Free The Laws of Evening: Stories by Mary Yukari Waters Page A

restrained, ascetic quality; gone is that wanton, wasteful lushness of summer growth. A new arum lily, a mere bud, has poked up amidst the browning, stiffening leaves, its waxy white petals still as fresh and firm as those of summer.
    Freshly turned soil, according to a recent medical study, gives off beneficial minerals that, if regularly touched and inhaled, significantly strengthen one’s immune system. This new bit of knowledge pleases Hanae immensely. She weeds and waters, solemnly inhaling the smoke-scented, beneficial minerals from the earth and fresh oxygen from her plants. She exhales carbon dioxide, which in turn nourishes the plants. Shafts of sunlight stream through the red maple leaves and press upon the back of her neck like warm fingers, infusing her body with vitamin D, which will strengthen her bones in concert with the calcium from today’s lunch. Her stomach, meanwhile, is still digesting her meal—eleven different varieties of food—and vitamins are flowing through her digestive tract, being sorted and chemically altered and absorbed.
    She recalls an educational television show in which a string of highly magnified cells bobbed slowly through the capillary of a leaf, as if in a trance.
    This particular melody—reedy, punctuated by precise pluckings of the koto—is quite lovely. It evokes the spirit-summoning music of a shrine rite. Each cell of the music goes bobbing through the capillaries of her own mind, floating in a stream of good hormones. The melody seems to arise quite naturally from this somnolent afternoon, instead of from the cassette player on the veranda.
    As a girl, Hanae used to take lessons in koto. But only now, especially in this last month or so, has she begun truly basking in its elegance and profundity. She admires the way each note has space in which to breathe, to reverberate within the mind, acting as syncopation to the mute mystery of things, as bird-song underscores the silence of a forest. Nothing can approach koto; certainly not Western music that, for all its dramatic surging and crashing (like that tiresome Beethoven, who gives her a headache), captures but life’s surface, the turbulence of waves above a deep sea.
    Hanae senses all this fleetingly, immersed beneath the surface of past sorrows thrashing above her with muffled sound. She senses with a certain awe how perfectly the music’s pace matches that of the afternoon, and of digestion: the dappled leaf shadows moving over the earth like dark cells, the entirety of this garden harmonizing and fusing—plants, with carbon dioxide and sunlight; soil, with water from her plastic can; herself, with all the kami that have only now begun revealing themselves but have always existed, shifting and rotating in slow timeless patterns, like dancers of a classical age.
    In the end, being alive is what matters.

Rationing
    S ABURO’S FATHER belonged to that generation which, having survived the war, rebuilt Japan from ashes, distilling defeat and loss into a single-minded focus with which they erected cities and industries and personal lives. Reflecting on this as an adult, Saburo felt it accounted at least partially for his father’s stoicism. This was conjecture, of course. When Japan surrendered he had been only six, too young to remember what his father was like in peacetime.
    Saburo’s memories of the surrender included his uncle Kotai being brought home, delirious with hepatitic fever, from Micronesia. He lived for only a few weeks, unconscious the entire time and nursed round the clock by Saburo’s parents. One of the visitors to their home was Uncle Kotai’s sweetheart, a pretty girl of nineteen on whom Saburo had a crush. She wiped away her tears with a handkerchief patterned with cherry blossoms and announced brokenly that her life was now over. Saburo was impressed. “Big Sister really loves Uncle, ne!” he said later that day to his parents at dinner.
    “The grief didn’t hurt her appetite,” his mother