The Shut Ins

by Katherine Brabon

  We went back outside, our eyes shocked by sunlight. We returned to the station.

  ‘Do you have any more money with you?’ Hikaru asked.

  ‘Not much.’ I pulled a few coins out of my pocket. ‘I don’t think it’s enough for two train tickets.’

  We went to the information help desk at Kintetsu-Yokkaichi Station, where Hikaru explained that we didn’t have enough money to get back to Nagoya. The woman took us to the police office at the station and a man arranged for us to be driven back to Nagoya at our parents’ expense. Hikaru gave them the address of the Satō s’ apartment. Mrs Satō paid the fare to the driver, with a thousand apologies, a horrified face. My father laughed when he heard. Yokkaichi? Couldn’t you choose a city with a little more class? Haven’t you heard of Yokkaichi asthma? It’s a dirty place. Yokkaichi! My mother was angry—mostly, I think, she was ashamed that we called Mrs Satō and made the Satō family pay for our trip home.

  The morning nausea continues; my temperature remains high. Hikaru is in my thoughts all the time, like he is no longer alive and is haunting me. I know that I would like to see him, but he has not replied, has not come out of his room.

  After a few days, J buys a pregnancy test and says, Do it. I refuse; I have nothing inside me, I tell him. I promise there is nothing there. It must be a virus, or the after-effects of drinking at the work party. I take several days off work. I spend those days drifting in and out of sleep, drinking soup, always thirsty and too hot to be comfortable.

  After one week I am not as sick, though my body is still warmer than usual. I return to work and my desk where, surrounded by lesson plans and textbooks, telephones and colleagues, I write more letters to Hikaru. I recall our trip to Yokkaichi. I ask him, does he remember it? Does he remember the construction site where we sat together before school, where he stayed for the day while I wasn’t strong enough to do the same? I don’t know if he remembers. He never responds.

  The visits to Hiromi Satō become regular, almost ceremonial. Hiromi accepts each letter and gives me an envelope in return. I have around ¥70,000 now. I don’t know what to do with it. It does not seem like enough money to do anything significant, and I do not know what something significant would look like.

  As the weeks pass I feel less guilty, more content with this thing inside me, this gestating secret.

  Towards the end of spring, J receives a promotion. He has worked for the company for six years now. They manufacture and export cars, that is all I know. He works longer hours and goes to Tokyo often. If he misses the last train he stays in a capsule hotel, like my father used to do when I was a girl. Our life mostly continues as usual. If J arrives home, I greet him, cook our meal, we watch TV or go to bed. I go to work at my part-time job. J once tries to discipline me, when he knows I have been again to visit Hiromi Satō. He thinks I am going to visit Hikaru, but of course he does not understand. He grips my wrist, says I should be seeing my girlfriends, not running off to the apartment of an old high school sweetheart. I can’t explain anything to him. The wedding band on his finger makes a deep red mark on my skin.

  Since I was sick, something in my body has changed. The temperature of my skin is warmer and my heart beats more quickly. I associate the feeling with the one I get when I am writing a letter to Hikaru, when I know I will be able to go to the apartment of Hiromi Satō again soon. It is the energy of anticipation, something warm in me. I like going there, to the Satōs’ apartment. I think I like it too much. Finally the feeling of anticipation I have had since Hikaru left the world has a place to go. Each week builds as I wait to go there. The feelings are so strong that I seem to myself like an unfaithful wife.

  J’s sister visits from Kyushu. She is two years older than J, married with two young sons. J’s sister stayed in Saga, the town of their birth, after high school and married a local man who had some success in business. J once said that this brother-in-law was not as successful as his parents could have hoped for their daughter, though, and he had a tendency to be volatile, a drinker. J’s sister had worked at a magazine before the marriage, but stopped soon after their honeymoon, when she fell pregnant.

  We meet for lunch at a French-style cafe with dark green walls and large canvas photographs of Parisian streets, several Eiffel Towers. I greet J’s sister and she smiles. She is a kind person. On these visits to Nagoya she always seems tired, but there is relief behind her fatigue. We order open sandwiches and coffee. I ask after her children. She says they are growing, now three and six years old. The eldest son has been accepted into a good elementary school, although it’s some distance from their home and it demands a lot from parents. She must sign off on all his homework and report on his behaviour and home activities regularly. The youngest is slow to learn new things. She is concerned about his ability to cope with kindergarten.

