With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have put together a good balance and developed children with the suitable agreement of components.
I am sure it was a wonder to them that they ended up with one of each. For it was not just that I resembled my mom and had even inherited her unique eyes; my sister, Yukiko, was as greatly like my father as anyone could be.
Yukiko was six years older than me, and of course, being the senior, she could do things I could not do. But Yukiko had an amazing personality of performing everything in a way that looked like a complete disaster.
For instance, if you wanted her to pour a plate of soup from a pot on the stove, she would get the chore worked out, but in a way that looked like she had poured it into the plate just by chance.
One time she even scrape herself with a fish, and I don't imply with a knife she was wielding to tidy up a fish. She was holding a fish draped in paper up the hill from the town when it slipped out and fell against her leg seriously in a way as to slice her with one of its fins.
Our parents might have had additional children besides Yukiko and me, especially since my father yearned for a boy to fish with him. But when I was seven my mom grew sick with what was presumably bone cancer, though at the time I had no clue what was wrong.
Her only elude from distress was to sleep, which she started to do the way a cat does—which is to say, more or less frequent. As the months flew she napped most of the time and soon started to grumble whenever she was awake.
I noticed something in her was transforming rapidly, but because of so much water in her temperament, this did not seem problematic to me. Occasionally she grew pale in a matter of months but grew healthy again just as instantly.
But by the moment I was nine, the bones in her countenance had started to bulge, and she never earned weight again subsequently. I did not realize the water was dripping out of her because of her illness. Just as seaweed is generally moist, you see, but whirls brittle as it scorches, my mom was giving up more and more of her significance.
Then one afternoon I was squatting on the pitted floor of our dark front cottage, singing to a cricket I had found that morning when a voice yelled at the door:
"Oi! Open up! It's Dr Miura!"
Dr Miura came to our fishing town one time a week and had earned a juncture of walking up the hill to check on my mother ever since her ailment had begun.
My father was at the residence that day because a disastrous storm was coming. He sat in his normal place on the floor, with his two huge spider-like hands tangled up in a fishing net.
But he took a minute to indicate his eyes at me and lift one of his fingers. This meant he expected me to answer the door.
Dr Miura was a very significant man—or so we speculated in our village. He had studied in Tokyo and reportedly learned more Chinese symbols than anyone.
He was distant too arrogant to see a thing like me. When I unlocked the door for him, he slipped out of his shoes and strode right past me into the building.
"Why, Masumi-san," he whispered to my father, "I wish I had your life, out on the ocean fishing all day. How stunning! And then on harsh days you take a rest. I see your wife is still sleeping," he went on.
"What a pity. I thought I might scrutinize her."
"Oh?" said my father.
"I won't be back next week, you know. Maybe you might raise her for me?"
My father took time to separate his hands from the net, but finally, he stood.
"Akemi-chan," he mumbled to me, "get the doctor a cup of tea."
My name before now was Akemi. I would not be known by my Geigi name, Rika, until years later.
My father and the doctor went into the supplementary room, where my mom lay sleeping. I attempted to eavesdrop at the door, but I could heed only my mother's groaning and a trifle of what they said.
I immersed myself in making tea, and shortly the doctor came back out stroking his hands together and looking very stern. My father came to join him, and they sat together at the table in the centre of the room.
"The moment has come to explain something to you, Masumi- san," Dr Miura started.
"You need to have a chat with one of the women in the village. Mrs Yoshiro, perhaps. Ask her to make a pleasant new dress for your wife."
"I have not the money, Doctor," my father said.
"We have all grown poorer recently. I know what you are saying. But you owe it to your wife. She should not decease in that wore robe she is wearing."
"So she is going to die soon?"
"A few more weeks, probably. She is in severe pain. Death will discharge her."
After this, I could not understand their voices any longer; for in my ears I heard a sound like a bird's wings flapping in terror. Probably it was my heart, I don't know.
But if you have ever seen a bird caged inside the huge hall of a temple, looking for some means out, well, that was how my mind was responding. It had never appeared to me that my mother would not just go on being sick.
I won't say I had never pondered what might ensue if she should die; I did mull over it, in the same way, I contemplated what might occur if our cabin were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could scarcely be life after such an event.
"I believe I would die first," my father was saying.
"You are an old man, Masumi-san. But your fitness is good. You might have four or five years. I will leave you some more of those medications for your wife. You can give them to her two at a duration if you want to."
They discussed the medications a bit longer, and then Dr Miura left. My father went on relaxing for a long while in stillness, with his back to me.
He donned no shirt but only his loose-fitting skin; the more I stared at him, the more he started to appear like just a weird arrangement of shapes and fabrics. His backbone was a path of knobs.
His head, with its discoloured splotches, might have been a wounded fruit. His arms were stakes covered in old leather, slinging from two lumps. If my mother died, how could I continue living in the house with him? I did not wish to be away from him; but whether he was there or not, the house would be just as deserted as when my mother had left it.
At last, my father uttered my name in a whisper. I went and squatted beside him.
"Something very crucial," he said.
His face was so much thicker than usual, with his eyes swirling around virtually as though he had lost composure with them. I thought he was fighting to tell me my mother would decease soon, but all he announced was:
"Go down to the village. Fetch back some incense for the altar."
Our small Buddhist altar lay on an old chest beside the foyer to the kitchen; it was the only thing of significance in our tipsy house.
In front of a jagged carving of Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise stood portable black mortuary slabs bearing the Buddhist names of our deceased forefathers.
"But, Father . . . was there not anything else?"
I wished he would answer back, but he only made an indication with his hand that meant for me to leave.