八月の器

八月の器　小山伸二

八月の午後
そのひとだけがいない
まだ生きているぼくたちは
お昼をたべる　山の控え室で
七十四の夏が
煙になって高いところで
果てているあいだ

「死んでしまえば白骨になる」
あたりまえなことはつまらない
そんな安吾を教えてくれた
女の子に恋していた夏
そんなことが思い出される
「肉体をバカにしてはいけない」
そんな声も響いてきて
抱きしめることもできなかったくせに

みじかい上映が終わった劇場の
扉がふいに開かれるように
母の物語の
灰になりそこねた何かが
まだそこに横たわっている
山の係の人にうながされて
読むことのできない枯葉の断片を
みんなでひろいあげていく
器になにかが積みかさなっていく

八月の山はしずかで
ぼくたちは
なにを納めたのかわからなくなるが
さらさらの七十四のあたりまえを
納めたのだろう
やけに軽い
八月の器

August Urn 

On an August afternoon,
being aware of her absence,
we the family who were left
are having lunch in a small room set in the mountains.
Just outside the room, her seventy-four summers are now
tuning into smoke, rising up high against the greenery,
and eventually vanishing into the sky. 

“We’ll all turn into bones in the end.”
That’s the downright boring truth.
The girl who got me to read Ango Sakaguchi
may have told me that
during the summer I was falling for her.  
“Don’t forget that we’re flesh and blood after all.”
She may have said that as well.
The girlI couldn’t even hold in my arms. 

As if we were in a movie theater
and the door was abruptly opened after a short film,
the remains of my mother’s story
still hanging there, going nowhere,
yet to be reduced to ashes.
Now her story has been broken into pieces,
fragments of a dead leaf that are no longer readable.
We pick them up with her remains,
put them in the urn along with her ashes. 

The mountains are so quiet
that we’re no longer sure
what we’ve done here
or what we really put into the urn.
The dry pieces of a seventy-four yearlong everyday life
are unrealistically light
inside the urn of August. 

Translator’s note:In funeral ceremonies practiced according to Japanese Buddhism, it is common for the family members to have a meal and drink while waiting for the body tobe cremated. After the cremation, the family gathers up around the body and each family member picks up a piece of bone with a pair of chopsticks and ceremonially puts it in an urn. During this process, large bones are broken into small pieces to fit in the urn.   
(translation: Yuiko Kimura)