  ‘My husband finds this difficult.’

  ‘School will toughen him up,’ says J.

  ‘Every child is different,’ I say. ‘Not everyone fits so easily into the way life is structured for them.’

  ‘That’s no excuse, is it?’ says J. He tears apart his sandwich. ‘There’s a proper way to do things. There are systems in place for a reason. If we give in to individual deficiencies, you weaken those systems and damage things for everyone.’

  J’s sister looks down at the table, holding her napkin.

  ‘When you go to Tokyo,’ says J, swallowing a large mouthful of food, ‘look at those good-for-nothings hanging around Shinjuku. Every second guy is a part-time hairdresser with skinny arms in a ridiculous tight t-shirt and jeans. They hang around on show half the day, contributing nothing. Compare that to what our parents did, the sacrifices they made. We had one of the world’s strongest economies because of them.’ J stuffs the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. He turns to his sister. ‘He’ll toughen up, your young one. He has to.’

  A waitress comes to clear our plates, although J’s sister has barely eaten. We go outside to take a walk. We reach Shirotori Garden. A few other people, mostly elderly, are walking slowly along the paths. The cherry blossoms have come, faint and dark pink, like skin burned by scalding water. When autumn arrives the air will be flaming red with leaves. And then everything will be white. It is all predictable.

  Shirotori Garden represents the world outside it. The large pond is the great Kiso River, a mound of earth is Mount Ontake. I have never seen the real Kiso River or the real Mount Ontake. Many gardens represent something far away for those in the cities: raked stones are mountain ranges, artificial ponds are ancient rivers. Usually I only see fake cherry blossom lights indoors or plastic autumn leaves decorating department stores and displays in subway stations. J checks his watch, says it is time that we were going. He insisted this be organised, the lunch and the walk, as a thing that is done. Perhaps he should simply say that he has done those things, and then his stories could represent something else, like the algae-tinged pond at Shirotori Garden represents a river far away.

  We accompany J’s sister back to Nagoya Station for her journey back to Saga. First we take the subway and then walk through the underground passageway to her train platform. I stop at a convenience store and say that I will get something for J’s sister to eat on the train. The journey will take her around four hours. J looks impatient but nods, hands in his pockets. I select a few things, more than is necessary, from the shelves. There is a queue before the cashier. I stand in the line—each person is separated by a distance that seems exactly the same—and look out of the fluorescent-tinged window at my husband and his sister. They stand to one side in the passageway, waiting. J talks seriously to his sister, and she nods. Perhaps we should see everybody we know through a pale convenience store window. They are stripped of all warmth and it is difficult to remember how or why we know them. I am married to J, but that is it. I know him on this side, in the everyday world, just as he knows me on this side. But he does not know me on the other side. I was reunited with Hiromi Satō, and therefore Hikaru, in this
underground passageway at Nagoya Station. Perhaps Hikaru always watched everyone through a pale window. And perhaps he knew that people rarely ever know the other side.

  As I press the bag of food into her hands, J’s sister nods and says quietly, Thank you, Mai.

  In the last days of spring, J announces that we are going to my parents’ for lunch. This is strange because usually he asks me to arrange these visits. He says that my mother happened to call the other day, and they decided on a weekend visit. For reasons unclear to me, I don’t believe what he says.

  We take the subway on a Saturday at noon. The apartment has barely changed since I was a girl. The kitchen is small and crowded with pots and utensils on open shelves, though my mother always keeps it very clean. The living room is next to it, with a table and chairs, and the sofa chair my father would sit on when he came home late in the evenings. I was sent to bed before he came home. Sometimes I took small, barefoot steps into the kitchen to look at him through the dark. My mother was already asleep. I don’t know why I liked to look at him. It did not fill me with warmth to see him there. He drank whisky from a glass and he did not look happy.

