“Uncle Ryu!”

Kaninohara’s daughter slammed into Ryuuta’s back, embracing him from behind. He laughed and turned, patting her on the head as her parents approached on the walkway. The woman and girl were wearing lightly designed kimonos, whereas the men wore jinbei. The festival goers around them made a part in the crowd while they spoke. 

“It’s rare to see you out of the house Sonochihama.” On the final word the craftsman made a thick cough into his sleeve. At which point his wife handed him a handkerchief. He took it with a smile and wiped his lips while greeting Ryuuta.

“Well, I can’t only get out for your abuse of my wallet.” 

“True enough, but a fireworks show? You surprise me.” 

The girl beneath them was spinning with a stick of green colored dango in hand. 

“Do you like my kimono Uncle Ryu?” 

“You look great, little Mitsu.” Ryuuta continued to pat her cute head. 

The four of them started to follow the crowd through the pathway between the numerous stalls. Vendors shouting and sweatily putting together various foodstuffs as they could in the rush of summer crowds. Occasionally Mitsuyo would pull Ryuuta this way or that, and he would bashfully buy the girl a snack at a stall only to be lightly scolded by the girl's mother for spoiling her. Still, the next time those little eyes looked up at him with the reflected light of paper lanterns he could not help but acquiesce. 

“Gendo didn’t come with you?” Kaninohara asked. 

“He’s in the capital making himself a nuisance. He has been quite shrewd about making connections there lately, but don’t ask me why.” 

“Probably to do with the war.” 

Ryuuta looked at Kaninohara with confusion. 

“What war?” 

“You don’t know? We’re invading China, the army began maneuvers earlier in the month. I heard about it from a friend from work, his brother is stationed in Shanghai. Some bridge battle, you know, army men do like to squabble over bridges. It’s full scale, we’re a nation at war, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at them.” He waved to his wife and daughter who had moved ahead of them to the front of the crowd.

“Do you think it will be bad?” 

The craftsman thought for a moment before shrugging. 

“How should I know? I’m not a soldier.”

The group reached the end of the causeway which was the entrance to the temple grounds whereon the festival was being held. Dozens more people rose the steep stairs of the hill to the temple grounds, trying to weave their way through the growing crowd that looked out over the field at the bottom. Somewhere over in that direction a group of men were organizing gunpowder and pigment, but were wisely hidden from direct sight. 

“When will they start?” Mitsuyo held Ryuuta’s sleeve tightly. 

“Be patient Mitsuyo.” Her mother tapped the girl's head with a finger sharply. 

“Oh it’s fine, I used to count the seconds until the first eruption. Here, see my watch little Mitsu?” Ryuuta took a knee to meet the little girl on her level as he exposed his left wrist. The hands of the watch ticked weakly from second to second, counting down to the moment of the explosions. 

“I don’t know how to read watches yet.” 

“Well that’s fine, we’re at the last minute now. If the men down there are really good, professional, sorts, they’ll let loose the first one right on the dot of eight o’clock. When that long hand touches the number twelve, see?” The second hand passed the six on the watch, and the final thirty seconds became fifteen, and then ten. 

“Count with me, look out there! Nine, eight, seven…” Ryuuta put a hand on her small back and aimed her to the clear night sky over Mishima. 

“Six…” The girl echoed with a toothy smile. “Five, four, three, two….” 

A pillar of light appeared from the treeline at the bottom of the hill half a kilometer from where they were standing. It rose to the stars fast and Mitsuyo’s eyes followed it just as quickly. Then with a great vibration that Ryuuta could feel deep in his chest, the light exploded into a galaxy of sparkling rays like a dandelion released by the wind. Every one a marvel itself, and as they fell Mitsuyo’s eyes darted between them, astonished anew by each glittering speck. Again, a pillar arose, and another, and another. Each one beating the sky with a new pattern of stars and lights. Each one reflected in the eyes of the little girl.

He sat on the stones and watched the fireworks through her childish laughter. 

Sonochihama Ryuuta jolted to consciousness. 

The idea perplexed him, because although his surroundings had only come into view in that moment, he had certainly been conscious before it. Rather, his mind was not present in the body that sat on the veranda that morning. He was certainly always looking out at the rain, but that his eyes absorbed the image of the outside world was without a doubt absurd. He had sat there to write in his journal, and before he knew it enough time had passed that the overcast sky and dry ground gave way to torrents of rain and a muddy walkway leading from his veranda to the street about ten meters away. 

