by Misumi Kubo
Once, just after my father left, before my mom started her own maternity clinic, she took me along to a shrine hidden away in the mountains. I remember staring up, mouth agape, at the huge stone column, with the four Chinese characters engraved on it. I’d only just learned to read them, and they looked to me like they meant moisture shrine.
“It doesn’t mean ‘moisture’ here,” my mom said. “The shrine is named after the gods who give us water, and that’s just how you write their name. It’s pronounced ‘mikumari.’ It’s the Mikumari Shrine.”
Then she started up the flight of steps up to the shrine building, her feet ringing out against the stone. I chased after her and found her standing there with her eyes shut and her hands clasped together in prayer. I imitated her at first, but she was there for so long that after a while I gave up and squatted down at her feet, showering sand on top of a line of ants. Eventually I got bored even of that and tugged at my mother’s arm.
“Mom, what are you praying for?”
“For children,” my mom said, her eyes still shut.
“For me?”
“Of course you’re included. I’m praying for all children. For all the children that are going to be born, and all of them who couldn’t be. Children who are alive, children who are dead. All children.”
A slap on my backside shocked me out of my reminiscing. I turned around to see Nana there behind me, straddling her bike. She looked at me and mouthed the syllables, “Ass—hole,” and then went pedaling away.
I stumbled dizzily back to the house. The moment I opened the door, my mom came pattering down the hall.
“Come on, foolish boy! Quick! Wash your hands and come with me!”
With that, she dashed back into the birthing room at the end of the hall.
I did as I was told, washing my hands and face in the sink, then followed after her.
“Wipe away her sweat and give her some water,” my mom barked. Lying on a futon laid out in the middle of the room was a woman with her legs opened into an M-shape, looking exhausted and letting out short, sharp pants.
I sat down behind her, supporting her from the back so she didn’t topple over, and gave her a plastic bottle with a straw stuck in the top to drink from. The baby’s head was already peeking out from between her wide-open legs, and my mother’s gloved hands cupped it gently.
“NYYYYAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHH!”
Without warning, the woman let out an animal roar, almost too giant to have come from her tiny frame, then reached her hands over her head and gripped my arm with such force I thought it might snap. There was a splashing sound, as the amniotic fluid poured out from between her legs.
My mom had barely finished saying the words, “It’s coming,” when the woman let out a piercing scream, and the baby’s body slid out, covered in white vernix. The baby stretched out two little fists as if grasping at the sky, opened a toothless mouth, and started to cry. When my mom lifted the baby, still attached by its umbilical cord, and placed it onto the woman’s chest, I caught a glimpse of his dick. It looked enormous in comparison to that tiny body. That thing’s gonna cause you a whole lot of trouble, man, I told him silently.
My mom opened the window, letting a lukewarm breeze into the room. I sat there to one side, watching my mom as she cut the cord and took care of the afterbirth, and the screaming baby, lying there on the pale chest of the woman who’d just become his mother. I wanted to join in with his wailing. I wanted to scream and cry, too, because Anzu had sucked my tongue and my cock, and they were stinging like hell.
2
The Enormous Spiderweb Covering the World
THE ELEVATOR JIGGLED ABOUT a bit on its way down, before coming to a stop at the fourth floor. The doors opened, and in stepped Mrs. Kimura and her daughter. The two of them wore their huge masses of hair wound into buns at the top of their heads and had on matching dresses in identical gingham fabric, the floaty kind that tastefully obscured the shapes of their bodies. They had the whole mother-and-child look down to a tee, I thought. Releasing a hiss of pent-up air, the elevator doors swept shut and we began our descent again.
“I’m a huge fan of your blog! I’m always checking it.”
I’d barely got the words out of my mouth before I noticed Mrs. Kimura tense up. Taking hold of her daughter by the shoulders and drawing her closer, she looked around at me and said, very quietly, “Thank you.”