  Today there is a purposeful mood in the air. My mother is particularly efficient and brisk, and my father watches everything with his hands behind his back, nodding occasionally. My mother casts approving looks at J every now and then, but she does not speak to me with warmth. This is no different from her usual behaviour towards me. Even when I was young I had the sense I was not living up to her expectations of a daughter. When I had failed to marry by twenty-five, she would wring her hands and say that if I was never to marry, it would be her greatest source of shame. If I did not respond to her tirades, she would say, It’s what must be done.

  My mother tells me to stop daydreaming and help her with the side dishes. I take several small plates to the table, which is set with both sake and tea. My mother brings a large plate with grilled salmon fillets to the table, and then the rice bowls. My father pours a cup of sake for each of us and makes a toast.

  ‘To family,’ says my father.

  My mother nods.

  ‘To family,’ says J.

  I nod once and drink the sake.

  ‘It is important to grow a family,’ says my mother. ‘It is healthy and normal. My biggest regret is that I could not have a larger family. But the doctors said I was lucky to bear even one child. My body struggled, but I’ve done my duty.’

  I know about the many miscarriages before me. And, worst of all, the son she almost had but who died midway through the pregnancy.

  My mother turns to me. ‘Mai, when are you going to have a child, hmm? It’s about time. We all think it’s about time.’ She looks to J, to my father, who both nod and eat and look up but not into my eyes.

  I swallow a mouthful of rice, thick and warm and suddenly unpleasant. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But come, Mai! You are almost thirty. What on earth are you waiting for?’

  ‘I think it’s important to be ready,’ I said. ‘For it to feel like the right time.’

  My father raps the table with his hand. ‘Enough! When did you learn to speak like this? To be so self-indulgent? A family needs children—it’s your responsibility. Enough of this!’

  ‘What else do you have to do?’ says my mother. ‘Your husband has a very respectable career. You don’t need to keep up your little job.’

  ‘I do think it’s time,’ says J, looking at me for the first time. ‘It would be wonderful to have children.’

  I look at J.

  ‘It’s important,’ he says. ‘Every husband and wife need a child.’

  I feel something strange, a hardening across my body, and I don’t feel hungry anymore. There is a flickering in my chest, my throat shudders, as though on the edge of a sound emerging from me, but nothing comes. I wonder if this is anger. I nod, duck my head, bring my sake cup to my lips.

  My father clears his throat. ‘You’ll do what is right. What is best for everyone.’ As though he has sealed our fates, he shifts the conversation, asks J something about work. I don’t really taste the food I push down my throat. My arm and mouth robotically feed me fish and rice and clam soup; it is just a thing to be done. We finish, drink another sake. I stand at the kitchen sink and wash the plates, bowls and chopsticks while my father and J stand on the balcony smoking and my mother rests in the living room. There is a more relaxed feeling between J and my father today. I see it as I watch them through the balcony window. I hold a bowl in my hands and turn it over in the soapy water for too long as I continue to look at them. The apartment does not feel familiar to me, despite all the years I lived here. With a frightening, cold feeling, I think of the apartment where I live with J, that it is not home to me either.

  I stand at Nagoya Station. It is Monday and today I don’t have to go to work. I cannot stand the closed-in smells of the apartment, the wet towels and warm rice and the unaired bedroom, the inescapable evidence of bodies, of lives lived in the same way each day. I don’t know what it would take to stop this compression when I am inside the apartment and when I think of returning to it; this sense of being crushed as one more day, and another, passes. J is a good husband, I tell myself. He has moulded to this role. There is no protest I can make, nothing I can say.

  At the ticket machines I purchase a ticket for the Hida Express to Takayama. I feel calm. I recall the day I stayed with Hikaru in the abandoned construction site. The anonymity of this enormous train station helps me to feel at peace. There is a separation between myself and the day. The feeling is similar to how it is after an illness, stepping back into the world, the fragility of aching eyelids meeting sun, the loudness of fresh green air on the skin, the confrontation of crowds at the subway station. But I am not sick now, so the division feels sharpened; it is something I have chosen. I have no reason for going, other than a vague longing to both leave the city and to find something to comfort me. I think of the children drumming, the night I walked alone in Takayama. The young girl’s face stays in my mind as I think of another type of person I might have been, but have not become. The train carriage is quiet. It is beyond the time for peak hour crowds and not a day for family trips. The people in the carriage with me are also removed from the usual course of a working life. They are older people or university students, or mothers with children not yet in school. It is a warm spring day; the breezes are warm enough now to convince everyone that winter is truly over.

