Short Stories
vol.1The Hole in the Sky（1/9）
Toyoko squinted past the moving windshield wipers to the blackness beyond. The rain seemed to have stopped to catch its breath.
It was always this way in a typhoon: the capricious sky would suddenly spit out huge drops of rain, and then pause for a second to see the effect it was having on those down below. Then, when everyone had let down their guard, it would hurl down those huge rain drops again, but this time diagonally and right into its victims’ faces.
Toyoko could do nothing in the face of these spasmodic attacks but grip the steering wheel and let out a snort of contempt. Her day had been filled with such unpleasant happenings, all of them unexpected. According to the weather forecast, the typhoon was supposed to reach the southern tip of Kyushu tomorrow afternoon and then make its way along the coastline to Shikoku. Instead, it had suddenly increased in speed and moved northward until it blasted straight into Fukuoka, the city where Toyoko lived. Of course, typhoons had a habit of doing these things, and there was nothing anyone could do about it, yet today’s unexpected weather had gone and knocked everything off balance.
During her lunch break, Toyoko had left the admin building of the university where she worked and walked through the pine grove onto the road to buy some lunch. As she thought about it later, she realized she should have made do with a boxed lunch from the Agricultural Department next door, but instead she had decided she wanted to walk through the rain, just to be different from everyone else. Once again the blame lay with the typhoon.
At the entrance to an old-fashioned post office on the other side of the zebra crossing, she saw a little fat old woman carrying a paper bag. Unprotected by the woman’s umbrella, the bag had become soaked through and had burst open, spilling its contents onto the concrete steps leading up to the post office door. Toyoko looked down and saw three ripe mangoes − the yellow type from the Philippines − rolling around in the rain. The old woman was just standing there staring calmly at her feet, so Toyoko reluctantly crossed the street, picked up the mangoes, and handed them back to their owner. If they had been anything other than mangoes, she would perhaps have shown a little more kindness and concern.
The combination of the silly old woman and her mangoes in the pouring rain of the approaching typhoon made Toyoko feel sick, as if she had seen a middle-aged man with his arm around a teenage girl’s waist. For Toyoko, a mango was a sophisticated, stylish fruit, more suited to a chic young woman.
The old woman gathered up the mangoes in her arms and held them against her chest, muttering “Oh, the poor things, they’re all bruised”. She didn’t bother to look at the face of the considerate lady who had picked them up for her. Toyoko’s fingers stank of mango juice. In actual fact, the woman had whispered some words of thanks, but Toyoko hadn’t heard them; she had already turned and begun to walk briskly away. Just as she was stepping onto the sidewalk from the zebra crossing, she fell and twisted her right ankle.
Later that afternoon, Toyoko’s husband had called from his office in Osaka to say that he wouldn’t be able to get home for the weekend. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Before he could provide an excuse, Toyoko threw him a lifeline, saying, “Well, the typhoon’s coming after all”.
“Right, the trains probably won’t be running,” added her husband, sounding relieved.
After she had replaced the receiver, she became angry with herself, wondering why on earth she had let him off the hook so easily. So many times throughout her unremarkable forty-five years of life she had thrown someone a lifeline while giving herself up to the waves, and here she was doing the same thing with her husband. She should have listened to his excuses, even if she knew they were lies.
There were several other incidents throughout the day that had annoyed her. She could simply have put it down to the typhoon, but Toyoko always felt that when something irritating or unexpected occurred, she was somehow responsible.