‘She is somebody I knew a long time ago,’ she explains, ‘who has only recently come back into my life. An old school friend of my son.’
The young officer nods and writes something down.
‘And you believe this is a matter for the police?’ he asks.
‘I am concerned about her. She visited regularly, and then no word.’
The young man speaks to Hiromi with the kind of expression and tone she has dreaded. ‘What makes you think anything has happened?’ he asks her. ‘Perhaps she is busy with work, or does not wish to pay visits anymore. As you say, this is a recently renewed acquaintance. If there is anything out of turn, it sounds like an issue of a more personal nature, perhaps a family matter.’
Hiromi looks down at her hands gripping her handbag.
‘Let me check our system, make some phone calls. If the woman is indeed missing then her family will have notified a police station here in Nagoya.’
Hiromi nods and thanks the young man, who is the age of her son. She sits in a hard plastic chair on the other side of the room.
Hiromi recalls her conversations with Mai before she disappeared. She wonders whether in them there are some clues to tell her what happened to the young woman. It is true that Hiromi paid Mai Takeda to spend time with her son. This seems to incriminate her in some way. Hiromi feels this guilt especially in the presence of police officers: that her actions are a truth she must keep inside.
Hiromi tries to remember. She pictures Mai and the first visit she made. Mai slowly eats a rice cake while she talks about her life in general terms. She says that her husband J works for a company in Nagoya but often goes to Tokyo. She says that they live in an older apartment on the other side of Nagoya, where she works part time at a language school. I left my old job before I was married, but it took a long time to find a new position. Because I had a fiancé, a lot of companies assumed I would be having children soon, and they only offered me part-time work. J says I don’t need to work—he thinks it’s a bit of a hobby, really—but what else would I do all day? They talk about high school and elementary school, remembering the names of teachers and students, a class excursion to Nagoya Castle. Soon Mai says it is time for her to go. I have to get the groceries today, because I am working tomorrow. Nothing is revealed to Hiromi.
Pointless conversations return to her. They talk about real estate. Mai says that many old apartments in Nagoya suburbs are of poor quality. Almost all of them were built after the war. They lose their value over time and so the owners are reluctant to put any money into them and instead wait until they need to be knocked down and rebuilt. But then they once again build with poor-quality materials. Some builders are advocating for renovations, to improve the old buildings. So that might be an option for us to buy an apartment, although there is no guarantee the buildings erected in the sixties are built on solid foundations. They were put up in a hurry, as I understand it. Was there something Mai wished to talk about at that time, and instead they spoke about houses and old buildings?
Another time, or was it the same occasion, Hiromi kneels on the floor and lays the tea provisions out on the old-fashioned wooden table. This table belonged to her parents, it is heavy and out of place in their apartment, a relic from a time nobody wants to think about anymore, especially as the apartment has been modified to incorporate a more Western style: a kitchen with an oven and broad counter, a wall removed to create an open living space, although the tatami floor remains. Mai kneels neatly in front of the table. She wears a dark dress and stockings, and has taken off her high heels and put on a pair of Hiromi’s satin house slippers with a floral print. Mai compliments the house, the table. Hiromi thinks how dated those slippers look on her slender feet.
Hiromi starts to regret these conversations, as though they were something she and the young woman were required to do, like the performance of a script learned by absorption. She imagines that Mai Takeda wanted to tell her something, to reveal the cause and plan of her disappearance, but the moment passes. In retrospect, she feels it sweep away with the finality of a cold autumn wind.
The young man calls her over after twenty minutes.
‘There have been no reports to other police stations in Nagoya about the disappearance of a woman by that name,’ he says. ‘We believe this is a private matter. And so we suggest you seek to make contact with the woman’s husband or her family directly. Unless they report her missing, I’m afraid there is no case here requiring investigation.’
Hiromi leaves the police station. She is exhausted. Her hands shake and she goes to a nearby takeaway stall to buy an iced tea. She returns home and spends a long time on the preparations for dinner. Hiromi always eats alone. Her husband returns home late from work and insists she doesn’t wait for him. In fact, he seems annoyed when she does. Why would you sit up waiting until so late? You’re not going to eat at midnight!
