by Misumi Kubo
I clearly heard him say, “You can’t come yet,” and then the door to the apartment next door opened, so I dashed away and shot as fast as I could down the fire escape stairs. Maybe the person Takumi had been going out with was the woman who lived in that apartment. Maybe she was the one who’d taken the photos.
“So what’s going on with you and Takumi?”
I had no idea how to reply, so I just shook my head, and then began: “It seemed to be going all right . . . ,” but as soon as I blinked, I felt a big tear go running straight down my cheek, surprising even me.
“Whoa whoa wahh wah wah wah!” As she let out a whole range of totally meaningless sounds, Akutsu took out her handkerchief from her bag and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“I promise I didn’t mean to make you cry, that wasn’t why I was showing you, I just wanted to, like, warn you, you know? Let you know about the pervy stuff he’s doing so you could watch out. So like, I mean, like . . .”
Akutsu grew incoherent again, then reached into her bag and took out a Snickers bar and tore off the wrapper.
“Do you want some?” she said, and held it out to me. When I shook my head, she bit into the half-melted lump of brown chocolate.
“Sorry for losing it,” I said to Akutsu, but still couldn’t stop crying.
“Look, let’s drop this, okay? I shouldn’t have shown you. It’s totally my fault. I’ll throw them away, right now.”
She went to rip up the papers, getting ready to put all her strength into it, but I took hold of her arm.
“Hey, give them here.”
“You want them?”
“Yeah. And the address of that website, too.”
“You want to see the videos?”
“Yes,” I said, blowing my nose loudly. Akutsu stared at me for a while and then let out a huge burst of crazy laughter.
“Hahahahahahahahahah!”
With her mouth wide open like that, I could see the chocolate all stuck in her back teeth.
“I still really like him,” I said, and then felt like I was going to start crying again.
The house where my family lives is just across the street from the riverbank. Dad told me that one time, ages ago, a big typhoon caused the river to overflow, and it washed away a few of the houses. Hundreds of years ago, he said, the water used to come up as far as the red torii gates to the shrine on the top of the mountain.
Apparently, Mom kicked up a fuss when Dad announced he wanted to build a house here. But Dad was convinced that because a disaster like that had already happened, it wouldn’t happen again, and so he went ahead and built it anyway. Mom often said with a sigh how the house had been a real splurge for someone like Dad, when you thought of it in terms of his salary from his job at the clothing company where he worked. But Dad had grown up in a very poor family, and he’d really hated living in their cramped, shabby old housing project apartment. As soon as my parents had kids, buying a house of their own had become Dad’s top priority, whatever it took.
“As long as you give kids a good, strong house to grow up in, they’ll turn out upright,” Dad would say when he was drunk.
When I said that he’d grown up poor and in a housing project but had still turned out upright, he’d say, “I’m not upright at all.”
Then he’d cackle, his face all red from drinking, and tickle me under the arms. Dad didn’t particularly have any hobbies of his own, but watching him on Sundays as he pottered around the house fixing things or gardening, I thought he seemed super content. Now, though, he’s not around anymore. His company sent him up north to manage a factory in Tohoku. He’s working such long hours that he can’t even come back home for the national summer holidays.
Akutsu and I stayed on the riverbank chatting, and, before we knew it, the sun had set, and it was growing dark. Riding back along the asphalt road, still hot from the feverish heat of the day, I noticed my brother standing on the balcony to his second-story room. It looked as if he were pointing his binoculars in my direction, so I waved to him, but he didn’t make any movement. In the light of the streetlamp outside our house, his white shirt looked like it was glowing. I pulled open our rusty gates that always made a terrible screechy scraping sound and parked my bike beside the back door. Mom and my brother were both in, but still the house was pitch black. We had a big garden which, with Dad away, had now basically become a jungle. I guessed the insects in there must have liked it that way, and they were making one heck of a racket to show it. The sky was dark, but the pink crepe myrtle tree in the corner of the garden seemed artificially bright, like some kind of tacky toy.
“Mo-om!”
I went inside, turning on the lights in the kitchen to find the table set with plates of food, covered in plastic wrap. In the living room Mom was lying on the sofa, snoring peacefully. The coffee table was strewn with Korean drama DVDs and crossword magazines.
I put a hand on Mom’s shoulder and shook her lightly. Her snoring stopped, and she let out a strange gurghh sound from her throat as she opened her eyes.
“Ah . . . Ah, you’re back.” She sat up heavily. “Oh goodness, it’s dark already! You must be hungry. Dinner’s all ready.”
“You just stay sleeping, Mom, it’s fine. Listen, if you’re not feeling good, you don’t have to make dinner, honestly. I can always just pick something up on the way home.”
“No, no, no takeout, it’s not good for you,” Mom said as she got up from the sofa and began walking unsteadily toward the kitchen.
“Honestly, Mom, sit down. I’ll do it.”
I pulled at her arm so she sank back on the sofa, then draped a light gauze blanket over her. Thinking the room seemed a little chilly, I looked at the air conditioner remote to see it was set to 64 degrees.
