Manazuru

by Hiromi Kawakami

  “Agreement. Scrap.”

  I don’t know if the meaning here is deep or shallow. I read it over and over and I still don’t understand. The diary harbors, on the whole, no mysteries; only this one day’s entry fills me with doubts.

  My morning sickness continued for two months. Then, as soon as I entered the fifth month, it abruptly stopped. The embryo developing into a child inside me is not a foreign body now, I thought. I craved fatty foods; I had, surely, lost the fish look. By then I probably resembled some other sort of animal, some furry creature.

  The whole time that the baby continued burgeoning inside me, my mind was shrouded in fog. I couldn’t think straight. Only when I engaged in monotonous, repetitive activities would my body pick up the pace. I sewed any number of diapers, fixing bleached cotton cloth in a circle, turning it inside out, stitching it from the top. Nothing could persuade me to take such trouble now.

  I don’t remember what Rei was doing then, how he felt. I was enveloped in a cocoon, not unwilling to face the world, but unable to grasp, no matter how I tried, what went on there.

  Not all pregnant women are this way. It could be that I am easily wounded, I mused, but I don’t think so. On the contrary, it is hard to hurt me. Rei was different. He seemed unfazed, but he wasn’t. He was closer, closer even than Seiji, to the breaking point. I can see that now.

  THE PAIN, GIVING birth to Momo, was staggering.

  Until then, I didn’t know pain. I thought I did, but I was mistaken. It was not a momentary thing, a passing numbness, a faint spell; it was just pain. Unremitting, uniform.

  And yet once I had borne her, I forgot. Completely forgot.

  “Aren’t you the cutest thing?” I said, unabashed, just one or two days after the delivery. I marveled at myself. After the agony I’d endured, hard like rage, coursing through my body, everywhere, finding no outlet, until I feared my body would be ripped to pieces, and yet I catch myself saying, lightly, unabashed, “There’s my baby, yes, yes.”

  It’s a travesty.

  I thought. Lying in bed, doing the postpartum exercises. At the appointed moment, all at once, the new mothers began moving their hips and legs to the music blaring from the speakers.

  It’s worse than it seems. No, that isn’t quite right.

  Time heals all wounds. Close, but not exactly.

  Different paths to the same conclusion. That’s even further off the mark.

  In our shared hospital room, doing the exercises, four new mothers chatting back and forth about the travesty of it all. It was incredible, too, that at the moment we had given birth, we came to regard each other as mothers. In the delivery room, seconds before we released our babies, we had still referred to each other, in our thoughts, by name.

  The other “mothers,” too, seemed to have been struck, each in her own way, by the puzzle of how we had felt before the birth and how we felt afterward.

  “It was nothing like I expected,” we repeated.

  It was not a whole new world. But we had come to a different place. As time passed, from moment to moment, that place evolved. Evolved, kept changing, and we shuddered, unsure how far we would have to go, and then we came back, back here. Only not all the way.

  The difference of the place had nothing to do with living and dying. It was simply different. Set apart from everyday life. Yet more and more, the everyday seemed to be bleeding in. Penetrating to the center, the very center of the pain. During the birth, at the soles of our feet as we strained against the tabletop, exerting ourselves, there was the utterly ordinary.

  It was unfathomable. I talked it over with the other “mothers.” And I forgot all of that, as well, in no time. After we gave the baby an actual person’s name, called it “Momo,” I thought of nothing but raising her.

  A place I should never have come to. As I bore my child, during that time, I felt the terror of having taken just a step into that space. How linked was that feeling, I wonder, to the words my husband penned in his diary?

  That feeling, after the birth, of being unable to return all the way, hasn’t completely faded. It is with me, I think, until death. The morning Momo was born, sparrows sang in the trees.

  “SO,” I ASKED Seiji, “did you meet your classmate, at nine, and have a few?”

  The hour 21:00 was on my mind. Since I started rereading the diary, I couldn’t shake it.

  “They serve tempura at this bar,” he said, answering a question I hadn’t asked.

  “Tempura?”

  “Whitebait.”