The honest-to-goodness truth was I had stumbled across her site by total accident one day while browsing the internet for dinner ideas. It seemed to be very famous and was always somewhere in the ranking of the top ten cooking blogs. Mrs. Kimura made sure to blur out her daughter’s face in the photos she uploaded, but I’d instantly recognized the view from the balcony where she kept her solid wooden table and chairs, and the arrangement of the beams on the living room ceiling. Even the placemats that often appeared in her tabletop shots were from the same hundred-yen shop I went to. That was how I figured out that the woman with the username “mrs mi” was one and the same as the Mrs. Kimura I had met a bunch of times in the residents’ weeding sessions.
But! It seemed like once again, I’d gone and put my foot in it. Just because I knew who Mrs. Kimura was didn’t necessarily mean she remembered me. The only reason I had said anything was because I just couldn’t bear that awful, awkward silence inside that cramped little space. Still, I guess that even if you do live in the same building as someone writing a famous blog, it doesn’t do to bring up the subject. It doesn’t do to tell them you read it. I get it. Or rather, I get that it’s exactly because I don’t get these kinds of things that I’m such a useless excuse for a human.
I find it all kinds of weird, though. Why would someone make that kind of face when you tell her you’ve read her blog, as if you’ve put her on the spot? All feedback should be expressed only via the comment box provided, is that it? Or is it more like, in her heart of hearts, she doesn’t want people to read it? But, the information on the internet is put out to the entire world. If you don’t lock your front door, then you’re basically inviting all kinds of strangers to come marching into your apartment, right? That’s the deal. That’s how the world’s set up. So, surely it’s hardly surprising someone you don’t know would be looking at your blog? But then again, I suppose it’s because I go around overthinking this sort of stuff that people don’t like me very much.
Keiichiro once told me that the “www” in website addresses stands for “World Wide Web” in English, which basically means an enormous spiderweb that covers the entire world. Keiichiro always explains the stuff I don’t understand in such a way that even someone as stupid as I am can get it. When he was telling me about the internet, he told me lots of other stuff about how it actually works, but those parts were a little too difficult for me. But the idea that the entire earth is covered in all this soft, transparent thread that glistens whenever information passes through it? It seemed to me kind of beautiful. So, while Keiichiro explained the technical stuff, I sat there thinking about how there must be a huge spider or two sitting up by the North Pole, churning out all that thread. After a while, Keiichiro smiled at me and said, “You tuned out again, right? I can always tell.”
The elevator reached the first floor. It must have been pickup time for the nursery bus, because there was a swarm of mothers with little kids in tow standing outside the entrance. Mrs. Kimura and her daughter immediately dissolved into the swarm and soon began smiling and chatting away with the others. As I went hurrying past them, lowering my head in a sort of bowing-greeting thing, I thought I sensed Mrs. Kimura shooting a look in my direction. She was probably going speak about me to the other mothers. Yeah, no doubt.
“See that woman over there?” she’d say. “She was in the elevator with me just now, and she was really creepy.”
“No way!” the other mothers would say, and listen with fascination to the rest of Mrs. Kimura’s story.
If I had the kind of friends I could speak to about minor incidents like
this, probably my life would be more enjoyable. But I went to an all-girls’ school from the age of twelve and was bullied the entire time I was there, so I still find groups of women pretty difficult to handle. Even just catching sight of a crowd of them from a distance, like those mothers, is enough to raise my pulse rate, or that’s how it feels anyway. It’s been nearly a decade since I left school for good, but when I think back to that time of my life I still get a squirming in my stomach, and I end up feeling a little panicky.
I got on the little bus that runs in a big loop around the area, headed for the women’s clinic in the next town along. The bus wound its way through the pear orchards, coming out at the foot of the small mountain where the clinic is located. Consultation hours hadn’t started yet, but the parking lot was already full. Opening the door and seeing all the women sitting there on the pink fake leather sofas, I let out a sigh. Looked like I was in for a long wait, again.
