Nan-Core

by Mahokaru Numata

The lights had come back on at some point.

  “Right, then. And everyone’s on board with this? No regrets?”

  “No regrets? Of course we’ll have regrets.”

  “Mom’s right, Dad. There’s no way to do this without regretting it.”

  When the women spoke, their voices were choked with tears.

  “I guess so. So we’ll make her pay for her sins in a manner that will leave us with as few regrets as possible. And you, do you accept this?”

  I didn’t realize right away that he was talking to me. At the same time, I was strangely cognizant of what he meant. I don’t remember if I nodded. I think I probably did. If I hadn’t, they wouldn’t have done what they did.

  On the day Misako was discharged from the hospital, her parents bundled her into the car and drove her away. She still couldn’t speak. I was to stay behind to collect her things and pay the remaining bills. She watched me from behind the car window right to the end. The way she looked at me remains burned into my soul. Her eyes shone black yet were blind even as she tried desperately to see out.

  When I went back to her room I lurched over the sink, throwing up bitter bile. I sat on the empty bed, telling myself it was for the best, that it was wrong for such a woman to be allowed to remain in this world. I tried hard to convince myself. I kept seeing the image of her, scrawny and filthy, that first night in the park when she had come up to me, asking the time. I knew I would never meet someone like that again, no matter how long I lived. And I knew that regardless of whom I met, regardless of how perfect they might be, I would never love anyone the way I loved that broken, malformed woman. I knew that to be true.

  It goes without saying that I told them I wanted to do it myself if we were going to go through with it, because I knew that that was what Misako wanted.

  Emiko lashed out furiously. “It can’t be you. We’re not trying to grant Misako her final wish. We’re doing this to make a murderer pay for her crimes,” she said in tears, practically clutching at me.

  There was something unhinged about her bloodshot eyes. It didn’t come as a surprise; she had found the notebooks in our apartment, then read through them even as she trembled in fear, all by herself on the night of the incident. She wasn’t the only one acting strangely. You read them too, Ryosuke, I’m sure you understand. My mother- and father-in-law as well as myself, all four of us had read the notebooks. We all felt like someone had reached deep into our hearts and minds only to savagely tear things apart. The confessions had been otherworldly but strangely vivid, leaving us all disoriented.

  They were the backdrop for the series of events that followed.

  My father-in-law, usually a gentle person, was resolute during that time. “We’ll take care of it. We’re suited to the task, since we’re old and don’t have so much time left, and as her parents you have to let us see this through.” Then he said, “Think of your son. You’ll condemn him to suffering for the rest of his life if he ever learned that his father killed his own mother. That can’t happen. We have to protect the innocent as best we can.”

  Still … I guess that’s all just an excuse. Even if no one had stood in my way, I don’t think I could have actually gone through with it. I could never have taken her last breath, not with these hands. Your mother was mad to ask such a thing of me. She had strangely overestimated me in that regard.

  They told me about a small dam, a long way up the river, deep in the mountains. They used sleeping pills to put her to sleep. Then they blindfolded her, tied up her limbs, and let her sink to the bottom of the lake behind the dam. They tied rocks to her so her body wouldn’t float back up. When my father-in-law told me all of this, he gave me her handbag and the lock of hair.

  Maybe there’s not much point in saying this now, but you should know that everyone agreed that we had to do everything in our power to protect you, as you were the most sinless of us all. Maybe we only managed to get through it all because we never lost sight of that one goal. It didn’t make any difference whether you and I were related by blood or not.

  Perhaps it was because I had lost my parents when I was so young, but I was determined to arrange things so you wouldn’t have to feel the pain of losing even one of your parents, let alone both. I also wanted to make absolutely sure you never learned that your mother was a murderer. At some point, the idea of her younger sister Emiko taking Misako’s place seemed to spring up naturally. I don’t remember having asked formally, and I don’t think anyone else came up with the idea.

