“It’s just as father says. I could see from the second floor,” his daughter
said, coming down the stairs.
“I thought you’d be able to. And you could see the split?”
“It’s starting to get dark, but I could see it. Maybe I’ll go up to the path
and take a look.” She walked out into the entryway. His wife was drinking
some of the tea she had poured for Soeda, and made no move to get up.
“You’re not going, Ikuko? Oh well, I guess you can go tomorrow
morning. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if the trees at the top lost all their
leaves tonight.”
“There’s no wind.”
“Wasn’t it pretty windy a few days ago?”
It had drizzled, but there had been no wind.
The path rose, roughly speaking, from east to west. Thus, if a powerful
easterly wind were to arrive, wasn’t it possible that only the ginkgos along
the bottom half of the path would lose their leaves? Soeda turned this
thought over in his mind, but it seemed unlikely. That a row of trees
planted, as far as one could tell, at the same time, long, long ago, should
have split halfway up into bare and yellow leaved halves—it was a natural
phenomenon that Soeda lacked the knowledge to explain. And so he
thought aloud, testing various ideas on his wife. The path rises from east to
west, so the trees in the row must get approximately the same amount of
sunlight on average, except that the way the light strikes the trees in the
morning and the evening might be subtly different in the lower east and the
upper west. . . . Or perhaps despite the fact that the wind hasn’t been
particularly strong lately something about the east and west winds has . . . .
The ideas were all farfetched, but still Soeda went so far as to close his eyes
and concentrate on the topography of the area around the path. He knew the
land so well that he could call its features up even without closing his eyes.
But he couldn’t see how those features related to the falling of the leaves.
