by Eto Mori
I just stared at him.
“I don’t know what happened between the two of you,” he continued. “But you do start to wonder when you’re all under the same roof together and things between your wife and son go all pear-shaped.”
“As a son, you do start to wonder when your parents act like everything’s just fine and dandy, but they’re really only going through the motions of being husband and wife,” I snarked, suddenly feeling spiteful.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me,” he insisted. “Go ahead and lay it all on me.”
“Okay, I’ll just say it, then,” I started. “Wasn’t it a huge mistake for you to marry her?”
“Mistake?”
“I was just thinking maybe you regret it.”
“That’s just ridiculous.” He frowned, immediately serious. “I’ve never once regretted marrying your mother. Just the opposite, in fact. I feel like I’m blessed. I’d never be able to find another partner like her.”
I wanted to tell him that was because he didn’t know who she really was, but he kept going in a loud voice.
“She’s just so full of life, you know? Unlike your old homebody dad. I’m not interested in much of anything, but your mom, she’s always up for a new challenge. I’m sure you remember, too, Makoto. She keeps on trying one new thing after another, from epic poetry to kappore dancing. I really admire her enthusiasm, how positive she is. You have no idea how much strength her vitality gives me.”
“Huh.” My mouth hung open, and I looked up into space.
Up for a challenge. Positive. Vitality.
I hadn’t seen even a whisper of any of these ideas in that overwhelmingly despairing letter from the mother. But the father apparently seriously believed this was what she was like.
“I’m not just talking about her hobbies. Uh-uh. With that part-time job of hers, too, she’s a fountain of energy. She never stops smiling. It’s like she has just as much fun there as she does with her classes. She really kept me going when I was out of work. I don’t know what I would’ve done without her.”
Part-time job? Out of work?
More new past came flying at me.
Whoa, whoa. What exactly are we talking about here?
“And I’m not just talking financially. Mentally, too. I was completely worn out back then. I couldn’t have made it through all that without your mom’s cheery smile.”
I was utterly baffled, as the conversation pushed ahead in an even more unexpected direction, leaving me behind.
“Now, I never really talked to you or Mitsuru about all this back then, back when I was really at my lowest. I didn’t want to sit around complaining, and I didn’t want to worry you guys either, so I never said anything. But maybe, at the end of the day, I was actually trying to keep up appearances. After you tried to commit suicide, I really regretted not telling you the whole story. I shouldn’t have put up a strong front like that, I should have made more of an effort to talk to you, not just about this, but about all my worries, my weaknesses. Even if it wasn’t particularly helpful to you then, I should have at least talked to you. Maybe you’ll hear me out now?”
I realized suddenly he had the wheel in this conversation and was driving me in the direction he wanted to go. I was dumbfounded, but before I had the chance to protest, he set about talking in earnest.
“I had to quit my old job at the candy company back when you were still in elementary school. That was the start of my misfortune. I told you boys that I quit to take responsibility for a mistake at work, but the truth is, that was only half the story. There was a mistake, but it was my boss’s and I took the fall. Happens all the time.”
A self-deprecating smile spread across his face. This wasn’t like him.
“Because my boss bungled things, we were back to square one for a contract with a major chain store. Next thing I knew, the blame for the whole mess had been put squarely on me. Plus we’d been in the red for a while, and the company was looking for people to downsize. But it wasn’t getting fired that hit me the hardest. I’d trusted that boss and he betrayed me.”
“Is that why you started hating people?” I asked, hesitantly.
“Maybe it wasn’t so much that I hated them as I got scared of them. Everyone in the office knew the truth of the situation, and yet not one of them so much as opened their mouth to speak up for me.”
As he spoke, the cypress leaves fluttered in the breeze above his head, and every so often, a bird chirped. The noon sun even farther up rained its dazzling golden particles down on us.
“On top of that, the country was in the middle of a recession, and I couldn’t seem to line up my next job. Even so, if possible, I wanted to keep doing the project-development work I’d been doing at my old job. I really love the process of thinking up new products and bringing them to life. It’s only thanks to your mother that I could indulge in that kind of thinking. It’s because she was right there by my side, cheering me on, that I could take my time and look for the right job. I was unemployed for around six months, until I was finally able to restart my career in the project-development division of the company where I work now. And I was over the moon when I got the job. I figured your mom could finally go back to those lessons she loves.”
His voice bounced up for an instant, but fell sharply. “However, your dad’s misfortune wasn’t quite over. Because then my new company got caught up in some pretty serious trouble.”
Trouble—the fraud I’d heard so much about.
“You seriously have zero luck, Dad.”
I’d been listening absentmindedly to him as he painted himself as the victim, and now I gasped in sudden horror. I couldn’t let myself be taken in. After all, this “trouble” ended with him getting promoted from a rank-and-file office worker to the division manager. He had to have been literally dancing for joy that night when the company CEO and the board of executives were all rounded up.
