by Misumi Kubo
Though it was still the middle of the night, I heard sirens sounding in the distance again. I wondered if the water level of the river had risen even higher. I picked up Lillica’s wand, and shouted in as hushed a voice as I could, “Parallel Princess Version Up!” That was what Lillica said when she wanted to transform from a regular schoolgirl into MAGICAL GIRL✩LILLICA. When she spoke those magic words, every wish of hers came true.
I wished that Machiko and Keiichiro would always be nice to me. I wished I didn’t have to go through any more painful fertility treatments. I wished I didn’t have to go out into a world filled with bullies. I wished I could do the bare minimum amount of housework and then spend the rest of my time doing whatever I wanted.
Each time I repeated Lillica’s magic words, I could feel the power building up in the base of my stomach. A siren started up again from outside like the wail of some dying beast. How good it would be, I thought, if the river would overflow and flood the town, washing away all the people who’d ever bullied me in a muddy torrent. It could wash away Machiko while it was at it, and Keiichiro, too.
Standing there in my Lillica costume, I kept striking poses in front of the mirror until it started to grow light outside the window.
I don’t know what was said between Keiichiro and Machiko that night, but from then on, Machiko stopped coming over so frequently. Occasionally, she would call the house, but she only ever spoke about normal, day-to-day stuff and I no longer heard the words “pregnancy” or “children” from her lips. Life for me and Keiichiro went on just as it had before. Keiichiro’s work got even busier, and he often came home way past midnight. I didn’t feel great about the fact that he had made no attempt to save me from his mother, but I was still grateful for him for not kicking me out. Maybe Lillica’s magic spell had worked. I returned to a life where, so long as I carried out all the basic domestic tasks, I could immerse myself in the world of anime and manga to my heart’s desire.
It was around this time that I started making my own cosplay outfits for my favorite characters. I got into it initially because the costumes that were on sale were too small for me. I was so clumsy that learning how to use a sewing machine was a mighty undertaking, but friends of mine I’d met on online forums would help me out and, besides, I knew I could take as much time as I liked without having to worry about being told off by teachers or bosses or whomever. Even if the costumes weren’t exactly prize-winning quality, I still had a great time making them.
After I’d finished the costumes for the three magical girls in MAGICAL GIRL✩LILLICA, a friend of mine named Kurumi, who I’d met at last year’s Comiket, asked me to make her a costume for another Lillica character named Lord Muramasa, a physics teacher who was also a sorcerer. Kurumi was tall and skinny like a boy, so I figured she’d be perfect as Lord Muramasa. I bought some shiny purple satin and set about cutting and sewing. I got so carried away that I was still at it when Keiichiro came home from work. He knew I was making cosplay costumes, but, as with everything, he’d never said anything to me about it.
Seeing me struggling with the buttonholes, Keiichiro came up to me.
“Let me try,” he said.
In a flash, he was sitting in front of the machine, slitting the fabric with a U-shaped tool called a seam ripper and creating four perfect buttonholes.
“That’s amazing! How come you can do that?”
“I was a member of drama club for a while, in college. We made all our own costumes, so I had to learn how to use a machine and to sew by hand as well,” Keiichiro said, somewhat proudly. That was maybe the first time I felt pure respect for him. It was also the first I’d ever heard about drama club. I thought the reason I knew so little about Keiichiro was because he didn’t like to talk about stuff, but I guess it was also my fault for not asking more. I was so happy to have discovered this totally new side to my husband that, without thinking, I said, “Hey, why don’t you try it on!”
“No way! Why?”
But I kept on at him, saying, “Please, please, go on! Just this time!” and eventually he took off his suit and stepped into the newly completed Lord Muramasa costume. I looked at him, standing there in the purple gown. Chubby, short, hunched, pale-faced, with dark bags under his eyes, Keiichiro didn’t suit the costume at all. I mean, it made total sense. Keiichiro was working himself to the bone, putting up with a job he hated in order to feed me, and that’s why he looked the way he did. I knew that, and I knew it was bad to even think those kinds of things about him, let alone say them. But still, seeing how old and haggard Keiichiro looked in the bright lights of the room, I became a little frightened. I didn’t feel at all sure that I could keep this marriage thing up, watching as this person right in front of me went on aging with every day that went by. And of course, I’d get older, too. I’d be following right after him. Thinking that, I felt a tiny hole open in my chest and a gust of cold wind go blasting through it.
I guess Keiichiro must somehow have sensed my disappointment. In a second, he was tearing the costume off, saying, “Why did you make me do that? You knew it wasn’t going to look any good on me.”
He went into his room and shut the door.
“Anzu, look! Over there!”
On that fateful day at Comiket, Kurumi was the first to see him. I looked in the direction she was pointing, and there I saw Takumi standing in a white T-shirt, jeans, and green Converse. He really looked like someone who’d found himself in the wrong place by accident. He was tall and gangly, and though he wasn’t desperately good-looking or anything, he had the kind of face that you could tell would look really ace when it was made up.