  There was one thing, however, that I had been dimly aware of for a while. I had a suspicion that Emiko kept jumping from one fiancé to the next because she had feelings for me that she couldn’t bring herself to voice. I think that might have complicated things for her. She became increasingly unstable after what happened to Misako and started to experience violent mood swings. She might not have been conscious of it herself, but it was clear in the way her eyes clung to me that she wanted me to rescue her. It made sense that they were in fact sisters. When she looked at me that way I fell into the bizarre illusion that it was actually Misako watching me. That aside, I knew that no one else would be able to take on the role of being your mother in the same way Emiko could.

  Consider that the four of us were, essentially, accomplices.

  Myself, Emiko, and your grandparents would carry the same burden for the rest of our lives, and the most natural way for us all to raise you was for Emiko to become your mother. She would be more than that; she would actually become Misako. By engineering this we hoped to protect you from finding out who your real mother was, from finding out what happened to her.

  Emiko wavered fiercely. On the one hand, she believed that abandoning everything she’d been to become your mother, to become Misako, would be recompense for what she’d done to her sister. On the other hand, she wondered if she was only thinking like that to justify being with me. She spent a long time troubling over it. In the end, however, she decided to be reborn as Misako. She decided to simply honor our original promise to protect the most innocent member of our family. I think she realized it was the only possible solution. She’d never reach a decision if she kept on worrying about it.

  You were in the hospital longer than expected. After you finally recovered from pneumonia, various other complaints started popping up; your tonsils swelled up or your ears or nose got inflamed.

  It was a stroke of luck, for us at least. We moved to where we didn’t know a soul, and Emiko began her new life as Misako. They were sisters and had similar facial features. Emiko had also lost a lot of weight after what happened, and after she fixed her hairstyle the likeness to her elder sister was shocking. You didn’t remember anything of what happened before you were hospitalized, even the fact that you’d almost drowned, so I hoped you wouldn’t notice.

  After some time we filed a missing person report with the police, saying Emiko had vanished. We included a photograph of Misako from the time when she was breastfeeding you, when she was slightly round-cheeked, and pretended it was Emiko. We chose a photo that least resembled either of them. We needn’t even have done that in the end. The police don’t do much when it comes to missing persons.

  Sorry, but could we leave it at that for today? I’ve covered most of it and I’m too exhausted to continue. It’s a shame this happened. I wanted you to only remember how kind Mom was. I can’t explain it logically, but I think Misako was alive alongside Emiko the whole time. Don’t you think so?

  I made up a story about a fire in our old place and disposed of all of the old photos, but I kept hold of the handbag with her hair inside, and the notebooks. Sheesh. I really don’t know why I did that. I’d pulled them out again so I could throw them away before I died, but I kept putting it off every day. And you went and found them. Maybe it’s some twist of fate.

  Dad really did look exhausted. His face was bluish black, practically corpse-like. Without saying a single word to comfort him I went downstairs and left the house.

 
My legs were shaking. I had already assumed my real mother was dead. But the shock of hearing Dad tell me what had happened was much more vivid than I’d expected. And I wasn’t even related to Dad by blood—my real father was some unknown passerby, someone who had paid for my mother’s body.

  More than anything I felt like I’d been taken in. I finally knew the truth, but I didn’t feel even a sliver of satisfaction. I don’t know if I was angry. If I was, I think it was probably directed at myself, not at Dad or any of the others. I was angry that I was the only one who hadn’t made a sacrifice, angry for having lived such a free and easy life, for being so ignorant, for failing to seek the truth.

  I had been a small child at the time, nothing more. But a kid could still have done more for his mother, even if it amounted to nothing more than a weak protest. I should have screamed and cried like crazy to see her when I was in hospital. I shouldn’t have let my memories from before the hospital slip away so easily. At the very least, I should have continued always to insist that she had been switched with someone else.

