I found Ms. Sato seated in a chair in a dark corridor of the hospital, her shoulders sagging with fatigue. When she saw me, she stood up, looking relieved.
“Sato-san,” I called out. “My god, how terrible!”
“It was my fault. I feel so bad.”
Ms. Sato explained how Raiki had been unable to step out of the shower, so he had crouched down and tried to shield his body from the hot water, screaming all the while. This went on for a few minutes until Ms. Sato returned, but by then it was too late. His back had been badly exposed to scalding water. Kanako was in the garden and wasn’t aware of what had happened until she heard Ms. Sato shouting in alarm.
Fortunately, the burns Raiki received weren’t life-threatening. He was hospitalized so that the burns could be disinfected and he could be treated with painkillers under the doctor’s supervision.
“Sato-san,” I began, “I wish to take care of Raiki. Would that be okay with you?”
“Why, of course,” she said. “I would be most grateful.”
The rainy season was coming to an end and the weather made it challenging for Ms. Sato to commute to the hospital, so she seemed relieved to hear my proposal. She had spent the night at the hospital, and the signs of fatigue were written all over her.
“Just leave the rest to me now.”
“All right, then,” Ms. Sato said appreciatively before leaving the hospital.
I entered Raiki’s room and found him lying in bed, facedown. Although he had dozed off, his large, dark eyes opened the moment he sensed my presence. I approached his bed and probed his eyes to see if there was anything in there that connected with my lonely existence. I don’t think I had ever looked at him for such a long time from such a close distance.
“Does it hurt?”
He promptly buried his face in the pillow before gradually turning to me again. I had encountered those eyes somewhere. They were the same eyes as Anna’s. They were searching just like hers, just like the eyes of a wild dog instinctively attempting to distinguish friend from foe.
“I’m okay,” Raiki said. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“Tough guy, eh?” I said. “Is there anything I can get for you, dear?”
He thought for a while but finally muttered, “I want senbazuru.”
“The thousand folded paper cranes?”
“Yes, because Miho-chan next to me and even Ka-chan have paper cranes on their beds. They’re like decorations.”
The long-term patients of the children’s ward were afflicted with various diseases, and to help brighten the atmosphere of their room, the walls were covered in cutout pictures of flowers and animals. Each bed was also decorated with get-well gifts from visitors: stuffed toys, small playthings, and the folded paper cranes, those agents of wish fulfillment as legend would have it. Raiki’s burns had covered his entire back, but he was scheduled to be discharged in about three to four days.
(A thousand folded cranes. He’d be out by the time the tenth one was folded.)
I told Raiki that the thousand paper cranes were origami prayers for severely ill children, and that he’d be discharged soon and had no need for them. The look on his face made me feel as if my affection for him was being tested.
(What this child really yearned for wasn’t the one thousand origami cranes, but rather someone who would fold them for him.)
When I was young, I ran a fever in the midnight hours and began to crave a bowl of shaved ice with syrup on top. It was a brutally cold midwinter night. Still, my mom grated ice, one cube at a time, and served it to me with gooey condensed milk over it, saying, “Here you go, ice à la milk.” I’ve never forgotten that special dessert. The ice went into my feverish, languid body, cooling my throat as it went down, and then spreading from head to toe.
Childhood—that spoiled, self-indulgent time of your life when every wish could come true, thanks to the presence of your mother. She had even scraped her fingertips on the grater, as I recall.
I wanted to grant Raiki’s wish. “All right, just you wait. I’ll get you the thousand folded paper cranes. You have my word.”
I found Shigeki in the hospital’s reception area. I wondered where he’d heard the news, and from whom he had heard it.
“Dear,” I said, touching his shoulder.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, looking back, his voice airy and untroubled. “Where’s Raiki?”
“He’s doing great. You seem to be doing fine as usual.”
“So you’re still mad at me. Look, it was wrong of me to hit you. I’m sorry about that.”
