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Koguma’s Cub began to run along the prefectural road in front of the school in the opposite direction from her home and Hinoharu Station.
The directions Reiko gave her were simple and straightforward: drive along the prefectural road until you reach the end and turn left. When you ride further than that, you’ll see a company rest home, so turn at its sign and go to the third house.
This was Hokuto’s villa area where Koguma, who had started to ride around the house on her Cub without any particular destination in mind, had gone several times to stroll around.
She didn’t get lost and arrived at the house Reiko told her about. The distance from here to the school wasn’t much different from the distance between the school and Koguma’s apartment.
Log cabins and two-by-four self-built houses neatly lined up along the simple concrete-paved mountain road. As it was the season for vacationing, many houses had lights in them.
Reiko’s house was a log cabin with a darker coloring than the others, located near the far end of the road. She didn’t need to look at the nameplate, as Reiko was washing her Postal Service Cub in front of the house.
As Koguma approached her on her Cub, Reiko, dressed in work overalls, waved at her.
“Your Cub goes over there.”
Koguma hesitated a little. Reiko was pointing at the front of the log cabin. Although the concrete paved surface was big enough for a bike, it was still visible from the street. Considering the possibility of theft, she wanted to park her Cub out of sight if possible.
For now, she parked her Cub in front of the log cabin as Reiko asked, and after washing the Postal Service Cub, Reiko opened the large window of the log cabin.
Then, she placed a thick wooden board to make a ramp in the space between the large floor-to-ceiling window and the front area of the log cabin.
I see. So I’m not the only one who’s invited, Koguma thought to herself.
Koguma followed Reiko’s lead and moved her Cub into the interior of the cabin.
Reiko’s cabin looked cluttered.
It consisted of a 12-tatami living room with a mezzanine floor that could be reached by a ladder. About a quarter of the interior was paved with bricks, which could be used to park motorcycles on.
The kitchen, bathroom, and toilet were located on the remaining flooring. Reiko, who brought in her Postal Service Cub after, placed it alongside Koguma’s Cub on the brick-paved space.
“Sit wherever you like. I’ll make some tea.”
However, the only place to sit was a large wool rug in the center of the room. There were several cushions scattered on it.
Koguma spoke as she sat on the edge of the rug.
“I’d prefer water rather than tea.”
Reiko giggled and took out two big glasses, then poured water from the tap.
It was a joke on the internet that there was an orange tap in Ehime that served POM juice1, but it was true that in the mountainous regions of Yamanashi and Nagano, natural spring water from the southern alps came straight out of the tap.
Reiko placed the tea table that had been propped against a corner of the room in the middle of the rug, placed the two cups on it, and then plopped down on the rug and gulped down her glass of water.
Koguma also sipped from her glass. It was delicious. The water, which seemed to have come from underground, was refreshingly cold to drink in the summer, and made her feel as though a breeze had blown over her body.
After finishing her water, Reiko got up from the rug and spoke as she looked into the refrigerator in the kitchen.
“What do you want for dinner? Do you have anything? I just got home today, so I don’t have much to eat.”
Koguma also put down her glass and stood up from the rug, then opened the cargo box of her Cub that was parked indoors.
“I bought some food. Let me use your kitchen.”
Reiko looked surprised. Koguma didn’t think she would do something like this either. She pulled out the grocery bag containing the ingredients for the dish she had planned to cook back at her apartment.
“What are you going to make?”
As she laid out the contents of the bag next to the kitchen sink, she answered Reiko’s question with sparkling eyes.
“Okonomiyaki. If you don’t mind.”
“I love okonomiyaki~”
Turning her back to Reiko, who was bending back and forth to express her joy, Koguma found a knife and cutting board in the kitchen, which didn’t seem to be used for cooking a lot, and began to chop the cabbage.
Koguma spread out the ingredients she had bought on the way here and mixed the chopped cabbage, red pickled ginger, eggs, flour, and water in a bowl.
A simple okonomiyaki, similar to Kanto’s monjayaki2, that she sometimes made and ate in her apartment. Those were the only ingredients she bought.
She opened the fridge to get something to drink, thinking that she would like to eat something with a different taste every once in a while. Inside, which was almost empty of food, there was pork belly on a styrofoam tray for some reason.
It was perfect for making pork okonomiyaki. But she closed the fridge, wondering if she could use it without asking. And then Reiko, who had thrown herself down on the wool rug in the middle of the living room, said,
“Is the okonomiyaki ready yet? I’m so hungry that I want to drink gasoline~”
Koguma opened the fridge and took out the pork belly, then put it all into the bowl containing the okonomiyaki ingredients.
“It’ll be ready soon.”
She heated the okonomiyaki ingredients in a frying pan. In order to prioritize time over quality, she used more oil and high heat to make it more like deep frying, which made the outside more well-done and delicious-looking than she expected.
Koguma cooked several pieces of okonomiyaki at once in the frying pan, as she usually did at home. She had a cat tongue, so she didn’t like eating it while cooking it on a hot plate, and she and Reiko didn’t have the kind of relationship where they would cook okonomiyaki together.3
Several pieces of okonomiyaki were made, and Koguma took them to the tea table on the rug in the middle of the living room where Reiko was waiting.
Reiko crouched down on the edge of the rug and looked at her Postal Cub and Koguma’s Super Cub, parked next to each other on the brick-paved space.
Rather than being interested in the pairing of the two bikes, which didn’t seem to suit each other that much, it seemed like she was comparing Koguma’s Cub, which was brand new and only bought about two months ago even though it had been through one summer, with her own Postal Cub that seemed to be damaged in many places, and smiling wryly.
Even to Koguma, who wasn’t very knowledgeable about motorcycles, Reiko’s Postal Cub looked considerably battered after a long time of not seeing it.
The front fender was broken, the side cover was missing, the seat was torn, and the turn signals had snapped at the base.
Reiko spoke as she touched her Postal Cub, where only the engine was brand new.
“I think it’s time for a refresher soon.”
The brick-paved space was stacked with tools and enough parts to build another Cub or two.
Koguma spoke to Reiko, who had her back turned to her and was staring at her bike.
“The okonomiyaki is finished. Let’s eat.”
Reiko turned around at those words, and her eyes lit up when she saw the okonomiyaki already covered in sauce and cut into eight equal pieces.
Reiko stood up and took out two bottles of unsweetened carbonated water, which she often drank at school during lunch break. She took off the caps with a bottle opener from the kitchen and placed the glass bottles on the table.
Koguma and Reiko sat around the table and began their dinner of okonomiyaki and carbonated water.
Reiko unceremoniously poured mayonnaise on the okonomiyaki without asking Koguma anything and started eating it as she said “itadakimasu.” It was still a little too hot for Koguma’s cat tongue. She sipped at the bottle of cold carbonated water in front of her and asked Reiko,
“Where did you go during summer vacation?”
Reiko, who had been stuffing her cheeks with okonomiyaki, looked at Koguma, then looked at her red Cub in the corner of the room, and smiled. She began to talk about her own summer, where she had been to places near and far.
1 POM Juice is made from mikan oranges grown in Ehime Prefecture, and the orange tap thing is a real urban legend.↩
2 Monjayaki is also a type of Japanese pancake like okonomiyaki, but a Tokyo variation with different seasoning.↩
3 In Japanese restaurants, okonomiyaki is usually cooked on a hot plate on top of the table. People either cook it themselves after ordering the ingredients or a restaurant staff would do it for them.↩
Magic,thank you so much for doing this
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