*
Uncle, Uncle Jōsuke.
I was scared that if I just let this opportunity go by, I would never learn what happened between Mother and Father. Until then, I hadn’t wanted to know about Father, not until the time came for me to get married myself and Mother told me. I kept the name Kadota Reiichirō tucked away deep inside my heart, and that was enough. But when I saw Mother earlier that day, sitting with her back to me in the Yūki haori, I changed my mind. For some reason, I felt absolutely certain that Mother was not going to recover — I felt it in my heart.
At some point, I had learnt from my grandmother in Akashi and other relatives why Mother had to break up with Father. It had happened when I was five, and I was living in Akashi with Mother, her parents and the maids while Father was at his university in Kyoto, doing research for his degree in the paediatrics department. One blustery day in April, a young woman came to see Mother with a newborn infant in her arms. As soon as she had come up into the house, she laid the baby down in the alcove, undid her obi, and started changing into an under-kimono she took from a little basket she had brought. Mother was stunned when she came back with the tea. The woman was genuinely crazy. Later, they learnt that the frail-looking baby in the alcove, dozing under the red nandina berries that had been hung there, was her child by my father.
Soon after that the baby died. Fortunately the woman’s mental issues were just temporary, though, and she was back to her usual self almost immediately. I hear she married into a merchant household in Okayama, and she’s still living there happily. Mother ran away from her parents’ house in Akashi not long after that incident, taking me along, and Father, whom her parents had adopted so that he would be part of the family, ended up leaving it again. I remember my grandmother telling me when I started school, “There was no point making a stink, but then Saiko always was a stubborn one, even when there wasn’t anything to be done.” I guess the thought of forgiving him offended Mother’s moral sense. That was as much as I knew about what had happened. Until I turned seven or eight, I thought Father was dead. They let me believe that. To tell the truth, even now, in my heart, Father is dead. I hear he runs a big hospital in Hyōgo, not an hour away, and that he has stayed single, even after all this time; but however hard I try I just can’t imagine him, my real father. That man may be alive, in reality, but my father has been dead for ages.
*
I opened the first page of Mother’s diary. And how surprised I was to find that the first word my hungry gaze landed upon was sin—yes, sin. Several times in a row—SIN SIN SIN—the handwriting so coarse I could hardly believe it was Mother’s. And then, under all those piled-up SINs, scrawled out as if the words themselves were being crushed by their weight: “Oh Lord forgive me — Midori-san, forgive me.” That was all I saw. The rest of the writing on the page had melted away, leaving just that one line, like a devil living there, glaring at me so fiercely it seemed it was about to spring.
I slammed the diary shut. I can hardly express how dreadful that moment was. The whole house was perfectly still, except for the loud pounding of my heart. I got up, checked that the door and the windows were still shut tight, and then I went back to my desk, screwed up my courage, and opened the diary again. I felt like the devil myself, now, as I read the whole thing — every word, from start to finish. But Mother hadn’t written a single line relating to my father, the man I had been so curious about in the first place — the whole diary was focused on her relationship with you, things I never even dreamt were possible, spelt out in language so wild I would never have imagined Mother had it in her. Sometimes she suffered, sometimes she was overjoyed, sometimes she prayed, or hoped, or resolved to die — yes, it’s true, she made up her mind any number of times to commit suicide. She would kill herself if Aunt Midori ever learnt about her relationship with you, that was her plan. She always seemed so bright, to enjoy talking with Aunt Midori… who could have guessed she was so terrified of her?
Reading her diary, I learnt that for thirteen years Mother lived with the weight of death always bearing down on her shoulders. Sometimes the entries would continue four or five days in a row, and then for two or three months she wouldn’t write a word, but it was clear on every page that Mother was face-to-face with death. “Yes, why don’t you just die, if I were dead all my problems would be solved…” Oh, what could have made her write such desperate, unthinking words? “What need have I to be afraid of anything, now that I have resolved to die? Forget your shame, Saiko! Be more bold!” What could have led a woman as gentle as Mother to write something so careless and self-centred? Was it really love? That beautiful, shining thing we call love? You gave me a book for my birthday one year, Uncle, with a picture of a naked woman standing tall and proud by a beautiful fountain, her long, full hair streaming around her chest, cupping her hands around her slightly upturned, bud-like breasts… This, the book explained, was love. But oh, Uncle, the love you and Mother shared was nothing at all like that!
Now that I have read Mother’s diary, Aunt Midori scares me more than anything else in the world, just as she did Mother. I’ve inherited the pain of Mother’s secret. Aunt Midori, who used to pucker up her lips and kiss my cheek! Aunt Midori, whom I loved every bit as much as Mother! I’m pretty sure that when I started first grade in Ashiya, Aunt Midori was the one who gave me a new backpack with giant roses all over it. And when I went on my first school trip to the seaside in Tangoyura, she gave me a big inflatable ring that looked like a seagull. For the arts festival in second grade, I told the story of Tom Thumb — the Grimm brothers fairy tale — and when I got all that applause, it was because Aunt Midori had kept listening to me practise, night after night, giving me rewards when I did a good job. And I could keep going and going — Aunt Midori is there in all my childhood memories. Mother’s cousin, her closest friend. Now Aunt Midori only dances, but she used to be so good at mahjong and golf and swimming and skiing. The pies she baked were bigger than my face. I remember she came over once with a whole group of Takarazuka actresses to surprise us. Oh, why has Aunt Midori always been such an important part of our lives, filling it with her bright light, as carefree as a rose?
*
I don’t know if people really have premonitions, but I had something like that about you and Mother once — just once. It was about a year ago. I was going to school with my friends, and when we got to Hankyū Shukugawa Station, I realized I had left my extra-curricular English reader at home. So I asked my friends to wait for me and went back alone to get it, and then when I came to our gate, for some reason I just couldn’t go in. The maid had been out running errands all morning, so I knew Mother was the only one in the house. And yet somehow, her being there all alone made me uneasy. I was scared. I stood outside the gate for a while, staring at the azaleas, trying to decide if I should go in or not. In the end I gave up on my reader and walked back to Shukugawa, where my friends were waiting. It was really weird — even I couldn’t say why I had acted that way. I had the feeling that from the moment I walked out of the gate to go to school, just a little while before, a time that belonged only to Mother had started flowing through the house. And she wouldn’t want me to intrude, she would look very sad if I did — that was the sense I had. So I went back along the street beside the Ashiya River, feeling an indescribable loneliness, kicking stones as I went, and when I got to the station I sat in the waiting room, leaning against the bench, hardly hearing my friends talking.