He sounded like he was reciting a line he’d memorized, speaking without hesitation. I couldn’t read his mind. There was no need to tell him how deeply I was hurt and I wasn’t going to compromise. That would have been impossible, even if I had turned a blind eye to Reika Terashima coming between him and me. But I had to put off my confrontation until I understood why he decided to have me as his wife. I was also preoccupied with the idea of becoming Raiki’s mother.
“I intend to look after Raiki in Kamakura, so I won’t be returning home for a while,” I said with a scowl. To myself, I thought, And maybe I’ll never return.
“I see,” Shigeki muttered, looking away.
I tried to leave defiantly to show that I was rejecting him, but he seized my arm and dragged me back.
“That hurts,” I hissed, trying to escape his grip.
He instantly winced, released his grip, and set me free.
“I’m sorry,” he said before whispering, “please do look after Raiki.”
I imagined hitting him. But in the end all I said was “Yes.” Then I left, feeling his eyes watch me walk quickly down the sloping road in front of the hospital. Even as I warned myself against crying, I couldn’t stop the tears.
(Somebody’s going to be there for him, even when I’m not, right?)
RAIKI: THREE
When I returned to the mansion in Kamakura, Kanako was away. I told Ms. Sato about making the thousand paper cranes and settled into the guest bedroom to get on with the task of folding them. It took me two minutes to fold a single crane. After warming up, I produced seven in ten minutes. At that pace I would never finish a thousand before Raiki was released from the hospital. When I realized this, it felt like I had flunked the motherhood pretest.
Ms. Sato knocked on the door and brought in some cold barley tea. “Oh my, now, why did he wish for a thousand origami cranes? They’re going to discharge him soon anyway, aren’t they?”
“To Raiki, it’s important to have someone fold the cranes for him.”
Upon hearing me say this, Ms. Sato set a chair by the table and started working.
“Why, even I can fold a couple hundred cranes,” she said, beginning to fold the paper.
I finally had a breakthrough in my relationship with Ms. Sato, I thought. I had finally established common ground with her. Her gnarled hands were moving deftly, in a way I never imagined she was capable of demonstrating. In the end, the cranes she made were far from perfect, but I still felt at ease watching her fold them so earnestly. Ultimately, making the cranes was therapeutic for us both. Before long, she was reminiscing and talking about the Tachibana family, spewing stories like a steam engine puffing out clouds of smoke.
“When I look at Raiki, I remember Mr. Shigeki when he was a tot.”
“Was he such a mild and well-behaved child?” I said a little jokingly.
“No, not like Raiki.”
I had all these questions stuck in my throat—questions about Reika Terashima, Sophie, and my father-in-law, Taichi—but I resisted the urge and just listened to the flow of her stories.
“I first came to this mansion to serve the family when I was eighteen, and I’ve been here fifty years. Madam Kanako is seven years younger than me, and she has been treating me with the love of an older sister. Even the late Master, like Madam, treated me very well, and in that sense, I must say I have been genuinely fortunate. They’ve even blessed me with many gifts of ki
monos, you know. To this day, I treasure them. I even gave one to my daughter for her trousseau when she got married, but people these days don’t wear kimonos that much—it’s such a shame.”
“What was your husband like, Ms. Sato?” I asked, hoping she would feel comfortable around me and keep talking.
“In the old days there were many young male servants working here, and my husband was among them. When both Madam Kanako and I became of marriageable age, we used to stay up late talking about the affairs of the heart.” Ms. Sato was talking rather bashfully, apparently nostalgic for the old days.
“The both of you, huh?” I asked with a grin. “So what you’re saying is Mother-in-Law also had an affair?”
“Well, as you can see, she’s such a beautiful lady after all, and Master used to keep an eye out to make sure she didn’t get mixed up in bad company,” Ms. Sato answered, changing her tone to one used for sharing juicy stories. “But you know something? It is the well-protected pet daughter of a respectable family, the kind that has led a sheltered life, who tends to end up having the most amazing kind of love affair, I tell you.”