“I’d love to see him in this,” Kurumi said, fingering the collar of her Lord Muramasa costume. Before that day, I’d never once gone up and spoken to a boy, but I was there with Kurumi and I’d already had my photo taken as Lillica by a bunch of people, so I guess I was feeling braver than usual. Takumi seemed kind of taken aback to be approached by two girls in cosplay and even more so when I asked him for his email address, but he gave it to me nonetheless.
After exchanging a few emails, we found out that we lived in the same part of town, and when I invited him over, saying that I just wanted to take some photos of him in cosplay, Takumi immediately agreed to come. I felt a lot like one of those pervy old men who trick schoolgirls into letting them take nude photos. Although actually, what I was doing was a lot worse than that. Admittedly, it was Takumi who pushed me down onto the bed, but I was the one who had enticed him into doing it.
The first time we had sex was Takumi’s first time ever, and he was trembling like crazy. Still, I showed no mercy. I told him I wanted him to fuck me as per the scripts I would write for him. He wore the costumes I’d made without complaint, and learned the scripts I wrote by heart. I was having exactly the sort of sex I wanted to be having, so needless to say it felt amazing, but afterward I was always ridden with guilt and would often slip some money into Takumi’s palm.
Strange as it sounds, Takumi’s body always had a milky smell to it, like a baby’s. I wondered whether that was because he was still young and, compared to me at least, fresh from the womb. But even though Takumi was just a kid and still didn’t know what to do in bed, he never treated me roughly like my boyfriends in college had. If the art of touching people tenderly was something that came naturally to some people, then maybe Takumi was a kind of natural-born genius in that way. I remember once, when we were having sex and I was on top, Takumi reached out to rest his hands on my hips and suddenly said, “You’re chilly here.”
I was so taken aback that I stopped moving.
“It’s important for women to keep this part of their bodies warm.”
It was the sort of thing that Machiko was always saying to me.
“How do you know that?”
“My mom . . .” he began, and then I watched as his face turned crimson. I can see how it might have felt pretty embarrassing to mention his mom while he was inside me. I thought it was cute,
though, and as I laughed I began moving my hips back and forward very fast.
“When you laugh, I can feel it,” he said, and came inside me, panting. His neck was pure white, without a single spot or wrinkle. I bit into it, gently. Somehow I sensed that Takumi was even less intelligent than I was. He was probably so dumb he couldn’t name all the Japanese prefectures—though actually, saying that, I’m not super confident I could, either. Yet I had this feeling that if the two of us were washed up on a desert island, we’d get by. Somehow or other, we’d pull through. Those are the kinds of things I’d started to think about as I was fixing dinner for Keiichiro in the evening.
Keiichiro’s job had become so busy that the only time we really talked was at breakfast. His visits to my room for sex had fallen to just once a month. Perhaps because he was so exhausted, he’d recently started doing it with me regardless of whether I was awake or not. If I were fast asleep, he’d just pull down my panties and wedge his way inside me. Usually, I just put up with it. After all, otherwise he was looking after me, so it seemed only fair. But there was one particular day, I guess maybe he’d drunk a lot with his clients or something, because he had that ripe smell that boozed-up guys on the last train have. He was moving back and forward inside me over and over, apparently unable to come, and I was dry as anything. I never got sad when I was having sex or anything like that, but this time was so sore that I really thought I was going to cry with pain.
“Stop!” I thrust an elbow toward Keiichiro, who was clinging on to my back.
“What’s with you?” He gave my hair a tug.
“It really hurts. Can you please give it a rest today?”
Keiichiro clicked his tongue in irritation. “That wet patch on your sheet was distracting me. It feels gross.”
“Sorry. I spilled some water there before.” Of course this was a lie.
“If you’re in the house all day long, you could at least change the sheets,” Keiichiro spat out, before clicking his tongue again, louder this time, and leaving the room.
Takumi started coming over more often.
Once, while we were having sex, the doorbell rang. Pretty bad timing, because I was just getting close to coming. I pulled myself away from Takumi, sighed, and turned over so I was lying on my back. Takumi looked at me, so I put a finger to my lips and mouthed shhhhh. From my bedroom window that faced onto the hallway outside, I heard Machiko’s voice.
“Satomi! Are you there?”
She began knocking at the window with her fingers and rattling the grate, saying in an affected voice, “Well, how strange!”
I lay there straining my ears, and after a while I heard her moving away from the window and returning to the door, ringing several times and turning the doorknob noisily, before giving up and going home.
Not long after, I got in the elevator again with Mrs. Kimura, the cooking blogger.
“Is it your brother who comes around to see you?” she asked me with a smile. When I said nothing, she said, “My daughter goes to the same nursery school as Mrs. Fujimura’s little ones—you know, Mrs. Fujimura, who lives next door to you? She was telling me you’ve got a younger brother in high school who comes over a lot. She’s always saying how handsome he is!”
Before Mrs. Kimura had finished speaking, the elevator reached the first floor. As the doors opened, I sensed the gazes of all the young mothers waiting for the nursery school bus fall on me. As ever, Mrs. Kimura melded in naturally with the others, and I walked on past quickly. I could feel their whispers following me down the street, lapping at my back.
