Child of Fortune

by Yuko Tsushima

  She groped to a chair at the table, sat down, and opened her eyes. The red curtains in Kayako’s room were swaying. Outside the open window spread a soft, white, overcast sky. From the kitchen she could see nothing but sky.

  She had just finished breakfast, and an uneaten crust and a coffee cup were still on the table. The bread crumbs had sopped up some splashes of coffee. Kōko started slowly wiping them up. There was nothing she need fear. Nothing. She continued stubbornly rubbing the table top, as if inscribing words with the cloth.

  Her sister couldn’t stop her either. She would be appalled, and might finally turn her back on her, but that was all. And what if Kayako did come home? That wouldn’t get her out of this foolish business of the baby. Freedom. There was nothing to prevent her doing whatever she pleased, because she had nothing. Nothing. She used to think that simply being Kayako’s mother gave her life a solid social value; but had it really counted for anything? Here she was, the same mother, with this great distended belly and the wild idea of actually having the baby, and yet no sentence of death had been passed on her. No stones fell from heaven, nobody came after her brandishing a gun, though she rather hoped they would. Of course not: with no proper job, no husband, nothing, she could do what she liked and it wouldn’t matter. Freedom. A fine state. Kōko clenched the dishcloth in her hands. Yes, that’s what she was afraid of. No one would have anything to say; not any more. She thought longingly of her mother who used to drag her by the arm and sit her, screaming and wailing, at the piano till she did her lesson.

  Kōko dropped the cloth, got up, and went into her room, where she stood before the mirror and studied her body: the front, the right side, the left. She smoothed down her skirt to check the line of her abdomen. Too swollen for five months. No choice of clothes would disguise it. She couldn’t recall what she’d been like when she was expecting Kayako and so couldn’t compare her size now, but something told her that the baby was growing too big. Maybe, since her routine provided so little exercise, the baby was getting fat and lazy like its mother. It didn’t move much; Kayako, although a girl, had moved a lot.

  Kōko stared at her legs and face. Look at those rolls of flesh – not a trace of youth anywhere. An ugly, fat woman. She simply couldn’t bring herself to look at her bare stomach. If I were having this baby with Doi, she thought, I needn’t have grown so ugly. How faithful the body is to the spirit.

  She moved back to the kitchen and turned on the television. She still had an hour to spare before leaving for work. She put the kettle on again and had a cup of instant coffee while she watched a puppet show. Even now, that sort of program made her absentmindedly want to call Kayako to come and watch. Until just four or five years ago, Kayako was always in front of the set, open-mouthed, too absorbed to hear Kōko speak till her arm or shoulder was jogged. Then she’d look up trembling at her mother’s face and set about her chores: there were dishes to be washed, or her help was wanted with the cooking.

  Kōko suddenly got up and snapped off the TV. She hurriedly made ready and left the apartment. There was no one else in the elevator. It was not too late yet. Hurry, she told herself, as she broke into a run down the road to the station. But she lost her breath at once and her legs refused to move forward under the weight of her body. How could she have let herself get into this shape, she wondered, coming to a standstill at the curb and searching for a taxi. She wanted to rush to a clinic – any one would do – and have her womb emptied before going to get Kayako back. At this late stage it might involve more than just a simple procedure; she might have to be admitted to the hospital. Even so, there was still time. Though she wouldn’t be able to attend Kayako’s school opening, she could meet her a week later as the same mother she had always been. She didn’t know what to do for Kayako after that. But there must be something she could do.

  She had missed the prize-giving at the elementary school, too. She’d been waiting to hear from Kayako, but in the end the girl must have gone alone. What was done was done, however: from now on Kayako would need her mother.

  Kōko was ready to stamp her feet in frustration before she finally got hold of a taxi. She quickly gave the driver the name of a Yamanote Line station, chosen at random – it was an area she didn’t know – and no sooner had the automatic door swung shut than she was begging him to go as fast as he could. There was no time.