I gave my name at reception, then settled down in a chair in the corner, pulled out my iPod, and put on some anime songs. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t find the women who came to this clinic very intimidating. Even on the days when I took anime magazines or fanzines out of my bag, the people around me didn’t bat an eyelid, and none of them looked like the sort to start spreading rumors about me being a geek or an otaku or whatever. I guess they must all have been way too caught up in their own problems. Funnily enough, I didn’t at all mind being among self-absorbed people like that, though I did wonder about what would happen if these women did manage to get pregnant and have babies of their own. Probably it wouldn’t take very long before they’d start finding me gross and creepy, like Mrs. Kimura did.
The clinic had a really good reputation in the fertility-treatment world, and patients traveled from far and wide to be seen there. Its doctors, nurses, and reception staff were never anything but smiley and polite, and the décor of the place was very heavy on pink, which is apparently supposed to encourage female hormone secretion. There was a permanent smell of lavender wafting from who knows where, and healing-style music with lots of running water sounds playing in the background. I sat there in that space, its every last feature designed to bring reassurance and comfort to women desperately wanting children, and waited for my number to come up. Out of respect for people’s privacy, names were not used in the clinic. Patients had to watch for their numbers to pop up on the LED display above the reception desk.
It’s not that I don’t like children, exactly. It’s just that whenever I think about the children Keiichiro and I would have, it doesn’t really feel real to me. Keiichiro says it’s the same for him. I suppose that if I did manage to get pregnant, I wouldn’t mind having the baby. I’m pretty sure I must be the only patient at this clinic who feels this degree of uncertainty about the whole “having kids” thing. If you’re wondering how someone like that ended up coming to a place like this, it’s because the idea was suggested to me, kind of forcefully in fact, by Keiichiro’s mother, Machiko.
“If there’s still no patter of tiny footsteps after five years of marriage,” she said, “something must be up.” That was her view on the matter. She not only discovered the clinic but even made the appointment for me and dragged me along to it.
When I first started coming here, they carried out all kinds of tests on me. I bit my lip and bore them as best I could, the painful ones and the frightening ones alike. The tests revealed that both Keiichiro’s body and mine had issues that effectively meant we’d be hard put to get pregnant just by having lots of sex. Thanks to an STD I’d contracted in college and let go untreated, my fallopian tubes had narrowed so much that any eggs would have a tough time making their way through, and I was told there was also some kind of disorder with the little parts that were supposed to catch the eggs when they came out of my ovaries. They also found a problem with Keiichiro’s sperm. His count was less than that of other men his age, and the sperm he did have weren’t very active. Lastly, they told us they had discovered an antibody in my vaginal discharge that identified Keiichiro’s sperm as a foreign body and attacked it. That kind of floored me. There I am doing my best to love Keiichiro while, unknown to me, my discharge is attacking his semen. How am I supposed to get my head around that one? What does it mean? Does my discharge not love Keiichiro? Just thinking about it all made me feel weird and bad.
Still, when we heard all the reasons why we couldn’t get pregnant, both Keiichiro and I felt pretty relieved. It seemed like a message from the gods: It’s okay, you guys don’t need to have them! But Machiko wasn’t so easily satisfied. She wanted to know everything they’d said, and started asking lots of probing questions. I fobbed her off by saying I hadn’t really understood all the complicated stuff the doctors had come out with, but I’d been told that I’d been born with very narrow fallopian tubes which would make it difficult to conceive naturally. Telling Machiko that there was some kind of problem with her beloved son’s body would have taken a level of courage I didn’t possess. When I finished speaking, Machiko looked right at me for a few seconds, and then said with a big, broad smile, “In that case, you really must try artificial fertilization. I’ll cover all the costs.”
In that particular moment I found her very frightening. The sad truth of the matter is that neither Keiichiro nor I have the power to go against what she says. So the two of us agreed between us to go along with Machiko’s proposal for a year or two, until she started to lose interest.
