From that very instant, I started to have imaginations that Mr Hiroki would accept me.
Sometimes I neglect how depressed I felt during this period. I assume I would have gripped at anything that gave me solace.
Always when I felt anxious, I found my mind withdrawing to the same picture of my mother, long before she ever started grunting in the mornings from the injuries inside her.
I was four years old, at the Obon carnival in our town, the moment of the year when we welcomed back the essence of the dead.
After limited evenings of processions in the cemetery, and fires outside the doors of the houses to navigate the spirits home, we assembled on the carnival's last night at our Shinto shrine, which prevailed on rocks dismissing the inlet.
Just inside the threshold of the shrine was a terrace, adorned that evening with coloured paper lanterns strung on ropes between the hedges. My mother and I paraded together for a while with the rest of the locals, to the music of drums and a flute; but finally, I started to feel weary and she carried me in her lap at the verge of the clearing.
Unexpectedly the breeze came up off the hills and one of the lamps caught fire. We saw the fire burn through the rope, and the lamp came floating down until the breeze caught it again and tossed it through the air right toward us with a track of gold dust blazing into the sky.
The ball of fire appeared to resolve on the ground, but then my mom and I gazed as it rose up on the widespread of the wind, drifting upright for us. I felt my mother discharge me, and then all at once, she flung her arms into the fire to disperse it.
For some seconds we were both awash in fires and blazes, but then the crumbs of fire fluttered into the trees and burned out, and no one—not even my mother—was hurt.
A week or so, when my imagination of adoption had had plenty of time to mature, I came home one afternoon to find Mr Hiroki crouching across from my father at the small table in our house.
I realized they were discussing something crucial because they did not even see me when I walked into our entrance. I stood there to listen to them.
"So, Masumi, what do you speculate of my proposal?"
"I don't know, sir," said my father.
"I can not imagine the girls residing anywhere else."
"I understand, but they would be much better off, and so would you. Just see to it they come down to the town tomorrow at noon."
At this, Mr Hiroki stood to evacuate. I feigned I was just entering so we would encounter at the door.
"I was speaking with your father about you, Akemi-chan," he told me.
"I live across the cliff in the town of Senzuru. It is larger than Yoroido. I think you would like it. Why don't you and Yukiko-san come there hereafter? You will discern my home and meet my small daughter. Probably you will stay the night? Just one night, you know; and then I will carry you back to your residence again. How would that be?"
I said it would be very delightful. And I did my best to feign no one had proposed anything out of the common to me. But in my head, it was as though an eruption had transpired. My emotions were in specks I could barely chunk together.
It was genuine that a part of me wished desperately to be adopted by Mr Hiroki after my mother deceased, but another portion of me was very much scared. I felt embarrassed for even visualizing I might live somewhere outside my tipsy home.
After Mr Hiroki had left, I attempted to involve myself in the kitchen, but I felt a little like Yukiko, for I could barely see the stuff before me.
I don't know how much time expired. To an extent, I heard my father making a sniffling noise, which I took to be sobbing and which made my face burn with guilt.
When I finally forced myself to look his way, I saw him with his hands already intertwined up in one of his fishing nets, but standing at the threshold directing into the back room, where my mom lay in the broad sun with the blanket stuck to her like surface.
The following day, in preparation for meeting Mr Hiroki in the village, I washed my filthy ankles and moistened for a while in our bath, which had once been the boiler room from an old steam device someone had relinquished in our village; the lid had been sawed off and the inner lined with wood.
I sat a long while watching out the sea and groping very dominant, for I was about to discern something of the globe outside our small village for the first time in my life.
When Yukiko and I arrived at the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, we saw the fishermen unpacking their traps at the wharf. My father was among them, pulling fish with his bony hands and lowering them into baskets.
At one point he glanced toward me and Yukiko, and then thereafter dabbed his face on the sleeve of his shirt. Somehow his outlines looked more enormous to me than normal. The men took the vast baskets to Mr Hiroki's horse-drawn carriage and organized them in the back.
I climbed up on the reel to scrutinize. Mainly, the fish gazed out with glassy eyes, but every so continually one would roll its mouth, which appeared to me like a little yell. I began to soothe them by saying:
"You are going to the town of Senzuru, small fishies! Everything will be okay."
I did not see what interest it would do to divulge to them the reality. To the extent, Mr Hiroki came out into the parkway and notified
Yukiko and I ascend onto the bench of the carriage with him.
I sat in the middle, near enough to feel the texture of Mr Hiroki's kimono against my hand. I could not help flushing at this. Yukiko was staring right at me, but she did not appear to see anything and wore her usual unsteady mood.
I finished much of the journey looking back at the fish as they swashed around in their baskets. When we climbed up over the cliff leaving Yoroido, the wheel traversed a rock and the carriage bent to one side quite abruptly.
One of the sea basses was booted and slammed the mud so rough it was jerked back to life. To watch it flopping and gasping was more than I could tolerate. I turned away around with tears in my eyes, and though I struggled to conceal them from Mr Hiroki, he saw them anyway.
After he had fetched the fish and we were on our route again, he inquired me what was the matter.
"The impoverished fish!" I said.
"You are like my wife. They are mainly dead when she sees them, but if she has to toast a crab, or anything else still breathing, she accumulates teary-eyed and sings to them."
Mr Hiroki enlightened me with a little song—virtually a kind of prayer—that I believed his wife had formulated. She sang it for crabs, but we amended the words for the fish:
Little bass, oh little bass!
Speed yourself to Buddhahood!
Then he enlightened me to another song, a lullaby I had never listened to before. We vocalized it to a flounder in the back lying in a low basket by itself, with its two button-eyes on the side of its skull changing positions.
Take a nap, you nice flounder! When all are sleeping—
Even the birds and the sheep
In the terraces and the fields—
The stars this twilight
Will spill their golden light From the window.