  She knew it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. If she started to think about it in a calmer frame of mind, she would probably come to her senses, realizing how foolish she was being, and get out of the taxi on the spot. What she was doing amounted to a denial of everything she’d ever done: clinging to Doi at the expense of Kayako; keeping Hatanaka away from Kayako; choosing not to go home to her mother with Kayako; everything.

  She could hear her sister’s voice now, drawing gradually closer: so you’ve finally begun to understand what a bad mother you’ve been, how little sense you’ve shown? And hear herself protest: no, that’s not it – don’t think I’ve liked choosing a different world from other people. I know I’ve been stubborn – but not about Kayako alone. All my life, though often I haven’t known which way to turn, I have managed to make choices of my own. I don’t know if they were right or wrong. I don’t think anyone can say that.

  One thing, though, was certain: that she had never betrayed the small child she’d once been; the child who had pined for her brother in the institution; the child who had watched her mother and sister resentfully, unable to understand what made them find fault with her grades, her manners, her language. And she was not betraying that child now, thirty years later. This, she had always suspected, was the one thing that mattered. And although she was often tempted by a growing awareness of the ‘proper thing to do’ once Kayako was born – not only in the harsh advice she was constantly offered by others, but within her own mind – in the long run her choices had always remained true to her childhood self.

  But now, just for the moment, she wanted to find an answer to this problem and be done with it – to let sheer momentum carry her there. She was on the way to a featureless but comfortable place known as ‘common sense’. She was well aware, though, that if the taxi didn’t get her there soon she would remember her childhood again, remember how she’d tagged along after her brother, and turn the taxi around. Hurry, hurry, she thought, more and more frantically. The driver seemed to be saying something, she didn’t know what.

  When she was set down in front of an unfamiliar inner-city station, there was a slight movement in her womb. Kōko pressed her hand firmly over her abdomen as she watched the yellow taxi drive away. It was soft: her hand sank deeper and deeper into the soft flesh. Flesh, and then a small enclosed sea. What must it be feeling, floating on this sea of darkness? Kōko tried to listen to the fetus’s voice. She couldn’t hear anything, she could only sense the breathing of something there, already clinging to its mother.

  People were streaming in and out of the station. The wind was warm and damp. Traffic signals blinked, and an electric signboard registered the noise level. These were the only spots of brightness; there were no shadows on the ground. It was a monotonous, inorganic scene, like Hanon played by a small child, the notes all disconnected. Kōko started walking. On the back streets there were sure to be two or three clinics that would perform an abortion unconditionally. She had looked for a doctor in the same way as a student, though in a different part of the city. Nearly twenty years ago. Kōko walked on, staring at the ground beneath her feet. The pale, dry sidewalk looked like the shallows of a river, its flow broken here and there by tiny eddies. Glistening spray was flung up around people’s feet. A child’s pink sandals approached and moved away. A coffee shop’s Coca-Cola sign on a stand came up and bumped her. Kōko carefully set it straight before walking on. Though it was only early April, she was beginning to sweat as she walked.

  Three big plastic buckets had been set out to dry in a row, upside down. A scrubbing brush was drying beside them. Walking with her eyes on the buckets
, Kōko caught her foot on the first. All three tumbled over noisily, one by one. Flustered, Kōko gave chase as they rolled onto the roadway. Horns blared around her. She ignored the impatient traffic while she gathered the buckets together. As she did so, the word ‘illusion’ echoed in her ears. Illusion. Were the road, the cars, the buildings, the sky, all an illusion? Was she, too, merely floating like a scrap of thread through an illusory universe?

  Only two buckets had rolled all the way onto the road. Kōko returned to the sidewalk with the pair in her hands. A woman in a cook’s apron was waiting intently beside the third.