  That’s right, even though whitebait are in season in early spring, and it’s nearly summer, he said, and smiled. My classmate drank a lot. I just had a couple.

  What do you think people think at nine at night? I asked.

  Hmm. I know how it feels at three A.M., or four, at daybreak.

  I glanced at Seiji’s reply. Three or four?

  At three, a bit hopeful. At four, a bit despairing.

  That’s a lovely way of putting it.

  You’re mocking me. Weren’t you? Just now.

  I wasn’t, actually. But it was too lovely. Hope and despair aren’t so easily distinguished.

  “Kei.” For the first time in a long time, Seiji spoke my name.

  “Yes?” I responded, as gently as I could.

  “Don’t make me think of things that aren’t here.”

  I looked again at Seiji, taken aback. His face was pale. What’s wrong? I stared.

  “I’m jealous,” he said.

  Jealous. I gulped, just a little. Such an odd word. Hearing it from his mouth. Seiji is never supposed to say that, and yet he just has.

  “But, he’s not, you know, around anymore,” I murmur.

  Seiji clammed up. He has something he wants to tell me, I thought. But he couldn’t say it. He seemed incapable of finding the words.

  I leaned against him. For Seiji, married and with three kids, to be jealous of me, who had only Momo. It made no sense. Or are such things irrelevant? Having, missing.

  “I get jealous because he’s not around,” Seiji said.

  “I get jealous because he’s not around, yet he follows you,” he corrected himself.

  He follows you.

  I started at those words.

  “You know about them, following me?” I asked.

  “Following you,” Seiji repeated vaguely. I saw that he had only chanced upon those words, he didn’t know. I don’t want Seiji to know, I thought.

  Suddenly one came. It was extremely dense. Not human, something furry. A thing like me, when I entered my fifth month, after the morning sickness stopped.

  I smelled water. I shook my head hard, and the thing went. Seiji said no more.

  SHORTLY BEFORE HE disappeared, Rei scolded Momo.

  Not in the reflexive way one reproves a three-year-old whose language is unformed, to keep her from doing something dangerous. He didn’t scold, he remonstrated.

  Momo had drawn on his papers. In crayons: red, yellow, pink.

  Momo. Come here. I heard him calling from the entryway before he left for work. I was washing the dishes, and couldn’t hear him well. I thought he was calling for me, I bustled out, wiping my hands on my apron, and found Momo sitting very small on the floor, her feet tucked under her. Rei sat with his feet tucked beneath him, too, not far from the door, looking constricted. His suit pants were wrinkled.

  Holding the colored-on pages out to Momo, Rei explained why what she had done was bad. What is he thinking, explaining something like that to a three-year-old, I thought. But Momo sat still, listening. She was not an extraordinarily active child, but she was a child, and it must have been hard for her to sit without moving in such an uncomfortable position. Yet she didn’t move.

  Slumped over, she apologized. I’m sawwy, Daddy. Some children can pronounce their “r”s right away; some take forever to learn. Momo took forever. Momo won’t cwayon anymow, she said, looking at his eyes. Rei nodded. You won’t do it again, right?

  They sat there f
or a time. When Rei rose, Momo began to weep.

  Because she was frustrated by the scolding she had received, perhaps. Or because she had been released from the adult tension she had endured, the unfamiliar position, the apology. Or simply because her body needed to release that liquid. Rei stroked the top of Momo’s head. There’s a good girl, he said, gently stroking her.

  I felt kind of like a father, he said that evening. You’ve been a father for years, I responded. He shook his head. It doesn’t feel that way. It’s not that easy.

  On TV, the anchorman was reporting the results of the day’s sumo matches, the September tournament. I never gave much thought to the word “family” back then. You don’t think about the things you have. Only when they are gone do you begin.

  In those days, too, things came and followed me. But they were very faint. So faint I could barely tell whether or not they were there. It is different now. It is perfectly clear, when they come, faint or thick, that they are there.

  The yokozuna won today, the anchorman says, and the final match is broadcast. The crowd cheers. Rei glances at the screen.

