“You must be sick of living in this pigsty,” Kazuhiro said to Takeru once, when he’d grown tired of shouting at Takeru’s mother.
Pigs are very clean was what Takeru wanted to say. Had he been too frightened? He didn’t know whether that was true or not about pigs—it was something he’d heard someone say on TV.
Later, living with Mitsuko in the village by the sea, he’d remember that day and be glad he hadn’t said it.
Hii-chan wanted to take every opportunity to show Takeru things he wouldn’t have been able to see in Tokyo.
He took him all over the place. Takeru would hear a small truck pull up behind Mitsuko’s house, then the sound of footsteps on the gravel, and he’d know it was Hii-chan. One day Hii-chan took him to visit a friend who kept pigs on the edge of the village. The pigsty was in a grove of cedar trees sloping upward behind the friend’s two-story concrete house. The pigs’ fat bodies were covered in mud, feces, and urine. As Takeru covered his nose and mouth to keep out the stench, he felt very relieved he hadn’t told Kazuhiro that pigs were clean.
“Your fucking mother amazes me! She just doesn’t get it. You’re at school now, so you’re old enough to help her. You have to do it—she’s too fucking dumb.”
Kazuhiro glanced across the room at Takeru’s brother. He shook his head, his mouth twisted in a smile of bafflement and contempt.
“No point telling him. He wouldn’t understand a fucking word!”
“I’ll kill you!”
Takeru felt like he’d shouted it, but the words just reverberated inside his head. He hated hearing his mother insulted. Of course he did. But maybe what he really couldn’t stand was having his brother spoken of like that.
“I’ll kill you!”
The shout inside him was so loud he thought his eardrums might burst. He wanted to shout like Kazuhiro and his mother did when they were arguing, hurling abuse back and forth so loud he wondered if their throats might rip apart. But all that shouting meant nothing. That was clear. Because after Kazuhiro and his mother abused each other with the foulest possible language—the types of words that his teacher said made dictionaries weep—they always ended up lying happily side by side.
One day, when Takeru got home from school, he heard his mother gasping and shouting in pain, a man swearing frenziedly. Takeru’s heart beat against his ribs. As he came down the hallway he could hear violent breathing from the tatami room where the family slept (no… his mother hardly ever slept with Takeru and his brother). There was a narrow gap between the sliding door and the frame. Takeru caught a glimpse… thought he caught a glimpse of them, biting and tearing like animals, bodies entwined, “Kill me!” his mother screamed. Her voice seemed cornered by despair. “Kill me!”
Takeru was terrified. He ran out of the apartment and down the rusting staircase. His mouth was dry. He retraced his route toward school, still carrying his backpack.
Then he remembered.
What about his brother?
He’d left his brother in the apartment. The blue sky lurched toward him. The ground shook at his feet. The sky and earth were attacking him. What terrible scene had his brother witnessed? Had he been caught up in the killing?
But Takeru couldn’t go back right away. He walked as far as Zebra Park, a playground next to the public housing he passed on the way to school. Children called it Zebra Park because of a plastic zebra for toddlers next to the swings. There was a plastic horse and a plastic giraffe as well. Some children called it Giraffe Park, but nobody called it Horse Park. Some boys, mostly older than him, were playing football. He leaned against an iron post and watched them for a while. He thought he should go home, but decided to wait until one side scored again. But neither did. Three of the boys started arguing about which one of them was Lionel Messi. Two were wearing Messi’s Barcelona jersey, but the third was dressed as a Japanese national player. It would be nice if Messi played for Japan, thought Takeru vaguely. The PA system broadcast the five o’clock chimes. The game broke up without the goal he’d been waiting for—perhaps it was time to stop, or maybe the boys were just getting bored. The blue sky above the public housing was deepening toward purple. Takeru left the park and came out onto the sidewalk. There was a flicker above his head and the streetlight came on. He could smell cooking coming from the houses as he walked sluggishly down the street. Was his brother all right? For some reason he thought of his brother first, not his mother. He was angry with himself for having abandoned him.
He sighed as he reached for the doorknob—a sigh so harsh and heavy that it hurt. He nervously turned the knob, but the door was locked. He took the key that hung on a string around his neck and put it into the keyhole.
The apartment was silent. He stepped toward the room from which he’d heard the terrifying voices of his mother and the man entwined together (he probably knew what was really happening). He peered in. His brother was lying on his stomach, half on and half off a futon, sheets and covers in chaos. But there was no blood. Takeru’s own breathing was so loud he couldn’t tell if his brother was breathing or not, but he could see some movement in his brother’s back. His cheek was squashed against the tatami, his lips puckered. Takeru put his hand against his brother’s mouth and felt warm, damp breath.
He sighed with relief. His brother was okay.
Even if he did know what had been going on between his mother and the man, he was probably still worried about his brother. There was no more pretense in that feeling than in his regret at having left him there alone. An ant was crawling on his brother’s arm, so Takeru squashed it with a crumpled tissue from the floor. He looked at the tissue. The ant’s tiny body seemed to have produced a large mass of sticky, ugly-smelling fluid.
Takeru was exhausted. He lay down beside his brother and pressed close. His brother’s body was warm. Takeru slept.
When he woke it was dark. He turned on the light. His brother was still asleep. After a while, he heard the sound of a car stopping on the road outside. The engine didn’t sound at all like Kazuhiro’s car. Takeru went out onto the balcony and leaned over to look down at the road. He was right. Kazuhiro’s was a stylish black foreign car—this one was white and Japanese. Takeru knew Kazuhiro took very good care of his car—it was always sparkling clean. Takeru had never been inside it, and, of course, his brother hadn’t either. He’d once seen it parked on a side road some distance away from the apartment. He’d had a ten-yen coin in his pocket and thought about using it to scratch the dark gleaming chassis. But then he remembered his mother saying the car had cost eight million yen. He hesitated. If it cost that much, it might make more sense to use a big five-hundred-yen coin. Then he began to worry about what would happen if Kazuhiro found out. The thought made him tremble, so he gave up on the idea and walked away. But he made a wish. He wished with all his might that Kazuhiro’s smart black car would be smashed in an accident. Seeing the white car outside the apartment didn’t make him think that his wish had come true, though. The car belonged to someone else—he knew that. Sure, his mother got out. But the man who climbed out of the driver’s side wasn’t Kazuhiro. The man took some paper bags from the back seat and followed Takeru’s mother up the stairs.
His mother called him Nakayama-san. He was a square-faced, balding man. He was stocky and paunchy, and wore black-framed glasses. Takeru’s mother said he worked for the council’s welfare department. Takeru couldn’t imagine where his mother would have met someone from the council. Nakayama often drove his mother home to the apartment in that white car. They held hands and linked arms. Nakayama sometimes brought sushi or cakes. There was probably something like that in one of the paper bags he’d just taken out of the car.