So We Look to the Sky

by Misumi Kubo

  Dr. Liu had such an immaculately handsome face that Mitchan was convinced he’d had plastic surgery in Korea and, unsurprisingly, his session was a great hit with expectant mothers. He must have been my senior, but with his blemish-free face and full head of jet-black hair, he looked considerably younger.

  Once, Mitchan had asked Dr. Liu the secret to his youthfulness.

  “Chinese herbal medicine developed because the ancient Chinese emperor wanted to be immortal,” he had replied, looking her right in the eyes, his Japanese a little more faltering than usual. “If a person will keep on taking it for years as I have done, it only stands to reason he will hold on to his youth.”

  “No wonder the women all fall at his feet if he looks at them like that!” Mitchan had reported to me excitedly afterward—and this from a woman who would say openly that what she valued most in men was broad shoulders and muscles rather than a handsome face. “Honestly, he could sell them anything he wanted!”

  Now, the same Dr. Liu was sitting in front of me, inspecting the tongue I’d stuck out for him. In Chinese medicine you can apparently understand a lot about a person’s physical condition by looking at his or her tongue.

  “You’ve been going without sleep again, haven’t you? Listen, it doesn’t matter if you don’t actually sleep, but it’s important to lie down. Even for a short time. Think of it as saving up a little strength. If you continue just using it all up, you’ve no hope of making it through to your twilight years.” He lowered his thick crop of eyelashes and started writing something on the paper on his desk. “Your body’s screaming out for a rest, but still you ignore it,” and, saying this, he disappeared into the dispensary.

  I had started coming to see Dr. Liu at his pharmacy six months ago. That was after he had leaned over to me one day at the clinic where he’d come to give his class and said: “Never mind the health of the mothers-to-be. It’s yours I’m worried about.”

  He had a point. I felt tired all the time in a way I couldn’t seem to shake, and for a while I’d been getting dizzy spells and bad headaches. So for the last six months I’d been taking the medicine he prescribed for me. There hadn’t been any miraculous improvements in my condition, but it did seem as though the exhaustion and dread I felt upon waking were gradually easing.

  After he had finished mixing up the herbal medicine, Dr. Liu came back into the room carrying a tray with a pot and teacups and a small dish of pine nuts resting on it.

  “It’s not just you, either. Why do Japanese women feel the need to work so much? That’s the reason so many childbirths go wrong. It’s like you’re constantly revving the body’s engine while it’s out of gas. I guess you believe that so long as you can summon up the mental energy, your body will somehow find a way. But I warn you: do that at your age and you’ll shave years off your life. I can tell you that with absolute confidence. Isn’t there something you can do to reduce the burden placed on you? Take on more midwives or something?”

  “That’s not financially viable, unfortunately.”

  “Because you’re trying to keep staffing costs down? Because you want to be rich? Richer than you are now?”

  Smiling, Dr. Liu poured tea from the iron pot into small, jade-colored ceramic cups.

  I remarked how nice it smelled and Dr. Liu grinned, revealing his perfectly aligned, white teeth. He took a sip of his tea, then said, “It’s doesn’t do to torment your body by working too much.”

  The winter afternoon sun caught the steam rising from the teacup, lighting its gentle upward motion. It felt like a very long time since I’d taken the time to sit down and really enjoy a cup of tea.

  “The job of a midwife isn’t just to help make sure that babies are born safely, you know,” I began. Dr. Liu looked directly at me. “Both back when I was working in the hospital and now, there are a lot of babies that don’t make it. Many more than you’d expect.”

  His teacup still held aloft, Dr. Liu listened fixedly to me.

  “However hard you try, there are some that die almost immediately after they’re born. I start thinking about them, remembering their cold, stiff little bodies, and then I can’t sleep. I feel like I’ve got to do their share of living, too. Like I’ve got to live for the babies who never even had a chance at life.”

  “Hmm,” Dr. Liu said, still looking at me. He reached out to the small dish on the tray and crunched a couple of pine nuts. Then he tilted the dish in my direction to indicate I should do the same. I put a pine nut into my mouth, just as I’d been instructed, and bit down on it with my back teeth.

