Miracle Apples

Chapter 24

‘Well, that’s how it happened, bit by bit, more and more people started buying my apples. For some reason the apples at that time were very sweet. Much sweeter than now. Although it wasn’t really their sweetness. When you cut them with a knife, the apple actually stuck to the blade. I wonder why? Perhaps the apple trees were giving me just a little help. Apples like that would always sell well. But to start with the orchards hadn’t settled down and there were years when the apples weren’t that sweet. There were a lot of spoilt and insect damaged ones too. I had letters saying things like “They weren’t sweet, so we sprinkled a little salt on them”. Anyway, at the end of the day, it was thanks to my customers that I made it through those years. They gave me hope, because they’d eat them, even if they weren’t sweet or if they were marked. They supported me. Apple trees produce apples, and they are supported by nature. But I was supported by people.

When you think about it, even though it’s true that I was rejected by some people around me who said I’d let the family down, and that I was mad, at those times there were others who remained friendly. There were friends who quietly helped me out when I couldn’t pay the electricity or water bills, and I didn’t have to pay the scrap merchant either during that time.

Amongst other things, he took away an engine which was in pretty good nick. Occasionally, the manager of the bank I’d got a loan from wouldn’t take the money I’d scraped together to at least pay the interest. He said to me “If you pay over that money you’ll have nothing to live on will you?” The local tax office had issued me with red tags, but the section chief always encouraged me: “Your time will come”. Once the apples started doing their own thing, the owner of the neighbouring orchard cut down all his trees along the boundary with my orchards. That was Makoto, the son of the Ginzō Takeya who’d told me that the apples were blossoming. He said “If even a small quantity of the pesticides I’m spreading end up in his orchards, it’ll invalidate his pesticide-free status”. Ryū Yamazaki, the chef at a local French restaurant, came to my orchards thinking he might use my apples in his cooking, to help boost sales a little. Somehow I managed to survive, thanks to the help I had from various people. In the days when there were no apples, I simply didn’t have the wherewithal to think about that that sort of thing, but bit by bit things started getting better, and I gradually began to see how it could work out.

In the same way as apple trees cannot survive on their own, people don’t live in isolation. I thought I’d work it out by myself, but if there hadn’t been people around supporting me, there’s no way I’d be where I am today. My mother and father in the Kimura household died shortly after the apples revived. My father had laughed, saying “I never thought you make it this far. I reckoned you give it up after two or three years”. Honestly, it was non-stop graft.

When I read the biography of Seishū Hanaoka[1], I remember thinking that he was just the same as me. In the course of experimenting with anaesthetics, both his wife and mother made personal sacrifices. The use of anaesthesia subsequently became widespread throughout Japan, but did that make his wife and mother any happier? I often think it would have been nice if it had.’

Kimura’s orchards continued to change rapidly. He stopped planting the soy beans he’d been growing for five years since the year he climbed Mount Iwaki. The actinobacteria had stopped growing on the roots. In the first year, dense clumps of actinobacteria formed on the roots of the soy beans. As the second and third years passed, the number of nodules decreased. If there’s insufficient nitrogen in the soil, actinobacteria on the roots – in symbiosis with the soy bean – will fix nitrogen. Conversely, as nitrogen in the soil builds up through actinobacteria activity, this is suppressed. The reason no actinobacteria formed in year five was that the soil was saturated with nitrogen. Nature isn’t wasteful. This was evident in the apples which became healthier as the actinobacteria diminished.