  ‘I’m so sorry, you shouldn’t have bothered, and in your condition too – you did give me a turn! What’s a plastic bucket when you’ve got the baby to think of? Take care, won’t you? …’

  Kōko handed the woman the buckets she’d retrieved, bowed, and hurried away. She was hot. Terribly hot. She stopped and laid her hands over her stomach. Its round mass felt ready to blaze up, spurting flames, at any moment. What she had there was no longer her own belly, to do with as she pleased, so how could she spread her thighs and have someone lay hands on the hot living thing inside? She remembered the word ‘sin’ with a cold shudder. The clammy vinyl surface of the delivery table. The nurse’s expressionless face as she positioned the light. The clinking of metal instruments. The stained floor tiles. The sound of the doctor’s leather scuffs. As she left the recovery room the nurse had told her she’d been screaming for another injection, quick, quick, in a near frenzy as she came out of the anesthetic. She didn’t remember. All she remembered was a sickening rush of blurred sensations as though her body were slithering down into the abyss of death.

  She had had that abortion before she could see the delivery table as a place where babies were born. And then, on a similar table in another hospital, she had given birth to a baby. The baby was Kayako, and Kayako was living still. She hadn’t killed her, and now she couldn’t lie on a delivery table for another abortion. She could see the baby all too well, its cells proliferating steadily toward only one end, the day of its birth. She couldn’t kill it. When next she lay down on a delivery table it could only be to give birth. Biting her lip, Kōko looked around her.

  She was quite late getting to the music store. Once again Beyer and Hanon began to filter back and forth.

  Kōko’s thoughts turned to the day her brother came home from the institution. He was ten years old. Dormitory life was so ingrained in him, he couldn’t have his routine upset in any way: he had to wake at the proper time, wash his face, do morning exercises by the radio, then eat breakfast. And Kōko, who till then had been whiling away long solitary days of boredom – being too young for her sister – suddenly had the same regular habits thrust upon her.

  Every morning, when their mother shrilled the order to rise, Kōko and her brother bounded out of bed and made a race of dressing and folding their bedding away. Their mother could hardly have been pleased that he needed this sort of treatment before he could function at all, but Kōko was delighted with the life they led after his return. She was sure there could be no happiness for her without her brother. For the first time, Kōko knew a kind of joy that had nothing to do with the intellect. The boy’s emotions were unclouded: what pleased him meant joy, what displeased him meant anger; but he experienced his deepest joy in enduring what displeased him for the sake of those he loved. She wondered why. Though he lacked intelligence, he was endowed with love, which was another kind of wisdom. Kōko had been disappointed to realize that Kayako at the age of one already possessed more of the wits she needed to protect herself than her brother had at the age of ten; she was simply a miniature version of the adults who would calmly abandon one another for the sake of their own happiness. Kōko’s pleasure was mixed as she watched Kayako display more intelligence each day.

  Sometimes, when he couldn’t make himself understood, her brother would fly into a rage, toppling furniture or swinging a baseball bat. But for his little sister Kōko he had nothing but smiles. When they raced into their clothes he always let her win; he would smile his approval, then hurry to put on his own. To him she remained a baby, a newcomer who could never do or understand a thing, and for all her admiration Kōko sometimes resented this from one who couldn’t even talk properly himself; but it was nice, after all, to be indulged. It seemed that having a younger sister bolstered her brother’s confidence in himself as a boy.

  It was cold the day her brother came home. Their mother left the house early in the morning to go and collect him. Kōko waited with her sister in the living room, all day long. Shōko, in junior high school by that time, was reading a book. Kōko had few recollections of her sister ever playing with her. She barely spoke to Kōko that day, while Kōko grew cross with no way to occupy the hours. The thought of a life shared with her brother took her breath away and – more from dread than anticipation – she just couldn’t hold still. She would start to talk and be scolded by her sister; she would wander about the living room and be scolded again.

  She remembered her sister saying –If you’re going to make a noise, why don’t you go into the garden?– Normally she would have done as she was told, in spite of the cold, and played with the dog, but on this particular day she didn’t want to leave her sister’s side.