  “But it’s not your fault,” he said. “That’s just their lot in—” A car with a loudspeaker blasting out some promotional message moved down the street, drowning out the rest of Dr. Liu’s sentence.

  “Their lot in life,” I said, and fell silent.

  I didn’t have any confidence that I could explain this vague, confused feeling I had inside me to Dr. Liu in a way that he, as a Chinese person, could understand it. What he was trying to tell me—that the babies’ untimely deaths could be put down to their lot in life, their fate, their given lifespan, and that there was therefore nothing to be done about it—I’d heard this from other people. For whatever reason, the argument went, those babies had lived out their allotted time on earth in just a few short days. But if that were true, I needed someone to tell me why on earth they would be born into this world at all. That was what I would find myself wondering whenever I saw young parents clutching at the edge of the tiny coffin placed in front of them, their bodies convulsing with tears. There was no religious doctrine, no theory of past lives or reincarnation or any other New Age philosophy that could satisfy me on that point. I wanted someone, it didn’t matter who, to explain it to me in a way that would make me say, Ahhh, I get it. I understand what the meaning was to those babies’ short lives.

  “But it’s okay,” Dr. Liu said after a while. “You won’t be rushed off your feet for that much longer. A doctor studying reproductive science at the same university as me used to tell me that only around 20 percent of the sperm stored in the Shanghai sperm bank was healthy. The same goes for Japanese sperm. I’ve seen data to suggest that the sperm count of men in their twenties today is half that of men in their forties.”

  He drank down the rest of the tea left in his cup in a long gulp. I noticed his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

  “Soon there won’t be as many children born as there were. In Japan or in China. Then you’ll be able to take it more easy.”

  “If that really happens, I’ll be left high and dry! I’ve never had any other job!”

  “Don’t worry. If that happens, you can come and work here.”

  With a smile on his face, Dr. Liu looked me straight in the eye.

  Taken aback at the way my heartbeat had quickened, I hurriedly reached for a pine nut and put it into my mouth, remembering something Mitchan had once said.

  “So they say Dr. Liu came to Japan for a girl whom he’d met when she was studying in China,” she’d told me. “He was top of his class in medical school in China but gave it all up to get his Japanese doctor’s license. Can you imagine how hard that must have been! And then she jilted him and married a Japanese guy. Another doctor, no less! I guess he’s the type who’s got just about everything going for him but is enough of a romantic to throw it all away for love.”

  “Okay, well, if you could just fill out this form,” I told the woman in front of me, who was visiting the clinic for the first time. She was short and chubby, with shoulder-length dyed-brown hair curled into ringlets.

  She started to say something, but I interrupted.

  “I’ll be back when you’re done.” I hurried down the hall to the room where Mitchan was overseeing a delivery. Mrs. Hasegawa, who’d only just come in, was down on all fours, doing her best to weather the contractions. Both Mitchan and the woman’s husband were kneeling down beside her, rubbing her lower back. From her face, I could see she was in considerable pain but not yet at
her limit.

  “Doctor, how long will it go on like this?” she asked, look-ing up at me.

  “Well, you’ve still got a while to go. If all goes well, you may be holding your baby by midnight.”

  “I’m sick of these contractions already. It’s someone else’s turn.” She looked about to cry, and, as she spoke, she grabbed at the neckband of her husband’s T-shirt.

  He had a white towel wrapped around his head like a bandanna, and said, “Trust me, I’d trade places with you if I could,” then flashed a wry grin in my direction.

  “If you’ve still got the energy for that kind of talk, it means you’re still a ways away. I’ll come back and check on you in a bit.”

  Just as I was leaving the room, Mrs. Hasegawa suddenly let out a loud shriek.

  I turned around and smiled at her, “Okay, that’s more like it. Now we’re really getting started.”

  “What did I do to deserve such an evil doctor?” The woman glared at me with a frown.

