So We Look to the Sky

by Misumi Kubo

  With my scarf wrapped several times around my neck, I got on my bike and set off down the bicycle path in the opposite direction from the station. I didn’t know why he never asked me to meet him at the station and instead specified some out-of-the-way spot, but I guessed he must have had his reasons. Besides, I knew that calling him out on it would only end in a fight, so I tried not to think too much about it and concentrated instead on getting to the specified meeting point as quickly as I could. The big bridge of the next town came into sight. I parked my bike by the path and walked across the wide expanse of riverbed.

  He was sitting on a battered wooden bench by the baseball field, slumped over in the same shabby plum-colored down coat he’d been wearing when I last saw him at the end of the year, his hands hanging down between his legs so they brushed his feet. Seeing me, he lifted his left hand and waved it. I stood in front of him and pulled out a little envelope. It was the kind of envelope that people put money in to give to kids at New Year, with a Hello Kitty picture on it—I’d been in a hurry when leaving the house and hadn’t had time to find anything more suitable. When I reached out to give it to him, he smiled a little, taking it into his outstretched hands. Then he put his hands together in a prayer of gratitude.

  “Bye,” I said and made to leave, but he grabbed my left arm. With sudden force, I shook his hand off me.

  “Look, I want this to be the last time, okay?”

  I lifted my face as I spoke. The piercing light of the winter sun, now nearing its zenith, made me wince, and I shut my eyes.

  “Okay,” he said. I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed how gray he looked all of a sudden or that the laces of his sneakers were so frayed they seemed as though they might fall to pieces at any minute. I turned my back to him and began to walk away.

  “Say hi to Takumi from me,” he shouted after me.

  I strode across the baseball field, pretending not to have heard.

  When we’d met, in the very beginning, he’d been working as a photographer’s assistant. He’d showed up at the maternity clinic where I was employed, asking for permission to shoot one of the births. Back then, he would work hard for a while to save up some money, then use it all to go off to India or Thailand or whatever. Even after we’d got together, there were several occasions when he disappeared off the radar. If he didn’t want to do something, he wouldn’t do it—that was the kind of person he was. At first I mistook that aspect of him for a kind of integrity. After he was kicked out of his apartment for failing to make his rent, we fell into living together, and then I got pregnant and had Takumi. To get by, I had to put Takumi into day care and start working almost immediately. His cameras and equipment gathered dust in the corner of the room. When I dragged myself home from work, exhausted, collecting Takumi from day care and returning to our apartment, I’d find him stretched out asleep, the fan and the TV left on.

  It wasn’t him that changed—it was me.

  I started to lecture him. “You’re a father now!” I would practically shout. “Isn’t it time you got a proper job?” Claiming the moral high ground like that always left me with a sticky lump inside. I’d married him out of admiration for his unfettered way of life, but the moment a child came on the scene, I’d tried to foist the responsibilities of a husband and father onto him. Until that point, I’d always claimed to have such an enlightened view of life, saying that the housework should be done by whoever found it easier and the living costs should come from whoever could afford them. But now, without ever stopping to properly consider how I wanted me, him, and newborn Takumi to get along in this world, in fact without even really exploring the available options, I flew at him, brandishing all the tenets of common sense that I’d had drummed into me throughout my life.

  We went through a phase of furious shouting matches, then a phase of picking holes in everything the other did, before finally settling on ignoring one another entirely, despite still living in the same house. At one point he got into producing organic vegetables. On another occasion he decided he was going to be a translator and started studying for that. His approach to life, which involved doing exactly what he wanted at that particular time, hadn’t changed at all. But nothing he did ever yielded results. Meanwhile, I was gaining experience as a midwife, improving little by little. The year I set up my maternity clinic at home, he announced that he’d found a younger woman and left. My abiding memory of that period of my life is the sound of Takumi’s sobs from a distant room mingling with the wailing of the babies I’d just delivered.

