The Mage's Herbal Tea

Stories

## Illustrations

## ORIENTATION

Translator: Yunying Yi

● Moon age 1.9 — Crescent

He had not expected a road with so many hills.

Yuki Fujiwara glared at the slope running on ahead of him, and at the clear sky joined to the far end of it, and muttered a complaint under his breath, a little deflated.

Speak of Yokohama, and it means the sea. It leaves people with nothing but the impression of a port town, so that one cannot help picturing gentle streets curled along the shore.

Yuki stepped into the shade of a camphor tree reaching out from the roadside, set the paper bags he held in both hands down beneath the tree, and rested a little.

He wiped and wiped, and still the sweat ran. The handkerchief could take in no more. Yuki groaned.

He let the canvas backpack the school had specified slip from his shoulders. His soaked T-shirt clung to his back. A breeze passed, and the pleasant rush of every bit of strength loosening in him streamed through his body.

Some twenty minutes had passed since he left the station. He had been climbing uphill the whole way.

He had asked at the police box in front of the station about a map of the neighborhood, so the route was already fixed firmly in his mind. But he had never checked the rise and fall on the map, and he was already close to forgetting even the distance that one confirmed centimeter stood for.

"Still about halfway."

Yuki shouldered the canvas backpack again, lifted the paper bags in both hands, and started off once more.

But it was not only the summer heat that made his steps heavy.

He had not slept at all on the overnight bus, and added to that was the unease of going to stay, through the summer vacation, with the uncle he was meeting for the first time—the eldest son of the Fujiwara family—and of being entrusted to him. It dragged at Yuki's feet like mud.…

## LESSON 1

● Moon age 2.9 — Four-day moon

A bay window in a wooden frame, a bathtub on cat-leg supports, a carved wooden table that must have been an antique, finely hand-stitched sheets. Yuki woke in a room like one in a little European hotel, and for a short while looked around, not knowing where he was.

Three locks were on the door. Yuki stretched.

"Yuki, are you up?"

From the other side of the door came the voice of his uncle, pastoral as a shepherd's song—no, the voice of his teacher.

"I'm up!"

Yuki answered in a fluster, smoothing his hair with his hands.

"When you're ready, come to the living room. After breakfast we go out to the fields. This is a witch's morning work."

A witch. Duties…. The thin unease that had barely settled the night before lifted its head in his mind again.

A suspicious religion? Or was it a joke?

Whichever it was, if he put the teacher in a bad mood and was told that he had better leave after all, that would be trouble. Better to keep his head down and do as he was told.

Yuki sprang from the bed like a startled hare, ran to the washroom and washed his face, dragged a brush roughly through his hair, and tied it together with a rubber band. His soft, straight hair hardly tangled. Even left loose it would not come undone, and that genuinely pleased him.

He looked at his own face in the mirror.

Yuki hated the way he looked. To put it more precisely, he hated these upturned eyes very much. You look angry. You look arrogant. He was often criticized that harshly. He kept his bangs long so that the eyes he was ashamed of, and the pimples on his forehead, would be hidden as much as…

## LESSON 2

● Moon age 6.9 — First quarter

"Well then. It's about time we began formal magical training."

On the sixth evening after Yuki came to the Western-style house, after dinner was over, the teacher put on a serious face for the first time and declared it.

The man himself was probably trying to summon some dignity for a sacred rite, or else to carry himself as a master, but unfortunately, because of those kindly drooping eyes, no such effect could be felt.

The teacher resembled no one in the Fujiwara family.

Neither the skin darkened a little by the sun, nor that deeply carved face, nor those characteristic downturned outer corners of the eyes belonged among the Fujiwaras. The eyes of the six siblings, Yuki's mother among them, were single-lidded or double-lidded, neither drooping nor upturned—eyes without any particular feature. What people call a plain face.

These upturned outer corners of his own eyes, which Yuki did not like, must have come down from the father he had never seen. Because of these eyes, people took him for conceited and arrogant, not cute in the least. If he had at least had a face in which Fujiwara blood could be seen at a glance, perhaps he would have been treated a little more gently.