As if trying to remember the moment one falls asleep, he could not recall when he had stopped paying attention to his surroundings. His mind simply existed before drifting somewhere outside himself. A dangerous pastime indeed. If he grew the habit of such behavior there was no telling how long he would become lost. One minute he would be as he was, and the next he may be a much older man. A minute terror crept from within his heart at the idea before the comedy of it drowned any malevolence. 

After Ryuuta had awoken from his non-sleep he noticed that his cat, whom he had yet to name, had curled in his lap. A trusting creature like that would be easily betrayed if he grabbed it in his hands and tossed it out into the rain. It was not a serious thought, but it was his first time owning a pet so the ease with which a simple habit of feeding it had ingratiated himself with the beast was a new sensation. He recalled his adoptive fathers second wife used to brag about how much the cats of the neighborhood loved her because she left fish bones out for them. Still, Ryuuta could not recall a single time any of the strays took more than a passing interest in their house. There was comedy there too, in the woman's delusion.

“Oi.” 

Ryuuta was again jolted from his absent minded daydreaming. 

Gendo had appeared under an umbrella and was taking off his brown leather shoes which had become caked with mud from the short path to the house. He left the umbrella open, tilted over the shoes on the stones just by the veranda to keep the interiors dry. He reached into the sleeve of his worn blue jinbei and pulled out a pack of cigarettes as he sat. 

“Oh, I didn’t see you come up.” 

“I guess you didn’t, but you saw me. Mind drifting with old age?” Gendo pulled a small pocket lighter from within the box and lit a stick of tobacco nested in his lips. He took a long drag while looking between Ryuuta and the cat. 

“More and more. I was thinking back to Akahatsuki, do you remember her?” 

“Yeah, she was the looker who married your adoptive father in, what, twenty-three?”

“I despise your qualification but yes, her. I was just thinking about her. Strange, I don’t think I’ve spared her memory a moment in almost ten years.” Gendo listened as he pulled the ash closer to his lips without a word. The words remained under the rain for several seconds without reply while the two men sat on the veranda. Even the cat remained frozen in place. 

A motorized three-wheel rickshaw puttered down the road and passed in front of his house with black smoke as the two high school girls sitting inside laughed. The scrawny, wrinkled driver wiped the rain from his hands with a tan rag as they passed, nodding to the two men as their eyes met. A moment later they were gone, laughter and driver drowned out by the gargling of the unhealthy rickshaw which, even then, was drowned at distance by the sound of the rain. 

“How’s the progress on your novel? I heard from Sunokaze that you haven’t been working lately.” Ryuuta let a deep breath leave his throat at his agent's interrogation. 

“No, I’ve been working well enough as ever, better even. It’s that young Sunokaze of yours that’s the trouble. He translates too fast, I can’t keep up with him. Can you believe that? I’ll give him a week’s worth of work and he’ll bring it back the next morning translated totally into English, with notes and suggestions for phrasing things better in the future. I may be a poor writer, but the true problem is that he’s just a spectacular translator.” 

Gendo let out a low, deep chested laugh and leaned one arm on his knees.

“Yes, he hasn’t matured very much has he? Already thirty and the boy can’t grow up. Meanwhile I’ve got you on my other side, growing old too quickly. How is it I’m the only one acting my age, eh? If that’s all then I suppose it’s fine to leave it be. The turtle and the hare may learn something from each other yet.”  

A pair of suited men under two umbrellas walked from one side and approached the gate of the house across the street. One man, the older of the two, was the owner or agent of the owner who was in the process of trying to sell the house. He was meek, with round spectacles, and he chased cats from the property between clients. The other man, the prospective buyer, was likewise thin but somehow more so in his demeanor. He bowed to the owner and smiled while waving his hands around in exaggerated expression of his sentiments and gratitude. It was not like Ryuuta to watch the street so deeply, or to be so cynical, but he thought that the new man was the most repugnant of those he had seen walk into that house, and so he prophesied, in his mind, that the new man would inevitably purchase the property. 

“I think you’re right. I’m getting too old too quickly.” Ryuuta rested a palm on the cat in his lap, at which it jolted awake, sniffed at his hand, frozen to allow permission, and then returned to its nestled pillow of fur and cotton. It was not quite satisfaction that Ryuuta perceived from the creature, and not quite arrogant permissiveness. That must have been what being married was like. Neither loving nor hating, but living beside each other as a course.

“Yes, well, hardly leaving your house and having no friends certainly doesn’t help with that. I always said you should move to the capital, before the war, remember? Last year I told you to move to Osaka to be closer to the magazine too, and no, you want to stay here in your hermit den.” 

