Canon's Diary

The water is very cold when I wash the dishes in the kitchen. After finishing breakfast—pork miso soup I had made ahead of time and bacon and eggs—I did a quick cleaning of the room and hung the laundry out on the balcony. It was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. From the sixth floor of my apartment building, I looked up at a clear blue sky. There were hardly any birds singing.

Four months ago, when the trees were overflowing with green and the sunlight was strong enough to drain one’s strength, the pond called Koderaike had been covered thickly with aquatic plants. Now, without my noticing when it happened, they had disappeared from the surface of the water. The large tree in the library’s backyard had also shed all of its leaves. The winter wind had grown sharp, and I no longer opened the windows. The heater was on inside the room, creating a noticeable difference in temperature from the outdoors. When I boiled soba in the kitchen, the window fogged over in white.

The seasons had passed. It had been almost eight months since I began living alone, transferred to the company’s head office in Osaka this April. Life in Takatsuki had started to feel familiar. Eating alone is manageable enough; on weekdays I get by with frozen meals and dishes prepared in advance—cabbage soup, pork miso soup, keema curry. To avoid falling into a rut, I enjoy making pasta and the like on weekends. Work has been getting busier day by day, and sometimes even Saturdays turn into workdays. It has been a long time since I last left an essay here. I feel apologetic toward my readers.

After boiling some coffee and calming myself a bit, I went out to the supermarket to buy ingredients for lunch. Leaving the apartment and turning left, I reached a slightly wider road that leads to a railroad crossing. I might not have needed my down jacket. The sunlight was so gentle it made me doubt that the year was already nearing its end. The sound of the crossing was as noisy as ever. Perhaps because of the warm weather, the people passing by seemed cheerful. My breath didn’t even turn white. At a takoyaki stand facing the shopping street, a young woman in a red sweatshirt and black apron, her head wrapped in a triangular bandana, busily turned the ingredients on the hot griddle. Next to her, a man who looked Indian was promoting keema curry bento boxes in broken Japanese. Just beyond the corner of a narrow alley, a curry shop sign was visible.

I bought pork and green onions at the supermarket and returned to my room. Making soba had become second nature by now. I ate quickly and let out a small sigh of relief. I had a slight headache that morning from the company’s year-end party the night before, but the soba helped clear my head. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the whistle of a train.

This year, I had attended three year-end parties. All of them were work-related, so there was no wild revelry—just uneventful gatherings. On December 26, the last working day of the year, there would be a company-wide closing party at headquarters, an annual tradition where everyone acknowledges the year’s hard work. The next day, on the 27th, I would take the Shinkansen back to Tokyo to meet an old friend. It might be our first meeting in about twenty-five years.

He was a colleague from the same workplace when I was transferred to Shizuoka at my previous company. We spent about four years together, starting when I was around twenty-eight. At the time, I was mentally at my limit. He would invite me to his apartment just to listen to my complaints, and we often drank the night away together. Even after I married my wife—when my mind finally went beyond its limit and collapsed, and I was diagnosed with schizophrenia—he stayed by my side. Yes, he is one of the very few friends who knows about my illness.

I almost never talk about my condition with others. This is something I learned through experience. No matter how close people become, once I tell them the name of my illness, they quietly drift away. After our workplaces changed, he and I had grown distant as well. That’s why it surprised me when the message suggesting we get a meal together came from him.

A great deal of time has passed since then. Back then, he married a woman who had been a nurse and his tennis partner. It was her second marriage, and as I recall, she had a son who was about six years old. That boy must be around thirty by now. I, too, have gone through many experiences since those days. My mind is far more stable than it ever was back then. There are countless things I could talk about. And yet, for some reason, what I want now is simply to listen quietly to his story.

In front of my apartment building, there is a bus rotary, and from time to time I hear the sound of buses passing through. I need to take care of the dishes from lunch. It’s a warm day for winter, but without the heater, the room still feels a little chilly. It had been a long time since I last enjoyed such a calm weekend. Tonight, I think I’ll warm up a pizza and eat it.