The trees at the park were in full autumn glory, and their fallen leaves crunched pleasantly underfoot. The cool air was bracing and fresh. They saw lots of other families out in the park, the parents clustered together, chatting about their kids and how they were having this or that problem. But Hana could not enter their circle. She could only watch from afar.
She crouched to smell a Japanese anemone blooming in one corner of the park, then sat down to rest on a bench near a deserted pond. Yuki collected leaves, holding them up so that the sun illuminated their veins and comparing them to her own hands. The minutes flowed by in a quiet peace.
As they continued on, they passed a kindly middle-aged man walking a beagle.
“Hello there! What cute kids,” he said as he passed by.
His compliment made Hana happy, and she bowed politely to him.
“The nice man said you’re cute!” she said, looking at Yuki.
The beagle, wearing a colorful knit sweater, took an interest in the girl. He padded closer to her and then started howling.
“Bad dog!” the man scolded, smiling apologetically as he yanked the leash.
Yuki shook free of Hana’s hand and walked up to the beagle, kicking the leaves as she went.
“Grrrrr!!!!” she growled menacingly, putting her face up to its nose.
Beneath her hood was a wolf’s face.
The frightened beagle tucked in its tail and hid behind its master’s feet. Surprised, the man looked back and forth from Hana to Yuki.
“…I’m so sorry…!” Hana said, flustered. She swept Yuki up and rushed away.
What if he saw?
She hurried home, avoiding other people and holding both children close to hide them.
She was sure that couple pushing a stroller glanced back suspiciously.
She was sure the young mother and her children waiting for a bus in front of the train station were looking over their shoulders at her.
She was sure the two housewives riding bikes with children on the backs started whispering to each other when they saw her.
She was sure the parents holding their children on the balcony of an old apartment were peering down.
She was sure the mother and child at the far end of an alley were staring.
Like a fugitive, she ran through the dark back streets.
The problems came one after the next.
Ame’s colic grew worse and worse, until some nights he cried straight until morning.
One night, the man in the neighboring apartment pounded violently on Hana’s door.
“What time do you think it is? Shut those kids up!”
Surprised by the loud voice, Ame stopped crying. The second Hana opened the door, the man started screaming at her, alcohol on his breath. He was wearing a tracksuit, as if he couldn’t even stand the noise long enough to change.
“Every single night I have to hear this racket! What’s wrong with you?!”
“I’m so sorry…,” Hana apologized profusely.
“You’re their mother; teach them how to behave!” he snarled, then slammed the door.
Like a fire sparking back to life, Ame started to cry again.
All Hana could do was shake Yuki awake and walk to the shrine near their building to calm Ame down.
“Shh, shhh. It’s okay. Shh, shh.”
While Hana waited in the dark precincts for Ame to stop crying, Yuki passed the time by tracing the veins in a leaf.
Then Hana heard the voices of drunken office workers from the far side of the shrine. Startled and scared, she picked up Yuki and hurried out to search for another place.
But where else could she go in the middle of a big city?
On another night, the children started howling in response to an ambulance siren passing nearby. Hana put her finger over her mouth, pleading for them to be quiet, but no matter how much she begged, they wouldn’t stop.
The next day, the landlord knocked on their door.
“As you know, the lease for these apartments prohibits pets.”
She crossed her skinny arms.
“The other tenants said they heard a dog barking. They said you were breaking the lease.”
“But I don’t have a dog.”
“Don’t lie to me! Someone told me they saw you walking around holding two strays!”
“—”
“The point is, if you’re going to break the rules, you’ll have to find somewhere else to do it. Do you understand?”
She was telling Hana to get out—to move. But where could she go? Hana had no idea.
Another day, an unfamiliar man and woman dressed in suits knocked on the door.
“You’re from Child Protective Services?”
“Yes. We’re very concerned about your children.”
“What do you mean?”
The woman leaned in through the cracked open door, folder in one hand.
“We did some investigating, and we discovered they haven’t had any of their regular checkups or vaccinations.”
“They’re fine. They’re healthy.” Hana tried to end the conversation and shut the door, but the woman wouldn’t let her.
“In that case, can we just take a quick look?”
“No, I’m sorry…”
“It won’t take long at all,” the man said. Without dropping his conciliatory smile, he tried to push his head in to look around the room. “We just want to make sure you’re telling the truth.”
“I’m v-v-very sorry.”
Hana pulled the doorknob with all her strength. She could hear the woman’s shrill cry on the other side.
“Keep this up, and we’ll have to charge you with abuse and neglect!”
After that, Hana was afraid to open the door.
She hated opening the letters that came through the mail slot, too, and she ignored the doorbell. Still, the piercing, aggressive tone rang and rang and rang.
Hana stared absently at the children’s sleeping faces, waiting it out. She had tried to do her best, but in a densely populated area like this, wolf children stood out too much for her to raise them properly. She sensed that if she stayed in the city, she would very soon hit a wall.
The three of them went out early one morning to the empty park.
