Only a few days before this, Ōura had written his brother to tell him how some mutual friends of theirs had come to visit, each bringing a gift from his yard—a pepper tree, a spiderwort, a shoot from a redbud paulownia, and a hydrangea. In his letter he had given an account of the rollicking party they had had, too, but he hadn’t mentioned the winds that visited them so mercilessly, day after day. He could easily have added a note about the winds, but he hadn’t.
Under the circumstances, his brother could not know that what Ōura really wanted was trees to protect the house. It would be tempting fate to let unappreciative thoughts enter his mind—such as to wish his brother had not sent the roses.
Ōura set briskly to work digging the holes. If he allowed as much room as his brother had stipulated, the whole house would be surrounded by holes, so he decided to reduce the measurements a little. It took him two days to finish his excavations.
“I feel like a grave digger,” he mumbled as he scooped out another shovelful of dirt.
Digging the holes did not complete the required preparations, however. Next he had to round up the soil amendments his brother had named. Having expended all that effort removing the dirt from the holes, he now had to fill them halfway full again with something else.
Down by the station was a rice store, which the owner ran with the help of his eldest son. The way the owner’s T-shirted stomach bulged out over his tightly wrapped apron reminded Ōura of the potbellied little toddlers he often saw running around looking so cute. He was a gentle, easygoing man—no doubt made that way by growing up at the foot of these verdant Tama Hills, soaking up the ample sunshine, drinking the sweet water, and enjoying to his heart’s content the plentiful harvests of persimmons and peaches and pears the region offered.
“Would you happen to know where I could buy some oil cake or chicken manure?” Ōura inquired.
“They sell oil cake at the farm co-op, but they might not be able to help you if you’re looking to buy just a little.”
“I need it for planting some roses. For fertilizer.”
“In that case, chicken manure should do fine.”
“Is there some place that sells it?”
“It wouldn’t be for sale, but every farm around here has chickens, and I’m sure they’d be happy to let you have some if you asked. They’re rolling in the stuff, so they’ll tell you to help yourself to however much you want.”
He looked ready to burst out laughing.
“We don’t really know any of the farmers yet, so I’m not sure I feel comfortable asking them for favors. Would there be anything else that might work instead of oil cake or chicken manure?”
“You mean something we might have here?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we have fishmeal. I suppose that should work.”
He went to get something in a paper bag and poured a little out onto his palm for Ōura to see.
“What exactly is it?”
“Dried sardines.”
“The innards?”
“No, not just the innards. They press the oil out and then dry what’s left. It’s for chicken feed, and there’s some problem with the oil so they have to get rid of it first.”
“They feed it to chickens?”
“Uh-huh. Everybody uses it. All the places that have chickens.”
“I wonder if it’ll work for roses.”
“I’ve never tried it myself, but it seems like it should be okay. If chicken manure works, then the fishmeal the chickens eat ought to do the job, too, I’d think.”
“I suppose that goes to reason.”
They both laughed.
Just to be sure, the rice man phoned a farmer he knew who cultivated roses (as he spoke on the phone he still looked about to burst out laughing). The farmer said it should work fine, so Ōura went home lugging two large bags of fishmeal under his arms.
The Ōuras had a slim notebook labeled “Planting Log” on the cover.
Yasuo had charge of it, and each time they planted something new in the yard, he recorded the date, the name of the plant, the number planted, and the place of purchase or the place it was transplanted from.
They had not actually started keeping this log right away; they had begun it in October of the year following their move. For all the things they had planted before that, they had had to reconstruct an approximate record from memory.
The advent of the Planting Log a year and a half after their move signified that Ōura’s preoccupation with trees for a windbreak had finally come to an end. Until then, the need to do something about protection from the wind had continued to occupy his mind, but at around that time he had finally been able to breathe a little sigh of relief. A glance at the entries for that October help confirm this:
Camellia 2 From Ozawa’s
Persimmon 1 From Ozawa’s
Maple 1 From Ozawa’s
Ozawa was the name of a gardener Ōura had gotten to know that spring. Like the rice merchant, he was a man who had lived here at the foot of the Tama Hills all his life, and he had the same easygoing manner. For the moment, he need not be introduced further.
Camellias and persimmons and maples can all reach a considerable size if permitted to grow, so these plantings could certainly have been part of a windbreak. But Ōura had chosen the persimmon tree in anticipation of the sweet fruit it would produce, as a replacement for the bountiful tree that the entire family so regretted leaving behind at the old house. Ever since their move, they had all shared the wish to someday have a persimmon tree in their yard again.
The camellias and maple were selected for their ornamental appeal. They stood as the clearest evidence that Ōura had emerged from his stubborn and single-minded obsession with trees that could fend off the blustering wind, and that his heart finally had room for aesthetic sensibilities to assert themselves once again.
This did not mean that he believed planting twelve chinquapins (after endlessly vacillating between live oaks and chinquapins, he had ultimately settled on the latter) and three Himalayan cedars around the house immediately gave them all the protection they needed. Perhaps in five years or so the trees would grow to a reasonably reassuring size, but there was no guarantee that a typhoon would not strike in the meantime. And nobody could tell beforehand what might happen if a typhoon did come their way.
Bush clover 3 From the mountainside
Of the plants thus recorded in Yasuo’s handwriting, the cluster on the far left was now in full bloom. Coming up close, Ōura could see several bees busily dodging in and out among the branches.
So they get nectar from bush clover, too, he thought as he watched them buzzing about.
two END AND BEGINNING
“OH, HERE IT IS!” ŌURA HEARD HIS wife say in the other room. “It’s called ‘sea tigertail.’”
“Weird name!”
“Never mind that. Hurry up and write it down.”
“Okay.” This voice belonged to Shōjirō, the third-grade boy. “Se-a ti-ger,” he sounded out as he wrote.
“Not