  I went down the hall to check on the new woman. As I slid open the screen door to the room I heard a wail, like a child crying. Startled, I went in to find the same woman with her head down on the table, sobbing.

  “What! What’s happened! Where does it hurt?”

  “No, it’s not me. It’s that voice from the other room! She sounds like she’s in so much pain,” the woman said, hiccupping.

  As I stood there too astonished to react, the woman reached for a tissue, still sobbing, blew her nose loudly, then took a pocket mirror from her purse and rearranged her bangs.

  “Sorry, I’m really sorry. I’m Chie Nomura, Takumi’s homeroom teacher.” She stared at me, mascara smudging the corners of her eyes, then bowed her head. Each time we heard from the other room the sounds of Mrs. Hasegawa screaming, Miss Nomura’s body would twitch. Mitchan brought us in some tea.

  “I’m really sorry, Miss Nomura. I mistook you for the person booked in for this afternoon. I had no idea that you were expecting. When are you due?”

  I watched as her exceptionally large eyes welled up with tears.

  “But how did you know I was pregnant? I haven’t told anybody!”

  With this, she began sobbing again, tears stained black with mascara cascading down her cheeks. Mitchan had been on her way out of the room with the empty tray, but now she paused by the door, and we exchanged bewildered glances. From Miss Nomura’s posture, the shape of her stomach, and indeed everything about the way she looked, there was no doubting that she was pregnant.

  “I only came to talk about Takumi,” she protested. She was so agitated, though, that she couldn’t stop crying, so Mitchan and I began to inquire about her situation. She’d been to the gynecologist just once, when her periods had stopped, and had never received a Mother and Baby Record Book, which was standard issue for every pregnant woman. Mitchan shot me a musical-theater frown.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to marry my boyfriend, and I haven’t even decided where I want to give birth—which hospital, you know?” She was still crying.

  Barely audibly, Mitchan clicked her tongue in disapproval. I glared at her.

  “First of all, you need to have a proper consultation with a gynecologist. So long as there aren’t any complications with your pregnancy, you could think about giving birth here, if you like.”

  Snatches of Mrs. Hasegawa’s screaming and wailing broke into the room from next door, and Miss Nomura’s blubbering grew louder.

  “I can’t do it! I can’t give birth if it hurts that much. I can’t even stand injections.”

  At this, Mitchan pounded the table so hard with her fist that the tea came spilling out of the cups onto the saucers.

  “You’re already way too far gone to have an abortion. Are you crazy? You went and created it, so now you’ve just got to damned well have it! How are you’re going to become a decent mother with that kind of attitude? Hmm?”

  I stood up and took hold of Mitchan, who had jumped to her feet in her anger.

  “Hey, hey! Mitchan, this is Takumi’s homeroom teacher! Stop it. You’re going too far.”

  But she pressed on: “I’m not having you causing Mrs. Saito any more problems, hear? If you want to give birth here, I’ll take charge of your delivery!”

  “I can’t do it! I’m too scared! This woman’s terrifying!”

  Miss Nomura’s whimpering mixed with the screams coming from next door and reverberated inside my skull, until my temples began to throb.

  Miss Nomura, whom the students apparently all knew as Notchy, did as we asked, and went for an exam at the general hospital. There she was told that the maternity ward was all booked up, and so it was that, despite her terror of both labor and Mitchan, Notchy made an appointment to have her baby here. As Mitchan and I had predicted, she was already well into her sixth month, and was therefore due to give birth around the beginning of April, when the cherry blossoms would be out.

  “She’s as bad as those high-school girls who get pregnant and say they thought they were just bloated with constipation!” Mitchan ranted at me. “With those kinds of people becoming teachers, Japan is well and truly doomed.”

  Yet, in her own way, Mitchan did take care of Miss Nomura, who would pop in on her way home from school for regular checkups. To Miss Nomura’s face, Mitchan would say in a severe tone of voice, “Remember, if you don’t gain a single pound between now and your due date, you’ll be doing just fine,” but she would put some of the food she’d made for dinner in Tupperware containers and slip them to Miss Nomura to take home with her.