  “Is he doing okay?” he called out at my back now, as I strode across the field. I turned around and shouted back.

  “Why don’t you go and see for yourself?”

  He hadn’t been to see Takumi once since leaving. I hadn’t banned him from coming or anything. He just stubbornly refused. If I asked him about it, he’d come out with the kind of things I’d never expected to hear him say, like “I’m too bad a father to face him at the moment.”

  I had robbed my son of his father, and robbed his father of his innocence. The guilt at having destroyed my family was forever there at the back of my mind, like a pile of smoldering embers. Every now and then, a gust of wind would come along and rouse the embers into flames. Cursing myself for always giving in to him, for always handing over money so readily whenever he said he needed it, I ran up the steep lip of the riverbank and onto the bicycle path.

  “We’re fully booked all the way through till April, Doctor! I’m not seeing much evidence of the declining birthrate around these parts, I’ve got to say.” Eyes glued to the computer screen, Mitchan let out a big sigh.

  I knew to what it was we owed this popularity. Maternity wards were closing their doors one after another, from the hospital in the next town to the big one in the neighboring prefecture, and there had been a sharp rise in expectant mothers looking for a place to give birth. Not that we could accept everyone—because we had no medical equipment, we weren’t allowed to take on women with any kind of medical complaints or those whose births had been deemed high-risk, so whenever anyone like that made inquiries we had to politely turn them away, however guilty we felt. Of course, when I’d first started the clinic, the flow of customers had been sparse at best, and I’d spend each day worrying about how on earth I was going to make ends meet, so the fact that now so many women were expressing a desire to give birth here should have felt like a dream come true.

  I had just given the babies their morning bath, going through the motions as quickly as I could, when a young expecting mother named Mrs. Nishimura turned up for an appointment. She was wearing a knitted dress of soft white wool with stripy legwarmers. I had it written in my notes that she was thirty-four, but she didn’t look a day over thirty. She’d only just been told for sure by the gynecologist that she was pregnant, but she was so determined that she wanted to have her baby in this clinic that she’d already made an appointment for the birth. Mitchan and I asked her a bunch of in-depth questions about her physical condition, and then explained the options for the different types of deliveries we offered here. Mrs. Nishimura took out a notepad from her bag and wrote down everything we said in small neat handwriting.

  “I’d like the birth to be as natural as possible,” Mrs. Nishimura said, sitting perfectly upright and pinning her eyes on me. Most of the women we saw here had the exact same reason for selecting this clinic. I said nothing. After a bit, Mitchan raised her head from the woman’s notes and looked at me expectantly.

  “I understand that,” I said. “The thing is, and of course I’m not saying this to scare you, but we do have to prioritize both your life and that of the baby. You need to be aware that if something happens that we’re unable to deal with here, we will have to take you to the hospital. We have an arrangement in place with a particular hospital nearby.”

  “I don’t want to give birth in a hospital.”

  The sun streaming in from the window made her light-brown eyes glisten. The sheer directness of her wo
rds and the force with which she spoke them set me back a little.

  “Since before I got pregnant I’ve been taking great care with the food I’ve been eating, for the baby’s sake. I’ve been on a strict vegetarian diet. I heard you cater here to the culinary requirements of your clients, and that’s the reason I decided to give birth here. I’d like to have my meals while I’m here made with only organic vegetables, as they have been throughout the pregnancy.”

  Saying this, Mrs. Nishimura removed a leaflet about an organic vegetable delivery service from a transparent folder she’d brought with her, and placed it on the table. I felt Mitchan’s toe nudge my calf under the table.

