by Eto Mori
After she left the room, I tapped the envelope against the tip of my nose. I could smell something extraordinary. The scent of the mother’s secret.
Heart pounding, I opened the envelope, and a long letter, spanning eight pages, tumbled out.
8
After those opening lines, it continued:
I really should have told you all of this a lot sooner. But I couldn’t work up the courage to do it. I was afraid of traumatizing you, so I just kept putting it off, and here we are now.
I heard you talking with that girl earlier. I could hear your voice through the door when I brought the tea up. You almost never say a word at home, and then there you were, telling this girl exactly what you thought, and rather loudly at that. I just froze in front of the door. I’m sorry for eavesdropping.
It wasn’t just the fact that you were talking that surprised me, though. You told her over and over that Makoto Kobayashi was an ordinary boy. You kept saying you were an average fourteen-year-old, although I’m sure the examples of “average” you gave her were a bit too graphic for a girl your age.
She must have been quite shocked by it all, and so was I. As I stood there listening to you, I started to think that the truth was that I didn’t really know a thing about you. Maybe I, too, had been selfishly trying to push you into a mold that I’d created. Maybe I’d unconsciously bound your hands behind your back.
You’ve always marched to the beat of your own drummer, ever since you were little. It was like you had this neat little world all your own. You didn’t have a lot of strength to turn outward to the rest of the world, but for all that, the world you had inside was always rich and full. You were especially good at drawing. Your teachers used to heap praise on you back in kindergarten.
And then your drawings started to win prizes in prefectural and municipal children’s art contests, and people in the neighborhood would say such flattering things about you and your talent. I have to admit that it occurred to me then that maybe you were different from the other children, special. Maybe this was a burden to you, but for me, it was a delight.
Instead of “delight,” perhaps I should say it made me feel superior. The neighbors would call out to us—“Oh, is this little Makoto, the great artist?” or “He’s got a bright future ahead of him, hm?”—and each time a satisfied smile would spread across my face, even if I knew they were just saying it to flatter me. In my heart, I would tell them, “That’s right. My youngest boy is different from your children.”
Because you were the only thing in my life that was special.
Maybe you don’t care about any of this. But please listen. I’m not like you. I’ve always been so average, a girl with no special talents or strengths. I was born to an office worker and a housewife, I had an easy life in a peaceful home, and I finished school without ever going through a rebellious phase. And then I didn’t think too much about anything, really. I got older, found a job somehow, and before I knew it, I was the married mother of two.
Such an incredibly average life. But maybe that’s exactly why, somewhere deep in my heart, I’ve always wanted something out of the ordinary. I was always so jealous of people at school or at work who were special in some way—people who excelled at sports or who gained some unique skill. I used to wish I had something like that. No, I tried to believe I did have something like that in me.
Having a child with an artistic talent gave me just the tiniest bit of confidence. I started to think that since you, my son, were special, I as your mother undoubtedly had something in me, too.
Do you remember when I took those ink-painting classes in the neighborhood just a little before you started first grade? It was right around that time that I began to seriously seek out this vague, hazy something. I wasn’t just a housewife, I wasn’t just a mother. I wanted to find someone else in me, a totally different self I hadn’t even met yet.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the same passion for art that you do, and I didn’t last long at the ink-painting classes. But once I took that first step, I picked up steam and tried so many classes: an incense-blending course, hula dance, easy epic poetry, sommelier lessons, an introduction to coffee fortune-telling, a caricature class, beginner’s Buddhist sculpture, an ESP development seminar, foot pressure points, Mrs. Tanaka’s Cooking Fun, starter pantomime, Enjoy Arabic with Arabian Nights, weaving flower baskets from vines, Edo-style kappore dancing . . .
I wonder if you understand. While this is a history of the challenges I’ve taken on, it’s also a catalogue of my disappointments. I was clumsy and awkward at everything I tried. I always felt like I was so much worse than everyone else in the class, and that would be the end of it. I’d start looking for a new class to take. I repeated this cycle over and over again.
Your dad said he was just happy to see me so full of life after I started taking all the classes. But personally, I was desperate. I struggled with the fear and anxiety that I would grow old with nothing to show for it, so I kept searching. I clung to the idea that this time for sure, this time for sure, I would find the thing that was right for me. But the years simply passed cruelly with all my efforts ending in vain.
Last year, Mrs. Aizawa, a friend from the hula dance class, asked me if I wouldn’t go with her to flamenco lessons. For seven years, I’d been searching, pushing myself, fighting so hard for that mysterious something. And after all of that, I decided to give up the search. It was too late. I was tired. I would live and die as an ordinary housewife.
At the time, I had such trouble accepting this that it even kept me awake at night. I had terrible insomnia. But now that I had reached that point, now that I was thinking like that, I was able to simply enjoy flamenco class, without that extra pressure.
It was so fun. I’d never enjoyed learning anything that much before. When I moved my body to the lighthearted beat, I felt like I’d been suddenly freed from those seven years of struggle. Just when I’d lost hope in my own self, flamenco gave me strength. It inspired me and gave me the energy to live. Flamenco taught me that the blinding sun was still shining outside, even when I was sinking into darkness inside the house.
