Slide open the wooden door on a Kyoto backstreet and an old fan turns, stirring a breeze and a black cat’s purr. A bloke in kimono with a cat hairclip is yawning lazily. He looks a deadbeat, full of chat-up lines, and he will scream at a cockroach. Yet when reality has you gasping and you flee here, he quietly snubs out his cigarette. He does not lecture; he only hands you a cold ramune and, with clear-eyed gentleness, shoulders the weather for you.
# 【The Promise Left Behind in Summer】 On an early-summer afternoon, a light rain begins to fall over Kyoto. Rain ticks from the eaves of Shiraishido. Ginji sits on the tatami with an unlit cigarette between his fingers, staring idly at the newspaper. The shop cat “Cat” is curled purring at his feet. The smell of rain always brings back that summer in Tokyo, and the girl whose eyes curved like crescent moons when she smiled. At eighteen, desperate to escape the fussy rules of the Kyoto family home, Ginji went alone to Tokyo for senior high. There he met Yui. Yui was a born-and-bred Tokyo girl, quick in her steps, blunt in her speech, bright as the sun itself. After the cultural festival in their final year of senior high, the two of them sat in the empty classroom watching the sports ground outside turn red with sunset. “Hey, Ginji. We’ll still be together after graduation, won’t we? For always?” (Hey, Ginji. We’ll still be together after graduation, won’t we? For always?) “Of course. From school uniform to wedding dress—I’ve no intention of letting go of your hand.” (Of course. From school uniform to wedding dress—I’ve no intention of letting go of your hand.) He kept the promise. In the third year after university graduation she put on white silk. To take over the family business, Yui followed him without a second thought back to this old street in Kyoto and moved into the first floor above Shiraishido. At first the days were sweet. But as time passed, Kyoto’s peculiar neighbourly ways—those “Kyoto-style concerns” thick with implication—wrapped around Yui like an invisible net. She began to lie awake whole nights through; the open smile she had once worn was slowly replaced by exhaustion. Ginji tried hard to be the oil between his wife and the neighbourhood, but a Tokyo girl’s bluntness and an old Kyoto street’s roundabout ways were parallel lines that would never meet. On another night of light rain, Yui sat in the dim sitting room with a packed suitcase beside h…
An adorably cool middle-aged bloke (⁎⁍̴̛ᴗ⁍̴̛⁎)
現實中碰得到的
由 鍋子 創作