  Just as she had said, it was our policy at the clinic to try, wherever possible, to cater to our patients’ wishes. That included not just food, but other aspects as well. People who didn’t eat meat or fish would be served meals without meat or fish, and people pursuing a macrobiotic diet would be served macrobiotic meals. If our patients told us they wanted us to hang blackout curtains on the windows so they could give birth in a pitch-black room, and if they wanted CDs of dolphin calls playing during their delivery, then we arranged that it would be so. Even requests that at first blush seemed somewhat demanding or greedy, we still did our best to oblige. The more the women had the sense of being accepted when they were giving birth, the more their bodies would naturally relax, and the smoother the delivery would go. In fact, not only did we go out of our way to comply with women’s wishes, but we also encouraged our patients to make use of the range of various treatments we had on offer to help relax the body and mind, such as aromatherapy, moxibustion, and acupressure.

  Time and time again, I would repeat the same things to expectant mothers: Keep your body warm at all times. Don’t put on too much weight. Try and walk as much as you can each day. At times I felt as if I were on a constant loop—much like the moon, which every month would wax full, causing so many women to go “naturally” into labor. Even in cases where people followed my advice to the letter, and there were no physical problems with either mother or baby, some births simply didn’t go well. Something they’d told us over and over again at midwifery school was that however much experience you had, no two births were ever identical, and that was certainly true.

  That said, over time, I’d developed the ability to be able to predict, based on factors like the woman’s personality and way of life, how the delivery would go. I knew that when assisting the births of a highly strung, finicky type like Mrs. Nishimura, I would have to treat her with kid gloves, making her understand the things I needed to get across without being seen in any way to criticize her or negate what she was saying. I also needed to work on trying to soften her rigid way of thinking as far in advance as possible before the birth. That was another important task of the midwife.

  “You’re fine to go on eating as you are now, and we’ll certainly do all that we can to meet your wishes while you’re staying with us. But will you promise me one thing?”

  “What’s that?” Mrs. Nishimura cocked her head like a sparrow and looked straight at me.

  “From today, I want you to try to keep away from the internet.”

  I saw Mrs. Nishimura neatly print the words no internet on her pad.

  “Your eyes soon get tired when you’re pregnant, and the net only makes them worse,” I said, not mentioning the real reason for my prescription. The information on the net was a real mixed bag, and perhaps because they were both mentally and physically more delicate, expectant mothers somehow had a knack for stumbling on the worst stuff. In the past, I’d seen women beside themselves with worry about diseases that affected one in every 300,000 children or those who became convinced, right before they were due to give birth, that a massive earthquake was about to strike and they mustn’t by any means go into labor. Women like Mrs. Nishimura, who were very particular about what they ate, what they wore, and all those other kinds of lifestyle choices, were particularly susceptible.

  “If I follow the instructions you’ve given me, I’ll be able to have a natural birth, yes?”

  Mrs. Nishimura shut her notepad and smiled up at me. I shot her a smile back that I hoped was open to multiple interpretations.

  Natural, natural, natural. Every time I heard that word come out of the mouths of one of the host of expectant mothers who passed through these doors I would find myself swallowing a whole bunch of other words. I felt hugely uncomfortable about how it sounded coming from their lips—how casual it seemed, how flimsy it was—yet I was unable to express that feeling of mine linguistically. I knew that, to put it bluntly, embracing “totally natural” births meant embracing all those lives that would be “naturally” eliminated by such a thing. I knew the feeling that the phrase conjured up for them—something soft, fluffy, and dreamy, like organic cotton. I suppose in a sense that wasn’t exactly wrong, but the truth was that even natural labor conducted in the presence of all kinds of sophisticated medical devices sometimes involved the ripping of warm flesh, the spurting of hot blood. From time to time both mother and baby lost their lives. Regardless of the advances made in medical technology, giving birth was still life-threatening.

  Mitchan and I stood at the door to wave off Mrs. Nishimura in her chocolate-colored down coat. Once she’d rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, Mitchan turned to me and said, with an indignant sort of look, “Don’t you ever just want to tell them the truth, straight up?”

  Stooping to pick up a scrap of paper by the doorstep that had blown in, I feigned innocence.

