Letting her drunkenness lead her on, Kōko called Osada again. The phone rang on unanswered.
His absence didn’t imply he was on his way. Instead, she sensed indifference. They only remembered each other at the sound of the other’s voice; that was all there had ever been between them.
With the receiver still pressed to her ear, Kōko muttered: I must go to a hospital tomorrow. The only one that came to mind was the university hospital where she’d had Kayako.
6
The doorbell chimed just as Kōko was putting on her shoes. She was still feeling the effects of the night’s drunkenness. Who the hell can that be at this hour of the morning? – and when I’m in a hurry, too – she was thinking as she opened the door. It was Osada. For a moment, in her astonishment, she thought something must have happened to Hatanaka. She forgot that she’d done anything herself. But the sound of Osada’s voice – as startled as a child uncapping a jack-in-the-box – brought back her phone call of the night before. ‘I haven’t much time,’ she said, flustered, ‘but come in, anyway.’
When he was seated in the kitchen, it finally seemed to register that the change in Kōko’s appearance wasn’t just extra weight. Kōko was so intent on following his expression that she didn’t even offer him a cup of coffee. Osada looked very young for his age, perhaps because he’d stayed single, but now, as she studied his profile, his features hardened in a look more suited to his years. Kōko was glad to see it: at least he would spare her the kind of emotional outburst she might expect from someone in his twenties.
‘… The baby has already started to move. I’ve been thinking I ought to tell you. I’m sorry. Today’s a bad day, though – I don’t have time to explain properly … I can bring the child up on my own, without having to bother you at all – as long as you don’t let it worry you, I mean.’
In a rush, Kōko explained as fully as she could that Osada’s own status was not affected in any way under the law, that she meant to ensure he wouldn’t be affected, that she wanted to forget about the child’s father herself and raise it on her own.
Osada remained silent. He gazed steadily at the table. He didn’t hold his head in his hands and bemoan his luck, as Hatanaka might have done, nor did he look the other way and puff a cigarette, like Doi.
Kōko got up, her eyes on the clock. ‘I have to go soon …’
Osada lifted his head and looked directly at her. Even then he said nothing. His lips were dry.
Kōko said, ‘Shall we leave together?’
Osada got clumsily to his feet and fixed her round belly with that glowering stare.
He finally spoke once they reached the street.
‘Are you on your way to work?’
The street outside was filled with morning light. Half closing her eyes, Kōko looked up at the young leaves on the trees lining the sidewalk.
‘Not until the afternoon,’ she answered. ‘I’m on my way to the hospital.’
‘The hospital?’
The fresh leaves would glisten as long as the early light lasted.
‘Today’s my first time.’
‘Oh … Well, anyway, take care.’
Kōko looked at Osada: his eyes too were crinkling in the light. She thought he was going to smile, but he went on regarding her with a hint of sourness about his mouth. Disappointed, she glanced away at a parked car.
‘I’m tough … Please don’t worry. Honestly. Not worrying is the best thing you can possibly do for me … Because then I can think of this child as really mine alone …’
‘A sort of virgin birth?’
‘Well, sort of … Though it’s too late to say so now without sounding preposterous.’
‘It is preposterous.’
‘But I wonder if it’s too much to ask that just one person should believe it? Everyone is so down-to-earth, I’m sick of it, they’ve all got one-track minds.’
For the first time Osada broke into a grin.
‘What do you mean, one-track minds?’
Kōko smiled back.
‘… Never mind … Well, I catch the bus over there …’
Osada saw where she was pointing and nodded. ‘Okay, then … I may give you a call … I can’t say just now …’
‘It has been rather sudden …’
‘A virgin birth, eh?’
They parted laughing. As soon as Kōko turned her back on Osada and walked away, though, her heart sank: that was all for today, but there was next time …
She had to hurry to catch her bus. When it moved off in the direction Osada had taken on foot, Kōko searched the sidewalk hoping to catch sight of him, but to no avail.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back in the seat and drifted off till she heard her stop announced. She had no qualms now, she was simply sleepy after getting up so early. Trips to the hospital had meant an early start the last time, too, when she was expecting Kayako, and she was always overcome with drowsiness in the waiting room. She had treated herself like an invalid – though she’d only been twenty-four – and slept and slept. She was an expectant mother: that was the one thought in her mind. Not the prospect of seeing the newborn’s face, for never having had a baby of her own she had no idea what it would be like. It had been strange to draw steadily nearer something unimaginable, and she had stared endlessly at her body.
Thickly muffled in weariness, she was glad she would soon slip into the same routine. From now on she would think of nothing but her womb. She would get plenty of sleep, plenty of nourishment, think of names, and prepare baby clothes. This time she wanted to give the baby all the loving she could. This time, there would be no regrets. Just as long as the baby came safely into the world, she didn’t care if she, the mother, were left an empty shell. Her child would feel proud to be alive if he knew how intently his mother had awaited his arrival. She promised him that much, regardless of what kind of future she would be able to give him. He might be born terribly handicapped, but that mustn’t stop him growing up proud. Let him grow up arrogant and ruthless, she thought, with Kayako and me to watch over him. Especially if he’s disabled like my brother. No one is going to force him to live in servile deference to other people’s wishes.
