Hiro Arikawa - The Travelling Cat Chronicles

‘I looked into the gardening club thing. They stopped a few years ago, because membership numbers fell. But if you’re interested, the science teacher said he’d run it, even if it’s just the two of us. And we can use the greenhouse.’

Two things surprised Yoshimine. One, that Satoru had actually looked into it. And two, that he was planning to take part himself.

‘You want to be in the club, too?’ Yoshimine asked.

‘I’d like to give it a try.’

‘But you’re not into gardening or anything like that, are you?’

‘I wouldn’t say I’m not interested. I just haven’t had anything to do with it up till now. I’ve never known any farmers.’

‘Really? Nobody? Not even, like, your grandfather or your grandmother?’

A total city boy, Yoshimine thought, but Satoru waved a dismissive hand.

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘My parents didn’t have much to do with their relatives. My grandparents on my mother’s side died when she was still young, and my father didn’t seem to get on with his parents that well. The first time I met them was at my parents’ funeral, and we didn’t talk much.’

Yoshimine understood now why Satoru’s aunt had taken him in. If your parents died and your grandparents were in good health, it’s likely that’s where you’d go. Pretty unusual for a single woman to take a young boy in.

‘I reckoned this might be my only chance to give it a go,’ Satoru said, laughing. ‘I’ve dreamed about living the country life. Like in Miyazaki’s film My Neighbour Totoro , do you know it?’

And so the two of them revived the gardening club. Yoshimine’s grandmother also invited Satoru over to their home to experience life on a working farm.

Satoru was a latchkey kid, since his aunt worked all day, so he began to go over to Yoshimine’s home, and sometimes stayed over for the weekend.

‘I hope you will be good friends,’ Yoshimine’s grandmother said to Satoru – what grandmothers typically say when other children come to play. ‘I always wonder if Daigo – she called him by his first name – ‘is getting on with the other children at school. I hope he isn’t being bullied.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that. I don’t think there’s any chance Yoshimine would ever be bullied.’

‘What d’ya mean?’ Yoshimine said, poking him in the ribs.

‘You know exactly what I mean,’ Satoru said, poking him back.

His grandmother, who had been worried that Yoshimine might not make any friends in his new school, was overjoyed when he brought Satoru home. Very soon, she started calling him Satoru-chan.

‘Shall I buy a video game or something you can play with Satoru-chan?’

She asked this because she was concerned that he might be getting bored, always helping out in the fields.

‘I already have some,’ Yoshimine replied, ‘and so does Satoru.’

Satoru genuinely enjoyed helping out in the fields – it was a kind of pastoral hobby.

‘We’re doing the gardening club at school together, too, and I think he really likes farm work,’ Yoshimine explained to his grandmother.

‘Really? Then that’s fine,’ his grandmother responded. ‘At any rate, you’ve made a good friend here. So I won’t worry about you.’

His grandmother didn’t just say this once, but at every opportunity. As if reassuring herself.

‘I guess Grandma still sees me as a little kid,’ Yoshimine said, a trifle embarrassed.

With Satoru being so good-natured, and her grandson’s best friend to boot, Yoshimine’s grandmother fussed over him, and Satoru grew very attached to her.

‘You’re lucky,’ he told Yoshimine. ‘I wish I had a grandmother like yours.’

He’d never been close to his grandparents, and seemed to enjoy having a relationship with an elderly person.

‘If you’re okay with an old woman like me,’ Yoshimine’s grandmother told him, ‘then consider this like your own grandmother’s house.’

Yoshimine never teased his friend about his obvious envy of his grandmother. He knew that Satoru tended to keep his distance from his aunt and had no other relatives he could become close to.

‘Come over any time. My grandmother likes you a lot, too.’

One afternoon, during class, Yoshimine was feeling uncomfortably hot. He glanced out of the window and saw heat shimmering up from the ground. It was the time of year when the temperature was often over thirty degrees.

He suddenly pushed his chair back and stood up, causing a stir of excitement in the class.

‘Yoshimine! What do you think you’re doing?’ his teacher scolded.

‘Nothing,’ Yoshimine said casually, and walked out of the classroom.

‘Hey!’

At times like these, it was Satoru’s role to step in.

‘What do you mean, nothing?’ he called.

‘I’ll be right back.’

It was Satoru, not their teacher, who ran out of the classroom after him.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked Yoshimine, when he finally caught up with him.

‘The greenhouse. I forgot to open the vent this morning. It’s so hot now, the plants are going to boil.’

Inside the greenhouse, they were growing tomatoes and other vegetables, as well as tending some orchids, a hobby of the science teacher. Tomatoes don’t do well in the rain so the roofed-in environment was perfect for them, but this region generally had a temperate climate and when it got too hot in the summer they suffered.

‘Why not wait until break? It’s only another thirty minutes.’

‘But it’s the hottest time of the day. We have to cool it down as soon as we can.’

‘You could have pretended you had to go to the bathroom or something! It’ll be your fault if they close down our club.’

‘Then you go and explain.’

‘Jeez,’ Satoru muttered, and made his way back to the classroom.

‘Yoshimine’s been attacked by guerrillas!’

Satoru’s report had the classroom in uproar.

Though Yoshimine threw the class into chaos on such occasions, before the summer vacation they got a bumper crop of tomatoes and other vegetables and were able to save their teacher’s orchids as well.

When he was sharing out the vegetables with Satoru and the teacher, Yoshimine ended up taking a portion of tomatoes that was a little larger than the others. Yoshimine’s grandmother’s outdoor-grown tomato plants had been hit hard by the long rainy season and hadn’t yielded quite what she’d hoped.

‘Take more. There are just the two of us in our house, so I don’t need so many,’ Satoru said, and Yoshimine burst out laughing. There were only two in Yoshimine’s home, too, and one of them was extremely old. Satoru had a comeback for that: ‘But you eat much more than I do.’

In the space of one semester, Satoru had learned a lot about farming, and had picked up on the fact that Yoshimine wanted to grow greenhouse tomatoes as a sort of insurance policy against his grandmother’s tomatoes failing. Grateful, Yoshimine went ahead and took three or four extra, dropping them happily into his bucket.

‘I’m going back home the first week of the summer holiday,’ Yoshimine said.

‘I get it,’ Satoru answered instantly. ‘I’ll take care of the greenhouse while you’re gone.’

Their first crop was in already, but there were a lot more that would ripen later.

‘This is the first time you’ve been home since you came to this school, isn’t it? Hope it goes okay.’

Satoru understood the situation, which is why he didn’t just say, Oh, that’s nice. Yoshimine’s parents weren’t taking any time off work to see their son; he was just putting in a token appearance. ‘If they ripen while you’re away, I’ll take some tomatoes over to your grandmother’s.’