Meiko, Moeko, Yōko, I thought, chanting their names like some kind of love spell. Words have power, even by themselves. That’s why I don’t say them very much. Words like love, or death. Whenever I recite the names of my three sisters, I find myself drifting off into a deep fog. Even at college the other day, during a lecture about Marcel Pagnol, I wasn’t really paying attention to whatever my French professor, Monsieur Kimura, was saying. I just sat in my seat, repeating the names of my beloved sisters to myself over and over, writing them down again and again in my notebook.
“Sounds like a sister complex to me,” my classmate Tamura said when we went to Hanake to get a bite to eat.
“A complex? That’s rich. You say that like it’s some kind of sickness, loving your sisters. And what with your mother complex.”
“That’s completely different. All I do is put up with that old bag’s nagging. But you, you’ve pretty much gone and offered up your own guts to your sisters in sacrifice.”
Tamura may well have been right about that. “That’s a good one, coming from you.” I smiled. “But I guess there might be times when I do want to offer up my heart to them, or my shit-stained guts, even if they don’t want them. Anyway, how long do you think those jumbo gyōza are going to take?”
“You sure eat a lot, don’t you? At this rate, you really will be able to offer them some shit-stained guts. Your breath already reeks of garlic.”
Tamura and I often go out to eat garlic dishes like this. He’s the kind of guy who always acts calm and indifferent, no matter what’s going on, who goes around wearing worn-out T-shirts, his hair covered in dandruff. Basically, he’s the kind of guy that girls call gross. On top of that, he’s always coming out with these macho comments, like that there’s no helping women who can’t play the piano. But Tamura himself knows that he’s like this, and the fact that he doesn’t really think of me as a woman actually puts me at ease. That’s why I had decided to hang out with him.
“So? Haven’t you ever thought about shutting that bitch up?” I asked. “You could finish her off, you know?”
“She’s an old bag, not a bitch. Anyway, I’m not going to kill her, if that’s what you mean. It’d be too much of a hassle to clean up. By the way, the gyōza here are pretty big, aren’t they?”
“I’ve been coming here with my family ever since I was a kid. All I’d have to do is go for a walk around Nippori, and as soon as I’d pass by this place, I’d just get incredibly hungry, you know? So I’d end up getting some gyōza and a bowl of shaved ice to snack on.”
“Gyōza and shaved ice? What a combination.”
“Right? My sisters have it when they come here too. We’re all big eaters. By the way, if you’re having trouble dealing with that old bag, why not try asking that tsukudani store around here to help out? You can make tsukudani from just about anything, you know.”
Tamura let out a disgusted sigh. “How can you say that about someone’s mother? And you call yourself a woman?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been brought up like a boy ever since I was little. Whenever there was a festival, they wouldn’t let me ride on the float. They made me carry the mikoshi with all the boys. That’s what my family’s like.”
“The float, huh? I’ve always had a thing for the girls riding on top of that.”
This time, it was my turn to let out a disgusted sigh. “Everyone works so hard to pull it through the streets, but it’s always the girls sitting at the top who capture everyone’s hearts.” But then I realized that Tamura was probably just acting macho, so I let him be.
When I got home, my sisters were all gossiping about this guy called S whom we had seen at the Azalea Festival at Nezu Shrine. He had only just moved into the neighborhood, but my sisters had already fallen for him. I had happened to see him myself not too long ago too, over at the Mad Hat. Everyone else was drinking Jinro, but then there he was, the odd one out with that Bloody Caesar of his. The Mad Hat. A run-down drinking house in the middle of this Shitamachi, this laid-back low town nestled in the old-fashioned, earthy half of Tokyo far from the bustle and commotion of the Yamanote. And this smug, pretentious-looking outsider sipping at his cocktail. He clearly didn’t belong here. He could probably spend the rest of his life in this Shitamachi bar, and would still never find a way to fit in.
When I saw him at the Azalea Festival, he was empty-handed, as if he hadn’t expected all the food stands to be there. He must have come just to see the flowers, never mind that you have to pay to go in. My sisters and I had been completely oblivious to those flowers ever since we were kids, and were busy stuffing ourselves with takoyaki and cotton candy.
“Didn’t he say the azaleas were so pretty? He must be a flower person,” Meiko said.
“I don’t know about that. He might have just been putting on airs. But that kind of naivety is so cute, don’t you think?” Moeko replied.
The two of them couldn’t stop talking about him.
I looked at Yōko. She had always had a cunning streak, ever since she was small. I was probably the only one of us capable of loving her unconditionally. I could see her eyes burning with jealousy as she listened to Meiko and Moeko go on and on. Knowing that two of her sisters wanted him too, she was no doubt plotting to make a move of her own. She may have been pretending to ignore them, but I’ll bet that she was planning to give him a flower or something behind their backs. Because that’s the kind of person she is.
When we saw him that time at the Azalea Festival, we quickly learned that he was around the same age as Meiko. And when she realized that, Meiko’s face turned bright red for some reason. Did she think that she had a chance with him just because they were so close in years? It looked like Moeko had thought the same thing too. She made a face, as if she found it all kind of boring. Yōko just watched on coolly. After all, she knew that men preferred younger women. None of them had any way of knowing whether S was even interested in them, but love has a way of making people get big-headed like that.
“You were the only one who said anything to him, weren’t you? He looked a little flustered,” Moeko insisted.
“Not at all!” Meiko replied. “He sounded so happy, when we were talking together.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
I looked back and forth between my three sisters. Each of these three women, in their own way, seemed to have found themselves developing a vague interest in this man who had popped up here from some faraway town. It was probably only a matter of time before they started fighting over him. I love them, all three of my sisters, but for some reason, cruel thoughts kept pouring into my mind. They should fight more, I thought. Because women are born to fight. At least that’s the way that it has always seemed to me. I mean, I’m always paying attention to how my sisters smell. Everything from their perfumes and makeup when they go out, to the scent of menstrual blood that they leave in the bathroom when they’re on their periods. And those scents must get even richer after getting into a fight. Just thinking about it was enough to send a shiver coursing through my flesh. I wanted those scents to be stronger, I wanted to be able to breathe them in and savor them. With men, there’s simply no comparison. Men smell of nothing but sweat. They don’t give off different scents depending on the time or place, the way that women do.
If jealousy is a feminine characteristic, then women ought to be free to be as jealous as they want. And a loving attachment to a jealous woman—there’s no way that a man would be able to understand that.