The Air of Kakunodate Has No Taste

The thing I hate most in Kakunodate.
I don't have to think about it. It comes to me at once.
It is myself.

Is there anything in Kakunodate less necessary than I am?
Thirty years ago and more, there were plenty of people who would have been relieved to see me gone. Some of them had it written on their faces. I won't give names. I won't, but I remember.

Lately, though, something is off.
Nobody minds me. They don't look when we pass. They don't even step aside.
When a tourist walked straight through me on the samurai district street, I stopped. He did not.

Yes. I am air now.
Here or not here, it makes no difference.

...And having thought that far, I noticed something.
Air. That's air, isn't it.

You need air.
Without it, you die.

I looked it up. Air is seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen, and the last one percent is argon and whatever else.
I am at the far edge of that one percent. Somewhere below the decimal point of the air of Kakunodate, that is my post.

And a post comes with responsibility.

The cherry trees bloom, I suspect, because I am breathing out. There is no evidence. None, but nobody has disproved it either.
The Hinokinai River keeps running, and the snow keeps coming down from above, because I have raised no particular objection.
During the three days of the festival I am nowhere in any chonai, the neighborhood ward that runs it. Nowhere, and yet everyone is breathing me.

Honestly, though, this is fairly dirty air.
I am aware of it, so for close to ten years now I have been trying to add a little umami to it, umami being the savory taste nobody can quite name.
Sink in a sheet of kelp, as if making stock. Add a shake of something as a secret ingredient. Write things. Make things. Say things nobody asked for.
And still the perfect spice refuses to come together.

Of course it does.
I am trying to turn the very component people dislike into flavor. Reach for it and nothing stays in your hand.
Air, precisely.

And nobody comes to taste it.
No one goes out of their way to get close to air with no flavor in it.

That is fine. Better, in fact, to be forgotten as I am.
No air that gets noticed is any good. It stinks, or it smokes, or it is cold.

So I will go on drifting where nobody notices.
Unnoticed, and seasoning all the while.

Remove the component I hate most in Kakunodate, they say, and the flavor will be complete.
Though nobody has ever breathed finished air.