I don’t really understand what menopausal disorder is, but it seems like a terrible thing to happen to a person. Mom can be just eating dinner in a normal way when she’ll suddenly break out in such a sweat that her hair will get as soaked as if she’d just come out of the shower, or else she’ll suddenly clutch at her chest as if she’s going to be sick. I’ve never known Mom to be ill in bed before, not even when I was little, so at first it was a real shock. I thought she might be dying or something.
Since Mom became ill, our house has grown messier and messier. I try to help with the cleaning, but even when I copy exactly what Mom used to do, it just never gets as clean as when she does it. However bad Mom feels, though, she still makes dinner for us every day, saying that’s her “last vestige of pride as a mother.” She’s had to give up her part-time job in the supermarket, though. She says it’s because it’s too physically tough now she’s got this menopausal disorder, and I’m sure that’s true, but my guess is that there’s another reason, which is that she’s worried about my brother.
The microwave beeped, and I removed the plate. Taking off the cling wrap, I saw it was meatloaf with egg inside. Yay! I thought. This was one of Mom’s special dishes, my favorite. It used to be my brother’s favorite, too, and there was a portion laid out on the table for him as well. But it would most likely stay there untouched. The only things my brother would eat now were brown rice and steamed vegetables. He got up earlier than any of us and prepared his food for the day, put it into Tupperware containers, and then took it to his room to eat alone. Even those things he only ate the tiniest amount of, so his once-pudgy body had become super thin.
It was now fully dark, but the laundry Mom had put out to dry this morning was still hanging on the line on the balcony, so I went to bring it in. My brother was still there with his binoculars glued to his eyes, looking in the direction of the riverbank.
“What are you looking at?” I asked, yanking the clothes free from the pegs, knowing full well that if Mom saw me doing it this way I’d be in trouble.
“I am regarding the sinful acts of foolish individuals.”
My brother came out with these words at such speed and with such a monotone, it too
k me a while to convert what he’d said into something that actually had a meaning.
“What kind of sinful acts?”
“Money, sex, violence, et cetera.”
This was the first time I’d ever heard my brother say the word “sex.” The way he came out with it so casually, without any embarrassment, took me so much aback that I threw the clothes I was holding in my arms through the open door to my room all at once. Also, I knew violence was bad, but I figured money and sex were kind of important and necessary, because they helped us survive.
“As soon as the Antarctic ice sheet starts to melt, this river will overflow. This house, this entire town, will be swept away by the flood,” my brother pronounced, seeming very pleased at the prospect.
“If this house gets swept away, Dad’s gonna be really upset,” I said, but my brother ignored me.
“The 2035 total solar eclipse will herald the next paradigm shift. We must be sure to mend our ways before then.”
Sometimes the things my brother said made no sense to me, but that wasn’t a recent development. He had been that way since we were small; basically, he was mega-smart from the moment he was born. Mom said he’d done everything much earlier than other kids—turning over in his sleep, growing teeth, walking, talking, writing and reading. At home we had a poster we’d got free from the bank with the names of all the Japanese administrative districts and the location of their capitals, as well as the names of countries around the world and their capital cities, and my brother had memorized all of it by the time he was three. When he got into elementary school, he read through his textbooks in the first week and memorized the entire contents of those, too. Both Mom and Dad are of average intelligence levels, or maybe even below average, so everyone was pretty surprised by my brother’s genius-like leanings and wondered where on earth they could have come from.
He used to come home from school crying because the lessons were way too easy for him and he found them unspeakably boring, so from the third year of elementary school on, my parents started sending him to cram school. The cram school in question was attended by kids preparing to pass the entrance exam for elite private schools, and it cost loads of money. That was when Mom began working at the supermarket, taking on a part-time job there to help pay for his extra lessons. I was in my last year of nursery school, but even so, I remember it well. After regular nursery had finished, I would go into the after-nursery club, looking out at the garden as it grew slowly dark, waiting for Mom to collect me.
When we got home, I’d have a rushed dinner and bath, and then get into bed, only to be woken up again just after ten in the evening when I’d go with Mom to collect my brother from the station on his way back from cram school. Mom was too scared to leave me in the house alone, so she’d strap me half-asleep into the child seat of her bike, and we’d ride to the station together. I would be desperate to get back to sleep, and it was freezing cold. In fact, there was basically nothing about those trips to the station not to hate, but I went because Mom promised that on the way back she’d buy me a red-bean-paste bun, the kind that she never usually allowed me to have. At the station, there were always lots of mothers waiting for their kids to come back from cram school.
“Your son is such a bright little boy!” they’d say. “And what a cute little girl you’ve got as well. I’m sure she’ll turn out to be very bright, too!”
Mom would always brush off their compliments, but she seemed over the moon when people said that kind of stuff. But hearing it made me feel angry. Even then, I knew full well that I wasn’t ever going to be “very bright.”
