Chapter 1: The Shape of a Normal Morning
The rope creaked.
Rei caught the bucket before it could swing, poured the water into his carrying vessel, and started up the slope.
Cold morning. The mist was still on the eastern ridge. Birds calling somewhere in the cedar grove. He listened to them without slowing down.
Old Hajime's house sat at the top of the eastern path. The door opened before Rei reached it. Hajime always heard him coming.
He stood in the frame with his hands tucked into his sleeves. "You're early."
Rei set the vessel down just inside the entryway and nodded.
"Hmph." Hajime looked at the water level. Then at Rei. "Birds singing this morning? The mountain ones."
"Yes," Rei said.
"Thought so. The big grey cedar was loud before I was even up." He clicked his tongue. "Means cold weather coming."
Rei waited.
"Put the empty bucket by the step. For when I do the washing."
Rei put it by the step.
"Go on, then."
He went.
He drew a second bucket on the way back and filled the community basin at the end of the main path. A big cedar vessel that everyone used. He refilled it when it ran low. Nobody had asked him to.
He could see the village waking up from there. Smoke from three chimneys. A woman shaking out a cloth on the far side of the road. Somewhere nearby, a blade being sharpened against a stone, slow and steady.
'Third morning this week,' he thought. 'Same blade.'
He rolled his sleeves down against the cold and went home.
The loom was running when he got there. He could hear it through the wall.
The rice ball was already waiting on the tray inside the entryway. He took off his sandals, picked it up, and sat on the step between the entryway and the main room. The loom kept going.
"You went to Hajime's." His mother didn't look up from the fabric. Deep blue, a complicated border near the edge. "Your sandals aren't muddy yet, so you took the east path."
"He can't manage the walk," Rei said.
"I know he can't." The loom ran for a moment. "You could have told him that yesterday, before he ran out entirely."
Rei ate.
"How's his knee?"
"About the same."
"Mm." More passes of the shuttle. She was humming — short, broken notes that stopped when the pattern needed her attention and started up again when it didn't. "Eat properly at midday. You forget."
"I won't forget."
"You always say that."
"I won't forget today."
She didn't answer. The loom kept running.
At some point she looked up — a quick check, a second's worth — and then back to the threads.
"Rei-chan."
"Mm?"
"Nothing. Just checking."
He stayed a little longer, watching her hands work. Then he got up and went out.
In his pocket: a fold of cloth with a handful of grain.
The cedar grove sat east of the village. Older trees, the air colder under the canopy. He'd been coming here since he was small enough to trip over the root systems. He sat on the largest root and opened the cloth on his knee.
They came in order.
The Japanese tits first, bold and quick, taking grain from the edge of the cloth. Then the sparrows — a loose bunch that came and went, retreating, returning.
Then the warbler.
It always came last. Small, grey-brown, nothing special to look at. He had been coming here two years before it stepped onto his palm the first time. It landed at the base of his thumb. Lighter than it looked. It pecked sideways, paused, looked at him with one bright eye, then kept eating.
He didn't have a name for it. He knew its song. Three notes, the middle one carrying something he couldn't name exactly but would recognize anywhere.
'Same branch after,' he thought. 'Third from the left.'
When the cloth was empty, the warbler looked at him once more. Then it was gone. The branch shook once and went still.
He put the cloth back in his pocket and sat for another few minutes before he left.
By midday he was on the far end of the village, moving timber with Hideo the carpenter and Hideo's eldest son, Daisuke.
The work was simple. Lift, carry, set. Hideo worked in silence. Rei liked that about him.
Daisuke was different.
"So I get there," Daisuke said, not breaking his grip on the beam, "and the merchant on the east road — the one with the bad eye — he tells me the rope price went up. I said, what do you mean it went up? He says there was a shortage. From the south somewhere."
They set the beam down. Daisuke kept going.
"Rope," he said. "A shortage in rope. I said, where'd the shortage come from? He says he doesn't know, it's just what he was told. So I said, what am I supposed to do with that? And he actually shrugs at me. Shrugs."
