Kōko turned to Kayako, still sitting in the kitchen. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she said. ‘It’s a shame to be indoors on a day like this.’
They spent an hour or so in the park, then, at Kōko’s suggestion, strolled into the grounds of the nearby university. There were few people about, though as far as they knew it wasn’t a holiday. The green of the old ginkgo trees lining the avenues was crisp and cool. They circled a somber lecture hall and reemerged onto the street behind the medical school.
Kōko, though a student herself at the time, had only seen news photographs of the protests that had torn this campus. She recalled the painful images: the students, skins as soft as babies’, pitched against the riot police in their heavy armor. The scenes had gripped her imagination, she recognized in them a mental image of her own. Those figures, hurling stones when they could only hurt themselves, had conveyed no sense of reality, but in its place she’d felt a bond, a fellow feeling. For Kōko believed that she too was throwing stones, in her own way.
The baby that she’d dealt with alone, without appealing to her friend Doi, had been a stone. Moving away from her mother and sister, living with Hatanaka, getting married and divorced …
Two or three months after they signed the divorce papers, Hatanaka had set his heart on a ‘modern’ relationship in which he and Kōko would remain on friendly terms. He telephoned and wrote to swear that no one else would ever care as much about her and Kayako. Kōko flatly ignored him; she told herself that she wouldn’t prove her kindness, her courage, or anything at all by a reconciliation. Rejecting Hatanaka was Kōko’s stone. He showed up at her apartment, and when she reluctantly stepped outside, with Kayako, he clutched the child in tears and offered to move to the same neighborhood so they could have their meals together … which would be fun, wouldn’t it? Kōko turned her back on him and went inside, unmoved. She was only afraid he might give way to violence, afraid enough to half consider the suggestion. But she knew how that would end. She could see him taking such a fancy to the scheme that he’d be settling in with room and board. And now that he’d yielded even his parental rights to Kōko, she couldn’t count on him controlling his emotions with any more success than before.
Kōko would not let Hatanaka into her life. She regretted what she was doing to Kayako’s father, but that was all. She even moved to a new address without letting him know.
When Hatanaka finally came to see an implacable enemy in Kōko, she heard from him only fitfully, as she’d expected; perhaps he had found some new focus for his energies. By that time Kōko was already with Doi. Kayako, who’d been three when her parents divorced, was five. And both Kōko and Hatanaka had turned thirty.
Tiredness overtook her as they reached the street, and she beckoned Kayako into a glass-fronted coffee shop that happened to catch her eye.
There, Kayako revealed how her aunt had been urging her, for nearly a month now, to take the exam for late admission to the private school. Kayako had plainly been worrying herself as to whether it would be wrong to refuse. Kōko listened without interest or attention, however. She had already given her answer as Kayako’s mother, and there was nothing more to say on the subject. From Kayako’s point of view, Kōko decided, she was simply her mother: no more, no less. Nothing would alter the fact, but nor could Kōko bind her daughter to her as her very own.
Nursery-school days. Her grandmother’s ways. The neighborhood park. The bean-throwing ceremony at a local shrine, and the summer festival. The record of a TV theme song that she wanted played over and over again. The stuffed toy she never put down. The time Kōko was laid up with a cold. Kayako’s bouts of chicken pox and mumps …
They’d slept together in the bed that Hatanaka left behind. It had been just this time of year. Next to the bed was a window which Kōko would open first thing in the morning, and Kayako would spring out of bed, stung by the cold. With a quick greeting they’d run shivering to the kitchen to dress in front of the gas fire. Then, grabbing a few bites of toast, they would rush out of the apartment. Kōko left Kayako at the nursery on her way to the ballet school where she worked as accompanist. And in the afternoons she went on to a private kindergarten where she taught piano. Both were well-paid jobs that Michiko had found her.
