So We Look to the Sky

by Misumi Kubo

  Taoka said, “It’s a little early, but happy Christmas,” and handed me a big box beautifully wrapped in Christmas paper.

  It was the model train from before.

  “Remember to brush your teeth and get to bed early,” he shouted, sticking his head out of the car window, and drove off, back in the direction of town.

  I kind of knew that if it had been just some regular rich kid who had taken a serious interest in my future without having any obligation to do so, then I wouldn’t have trusted him as much as I did Taoka. It was the darkness Taoka carried around with him that meant that someone like me who’d grown up in the projects could feel as close to him as I did.

  After thinking on it for a while, I decided I’d try working for him for a month and see how it went. Akutsu and I both arranged to cut our shifts short by two hours and spent that time studying instead. Akutsu said she found the temptation of the TV too much when she was at home, so she asked me to study with her in a nearby cafe. As a thank-you, she paid for me to use the unlimited-drink bar.

  “How do you read this?” Akutsu showed me a kanji on the printout she was working on.

  “We learned that in the first year of middle school.”

  “Okay. I’ll write that I can’t read it.” The printout was already bathed in little red writing, but she somehow found a space and printed can’t read this in even tinier letters.

  “Shit, I didn’t realize it was this late! I’ve got to go and make dinner.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot. Here.” Avoiding my eyes, Akutsu passed a plastic Tupperware box from her bag across the table. “This is for your gran, from my mom. It’s simmered pumpkin.”

  She started erasing something furiously, and, although she was holding the paper flat, it quickly grew crumpled.

  “Thanks,” I said. When I picked up the box, I felt it was still warm.

  Now that my shift at the store was shorter, I could be at home for dinner, which was a great help. It seemed like my gran was getting more senile every day, and she’d started disappearing out of the house in the evenings, sneaking out when I was in the kitchen chopping leeks or whatever, without even bothering to put her shoes on. When I went to look for her, I’d inevitably find her sitting on a bench by the swamp, or crouching down in the parking lot, muttering something to herself over and over. I’d take hold of one of her arms, spindly as a dried twig, and say, “Let’s go home,” and then she’d allow herself to be escorted back, but it wasn’t long before she’d make a break for it again. It had gotten to the point where she was escaping multiple times in the few hours between dusk and the time she got into bed, so I started to lock the door to keep her in. But sometimes in the middle of the night she’d wake up and start pounding on the rusty door with a strength I found frightening. When I told her to stop, that she’d wake the neighbors, she’d look at me with a tragic face, and say, “Yoshio isn’t here.”

  Now, in addition to the letters asking us to pay the rent, health insurance, and utility bills and the reminders from school that my fees were late, envelopes addressed to my mother from a private loan company had started showing up. Then phone calls started coming in the evening, warning us that the repayments were overdue. My mom was supposed to be taking care of the rent, utilities, and my school fees. I tried calling her cell phone. It didn’t go through.

  Until now, the money I made from my jobs had just about covered the cost of food for me and my gran, but her superhuman appetite meant we got through everything so quickly, and we were starting to feel the strain. Then the debt collectors called us a bunch of times late at night. I disconnected the phone and continued studying.

  It turned out that while I was at school my gran was unlocking the door and wandering around the grounds. I only found this out because one particular day, she found her way into one of the apartments on the floor below whose door had been left unlocked, opened the fridge, and helped herself to its contents.

  The moment I got back, the man whose apartment it was started hurling abuse at me. When I went down to collect her, I found her sitting in front of someone else’s TV, munching on rice crackers.

  “If it happens again, I’ll throw the old hag in the swamp!” he snarled, but when he saw me standing there looking so wiped out and my gran cackling away at the TV, he lowered his voice and asked, “What’s your mom up to these days?”

  Not long after, I got home from school to find the bankbook and personal seal, which I kept inside the plastic tub where we stored our rice for safekeeping, had disappeared. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was visibly less rice than there had been that morning. I jumped on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could to an ATM, where I used the bank card I kept in my wallet to check the balance of my account.