  When I caught wind of the fact that Mitchan had summoned Miss Nomura’s boyfriend to the clinic and given him a talking-to about his unwillingness to get married, I told her in no uncertain terms that, whatever the particulars of the situation, that was way, way out of line. Not long after, though, Miss Nomura was beaming as she told me that, “Thanks to Doctor Mitchan, we’ve set a date for the wedding!”

  I found myself at a total loss for words.

  Once her checkups were over, Miss Nomura would go up to Takumi’s room, handing him homework printouts and filling him in on what had been happening at school. At first, she would often return hanging her head, telling me, “It seems like Takumi doesn’t really want to speak to me,” but after a few visits, she came bounding down the stairs with a big smile on her face, grabbed my arm, and said with great excitement, “I’ve got the feeling Takumi’s going to be all right, you know!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! He looked at my stomach and was like, ‘Notchy, you’ve got to make sure to keep the baby warm.’”

  Fat tears were spilling from her eyes as she spoke, and as I looked at her, I felt the tears forming in my own as well. For a little while, Miss Nomura and I stood there in the darkened hallway, crying together.

  Ryota would also come by before he went to work in the evening. It seemed like he had nothing in particular to say to Takumi, and instead he just played games or read manga in Takumi’s room, then left. Nana, whom I’d previously assumed was Takumi’s girlfriend, came early in the morning, stood at the bottom of the stairs, and called out in a loud voice, “Takumiiiii!” She waited for ten minutes, and if there was no answer, she’d turn to me and say, “Is it okay if I look at the babies?”

  She started giving me a hand with changing the newborns, lined up on the examination bed ready for their morning bath.

  “You like babies, do you?”

  “Yes. I want to do what you do. When I’m older, I mean.”

  “You want to be a midwife? There’s no money in it, you know. You can’t take vacations, either. There’s really nothing to recommend it.”

  Nana burst into a peal of laughter. “Yeah, Takumi told me the exact same thing.”

  Suddenly, from the second floor, I heard Mitchan’s booming voice and the sound of a vacuum cleaner. I quickly put the newborns, still all warm and toasty from their baths, back into their mothers’ rooms and ran up the stairs with Nana.

  “I
f we let the rooms get this dirty, the babies downstairs will end up breathing in the dust!” Mitchan had donned a surgical mask and gloves and was brandishing the hose of the vacuum cleaner like a weapon as she spoke. “Come on! Get up, get washed, then go eat breakfast!” Saying that, she thwacked Takumi on the backside with the vacuum hose. Still bleary-eyed with sleep, Takumi looked between me and Nana and then set off slowly down the stairs.

  From that day on, Mitchan would wage a surprise attack on Takumi’s room every morning.

  “I had a younger brother, brother number four, who stopped going to school, too, but I set him straight,” she said with tremendous pride. And in actual fact, from then on the amount of time Takumi spent up and about during the day began to increase. Nana came to the house every morning, and at some point he began going to school with her. Once a week became twice a week, then went back to once a week again. Little by little, taking baby steps forward and the odd baby step backward, Takumi began returning to life as a regular high-schooler.

  Into February the days grew even chillier. As I wiped the condensation from the steamed-up windows, I saw someone jogging along the bicycle path, breathing clouds of white. As I was making breakfast for the patients, Takumi came into the kitchen in his school uniform and sat down at the table.

  “You’re up early!” I set down a bowl of steaming miso soup in front of him.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a graduation ceremony committee meeting,” he said, stirring raw egg into his rice. That Takumi was going to school every day, that he was eating breakfast—to other people these might have seemed like ridiculously normal things, but to me they were reason to rejoice.

  The emails with attachments of photos of Takumi or saying libelous things about me and my clinic hadn’t stopped coming, but, little by little, they were getting less frequent. I wished everyone would hurry up and get bored of whatever it was Takumi had done—that time would pass and people would move on and forget about it. Every day, I would pray for that to happen as soon as possible. I’d really had enough of the hatred directed at me by these faceless strangers, these unknown people in unknown places.