In theory, her days ought to have been twice as busy once Hatanaka was gone, and yet it was the carefree mood of those early mornings that lived on in her memory. Every day was wrapped in the faint warmth of the blankets they’d slept in, snuggling together. There was no one they had to be frightened of waking. They could bounce on the bed, crow –Good morning, good morning, rise and shine!– or throw open the kitchen window and swing into their exercises, puffing steamily.
Hatanaka always went to bed toward dawn. He could only concentrate at night, he said, and then only after twelve. He would watch the late shows, fix himself a midnight snack of instant noodles, and reread the newspaper before he sat down at his desk. He was preparing to take the state law examination for the fourth time. This year he was going to pass, he claimed, but Kōko never took it seriously. Nor, most likely, did he. Much of his time was spent writing long letters to old friends or reading novels.
–Why won’t some other line of work do? I’ve got a lawyer for a brother-in-law already. Why don’t you leave that sort of thing to him?– Kōko said to Hatanaka after his third failure, when she couldn’t stand it any more. Hatanaka frowned up at her.
–That’s easy for you to say, with one in the family. Lawyers are an elite, they get respect, people call them ‘sir’.–
During the last year of their marriage Kōko would creep into the kitchen carrying Kayako and help her out of her pajamas with much whispering and shushing. If Kayako woke Hatanaka, Kōko would dread what was to follow like an encounter with a ghost. More often than not, Hatanaka would merely trudge to the toilet, his face sallow from lack of sleep, and back to bed again. Sometimes he mumbled in passing: –You leaving already? Sorry to be always like this.– And Kayako would reply: –Sleep tight, Daddy.–
By then Kōko couldn’t look directly at him. After this life had dragged on for some time, Hatanaka took Kayako with him on a visit home, saying he needed the rest. At that point Kōko sensed vaguely but undeniably that the current in which she and Hatanaka were both immersed was about to divide. She realized, too, that she wasn’t anxious on that score, but only at the thought of losing Kayako. Though she was shocked at her selfishness, one thought – that she wouldn’t part with Kayako – was all that gave Kōko the strength to go on speaking civilly to Hatanaka. When he moved out he left Kayako with her as a matter of course. But she could never believe that her fears had been unfounded.
One morning, soon after she and Kayako began their life together, they were woken by piercing cold. There was an unearthly brightness in the room. Kōko threw open the window to see everything below her lightly coated by the still-falling snow. Tire chains crunched in the distance. White siftings piled along the power lines, and patches were sliding to the ground from the neighbors’ tiled roofs.
–Kayako! It’s snowing!–
Rubbing her eyes, Kayako propped her face on the windowsill.
–Wow, it’s snowing, it’s snow, Mommy!–
They stayed by the window to gaze at the powdered street, then they dressed quickly, drank down glasses of milk, and ran outside. Large flakes were drifting steadily from the sky like balls of lint. Kōko and Kayako trampled happily on the inch-deep layer, watching their footprints turn instantly to slush, until it was time to leave for nursery school. Tramping was the only way to enjoy so light a fall.
After midday the snow turned to rain and all traces of white vanished from the streets. That afternoon, however, Kayako ran a high fever. Kōko, at work at the kindergarten, received a phone call from the nursery asking her to come for her child. She felt momentarily dizzy when she remembered her own excitement of the morning; it was frightening, the way she’d cheerfully let Kayako play in the falling snow. Belated anxiety clutched at her
: could she really bring up Kayako by herself?
When Kayako was quite better and Kōko could stop worrying long enough to take in her surroundings, she found that spring was upon them. It was March, and the first sweet daphnes were out. Kōko bought a potted primrose and a bunch of marguerites. They gave her such pleasure when she brought them home that she took one deep breath after another and still wasn’t quite satisfied. Somehow it wasn’t enough that Kayako shared her delight; all at once she saw the loneliness of an adult and a child – one of each – gazing at the flowers.
