I Hear Them Cry (15 page)

Taichi became strict with the money. In fact the more his business thrived, the more he tightened Kanako’s and Shigeki’s spending.

“That man said the money was there because he earned it, as if to say it didn’t belong to the Tachibanas, that it was separate from the family. He forbade us to lead a life of luxury. He even reduced Shigeki’s allowance by half. Now what can anyone buy with four, five thousand yen? Still, the child submitted humbly to Taichi without saying anything and simply squirreled away the money, which was all well and good in the end, because he went on to buy a surfboard. Back then having fun at Shonan Beach was all the rage.”

When Taichi came back drunk, occasionally he would take out his frustrations on Kanako. He was high-handed and despotic with Shigeki, too, picking quarrels over trivial things.

“When he found the surfboard by the front door, he said, ‘What? A surfboard? For a junior-high kid, goddamn it. Shameless extravagance, that’s what this is. Kids these days, it’s all play, play, and play for them. That’s all they spend their money
on.’ He kicked the board. Shigeki ran down from his room and stood before Taichi. The brute stiffened all the more and said, ‘What the hell’s that attitude, boy,’ and went on to knock him off his feet with a slap.”

Shigeki ran off. Taichi then stamped on the surfboard. Shigeki returned from the living room with a wine bottle in his hand and looked ready to fight Taichi.

“I thought the child was going to kill him just then. His eyes were frightfully serene—which got me to thinking that maybe the puppy he killed had been a stand-in for Taichi and that he had been waiting all along for this moment.

“I quickly stepped in to intervene, and he kicked me as if I was some kind of pest he could brush away.”

This was the first time Kanako came face-to-face with the bitter hatred lodged deep inside Shigeki’s heart. Putting on a bold front, Taichi retreated and walked away from the entrance, pretending to be drunk.

“You know what? I sent Shigeki to America to finish high school. Removing him from this household was the one motherly thing I did for my boy. Yes, among all the things I ever did for the child, that was the one motherly thing. I’m sure of that. He came back as a fine young man by anybody’s standards. Don’t you agree?”

Mayu. Mayu. Mayu.

I could hear that person whispering, pleading for help. It felt the same as with Anna. I drank my whiskey to drown my response.

KANAKO: THREE

Shigeki was popular among young women, thanks to his proficiency in English, his sporty car, and his affluence. But according to Kanako, he would never get seriously involved with anyone he dated.

“The one trait he shared with my husband was his womanizing. He’d make women cry, one after another. They’d whimper like puppies, poor things. I think that somewhere inside Shigeki there was a part of him that hated women. After all, that child not only hated the treatment he received from Taichi, but he also hated me for not being able to prevent the abuse. But you know, I was hurt too. His pain was my pain. Why can’t he see that? I suffered too.

“I kept silent, letting him do whatever he pleased, but when he brought Sophie along and said he was going to marry her, I was shocked. At first I thought he was doing it out of spite for us, retaliation for his miserable childhood. She was a poor immigrant prostitute, for heaven’s sake. Surely this must be a joke, I thought. I stubbornly refused to recognize their engagement, believing it, too, would end quickly like all his other flings. As for Taichi, he refused to be in the same room with Shigeki. One year later, Raiki was born.

“Shigeki was my revenge, I thought. Some form of poetic justice. I now understood how my parents must have felt after my situation. Still, to think that Shigeki had married this lowly woman, this bar hostess he’d met at some nightclub in Ginza, it was profoundly revolting to me. There was no way on earth I was going to allow her to remain a daughter of the Tachibana family.”

Both our glasses were empty. Kanako rose from her chair and left the room. I sat there, dumbstruck by everything she had told me. She returned quickly, leaving me no time to process any of this. She had brought with her the whiskey bottle and an ice bucket. She poured us each another drink, sat down in her chair, and continued, as if she was talking to herself.

“Terashima Industries operates bars on a large scale, and we sell them our wines wholesale. Reika works there managing the bars and escort girls, and she’s a rather formidable character, mind you. I have no idea when Shigeki and Reika began seeing each other. But it was necessary for the Tachibanas to get along with Terashima Industries for the sake of business, so I was in favor of seeing Shigeki’s relationship with her last.”

So here she was, basically telling me that as long as the relationship was for the sake of business, there was nothing for me to get worked up about, that I shouldn’t care, that life was still a bowl of cherries.

Even after Raiki’s birth, Kanako couldn’t accept Sophie.

So one day Kanako visited Reika to confess her troubles. The two of them tried to devise a way to ship Sophie back to the Philippines. Even after Raiki’s birth, Kanako had remained blind to Shigeki’s feelings. She was behaving exactly as her parents had.

“Although Reika never lost her cool, I suppose she couldn’t help feeling jealous that Shigeki had a child with Sophie. She always wanted to remind Shigeki of Sophie’s background.”

It was Kanako’s habit to trace her Venetian-crystal necklace, bead by bead. She had left it on the dresser before her shower
and now she picked it up. Dangled around her right hand, the necklace began to slowly revolve, one bead at a time. It reminded me of a television show I once watched about nomadic people in a foreign land praying, as they skillfully turned prayer beads with their right hand while holding a scripture in their left. But Kanako’s left hand was busy shaking her glass of whiskey and turning the melting ice cubes, making them rattle.

