You’re lucky. I envy you, I said. Why? she asked in return.
Just that New Year’s must be properly celebrated at your home.
How’s that? How does one celebrate New Year’s properly? Eriko was laughing lightly, looking curious.
"So, like, on the morning of New Year’s Day, for example, you arrange New Year’s dishes like these, drink the spiced toso sake together with your entire family, eat zoni soup, make a New Year’s visit to the shrine, welcome relatives and guests—you know, like in those New Year’s holiday moments you often see in television dramas. It just occurred to me that you guys back in Suwa must have actually been doing stuff like that."
And your home wasn’t like that?
It puzzled me how she could be so thoughtless.
If my home were like that, I snapped, I wouldn’t have said that I envy you. I immediately regretted the outburst. I wonder why on earth I got upset over such a trivial matter. I think it must have been because I was so tired from the past several days.
The two of us fell silent for a while, until I said, I’m feeling rather restless, how about you?
Frankly, I’d been extremely uneasy since the moment I invited her into the apartment. Eriko didn’t respond.
Shall we go out? I continued. There are places open until late in this neighborhood, or if you like, we can use the car.
But it’s very cold outside.
Eriko appeared amused, her confident look making me depressed all the more.
Let’s go outside, all the same. Besides, someone might be dropping in soon.
Someone? she asked instantly.
I have these two acquaintances who come over sometimes to stay overnight—that is, just once or twice a week.
Eriko became prickly, the question of the key still lingering in her mind, naturally.
Are these two your friends?
I politely explained about Raita and Honoka. I didn’t want Eriko to get the wrong idea about them, let alone about Tomomi. Besides, by clarifying matters I felt my mood lifting a little.
Eriko was listening with a serious look when it occurred to me, as I watched her, that she was always way too serious like that.
So that’s why you don’t lock up, huh? she interrupted.
No, I answered, that’s just a habit of mine from way back when; it’s got nothing to do with those two.
After listening to my talk, Eriko seemed to understand to some extent. There was no indication that she doubted my relationship with Honoka. But then she said, If that’s the case, this room might be too small, I guess. You should think about moving to a larger place, you know. Her input was a bit too much for me.
Why should I go to such lengths just for them?
Why not?
Look, it’s not as if I’m letting them freely come and go to help them out with their lives or offer support or anything like that.
Then why do you do it?
No reason.
That can’t be.
Well, you probably wouldn’t understand. When you don’t have a place to go to, even if it’s just for a temporary stay, it can really devastate you. I believe a person exists only when a place exists for them.
A person exists only when a place exists for them?
Right. It’s the most vital ordering principle of the world.
There’s nothing sadder, I continued, than never having a place to go to. I’ve always felt so since I was a child. I never had a proper, respectable home to return to, nor did I have proper parents, you see. And that’s why I kind of relate to those two, Honoka and Raita.
What was your home like, your family?
It was terrible. Among other things my home was poor, the kind of place you couldn’t possibly imagine, I’m sure. You know, this is why I get restless whenever I let someone like you into my apartment. I’ve actually never lived in a house where I’ve felt comfortable enough to invite friends.
Eriko was nodding but I needed to clarify.
Now don’t get all philosophical and start saying something like ‘If you stop to think about it there’s really no place anyone can really go to,’ all right? What I’m talking about is a far more practical and unsentimental matter.
You know something? You’ve never spoken so much about yourself.
Yeah, I guess not. Your visit’s also probably making me panic or something. I never thought I had any explaining to do to you about my past. All I’ve got are miserable and shameful memories.
Eriko mumbled slightly, but swallowed whatever words she’d started to say. Then, wearing a gentle smile, she spoke in her usual point-blank manner.
I don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of in your past.
I gazed intently into Eriko’s face; at that moment she brought back memories of a person I knew a long time ago—someone who once admonished me the way Eriko did just then.
After we finished eating, Eriko gathered the leftovers on one plate, took both boxes, which had been emptied, into the kitchen and washed them with a practiced hand. While listening to the sound of running water it occurred to me that she was intending to stay overnight. I wondered if that was a good idea. So far I’d never let anyone I was seeing stay in my apartment. Tonight was the first time we’d even had dinner together here.
When Eriko finished washing she removed a small, white towel from her bag and wiped off the wet boxes before stacking them up, together with the box containing leftovers, and putting them away in the kitchen’s hanging closet. She then neatly folded the towel and hung it over the rim of the sink. Vacantly watching her move about in her element like that, I lined up in my mind words like procedure, habit, regulation, order, and control.
With just that single piece of small, white, wet towel hanging in the kitchen, my apartment didn’t feel the same anymore. There was a certain quality, a certain ambiance that was fundamentally different from the one that had been there while Honoka was still washing.
I felt strangely suffocated then, as if something were clogging my lungs.
Eriko, who had returned to my side, hastily switched off the heater she’d turned on a while ago and took out pajamas from her bag before saying, Right, let’s go to sleep. I stood up and obediently led her to the eight-mat room where the bed was.