  Nothing. All the money I’d saved up little by little from my various jobs had been withdrawn. I got on my bike and rode to the apartment by the river where my mom lived. I climbed the metal staircase, my feet making an unpleasant clanging sound, and saw that the surname that had been there the last time had been taken down from the nameplate. I peered inside through the crack in the kitchen window and saw there was not a single piece of furniture left. All that remained were the dirty cream curtains on the windows.

  Back at home, an hour after I’d served her a sizeable dinner, my gran started shouting that she was hungry. I tried to explain that she’d just eaten, but in her current state that information meant nothing. I cooked more rice, made rice balls, and gave them to her. There was only a little rice left. I knew I had to prioritize my gran’s hunger over my own.

  In a bid to forget about my growling stomach, I would try solving equations and drumming English vocab into my head, though I knew it wasn’t really a good substitute. One day, I stupidly forgot to lock the door, and my gran, seeing I was wrapped up in my schoolwork, took the opportunity to slip outside. I was weak from a lack of food, and tearing after her was beyond me. Instead I lay stretched out on the fraying tatami. Suddenly, I remembered the model train set Taoka had given me, still sitting in the top of the closet where I’d left it. I ripped off the paper, opened up the box, and linked the pieces of track together. I plugged it in and pushed down the lever, and the little Nozomi train shot forward. Noisily, it raced around and around the short track. That was it—that was all it did. Here was a toy I would have given my back teeth for as a kid, and I couldn’t take even a scrap of joy from it. I turned off the power supply and lay back on the tatami. The wind came whistling into the room through the cracks in the badly fitted window frame. Maybe, I thought, maybe Gran will come home of her own accord, but the thought only lasted a second. I got to my feet and went unsteadily out the door to look for her.

  When I got to school after my morning paper route, Takumi was sitting at his desk. I watched how, each time anyone came into the classroom and saw him, their eyes grew round with shock. Then they’d either ignore him entirely or watch him from afar. It seemed like it wasn’t just me who had no idea how to deal with him.

  At break, Nana went up to Takumi’s desk and began talking at him. Takumi didn’t look at her but nodded, making an inscrutable face. Then Nana went away, and Takumi came over to me.

  “Thanks for the handouts,” he said.

  “How nice it must be to have so many people looking out for you.” I injected my words with as much bitterness as I could, but Takumi just stared at me hard and said nothing.

  * * *

  “You are all here on this earth because your parents loved one another.”

  That afternoon we went to the gym to listen to a lecture by an ob-gyn doctor I’d seen a bunch of times on TV. She was a fat, middle-aged woman with a very wide jaw, who went on and on about contraception, abortion, AIDS, and how precious life was. Needless to say, everyone was dozing or sneakily reading manga or playing with their phones. It felt like not a single person in the gym was listening to what she had to say.

  “God only gives us challenges that He believes we are capable of overcoming.”


  The doctor had informed us at the beginning that she was a Christian. As her speech went on, she got more and more into what she was saying, and her voice grew really loud. Occasionally, her microphone made horrible squeaking and thumping noises.

  I sensed some kind of commotion behind me, so I looked around to see the boys on either side of Takumi nudging and poking him.

  “What about you, Saito? Did you use ‘adequate protection’?”

  “With all that lovin’ there must be a few of your kids knocking around, no?”

  Takumi was staring straight ahead with a tense expression I’d never seen him pull before. I watched as a graying gym shoe came flying out of nowhere and struck him right on the back of his head. Taking their cue, the other kids began pelting him with shoes or balls of scrunched-up paper. Still Takumi said nothing, just sat there staring straight ahead. I stood up and went over to him, forcing my way through the metal folding chairs. I took one glance at the boy next to him, grinning as he dug his finger into Takumi’s cheek, and swung at him with all the strength I had, my fist catching him under his jaw. Still in a seated position on top of his chair, he went sailing back onto the floor in slow motion.