“When Taichi first got the boat, he used it for fishing. It relaxed him,” Kanako continued. “It was also a great way to entertain clients. The entertaining became more and more over the top, with wild parties and escorts arranged by Reika. Then even when there weren’t parties or clients, there were women. One day I visited Sophie at her apartment and told her that Taichi was hoping to see her. Mind you, I had never been to the boat. But Reika had told me all the details, and I conveyed them to Sophie, telling her to treat the meeting like a job interview.”

In my mind I began to hear the sound of that cry from far away:

Help. Help. Somebody help.

Kanako was feeling the whiskey and she really started to vent, releasing a flood of pent-up emotion like a dam had burst. I dreaded what she would share with me next. All I could do was listen.

“So the next day I had Shigeki go to the harbor to welcome the clients. Seeing Sophie step off the boat, my son must have finally remembered who she was—and what she really was,” Kanako spat out.

As she spoke, Kanako disappeared from my vision and was replaced by Simone, just as her trial had ended. As she was being taken into custody, Simone turned back for an instant to glare at
me, spit on the floor, and say, “I had no choice. A bitch like you would never understand.” She had spoken in a voice only I could hear—a low, whispering simmer—and the look on her face then was the look on Kanako’s now. They were one and the same.

(I did it to survive.)

Was that a justification for a mother to do anything to her child?

In the end, the fact that an underprivileged woman had married into the Tachibana family, a celebrated name with a lineage dating back three hundred years, was too hard for Kanako to swallow.

“But who would have thought,” Kanako continued, “that Sophie would commit suicide? I certainly didn’t. Wasn’t it just business as usual for her?”

I simply couldn’t believe the coldness of what I was hearing. I sipped my drink, but the whiskey didn’t help. It failed to penetrate my numb disbelief.

“She dropped some sleeping pills into her drink and ended her life right there on the boat. It was intentional, I tell you, to stage her death on the boat like that. Now that’s harassment at an excessive level.”

Up until this point, I’d thought that Kanako was remorseful and was confessing to repent for her sins. But she was wallowing in self-pity, feeling sorry for the pit of loneliness she had dug for herself. She was blaming Shigeki, Sophie, and even Raiki for making her life miserable. Kanako and I did not share a common language; we did not see the world in the same way. A torrent of violence ran through me as I realized how she was using my sympathy. I was so angry that I wanted to shatter the glass of whiskey in my hand and wield it against her. I found myself grateful I didn’t have Pierre’s knife with me for fear of what I might do with it.

I stood up and gradually moved away from Kanako until I was backed up against the door. How depraved were Taichi’s abuses really, in light of what I knew now? Whether they involved being thrown into the sea or stuffed into a hemp sack and kicked away, such things seemed like mere bruises.

Kanako had committed murder—murder of the soul.

She had impaled Sophie’s and Shigeki’s souls. She robbed Raiki of his mother. Yet Kanako remained ignorant of her guilt.

I saw Simone’s glare. I was shouting at her, and at Kanako.

True suffering is born of women like you!

KANAKO: FOUR

Raiki was riding on a crane. It was attempting to fly into the dark night sky. Tilting his neck, Raiki waved his small hand good-bye. I yelled as loudly as possible, “Wait, don’t go, Raiki, watch out!”

Raiki fell, whirling in the air as he dropped. I reached out my arms and caught the child, only to realize what I had caught was a badly bruised, slimy lump of flesh. Desperately, I licked the thing. If I didn’t, it would stop breathing. The blood oozing out turned clear, and I shoved the thing into my womb, where it landed with a thud. It was too early for the lump of flesh to be born, and I was convinced that it was Shigeki. I felt a strange sense of relief and happiness arising from the knowledge that I had Shigeki back at last.

Ms. Sato shook me awake. My head throbbed as I wondered when and how I had returned to my bed.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow!”

“You drank too much, that’s why! Didn’t I tell you that Madam Kanako grew up in a sake brewery? You’re thirty years away from being able to match her drinking pace.”

“All right already, ahhhh, ow, ow!”

I curled up into a fetal position and remained still to keep the dream from escaping me. I wanted to commit it to memory. I wanted to continue keeping Shigeki secure in my womb.

“What time is it?”

“It’s already noon.”

“Where’s Mother-in-Law?”

“She put on her makeup and left a long while back.”

“So she went to work, right?”

“I don’t know. How about telling me what the two of you talked about?”

It felt as though she was pressing me to make a deal—her story about the makeup for mine about last night.

“She was talking to me about things that happened in her life, up to the point when Sophie committed suicide.”

“Oh yes, Sophie. Well, if only she hadn’t aimed too high and desired to take up the position of a Tachibana daughter-in-law, she would have led a good life with her child. It would have been blissful in its own way, really.”

“What are you saying? She killed herself because her dignity was trampled on. And on top of that, she lost Shigeki’s love.”

“Oh my, is that so?” Ms. Sato managed to dodge my sudden counterattack.

“Where would Mother-in-Law be besides some place for work? That’s all she has in her life these days, right?”

“Your lunch is getting cold. You really should start eating soon,” she said, putting on airs before scuttling out of the room.

My head was still throbbing, and I wanted more sleep, but Ms. Sato had piqued my curiosity.

In the kitchen I found a meal of corn soup, toast, prosciutto salad, and a glass of cold lemonade. I drank the lemonade, chugging it down in one sip. My body felt awake at last.