  I reached out, feeling myself blur, and placed my hand on Rei’s neck as he stared at the TV. I touched him slowly, and he smiled. It was a deep, tender smile. Is this really how he smiles? I thought, taken aback. The blurring spread, wider and wider.

  Not long after, Rei was gone.

  “THEY WERE MISSING. I found them,” Momo said.

  “You lost something?” I asked, and Momo spread her palm, held it out.

  “Look, these,” she replied.

  A few small objects, wrapped in silver foil, rolled in her hand.

  “Chocolates?”

  Yes, she nodded. A present. Valentine’s day, she added.

  “You got these?”

  All the girls give them out. Not to boys, to their girlfriends.

  You want one? Momo offered me a ball of silver foil. I picked at the tightly mashed edge of the foil, then peeled it away. A brown sphere appeared. I put it in my mouth. After sucking for a moment, I bit down, and a gooey liquid flowed out.

  “They were all the way in the back of my desk.” Peeling off the foil, Momo pops one after another into her mouth. There is a pimple on her cheek. Her pimples are small ripples of skin, here in the morning, gone by the evening. Her skin was always so smooth, but recently it has acquired a dimmer luster. Her skin was soft, clinging, the skin of a baby, but now it has begun to project, from inside, a hardness.

  Presents are interesting, Momo says, mashing her jaw up and down as she chews her chocolates. I think I prefer getting presents I’ve been anticipating, rather than just being given one all of a sudden, out of the blue.

  Startling to hear her make a comment so adult, like a grown woman.

  “Is there something you want?” I ask. Just to see.

  “I think so.”

  “What?”

  She started to say something, then stopped. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to say it, I think, it’s that she can’t think how. Her mouth hangs slightly open as she wavers, and I can see, on the back of her tongue, a pale smudge of chocolate brown. Let me know when you figure out how to say it, okay? I say, and leave the room. When, I wonder, did I stop blurring around the edges? I don’t blur with Seiji. My shape is always the same, contained.

  THE FIRST TIME I spent the night with Seiji, we stayed in an inn on the beach in Izu. I used work as an excuse, added an extra day to my trip, met up with him at the station.

  We found the van to take us to the inn. The driver was not there, the doors were open. Seiji and I climbed in. Soon three older women boarded and filled the middle row of seats; then a couple in their twenties got in. Finally the driver came. I realized he was the same old man, wearing a sash, who had been angling for customers by the station.

  The inn was large enough to accommodate tour groups. Awfully jolly, this place, isn’t it, I remarked, and Seiji smiled. You would have preferred someplace less well lit, free from prying eyes?

  We went off separately to the large, open baths, men’s and women’s, then, since there was still time before dinner, played ping-pong. The ping-pong room was carpeted, so we kicked off our slippers and played barefoot. We played hard. Beginning to sweat, we rolled our sleeves up to our shoulders.

  “I feel like I’m on a field trip,” I said, fanning my face with the paddle. Seiji seized this opening to smash the ball back. Chagrined, I put as much spin on the ball as I could the next time I served.

  By the time we finished dinner, we were sleepy. We had already been to soak a second time in the baths after our ping-pong match. As we watched television in our room, it struck me that my travels with Rei had felt much more secretive. It was apparent to me that Seiji belonged to a family. Since Rei’s disappearance, I had forgotten what family meant. What it meant to be a family, or to be in a family.

  I switched off the television. Seiji and I lay face up on our futons, side by side, gazing at the ceiling. Come here, Seiji said. Just like always. I scooted over, we coupled, we parted, again we gazed at the ceiling. If I had married Seiji, it would have gone on like this, I thought, always. Not just the way we interacted, but some bond between us that took longer to form. It would have stayed, I thought, exactly as it was.

  Longer. Prior to Mother. After Momo. Something that continues, unbroken.

  It isn’t only memory, neither is it anything as precisely structured as a gene. All one can say, in the end, is that it continues.

  I fell asleep right away. I didn’t wake, not once, until morning.

  WOULD YOU LIKE to go somewhere, for a change? Seiji asked.

  Where? I asked back.

