Miracle Apples

Epilogue

August 2007. Kimura was in his orchards on the lower slopes of Mount Iwaki. The faint smell of vinegar lingered in the air in the orchards. It seems he’d been spraying vinegar during the morning. Kimura was sitting on his ladder, on the other side of a thick canopy of apple leaves, intent on his work. It was the ladder he’d been perched on when he looked down and saw a chasm open up under him. For some reason I’d imagined a rickety metal ladder, but the one Kimura was sitting on was a wooden one, worn and softened by time. His wife Michiko was at the base of the ladder, engaged in light-hearted chat. I didn’t want to disturb them, but Kimura had told me there was something he wanted to show me.

‘Take a look at this leaf. There’s a round hole in it. What do you think it is?’

He had a leaf in his hand. There was a hole right in the middle of it. It looked as though it may have been eaten by an insect. When I said so, Kimura smiled, leaning d his head to the side.

‘Nope. This hole was formed by the leaf itself. I thought it was done by an insect at first. But there’re no insects which would make this kind of hole. For years it struck me as strange. Then I came across a leaf with a hole like this, and beside it a typical, brownish, alternaria blotch diseased leaf. Interesting, I thought. So I decided to watch and see what would happen to the alternaria blotch. The diseased area became parched and brittle. The leaf cut off the supply of moisture to those parts, those parts only, as though it was trying to starve them. The diseased leaf then fell, and it had holes. Not only that. Since the time these holes started appearing, the small leaves next to it gradually got bigger. The tree was making up for those leaves that were lost. I used scales to measure them, and found that the size of the holes that developed, and the amount the other leaf increased in size, were about the same. When many more holes appear, and the tree cannot make up for them, new leaves come out at the tips of the branches. When I fertilized the orchards in the past, these holes never developed, even when they were affected by disease. There are only just enough nutrients in the orchards, so I think that the trees relied on their innate, natural vitality. The more you learn about nature, the more amazing it is.

Helping nature, and sharing its bounty. That’s the essence of farming. How farming should be. Unfortunately, agriculture today has lost its way. The point is, we cannot simply carry on like we have been. In the old days, I was attracted by industrial farming methods, but areas where industrial farming methods are practised are rapidly turning into deserts. All you’ve got to do is look at what’s happening in the Corn Belt in the America and to the collective farms in the former Soviet Union. However sophisticated science becomes, human beings cannot live separately from nature.

We’re products of nature too. Being able to ‘help’ nature depends on whether we can feel it from the heart. I believe this is where the future of humanity rests. This is no exaggeration. I simply help apple trees. There’s only so much I can do. But as far as our future is concerned, it can only help. I may be overstating it a little bit, but I’ve come to believe that from the bottom of my heart.’

It is no exaggeration whatsoever. Kimura has achieved something more important than taking off in aeroplanes, or landing on the moon. The apple trees were laden with green fruit. The harvest season lay ahead. Gazing on that peaceful scene, I was reminded that this was where it all happened. These orchards were the stage where, when he was a boy, he planted apple trees with his elder brother, where the four orchards first went pesticide-free, where he saw the shining silver man, where he tied the rope after deciding to try and end it all on the mountain, where only seven blossoms grew, and where he saw the apples in full bloom after nine long years.

It was in these orchards that he and the apple trees had continued to face each other. It was where people had joked about him, made a fool of him, yet whilst suffering in poverty, he had persevered along the long and winding road.