While Gendo spoke with a smile another figure appeared on the street. It was a young woman no older than twenty in a long blue skirt. She had on a long sleeve cotton shirt of the kind Ryuuta had seen British fishermen wear in newspaper pictures. Her umbrella covered most of her head beneath its brim. As she walked the road she paid no mind to the two men who observed her broad gait. 

“We’re in luck then. I ran into Mitsuyo. She's grown up a lot since we knew her. She even worked at a tailors for sometime during the war, can you believe that? She’s on her way here, I actually was supposed to arrive after her, so it looks like she may have been slightly delayed by the rain.” 

Ryuuta rested his eyes on the house across the street again. Had it been nine years since the family moved out? The father, a craftsman, caught something and died in hospice. The mother could not keep up the house and sold it to move to an apartment in town where she lived with their daughter. That was from a different time, a time before fire rained on them, before a great many things. That girl, then seven, was going to return as a woman. 

“Why? She shouldn’t even remember me that well, I only saw them a few times on holidays. I seriously doubt she could even pick me out in a crowd.” 

Gendo raised his brow. 

“You know she still calls you Uncle Ryu, right? Her father played cards with us twice a month, I’d say you downplay your presence my friend. Sure, you may not really be her uncle, but she does think somewhat highly of you. Apparently she’s been following your work since the war, I guess her school teacher was from Osaka and subscribed to the magazine. Amazing coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Contrivance, are you lying to me?” 

Gendo laughed again and put the butt of his cigarette out against the metal of his pocket lighter before tossing it out into the rain. 

“Who knows? Does it matter? Anyway the point is that she wanted to see you again so I told her you still lived in this old shack and she’s on her way.” Gendo pulled another cigarette out and lit up again. One trait of his friend's behavior which served to persistently irk Ryuuta was Gendo’s chain-smoking whenever he visited. 

“And what are your intentions this time? You always have a hidden agenda. What is meeting this girl again after so long going to do for my work, or, rather, for your work?” 

“You know Ryuuta, we know each other too well, don’t we?” 

Perhaps having been disturbed by the noise of the two men's conversation, the cat stood in Ryuuta’s lap and kneaded his leg while arching its back. It repeated this for several seconds while they watched before stepping from Ryuuta’s lap and sitting on its rear at the edge of the veranda. Looking out at the rain, the cat without a name began to lick its paw. The toes and claws of which stretched out as it sharply cleaned between each one. Then it proceeded with long strokes across each of its hind legs, concluding its bath with several shorter licks of the knuckles of its forepaws. Finished, it stared out at the rain, back to Ryuuta, glanced at Gendo, and then moved towards the door into the house. Rubbing itself against Ryuuta’s arm as it passed, waving its tail until disappearing beyond the threshold. 

“That one's comfortable.” Gendo chuckled, puffing on his cigarette. 

“Yes, I think it’s started to enjoy its stay. I haven’t even had to scold it but for twice it tried to tear up the tatami with those little claws.” Gendo watched with a tilted smile as Ryuuta spoke. 

“You know, I was hoping getting that thing for you would  encourage a little socialization. I didn’t expect you to get worse for it. You’re something else Ryuuta. I’ve seen old women with more social skills than you, and they even have cats to their ears. You ask my intentions? Fine, I’ll be clear with them, as ever when you press me. Simply this; To broaden your world. I can’t stand to see you curled up in here waiting to die. That’s my honesty creeping out so take note. It’s all to do with how you were when I met you, it’s all to do with why I started publishing you, even though you were hesitant at first. You understand? Well, no, you probably don’t. Then, understand this; my job has always been to improve your life. I’ve done that to some degree. You aren’t starving. Sure, you aren’t living easy off your family's pre-war finances, but you still have the house, and you can eat and pay off the wartime debts you accrued.” 

Gendo did not speak with a reverential or even a saccharine tone. His speech was made over the sighs and cigarette breaths with which he always spoke. His eyes half squinted as he peered through the smoke and sniffled from a cold-red nose. Gendo’s expressions of exasperation never changed in all of those years since they had met as teenagers. It was at once comforting to Ryuuta that one thing remained the same throughout the terror of the recent years. Then, its omnipresence was a result of his own unchanging nature. 

