PROLOGUE
Three years after the end of the war, a baby girl was born in a small village in Akita Prefecture. She had two older brothers who were later joined by a younger brother and sister. Being from a farming family, although not well-off, they grew up healthy and vigorous.
Many of the girl’s contemporaries were sent off to find work in the city after graduating junior high school, as soon as they could. She, however, continued on to the local high school. When she graduated, she found a job at a textile mill in Chiba, on the outskirts of Tokyo. She told her family that she wanted to help them financially when, in fact, she just wanted to put the poverty and hardships of country life behind her. Hosting the 1964 Olympics had endowed Greater Tokyo with an irresistible luster in her eyes.
Unfortunately, her textile mill was out in the suburbs and both it and the all-female dormitory next to it were surrounded by nothing but fields and rice paddies. Still, on her day off, she would head into Tokyo. Parading in her miniskirt through the lively parts of town—that simply did not exist where she came from—was an exhilarating experience.
Life was fun and the time rushed by. She almost never went back to her hometown. The first year she went home for New Year and for the Obon summer holiday. She found it dreadfully dull and she was disgusted by the way her siblings would shamelessly try to squeeze her for money. She gradually started making up excuses to not go back.
In this way, around two years passed. She’d gotten used to life in the big city and learned to have fun in all sorts of ways. And now that she was over twenty, she was allowed to drink.
It was a Sunday when it happened. She was looking into the display window of a boutique not far from Ginza when a shadowy figure came up behind her. She was just about to turn around when her handbag was grabbed and torn off her. She yelled but it was too late. The man had already run off. A purse snatcher!
Yelling “Thief!” she launched herself in pursuit. In her high heels, she was barely able to run. The other people in the street did not seem to grasp what had happened.
She stopped and stood frozen to the spot, overcome with the shock of it, before sinking down into a squatting position. She felt demoralized. Her brain was a blank. She had no idea what to do. Her wallet was in the bag. She wouldn’t even be able to get back home.
She noticed a shadow on the sidewalk followed by a pair of black leather shoes. She looked up. A man in a rather flashy shirt open at the neck was standing there. He was young but probably older than she was, she reckoned.
“This yours, miss?”
She caught her breath when she saw what he had in his hands. It was the bag that had been snatched just a moment or two ago! She pulled herself hastily to her feet and took it. She opened it. Her wallet was still there!
“I let the fellow go. Handing him over to the police is more trouble than it’s worth. You got your stuff back, and that’s what counts, right, miss?”
“You … you ran after him and caught him?”
“Nah. I was just walking along minding my own business when the guy comes charging across the street. He was holding a woman’s handbag. Right away I was like, ‘This guy’s got to be a purse snatcher.’ I just stuck out my leg and—crash—down he goes. He dropped the bag and was too stunned to pick it up again. He just took off, so I picked it up and was walking this way, wondering who it belonged to, when I saw you.”
“Thank you. You saved my life.” She bowed deeply to show her gratitude.
“You need to be careful. There’s bag snatchers on bicycles and motorbikes too.” The man was already moving off as he said this, but spotting a hole-in-the-wall tobacconist a few meters away, he stopped at the counter. “A pack of Highlights,” she heard him say.
The girl dashed up to him, pulling her wallet out of her bag as she did so. “Look … Let me pay for those.”
“What? Why?” There was an expression of surprise on the man’s face.
“It’s my way of saying thank you. It’s the least I can do.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I can’t help it. It’s something my parents drilled into me: if somebody does you a good turn, you’ve got to show them you’re grateful.” She turned and looked at the old woman behind the counter. “How much for the Highlights?”
“Seventy yen,” she said.
The younger woman hesitated. Was that too little to properly express her thanks?
The man burst out laughing. “Okay, okay, I get it. Fine, then, go ahead and pay for them.”
She felt her cheeks reddening as she handed over the money.
“I think that gives me the right to do something for you. What would you say to having a cup of coffee with me?” the man said as he dropped the cigarette packet into the chest pocket of his shirt.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly … I mean, coffee costs more than a pack of cigarettes.”
