ignored the other two and began working. His father and Koji bantered a bit more, then went off to separate sections, each carrying a container. Mitsuo stripped off his shirt, hung it over a pipe and switched on the radio. He imagined he could hear the plants telling him to get on with the harvesting business. The smooth growth of the fruit gladdened his heart, and he worked without thinking.
At three o'clock, they took a break and sat in a circle on a piece of cardboard, smoking cigarettes. Nearby, a large pile of tomatoes testified to their hard work. Mitsuo felt they'd accomplished a lot. Since he couldn't be bothered to buy something to drink, he gulped lukewarm water straight from a kettle, and handed it to his father sitting next to him. Matsuzo drank, water dripping from the corners of his mouth. Mitsuo leaned back, hands clasped behind his head, and closed his eyes. A red light penetrated his eyelids. A metallic taste lingered in his mouth, and he stretched his jaw muscles.
He said, "You know, there must be a hundred carp in that muddy river in town. I'm thinking about doing some late-night fishing."
"Great idea," Matsuzo said. "I'm an expert at cooking carp. Soup, sashimi, I can make anything with that fish. We'll have drinks at my place. Yes, indeed, carp is great for the health."
Mitsuo heard his father's voice from close range and realized he, too, was lying down. The thought crossed his mind to tell his father to ditch the woman, but he kept his mouth closed. Seeing her face or hearing her voice would be enough to ruin the taste of any drink.
Koji blurted out, "But if I eat carp and get all that extra energy, I don't know what I'd do with it."
Mitsuo thought how he would like to maximize the day's harvest. He would ship the tomatoes to the co-op tomorrow. He noticed the sap around his fingertips had turned black. Some of the apartment women came to buy tomatoes, and Mitsuo let Koji handle them. Judging from the animated sound of their voices, Koji was giving them a sweet deal.
Darkness crept across the land outside the vinyl. Matsuzo laughed and said he felt good, having built up a sweat. He left to catch a bus at the complex, carrying as many tomatoes as he could hold.
Granma sat erect, her knees atop a chair in the kitchen, listening to Mitsuo's account of the ambulance and the pregnant woman. When he finished, she closed her eyes, held her head upright, and performed an incantation for the safe delivery of the child, intoning the syllables from deep within her gut. Mitsuo was familiar with the chant, for Granma had been the village midwife. Her chanting meant she was in a good mood.
She enacted the birthing process. Placing straw rice-bags beside and behind an imaginary mother, she used an equally imaginary rope to tie the woman's hair to a pillar to restrict her movements. Next she drew the woman up from behind and squatted under her, using her own knees to spread the mother's. Finally, she squeezed her arms about the woman's abdomen.
"Yes, I helped bring hundreds of babies into the world. I gave birth to your father all by myself. It happened in midsummer. I was weeding the fields and began to feel sick. I waddled as far as the back door of the house and collapsed. The shock of the fall sent me into labor.
"My next four children showed me great concern and came out quite easily. One was born as I lay next to a crying baby, I remember. Village women never had any problems; it was always the towngirls who screamed their lungs out."
She squatted up and down on her chair and stretched her arms, periodically stopping to sip lukewarm tea. Part of what she drank she spat onto the table while Mitsuo and Tomiko ate. Tomiko frowned, and when her mother-in-law looked away, revolved a finger around her head to convey to Mitsuo her opinion of the old woman's mental condition.
"A lot of the women had no afterbirth, you know," Granma continued. "It wouldn't do for them to fall asleep, so I made them chew rice to keep awake. Sometimes I just slapped them on the cheek. A midwife needs to be as strong as any man.
"Sometimes they kept me on to take care of the afterbirth. I always buried it in a closet, beneath the tatami. You had to keep it hidden from the gods. We all knew that a child would fear the first person to walk over its own afterbirth, so I always had the father step on that piece of tatami first."
Satisfied with her monologue, Granma slowly descended from her chair and ambled out of the kitchen. A moment later the sound of the TV blasted through the house. Tomiko sighed and began piling the dirty dishes. Then she ran her fingers through her hair and rested her chin on her fist.
Smiling, she asked Mitsuo, "Tell me now. You have a girlfriend, right?"
"Where did you get that idea?" he countered, in surprise and embarrassment. He blinked a number of times, feeling a strange sensation each time he did so.
"You have to get married some time. Go ahead, tell me about this girl you're going to marry. You shouldn't be hiding that sort of thing from your mother."
"There isn't anyone. That's the truth!"
"All right, all right." Tomiko's face flushed as though she had come straight out of the bath, and she smiled pleasantly. Her eyes, however, were all business. Her gold tooth glinting, she asked, "What would you say to omiai?"
Mitsuo squirmed. Omiai is a formal meeting between an eligible man and woman, arranged by a third party. He raised his eyes but found he couldn't bear his mother's gaze.
"She's the daughter of one of the men on the construction crew. She went to the same agricultural high school you did, and now she's working at a gas station. She's three years younger than you, and a real prize. She knows about this messy business your father is involved in, but she doesn't mind.
"She's heard you're a hard worker. She'll know for sure once she meets you. I told her father I'd give him your answer tomorrow. What do you say? Or are you thinking of enjoying the single life a while longer?" She spoke slowly and carefully, as though she were a doctor probing a tumor.
Mitsuo sniffed. "I guess it can't hurt to see what she looks like."
"In that case, I'll tell them it's on. You've got nothing to lose, you know. If you don't like her, that's the end of it. I'll back you up." She nodded and narrowed her eyes.
Mitsuo gazed at his mother's sunburnt lips. He picked up the earthenware teapot and poured some of the contents into a rice bowl. Brown bubbles frothed and dispersed. He rubbed his face with his palms, and the smell of tomatoes invaded his nostrils.
An idea occurred to him. He hesitated, but when he finally spoke it was with force. "How about helping me ship out the tomatoes?"
"Why are you asking me that? You know I've got the road construction job."
"The hell with that! You're a farmer, and farmers work the fields!" Mitsuo surprised even himself with the vehemence of his outburst. Tomiko shrank into her chair. "Koji came and helped me today, and he's not even family. Just come for two days, that's all. One call to your foreman and it's done."
"I've never worked in a hothouse. What do you do? Do you think I could do the work?" She nervously twisted and untwisted her fingers on the tabletop.
"Farm work is farm work. I figured the hothouse would bring in just a little money, but it'll make us ten times as much as working normal fields. You can't make anything waving flags on asphalt."
She nodded in agreement and slunk from the kitchen. A moment later Mitsuo heard her shout, and the volume on the
