Rusty Maple Syrup: The Second Goodbye 1
I have no dreams, no aspirations, no status, and no self-esteem.
I gave up on myself. But I can't give up on him.
A man permanently banished from that world for match-fixing. A sixteen-year-old caring for an old man he has no emotional attachment to. A second sixteen-year-old whose mother ran away, who communicates via tablet. And a man who escaped everything due to the yips and alcoholism.
A seaside town where a rusted wind clings to everything. It all started at a grocery store that looked like it was clinging to the road. A hard-boiled story about four people with no passion for tennis who somehow form a team and aim for the world.
When I enter the dim grocery store, Masato always says the same thing.
“The match-fixer is here.”
I have never seen a customer in this store, which clings to the prefectural road along the sea. Masato, who tends the shop at the dim counter, is sixteen. He grins at me, over forty, and calls me a match-fixer.
While tending the shop, Masato cares for a distant relative, an old man. With no other family, it’s hard for Masato to go to high school while looking after an eighty-year-old bedridden man. His real mother died a long time ago, and I don’t know the circumstances, but it seems he was left at this house of a distant relative when he was in elementary school.
Masato is well-versed in the rumors of this rusted town. The other day, a black Mercedes was parked in the neighborhood. Masato says, “The president of a big company in Tokyo is coming here because he wants his son, born to his mistress, to take over the business.” I asked him how he knew such things. Masato silently slammed a can of chuhai onto the shelf and disappeared into the back. He’s with the old man all day, and his only conversation partners are the few customers. Perhaps he naturally becomes well-versed in gossip-like things.
There is a small supermarket a little way from this store. But I come here. That’s because Masato sells things to me cheaply. I don’t know why. In exchange, I am forced to listen to something like a sarcastic remark every time.
“Otomo, what’s it feel like to lose on purpose without getting caught? Well, since tennis is a solo sport, maybe it’s pretty easy to fix matches.”
Even though I’m being called by my last name without honorifics by a sixteen-year-old, I don’t feel any real malice in his tone or expression.
Even so, I never thought at the time that I would end up moving toward something together with this kid.
＊
Every sport has a coach. By receiving advice from a coach during a match, an athlete can escape loneliness. In baseball or soccer, coaches shout from outside the field. And players can blame their teammates for their responsibilities. There is little time to face oneself.
Boxing is an individual sport. There is only one opponent. The enemy steps in as if to kill you, their eyes gleaming dully. Even then, once every three minutes, the words of a second save you from loneliness. You are not alone.
However, in this world, there are sports where even elementary school students fight for over an hour without receiving any advice from anyone.
I started tennis when I was a child. I was just enjoying it casually without any intention of becoming a professional. That changed suddenly in high school. As my physique developed, the destructive power of my forehand increased. Relying on that power, I advanced without even thinking. I turned pro right after graduating high school and went overseas. However, while I won in the lower ITF tours, I couldn’t win in the Challenger tournaments above them.
Overseas, my power tennis didn’t work at all. I couldn’t win with the patterns that overwhelmed opponents in Japan. I couldn’t earn prize money either. In the lowest-level tour, winning the first round gets you 50,000 yen. Winning the tournament gets you 600,000. It all disappears into travel and accommodation expenses. By the way, at Wimbledon, even losing in the first round earns you over 10 million yen.
I got married. My partner’s parents run a tennis club and school near Tokyo alongside their business. Their values are entirely built on tennis. Marriage to someone like me, who was like a stray dog, was difficult, but my background was clear, and my conduct wasn’t bad. I managed to push through it. My in-laws had expectations for me. If I reached the top 100 in the world rankings, it would add prestige to their tennis club.
However, I couldn’t win once I went overseas. I couldn’t earn many points and would just move on to the next venue.
The only place I could relax was an American diner. A typical roadside diner in America. Pancakes, french fries, omelets, hamburgers, meatloaf, chili beans. They would come out overflowing on the plate.
I would kill time for half a day or more with fellow losers I met at the tournament venues. Then I’d take a bus to the next venue. Even when I arrived at the venue, I would have lazy practice sessions with those same people.
I lost in the first round of a lower-level tournament in Caracas, Venezuela. December in Venezuela is the dry season. Under the clear sky, I was stunned, unable to think of anything. I couldn’t go back to Japan like this. But I didn’t have enough points to enter the next tournament. I was running out of money.
I had a bad feeling. Where did I put my wallet before the match? The Boston bag I put my wallet in. I was sure I had placed it at my feet. It had been stolen while I was dazed. Caracas has poor security. But this park was clean and well-maintained. I had let my guard down.
The person who stole it might be nearby. I ran around for about an hour, but no one had my Boston bag. Cold sweat soaked my sportswear. It was over. Under the parched Caracas sky, I stood still, unable to think of anything.
A stranger spoke to me.