“Sod all that though, I’m just ranting. At least the cat took to you. Shinzaemon, that old lady I got it from? She made me run up and down Shimbachi doing all sorts of errands for her in exchange for that thing. My feet are too sore to do all that again if the damn thing runs away, so even if it claws at your tatami, try to be nice to the damn thing alright?” 

“Of course.” Ryuuta laughed. 

“Honestly, I think your age is rubbing off on me. Getting sentimental about things lately. I was watching my wife sow the other day and she called me a creep. She said I never watch her like that, and I had a grin too. Can you believe that? Grinning at my wife in the middle of a quiet afternoon. I’ve contracted your affectation.” Gendo rubbed his red nose as his voice became more nasal. He reached into his sleeve but found no handkerchief. 

“I forget you’re married.” 

“I’m sure. If that grandmother of yours was around she’d be getting you a wife as well. I get chills remembering how much she’d lecture your father to get remarried. Frightening woman, I’d guess you’re somewhat lucky the war took her.” 

“Not so much, after all, you nag me twice what any wife of mine would.” 

Gendo laughed as he flicked the butt of his cigarette into the rain. 

“You underestimate women my friend.” 

While he spoke a young woman wearing the new teenage school uniform approached at a carefree pace. She held a book bag over her long hair which had become soaked from the rain. Without any rush, she stepped up the walkway to the pair of men. Once she was about a meter from the step which would lead to the dry cover of the veranda, she stopped and smiled. With a bow and an energetic voice betraying her red eyes, she spoke. 

“Kaninohara Mitsuyo! It’s a pleasure to meet you again, Mister Sonochihama!” 

She raised her torso again and tilted her head. 

“And you as well Mister Gendo.” 

“Well get on in here girl!” Gendo exclaimed with a smile. “You’ll catch your death out there, didn’t you grab an umbrella? Nevermind that, just step up here.” 

Mitsuyo did as she was told, dripping water all over the floor of the veranda when she finally entered. Gendo regarded Ryuuta, who took his meaning and stood to lead the girl into the house. In the back corner was a small tatami room that he never used, but its forefather, the original which the current one replicated, was where his maid would sometimes sleep if she worked later than normal. Its duplicate descendant had since become a guest room, and within Ryuuta had stored plain colored cotton yukata. He showed them to Mitsuyo and then let himself out of the room, returning to Gendo on the veranda. 

The two men sat in silence while they waited. Ryuuta watched the rain batter the yard while Gendo continued to smoke another cigarette. He let his eyes wander to the house across the yard again when the gate opened and the two suited men stepped out. The buyer seemed displeased, which made the seller seem tortured. The humorous pair noticed him and tipped their hats as they walked back the way they had come earlier. The seller all the while making gestures to appeal to the buyer, who kept his eyes straight but not firm. Perhaps the house would be empty for some time more.

“Well, I should go, I think.” Gendo pushed his legs over the edge of the veranda and grabbed his shoes. Sliding them on while donning the umbrella which had protected them. 

“Already? What about the girl?” 

“I already caught up with her. Besides, she’s here to see you, if I stay you’ll just let me do all the talking and that’s no good for her having wasted time coming all this way from the other side of town. Just try not to be too—well, too old. I’ll check in on your book progress in a few days. See you.” He waved over his shoulder as he walked away, footsteps on the gravel path barely audible over the falling rain. As he had come, so he had gone.

Gendo was one of those people who was in constant motion. Not only irreverent to the friction of the world, but defiant of it. An object without entropy, which age had not yet claimed. It made him a frustrating agent, and it made him a great friend. A person who could be insulted harshly and laugh it off as no more than emotionality. A person worth aspiring towards. A person Ryuuta knew he would never become. 

Behind him the door slid open and Mitsuyo emerged in the yukata. She had dried her hair somewhat but it still gripped her neck with moisture. She looked a bit like a ghost, only forfeiting the costume for the red eyes and nose which showed there was still blood pulsing through those youthful veins. 

It was, in fact, the same Mitsuyo who, as a seven year old girl, would sit on her fathers lap and strategize poker hands. The resemblance was almost eerie in its exactness. The same nose, the same ears—though both she had grown into and were no longer oversized for her face. The abnormally long hair that her mother favored. That little girl whose modern parents made her wear skirts and blouses had also tied her yukata correctly. It was remarkable that, seeing her in the clothing of her parents homeland, she looked more a stranger than she had in the modern western styled uniform which she had arrived in. He tried to bring the mothers face to mind, hoping to inspire it from Mitsuyo’s blood relation, but it had long faded from memory. So too had her fathers. Both ghosts, yet not both dead. A matter for which even the war was not to blame. That was the process of time, the forsaken faces of the past. 