It had been a long time since their last excursion. The cold winter air stung their skin. Yuki’s and Ame’s breaths came out in white puffs as they zigzagged across the wide-open lawn, frost crackling under their feet. They changed from wolf to human to wolf with dizzying speed, wearing their hooded onesies the whole time. The wolf children—wolf Yuki and wolf Ame—chased each other happily, letting out all the pent-up frustrations after so long inside the little apartment. Their laughter echoed through the park as they ran wild and free.
Hana hunched on a bench, watching them listlessly. Her worries and exhaustion had reached a peak.
“…Hey,” she called weakly to Yuki and Ame.
“What, Mommy?”
They ran panting to her. She took a deep breath and exhaled.
“What do you want to do?” she asked softly, almost to herself.
“??”
“How do you want to live?”
“????”
“…As children or as wolves?”
“??????”
In their half-wolf, half-human forms, Yuki and Ame tilted their heads quizzically.
Of course, they didn’t have an answer for her. As she looked at their faces, though, energy slowly began flowing back into her body. The exhaustion and fatigue steadily faded as a kind of strength she had never experienced before bubbled up inside her. She smiled gently at the children.
“I think we’re going to move. That way, you can choose to be what you want.”
She looked up at the distant sky. A strong morning sun was rising between the trees, bathing Hana in its blinding light. A new day had dawned.
2
It was spring.
As they turned off the immaculately paved Super Agricultural Highway ont
o a side road through a dark cedar forest, a magnificent cascade of terraced rice paddies came suddenly into view. Mountain snowmelt rushed noisily down the irrigation canals.
From the passenger seat of a white municipal car, Hana gazed absently at this countryside far from Tokyo.
A young city employee named Mr. Kuroda sped down the narrow roads, skillfully navigating the curves. He had been chattering nonstop for the entire drive.
“We started advertising the empty houses at the town hall, and ever since, we’ve had a decent stream of people who want to live in the country…but they never last. No surprises there. I mean, as you can see, there’s not much out here. It’s a half-hour drive to the elementary school or the hospital, and once the kids get to junior high, they’ve got a two-and-a-half-hour commute by bus and train, and that’s just one way. Five hours round-trip. The nature is nice out here, sure, but if you want to raise a family— Oof!”
The paved road suddenly ended, and the car bounced into the air.
“—I think you’d have a better time in the city.”
In the back seat, Yuki and Ame were flopped over asleep, exhausted from the long journey. Their eyes didn’t even open as the car jounced along the potholed forest road.
Hana could see snowy mountains in the distance. She pulled out the photograph she’d stuck in her notebook and compared the view. They were the same mountains he had once talked about—the home where he had grown up.
Mr. Kuroda pulled over to the side of the road, traded his leather shoes for a pair of rubber boots, and stomped up the hill, pushing his glasses up on his nose as he went. Hana followed with the sleeping children in her arms.
The house was buried among trees lush with new spring leaves.
“…It’s huge…!”
Mr. Kuroda had said it was a run-down old farmhouse built a hundred years ago, but it was far grander than Hana had imagined. The sloping tiled roof supported by thick posts cast a heavy shadow under the morning sun, and the sprawling house recalled the bygone days when the forestry industry had thrived in this region. It was big enough for three generations to live in, let alone Hana’s three-person family.
As Hana looked more closely, however, she saw that the cracks in the dirty glass doors were repaired roughly with packing tape. The earth walls were crumbling in places, revealing their bamboo framework. (Mr. Kuroda explained that black woodpeckers were responsible for the holes.) It was clear that no one had lived here for quite a few years. Across from the main house was a barn with missing doors, and on a hillside leading to a mountain path, a shed tilted so far over it looked ready to collapse, perhaps from the weight of deep snow.
“The rent is just about free, but you’ll break the bank fixing this place up… It’s more of a ruin than an empty house… Oh, don’t worry about taking your shoes off.”
Hana took her shoes off anyway. The floor creaked as she stepped up from the earthen-floored vestibule to the raised wooden entryway.
The main room must have measured twenty tatami mats in size, about thirty square meters. Overhead, enormous wooden beams crisscrossed the exposed ceiling. The tatamis were discolored where rain had leaked onto them, and they smelled of mold. Screens and sliding doors with ripped paper coverings leaned at random against walls, and some of the old furniture remained as well. The tin woodstove in the room with a traditional sunken hearth was apparently the only source of heat. In the kitchen, dust lay thick on abandoned washtubs and cooking pots, and stream water gurgled from a plastic hose sticking out of the tiled wall.
“On the upside, the electricity still works, the stream hasn’t run dry, and the owner says you can use whatever you want from the barn.”
Mr. Kuroda slid open all thirteen of the glass doors on the porch running the length of the house to let fresh air in. Hana looked out at the weed-filled front garden. Beyond the grove of trees surrounding the house, she noticed an open area.
“Is that a field?” she asked.
She definitely saw something that looked like an overgrown rice paddy. Mr. Kuroda stepped down from the porch into the garden.
“Oh, this land is no good for growing your own food. Wild animals will come down from the mountains and dig up your garden. There’s boars and monkeys and bears, and that’s just the beginning. You take the trouble to grow vegetables, and they eat ’em all. The reason there are so many empty houses out here is that the humans were chased off.”
