After walking down the path that morning Soeda had looked casually
back over his shoulder and then stopped, astonished. The ginkgo trees
along the bottom of the path were completely stripped of their leaves, all
the way up to their highest branches. And yet the crowd of trees up at the
top was a thick mass of yellow foliage. It took about two minutes to walk
down the path—it was short enough that the entire length of it could be
taken in at a glance—and the row of trees wasn’t long. So the split between
the leafless trees and the yellow foliage had burst all at once upon Soeda’s
eye, leaving him peculiarly impressed. The bare branches of the enormous
trees at the bottom of the path looked particularly sharp against the
background of yellow leaves at the top, and the foliage that rose up over the
path at the top looked richly colored and even more thickly layered than
usual with all those bare trees in the foreground. The sense of great height
that one feels looking at ginkgos was especially marked in these trees. Even
the copious small branches of the bare trees strained toward the sky, as if
attempting to embrace the tree-trunks, forming shapes tightly closed. The
masses of yellow leaves conveyed a sense of volume as only layers of thick
leaves can, but bathing in the morning sun they looked still and lonely.
The crowd of bare trees and the crowd of yellow leaved trees didn’t split
neatly at a particular tree on the path, but generally speaking the division
occurred about halfway up. Why it should occur halfway up—this too was
a mystery to Soeda.
He passed under this row of ginkgos every day on his way to and from
work. Several days had passed since he first sensed that the autumn leaves
were starting to fall. But when had the trees along the bottom half of the
path gone bare? Soeda had been so surprised by what he saw that he’d
considered walking back up to the house to tell his wife and daughter of the
change—this peculiar change in the row of trees.
He told them that evening. Of course neither of them had noticed.
