I Hear Them Cry (10 page)

With his large dark eyes, Raiki threw a glance at Kanako to see if she had any objections to him accepting a cookie. He seemed rather shy for a boy.

“How about saying thank you?” Ms. Sato suggested.

He did just that before timidly reaching out for the treat. Clearly, Kanako and Ms. Sato had disciplined him well, but the sight was still pathetic. It was like watching a dog react to the commands “stay” and “go.”

“Let’s get you changed,” Ms. Sato said before leading Raiki away. She seemed to have grown uncomfortable, sensing a heaviness in the air.

“Steady now,” Kanako muttered, speaking to no one in particular. “Remain as though nothing has happened.”

Was she in denial about her husband’s disappearance? As for me, it was absolutely impossible to accept that Shigeki was having an affair. How could I act as though nothing was happening?

GRANDMOTHER: ONE

I visited my parents’ house not too long after parting with Kanako. My father was a scholar who taught college science and spent most of his time cooped up in his research lab, leaving family matters entirely to my mother. My brother and I were in awe of him even though he never spared time to play with us, even when he was home. He preferred being cloistered in his study, working away at his desk.

There was one exception to this, however. Every evening on his day off, my father would dawdle out of his study and call out, “Come on, let’s go!” My brother and I would stop whatever it was we were in the middle of—be it an argument, a scuffle, or a snack—and jump into our shoes. It was our night out at the
pachinko
parlor!

My father would hand over ten balls to my brother. I was very young, so I sat on my father’s lap and we would lose ourselves in the world of pachinko. As we basked in the cacophony of the marching-band music that filled the rackety arcade, we devoted our hearts and souls to the game. I never got tired. I loved watching all those pachinko balls going round and round in circles. Sometimes I’d even insert a ball or two into the machine’s shooting slot and the machine would eject more
balls from its spout at the bottom, and I would get all excited as they jingled and jangled their way into the receiving tray. When my father’s tray filled up, I would look up to him, brimming with deep respect and admiration for his prowess as a player. He would even give us a tiny share of his bounty whenever his winnings grew. The more we won, the more the game absorbed us. We forgot about time. All I felt was the warm and fuzzy happiness of sitting there on my father’s lap.

When I was ten years old, though, I began to have a slightly different view of him. I began to believe he had a reason other than work for shutting himself inside his study.

One day, I was on my way to my brother’s room to get some help on my arithmetic homework. He was in junior high at the time. I saw him enter my father’s study. How should I say this? I smelled secrecy in his abrupt movements? So I shut my door, deciding right there and then that I would feign ignorance.

A few days later, when no one was home, I went into my father’s study because I was dying to find out what my brother had been up to in there. Books filled the room to the ceiling and there were documents and manuscripts scattered all over the desktop. Father wouldn’t let anyone in to clean the space, not even my mother. There was an order to the chaos that only he understood. Any disruption to that order would infuriate him; a single piece of paper slightly out of place wouldn’t escape his notice. And it didn’t help to blame it on us children. He would still act bitterly and accuse my mother of failing to discipline us adequately. For my brother and me, our father’s office was off-limits.

The room was stuffy with the smell of tobacco even with an air conditioner, a dehumidifier, and a fan—items my father considered indispensable. There was a bay window blocked by more books. But that’s where I found it, in that part of the dusky chamber where only half of the bay window let in the sunlight.

It was a stack of ten sketchbooks, their spiral wiring reflected in the windowpane. Even then I was in love with pictures.

(Does my father also draw?)

Wanting to see his drawings, I approached the window carefully, so as not to move anything. I removed the books in order and opened one of the sketchbooks.

GRANDMOTHER: TWO

My grandmother’s dementia progressed with age. It got so bad that she’d forget turning on her bedside lamp a split second after she’d done it. Consequently, my mother decided to turn on the house lights at four every evening.

In the end, though, it was no use. One day, Grandmother began walking toward Hikami, her hometown of old in Hyōgo Prefecture. She stepped outside and set a newspaper on fire before ambling down the road, illuminating the area around her with the flame.

Mother put out the torch with a bucket of water. But Grandmother got wet, too, and she caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. My father had objected to hospitalizing her at first, but in the end he gave in and Grandmother was hospitalized against her will. After returning home, my dad was in a bad mood, so he went into his study.

(Did he go here to draw?)

The day I’d snuck into his study and looked at his sketchbooks I found countless drawings of a naked man and woman entwined in a tangle of arms and legs, but with their navels always connected. Every sketch was drawn meticulously in pencil and was very detailed, as if he had been working from
real-life models posing in front of him. The woman on these pages was not my mother.

I couldn’t stop looking at the drawings. I’d discovered my father’s terrible, secret world. From that day on, every time my father went into his study, I imagined him drawing “that stuff,” as I came to call it in my head. Before I knew it, I came to hate him. Looking back now, I can’t help but wonder whether that room was a refuge from the messy feuds that erupted between Grandmother and my mom. These drawings were his secret pleasures. Was the woman in the sketches his lover? Were all those documents on the desk merely smoke screens to keep prying eyes off the drawings?