Hikaru is in his room. She will take the tray to his door and then return to the kitchen, to her own meal. Sometimes a transformation takes place between leaving Hikaru’s door and returning to the kitchen, after which Hiromi’s stomach muscles are contracted, or her chest has a nervous, breathless flutter, and she can barely even swallow her soup. The cold snake in her turns.
One night when Hikaru was seventeen, before he went inside his room, Hiromi walked into the bathroom and saw her son sitting on the edge of the bathtub, his hair soaked and water trailing down his shoulders. She thought of his mucus-wet forehead on the day he was born. He was holding an unopened box of hair dye. She guessed he must have bought it at a convenience store.
She put down the towels she was carrying and took the box from his hand. She read it and then told him to kneel on the floor and lean his head into the tub. He looked up once as Hiromi put on plastic gloves, and squirted the dye mix into the plastic container that Hikaru hadn’t yet taken out of the box. He kneeled. Hands on thighs, preparation for absent gods.
‘Lean over.’
Hikaru obeyed her, bowed into the tub. She pressed her fingers over his head with hard pressure, a massaging motion that felt strange, like her son was a toddler again, then a boy in kindergarten, when Hiromi still washed his hair in this tub, when he had a pale blue bath towel with yellow animals on it. She would climb into the tub and bathe too, and wash his hair, and then scrub it dry with the towel. She would kiss his head and say that he was clever, that he was a good son.
‘Now you must wait,’ she said to him. ‘Twenty minutes.’ She left the bathroom.
When she returned, Hikaru was again sitting on the edge of the bathtub in silence. The room was bright. He kneeled again, bowed into the bathtub. The water ran over his head.
‘I can do it now,’ said Hikaru. He lifted his tall body upright and flecks of watery dye hit the wall, splashed Hiromi’s clothes, dotted the floor like sumi-e ink. Dark orange strands were plastered to his face.
‘Let me do it,’ she said. ‘You’re making a mess.’
‘Fuck you! I’m not a child!’ He pushed her arm away but kept his head in the bath. He screamed at her to leave, but Hiromi tried to rinse the rest of the dye out of his hair. Hikaru lifted his head up again and she missed her target, the water from the hose sprayed his shoulders and the side of the tub. She tried to force him back down, one arm pushing down on the back of his neck, and for a moment she hit his head again with the water. Hikaru reared back this time with a desperate scream, and Hiromi jumped up, sending the water over both of them. They made a similar noise, a shared shock, and then Hikaru wrestled the hose out of his mother’s hands. The water was everywhere. He threw the hose into the tub and told his mother again to get out, get out, get out of everything.
Hiromi didn’t see her son for weeks after that, and was shocked at the yellow-blond shards of hair when she caught sight of him walking to the bathroom. He looked like a cartoon character from a magazine, she thought, someone unreal. It seemed to her that everything he did that was of this world strained against his nature, against wh
o he was, what he was inside.
When Hikaru was a little older but still a boy, Hiromi dressed her son in immaculate white shirts. She bought him polished black shoes in unmoving leather that he said hurt his heels. She pushed a sharp comb through his hair, scraping his scalp. She thinks of the identical pink hats he and his classmates wore on school excursions to museums or to Nagoya Castle in elementary school; her anger if he dirtied himself, spilled sauce on his shirt or scuffed his shoes on the walk to and from school, his failures to meet the kind of expectations she had grown up with. And in junior high, when he let his hair grow past his shoulders, as though he liked the way it protected his neck and ears. But she forced short haircuts on him as soon as it got too long. She needed him to conform just enough to ease his passage through life.
