Read The Sweetest Fruits online

Chapters (16)

Oman’s Father and Mother were said to be poor in girls, in that there were five daughters and no son. Oman, the youngest, was the last of the sisters to work outside of the house. She never attended a day of school nor did any of her sisters. Foster Grandmother, when she was still with us, used to remind me that Oman’s Father belonged to the foot-soldier class. “Their kind lived south of the Ōhashi River,” foster Grandmother said. “Only the true samurai houses, the Shiomi, Koizumi, Inagaki among them, were allowed to live within the shadows of Matsue Castle,” she declared.

We all live on the same lane now.

I never disrespected foster Grandmother by stating this truth aloud, for it should have been evident to her when she was alive.

Oman, catching the look between foster Mother and me, added that Onobu, another of the inn’s maids, shared the workload with her at the garden pavilion. “Herun-san feels sorry for Onobu because of her own bad eye,” Oman explained, as she again touched her kimono. “He even gave the landlady Tsune money to take Onobu to a modern doctor, but the landlady kept it instead. When Onobu’s eye showed no improvement, Nishida-san asked the landlady what had happened to Herun-san’s money, and she lied to the head teacher’s face.”

“The modern doctor could do nothing for Onobu, as her eye is a curse, the landlady Tsune told Nishida-san,” Oman said. “The following week the head teacher informed the Tomitaya that Herun-san would be leaving,” she added.

Oman was usually more discreet about the topic, referring to the blind eye only as Herun-san’s “condition.” The newspapers had written about it but only in passing. An article had noted that Herun-san’s students thought him a heroic figure because he sometimes wore an eye patch when teaching. He must have lost the eye in a battle or a duel, these students speculated.

I was grateful to Tsune for speaking so bluntly about your left eye, Yakumo. As with the paper lanterns at Matsue Castle, I could imagine the storm cloud. When I saw it in person, I thought of the moment before the summer rains, a natural occurrence, and that thought kept me calm as I stood before you, as your right eye appraised me, as the thick disk of glass that you held up to it magnified the unblinking orb.