“There’s a tournament of the same grade here next week. You should enter. Do you want points or money?”
“Both.”
“Then let’s do this. You bribe your opponent and win. We’ll provide the money for the bribe. If the bribe is successful, we’ll pay you a little. If you, with your low rank, enter, you’ll face a seed in the first round. Put on an upset. We’ll make money there. You get the prize money, the points, and the reward from us.”
It was a match with an unusually large number of spectators. When I approached the second-seeded player about match-fixing, he easily agreed. The money I received for the bribe was 250,000 yen. He lost to me skillfully. He staged long rallies and even made sounds of frustration. I got the points and earned 30,000 in prize money. I received about 50,000 as a reward.
The same man approached me with the same offer for the next match. I bribed my opponent in the same way and received money. I did it the next time, too. In the end, I reached the finals and finished as the runner-up, but I got the prize money and points.
I got involved in match-fixing. Tennis match-fixing is hard to detect. Simple errors in a match account for 20% to 30%. Intentional mistakes are hard for those around to notice. Besides, if you include everything from the top to the lowest-level tours, there are about 100,000 matches a year worldwide. It’s a hotbed for gambling and match-fixing. At first, I bribed opponents by myself. After repeating that, I was approached by a man who was neither a player nor a tournament official. I was wary, thinking my match-fixing had been discovered, but that wasn’t the case. He was a bookie. I asked him how he knew I was involved.
“The people here have a kind of dry brightness. That’s because they don’t have anything important captured by someone else. You are captured. Everyone is the same when it comes to caring about winning or losing. But you have a face like you’re sinking into mud. There are lies plastered on that face. People who are bound and captured by lies are easy to spot in dry places.”
Saying that, he looked down and laughed in a high-pitched voice.
I traveled the world fixing matches. At every venue, I could immediately tell who would accept match-fixing. I had plenty of points and money. But I couldn’t go back to Japan. In the end, I couldn’t go anywhere.
The end came abruptly. After a fixed match ended, I was surrounded by unknown men as I left the venue. They called themselves the TIU and said they were monitoring corruption. I was told of my permanent ban from the tour. I was also banned from entering any events related to tennis by the Japan Tennis Association. I couldn’t even go near my wife’s tennis club. And then, the divorce was finalized easily. Her parents wouldn’t let me see her. I lost everything and realized the magnitude of what I had done.
I wrote letters to my wife every month and sent them with a small amount of money. I couldn’t help but send them. There was never a reply.
The blue sky of Caracas where I got involved in match-fixing has faded in color, and I can only remember it in monochrome.
I haven’t held a racket since then.
＊
While resting his chin on the counter of the store, Masato says,
“I’ve been writing a will lately.”
“Who has?” I ask back.
“Me.”
“What’s with a sixteen-year-old writing a will?”
“I’m a sixteen-year-old tending a shop in a rotten store in this rotten town. If I died now, no one would care, right? At least a will is proof that I lived.”
“What are you writing?”
Masato says, brewing instant coffee in a mug with a Swedish flag printed on it that he bought recently. “I write it every day. Even for me, there are changes every day.”
“Isn’t that called a diary?” I asked.
“Why don’t you write a diary too, Otomo? How about writing down how to fix matches? You made quite a bit, didn’t you? Still, the internet is amazing. If you type in Otomo’s name, stories about match-fixing come up in an instant. Did you know? You even have your own wiki.”
At first, the interaction felt very stressful, but I’ve gotten used to his insolence. And as usual, without me asking, he hands me frozen pasta, spinach, and milk that’s about to expire. He doesn’t accept money. Even if he does, it’s half price.
“If I had made money, I wouldn’t come to a dead-end town like this,” Masato says, smiling with his thin, handsome face. His teeth are terrible. If he got them straightened, he could even be a model. But he probably doesn’t have that kind of money.
“Did you go to high school today?” I said.
Clicking his tongue, Masato pointed his chin toward the back of the store.
“The old man wasn’t feeling well, so I went to the hospital. Besides, I don’t even know if that old man is related to me by blood. I have to accompany him on the final corner of his life, you know.”
I hear a painful cough from the back.
“Otomo, you know, the guy who’s hitting against the wall with a tablet at the sports park where you work,” Masato says.
After several jobs, I landed a job managing the city’s sports park. A large resort hotel is adjacent to the sports park. It seems it used to be popular as a well-equipped hotel along the sea. However, because there is nothing around it and no specialties, customers decreased as the building deteriorated. To break the deadlock, the hotel and the city built a large-scale sports park right next to it. Large-scale athletics and tennis courts. I manage it alone. It’s quite large, but one person is enough. After all, no customers come.
“Who’s that? I haven’t seen anyone hitting against the wall. What do you mean by a tablet?” I said.
