Free The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto Page B

thought. I don’t want to be part of the gloominess these not-normal people exude .
    Mino peered at me, grinning, as these thoughts ran through my mind.
    And all at once I felt content, as if I had an angel watching over me. I didn’t even feel that I had to hide what I was thinking. His eyes were so clear it seemed as though all the bad bits of my personality were being swept away, just like that.
    “What about Chii?” Nakajima asked. “How’s she doing?”
    “She’s inside. Come on in,” Mino said. “Sorry it’s so cramped and dirty.”
    Nakajima and I nodded to each other and went inside.
    The inside of the house was as plain and tidy as a European country cottage, the kind you see in movies.
    As far as I could tell, the first floor only had a kitchen, a toilet, and a bath. Mino led the way into the kitchen, and after we had each picked a chair we thought we could sit in from the mismatched group around the table, we gingerly sat down. The table was perfectly square, like an oversized school desk.
    “I used to live here with my mother,” Nakajima said. “It was like camping, like in an old French film—we didn’t have much, but every day we would gather up whatever we could find, and we lived like that, very quietly. Always looking at the lake.”
    “Wow,” I said.
    “It was hard sometimes, but in retrospect I had a lot of fun.” Nakajima had gotten a bit hyper, and his tone was cheerful. “The house is so small, we used to go on walks every day. Just wandering around the lake. Sometimes we’d go out in a boat, too. We felt better each day. People look so beautiful when their expressions show that they know they have a future. You couldn’t help seeing how my mother was reviving—it was like watching the mountains turn green, the trees growing new leaves. I remember it so clearly, all that, how happy it made me.”
    Tears filled Nakajima’s eyes as he spoke.
    The whole house was still. Outside the window there was nothing but the lake, hazy in the early spring.
    To me, it was a frighteningly desolate scene.
    Mino brought water to a boil over a low flame, and carefully made tea.
    I took a sip. A delicate fragrance filled my mouth. This was the most delicious black tea I had ever drunk in my life.
    When I told Mino this, he fidgeted shyly.
    “The springs here are good for tea,” he said. “I go and get water every day, just for tea.”
    No way, it can’t just be the water , I thought. It’s because this is all he has, in this circumscribed world. Looking out at the lake, drinking good tea. That’s his only luxury.
    And what an enormous luxury that is. He’s created a world for himself that no one else can interfere with, I thought. A world free from all external impositions.
    Mino’s bearing was sufficiently dignified to expunge the last traces of a middle-aged-lady-poking-her-nose-into-everything sort of sympathy that had managed, in some mysterious way, to keep smoldering inside me, until then.
    Good tea is eloquent enough, it turns out, to change a person’s mind.
    Nakajima and Mino exchanged various bits of gossip for a while, giddy as two schoolboys. I half listened, staring out at the lake. Sometimes there were waves, and for a second it would look very cold, and then it went back to being a mirror … I watched the water near the shore, smooth as a piece of fine cloth, through the glass.
    “Actually, I had a question I wanted to ask Chii. It’s not a big deal, though, if she’s in bed,” Nakajima said.
    “What are you talking about?” Mino replied. “She’s always asleep. Let’s go see her.”
    Then, for a long moment, he peered at me. And then he spoke.
    “You see, Chii, my younger sister, has been bedridden for ages. She’s not exactly sick, but her liver and kidneys aren’t in good shape, so she doesn’t have much energy—it’s hard for her to move around. So she really is always in bed. Even when she gets up to go to the bathroom, she has to sort of slide along the