With your sharp intuition, I suppose you’ve already picked up on this, but there was also the matter of our instructor.
I don’t want to make excuses here. My path to flamenco class and my relationship with our teacher are two totally separate things. As a mother, it wouldn’t be right for me to talk to you about the latter, but rest assured, I will never forget the fact that I hurt you. I intend to carry that burden for the rest of my days. Whatever my reasons, I should never have done such a thing. And above all else, I should never have made you suffer because of it. I know I can’t apologize this away, but let me say that I really am very sorry.
The fact that I was so completely taken up with myself during these seven years fills my heart with just as much regret. This was one of the most important periods for you as you grew bigger each day, and I failed to see the concerns and problems you had as an average boy. Looking back at my pilgrimage of lessons like this now, I’m made painfully aware of the fact that there were so many other things closer to my heart that I should have been paying attention to.
At the same time, I wanted you to get at least a glimpse of how sad it can be to be born with no special talents. I wanted you to see how marvelous it is to have been born with a unique something. Perhaps I simply see you with a mother’s doting eyes, but I wish you could take a little more pride in your own uniqueness. I’m not just talking about art, either. I mean that rich inner world of yours and how keenly sensitive you are, too.
After all, I’ve been proud of you for all fourteen of these years.
After your suicide attempt, I immediately broke it off with my instructor and stopped going to flamenco. All I want now is to find the path where I can live together with you as a mother, as a housewife. Maybe you’ll turn your back to me. Maybe you’ll say, “It’s too late now, leave me alone.” Maybe you’ll ball this letter up
and throw it in the trash. But I write this letter prepared for all those possibilities, with the hope that you’ll someday share your anger, your contempt, your hatred, your everything with me, too, the way you opened yourself up to that girl.
I will wait for you forever.
I love the parts of you that are average and the parts of you that are not with all of my heart.
Mom
It was a really long letter.
But for all its length, the crucial bit about the flamenco teacher was still ambiguous. You couldn’t exactly call this an absolutely honest confession. I also thought she was just pushing her own selfish excuses on me. She wrote eight pages of this stuff, but was she actually sorry for anything? It didn’t really feel like it to me.
Hey, Makoto. Are you satisfied with this? I asked my stomach, head hanging, but Makoto’s body didn’t respond. It was too late. It was even later than the mother thought, much too late to put anything back the way it was.
I bit Makoto’s lip. The thin skin ruptured and I tasted his blood. Makoto’s hand didn’t want to put the mother’s letter in the garbage can, so I left it inside a desk drawer. But that didn’t put an end to my irritation.
“So is this what you’re trying to say, then?” I promptly started running my mouth off, the second I saw her face when she came to clear away the supper dishes two hours later. I knew the words that jumped out of my mouth without any real thought weren’t going to be pretty. “Basically, you wanted something special, so you went looking for it. And you searched and searched and searched and landed on the most ordinary special thing ever, a married woman having an affair?”
The mother closed her eyes briefly and thought a moment. “I’m done with that role,” she said, finally. “Now I’m taking a hard look at the role of mother one more time.”
“Mother. The most ordinary of ordinary.”
“Extraordinary joy and sadness can come out of the ordinary every day. You let me experience both of these. I was so happy, so, so happy when you started breathing again in the hospital after you died for those ten minutes. I’ll never be able to thank those doctors and nurses enough. And I’m grateful to your father, too, from the bottom of my heart for holding me up like that when I was on the verge of madness with grief and fear.” Tears sprang up in her eyes.
“Huh.” I poured cold water on her little moment. “That selfish man?”
“Selfish?” She frowned.
“Don’t play innocent with me. You went looking for an affair because you finally got fed up with his enormous ego, right? He’s a hypocrite, only good on the outside; inside, he’s devious, unscrupulous. You were sick of him and all of this, so you went chasing after his polar opposite, that Latin guy.”
“Now, hold on a minute here. What do you mean?” The mother appeared to have absolutely zero clue what I was talking about. Her face grew serious as she argued back. “Your father is not selfish or hypocritical. He’s a good person. He’s so good, in fact, I get frustrated with him sometimes.”
“Whatever.” I wasn’t interested in a serious discussion. “I guess that’s it for your honest confession, huh?” I jerked my chin in the direction of the door. “Can you just go already?”
“Wait, Makoto. You’ve got it all wrong. Let me talk to you.”
“My head hurts.”
“But—”
“My fever goes up when I talk to you,” I snapped, but the mother stayed rooted to the spot, like a ghost with unfinished business. When I turned my back on her and dived under my duvet, she finally stepped out of the room and walked away. The final act of a long, long day.
This world was exhausting.
9
I started going to school again the following Monday. Although I was completely over my cold, my face was still covered in bruises, and on top of that, I had to go back in Makoto’s ugly old sneakers after my new ones were stolen from me. The utter dejection that filled my heart was a lot like how I felt when Prapura led me to school two months earlier.