“So there aren’t any neighbors?”
“Nope, not unless you go way down the hill.”
“I see.”
Mr. Kuroda sighed and looked around at the fields and forest. “Should we look at another place? There’s one in town that’s a little better…”
“I’ve made up my mind.”
“What?”
“I’ll take this one.”
Hana smiled at him. He blinked, dumbfounded.
“…Why?”
When the children woke up, Mr. Kuroda was already gone.
“Wow! Where are we?” Yuki asked.
“At our new house.”
“Yippeeee!” she shouted, leaping off the porch barefoot into the tall weeds of the garden. She spotted the leaning shed right away.
“It’s tilted!” she yelled happily, tilting to imitate it.
She dashed around the garden well, then abruptly squatted down, greeted a procession of ants with a friendly “Hello,” and stepped carefully over them. In the back of the garden, she discovered the ruins of a demolished storehouse. With an excited shout, she charged forward, scaled the roof, and screeched joyfully from the top over and over again.
Ame peeked out timidly from the shadows of a post in the main house, watching his sister. Just as he did, a gecko scurried across the post. Ame screamed, jumped off the porch in a panic, and flung his arms around his sister in an entreaty for her to save him as she skipped back to the house.
Hana crouched down on the porch.
“So do you like it?” she asked the two of them.
“Yeah!” Yuki shouted, planting her feet sturdily on the ground.
Ame grabbed the hem of his sister’s shirt. “I wanna go home,” he said weakly.
Yuki was five years old, and Ame was four. Yuki was a bright, active girl with long black hair and well-formed features. She helped her mother often with housework, ate well, and laughed all the time. She quickly memorized her storybooks and liked to recite them back.
Ame was quiet and introspective. He was also a stubborn, withdrawn mama’s boy who worried about everything and would burst into tears over anything. When he whimpered anxiously on and on, Hana would rub his back and murmur, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” like a magic spell.
After Hana had decided to give up the apartment in Tokyo where she’d lived with their father, it had taken several years to choose the right place to live. Earlier, Mr. Kuroda had warned her that things weren’t so easy out here and she wouldn’t last long if she’d only come because she romanticized the idea of country life. But his warnings didn’t bother her. In fact, they did the opposite; she thought it was an ideal place to raise wolf children away from prying eyes. She believed she should give them the opportunity to choose their path freely, and that had led her here.
The barn was crowded with possessions left by the previous inhabitants of the house. Of course, there were hoes, scythes, and other farming tools, but she also found a foot-peddled sewing machine and a bicycle with a child seat attached. Hana lugged out a box of carpentry tools she had found on a shelf and carefully sorted through its contents. Her first order of business was to at least make the house livable.
A white municipal car was parked by the terraced paddies.
“Seems she wanted a place without neighbors. She’s an odd one, I’ll say.”
Mr. Kuroda was informing the village elders of the strange newcomer.
“She married?” a man in tinted bifocals named Mr. Hosokawa asked, like a writer.
“Dunno.”
“Got any mon
ey?” a man with a hand towel draped over his neck named Mr. Yamaoka asked with arms folded, like a scientist.
“Dunno.”
Mr. Hosokawa and Mr. Yamaoka looked at each other with disbelief.
“So how does she plan to live?”
“Dunno…”
Mr. Kuroda scratched the back of his neck uncomfortably and looked around. He caught sight of a third elderly man absorbed in his work banking soil against the sloped edge of a field with a hoe.
“Excuse me, Grandpa Nirasaki…I’d be grateful if you could go easy on this one.”
The tall, thin man called Nirasaki looked sullenly at Mr. Kuroda and said nothing, like a philosopher.
The next day, Hana awoke at dawn, slid open the door, and looked around the front garden.
The mountain air was cool and refreshing. The trees glittered in the sunlight as if in celebration of the new day. The stream burbled pleasantly in the morning quiet. Hana breathed in deeply.
“Okay!” she said, firing herself up for the day, and got straight to work cleaning the house.
First, she pried all the tatamis from the floor and propped them against the porch, along with the screens and sliding doors. She counted nine rooms and a mind-boggling sixty-some mats in total, if she included the main room, family altar, storeroom, hearth room, and all the others.
She used an old carpet beater to beat the dust from the ceilings and posts all through the house, then briskly swept the exposed floorboards with a worn-down straw broom. Clouds of accumulated dust and dirt swirled into the air. The towel Hana had wrapped around her face to keep out dust proved absolutely useless, and she sneezed over and over, hard enough to send up bits of rotten floorboard.
She looked up and noticed that the ceiling right above her was stained from a leak. She climbed a stepladder and pushed up on the rotted board, only to bring a family of huge poisonous centipedes falling toward her. Undiscouraged, she thrust her head into the attic and discovered several sunbeams piercing the darkness. She would have to start by repairing the roof.
Leaning a ladder against the outside of the house, she climbed nervously up on top. She pulled off the tiles and nailed scrap wood onto the damaged boards underneath, nudged displaced tiles back into place, and exchanged broken ones for extras from the barn. When she peered into the attic again, the holes were gone.
Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki Page 4