  I hardly remember the route I took back to the station or even how I got back to the cafe. I only came back to myself when I stopped next to the window in my darkened room to look vaguely out across the dog run.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow abandoned my mother.

  Without any dogs the land outside seemed barren and too wide, like the surface of a lake brimming with dark water. How did it feel to drown, blindfolded, with your arms and legs bound tightly? I could see my mother, writhing but unable to move, sinking down, bubbles spewing from her mouth. It felt like she would continue sinking inside me like that forever, as everything around her turned insubstantial, blurred.

  Had she suffered badly? Or had she breathed her last without even knowing what was happening?

  She was a murderer. It couldn’t be helped.

  The words suddenly sprang into my mind. I couldn’t tell if they were mine. It felt like someone had whispered them into my ear. They were my words, of course. They were the words that came to me, mostly without resistance, each time I read in the papers about a condemned criminal being executed.

  There was no other choice, they were killers. Killing killers wasn’t murder.

  My mother the killer. My mother, who had been bound hand and foot and thrown into a lake because she was a killer. Of my real father I knew nothing, not the way he looked, how he was raised, even whether or not he was alive—just that he was the kind of man who would hire a hooker. For a moment I could feel their blood melding inside me, seething. As I was alive by this blood, what did that make me?

  I shuddered as a cold sensation crept from my knees to the small of my back. I felt for the first time the presence of something cavernous and dense nesting inside my heart, like an unfathomable darkness.

  14

  Tuesday, a couple of days later, Ms. Hosoya left to visit Chie’s parents again. Shaggy Head was open all year round, closing only for the New Year and the O-bon holidays. The staff worked on a rotation to manage the six days they had off each month, and Tuesday was Ms. Hosoya’s scheduled day off that week.

  It had been hot and humid since morning, and the sky had threatened rain all day long. The cafe was mostly empty, even though a drop never fell. The few dogs pacing in the field seemed to lack their usual vigor. They couldn’t take off their coats, and didn’t do well in the humidity.

  When the weather was like that the dogs gave off a musty, animal smell. Nachi kept pulling a face and complaining about the stench, throwing open the windows only to shut them again once all the cold air from the air-conditioning had dissipated. I actually liked the way it smelled for some reason, kind of like something scorched.

  With nothing much to do it was hard to concentrate. I hadn’t slept for a few nights and I had to bite back a number of wide-open yawns. I was hopeful for some new information on Chie, but my senses felt dulled as though the sluggish gray of the sky was hanging, leaden, within my skull.

  After listening to what Dad had to say, I’d stopped caring about anything. I started to believe that Chie was beyond my reach, that she would never come back.

  I mean, if she’d wanted to see me, she could have snuck away from her husband. The fact that she hadn’t done so even once spoke clearly of her feelings. Even if Ms. Hosoya discovered Chie’s whereabouts, there was nothing I could do as long as she didn’t want to see me. Occasionally I caught myself thinking about Chie like she was already dead. Just like my mother. It was curious, as though I was losing the ability to grieve for them individually. They had, without my realizing it, merged into a single ache.

  My heart wasn’t in it but I made a show of working hard, and as I wiped down the tables and handed back change to customers, the hours eventually passed. When the cafe emptied out that evening I decided to take it as an opportunity to close up half an hour early. I’d never done that since the cafe opened.

  After Nachi and the other girl working part-time had rushed home in glee, I filled a mug to the brim with coffee, but even after finishing it I just sat vacantly with my elbows resting on the table.

  No matter how hard I tried to gloss over it, I always succumbed to an unbearable sense of emptiness when I was by myself. When night came and the quiet of the mountains eased its way into the building, even my sense of being seemed to dilute.

  I nodded off a few times, with my head still propped up in my hands. It seemed like too much trouble to get up from the chair and go upstairs. I don’t know how long I sat there.