  An hour and a half into the journey, I start to doubt myself. I work out how long I can spend in Takayama if I am to make it back to the apartment in Nagoya at a decent hour. The everyday starts to stretch out its claws and pull me back to it. I hold my handbag. Inside it is the money Hiromi Satō has paid me for each letter to Hikaru. The money creates a threshold, as if between two sides, and on each of those sides, a million possibilities. Countless passageways. With a fast-beating heart I get off the train at a small station somewhere in Gifu Prefecture. Takayama is still ahead, Nagoya is somewhere behind. I step out into the town, a sea of concrete buildings and, beyond it, the deep green of the countryside. The mountains would now be flowering with spring.

  At a small kiosk near the station I buy cold tea. I turn around and look back at the station. My temperature is warm, as it always is these days, and a rim of sweat lines my forehead. There is no point. To truly get to the other side, something drastic has to happen. Total severance, like Hikaru in his silent, sealed-off room. Or the other way, the ultimate passageway to the other side, the one taken by the teenage girl in the apartment building, who left this world in the winter.

  I stand beside the road, stuck, staring at the car park, the few buildings on the street. They all look empty or unused. I know nothing about this town. I hear the scrape of slow footsteps behind me. An old woman asks me if I am lost.

  ‘I couldn’t decide where to go,’ I say to her.

  ‘You’re from the city?’ She squints at me. Her face is round and wrinkled; she is short and pl
ump and wears old tracksuit trousers and a cardigan.

  I nod. ‘But I was born out here somewhere. I don’t remember it.’

  She asks me if I am on my way home or on my way to somewhere else. I tell her that is the thing I am trying to decide.

  ‘The station is that way,’ she says, pointing.

  I nod awkwardly and she keeps walking, looking back only once as I continue to stand there, stranded on this suburban road.

  I return to the small station and sit there for another hour. For the first time since I got off the train, I look at my phone. There are several missed calls from J. The phone rings again as I hold it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Where the hell are you? I’ve been calling you for half an hour. Why aren’t you at home?’

  ‘I went out. How do you know I’m not there?’

  ‘I left work. My stomach sickness is back. Can’t you come home now?’

  ‘Of course. But I have to do the shopping first. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Thankfully, there is a train arriving soon that stops at Nagoya.

  I walk into the apartment at dusk. J lies in the bed, dozing, sweating. He wakes and looks at me with a helpless expression, a slightly red face. This helplessness repulses me. I do not want to care for him. I do not want to wipe the sweat from his forehead or bring him broth or change the musty bedsheets. I do not want to have his child. But I think I will have to do all those things, unless something changes. I don’t know how to make drastic things happen. Only Hikaru knew how to do that. My thoughts always refer to him; the thought of him reassures me. It is comforting to have somebody to think about with warm feelings. I can’t help it now. He is a constant presence, something inside me. As though he has become something spiritual, not physical. I barely recall his physical form.

  Time passes but does not change. J returns to work the next day, although during the night he called on me many times, asking for water, a cold cloth for his face. I write letters to Hikaru but he will not come out of his room. I try to visit once a week. Sometimes two weeks pass before I go there again. It’s difficult to go every weekend without J getting upset. My letters become shorter as I run out of things to remember with Hikaru. Sometimes my thoughts leak out onto the page and I tell him about my life now. I don’t reread those parts of the letters. I think they come from a part of my mind I shouldn’t pay attention to so closely. Hiromi and I talk about normal things. I tell her about the apartment J and I rent in Nagoya, the large old tiled building, and how it looks tired. I feel that I have failed Hiromi Satō, that all of this time and her money have been for nothing. I worry that she will dismiss me from this role she has given me, the rental sister. If I fail in this, I don’t know what the consequences will be.