When Doi began to visit the apartment, for the first two or three months Kōko would move from the bed she shared with Kayako to his mattress on the floor for the middle hours of the night. But after a while she began to have Kayako sleep alone in the bed, even when Doi wasn’t there …
Kōko was conscious of a question growing at the bottom of her belly in place of the baby: why did she go on living still? There was no justification, none. The same thought had often haunted her as a child. After her brother’s death she’d wondered why she had to stay alive when, whichever way she looked at herself, there wasn’t a single redeeming feature to be found. They were wasting the food and clothes they gave her, and the place at school. The more she thought about it, the less reason she saw to carry on. Yet she made no attempt to die, and this very fact added to her humiliation. Dying was too frightening, after all, to be seriously contemplated. The closest she could come to it was gazing down on the school playground from the rooftop, or fingering a bottle of some poisonous reagent in the science lab.
Kōko was shaken by the realization that even now, more than twenty years later, she still lacked any compelling reason to go on living. And by the fact that the will to live was still there.
8
Kōko returned to work after two weeks’ absence. The Golden Week holidays of early May were already close at hand. As soon as she set foot in the office she found herself in trouble for failing to contact them, though in actual fact one of the staff, worried when she didn’t appear, had phoned her on the very first day. Although Kōko couldn’t even remember the call, it had given her a chance to tell them that she was feverish and ill, too ill for just a cold. No one doubted her story when they saw her looking a little on the thin side.
‘It seems to have been the flu. I’m fine now,’ said Kōko reassuringly in the office and the practice rooms.
That evening, she returned the keys on her way out, then crossed to a department store on the opposite corner of the intersection. She took the escalator to the third floor and made her way to the department on the right, where the first thing that met her eyes was a white rattan cradle, then a red crib, a mesh playpen, walkers and baby carriages. Beyond them she could see mannequin babies in various poses on top of the display cases. The floor was not busy, since it was nearly closing time. In one corner, in the baby clothes section, a very pregnant young woman and a middle-aged saleswoman were loudly discussing articles of white fabric, holding them up and discarding them one by one. From the maternity dress section close by, where she pretended to be making a choice, Kōko strained to catch what they were saying. The customer seemed undecided between Western- or Japanese-style diapers; the saleswoman was very much in favor of the Japanese kind.
Kōko’s mother had made Kayako’s diapers from old cotton yukata that she picked apart and ran up on her machine. –You should really be sewing these yourself– her mother had sniffed, –and praying for your baby’s health with every stitch.– When Kōko began bottle-feeding Kayako almost at once, her mother had used the same tone: –What do you mean, you’ve no milk? I’ve never heard of such a thing. What do you think your baby is, giving her cow’s milk? You haven’t even tried massaging, have you? When I had you – in wartime, mind, during the evacuation – I massaged my breasts and worked desperately hard at feeding you.–
–But that was then– Kōko said, and took no notice. In fact she hadn’t been interested in knowing what went on when she was a baby. She hadn’t asked her mother, or her sister either, and then her mother had died before she could get the facts straight. No one had thought the end would come so soon; she herself had probably expected to live another twenty years, at least. Kōko missed her chance to find out where her brother had been looked after, why he was left in the home instead of returning with the family to Tokyo, why her father (who taught music) wasn’t evacuated with them, what had happened while he stayed behind in Tokyo – or, more importantly, what kind of person he had been. While in junior high she did sometimes ask her sister, but though Shōko was seven years older her memory of it all seemed hazy, too. Some things must have left a lasting impression, but she wasn’t keen to talk about them. There was no point in dragging out what was long past. And, except where their brother was concerned, the two sisters had shared the same outlook as they grew up and raised children of their own.
‘Auld Lang Syne’ signaled it was closing time. The customer at the babywear counter bought Japanese diapers and took the escalator down. The staff were flipping cloth covers neatly over the display cases and mannequins. A plain young woman with heavy pink lipstick came briskly over to the maternity dress section when she noticed a customer still standing there.