  I heard the roar of an engine climbing the hill, then a car coming to stop in front of the cafe. When I dragged myself over to open the front door I saw Ms. Hosoya, looking sharp in a suit, step out of a taxi. I was about to walk over when I saw someone take her outstretched hand and slide out of the vehicle. My heart was already telling me it was Chie, but it took my mind a full second to catch up. In that second I thought I was looking at my mother, still young as she walked through the park at night, her body bruised, haggard. That was how slight Chie appeared. Her cheekbones jutted out from her pale face and her neck was shockingly thin.

  I couldn’t process any of it. I moved on instinct alone. I ran to her side and held her softly like she was something that might easily break. That she had very nearly been broken was clear from a single glance.

  “Chie …” My throat was choked up, and I could barely get my voice out.

  She seemed like a doll. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t return the embrace either. It was enough. Nothing else mattered so long as Chie was alive and I could hold her.

  It took a long time before the doll opened its mouth and the words came slipping out. “I’m so sorry.” Her voice was wretched, barely audible.

  A pitiful woman—I didn’t know what to do to put her at ease. I was almost suffocated by a rush of emotion. I held her a little tighter, just a little so she wouldn’t be afraid. “D-Don’t go away ever again,” I stuttered and stumbled over my words. In the end, that was all I said.

  I supported her as she hobbled step by step up the stairs to the cafe’s entrance. Ms. Hosoya was already busy inside, wearing an apron over her suit. In no time at all an omelette and salad were set on the table.

  “This is all I can manage, but we need to get something in her stomach. And not just Chie. You look like you’re ill yourself.” She put a bowl of bread stewed in milk, like a sort of porridge, on the table next to Chie. “I hope this will be easy enough to get down.”

  Chie thanked her, her eyes still on the floor.

  “Chie’s got a bad cold, you can see she’s still recovering.”

  I nodded absently. No cold could possibly have caused such a total transformation. I had lots of questions, but I knew it wasn’t the time to ask them. Chie didn’t have much of an appetite but she ate the milk porridge, blowing on it as she carried it to her mouth. As I watched her, I realized I didn’t want to ask her anything about it, ever. I wanted to just let it lie.

  A
s though she’d understood what I was thinking, Ms. Hosoya said, “We can talk about the difficult bits tomorrow. We should let her get some sleep for now, once she’s finished. She should be okay here for tonight. Go on, boss, eat up.”

  I did as I was told and took a bite of omelette. The soft yolk seemed to melt on my tongue and I suddenly realized I was completely starving. I polished off the whole plate in the blink of an eye. On the way out Ms. Hosoya gave me a few paper bags with Chie’s medicine, instructing me on how she needed to take them. The pills had been dispensed from a number of different hospitals and seemed to include anti-depressants and sleeping pills. I was shocked by the number of different types of drugs and started to feel uneasy. I had yet to absorb any of what was happening, but that didn’t stop me from feeling a sudden and powerful hatred for Chie’s husband.

  15

  The sky that had been on the verge of rain for so long finally opened up, and the next morning brought a heavy downpour. I went down early to the cafe and was making coffee when Ms. Hosoya arrived at seven, as we had agreed. She had taken the business car home the night before, and driving it back meant she had been able to stay dry.

  Chie was still asleep on the second floor. She had woken in the middle of the night and started to shiver violently, telling me she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, so I had given her one more of the sleeping pills and massaged her back. We didn’t say much, only speaking when necessary. I was amazed to find that even after all that had happened, the natural ease we’d had around each other back when we were happy, when we could spend hours in companionable silence, hadn’t faded.

  “It was a surprise. I had never expected Chie to be there in person. I had a hard time convincing her parents. I all but dragged her away with me in the end. Chie herself hardly knows what she wants in the state she’s in, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  Ms. Hosoya’s eyes were red and bloodshot behind her glasses. She had used her day off and driven in again early in the morning, so of course she was tired, but it didn’t come through in the way she spoke. I was too filled with remorse to properly apologize to her.