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

said curtly. She was referring to the rationed tea she had served at lunch, as well as to a certain fish cake that had been purchased, after two hours of waiting in line, for their family dinner.
    In a dispassionate voice, Saburo’s father explained that the amount of energy you have is limited, just like your food, and that when you love a sick person you have to make the choice of either using up that energy on tears or else saving it for constructive actions such as changing bedpans and spoon-feeding and giving sponge baths. “In the long run, which would help your uncle more?” he asked.
    Saburo supposed the constructive actions would.
    “That’s right,” his father said.
    Saburo’s father had not fought in the war. He was barred from service because of his glaucoma, which was discovered during his military recruiting exam. So he stayed home while the war claimed the lives of his best friend, then his cousin, and last of all his brother-in-law Kotai. Growing up, all Saburo understood of glaucoma was that it consisted of some sort of elevated pressure within the eye. “Your father has to keep calm,” was his mother’s constant refrain. “Don’t you dare upset him, or his eye pressure will go up.” It seemed to young Saburo that this condition was in some insidious way a result of the war, not unlike those radioactive poisons pulsing within survivors from Hiroshima.
    At Uncle Kotai’s funeral Saburo had overheard a woman say, “At least in his short life he was never thwarted.” He understood later that Uncle, the babied youngest son of a wealthy family, had no profession save those of martial arts champion and dandy. He drank too often, laughed too loudly, used too much hair pomade. Saburo had very few memories of him or of their former wealth, which had been lost in the Tenkan bombing, forcing Saburo’s family to move into the merchant district. He did recall that once when he had gotten a nosebleed as a little boy, Uncle Kotai stopped it instantly by giving a hard chop with the side of his hand to a specific vertebra on his nape. “Aaa, be careful!” Saburo’s mother had wailed, watching with both hands pressed to her mouth. Uncle Kotai used another trick when Saburo tried to tag along on one of his outings. “Let me come, I want to go too!” he had demanded, squatting at his uncle’s feet and clutching fistfuls of his long yukata . With a rumble of amusement, Uncle Kotai reached down to press some secret nerve between thumb and forefinger, and Saburo’s fists miraculously unclenched.
    Seen across the gulf of the war that separated them, this lost uncle held for young Saburo all the magic of a lost era, a magic emanating from the smallest of details: a photograph of Uncle and his well-dressed friends sitting around a heavily laden banquet table, heads thrown back in laughter, or his mother’s nostalgic recounting of Uncle’s outrageous pranks. The aura of careless abundance often wafted up around him, faint and nebulous. Yet running through this wonder was a hard thread of moral disapproval. Uncle had it coming. Saburo had overheard his mother telling a neighbor that Uncle Kotai had been born in the year of the rooster. Roosters, as Saburo knew, finished their crowing early in the day.

    When Saburo joined the track and field team in his first year at Bukkyo High School, the sport was enjoying a popularity it had not known before the war. At the time, few schools could afford baseball bats or gymnastic equipment. And there was something in the simplicity of the sport—the straight path to the goal, the dramatic finish line—that stirred the community to yells and often tears. On Sundays entire families came outdoors to cheer, thermoses of cold wheat tea slung across their chests. They sat on woven mats and munched on rice balls, roasted potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and pickled shoots of fuki gathered up in the hills.
    “So what distance are you running?” Saburo’s father asked at the dinner