‘Excuse me, madam …’
As the customer turned to face her, she blushed and left off in mid-sentence. The older woman’s eyes were bloodshot and the sides of her nose wet. Before the saleswoman could say a word, the weeping customer drew herself up and strode over to the escalators, not bothering to brush the tears away. The escalators were both going down, and had been for a long time.
She rode to the first floor. As she walked along the aisles, between counters draped with pale-olive cloths, a dread of being trapped alone overnight in this huge empty building began to grow so fast that she couldn’t keep pace. Kōko took a small pride in refusing to break into a run for the exit, even then, and walked deliberately on at her normal pace.
When Kayako learned that her mother was back at work, she watched for her outside the store every few days. On each of the three holidays during Golden Week she arrived at the apartment with an armful of groceries. They passed the time together at movies and bargain sales. Once the holiday week was over she stood patiently waiting by the store window every evening, smiled shyly when her mother appeared, and walked at her side, never the first to speak. Since she came in casual clothes and without her satchel, she must have been home first to her aunt’s. Embarrassed, but a little exhilarated all the same, Kōko took Kayako to a variety of restaurants. She retold harmless stories of the past, and when they’d both eaten their fill they walked together to the station and parted there, Kayako taking the subway and Kōko the train.
Not long after they’d fallen into this routine, Kōko received a phone call from Osada. He had to see her, he had something special to say. Kōko agreed doubtfully. Of course she’d rather not have seen him again if she could avoid it – but she hadn’t even apologized to him yet. She couldn’t imagine what kind of reparation Osada would seek as the father of the vanished baby. Perhaps he was brooding more deeply than ever because it had been a false alarm … If Doi could see them, what fun he’d have. Ah! so human existence is more abstract than we thought, is it? There’s hope for you yet, you know – a fertile imagination, yes, not bad at all. I never knew you had it in you …
You’re talking as though it had nothing to do with you. Kōko answered her imaginary Doi without thinking, then felt a sudden chill. It was nothing to do with Doi, from his point of view. The baby was hers and Osada’s. The baby itself might have been an illusion, but she’d never gone so far as to make Doi the father. She may have wished he was, with ever-deeper regret, but she’d never lost sight of the fact that the baby’s father was Osada. It was the ease of her connection with Osada that had sustained her, her lack of attachment to him that had encouraged her; while her eyes, as always, were on Doi.
Kōko was thinking the same thoughts on the way to meet Osada, the
following evening.
They’d arranged to meet at a restaurant, quite a large robata-grill place. As she stood in the doorway searching the tables, Osada appeared from the farthest corner and led her back with him. There was a man already seated at the table that he pointed out. For a second it struck her as odd that he’d brought a friend, and then she realized it was Hatanaka. She was shocked to think she hadn’t recognized him at first sight. But what was this all about? She couldn’t keep from glancing inquiringly at Osada. Unawares, Osada walked up to the table and spoke to Hatanaka.
‘Well, how’d it be if we get her to sit here and we sit opposite?’
Hatanaka raised his eyes and rested them on Kōko. For an awkward moment she hid behind Osada’s back.
‘Well, go on, move over.’ At Osada’s prompting, Hatanaka slid across to the next seat.
‘She’s looking well,’ she heard him say.
‘She is, isn’t she?’ Osada settled himself in the vacated chair. Losing her hiding place, Kōko gave a deep, flurried bow which kept her face hidden as she accepted an empty seat. She could hear an impatient voice inside her crying: quick, you must greet them with perfect poise. But how? – when Osada, as well as Hatanaka, was watching her as though she were a cat who’d tumbled around in heat till her fur was worn to mangy patches. She couldn’t even look them full in the face, but cowered, and breathed with difficulty. This didn’t make sense: why was she reacting like this? There had been doubts and misgivings when she slept with Osada, and again when she believed she was carrying their child, but there’d been no fear of Hatanaka, the man who brought them together. She had never even considered what Hatanaka would think if he knew of their affair. Over the years Hatanaka had dwindled to a figure from the past; the little weight he’d once had as her ex-husband had almost gone.
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