“Thank you Mister Sonochihama.” She sat on her knees beside him as though she were approaching some authority. It was the only polite way she could sit in the yukata, but Ryuuta still felt odd having someone actually make that gesture towards him. 

“Oh, it’s nothing at all really.” He stammered. It dawned on him that he had actually not spoken in depth to anyone but Gendo for a long time. Besides that, the youngest person he normally traded brief words with was the paper boy, who even then was in his mid-twenties. 

“Has Mister Gendo gone already?” 

“Yes, he probably had some things to do.” 

The girls look eased somewhat as her shoulders relaxed and her back loosened. 

“It’s nice to see you again, Mister Sonochihama. I hear you’re writing now?” Her words were not as energetic as her introduction had been. They were tired almost, sighed, perhaps, or rather just politely careful. Ryuuta began his suspicion that her eyes were not red from naturally occurring rains.  

“Yes, well, a little. Mostly short stories in Reconciliation.” 

“I’ve read that magazine, my teacher last year would bring them in to read during breaks. I love the one about the eel, did that really happen?” 

Ryuuta remembered that prewar frustration when he had attempted to catch an eel. The story he wrote as a result was so far from his mind that what events of the story had taken place or what he had fabricated for the narrative eluded him. Sparing one minor detail. 

“The letter at the end, from my brother, I made that up. In truth we hardly spoke to each other, but if it helps he was always the type to make comments like that. He wasn’t a bad person, but he did like to exaggerate.” 

“That’s a shame. I really liked that joke. Saying that the British like to wear eel-skin shoes. It made a lot of us laugh at the time, but then I guess it makes sense. Funny stuff like that probably doesn’t happen all that often, does it?” 

As she spoke the cat appeared between them, rubbing its face along Ryuuta’s sleeve before cautiously stopping to sniff at Mitsuyo’s leg. The two of them stopped speaking while they watched the creature. It rubbed its face on the leg, sniffed, and rubbed again before putting a paw on the spot it had rubbed and standing to sniff in the direction of Mitsuyo’s face. Propped up on its hind legs and its one stable front paw, it looked at the wet hair and the cotton neckline of the yukata. Mitsuyo, eyes wide slightly and probably surprised a cat had taken such interest in her, held her right hand to the thing. The cat replied by using its free front paw to stabilize itself on her palm, an effort which made it look like the two were shaking hands. Mitsuyo looked at Ryuuta with an expression of bafflement. Ryuuta smiled and tapped his cheek with a finger, at which point Mitsuyo nodded and began to lower her head to meet the cats. 

Close enough at last, the cat tickled Mitsuyo’s nose with its twitching whiskers before rubbing its cheek against hers several times. It then put both hind legs onto her lap and rubbed itself against her neck. Then, without warning, it quickly climbed onto her shoulders, laying across the back of her extended neck. The cat let its fore-paws out in front of the right side of her neck, and its back paws over her left. Resting its weight solely within its stomach pressed against her nape. 

“You’ve got a lovely scarf.” Ryuuta blurted out. 

“Is this your cat?” 

“Yes, but it’s never done that to me before. I think it likes you.” 

“What’s its name?” 

“It doesn't have a name.” 

Naming such a thing was somehow very difficult for him. It was part of the reason most of his work was thinly based on his own experiences or the shared experience of others, rather than being strictly fantastic. The parenthood of naming something was too difficult a task for him, it felt close to definition. Placing something into a concrete base from which it could not move. Stagnation, almost, to limit something to a name. Or else to introduce it to the things which had taken him all his life. Errors of time, entropy, age, the first chime of that tall clock in the heart surely sounded something like the name of the body it was housed within. His brother must have thought the same, and tried to re-birth himself by changing his name. It had already been three years since he last saw his brother drunkenly marching off into the grim of the post war age. Galavanting, preaching about the death of his past. That far gone relation, too, had left his mind. He had made a pastime of forgetting it seemed. 

“Monpe.” Mitsuyo said. 

“Excuse me?” 

“Monpe, like the pants. Its name should be Monpe, because it's the same color as the ones people used to wear in the factories. You know?” 

Her eyes began to well with an interior rain. Ryuuta could only see the little girl from before the war, that seven year old in her fathers lap. Yet that was no longer the person sitting beside him. People changed a great deal in their younger years, not to mention the toll of such a conflict as had happened when she was only twelve. Something had happened to her earlier that day which made her upset. Even though he knew himself to be a dullard, he could infer as much from the wet eyes. He was someone unlike Gendo, someone motionless, someone with nowhere to go, but also nowhere else to be. 