  You went to Manazuru with Momo, right?

  I haven’t told Seiji of my first trip, alone, to Manazuru. That might be nice, I say, reserving an ambiguity. After ten years, surprise, I’ve spent more time with Seiji than with my husband.

  I’d like to go to the end of the earth, I say quietly.

  Which end in particular? South? North? West? East?

  So like him to take me literally. Not the North Pole. Too cold. Not the South Pole, either.

  As I replied, equally literally, I began to grow sleepy. It is so ordinary with Seiji. It is hard to be ordinary. Extraordinary things abound. But the extraordinary usually can’t be sustained. Sooner or later, it breaks. Beyond the break it is easy. Keeping it ordinary is hardest of all.

  What are you thinking? Seiji asks.

  Nothing interesting, I say.

  I think more, now, of Seiji. In the beginning, the ordinariness of it never even struck me. Did Rei ever think of me? I feel my expression cloud.

  “There you go again,” Seiji says, “with what isn’t here.”

  “How could you tell?” I ask, taken aback.

  “Because, you’re like that lately.”

  Is he jealous again? If so, it’s frequent. Before, the word jealousy didn’t figure.

  Overcome by tenderness for Seiji, I hug him. You hug like my mother, Seiji says.

  I’m not your mother. I’m me. It’s me, you know? I say, hugging him stronger. A woman comes. The woman who followed me when I went to Manazuru, both times. Who is bidding me, constantly, to go to Manazuru.

  Seiji, don’t go, I say, hugging him so tight it hurts. His arms hang, and he is still.

  IT GOT HOT early, so we put away our winter clothes twice this year.

  Once, soon after the tadpoles Momo scooped up sprouted limbs. Again, at the end of June, midway through the rainy season.

  “You don’t smell the naphthalene anymore,” Mother says. Before Momo was born, we used to cut small incisions in the corners of cellophane packets, each of which contained two balls of naphthalene, and tossed several into each drawer in the chest.

  “These new ones don’t smell like anything, huh.” Mother presses her nose to the package and frowns. There’s nothing to miss in these.

  Putting away clothes at the end of June is a bother. Push the heavy jackets to
the back of the closet, bring the lightest ones to the front. Put all the end-of-winter outfits that haven’t yet gone to the cleaners in a single bag to be taken there later.

  Mother is trying on a sleeveless blouse she bought last year, massaging her slender arms. “As wrinkly as crepe paper,” she whispers. “Look at this, when I push the skin up, just look.” She told me to touch it, and I put a fingertip against her upper arm, simply to oblige her. Her skin was half desiccated. It gathered in neat folds, like windswept sand.

  “It’s only half dried up, so it doesn’t wrinkle unless you press it.”

  Enthralled, Mother squeezed innumerable crepe wrinkles into her skin, above her elbow and below it. This is what happens when you grow old, I guess. A few more years and I’ll be all dried up, I’ll have wrinkles all the time, without making them, she says, impressed.

  I don’t often do household chores with Mother. When we move around in the same area, the space grows hot. When we work separately, we stay cool.

  “It’s fun rearranging our wardrobes together,” Mother smiles. When we get ready for winter, let’s have Momo help, I murmur in response.

  Handling so many different fabrics, heavy clothes, light clothes, makes my palms feel silky. I rise quietly, take the folded material from here to there. Bend down, lay it in a box. In the same motion, I take the next piece from the box. Fabric brushing against fabric, making the merest sound. Two women, one getting on in years, one starting to get on in years, pacing among the fabrics. With the tips of my fingers, I tear off the paper tag the cleaners stapled to the label last year. Replace the paper that lines the drawer, fold the old paper, throw it out. Straighten the new paper in the drawer, pile in the different materials, layer upon layer.

  Each time we change winter clothes for summer, summer clothes for winter, I find items I no longer need. Sometimes I pack away clothes I know I will never wear. Sometimes I unpack something, only to realize that its time has come. I cut some up to use as rags. Some I pass on as hand-me-downs to younger relatives. Some I throw away. I remove the buttons from heavier articles before I get rid of them.