Under the lights of the food stall, I was captivated by a toy watch.

#nana56b


Synopsis

One morning in December, in the kitchen where the
heat hadn’t kicked in yet, I got a call from my
mother.

“Your father… had passed away,” she said.

She didn’t say “passed away”; she said
“had passed away.”

That slight shift to the past tense slowly seeped
from my fingertips gripping the receiver down into
the very core of my body.

I swallowed the words “Since when?” deep in my
throat.

Outside the window, light snow was silently
blanketing the sidewalk in white.

My mother fell silent after that and exhaled a long
breath on the other end of the line.

My parents had separated the year before I started
elementary school.

To this day, I still don’t know exactly why.

That’s why my memories of my father are as faint
and shapeless as the margins of an old photograph.

All I remember is the smell of cigarettes and his
back, which always seemed irritated by something.

I can’t even recall the feel of his hand as he
held me on his lap anymore.

There is just one memory that remains vividly clear.

One summer when I was five, my father took me by the
hand to a night festival in the castle town.

Under the lights of the food stalls, I became
fascinated by a toy watch.

It was a cheap, children’s wristwatch with a blue
face.

When I begged for it, my father—unusually—bought it
for me without saying a word.

He asked the shopkeeper to fasten it around my small
wrist right there on the spot.

My father’s fingers were thick, and he struggled
quite a bit to fasten the clasp.

That clumsy movement of his is the only thing I
still remember clearly.

Whenever my mother spoke of my father, it was always
just complaints about his debts and how selfish he
was.

So, before I knew it, I, too, had stopped thinking
of him as anything other than that kind of person.

In a castle town in Shinshu, my father ran a small
watch repair shop all by himself.


I have a faint memory of being taken there just once
when I was very young.

I was told that my father’s cause of death was
complications from diabetes.

Apparently, he had gone without insulin for nearly
half a year because he couldn’t afford the cost of
hospital visits.

In the corner of the room, empty plastic bottles of
cheap candy and soda were piled up.

I wonder if, in his final moments, my father had been
clinging to those things—which raise blood sugar—as
if they were his last hope.

Leaning back in his recliner, he had passed away
peacefully, without a trace of struggle.

I heard he was found on a cold evening as the year
was drawing to a close.

The discovery was delayed because there was no one
to visit him or worry about him.

The funeral was held among just the immediate family
and ended abruptly.

The only attendees were my mother, me, and two
elderly men who were said to have been regulars at
his shop.

While we were offering incense, one of the elderly
men…