“You haven’t seen him? You’re the manager, right? You’re not doing your job. He’s a trespasser, you know? He talks with a tablet. Well, there’s no need for you to talk to him, though.”
“What do you mean by talking with a tablet?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
Masato looked down for a while and tapped the counter with his fingernails. Then he took one from the very back of the cup ramen shelf and threw it to me.
“There’s no middle-aged man who looks as good with cup ramen as you, so what’s with the American diner talk? Don’t act cool. Don’t waste money, you poor person like you.”
There is a small diner nearby. A genuine American diner that doesn’t fit this countryside. Faded light green counter tables, sun-bleached red vinyl chairs, chrome plating, and worn-out white and black checkered floors. I felt like I was in Vancouver. Lower-level tournaments were held for three consecutive weeks around Vancouver. In all three weeks, I reached the top 4 without match-fixing. During that time, I frequented the same American diner. The maple syrup was unbelievably fragrant and delicious.
Incredibly, the diner’s maple syrup was the same as the one in Vancouver. It seems that maple syrup doesn’t come in very often, and when it did, the owner of the diner would let me know through Masato. It was my only pleasure.
“I’ll take you with me sometime, Masato.”
“Why would I go with someone who’s feeding me groceries? I’m not going, are you stupid?”
＊
A cold, strong rain fell, mercilessly burying the signs of summer. It wasn’t weather for hitting against the wall. The rain continued for several days.
The wall-hitting court here hasn’t been used for years. The six tennis courts are also rarely used except on weekends. Resort hotel guests play for fun, and no one does it seriously. However, I maintain it so that anyone can come.
I clean the fallen leaves in the gutters, pull the weeds around, and wipe the benches. I regularly grease the cranks that wind up the nets. I also repaint the umpire chairs and the fences surrounding the courts once a year. The court is a hard court with urethane resin applied over asphalt. It is the most used type in world tournaments. Frighteningly, this court that no one uses is the same expensive Laykold as the US Open. However, since I don’t do large-scale maintenance, it is quite damaged. I haven’t received any specific instructions from the city, but I also repair the courts. It’s not a job that matches the salary, which is slightly added to the minimum wage. And I don’t even know why I’m so obsessed with tennis courts. I go back to my room, and other than eating and bathing, I don’t do anything in particular and go to sleep. Every day ends with that repetition.
The only thing I got better at was self-massage, pressing my own muscles. Maybe it was the price I paid for using my body hard in the past, but for a while, I couldn’t walk at all. I had no choice but to manage it myself.
The wall-hitting court is locked. To use it, you have to climb over the fence. It’s annoying to have someone do that to a fence I’m carefully repairing. I just filled in the cracks in the wall-hitting court the other day. I feel like it was stepped on with dirty shoes. I also don’t really understand what a tablet is.
＊
Four days later, on a drizzly evening, I saw a large animal shadow on the fence of the wall-hitting court. The shadow was climbing the fence at an impossible speed. If something that big climbed it, the fence itself should shake, but there was no sign of it wobbling. Maybe this is what it’s like when a giant cat climbs. Its speed dropped for a moment when it climbed over, and I realized what it was. It was a person. He was holding a racket and had a flat bag hanging from his shoulder.
A dull white racket that I don’t know how many years old it is, a ball so faded that I can’t imagine it was ever yellow, messy hair reaching his shoulders, and a worn-out junior high school gym uniform. His shoes are probably school indoor shoes. There is a hole near his right little finger.
He bounces the ball and hits it against the wall. That’s it. It doesn’t continue, so he goes to pick it up every time he hits one. And then he hits it again. Picks it up. He continues that endlessly. He is swinging the racket from top to bottom diagonally. People who hold a racket for the first time try to swing from bottom to top diagonally to make the ball fly far. Something seemed to be missing in the man’s movements. I feel like only he is moving according to a different law in this rusted place. When the mouse-gray ball, wet with rain, hits the wall, it makes a “splat” sound. It was an unpleasant sound, as if some small animal had been crushed.
“Get out of there right now.”
He looked at me and smiled. His hair, wet with rain, was clinging to him. A fair-skinned face with well-defined features. I stopped moving involuntarily and watched him for a while. I reconsidered and said it again.
“Get out of there.”
He took a scratched tablet out of a crumpled white plastic bag he had placed on the bench and entered it by hand.
『Why』
The “Why” he entered had the “de” about a third the size of the “na,” and the balance was terrible. And he looked at me through the fence without breaking his smile. I opened the fence door without saying anything. He took something like a rag out of the plastic bag and carefully wiped the tablet. And he waved at me with a smile and went home.
The unpleasant form and the nasty sound of the ball hitting the wall remained in my head.
The next day was also rainy. In the evening, when I went to check the wall-hitting, he was hitting with the same form, making that nasty sound. That sound scratched around inside my head. He smiled when he saw me, but I told him to “get out.” Just like yesterday, he carefully wiped the tablet and left.