Soon after being hospitalized, Grandmother passed away, and, without even waiting for me to graduate from art school, so did my father, having contracted a medical condition called subarachnoid hemorrhage.

I wonder whether my mom was actually exacting revenge against my father, in her own underhanded way, when she tied my grandmother to her bed. Even the dousing of the old lady in such a callous, heartless way might have been driven by the impulse to get back at him for his secret.

When I was a kid, there was a time when I pestered my mom to give me a younger sister. It was something I had said without understanding the workings of the adult world.

“You know what?” my mother said to me. “Grandmother opened the
fusuma
door and said, ‘Enough with the children.’ ”

Thinking about that now as I headed to see my mother, I realized what it meant for a grandmother to enter a married couple’s bedroom and say such a thing. In that house, the sounds of Grandmother’s breathing prevailed, and all semblance of a married life had probably vanished. My father probably never went to bed with my mother again, not because he didn’t want to, but rather because he was unable to. Is that when he got
himself a mistress? It’s certainly when Mother began to lead a life of simmering fury. It was all clear to me now.

I badly needed a friendly ear, someone who would sympathize with me. My mother seemed like a sure bet.

The quiet residential streets in the outskirts of Yokohama wound along hills lush with oak, zelkova, and chestnut trees, shielding the homes from the strong midsummer sun.

My mother lived with my brother, his wife, and their son, Kenta, who was one year older than Raiki. The house was a new build, and as I approached it, I heard Kenta’s lively voice. I sounded the chime and was greeted by my sister-in-law’s cheerful voice.

“Yes? Who’s there?”

“It’s Mayu, hello!”

“Yes, yes.”

Saki wasn’t surprised by my arrival. She acted as if my out-of-the-blue appearance was business as usual. She had an open heart, and I needed that. After all, I was feeling like a piece of filth, wrapped up in a sheet and put away in a corner for sanitary reasons. I felt like I’d been told, “You just stay there and keep your mouth shut.”

Kenta was in the living room, wearing Saki’s scarf around his neck like a cape and prancing about the sofa with a toy pistol in one hand.

“Hey, it’s Auntie!” he yelled upon seeing me.

He leapt into my arms and his bursting innocence, his cloudless affection, warmed me. I hugged his soft body with all my might, as if by squeezing him I could heal the endless wound I felt.

“Ow! Let go of me, Auntie, it hurts,” Kenta said before I put him down.

He restlessly ran around the room after that, never keeping still for an instant. When Saki came in with some iced coffee, she hollered, “Kenta! I’ve told you many times! Don’t jump up and down on the sofa.”

She was seriously scolding him, probably out of respect for her mother-in-law, who had just come into the room, and me. Still, Kenta wasn’t bothered at all. The little typhoon just took off, hightailing it out of the living room.

“Mayu-chan, please make yourself at home,” Saki said before chasing after her son.

Appearing relieved, mother picked up her cup of iced coffee and began to rattle the ice before asking, “Is Shigeki away on another business trip?”

“I guess. He’s supposed to return from Kamakura today.”

“How is your mother-in-law? Is she well?”

“Yes…” I said and fell silent. I didn’t know how to begin.

“What’s the matter? What’s troubling you?”

“Shigeki has a mistress.”

My mother froze in mid-sip. She said, lowering her voice, “What? No, that can’t be true, can it?”

“I’m afraid so, and what’s more, his mother has known all along.”

I couldn’t shake Kanako’s words:
Remain as though nothing has happened
. I realized now that they had been desensitizing me, dehumanizing me, in a cold, matter-of-fact way. But the charade had reached its limit, and I was ready to let go. If my mother had gotten angry, I would have burst into tears without fail, and that would have been just fine. I was just hoping to find some space, some breathing room so that I could vent my emotions. But my mother’s words only numbed my senses more.

“Perhaps it’s just your imagination?”

Stunned, I had no words to give in return. It had taken a lot out of me to tell the truth. I was short of breath. I didn’t have
to “prove” anything. How absurd was that? Shigeki’s affair was a fact. My mother was spurning me, afraid of being burdened with the complications of a difficult situation.

(He’s a wealthy man! A rare catch!)

It was obvious that she was going to be troubled if I had said that I was getting a divorce and returning home.

My brother, a graduate of Kunitachi University, was working for a major company, and my mother was spending her old age in peace. Grandmother, a product of the Taishō era, apparently used to dote on my father. But to my mother she had been a stern mother-in-law. This house was my mother’s fortress of happiness, one she had won at long last after putting up with the madness of staying sane in the narrow, sad space between her mother-in-law and her husband’s mistress.

There was no place for me in this home anymore. My mother had spoken, echoing Kanako’s dictum:
Remain as though nothing has happened
. I was absolutely homeless now, not only physically but spiritually too.

“Yes, well, you could be right: I may be imagining things,” I said before leaving. I needed to be alone, so I took the next train home. After boarding, I looked through the gloomy window and felt myself being sucked into a profound darkness as I pondered the reflection of my eyes. They were the same as Anna’s.