Without saying much we changed our clothes, took turns going into the bathroom to brush our teeth, made sure of when each of us planned to wake up tomorrow, and turned off the lights before getting into bed. A few minutes later, with my back turned, Eriko snuggled up her body against mine, her lukewarm, gummy femininity clinging onto my ass, feet, and back. At that moment I thought what a bother all this was.
A line from What It is To Live I’d read three days ago came back to life in my mind. If life were clothing you put on a skeleton bearing old age, illness, and death, then what point was there for Eriko and I to take the time and trouble to enter into a relationship? Life, after all, was just a flimsy piece of clothing, according to the book.
I really couldn’t find any reason.
Remaining silent, I suddenly turned my body to face Eriko and leaned on her, as if to pin her down. With both hands I seized her slender arms and crossed them above her head, binding them together with the cord of a bedside desk lamp I’d been using for ten years. Eriko resisted, but not for long. After peeling off her underwear, nearly tearing them, I folded her pajama shirt up to her shoulders and completely covered her face with it.
After that, until the sky began to turn bright with the light of dawn, just like Lady Onishi, Eriko continued to raise her voice nonstop. When I finally untied the cord, she fell asleep, resting on my arm, blacked out from exhaustion.
After that, for around thirty minutes, I stared at a stain on the ceiling while chewing the ball of the forefinger of
my right hand. The more I stared, the more it appeared like a really small square.
The blurry light of the morning glow slowly colored this square faintly purple.
Why did this person take the tr
ouble to enter such a small, stuffy room? What on earth would motivate her to do something like that? I was beginning to think clearly again, feeling like I’d finally regained myself.
She must be lonely, I thought, just like me.
But you didn’t need to follow the teachings of Buddha to see that we’re all lonely and that it’s no one’s fault, just an inevitability we were all born to bear. So if that’s the case, no matter whose help you seek, you can never cure your loneliness.
Doesn’t this person understand even that? Moving my eyes from the ceiling, I gazed at Eriko’s face as she continued to sleep on my arm: appearing dead, it looked truly sad, filled with a deep resignation in its calm and peaceful stillness.
7
THE SEASON OF CHERRY blossoms arrived again.
During the winter I shared four holidays with Tomomi and her son. The three of us went to the Museum of Maritime Science, the aquarium in Kasai, and a movie theater in Kiba. When March began we went for a drive to Kamakura.
Eriko had started, after her first visit, to come to my apartment once a week. She even came to know Raita and Honoka by sight, and while I was away once, she talked them into agreeing to keep the apartment door locked. Consequently, I was made to hand over duplicate keys to the three of them.
For some reason, Raita and Honoka had completely opened up to Eriko, so instead of visiting less frequently out of respect for her privacy, they ended up coming and going more frequently than ever before.
In brief, Eriko had brought some sanity into our lives.
Because Raita and Honoka grew up without normal families, I can safely say that they got their arms twisted easily by Eriko, being the sort of person she is. Having lost his mother immediately after he was born, Raita has been living all the while with just his father. Honoka also was never blessed with the love of two parents. You could say even my situation was somewhat similar.
Although Raita is miserable for having no memory of his mother, I know for a fact that children with mothers in their lives can end up even more miserable, if, at the end of the day, they were never loved.
Honoka calmly spoke about her mother once. That woman left me with a nursery school soon after I was born, when I was only one and a half months old. It’s not illegal or anything; society approves of such behavior, and plenty of other mothers do it. But, frankly, I don’t know what to make of mothers like that; mothers who entrust others with the care of their own children who are so young they’re barely able to cry properly. Of course, under special circumstances, I believe it would be unavoidable. But in the case of most mothers, the situation isn’t bad like that at all, right? I mean most of them don’t particularly need to work to bring up their baby. My mother was typical in that sense. But if you stop and think about it, I think it’s a real shame. Any baby, if he or she could speak, would get upset and say, ‘you must be joking!’
I have no intention at all, she also asserted, "of accepting that person as my mother! Sure, she’s remarkable, I believe, as an individual human being, as a lover of independence and freedom above all else, as ‘a friend to no one but herself.’ According to her, the most important thing in life for a human being is ‘to live all by yourself.’ But in reality no one is capable of such a thing. Even when, from the outside, it may seem as if you’re totally self-reliant, in reality, somewhere unseen, there’s always somebody paying a large price, someone being sacrificed, for such arrogance. I think that someone is always a child.
After leaving me with a nursery when I was just a newborn baby, and after having strangers nurture me en masse with the children of other strangers most of the time, day after day, it’s really annoying to see her wear the face of a parent now. The sight of a baby in the streets or inside a train gets me all worked up, you know. I keep being reminded of what she did to me when I was a baby; I keep thinking, ‘It’s incredible how that person could’ve done such a horrible thing.’ I don’t think I could ever do the same—it would be impossible for me. When she made the choice to give birth, it was only for herself. She wanted to become a mother without ever having thought about how the child might turn out—her decision to give birth was just a whim.