  “Every child chooses the parents he or she is to be born to, and the life he or she is going to lead,” the woman on stage said in an excited tone. Her words took away any hope I might have had of checking the violent impulses bubbling up inside me. My ears began ringing like tuning forks, drowning out the voice of the speaker and the shouts and shrieks of the other kids around me. Again and again I punched and kicked at the kids trying to hold me back, and those pointing at Takumi and laughing. Eventually, Notchy, looking like she was on the verge of tears, came up with the PE teacher. The PE teacher grabbed my arms from behind and the two of them dragged me out of the gym. I heard people whistling and cheering. There was just one thought going around my head: Everyone, everyone in this whole fucking place is a fucking idiot.

  “With your grades, you could get a school recommendation for college, you know! You shouldn’t go doing that sort of thing, or you’ll blow all your chances!” Notchy was in tears as she told me off in the teachers’ room. “And just when Takumi’s finally come back to school and everything!”

  Her mascara was running, forming black patches under her eyes.

  At last, she let me go, saying, “If you’re ever in any kind of trouble, you have to just tell me, okay?”

  I hurried back home to discover my gran was gone. I turned on the rice cooker, dissolved miso paste in hot water to make soup, without any of the usual wakame seaweed or tofu or anything, then dashed out. Notchy’s lecture had gone on so long I didn’t have the time to be looking for my gran. That day, I was supposed to be at the shop for three hours to cover for Mrs. Aoki, a part-timer whose kid was ill, but I was over half an hour late, which earned me a dressing-down from the manager. When I opened my wallet during my break to buy a rice ball, I saw there was no money left. I put the rice ball with its salty plum filling back on the rack where it had come from.

  I had no idea what to do about the fact that my mom had disappeared, or what my gran and I were going to eat tomorrow. I didn’t know who I was supposed to talk to when I ran out of money. I didn’t have the courage to look a person in the eye and tell them I was in deep, deep trouble. Each time I opened the cash register, my eyes would be drawn to the row of notes.

  I somehow managed to get through my hours of work, dizzy with hunger, and went to the back of the shop. The clutch bag the manager always carried around under his arm was lying on the sofa. It was unzipped, and I could see his cell phone, his keys, and his bulging wallet poking out. Before I knew what I was doing, my hand was reaching toward the wallet. I opened the clasp slowly, so it wouldn’t make a sound. It was like the shoplifting I’d done when I was a kid—I didn’t feel guilty in the least. And then the manager had come in through the back entrance of the store without me seeing him and was standing there staring at me as I held his wallet. I watched as his sweat-beaded face turned puce before my eyes, then threw the wallet down onto the sofa, dashed out the back door, and jumped onto my bike. I pedaled so fast that the wind rushed through my ears with a metallic ring.

  I made it back to the projects, and I was starting to climb the stairs to my block when I heard what sounded like lots of voices coming from above. It hadn’t been raining before, at least not that I’d noticed, but with every step I took now, drops of water came flying down from above, soaking into my sneakers. When I reached the fifth floor, I saw a crowd of people standing in front of the door to my apartment. Catching sight of me, the man from the apartment below started yelling.

  “It’s all come leaking into my room! It’s gonna ruin all my stuff!”

  A middle-aged woman stood next to him cast me a pitying look. There was a guy with a can of beer in hand, laughing as he peered into my apartment.

  “Your damn gran left the kitchen tap and the bath tap running and then started throwing water around the room with a bucket! She was throwing it off the balcony, too!”

  I rushed in through the door to find Akutsu mopping the kitchen floor with a towel. My gran was sitting in front of the blaring TV, laughing to herself. I apologized endlessly to the man from the apartment below, bowing so many times I lost count.

  “It’s compensation I want! Compensation!” he kept yelling, until another man dragged him away, saying, “Let’s deal with it tomorrow. Give the kid a break today.”