Ms. Sato then went on to reveal how, after graduating from a girls’ high school, Kanako had entered a university in Yokohama to study English literature. During that time, she went to a pub frequented by visiting sailors, where she became acquainted with rock musician Kei Nakahara. It had happened when Kanako was just twenty-one, a time when the royal marriage of Her Imperial Highness, Empress Michiko, was making waves, giving rise to the so-called Michi boom. Any parent with a daughter of marriageable age at the time longed to pair her to a partner with an esteemed pedigree and social standing. So someone like Kei was definitely out of the question for Kanako’s parents. His background was found to be wanting, after all, not to mention the fact that he was a musician. Nevertheless, their affair lasted for two years, but when Kanako finished university, she was forbidden to take even one step out of the mansion and eventually the two were forcibly torn apart from each other—and that’s how their romance ended.
“That’s incredible,” I said. “I would never have pegged her for someone with such a passionate romance in her past.”
I was resisting asking about the series of events that led up to Kanako’s first encounter with Taichi, my father-in-law. But then Ms. Sato’s story began to get heavier.
RAIKI: FOUR
“Ms. Kanako was pregnant,” Ms. Sato muttered as if to tear off a scab that she long had been resisting picking off.
“Master and Madam were so shocked, I tell you. For them it was as if heaven and earth had been turned upside down. It certainly wasn’t a story that was going to get settled the way such a story does nowadays, you know, shotgun style.”
A quiet shockwave enveloped me, and my fingers stopped folding the cranes. I swallowed my breath, dazed by the twist in her tale. “So Shigeki is that musician’s—?”
Ms. Sato slowly nodded in response to my unfinished question. “I’m sure Madam would eventually talk to you about this, but when she does, that will be the first time you hear the story. I hope I’m making myself clear.”
“Of course.”
Strangely, there were no photographs of Taichi in the house, not a single one. I only came to know about him when I visited Shigeki’s company and saw his photograph hanging on the wall of the President’s office. He had small eyes, thick lips, and a pug nose sitting ostentatiously in the middle of his face. His features were worlds apart from Shigeki’s. Shigeki didn’t even have Kanako’s distant, frosty eyes. He didn’t really resemble either of them.
“Ms. Kanako confided everything in me,” Ms. Sato went on, “and we even hatched a plan for the two of them to elope. But in the end it was all too scary. She was the heiress of the House of Tachibana after all, and there was no way I was going to let her take part in such an audacious enterprise.”
(Elope!)
“I persuaded Ms. Kanako to give up the idea. But, alas, since then she has stopped opening her heart to me like she used to.”
Ms. Sato went on to recount that Kanako’s father now had no choice but to give up on his dream of finding the suitor he had been picturing in his mind—a suitable boy from a good family. So he searched among the young men on the liquor-brewing side of his family business and chose the rather rugged yet hardworking and earnest Taichi. He talked to him about being the father to the child about to be born, and about marrying into the Tachibana family. Needless to say, Taichi was filled with joy, gratefully accepting the offer to marry the beautiful Kanako. Shigeki was born and spent a happy childhood, blooming amid the blind love of his grandparents and Kanako.
But after the grandparents passed away, Taichi, who had been a thoughtful man of few words, suddenly changed. Shigeki had just turned five.
“The President started to go on about spartan discipline and such things. My goodness, it was really…”
For a while Ms. Sato was at a loss for words and remained silent, looking down. She seemed to be in pain, just remembering.
“He used to take the boy out to the boat. He would force Shigeki into a somewhat large cage, throw it into the sea, and drag it around, saying he was training the boy to make a man out of him, a man of the sea, or some such thing. Just imagine how frightened Shigeki must have been. Whenever the President would say, ‘We’re going to the ocean,’ Shigeki would turn pale in horror, poor boy. One time I even pleaded to Master with tears in my eyes, but he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t listen to anyone. All he did was berate the dearly departed for their doting and say, ‘I’m going to discipline him into a genuine man, goddamn it! He’s already been spoiled too much.’ ”
Apparently Shigeki was also frequently made to clean up the pond. Taichi would drag him out of bed at five in the morning on a midwinter day. Good for building his moral fiber, his strength of character, Taichi claimed. But Shigeki’s small hands would turn bright red after being exposed to the frozen pond; his fingertips would turn purple, as though they might crack off.
