Chapter 7: Lantern Festival

On the night of the Lantern Festival, three hundred people came to eat at Hanae's inn.

She had not planned for three hundred.

She had planned for forty.

Then the village headman came to the fork with news.

The festival tables would be set up in her yard this year, because the old square was flooded.

"Why my yard?" she asked.

"Because yours has a lantern," said the headman, as if it were obvious.

So the whole of Mikage came, with paper lanterns on poles, and drums, and children carrying fish-shaped lamps on strings.

Hanae stood at a kettle the size of a washtub in the open kitchen, with sleeves tied back and flour on her chin.

Tamae ran the rice.

Six village women cut vegetables on planks laid across barrels, and gossiped faster than they chopped.

And at her elbow, in a borrowed apron that was far too short for him, a tall quiet man was stirring the pot.

"You're doing it wrong," Hanae said.

"I am stirring."

"You're stirring like you're trying to kill it. Slow. Figure eights."

Jiro stirred in figure eights.

Under the apron strings his shoulders were relaxed for the first time in her memory.

Every few minutes his eyes came sideways to find her and went away again.

She felt it each time.

She had not slept more than four hours a night for three weeks.

She had never been happier.

By dusk the yard was crowded, with every table full and the lanterns lit along the fence.

The woman who had said "poor thing" at the gate sat down on a bench with her mother.

She ate two bowls of soup in silence.

Then she came to the kitchen window.