Yoshiharu decided to tear down the storage shed in his backyard. While he sorted out its contents in preparation, he found the equipment he had used when he was a member of the Mountaineering Club at his college. In his junior year, Kayo, who would become his future wife, joined the club. Attracted to Misako, who joined at the same time, Yoshiharu would go to the movies and stroll around Oze National Park with the two girls. For one reason or another, however, he ended up marrying Kayo. Judging from the New Year's card Misako sent out every year, she was apparently still single. "I wonder how things would have turned out if I had married Misako?" Such a thought suddenly came to Yoshiharu and he smiled.
He found a golf bag while he was cleaning out the back of the shed. He pulled out an iron and took a swing. Then a surge of sharp pain ran down his back. "It's a good thing I quit playing," he mumbled to himself.
He began golf to socialize with his boss. He remembered he had bought the golf set on the advice of his boss and an expensive membership while his wife complained that he was thoughtless about their household budget. When his boss fell ill, Yoshiharu lost his support and a means to climb the corporate ladder. In the spring of that year, he had retired after having worked as a subsection chief for what seemed like eternity while finding solace in golf, which had become his hobby. If he had associated himself with a different superior, he would have been promoted to manager, and he might have landed a cushy job at a subcontractor by then.
He found a tape recorder among the drawings and crafts his children made when they were small in a wooden box in the back of the shed. There was a cassette tape inside. When he plugged the tape recorder into the outlet near the entrance and played the tape, he heard his son and daughter, who were kindergarteners, sing, vying for the microphone. His children had become independent and left home.
"They had cute voices back then. Come to think of it, my daughter said she wanted to learn ballet, but I forced her to go to cram school instead," he said to himself as he listened to his daughter sing on the tape.
His son liked baseball and wanted to go to a private high school known for its great baseball program, but Yoshiharu convinced him that he could still play at a local regular high school. He found his son's glove and metal bat covered with dust. His son had hit a home run only once with this bat.
Yoshiharu remembered his son thought this bat had brought him good luck. "He struck out most of the time after that," he said to himself, immersed in those distant memories.
When Yoshiharu had finished carrying the junk he had found in the shed to the incineration plant in town, he began to dismantle the shed. It came down more easily than he had expected. When a dealer removed the waste material, an empty plot of about three tsubo was revealed.
"Let's make a flower bed here," Kayo said when she came home from her part-time job.
"What will you plant?" he asked in a listless tone.
"What do you want to plant?" Kayo asked.
"But flowers don't interest me."
"That's beside the point. We have to turn it into a flower bed no matter what," Kayo said forcefully. "Summer flowers are in season, aren't they?"
In high spirits, Kayo went out to a flower market nearby. Many seedlings were lined up in the shop. Marigolds, petunias, surfinias, salvias, impatiens, Sunpatiens. She pictured in her mind a flower bed that had been in the kindergarten her children had attended.
When Kayo got home, the spot where the shed had once stood was neatly leveled. She arranged the flowers she had bought in the flower bed. She formed a border with bright yellow melampodiums and planted orange marigolds in a circle. After finishing planting sunflowers in the back, she let out a sigh. "I wonder if I should have planted begonias instead." After a while, she mumbled, "Sunpatiens may have been better here." Then she gave out another sigh.
On hearing this, Yoshiharu said in a mumble, "Now that you have planted them already, you'll just need to give them good care and enjoy them. What you chose to plant isn't important. What matters is how you make them bloom."
"It sounds like you're talking about you marrying me," Kayo said and laughed. Hearing her words, Yoshiharu suddenly recalled Misako's face and saw her in his imagination. Even so, he muttered to himself, "Kayo turned out to be the right choice for me."
Yoshiro Takayasu lives in Togane, Chiba, where he edits Village Tsushin. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Mukashi mukashi (1982) and Jigenkyo (1987). In the US, Toshiya Kamei has published English translations of his fiction in The Broken Plate, The Dirty Goat, Gargoyle Magazine, Metamorphoses, and Nebo, among others.