“What about Mother-in-Law? Did she just remain silent to all that?”
“Of course she stood up for Shigeki many times, over and over again, even laying her life on the line for him. How shall I say this? Taichi was obstinate. There was no one left in the mansion who’d dare defy him.” Ms. Sato paused to heave a huge sigh before continuing. “Frankly, Mr. Taichi used to be an outsider, the odd man out in a world that revolved around Shigeki. They were in harmony without him. The family bond was among Shigeki, the grandparents, and Ms. Kanako—no one else. Taichi probably felt treated like a lowly clerk. It certainly mustn’t have been all that fun for him. Then the grandfather, the late President, unexpectedly died from a stroke, and his wife, the lady of the house, followed two years later due to a weakened heart.”
With them gone, Ms. Sato went on to tell me, Taichi changed completely, venting all the pent-up anger he’d been keeping in for so long, and he projected it all onto Shigeki.
I remembered again how Shigeki had called Taichi “that guy.” It figures. Shigeki was raised by an abusive stepfather. That cold, heartless look in Shigeki’s eyes was probably a reflection of the look in Taichi’s eyes.
Ms. Sato had fallen silent and was motionless, appearing to be lost in thought.
“Is there more to the story?”
“Well, yes,” she continued with gravity. “Ms. Kanako declared she would get the last laugh on the poorly bred Taichi, so she began to develop a deep attachment to Shigeki’s education, getting very fussy about it. She wouldn’t even let him sleep until he completed his homework. If he nodded off, she would swat him on the head with a slipper. She’d gloat about it, saying, ‘Yesterday my child stayed up all night studying.’ He was still in elementary school, mind you. It was simply beyond me to appreciate what she was doing. All I did was shrug and think how hard it was to bring up a child to become part of the elite. She would also give him pocket money whenever he showed good results—a surprising amount, mind you.”
&nb
sp; “How much exactly?”
“Shigeki was in the fifth grade, but as I recall it was to the tune of fifty or sixty thousand yen.”
“What’d he spend all that money on?”
“On pet puppy dogs,” Ms. Sato answered once she remembered. “And various other things. But you know something? Whenever Shigeki took one of his pets out for a walk, the dog would escape without fail. He’d then buy a new puppy every time. He eventually stopped buying the ones that came with a certificate of pedigree.”
(A puppy dog escaping? Where to? Multiple times?)
I envisioned Shigeki as a child kicking a puppy and then recalled him slapping me. Having led such a suffocating childhood, it was not surprising that he used violence to let off steam.
Jean used to say, “The more the child is abused, the more well behaved the child appears to be.” The more he tries to hide domestic problems, the more he conceals his own emotions to win the favor of his parents and others around him. In fact, the self-repression can be absolute in such cases. Jean was right about how violence inevitably stems from anger at a lack of love. Jean was also concerned about how Shigeki’s face never showed any emotion, how vacant and expressionless it was. When I told him about my plan to marry Shigeki, he looked at me somewhat sadly and said, “I guess you’ve made up your mind already.” I thought he would have been happier, but he acted as if I was beyond help.
At that moment, I heard the sound of Kanako’s car pulling into the garage.
“Please remember, everything I said is just between you and me,” Ms. Sato said, standing up.
“Yes, of course. Trust me. My lips are sealed.”
I reluctantly left the room with Ms. Sato to receive Kanako, disappointed that the exposé was cut short.
RAIKI: FIVE
Kanako was beautiful. She was seductively slender and her skin, thanks to regular visits to her beautician, made her look like she was only in her mid-fifties. Usually detached in demeanor, the Kanako standing before me holding a white Chanel bag looked gorgeous in a blue skirt suit and white broad-brimmed hat. She looked like she’d stepped straight out of a fashion magazine. Her eyes sparkled. She looked desirable. It was the first time I had seen her like this.
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