Rei picked up his water jar. Drank. Set it back down.
"In the end I bought the rope." Daisuke picked up his end again. "What else are you going to do? But I said to him before I left, I said — I'm going to remember this."
'He's been on this since the first beam,' Rei thought. 'That's at least thirty minutes.'
"Daisuke," Hideo said.
"I know, I know. I'm working." He lifted. "I'm just saying. Rope."
They moved another beam.
"My wife thinks I should complain to the market association," Daisuke continued. "I said, what's the market association going to do about rope prices—"
Rei stopped listening.
He had been mid-reach for the next beam when something made him go still. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked east.
The grove was quiet.
Not a lull between calls. Quiet — the kind where nothing is there.
"—and the thing is, even if they could do something—"
Rei looked at the grove directly. Trees standing where they always stood. The canopy moving a little at the top.
No birds.
"Something wrong?" Daisuke had noticed him stop.
"No," Rei said.
He kept looking.
The grove gave nothing back.
He went back to work. But he kept watching east.
The dogs were next.
Hideo's neighbor kept three mountain dogs. Thick-furred, always sprawled across the path. Rei passed them twice a day and they barely opened their eyes at him.
They were at the doorstep now. All three pressed together, touching side to side. Ears flat. Eyes open.
One of them looked at Rei as he passed. Held his gaze.
He kept walking.
The cattle were at the far fence.
Fujioka's pen sat up the slope. Rei glanced up as he passed. Every animal was pushed against the back fence, away from the gate, away from the path. One of them was breathing fast — he could hear it from fifteen meters out. All of them facing the same direction.
East. Toward the mountain.
He stood at the fence for a moment. None of them looked at him.
He walked home.
He told himself it was nothing. He kept telling himself.
Wood splitting a few houses over. A woman calling her daughter in. The smell of pine smoke. Kids shouting at the far end of the road.
Normal. All of it.
At the main junction he stopped and looked east one more time.
Dark between the trees. Quiet.
He was ten years old. Birds moved around in a grove all the time. Dogs pressed together in autumn. Cattle were skittish animals.
He almost believed it. He went home.
The flat stone outside their door sat on the west side of the house, where it caught the last afternoon light. Rei ended up there most evenings without deciding to.
The sky was red.
He sat with it anyway, hands on his knees, the cold settling into the back of his neck. The red deepened, and then the ridge went black against dark blue. One star appeared. The sounds of the village shifted into evening — fewer voices, more fire crackle.
"Rei-chan."
His mother's voice through the screen.
He got up and went in.
The broth smelled of ginger and daikon and dried matsutake — the last of the fall stores. Steam off the pot. The lamp already lit.
His father came in from the shed a few minutes later, sandals left crooked by the door. His mother looked at the sandals.
"The south joint on the new frame is going to shift," his father said, washing his hands. "I told Hideo. He knows, he just doesn't want to redo the cut."
"Why not?" His mother set bowls on the table.
"He says it'll be fine once it sets."
"Will it?"
"No."
She served. She gave Rei more mushroom than the others. She did this when she thought he wasn't paying attention.
His father picked up his bowl. "He used green wood. You can see it in the grain. I don't know what he was thinking."
"He's careful with costs," his mother said.
"There's careful with costs and there's making the same mistake twice." He ate. "The frame'll shift by spring, then he'll have to redo it anyway. Cost him more in the end."
"Did you tell him that?"
"I told him the joint would shift."
"That's not the same thing."
His father looked up. Then back at his bowl. "No. I suppose it isn't."
Rei ate. The broth was very good.
He thought about the grove once, about the silence, about where the warbler had gone. Then the thought left.
His mother laughed at something his father said — short, quick, surprised-sounding. The sound moved around the small yellow room.
'The broth is good tonight,' he thought.
He ate. Outside the window, the mountain was dark and still.
The lamp burned steady.