  She couldn’t remember what else they did until the others came home. In fact, she’d forgotten the homecoming itself. Perhaps, worn out by waiting, she had fallen asleep. In the morning, though, began the dazzling sunlit life of what her brother called ‘the mountain school’. She studied with her brother, rode double on his bicycle in the yard, even went to the toilet when he did. Once their mother had caught them there comparing their efforts. They would also get lost together, and the name tag around her brother’s neck proved useful then.

  Then a cold her brother caught had turned into pneumonia, and he had died. He was Kayako’s age. Kōko went back to being a quiet child, slow-moving about the house. When set to practice the piano she would go through the motions so mechanically that she spent a year on one gavotte; her sister, meanwhile, performed a piano solo at her school concert, much to their mother’s delight.

  Kayako answered the door. Kōko stood there tensely, trying to follow the change in her expression. Kayako was wearing a fluffy pink cardigan, probably another hand-me-down from Miho; she seemed to have settled very cozily into her aunt’s home. Her eyes widened in initial surprise, then dropped awkwardly as she said in a small voice, ‘Come in … I hardly recognized you. How did you get so fat?’

  ‘It’s not all fat,’ Kōko answered, smiling, as she took off her shoes. Kayako gave a halfhearted smile. Most likely she had taken it, without understanding, for some kind of joke. Kōko put on the slippers that Kayako set out for her and bent down to arrange her shoes neatly. Her swollen belly was uncomfortable, and she straightened up gasping for breath.

  This was her first visit to the house since her mother’s funeral, two years before, but very little had changed. The hall was brightly lit by a new chandelier, and the familiar watercolor of daffodils had been replaced by a modern woodblock print. The bronze vase had been replaced, too, by a glass horse.

  Her sister and Miho were sitting on the living-room sofa watching television. They rose together when Kayako and Kōko entered.

  ‘You’ve kept us waiting so long, we’re all starving. Good gracious … what’s happened? … You’ve put on so much weight.’

  Kōko could see Kayako slipping away to the kitchen. As her tall, slim back vanished from sight, Kōko answered, as nonchalantly as she could, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you before, while you’ve been looking after Kayako.’

  ‘Yes, I should think so. I don’t know what you’ve got against us, never dropping in even for a chat. You were always a funny stubborn old thing, though, so it’s not surprising. But when did you get so fat? I hardly know who I’m talking to.’

  Miho looked up, glanced from her mother to Kōko, and said, ‘When I saw you a while ago, you wer
en’t any different, were you, Aunt Kōko?’

  Kōko nodded a greeting. ‘Ah, yes, it’s a good school, isn’t it? I’m awfully sorry about Kayako, after all the trouble you’ve gone to. Still, these things can’t be helped, can they?’

  ‘Actually, that’s what I wanted to discuss with you,’ said her sister, half-rising to her feet, ‘and that’s why I’ve asked you to come. But let’s have dinner first. We mustn’t keep the children waiting any longer. Papa will be a little late home from the office. Miho, dear, go and call your brother.’

  Miho answered brightly and went upstairs. Kōko felt a sudden wave of nostalgia as she wondered which of the upstairs rooms was now Takashi’s. There were two rooms: her sister used to have the larger one and Kōko the smaller, facing east, but only after she reached junior high; until then she’d slept beside her mother in the room downstairs, with her brother alongside when he was at home. Now the downstairs bedroom had been redecorated in a Western style for Shōko and her husband. Kōko’s old room upstairs looked out on the trees at a nearby shrine, and from her last year in school she had often watched the midsummer sun climb beyond the grove, and listened raptly to the crescendo of birds and cicadas as the sky brightened. Those skies were tinged with the most brilliant, refreshing colors of any dawn that Kōko had seen.

  When Kōko and the others were seated, Kayako carried in a large tray of soup bowls. She kept her eyes lowered – embarrassed perhaps by her mother’s presence – even while she was passing out the bowls. The maid, a slight girl whom Kōko hadn’t seen before, also emerged from the kitchen to place a salad bowl and a set of dishes in the center of the table.