It continued to drizzle for several days, but he still came every day. When I went to check the wall-hitting around 4:00 PM, he was still hitting with that incomprehensible form. And I kicked him out.
When I went to the store, Masato didn’t talk about the usual “match-fixing” but talked about the guy hitting against the wall.
“Isn’t it pitiful to kick him out every day?”
“Why do you know even that? Are you having someone watch him?”
“How much of a demon are you to kick out someone who is hitting against the wall with all his might while soaking wet? You also went overseas and came back only hitting against the wall, right?”
When I was touring the lowest-level tour, I entered a tournament in Uruguay. When I got there, the tournament had been canceled. I thought about going home immediately, but the airport was on strike and not moving. I had no choice but to hit against the wall alone for about three days and came back.
“That’s different from this,” I replied.
“That wall-hitting can be done by anyone without paying, right? What’s with that old-man-like attitude of yours? You’re still forty, right? Isn’t it too early to be an old man?”
It’s true that I kicked him out without question. As Masato says, anyone can use the wall-hitting.
“It was raining.”
“Does that have anything to do with it? The person using it decides whether to do it or not, in the park you love.”
That’s true. I’ve never stopped anyone from using it because it started raining.
“Is he good?” Masato says.
“It’s not a question of whether he’s good or bad, it’s unpleasant.”
“What’s that?”
“Tennis is a sport where you hit the ball forward. He doesn’t have that atmosphere.”
“Does it not fly forward?”
“No, it flies.”
“Then isn’t that fine?”
“You know how people say that someone who can’t exercise moves their right foot and right hand together? It feels like he’s running at full speed for 100m with that irrational movement.”
“That is unpleasant.”
“Right?”
“But he’s not doing anything to you, right?”
“Yeah,” I nodded.
“Let him do it next time, match-fixing manager.”
I received expired canned goods and vegetables on the verge of rotting, and walked on the sidewalk where the rain had stopped. I was thinking back on his wall-hitting.
He never lost his balance or fell even once. A hard court in the rain is slippery even if it’s a venue for a Grand Slam. Matches are immediately suspended. He was hitting calmly in a situation where there were puddles on the court. And that too, in shoes like school indoor shoes.
It wasn’t that Masato told me to, but I decided to watch his wall-hitting from the second floor of the management building.
That day, a pleasant autumn clear sky spread from the morning, and the court was dry. He still had that unpleasant form. Even so, he was finally able to continue rallying with the wall. However, the way he chases the ball returned from the wall is nothing but uncomfortable. He runs with both hands hanging down. His knees are hardly bent. That’s why his waist is so high. Normally, there’s no way he can run fast. Besides, his stride is short. If I had to name it, it would be “teke-teke running.” However, he is catching up to the ball with ease.
That day, I called out to him just before closing and kicked him out. He waved with a smile and went home.
He came the next day, too. And the day after that.
The swing from top to bottom diagonally and the “teke-teke” running. With that style, he started to be able to keep the ball going. His movements became a little smoother. It was flying forward without strain. However, his ball is a “slice.” The trajectory of a “slice” is low, and the ball stretches. It’s easy to hit the net and easy to hit out. It’s a risky type of shot. You can’t do it unless you have a lot of sense.
One time, he hit the ball outside the fence. When I think about it, it’s strange that an amateur hadn’t hit the ball out until now. He looked for the ball for a while, but couldn’t find it. The place where he hit the ball out is overgrown with weeds that reach up to your head. In the end, he looked for it for over an hour. I opened a can in the management building, took out a new ball, and threw it. He smiled at me with the same smile as always and showed me “Thank you” handwritten on the tablet.
I wrote “What’s your name?” on that tablet. He wrote “Hiroki” and put the tablet away.
And he cheered at the new, bouncy ball, which was different from the crappy balls until now, and continued hitting against the wall.
On the way home, I remembered Hiroki’s dry smile when I handed him the new ball. It looked like a small animal trying to escape from something.
※The continuation of this is currently back in “Drafts” as of 2025/9/29.
There are no plans for re-publication at this time.
If there is anyone who would like to see the continuation, please contact me.
Episode 2
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/nbfbcf7596e70
Episode 3
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/ncae19211ed48
Episode 4
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/nfc3d331a6aab
Episode 5
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n63b6feeac50e
Episode 6
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n849c0e374428
Episode 7
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/nb71e4b325df1
Episode 8
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/nef214d34c18e
Episode 9
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n08f7a1087602
Episode 10
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n757dc28f670b
Episode 11
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n12a5f0532ebd
Episode 12
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/na928479fdf1d
Episode 13
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n80034eec566a
Episode 14
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n278b2e09eff6
Episode 15
https://note.com/yagicowcow/n/n1cdd7ec1450e