Nanako no kessoku

Many Seasons is the poetry book Marco finds on Irene’s desk in the room his parents have kept intact since her absence. Its poem and a sheet in Irene’s handwriting, dated June 1981, make an ordinary, long-unnoticed object the point at which Marco’s repeated visits to the house become a return to his sister’s traces.

Discovery in Irene’s Room

Marco goes to the family house in Piazza Savonarola from time to time to check for leaks, breakdowns, and other problems. He does not go to clean or restore it; he checks that the house has not deteriorated altogether. Although he has entered Irene’s room on earlier visits, he usually avoids it, convinced that nothing there could cause trouble again. He calls it a peaceful room: a space whose stillness seems to set it apart from the practical decay he monitors elsewhere in the house.

On one visit, for reasons he cannot explain, Marco goes inside and does more than look. He sits on the bed, turning the blue bedspread’s preserved purity into something he has physically disturbed, switches on the lamp, and sits at the desk. The room’s objects are familiar, but the desk yields a surprise: a book that has been there all along and that he had never noticed.

The Book and Its Contents

The volume is an old, carefully kept book of poems, with a plain cover protected by glossy paper. Marco picks it up and opens it to page 25, where a folded sheet falls onto the desk. The poem on the page begins with the words “Left by you” and includes the line “I'll break, you know;”. Marco calls it the saddest poem he has ever read.

The book’s significance is inseparable from the paper tucked inside it. Written in Irene’s blue fountain pen, the sheet bears the date June 1981 and the heading “Weltschmertz & Co.” Its presence reveals a piece of Irene’s writing that Marco had not known was there, waiting among the poems on the desk he had mentally classified as empty.

A Preserved Room, Newly Read

The discovery reverses Marco’s understanding of the room. He had thought that, if asked what was on the desk, he would have answered “nothing,” naming only its lamp, the National Geographic planisphere beneath a glass plate, and a framed bas-relief of the Rocky Horror Picture Show that Irene had never hung on the wall. The book makes that answer untenable: what seemed like absence had included an overlooked object, and the object had held Irene’s dated handwriting.

The scene gives the book a role beyond its contents. In a room maintained as if Irene might return, the volume is both materially present and unnoticed until Marco sits down and handles it. The poem’s sorrow and the sheet’s date bring the past into contact with his present visit without explaining away the room’s silence. The discovery does not undo Irene’s absence; it gives that absence a newly legible, intimate trace.