She thinks of how he mourned the clothes she once threw out: his purple-and-white t-shirt, the grey tracksuit, the zippered sweater, his favourite clothes that one day she refused to bring back to his room after he put them out to be washed. They were beyond repair or cleanliness and she threw them out. It was the early days of his refusal to go outside, when Hiromi still cried at him, Hikaru, come out now, still called for him at the door to his room. She tried to push the door open. He raged at her for that. He cried and grabbed her head, wrapped her hair in his fingers and pulled as tight as he could. The clothes were his, he screamed, they were his-his-his, he yanked her hair. He had barely uttered a word in months. In the end she went quietly, and after that she did not try to go into his room. Hiromi and her son began their new relationship: she submissive, he quiet and passive but somehow in control, because he mutely refused to be in the world she inhabited.
Increasingly she feels they are both, she and her son, complicit in his failure, as entwined today as they were the day of the snakebite, on a summer afternoon in Nagasaki. Days pass. Hikaru remains in his room. It is like it has always been. The air pressure is oppressive. To continually breathe in warm wet air is tiring. Her muscles feel loose and weak, but her heart is tense.
Hiromi Satō lies next to her husband, who sleeps deeply. She looks at him and thinks of all the things he does not know. The only option that comes to her in the darkness is that she could go to the apartment where Mai Takeda grew up. Hiromi knows the street.
Hiromi’s husband turns over in his sleep, emits a short, deep snore, then his breaths are quiet. Her husband attributes their son’s failure to her. In the past he expressed this as her failure to control, the lack of order in their home. The wives of his colleagues raised good children, sons who worked and daughters who bore children. She raised a failed son, a cause of shame.
It is true that she recruited Mai Takeda to help her. When she ran into the young woman in the basement of Nagoya Station, Hiromi Satō was made anxious by hope. It was Mai Takeda who suggested the dormitory for Hikaru. She must have researched—and at this Hiromi feels tight in her chest, grateful and guilty—to find places that might make him better. Hiromi cannot explain to herself why she now feels responsible for Mai’s disappearance. She wonders whether there is cause and effect between introducing something new to Mai’s life, changing it in some small way, and the young woman disappearing.
At the end of September, Mount Ontake erupts. The day is beautiful: clear weather, ideal for hiking. Many people had decided to scale the mountain, and so when the lava burst from the volcano they were in its path. Mount Ontake is one hundred kilometres from Nagoya, so there have been many warnings for people with respiratory conditions to stay indoors. There is a mound in Shirotori Garden that represents the real Mount Ontake. Hiromi wonders if anything about it has changed, if the symbol reflects the real.
At first the reported death toll is low, around five people. However at least thirty people are reported to have suffered cardiac arrest, which Hiromi knows means a death. The words are a symbol for death.
By the first week of October, the Asahi Shimbun reports that forty-seven people have been killed at Mount Ontake. The volcano is reported to be a phreatic eruption, which occurs when magma heats the water beneath the ground. This superheated, trapped water rapidly changes from liquid to steam, resulting in a hydrothermal explosion. Phreatic eruptions give almost no warning signs. There is no structural movement or seismic activity; the water just seeps quietly into the volcano. To Hiromi it seems like some horrible and huge metaphor. A slow leak of anger. In news photographs, mountain lodges are coated in snow-like grey. The ground is a grey field of ash dotted with the yellow hats of rescue hikers.
Hiromi makes a phone call to her mother, who has been increasingly incoherent but today is quite lucid. She is troubled by the news reports she hears on the radio. The ash was so thick that it blocked out the sun, says her mother. Total darkness on a sunny day. Just like Nagasaki, she says. Total darkness on a summer’s day.
Hiromi remembers her last conversation with Mai Takeda, just before she left to see her mother. The floods had just come to Hiroshima. Dozens of people died. They had both remarked on the flooding, said something about Japan being an unstable place. We live on fault lines, Mai had said, beneath the earth, so you can never see the pressure building under us.
Hiromi Satō wears a white shirt and light blue trousers. The early autumn wind hints of something cold, so she ties a dark blue scarf around her neck. She has left food in front of Hikaru’s door, which he will eat if he wakes. More often lately he does not wake during the day. When Mai Takeda was visiting regularly, she heard her son bathe almost daily, which brought her some relief, but now he has stopped again. She takes the subway to the suburb where Mai Takeda grew up. She does not recall the circumstances that caused her to know the location of the apartment. Did she take Hikaru there in her car one day before school? Did she collect him one weekend? It troubles her that she has forgotten, the memory lost in a vast body of time.