The Fujiwara genes hardly appeared on the surface at all, and on that point Yuki felt a kinship with the uncle who was his teacher.

While he was thinking over the Fujiwara family's hereditary traits as they showed in the face, the teacher brought out a plain, utterly unadorned volume, no larger than B5…

## LESSON 3

● Moon age 16.9 — Lingering moon

Summer sunlight fell into the café. Bands of gold passed through the glass wall, the heat stripped away, and only a freshness remained, settling on the wooden floor.

A delivery was supposed to come to the café today, so he had been asked to mind the shop—so the teacher had said, and then gone out to the fields.

The rose hips that had all been wasted because of that business with Katsuya—they had gotten some from an herb farm they knew.

From tomorrow, Madam could drink rose hip tea just as she had until now. That made him glad. The teacher must be thinking the same.

His gaze fell on the notebook of the past.

—When you turn fifteen, fate begins to turn.

He remembered the man who had called himself a mage, but he did not understand what those words meant.

Was he simply teasing an elementary schooler? Calling oneself a mage was far too strange.

But he could not have been only a thrill-seeker passing by.

If one asked why: because he knew Yuki's name. He had waited for Yuki in the park. And they had met only that once.

Soon he would come to his fifteenth birthday.

Yuki's birthday was the twenty-second of August. Because it fell during summer vacation, it never became something his friends talked about. Only his mother celebrated it. And now there was no one at all.

A birthday was simply an ordinary day. Nothing changed. No one paid it any mind. Yuki grew one year older. That was all.

But perhaps this birthday would be different. There was…

## EXAMINATION

● Moon age 1.5 — Slender moon

Black clouds heavy with too much rain hung thick and low, and the tips of the linden trees looked as if they might stab into them, they seemed so short.

But the rain still had not fallen. The damp air pressing in darkened his mood, and Yuki sat hunched on the bed.

He had prepared for bed an hour earlier than usual and opened the notebook of the past, but because of what Haruto had said, he could not help caring more about the teacher's past than his own.

That the teacher would steal fruit from someone else's field was hard to believe. He could not imagine the calm teacher of now doing such a thing, but perhaps he had when he was still a child. And the teacher had come to Kanagawa Prefecture when he was only a child. Why? This was the first he had heard of the adoption. Perhaps Yuki simply had not been told. His uncles and aunts must have known. Perhaps the discord between the teacher and the Fujiwara family ran deeper than he had imagined.

The gentle teacher—what kind of past did he really have?

Just as the tip of his mechanical pencil was poking the notebook, the room suddenly grew bright, as if it were day. Outside the window, the outline of the herb field showed itself for an instant.

In the moment it returned to night, thunder began to roll.

As Yuki straightened his upper body and looked out the window, rain fell as if it meant to smash the glass.

The downpour struck the leaves and flowers of the herbs without mercy.

The herb field, seen looking down from the window, looked as if it were crying out.

● Moon age 2.5 — Three…

## Afterword

I once had the experience of being granted magic.

I used to be a rather picky child. Of the school meals, I would mostly eat only the bread and the milk, and I basically never touched the rest.

In the third year of elementary school, the new homeroom teacher's eyes fell on my tray, eight-tenths of it left. I felt I was about to be scolded. "I'm sorry for being so picky," I apologized, my voice shaking with nerves, but the teacher said to the likes of me, "It's all right. It's only that you can't eat because you aren't hungry," and laughed a big, open laugh, as if to blow every worry away (and she was a woman teacher, at that).

Strangely enough, right after that my stomach began to complain fiercely of hunger. Milk and bread alone were more than I could bear, and, nervous and awed, I put meat and fish into my mouth.

Thanks to that, I can now enjoy most foods as delicious.

The teacher's words at that time (and that open laugh) were a magic spell to me.

No—she was only an elementary school teacher. She certainly was not a witch. Those words, too, must have been words gained through long years of a teacher's life (career).

But it is a fact that I was granted magic. The pain over meals that had clung to my back all that time vanished completely from the next day on.

In this story there is no battle with a dragon (dragon), and no mage who can bring forth lightning and flame, but there is a gentle magic that can draw a sound from herbs (herb), filling…