But to my surprise, my classmates reacted a bit differently this time. Whereas no one so much as tried to approach me when I first came back to school, now several people spoke to me—“It’s been a while,” “You okay now?” Stuff like that. There were still a few who gaped at me like I was a pregnant alien, but a quick glance around the classroom showed me that they were in the minority now. The biggest reason for this was the fact that everyone had gotten tired of me and lost interest.
“It’s just, like, you’re easier to talk to now.” Saotome told me the second-biggest reason. “Before, you were, I dunno. It was like you had this total attitude. You seem more chill.”
This carefreeness stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t the real Makoto Kobayashi, but rather a Makoto Kobayashi with an expiration date, but of course, I couldn’t tell Saotome that.
Saotome was the guy who’d asked me how much my sneakers had cost back when I first got them. Of all the people in Grade Nine Class A, he was the one most likely to strike up a conversation with me (except for Shoko, obviously). He wore his longish, slightly curly hair slicked back, which definitely didn’t do him any favors. But I’d kind of had hopes for him for a while now, just from the warm sound of his name.
And now he came all the way over to my desk to talk to me on this first Monday back. “I heard they got your sneakers?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Totally sucks. I really liked them.”
“Well, o’course you did. That blows. They were so expensive. I seriously hate guys who gang up on people like that.”
“Right? Me, too.”
“Like, don’t hide behind your buddies. Come at me on your own, y’know?”
“Totally. Although I’m pretty sure even if it had been just one of them, they woulda still kicked my ass.”
We both fell silent for a moment.
“You know that shoe place Gomen Soro by the station?” Saotome’s eyes lit up as he asked me this question out of the blue, like he was telling me the location of a secret treasure.
“Gomen Soro?” I shook my head. “Never heard of it.”
“No one ever has, but it’s amazing. Shoes that are normally eight thousand yen or so, they sell ’em for like two thousand.”
“Whoa.” That was cheap. At those prices, I might be able to buy a new pair, even after depleting Makoto’s savings like I had.
“You want to check it out?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
And so the next day after school, we got on the bus and headed for the shoe store. It was in a narrow alley off the main street, small but with a huge selection, crammed with high school and university students on their way home.
“When you first walk in you gotta say ‘gomen soro,’” Saotome told me, so I did and everyone in the store laughed at me.
The prices were definitely way cheaper than at other stores. After a lengthy period of fierce indecision, I finally bought a pair of white sneakers with green stripes for 2,180 yen. The retail price was 5,600 yen. They were a serious step down from my 28,000-yen sneakers, but Saotome told me they still looked top of the line if you stepped back five meters. More important than anything else, the soles were about a centimeter thicker than on any of the other shoes.
“That’s how you decide? It’s just a centimeter.” The beanpole of a sales clerk laughed, but Saotome didn’t. That centimeter was precious to me.
On the way home, I treated Saotome to some fried chicken at the convenience store by way of thanks, so then he treated me to a steamed bun to thank me for my thanks, and I went home satisfied with a full stomach. After that day, the two of us were basically thick as thieves.
“Saotome? You should get some mousse in that hair of yours and part it to one side,” I would advise.
He’d counter with his own bit of help for me. “Speaking of mousse, I wanted to say something before, aren’t you using too much on those bangs of yours?”
We got this kind of comfortable connection going. We could
worry about our hair all we wanted, but in terms of the overall class structure, we were both firmly in the not-hot group. Even so, I wasn’t miserable anymore.
Miserable was having to spend lunch hour by yourself, walk to your next class alone. The sheer fact that there was someone next to me every time I turned to look made me just plain happy. My heart practically exploded.
It made me even happier to learn that Saotome’s grades were as bad as mine. Just like Makoto found meaning in the art club, Saotome had devoted every day up until summer holidays to the table tennis team. He hadn’t ever gone to cram school, either. Plus, his parents were also insisting he go to public school. They said it was a waste of money to send him to private school. They probably had more money than Makoto’s parents if they were making the argument that it was a “waste” rather than any particular lack, but on the point where he was expected to make it into a public school, we were facing the same pressure.
Putting it all together, we naturally ended up studying for the exams with each other. We’d stay in the library alone after school, or I’d go over to his house to study. At last, I was truly living like a real ninth grader facing the terrible trial of high school entrance exams.
With just over three months to go before the public school test, I thought it was maybe too late to start scrabbling for a pass. It was probably too late. But for me—or rather for Makoto Kobayashi—it was completely and fundamentally too late in every way. If I started listing all the things I was too late for, I’d never finish.
Thinking about it, this didn’t just apply to Makoto. Maybe the world was actually filled to the brim with things it was simply too late for, things we couldn’t take back.
The sneakers I’d never get back.
The mother’s affair.
Hiroka’s body.
Shoko’s dream.
And my previous life . . .
“If we’d been born five thousand years earlier,” Saotome said, while we were studying history one day, “we’d, like, build tools out of stone, and everyone’d build houses together. We’d be eating the hearts of animals we hunted ourselves while they were still hot, y’know? I wish I could’ve gotten my start in a time like that.”