“Are you going to tell me why you’re upset?” 

She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the yukata before speaking. 

“I accidentally insulted an old woman today. I’m just the worst, aren’t I?” 

So, the drenching was penance then, he realized. 

The rickshaw jostled on the street again, this time only the old man driving it was present. Though he did not again regard the veranda under his wet brow. Puttering on into the torrents of a mid-April storm. Ryuuta almost thought he spotted an army tattoo on the man's exposed right shoulder, but the speed of his passing beneath the veil of rain did not guarantee such fancies to be true. What would Gendo say to the girl now? 

“To hell with her.” He said flatly, staring off over the roof of the house where the ghost of Mitsuyo’s father watched the two of them.

“Mister Sonochihama…” She spoke, trying to argue but finding no words. 

“Don’t give me that, we’re not so distant still to be talking to each other like strangers. Damn them, all of them, all the ones who caused this. All of them who told you to cry because of something you did by accident. You haven’t done anything wrong, little Mitsu.”

The girl wiped her eyes while trying to smile. His little speech had clearly not struck a chord of complete refrain. It did not immediately part that girl from the pretentious affectations which his generation had selfishly wanted to pass on. It was probably exactly what Gendo would have said, but Gendo would have had more heart in it, more fire. As it stood, Ryuuta felt awkward after having said such things. 

“Thank you.” 

He looked to her again to find a wide, honest, and terribly youthful smile crossing the girl's face. It baffled him to see her so happy. To see anyone so indulgent in joy. For all the world that had changed, he saw his reflection in her eyes. There was comfort in the ageless aged. In the childish old men who bickered at each other after decades of experience and heartbreak. For all the good the world had stolen, it could not have gotten away with everything. Too heavy would the pockets be for it to keep turning. Something had to remain. 

The cat's head jerked suddenly. Its pupils thinned sharply as it stood on Mitsuyo’s shoulder and looked out at a small pile of rocks on one side of the yard. Ryuuta, between Mitsuyo and the pile, followed the gaze. There, taking cover under the rocks, was a mouse. It messed with a few pebbles before skittering around and disappearing under the fence of the neighboring yard. In that moment of its exodus, a calico colored blur began to cross Ryuuta’s vision. Without a moment of hesitation, and on complete instinct, Ryuuta awoke inside his own body and reached out for the charging cat. 

In such a motion he caught the feline, and had thrust himself off the edge of the veranda into the ocean of mud in his yard. The cat, having landed square on his chest, made a sound of immense annoyance at the moisture and scratched through his clothes as it leapt from him to the safety of the house. The breath knocked clean from his lungs, Ryuuta lay on his back in the mud for a few moments while a new sound overpowered the rain. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked to the source. 

Mitsuyo was laughing. Utterly and without a hint of restraint. Her white cheeks flushed with the blood of her age and her white teeth exposed in an open smile of pure youthfulness. To her side the cat stared at Ryuuta while occasionally licking itself clean. 

“Laughing at an old man getting mud on his clothes. You never change little Mitsu.” 

“Neither do you Uncle Ryu!” She shot back lightly. 

Ryuuta released his grip on the ground and let his back hit the mud again. It was strangely cathartic, to lay on the cold ground. To feel the mud stick to his fingers and ankles. A sensation forgotten across the decades between his present and his youth. Though he could hardly remember the names of people he met years ago, and even the faces of the few who he spoke to often as a young man, he at least remembered they were there. Akahatsuki was living in Shimoda, just south on the peninsula, and she had visited the year before to give him a watch that belonged to his father. Then he had seen his sister when they met for a mutual friend's wedding a few weeks prior. She looked older than he remembered, but she acted just the same, as though time had not truly disposed of that eager young girl he had known. Now he had become re-acquainted with that little girl who was too good at poker. 

After he rose and changed his clothes, he met Mitsuyo on the veranda again with his journal. She was petting the cat who had tucked itself into the corner made by her left leg and the floor, melting into the space there warmly. Like he did every day for the last twenty years, he filled in his daily entry. 

“April 14th, 1948. Mitsuyo is back. Gendo schemed such a thing. As a result the cat's name is now Monpe. It reeks of mud-stained pants, but the girl seems to like it. Perhaps Monpe is a fine name for a cat.” The short note was scratched away silently beneath the sound of Mishima rain.