied, but kept on reading.
“Shōjirō!”
“Okay, okay.” This time he put his comic book away on the shelf and went to say “Good night” to his mother.
A banker comes to call on the impresario at his office. He tells the reluctant director that the bank would like to put up the money for him to produce a show.
“And so long as you’re doing a show,” he adds, “I’d like to recommend a singer—Madame So-and-so, a good friend of mine. She’s waiting right outside.”
The lady who enters is a once-celebrated prima donna, no longer in her prime. After boasting immodestly about her numerous credits, she says she wants to sing the lead role and declares how much she expects to be paid. The director has no choice but to assent.
Then the banker speaks up again. “I’d like to recommend another singer—my good friend Mademoiselle So-and-so. She’s waiting right outside.”
“This guy seems to know a lot of women,” Ōura murmured, sounding almost envious.
Now a young woman enters. She, too, is swollen with vanity; she, too, says she wants to sing the lead and declares how much she expects to be paid. The director feels compelled to assent.
The first singer then returns and starts ranting, “How dare you offer an upstart like her more than you’d pay me? What an insult!”
“What are you talking about?” the young singer retorts. “This is no part for an old granny to play.”
Another man from the theater steps in to try to soothe tempers, leading to a humorous trio.
“This is the climax. Be sure to write about this part.”
“What should I say?”
Yasuo had not written anything more in his notebook, so the page remained mostly empty. Shōjirō tossed restlessly in his bed. With his father and brother working on homework, he was having trouble falling asleep.
three ON TOP OF THE PIANO
“I SUPPOSE SHE’S AT THE INN EATING dinner about now,” Ōura had repeated every night.
“I suppose so,” his wife had given her same reply.
Haruko was in eleventh grade, and her class had departed on a school trip to the Hokuriku region barely three or four days after the start of the fall term. The usual family of five had become just four.
Yasuo had been able to complete only three of the seven pages in his math workbook before classes resumed, and as if that and the music assignment weren’t enough, he discovered that he had missed an art project as well. Rushing out to cut down a small tree on their mountain, he began carving a totem pole, and he was still hard at work on it when Haruko went merrily off on her school trip.
“Lucky stiff,” he said.
“Yeah, lucky stiff,” Shōjirō echoed.
It seemed unfair that they had to go to school when Haruko was away on a trip having fun.
“But, you know,” Mrs. Ōura countered, “Haruko easily had the most homework to do over the summer—lots more than either of you. But did you ever once hear her complain? She did her assignments without a peep. And she often helped out around the house, too.”
“She played baseball with us.”
“Uh-huh, because you couldn’t have a game without her. She was always paying attention to what needed to be done, and she would heat the bath, or go to the store, or do the ironing, and in between times she also managed to play ball with you guys. Not to mention that besides doing all that at home, she went to school now and then to help with watering and weeding for her gardening club. That was an important contribution, too.”
Yasuo and Shōjirō could but listen in silence. Their mother was right, of course. They should have kept their mouths shut.
The school had sent home a copy of the itinerary, listing all the places Haruko’s class was scheduled to go, so Ōura and his wife could look at it and know exactly where she was at any given moment: right now she was visiting the aquarium at Tōjinbō; now she was touring downtown Kanazawa. But they spoke without reference to proper nouns:
“I suppose she’s at the inn eating dinner about now.”
They didn’t need to look at the itinerary to know there could be no mistake about that much. The name of the hot springs she happened to be staying at on any particular night was incidental; what mattered was that she had made it through the day’s scheduled activities and arrived safely at her lodgings. With that thought, they could breathe a sigh of relief.
“Do you suppose they might be having crab tonight?” Mrs. Ōura sometimes asked. The crab from that part of the Sea of Japan was supposed to be especially good, but the Ōuras had never had the occasion to sample any themselves.
Before sitting down to write each day, Ōura gathered up a fistful of pencils and headed for Haruko’s room, where the family’s pencil sharpener sat clamped to his daughter’s desk. For some reason the atmosphere in the room felt different to him after she had departed on her trip.
The difference hit him the moment he entered the room each morning.
It wasn’t as if she was going to be away for a month or two; the excursion was to last a mere five days. And yet, from the very first day she was gone, the room felt different.
What a strange feeling! Ōura thought as he pushed his pencils into the sharpener one after the other and turned the crank.
Haruko had left the room in perfect order, everything neatly in its place. As always, a stuffed tiger and rabbit sat on top of her bookcase flanking an adorable little doll Haruko had made.
The stuffed tiger and rabbit went back a long way in this family. At their old house, when the children were still little, bedtime often meant a squabble over who would get to take the stuffed tiger to bed. Shōjirō, being the youngest, always got the rabbit, but Haruko and Yasuo constantly fought over the tiger, arguing about whose turn it was that night.
Hoping to put an end to these altercations, Mrs. Ōura had started keeping track with the children’s initials on the calendar, but even so, one of them would forget to take the tiger to bed one night, and they’d quarrel over whose turn it was the next.
“Why did they fight so endlessly over a silly toy like that,” Ōura had