The hospital was crowded, as always, but her turn to see the doctor came around sooner than expected. Kōko, who had been staring curiously at the pregnant women in the waiting room – even though she was one of them, with her belly protruding as plainly as theirs – started when her name was called so quickly, and in jerking to her feet she dropped her shoulder bag on the floor. She scraped up its spilled contents and entered the examination room, shrinking with embarrassment.
The room had changed little since her visits before Kayako was born. It had been newly redecorated at the time, and the only change, if it could be called that, was twelve years’ wear and tear. The cream-colored linoleum, once perilously slippery, was now so worn that the concrete showed underneath.
Another half-hour went by before her name was called again in a curtained-off area. Once inside the curtains Kōko removed her stockings and lay down on the examination table. First a nurse measured her abdomen with a tape and checked with both hands for the fetal position. This took a long time, however, as she seemed to have difficulty locating the fetus. A doctor arrived and began to palpate the uterus, but he too gave a puzzled look.
‘How many weeks is it, again?’ the young doctor asked.
The nurse answered first: ‘Twenty-one.’
‘Odd, perhaps it’s undersized. We’ll have an X-ray taken later, if necessary. Now, let’s check the heartbeat.’
He switched on a small machine beside the bed and pressed a microphone attachment onto Kōko’s abdomen. She’d listened to the heart on the same machine when she was having Kayako and knew the sound to expect: a restless fluttering, like the scuttling of a mouse. The first signal a mother receives directly from her child. Anxious that the thudding of her own pulse might interfere with the machine, she managed at least to breathe quietly as she strained
toward the speaker, alert for the baby’s signal.
The doctor was placing the microphone here and there on her abdomen and tilting his head in a puzzled fashion. All that emerged from the speaker was static like the roar of the sea. Kōko lifted her head and joined the doctor in peering at her belly. She was fretting with impatience while the fetus took its time as if, like a baby’s smile, the heartbeat were something it could give or not, just as it pleased. This is no time to play hard-to-get, she pleaded, you’ll have us both in trouble if you don’t get on with it. At any moment, she feared, the doctor might wrongfully reach a conclusion that would crush them both. Just a little signal would do. Barely knowing what she was doing, she flexed and unflexed her abdominal muscles, bent her legs, tried everything that might help.
‘This is no good. We’ll do an internal examination,’ said the doctor, switching off the machine.
Kōko sat up briskly and asked: ‘What’s the situation?’
‘Well, we can’t tell yet. This happens often enough. A thick layer of subcutaneous fat can make diagnosis very difficult. Now, I’d like you to wait till you’re called over there.’
Kōko stepped down with a helping hand from the nurse. She sat on a bench opposite the internal examination room and awaited the next stage. Now’s the time if you’re going to run, she thought, but it was too much effort to get to her feet. There couldn’t be anything wrong. There hadn’t been any bleeding. She should know. She was overweight, that was all. She would simply disappoint the doctor by failing to present any problem in the internal examination, and once the bed was booked for the delivery there’d be no need to come again for quite some time.
A pale wisp of a girl was sitting next to her: she looked about high school age. Whatever could have happened inside her, Kōko wondered with vague concern. Nobody came to this university hospital for an ordinary abortion. On the other side of the girl sat a woman obviously close to term, resting her hands uncomfortably on her belly. Kōko’s heart refused to be quiet. She was having trouble breathing, and she couldn’t see much, either. There’d been nothing untoward during her checkups with Kayako; everything had passed so smoothly that she’d almost wished more would happen.
There was a window across the way. Through racks of assorted instruments outlined against the panes she could see a distant wall, with its own rows of windows lit by the sun. They evidently belonged to the wards: towels and underwear fluttered over the sills, and spots of color in flowerpots caught her eye. The angle of the wall left half of the window filled by blue sky and a treetop – thin branches wavering like a sapling’s. In fact, though, any tree that reached that fourth-floor window must have been massive. Kōko was tempted to go and find out just how big it was. The round leaves were shimmering whitely like flakes of metal. She didn’t recall seeing it when she was last there.
She remembered again that it was spring. The thought made her long to stretch, to luxuriate, to run in the light, to feel the season as it should be felt. Like the hours spent playing in the vacant lot with her brother. Or that day, on a school outing in spring, when she’d run barefoot on a sandy beach …
Kōko snapped wide awake: that was when she raced off along the shore. Not with Doi, nor her brother, nor Kayako. She remembered straggling behind when the class reassembled on the beach at the appointed hour, and on a sudden willful impulse running on barefoot, deliberately getting farther from the group, though the time to assemble was long since past. She didn’t want to see anyone’s face ever again. She knew that no amount of chatting and girlish pranks and all the perfectly ordinary things she did in junior high would satisfy the hunger she felt. She was aware that the boys in her class were somehow sorry for her, knowing the situation at home, but at the same time they were wary of her, considering it safer not to get too close. She was a plain, thin girl who often contrived to draw attention to herself. She would dash out of the classroom in the middle of a lesson, ignore her turn to sweep the floor, sing loudly but leave the dustpan and broom untouched. One way or another she took great pains, for no particular reason, to ensure that people kept their distance.