When my brother, who was always top of his class throughout cram school, was nearing the end of elementary school, he began preparing for entrance exams for all the top private schools. Staying up until the middle of the night studying every day, he found it hard to wake up in the morning, so Dad would prepare hot, wet towels to press against my brother’s neck.
“There’s a big artery here, see,” he used to say. “If you send plenty of nice hot warm blood to your head, you’ll feel nice and awake.” I would watch them through the door of the room, brushing my teeth in silence.
Unsurprisingly, my brother got into the best school in the area, a combined middle and high school, with the top examination score in his year. It was around this time that he began talking to me and the rest of the family in a weirdly distant and formal way, and, apart from the times he was eating, he always had his head in a book.
He’d begin conversations with me and Mom about whatever it was that he was immersed in at that moment, like, “Something that occurred to me reading Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is . . .” or “Ludwig II of Bavaria, who commissioned Neuschwanstein Castle, was in fact . . .” or “The Meiji Revolution is often referred to as a ‘revolution without bloodshed,’ but that’s actually a total falsehood because . . .”
Mom, Dad, and I couldn’t engage with what he was saying in any proper way, so we’d just smile vacantly in response. Maybe he realized that there was nobody in this house who he could have a decent conversation with, because he gradually began to speak less and less.
He didn’t have to wear a uniform but always wore exactly the same outfit: a white shirt and jeans. The only thing that changed was the length of his shirtsleeves, depending on the season. Even when he was in high school, he wore the clothes Mom bought for him without ever expressing an opinion about them. Though it was hard for me to get my head around it, it genuinely seemed as if my brother had literally no interest in what clothes he wore. Equally crazy to me was the fact that he went to an all-boys’ school. However clever he was, the idea that he was content to spend six whole years surrounded only by boys was unfathomable to me.
Once, I went along with Mom to an arts festival held at my brother’s school and found the whole place full of boys just like my brother. Looking at them all from a distance, it was as if the whole school was made up of clones of the same person. Everyone wore glasses, had the same haircut, was shy and dweeby-looking, and spoke quietly at high speed. If someone had asked me to find a boy to have a crush on from among them, I’d have been at a complete loss.
After a lot of persuasion from Mom, my brother would occasionally help me study for my own high-school entrance exams. I really hated those sessions. My brother would just explain at machine-gun speed the way he’d got his head around the problem in question. It seemed he had no idea that people like me, who could have something explained to them three times very slowly and still not get it, even existed in this world.
At the same time that I got into the second-worst school in the area, my brother got into the country’s top university to study medicine, which was apparently one of the hardest courses to get into. Dad wasn’t really the type to show his emotions, but when my brother got into Tokyo University he seemed totally over the moon. He went around telling everyone in his company about how his son had got in on his first try—to the point that his boss had to call him in and give him a talking-to.
My brother had always been weird, but after entering college he became even weirder. For a start, he began leaving the food Mom made him, which he’d previously wolfed down with such obvious enjoyment. He refused to eat meat. He stopped using a cell phone and wouldn’t go near the microwave, saying that electromagnetic waves were bad for your health. He would sit for extended periods of time in his room with his legs crossed and his eyes shut, and pictures of men with Indian-style beards appeared on the walls of his room. He started to do his own laundry separately from the rest of ours, using a box of soap flakes he’d picked up somewhere or other. Their strange smell would get on the clothes of anyone who used the washing machine after he had. When I complained about this to him, he said, “Do you realize, Nana, that if you continue to use synthetic laundry soap, toxic particles will build up in your body, causing your future children to become sick?”
It felt like he was trying to threaten me or something.
“Yusuke’s being real
ly weird recently,” I said to Mom one day.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “He’s gone and got himself all into environmental issues. You know what he’s like! Once he gets something in his head, he can’t think about anything else.”
I’d once heard someone on TV say that all mothers spoil their sons rotten. Now I realized my own mother was absolutely no exception.
It was just before the May holidays that my brother didn’t come home. For the first day or two, Mom was pretty relaxed about it, saying stuff like, “Oh well, what can you expect from students!,” “Boys will be boys!,” “Maybe he’s found himself a girlfriend!,” and those kinds of things, but when a whole week passed without a word from him, she began to get worried and called Dad, who put all his work on hold and rushed back home halfway across the country. My brother didn’t have a cell phone, nor did he have any real friends to speak of—or none that we knew of anyway. The school had no idea where he had gone. So, at a total loss, Mom and Dad filed a missing-person report. A month later, though, we still had no leads at all.
One day, I went into my brother’s room to borrow an English dictionary and found all these great stacks of books like anthills, covering so much of the floor space it was hard to find anywhere to step. I approached his desk, knocking over anthills left and right as I went, and found a single book sitting on top of it. On its cover was a picture of the guy with the piercing gaze that my brother had stuck photos of all over his wall. I picked it up and opened it. Its first page was blank except for the words:
ABANDON THE PAST. LIVE THE NOW.
I wondered if my brother had the kind of past that needed to be “abandoned.” He’d spent his whole life happily chowing down the burgers and potato croquettes Mom made for him, being kept warm and cozy by Dad, and studying. That was it.