Free The Laws of Evening: Stories by Mary Yukari Waters

like that,” Hanae often tells her friends at the public bathhouse, “I’d be senile by now, without a doubt.” Sound connects her to life. This evening, she hears the melancholy toohfu, tofu-tofu of the tofu vendor’s horn and thinks, as usual, Aaa, right now people are cooking supper. Later on tonight, when she lays out her futon, it will comfort her to hear old Mr. Kishi plucking away at his shamisen over in Murasaki Alley and always stumbling at the same point in the score.
    A doctor on the NHK show once said that the quality of your life depends upon what links you maintain to life-enhancing forces.
    Hanae’s links are not merely auditory. Aside from the bathhouse, there are her daily strolls through the open-air market as well as her children’s occasional visits. And there is the world of the past with all its happy memories, deliberately culled to keep down the bad hormones. There is the world of the dead, with which Hanae connects morning and evening through prayers at the family altar. There is the hope of longevity, which stimulates her each day when she turns to the NHK channel; her television is placed right next to the family altar (on a lower stand, of course, as is fitting). And there is her tiny garden, which for decades has been a source of pleasure and solace.
    Daigo was the opposite, always shutting himself up like that in his dark office. Shortly before his diagnosis, back when Hanae was first discovering the health show, he had sighed and asked, “Why bother watching that? You know we’re all going to die anyway.” Now, knowing science as she does, she feels his cancer makes sense—he had refused to embrace those very links that might have kept him alive. In his last days, delirious from morphine, he had cried out, “There is no god! Anywhere!” and sobbed hoarsely for a minute or two until his drugged mind drifted off somewhere else. She cannot forget that. There is a lesson for her there.
    More and more now, Hanae is on the lookout for mystical life-enhancing forces all around her. The precursors to the Shinto religion were shamans who spent the majority of their waking hours invoking, and revering, magical powers. They called those powers kami, that strange wisdom that presides over yeast rising or a fetus unfurling. The shamans believed everything was inhabited by kami —pine trees, rocks, a cooking fire, a handful of rice. She considers this now, slowly chewing her supper at the low table: innumerable vitamins and minerals and calories in each mouthful, mysteriously programmed to empower different parts of her body and mind. They can even join forces with other nutrients, as in the case of vitamin C and iron, for increased effectiveness. The NHK doctors, by validating such fantastic possibilities, have exposed her to a new realm of wonders. Aaa, they too are priests in their own right! Afterwards, waiting for sleep under her futon, Hanae ponders what she has learned from the show: that her body will repair itself as she lies here unconscious, digesting leftover food and knitting back together the minute muscle fibers torn during movement; that her nervous system, through cycles of dreams, will resolve emotion and memory into increasingly healthy patterns; each cell knowing, without her intervention, exactly what to do.
     
    During the hot weather, Hanae had weeded and watered her garden right after breakfast, when the air was cool and her heart still buoyant from the ballroom music. Now that autumn is here, she waits till after lunch, when it is warmer. The smell of burning leaves wafts through the pale midday light of the alley. She has placed her portable radio–cassette player on the edge of the veranda, and koto music, turned to low volume, is trickling into the garden where she works.
    Hanae’s tall fluffy chrysanthemums are in full bloom, white and yellow and lavender, each flower as big as her hand. Most of the other flowers have gone the way of summer. The garden has a