If there’s no one I can really talk to, then you might as well leave me alone, was what she seemed to be saying. The fair-mindedness of everyone at school, their concern that no child should ever be left out, drove her wild.
I was like that then, thought Kōko as she gazed at the blue sky half filling the window. When I ran along the beach I was hoping a ‘bad man’ would come and spirit me away. What could a ‘bad man’ do, anyway? At worst, he could only fiddle with this stupid body. And then he’d take me to an unimaginable world of brimming colors, a world without pretense.
She hadn’t found her ‘bad man’, though; instead, the teacher had chased after her and put an end to her mischief. She simply pretended to have forgotten the assembly time. Which didn’t help change anything. She still went to school; the schoolgirl pranks continued.
And I still haven’t changed a thing, Kōko murmured to herself.
From the time she was summoned till her return to the apartment, Kōko watched herself as remotely as she might her early childhood: with a sharp pang of loss, but only a faint sense of reality.
First the doctor said in a kind of groan, ‘… Not a thing.’
Then a large man with close-cropped hair, whom the first doctor addressed as the head of the department, took a look inside and muttered, ‘Nothing, it’s true.’
After that Kōko had to sit facing the two doctors in a small office. She would have no memory, afterward, of her own responses to what was said. She was suspicious of the doctors: how could they be genuine when they talked such fantastic nonsense? And she suspected that the time she was spending there was not what it seemed, either. She couldn’t help thinking that something had come unstuck.
Clearly, time and space must have buckled out of their true linearity into curves that doubled back and fused together, all without her noticing. Then what was this time, this space? They were an illusion. Nothing but tangled strings. She must keep her wits about her, refuse to be deceived. The air was warped. The window and desk appeared to be undistorted rectangles, but she knew better: her own sight must be equally deranged by the warp in the air. The doctors – and she herself – were weird apparitions contoured by the bend in time, but here, clearly, the apparitions were supposed to be the real thing. The words being spoken seemed to make sense, they sounded like her native Japanese, but here they were probably a code with a totally different set of meanings. It was up to her to fathom it somehow.
Kōko watched the doctors’ lips attentively and listened closely to their voices. She had a sudden sense that her vision and hearing were limitless and perfectly clear. She could see and hear everything. She could even make out the capillaries inside the doctors’ mouths.
T-h-e-r-e i-s n-o fetus: these were the first code words that reached Kōko’s ears. T-h-e-r-e i-s n-o fetus. Y-o-u a-r-e n-o-t pregnant. Now, what did that mean? The two doctors, taking turns, continued to send Kōko coded messages.
‘You are in a physical condition similar to pregnancy, but you’re not pregnant. Quite a few women develop this phenomenon, for various reasons. There’s absolutely no need to worry, it’s not at all abnormal.’
‘Of course, this will be difficult for you to believe, but you must try to accept the fact calmly.’
‘To help convince you we’ll do X-rays and a pregnancy test, and if you’re still in doubt and your condition doesn’t change, we can also provide hormonal treatment, for example. We intend to do everything possible to help you fully accept what has happened.’
‘The female body, unlike the male, is so intricately and delicately organized that it can only be called mysterious. Almost all women’s ailments – menstrual problems, morning sickness, miscarriage, the menopause, and even breast and uterine cancer – are deeply associated with the mind.’
‘In other words, there are many illnesses that simply clear up according to the patient’s menta
l state. Morning sickness is a typical example: there have been cases with actual symptoms so severe that the mother’s health was in danger and an abortion had to be considered, but as soon as she entered the hospital and began talking with other patients she got over her depression and was perfectly all right.’
‘In your case, also, because you believed you were pregnant your body responded with changes which simulated pregnancy. As with morning sickness, the important thing here is the way you feel about it.’
‘Of course, we can explain whatever you might want to know about the physical aspects. First, when the patient begins to believe she is pregnant, the related hormones are activated, stimulating the uterus and making it swell to a certain extent. Then fatty tissue is stored around the intestines, and the mammary glands also develop under hormonal influence so that the breasts enlarge. In some cases they even produce milk.’
‘The fetal movements you reported are nothing more than movements of the intestines.’
‘But I’m sure that you don’t want to hear this sort of information in the first place. The main thing is to disentangle your feelings, which have become preoccupied with pregnancy. We suggest you come in for some regular sessions at the psychiatric department here.’
‘Many people don’t like the sound of the words “psychiatric department”, but of course that’s merely a prejudice. We refer many of our patients there for a chat as part of the treatment for the morning sickness and menopausal troubles that I mentioned earlier.’
‘And so we recommend a course of such visits – nice and easy, like dropping in for a cup of tea – to enable you to accept what has happened in the fullest sense. What do you think?’
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