She rings the doorbell. It is a weekend afternoon, and she does not know if her visit will be an intrusion at this time, although perhaps it will always be an intrusion.
Mrs Takeda opens the door. She recognises Hiromi Satō straight away, Hiromi is sure of this. Hiromi offers a halting stream of pleasantries and apologies and then Mrs Takeda invites her in. She offers tea, and although this has been forced upon Mrs Takeda by the circumstances, by the tradition of manners, for once Hiromi is grateful for the things a host is compelled to do.
Hiromi sees the kitchen. She has interrupted Mrs Takeda in cooking, preparing for something. It is only mid-afternoon yet there are chopped vegetables on the counter, a simmering pot on the stove, and the intrusion feels like a transgression into the deeply private: a mother in pain over her child. It is as though Hiromi has walked in at a moment of crying. Mrs Takeda’s apron lies, abandoned just now, on the counter. Hiromi offers more apologies. Mrs Takeda shakes her head.
‘We have a guest later, but that is hours away.’
‘Again, I am very sorry to intrude like this. I would have called, as I said, but I do not have the number.’
Mrs Takeda prepares the tea, her back turned.
‘I came about your daughter.’
Mai’s mother continues to prepare the tea; cups on a tray, plastic-wrapped biscuits.
‘I was reacquainted with her recently. We saw each other at Nagoya Station. And then a week later I saw her again. I invited her for tea. She was a friend to my son, years ago.’
Mrs Takeda serves the tea in the living room. There is a TV and a small altar, and the table where they sit. A sliding door at the end of the room opens to a balcony.
‘I know this. My daughter told me of the troubles of your son.’
Hiromi looks down at her bent knees. She knows she is a source of morbid fascination to those who are aware of her son’s condition. She is the one to whom the worst happened. She knows this. Her failed son, she loves him.
‘Yes. That is why I came. Your daughter was a great source of hope for me, for my husband and me. She visited our home. She wrote to Hikaru to encourage him to make some changes to
his life.’ After a moment she says, ‘But he is yet to make those changes, unfortunately.’
‘My daughter is experiencing some difficulties. She is not participating in our family right now. She will not come to dinner tonight.’
Hiromi nods. ‘I thought it may explain some things. I don’t know how. That your daughter was in contact with my son. But she made contact with him and then she left.’ Hiromi feels sweat bead on her forehead, as though she is professing her shame, her guilt, before a great crowd.
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Many things are not clear to me either.’
‘Children are incomprehensible to their parents,’ says Mrs Takeda.
‘I am truly sorry for these circumstances. I hope Mai will be reunited with her family soon.’
The mothers have nothing more to say to each other.
Hiromi takes the subway to Nagoya Station. She walks into a department store, takes the escalator down to the food hall. Although it is some distance from her home, she avoids Yagoto, avoids anywhere close to the apartment where she lives; it is part of her seclusion. And in truth she rarely needs to buy many things: her husband eats out more and more often, her own appetite lessens, it is only Hikaru left. Walking in these busy parts removes Hiromi from the story of who she is, the woman who failed to raise her son. Up in the passageway of the station she sits in a cafe and orders an iced tea.
When Hikaru began to refuse to go to school, and some days refused to leave his room, Hiromi assumed it was temporary, a teenage phase, a mood. She was impatient with his inability to cope with the obligations of every life: the duties, school and family. He was too sensitive, too soft-headed, as her husband said. It got worse gradually. He would stay inside his room for three days, four. He would emerge and eat with them, and then Hiromi or her husband would say, Why don’t you try harder? Do your best. Just do your best, Hikaru. And then he would retreat. Sometimes he would yell, grow angry; other times he would simply drift back to his room. At this time—when her son went to that side, this side, that side, this side—it was as if she were holding his hand while he dangled off a cliff.
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