An Interlude, between Chapters 8 and 9.
I.
The bench is outside a train station in a town too small to be misfiled. It has been misfiled anyway. This is what happens when a station is very old and the trains stop being interested in it — the maps quietly agree to disagree, and the town, without complaint, becomes optional.
Takohito is on the bench. It is four in the afternoon. There is a small ceramic dish beside him, on a wooden tray, on a folded blue cloth, in the specific configuration a certain kind of shopkeeper uses when she does not want to be thanked out loud.
In the dish is one umeboshi.
One. Not three. Not a small mound. One. Wrinkled, the colour of a bruise a hundred years after the argument, sitting in its own small pool of red shiso brine like a monk in a bath he has earned.
Most people, on most planets, would eat it in a single mouthful and reach for water. Most people, on most planets, do not understand what has been done to a plum to arrive at that surface tension.
II.
This particular plum was salted eight years ago by a man named Kōji, in a village that faces the wrong way for tourism. He was sixty-one. His wife, Emi, was in the second month of a nine-month illness that his doctor had not yet told him the shape of, and that Kōji had not yet asked. He was, on the morning of the salting, thinking about her mouth.
Specifically, about the way she winced at his umeboshi when she was well. He always over-salted. She always said so. He always over-salted the next batch anyway, because being told off by Emi was, secretly, one of his favourite domestic weathers.
That morning he measured the salt differently. He measured it for the mouth she would have after. After the illness. After the weight came back. After she was well enough to complain again. He measured for the tongue of a woman who was going to return.
He layered the plums. He weighted the crock. He wrote the date on the lid in the small, embarrassed hand of a man who has never been good at writing dates on lids.
He waited.
Emi, in the end, did not return.
Kōji did not open the crock. He did not open it the following year, either. It became, without ceremony, the thing in the corner of the pantry that he walked past every morning on the way to boil water for one. The salt continued its patient argument with the fruit. The fruit continued to lose, gracefully, on purpose.
Eight years passed.
This spring, without deciding to, Kōji opened it. He took out one plum. He set it in a dish, on a tray, on a blue cloth, and put it on the counter of the small shop his daughter runs next to the station nobody uses. He did not say who it was for. His daughter did not ask.
She has been waiting to see who would take it.
III.
Takohito lifts the plum with the wooden pick.
He does not smell it first. Some watermarks do not want to be smelled — they want to be tasted, in the specific chamber of the mouth that only opens when the tongue is already committed.
He eats it slowly.
The salt arrives first. Then the sourness — not sharp, softened by eight years of being asked to be patient. Then the shiso, faint, embarrassed to still be there. Then, underneath all of it, in a register the tongue is barely licensed to hear:
a woman’s mouth, wincing, fond.
Kōji’s measurement. The tongue he was measuring for. The specific gram of salt held back for the specific complaint that never came.
Takohito closes his eyes.
He does not, as a rule, weep. His species does not have the ducts, and he has not, in his current configuration, borrowed any. What he does instead is a small, precise stillness — the stillness of a being who has just been handed something that was never meant for him and is trying to be worthy of it anyway.
IV.
You should know: the plum is not, technically, an act of grief. It is an act of preservation-for. There is a difference. Grief closes a jar. Preservation-for keeps the jar open the wrong way — waiting, for a mouth that has not yet arrived, or has already left, or is at this moment sitting on a bench eight years and one country away, not knowing it is the mouth in question.
V.
He sets down the pick. He folds the blue cloth. He leaves, on the tray, more currency than the plum was worth, in a denomination the daughter will later look at for a long time without quite deciding what it is.
He stands. The station clock, which has been three minutes slow for a decade, agrees with itself.
He bows once, to nobody, in the direction of a pantry he has never seen.
Then he walks east, because east is where he has been walking, and because the salt in his mouth is still, very quietly, being kept for someone.
息