“You worked there. Did you really not know about the fraud stuff?” I looked at him warily. “Weren’t you actually involved in the whole scam?”
The look on his face was hard to read. “I didn’t know when I first started working there. Or I should say, the CEO was still on the straight and narrow back then. He’s a bit of an oddball. He’s always saying sales isn’t about selling a product, it’s about selling an idea. And he was ambitious even then, but he wasn’t doing anything that came close to breaking the law. Then, about two years ago, things started to look bad when he began pursuing this extreme theory that you can get consumers to come on board so long as the idea is good, even if the product itself is junk. Word started going around the office that he’d launched a pretty iffy project with some trusted directors. I guess they figured they could keep it top secret, but people in the office were bound to figure it out, no matter how well they actually hid it.”
“So then you did know.”
“Mm-hmm.” He nodded. “There wasn’t anyone at the company who didn’t.”
“If you knew, then why didn’t you stop it?”
“I tried to any number of times. I appealed directly to the CEO and his cronies whenever they launched some dodgy scheme. I said that if we kept doing things like this, we were going to be facing some serious consequences down the road. I said we should be putting our efforts into developing actual products, even if it took more time.”
“Huh.” Something was off here. This wasn’t the story I knew. Prapura hadn’t said a word about any of this.
“The CEO turned on me. It was just like what happened at the candy company. My desk was moved, off by a window in an out-of-the-way corner of the office, and they stopped giving me any work to do. They were trying to shame me, to force me up against the wall, make it so I had no other option but to submit my resignation. I didn’t, though, maybe out of sheer spite. But if I lost this job, I didn’t know when I’d find another one again. And of course, I couldn’t do t
hat to your mother. We still had the mortgage on the house and the tuition fees for you boys. They could strip my pride if they wanted to. I’d still get paid my salary so long as I kept going into the office.”
He let out a heavy sigh. “Two years,” he said. “I went to work every day like a dead man for two years.” The northern wind toyed with his graying hair.
I shivered and picked up my stainless-steel mug. My coffee was ice cold.
“So then no one else in your office tried to help you, I guess?” My voice grew more and more feeble with each word. What if I—no, what if Makoto had misunderstood everything and now he could never take it back?
“I had people on my side, who offered me encouragement, but there was no helping me, not really. Not up against the head of the company.”
“Were all the executives who were arrested his allies?” I asked.
“I don’t know if they were so much allies as they were lost too, each in their own little way. But considering their own positions, I suppose they probably couldn’t oppose him. Meanwhile, more and more of the younger employees raised their voices and said that the CEO ought to be dismissed and the company completely restructured. I was in complete agreement. Once a company’s fallen that low, your only way out is a full-scale revolution, essentially.”
“So then, the reason you were so happy that night wasn’t because you got promoted?” I asked.
“Oh no, it was,” he assented, readily. “With a promotion, I’d finally be able to do some real work. My dream job, project development! The younger employees and I got carried away that night. We were so excited that we were finally going to be able to develop some serious, high-quality products. I felt like it had been touch and go for a bit there, but your old dad wasn’t quite ready to give up the fight.”
I was at a total loss for words by this point.
“So?” He puffed his chest out with a self-satisfied smile. “I probably looked like a regular office worker to you, a boring old man stuck hanging on to a strap in a crammed rush-hour train every day. But I’ve had my fair share of drama, you know. Some of it’s been good and some of it’s been bad. And if there’s one thing I can say for sure at this point, it’s that the bad things will end. I know that sounds like a tidy little moral, but it’s the truth. Just like how good things can’t last forever, the bad stuff doesn’t stick around that long, either.”
He laughed out loud, sounding a little embarrassed. As if repelled by his cackling, the crows that had crowded around the picnic tarp with their sights set on our lunch leaped into the air all at once. The sound of flapping wings echoed around us while their black bodies were drawn into the deep blue of the sky.
I suddenly felt so alone that it made me dizzy.
The father had apparently intended his story to be encouraging, but unfortunately, I knew that there was one bad thing that had no end. Makoto’s death wasn’t going to be over one day. No matter how many years passed, how many decades, death was the one thing that definitely never ended. With this misunderstanding he could never take back still here in this world, Makoto would keep on being dead forever.
11
Mountain weather is unpredictable. After lunch, the sky suddenly grew dark, and the clouds thickened above us. I couldn’t get back into sketching, no matter how I tried, so I finally went over to the father, who was still hanging his fishing line in the river.
“Let’s go home.”
We got stuck in a huge traffic jam that stretched out for around twenty kilometers on the toll highway, so the drive back felt like an eternity. Cars were bumper to bumper across three lanes. Every so often, we’d stagger forward like the cars were on the verge of collectively passing out, and then we’d stop again. Everyone was on edge, it seemed, and eventually, with no particular catalyst to set them off, drivers all around us leaned on their horns, the only possible act of resistance. But next to me, the father gripped the wheel without so much as a raised eyebrow. He was even humming along to the song that was playing.