Finally, one hour after my appointment time, my number was called and I went into the consultation room.
“Unfortunately, the treatment was not successful this time.”
With a detached air, the doctor revealed the failure of the latest artificial-fertilization attempt. Even before hearing the official verdict, I had somehow sensed from the way my body felt that I wasn’t pregnant. I felt awful about making the doctors go to such efforts, tiring them out, causing the other patients to wait even longer, when I didn’t really want a baby at all. How many times in the course of today would this doctor, whose hair was almost entirely gray, have to sit in front of a woman and tell her that she hadn’t managed to get pregnant? I wondered about such things.
The appointment was over in less than five minutes, and I went back into the reception area to pay the bill. It was still full of women patiently waiting their turn. The room was quiet, yet I could sense that the air was saturated with a kind of determination—a single-minded zeal to imprint their and their husbands’ DNA on the world. That was exactly the kind of thing that Keiichiro and I so lacked, and I always found it a little stifling when I encountered it. Whenever I left that clinic, I’d discover myself walking at a slightly faster pace than usual.
I listened to anime songs on my iPod again that evening while I prepared dinner. I soaked the salted wakame in water to rehydrate it, and lightly dusted some cucumbers with salt. The sauce and the mashed potato, which would go with the hamburgers I was making, seemed to have turned out pretty well this time. I sang along to the music as I formed the ground beef in the bowl into patties. All of a sudden, I found myself being squeezed from behind.
“I could hear your singing from all the way down the hall.” Keiichiro removed one earbud so he could speak into my ear. “It’s burger night tonight, eh?”
He went to the bathroom to wash his hands.
Keiichiro is about the same height as me, but when he comes home from work he always seems much shorter than he did in the morning, as if his body has shrunk over the course of the day. Keiichiro works in a pharmaceutical firm as something called a medical representative. I wondered if maybe the doctors had been mean to him again. Since he’d been put in charge of the private clinicians a while back, it was rare for him to get home this early. Apparently, there was one really tricky guy who Keiichiro was responsible for and who was always making Keiichiro accompany him on day-long golf sessions on his days off or sort out tickets for the boy band concerts his daughter wanted to go to, or else forcing him to stay out for
the late-night karaoke sessions that Keiichiro hated more than anything. It was a very different story from when he’d been working with the university hospitals.
Despite saying my hamburger “wasn’t at all bad,” Keiichiro didn’t seem to be making much progress with it. As I watched him not eating, I remembered something Machiko had said about how much weight Keiichiro had lost since we’d got married, and started to feel slightly upset. Until getting married, I’d basically never cooked in my life, so there was little to no hope that the food I rustled up would ever match up to that of veteran homemaker Machiko, who made housewifery look like an art form.
“I was at the clinic today.”
At this, Keiichiro put down his chopsticks and looked at me.
“It didn’t work.”
Keiichiro blew on the steaming liquid in his teacup, then nodded silently and returned the cup to the table.
“Sorry, is it too hot? Shall I add some water?”
Keiichiro has a low tolerance for hot things. One time, just after we were married, he lost it with me for serving him steaming rice straight from the rice cooker. Feeling very nervous, I got an ice cube out of the freezer and transferred it into Keiichiro’s teacup with a spoon. In my haste, a little of the tea splashed over onto the tabletop. When I went to wipe it away with a cloth, Keiichiro stood up from the table, saying, “I’ll leave it to you to tell Mom.”
Then he went to his room, leaving more than half his burger on the plate, and I told myself I was going to have to make more of an effort with my cooking.
“There’s just no way that a kid who’d inherited genes from two bully-magnets like us could ever make it in this world.” That was Keiichiro’s opinion on the matter. I agreed with him, though I sometimes wondered if he really had been bullied at school like he said he had. I wanted to ask him about it, but I wasn’t brave enough.