  “Don’t worry about the rest,” I said to Akutsu when they’d gone. “I’ll do it.”

  “Let me do the floor at least. You can’t deal with this all by yourself.”

  Akutsu kept on mopping the floor.

  I draped a blanket over my gran, who’d dropped off to sleep on the sofa, and lowered the volume of the TV. Looking at the coffee table, I saw a paper bag I hadn’t noticed earlier.

  “It was hanging on the door,” Akutsu said. From the bag, I drew out a slip of paper in Takumi’s handwriting. “This is for you, from my mom.” Nesting inside the big plastic lunchbox were heaps of rice balls, fried chicken, and omelet rolls.

  I gorged myself like I never had before. Akutsu said she’d had dinner already, but she still managed two of the rice balls before she got back to wiping the floor. When my stomach was full, I felt suddenly overcome by drowsiness. I asked Akutsu to wake me in five minutes and, slumped forward on the table, I fell into a deep sleep.

  “Hey! Your gran’s gone!” I woke to Akutsu’s voice in my ear. “I was just cleaning the bathroom, and then when I came back in here, she . . . she . . .”

  Akutsu looked ready to burst into tears.

  On the sofa where my gran had been lying was now only a rumpled blanket. I looked around the apartment, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Stepping into my sneakers, I headed outside, and Akutsu followed me. We ran around the projects looking for her, checking the parking lot, the staircases and landings of the other blocks, the communal gardens, but no luck. I even peered down at the surface of the swamp—right now, it seemed like anything was possible—but the only thing there was a narrow sliver of moon flickering on the surface of the water.

  I got on my bike, and Akutsu got on behind like it was the most normal thing in the world, wrapping her arms around me. We passed through the dark tunnel and started down the road leading down to town, passing the crematorium and coming out in front of the hospital. Just to be sure, I asked at the emergency room reception to see if they’d heard anything, but an exhausted-looking security guard waved me away. We came onto the big road that led to the station. Standing outside the doughnut shop was a group of boys from our class. Seeing me and Akutsu on the same bike they called out, “Ooh, look at you two! Lovebirds!”

  I stopped the bike and walked over to them. They took me in nervously.

  “You haven’t seen an old woman in a beige dress, about this tall, have you?”

  “Your gran?” one guy asked. My question seemed to have shocked him into taking me seri
ously.

  The guy next to him looked at me with equal earnestness and said, “Have you lost her?”

  I nodded limply, and the guy who’d spoken said, “I’ll ask around. At this hour, there’s a ton of people coming back from cram school and part-time jobs, so they might know something.” He took out his cell phone. Realizing I didn’t have a phone, he said, “If I hear anything, I’ll call Akutsu. I’ll keep an eye out on my way home!”

  We put the doughnut shop behind us, along with our classmates who were now typing into their phones with grave expressions, and began searching the town. When we passed the convenience store I glanced inside to see the manager standing alone at the cash register, and a long line of customers waiting.

  We came out beside the river and moved slowly along the bike path, looking at the wide stretch of land leading to the river. I was exhausted and parked my bike beside a vending machine. Akutsu bought a couple of cans of sweet red bean soup and handed one to me. We knelt down and drank the soup, feeling its sticky sugariness spread throughout our bodies.

  “Look, it’s late. You should get on my bike and go on home. Your family’ll be worried.”

  Ignoring what I’d said, Akutsu said, “Do you remember those mugwort sweets your grandma used to make? They were amazing.”

  In the spring my gran had always gone out picking mugwort, which she used in making sticky green rice-dumplings full of sweet red bean paste. Once, when I was a kid, she’d taken me up a mountain at the edge of town, saying the shrine at the top was full of the stuff. I’d helped her pick those green leaves for hours on end and had been so tired afterward that she’d given me a piggyback home. Once the sweets were done, my gran would take them around to Akutsu’s apartment and to other families in the projects. She also set a whole pile of them down in front of my dad’s memorial tablet, the only one in the family altar.