Now that I was thinking about it, this was the first time I’d seen his face so close up. He had the sort of round face that if you set up a panel of a hundred people, every single one of them would no doubt say he looked like a gentle man. Eyes that seemed to have never glared at anyone. And he might have been past forty now, but his skin was still firm and smooth. Despite everything he’d been through, there was no hint of the gloom that clouded Makoto’s face.
“I want to ask you one thing,” I said, almost whispering. “Does all that stuff in the past not matter so long as you’re doing good now?” I wanted to understand. “You don’t hold a grudge? You’re not angry at the CEO and that boss? Can you really say you don’t hate people anymore? I mean, they might still do some really terrible stuff to you. Maybe they’re doing it already and you just don’t know about it yet.”
I was thinking of the mother.
The woman who had secretly cheated on him.
The woman he worshipped as his savior, full of powerful energy.
So maybe it wasn’t only Makoto Kobayashi. Maybe every single person on this earth was just living their life under false impressions, misunderstanding other people and being misunderstood in turn. This was a heartbreakingly sad idea, but then there were also times when things went smoothly for just this reason.
“Oh, I held a grudge,” he said, after a long silence. His face in profile, bathed in the headlights of the oncoming traffic, stiffened slightly. “Things might be going great now, but that doesn’t make all those hard times go away. I can’t get back those two years I spent like a zombie. I’ve never forgotten what my old boss did to me, and when the CEO was indicted, my first thought was, Ha, take that. Sometimes, I even got fed up with myself for thinking like this.” He paused. “But all that stuff was blown right out of my head in an instant.”
“An instant?” I looked at him curiously.
“That day, that moment.”
“When?”
“You don’t know?” The smile disappeared from his face. “It was the moment you came back to life.”
“Oh.” I felt a needle-sharp pain in my heart.
“After you took all those sleeping pills and you were on death’s doorstep, I thought my own heart would stop first. I tried to hold it together somehow in front of your mother, but I was in an absolute panic inside. I called the ambulance as fast as I could, but once we got to the hospital, the doctor told us there was almost no hope, you were in a vegetative state at best. But even so, the doctors and nurses worked so hard on you, they really did everything they could. I was honestly struck by that. And then you miraculously came back to life, as if you couldn’t help but respond to this passion of theirs. And I thought, for better or for worse, human beings are really something.”
He spoke slowly, as if he was digesting the events of that day all over again.
“The joy I felt in that moment more than made up for every terrible thing that had happened to me up to that point.”
I heard another horn from behind us. And then like a call and response, a horn blared up ahead and then to our right. I felt like running away, unable to sit in that seat any longer, and I craned my neck in the direction of each and every honk, my eyes racing around restlessly.
“It wasn’t just me. That moment set the future in motion for someone else.” The father’s voice drew my gaze back to him. “I don’t know if you noticed. But it was right after they saved your life in that hospital that Mitsuru began to say he wanted to be a doctor.”
“Huh?” My jaw dropped.
“He said he’s giving up on getting into medicine this year. I guess it was just all too sudden, and he won’t be able to catch up in time for the scholarship exams. He’s going to take a year off and really study hard so he can take them next year. He said we should send you to private school instead.”
That Mitsuru? No way. Impossible. Not a chance. Although I tried desperately to deny it, somewhere in my heart I knew it was true. I flopped back a
gainst the seat in resignation.
The truth was, I’d had a vague inkling that something was going on. Ever since I’d become Makoto Kobayashi—in other words, ever since Makoto’s suicide—that sharp-tongued Mitsuru hadn’t teased me once about my height.
“What do you want?”
It was already past nine by the time we got home. Mitsuru was apparently in his room; light was leaking out from the crack under the door. But I got no answer when I knocked, so I opened the door anyway.
He was studying at the desk in front of me. “Who said you could come in?” His voice was harsh as usual; his back remained turned to me.
“I just wanted to check on a couple things with you.” I got straight to the point. “Did you decide to give up medical school this year because of me?”
“Spare me.” He snorted. “I just didn’t think I’d make it is all. I am your big brother. I’m not so great in the brain department, either.” As always, the provoking tone and the little jab at me. “And when I checked into it, med school costs way more than I thought. I figured I’d get a job and earn my tuition once I started school, but I’d have a better shot betting on the scholarship exam next year. Change of plans, that’s all. The end.”
He turned back to his workbook.
“One more thing.” I stopped him. “Is the reason you decided to become a doctor because of my suicide?”
“It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s because of your doctor,” Mitsuru said, his voice flat. “I’d never seen a doctor working up close. I mean, they really do hold people’s lives in their hands, and it was kind of amazing to see your doctor doing everything he could to keep you with us. And when I saw how insanely happy Mom and Dad were, it seemed like a pretty sweet gig. That’s it. The patient coulda been anyone. Coulda been the person in the next room, coulda been a monkey even. The end.”
He started to move his mechanical pencil again, but I stayed in the doorway.
“One more thing.”
“You still got more?”