I had the feeling that things couldn’t go on like this for much longer, but even I was surprised by how quickly the dreaded day came around. Even knowing that I had to stop, that what I was doing was an outrageous crime, I still felt very upset when Takumi broke up with me. When he told me out of the blue that he wouldn’t be coming to see me anymore and then left, I lay stunned on my bed for a while. Then I decided to go after him.
I pressed the button to call the elevator up from the first floor. When it reached the landing, the doors opened, and Mrs. Fujimura and her daughter stepped out. Mrs. Fujimura looked at me, her eyes perfect circles of surprise. Her daughter pointed a finger at me and said loudly, “Look Mommy, it’s Lillica!”
The little girl wouldn’t take her eyes off me, and Mrs. Fujimura had to drag her down the hall by the arm to their apartment. I watched as the doors to the elevator closed in front of me, and the elevator started out again for the first floor. Looking down at my feet, I noticed I wasn’t wearing any shoes. The toes of my white knee-high socks were gray with dirt.
One evening, about two weeks after Takumi stopped coming over, I came back from buying food for dinner to see Keiichiro and Machiko’s shoes arranged neatly side by side in the entranceway. It was getting dark, but there were no lights on in either the entranceway or the hall. Opening the door to the living room, I found Keiichiro with his head on the table, sobbing, and Machiko stroking his back. Keiichiro’s laptop was open on the table. The glow from its screen was the only source of light in the room, but the picture itself was dim, and at first I couldn’t tell what it was they were watching. Keiichiro’s sobbing drowned out the noise from the computer, but after a little while I clearly heard my own voice say, “Lord Muramasaaaaaaa!”
As my eyes began to adjust to the darkness I saw that there, on the computer screen, was a video of me and Takumi in cosplay. The shopping bag fell from my right hand, and an onion went rolling across the floor.
“It’s because you don’t have children,” Machiko explained quietly. Her face was lit up by the glow of the screen. “This kind of thing wouldn’t happen if you had children. When women have too much time on their hands, they always get up to no good. Keiichiro’s been suspecting something was up for a while. There’s been a hidden camera in there for some time. Did you really not notice?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve talked it all over with Keiichiro. Even in the light of all of this, he says he doesn’t want to split up with you. So the question is how can we go about ensuring you have kids. If artificial fertilization and IVF won’t work, we need to think of another way. If only I could give birth for you!”
The image of Machiko with a great swollen belly passed through my mind. I instantly felt the skin across my body begin to crawl, and nausea rise up from the pit of my stomach. So long as they’re happening within the confines of anime and manga, I can forgive weird procreation plotlines, however ridiculous they might be—Human Instrumentality Projects, or transmutation, or humanoid interfaces, or what have you. But the idea of Machiko giving birth to Keiichiro’s and my child was definitely, 100 percent out of the question. I may have been a perverted housewife who had made a schoolboy dress up in cosplay to have sex with her, but there were some things even I couldn’t agree to.
“I’m very sorry, Mother,” I said, kneeling down on the floor and bowing until my head touched the ground. “Please let me divorce your son.”
I’d seen people adopting that position on TV and stuff a lot, but it was the first time I’d ever done it myself and I didn’t know if it was really appropriate for the occasion. It was the first time I’d ever called Machiko “Mother,” too.
“There’s an excellent hospital in America that finds surrogate mothers for couples wanting babies,” Machiko began. “They have a Japanese coordinator who’ll arrange everything. It doesn’t matter if you can’t speak a word of English. I think we should go, the three of us, to take their test. To America. Of course, I’ll pay for everything.”
Entirely ignoring the way I had prostrated myself on the floor, Machiko spoke in as cheery a tone as if she was suggesting a family outing to a spa resort.
“This way you won’t even have to go through the pain of childbirth. It doesn’t get any easier than that! And there’ll be nothing to worry about afterward, either. I’ll be there to take care of the baby. You can lie around and read manga all you like, or do whatever. Aside from t
hese kinds of antics, of course.”
“I’m comingggg!” bleated my voice from the screen, as if on cue. Machiko shot a glance at the laptop. A deep frown formed on her face, and she sighed, loudly. Face still buried in the table, Keiichiro let out a sob. Machiko gently rubbed his back the way people did to lull children to sleep.
“He’s such a kindhearted boy, my Keiichiro. I’m sure you must think so. I was always determined to have a nice, kind child, and I did my best to make sure he turned out that way. But then, of course, when he got into school, he was so badly bullied. The truth is, in this world of ours, it’s not enough just to be kind. You know this scar? Wait, have you not heard about it? Oh, heavens, he doesn’t tell you anything, does he? Well, it’s time you heard. When Keiichiro was in middle school, he tried to take his own life. Slashed his neck open with a knife, right here. That was a shock, I can tell you! When I went to wake him in the morning, his bed was drenched in blood. My husband wouldn’t let me hear the last of it, saying that if we lost our only child, it’d be all my fault. He’s very kind, and he’s got a good head on him, but he’s so very weak, that’s the thing. I started to regret the way I’d brought him up. To think I’d made some kind of mistake. But everything’s going to be okay. With yours and Keiichiro’s child, I’ll make sure that everything turns out fine. Everything goes better the second time.”