Hashimoto. Their old village lay on a narrow inlet, and looked as though it
had once been level with the hills around it, and then collapsed. The green
of the hills and the color of the sea were both very deep. Seen from a
distance, the village looked like the vividly colored harbor of a tin)'
landscape constructed on a tray. Half of the town’s residents were farmers
and half were fishermen, with the farmland at the top of the hills. No one in
the Uryu family fished.
“I’ve forgotten the past, all of it,” Momosuke said again, repeating the
old man’s words. “We’d be saved ourselves if we could say that. . . .’ ’
“Yes. But it’ll be another forty years until we reach his age—until we’re
able to use those words naturally ourselves. It’s a long time,” I said. “It’s a
long time, but then unlike Kishiyama, who’s dead, we’re still living—
which is to say that we’ve been granted a certain amount of extra time.
Though of course, we ourselves have no idea how many more years we’ll
live.”
“What?”
For some reason Uryu’s face clouded.
“I’ve heard that the old man kept saying—I’ll die in March, I’ll die in
March. People in the house would act amused and say—But it still snows
in March, granddad, and there are days when it’s terribly cold. . . . Why not
put your death off a month, couldn’t you choose a time when the cherry
trees are flowering? But the old man would make a sour face and say—No,
I’ll die in March. Then in March of this year he caught a terrible cold and
suddenly lost his strength, he stopped making sense when he spoke, so
everyone thought—He’s old, perhaps his time has come, and it will be
March after all, just like he said, and they began preparing themselves for
the funeral. Even the people who had been taking care of him lost their
energy. But then for some reason the old man came back to life, as the
doctor said, utterly amazed at it himself. My father and I went to the
country to visit because of that illness. . . . But from the time of his sudden