  “What do you mean?”

  “C’mon, Doctor!” she said, giving me a gentle poke with her elbow. “I think if it was up to me, I’d explain everything to them, in painstaking, gory detail.”

  “She just has to listen to what we’ll teach her in the prenatal classes. If I spent that kind of time on every single person, we wouldn’t be able to keep this business going. Save the laborious stuff for the birth itself! That’s more than enough, I say.”

  Mitchan widened her eyes at me and blinked. “You’re really surprisingly cynical, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean? We’ve got to make a living, haven’t we? Doing this job.”

  The fact was, when I’d been Mitchan’s age I’d gone through a phase of trying my best to bring my patients around to my way of thinking. But the more I tried to explain in a theoretical, heavy-handed way what labor involved, the more the women’s faces would freeze up. This then manifested itself in hitches in the deliveries.

  In fact, it had dawned on me only very recently that the things I truly wanted to get across to others were actually few and far between, and they didn’t have to be conveyed in a loud voice or even in words at all. I only wished I’d realized that sooner. The knowledge may well have come in handy with my marriage, too.

  I was standing in the kitchen eating the ham sandwich Mitchan had rustled up for me as a late-night snack, washing it down with coffee. Midway through, I bit into a glob of mustard that made my nose tingle and my eyes water—and which sent my sleepiness packing.

  Whenever the full moon was drawing near, the clinic would start to get busy. There’s no real medical explanation why people tend to go into labor at this time. Of course, over half of the human body is made up of water, and that proportion increases in pregnancy with all the blood and amniotic fluid, so there are some who say that, being so similar to seawater in its constitution, that water also falls under the sway of the moon’s gravitational pull. Who knows? I suspect most doctors would ask me to first prove my assertions with solid statistical evidence before they’d even discuss it with me, but my thinking is that it’s a midwife’s job to come face to face with the mysteries of the body that can’t be fathomed through numbers and figures alone.

  In the absence of major mishaps, there would be two babies born before dawn. Mitchan had also been working through the night, assisting the deliveries without a dinner break.

  Just past midnight, the birth I was overseeing finally
reached its conclusion. I stepped into the kitchen, and in a single gulp drained the cold coffee left in my mug from earlier. As I was doing so, Mitchan came running into the room looking very concerned.

  “Doctor, can you come and look at Mrs. Wakabayashi’s baby?”

  I followed her back into the room at the end of the hall. Mrs. Wakabayashi was sitting up, leaning forward, her upper body draped over a big red cushion. Seeing us come into the room, her face softened in relief. Her husband was standing behind her with a grim look on his face.

  “I’ll just check how the baby’s doing, okay?”

  I had Mrs. Wakabayashi lie down on her back, then rolled up her T-shirt and wiped the sweat from her stomach with a towel, using the monitor to check the baby’s heartbeat. The contractions were coming at five-minute intervals, and each time they arrived the baby’s heartbeat would drop. Mrs. Wakabayashi, who had been battling with the agony of contractions since she’d arrived yesterday morning, was nearing the limits of her physical endurance. Dusky rings had appeared under her eyes from the lack of food and sleep. I put on a pair of surgical gloves and checked her cervix. It was still clamped shut. By this stage, it should have been more dilated.

  “Mrs. Wakayabashi, you’ve done a magnificent job. But the thing is, the baby’s getting tired. I think it’s best to go to the hospital, just in case. I’ll call an ambulance right away, okay?”

  Mrs. Wakayabashi looked at me for a while, then nodded silently. She looked utterly wiped out. Unlike Mrs. Wakayabashi, there were some women who wouldn’t have assented so readily, despite the state they were in. They knew that if they were taken to the hospital it was likely they’d be given a cesarean, despite specifically choosing this clinic because they wanted a “natural” birth. But if there was ever any kind of trouble, we took the women to a hospital we partnered with so they could be operated on as and if necessary.

  “You see!”