Watering the Underground Cherry

I do maintenance in the subway’s rail yard. After the last train, in the dark depot, I put out the lights of the cars on the line slated for closure next spring—one by one, in the order of the paperwork. The official job title is a long one, but my colleagues call me the lights-out man.

Ridership on that line has dwindled year after year, and in the city’s restructuring plan, behind the phrase “a review of the transport network for greater efficiency,” the cars that carried forty years of mornings will be sold for scrap. No one complains. The system produces the right numbers, after all.

I hated that rightness. Correct numbers never look at the faces of the people who ride. Once a line is marked for closure, the tracks stop being a means of transport and become inventory—and lights worth another hundred million yen or so shine down on all that steel.

One night like any other, beneath the bogie of an old car waiting to be dismantled, I found a blossom of the palest pink. It was blooming under fluorescent light—a bud that had never known the sun.

It was that faint shade—the cherry pink a certain woman writer was said to have loved all her life. A woman who fell in love again and again across her long years, was betrayed again and again, and still, whenever the season came, changed into a kimono of that color and went out to meet it—the color she gazed up at until her very end. And here it was, rising from a crack in the earth that no one had recorded.

There was no telling where the seed had come from—a single grain blown into a gap in the driver’s cab, or a crumb that had clung to someone’s sakuramochi, dropped years ago. Probably the latter. The residue of something sweet, eaten and forgotten, had sprouted ten meters underground.

When I reported it to my boss, he handed me weed killer. A safety issue, he said. I took it, set it on a shelf at the back of the depot, and started carrying a water bottle instead. I added a two-minute detour to my nightly rounds. In the empty rail yard, I had been given the job of watering a loose thread in the world’s fabric.

That spring—the last cherry season before the closure—the underground cherry came into full bloom. Above ground, the cherries lit up for tourists were in full bloom inside everyone’s screens.

The blossoms, bathed in the white of the fluorescent tubes, glowed as if quietly lighting themselves. For forty years, tens of millions of people had passed directly over this depot. Not one of them knows the flower that blooms here. And still it blooms—without filing a single form with the system.

The roots had begun to split the concrete floor, running along the seams of the rails, growing strong enough to bear the weight of the cars. Even I, an inspection engineer, could see it was a magnificent crack. A structural defect, or a future the structure had accepted? The kind of thing that cannot be written into a calculation sheet.

In time, the flower bore small fruit. White berries rolled across the depot floor, and some of them mingled with the grime on the bogies of the stacked scrap cars. Aboard those hulks of iron bound for foreign ports rode a life with no travel papers, no visa.

On the final day, I reversed the order of the lights. One by one the lamps of the lined-up cars went dark, and the last to burn was the single tube above the cherry. Even in darkness the blossom stayed white, until at last it took on the color of the dark itself.

On my way out, I stopped at the shelf with the weed killer. It had not passed its expiration date. The can, resting on the cold metal shelf, had the exact shape of the world’s rightness as it stands now.

This spring, somewhere in this city, someone may come upon a pale, unfamiliar pink blossom—beside a port, at the end of a rail line, in a crack in the pavement. Will you water it? Or will you still say the system is right? I noticed the water in my bottle had gone down, just a little, and without telling anyone, I climbed the stairs into the night.