A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

Was Hara aware of the fifty years that Ito had said would follow? The trees that Hara cut had been planted by someone generations earlier, and the trees that

Hara planted would be cut by someone generations to come. In the midst of this unfolding time, did he contemplate the duration from his birth until that moment?

he must have felt that he was truly happy, all his many past ordeals only adding immediacy and power to the experience . . .

Hara had begun his life anew after his second suicide attempt in order to be alive. Kido wished he could have told him that he understood.

Strange that it had never occurred to him before, but Kido realized how much he wished they could have met.

Growing up was transforming her daughter at such a dizzying pace that memories of her from just a year ago had turned unaccountably fuzzy.

The climax comes when the boy sits down on “the base portion of a large stone lantern” and “starts to cry, covering his face.” He had mistaken a man with “mouth and nose covered behind a mask” and “a smile somewhat suggestive of malice” for his father almost immediately after losing him, but now, unbeknownst to the boy, this man actually becomes his father.

what astounded her was that he had been reading this story before she told him that his father wasn’t actually Daisuké Taniguchi. Had this been a mere coincidence?

she was able to sound the depths of his interiority. How peculiar that she saw her son every day but had only succeeded in drawing closer to him through a book.

Yuto’s penchant for reading arose from something distinctive in him that he didn’t share with any of his parents. While the

cause of this difference must have been in his milieu, it nonetheless seemed beautiful to Rié, like a flower budding spontaneously from the wreckage of some disaster.

a haiku that Yuto had submitted as part of his summer break homework had been awarded top prize in the middle school category of an all-Japan competition held by a newspaper.

Beside it was the award-winning poem: In his cast-off shell How rich the singing echoes Cicada voices

I listened carefully, trying to find the voice of the cicada that had flown from that shell. I imagined how it must have sounded to the shell to hear the voice of the body that had been inside it under the earth for seven years.

she pictured her son alone at the foot of the tree, staring at the shell while listening to the cicadas, and couldn’t stop crying.

she could now see how literature brought him solace.

It wasn’t until Kido left and she found herself capable of looking at the pictures of her husband on her computer for the first time in ages that she felt certain of his wishes. Something told her that he had yearned for the day she called him by his real name, praying that she would love the whole of him—not as Daisuké but as Makoto.

Rié was deeply moved by what she read of Makoto’s sad life in Kido’s report and began to suspect that it was this her husband had sought to convey through the unfortunate story of Daisuké.

While she wasn’t bothered in the least by the idea that the blood of a murderer ran in her daughter’s veins, it was still possible that Hana might despair if she were to one day learn the truth.

she had to ask herself whether she would have loved Makoto if she had known the truth from the start. Did love even need the past? She wanted to say no. And yet, if she was honest with herself, she suspected that she would not have been capable of embracing a partner with such a tortured history at a time when grieving her own losses and raising Yuto had absorbed all her energy—ultimately, there was no way to know.

Kido’s report was such a tome that Rié finally began to wonder why he’d gone to such lengths for her.

“I think that the three years and nine months that Hara-san spent with you was the first time that he ever knew happiness. True joy, I suspect. As short as your time together was, it was the culmination of his entire life.”

“Now I understand why he was . . . so nice to me.” “Why?” “I think Dad . . . he did for me what he wanted his father to do for him . . .”

“So, our last name . . . in the end, what will happen? Are we going to be the Haras?” Rié smiled and said, “I don’t think so . . . How about the Takemotos? Then we’ll be the same as Grandma and Grandpa again.”

He was gone now. And the two children he had left behind were growing up. She decided that those three years and nine months had been happy for her as well, so happy that her memories of that

time and everything that flowed from it might just content her for the rest of her life.