As I listened to Honoka it occurred to me that it wasn’t necessarily the case that her mother was being completely thoughtless; it was probably, more than anything else, a failure of imagination. This world’s ultimate ruin will no doubt be triggered by the decline in serious, deliberative thinking, but in the course of reaching this decline what will emerge first is a shortage of ordinary imagination, as seen with Honoka’s mother. When Honoka’s mother became an actual mother, she must have been horrified. Just as Honoka finds it unbearable to sacrifice herself for her mother, it must have been unbearable for the mother to sacrifice herself for her child.
I’m sure it was the same with my mother too.
However, while Honoka’s mother and my mother were given a choice, we—as their children—were not. The fact that they made the wrong choice stems from nothing more than the lack of genuine, childlike imagination, but that’s all the more reason why the consequence was monumentally grave—the consequence of having been brought to life.
Well, all I can do is resign myself to the fact that it was bad luck to have been born to such a mother.
My favorite writer, Komao Furuyama, has reached the ripe old age of eighty, and based on his experience of being dragged around Asian countries as a lowly soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, before barely escaping alive and returning home, he recently wrote the following account.
I’ve given up on luck. I do not entertain such fanciful notions like the idea that luck is talent, or that luck is something you can carve out by yourself. Luck isn’t something a person can bring about on his own. We have no choice but to live at its mercy, letting it make fools of us.
Although we humans may talk big, and are even creatures markedly different from other animals, when it comes to luck, we’re powerless. One should, while being aware of the very fleeting nature of existence, go on living as long as one is kept alive, and then simply proceed to die. People urge you, among other things, to be optimistic and forward-looking, encouraging you to live life energetically even in old age. But while I won’t hold anything against you should you think like that for yourself, don’t go compelling others to think the same. There’s no need for every one of us to be positive, to be full of life and energy; it’s okay to be gloomy and blue, it’s okay to dream your life away. A person has the right to think the way he likes, to live the way he likes. Life has a way of failing to turn out as planned at times. When your wishes don’t come true, there’s nothing else to do but give up.
Ultimately, no matter who you are, in the end, surely all you can do is give up. But in the case of a parent and her child, the choice is the parent’s to make, so the parent should be the one, in the first place, to give up; I suppose this is the point Honoka was trying to make in particular.
Among my acquaintances is a man named Minegishi. He’s an official at the Ministry of Finance, now on loan to the Cabinet Office. But until a few years ago, he was serving as a paymaster in the Ministry of Finance, put in charge of the budgetary affairs of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Although he’s far older than me, ever since interviewing him when I was in the editorial department at the monthly I’ve been enjoying drinks with him a few times a year. This Mr. Minegishi once told me an interesting story from his years as a paymaster.
"You know about my place, right? It’s a double-income household with two children. In those days, we’d just had our second son, and my wife was employed at a government office, so you can imagine how hectic it was for the old lady and me; we were living in an official residence at Takanawa, but public childcare centers were all booked up so we were left with no option but to hire a babysitter for our baby boy. As for ferrying our eldest son to his nursery school and back, whoever happened to have the time that day would do so. But come budget preparation time, something like that was out of t
he question for me. As for my wife, since she was the head of the division in the Department of Labor promoting gender equality, there was no way she was going to be accommodating. I was exhausted, I tell you. Then I found out that my colleague in the Ministry of Health and Welfare was in the same boat. He says to me, ‘Mr. Minegishi, this is a major problem! Unless we find a way to increase the number of public childcare centers, this nation’s productivity is going to hell in a handbasket.’ I too at that time sincerely believed so. That’s why the two of us ended up persuading each other’s government offices, to allocate for the expansion of childcare facilities, a budget the size of which would make your eyeballs pop out—an amount so exorbitant it’s too much even for this age of zero-ceiling.
"The day the original bill passed and the budget document was approved in a Cabinet meeting, the two of us went to Akasaka to celebrate, applauding and cheering, we did it, we did it! But unbeknownst to us at the time, we had, in actual fact, committed a terrible mistake. I became aware of this only recently. Last time I had a drink with that colleague of mine he muttered suddenly, out of the blue, ‘Mr. Minegishi, for some reason, we seem to have committed a fundamental error. At that time I certainly believed that we should make the budget pass no matter what, for the welfare of working parents, but in reality we appear to have misidentifed our most important clients.’ Having seen how my sons have turned out over the years, I was keenly aware of what he said, so I asked him, ‘Are your kids weird too?’ He nodded dramatically and said, ‘Oh yeah! When I look at my kids all I see are automatons; it’s as if they’re emotionally bankrupt.’ He said that he felt, compared to our generation, they were decidedly inconsiderate, and were far more introverted and fearful of laying bare their true colors in any strong, impassioned way. And that’s so true, don’t you think, Matsubara? Essentially, we’d gotten our clients wrong. Sure, parents like my wife and I were initially grateful that the budget helped boost the number of childcare facilities, you know. But don’t you think that public funds reserved for education should be primarily spent for the benefit of children? The clients, after all, aren’t supposed to be the parents; they’re supposed to be the children themselves, you see.
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