“It’s okay. Really. The cost price of coffee’s less than seventy yen.”
“The ‘cost price’?”
“Yeah. Come with me.
You’ll soon see what I mean.”
He took her to a bar on the third floor of a modern building. It was closed, but he unlocked the door. There was a counter on one side and four tables in a row on the other.
The man went around to the inside of the counter and started preparing some coffee. He sometimes served it to people who didn’t want anything alcoholic, he explained.
He introduced himself. His name was Hiroshi Yano and he worked behind the bar here. The place was closed because it was a Sunday.
She told him her name.
“Where’re you from? Sounds like the northeast to me.”
“I’m from Akita.… It’s that obvious, is it?”
After two years in Tokyo, she liked to think that she’d gotten rid of her accent, but people often commented on it.
“It’s nothing to get upset about. I think it’s rather sweet. I’m an out-of-towner too.”
Hiroshi was from Nagano Prefecture. He’d come to Tokyo as part of a group who had moved in search of work. When the factory he and his cohort were working at shut down, he’d started working at the bar. As well as tending bar, he was also a general drudge, doing the unglamorous jobs like cleaning and tidying before the place opened for the night.
They went on to discuss their interests and enthusiasms. She’d never had such a long conversation with a man outside of her workplace. If truth be told, at work, conversation was kept to a minimum, and she wasn’t much good at it anyway. As she chatted away with Hiroshi, she felt relaxed and comfortable. At the same time, her whole body felt burning hot. It was a strange feeling.
She wanted to stay longer, but she needed to get back to the factory dormitory before it got too late. As she was getting ready to leave, Hiroshi said, “Fancy getting together again some time?”
“I’d like that.…”
“How about next Sunday? Will you be back in town?”
“Probably…”
“Good. Same place, same time?”
“Fine by me.”
“It’s a deal, then. If there’s any problem, give me a call.” Hiroshi slid a book of matches across the counter with the bar’s phone number on it.
They started meeting at the bar every Sunday. They would go out for a meal or occasionally go see a movie. She felt miserable when it was time to say goodbye. In the train on the way home from Ueno Station, she would often sing, “I love him and I’ll never forget him,” quietly to herself. It was a song from Pinky & Killers’ The Season of Love, which had been a big hit the year before.
They’d been seeing each other like this for around three months when she went to Hiroshi’s apartment for the first time. It was a single room with a small kitchen area. The futon almost completely covered the floor. It was on that futon that the two of them made love. It was her first time.
Instead of meeting Hiroshi at the bar on Sunday afternoons, she started going around to his apartment on Saturday night. She would head to the station as soon as work finished for the day and catch the train for Tokyo. Sometimes she would cook up a simple dinner for them both. She started keeping toiletries and a change of clothes at his place.
After a while, she noticed that something was not quite right. She wasn’t getting her period. Initially, she wasn’t too worried; it was irregular at the best of times. Only when she was late by over a month did she really get concerned. She went to the hospital.
“Congratulations,” the doctor said. “You’re already into the third month.”
She simply couldn’t accept it. She couldn’t believe what was happening. She shared her confusion with Hiroshi, who just burst out laughing.
“You’re pregnant? Thought you might be. No big surprise when we’ve been screwing like rabbits week in, week out! Besides, people say that the pullout method doesn’t really work.”
“What should we do?”
“Simple enough. You’re going to quit your job and I’m going to have to do enough work for two. No, make that enough work for three, for when the baby comes along. It won’t be easy, but what other choice have we got?”
“What are you saying? What am I supposed to do after quitting my job?”
“Move in here. Let’s live together. It’s not the biggest place, but we’ll just have to make do for the time being. As soon as I start earning more, we can move somewhere bigger.”
As soon as Hiroshi said that, the gloom that had been enveloping her like a fog instantly lifted. He was pleased at the news. He even went a step further and took the opportunity to ask her to marry him.
She wrapped her arms around his neck.
They still had one problem to deal with. She had not told her parents about Hiroshi. She knew for a fact that they would be furious to discover that she was pregnant out of wedlock. On top of that, as country people, they had a powerful and instinctive prejudice against the nightlife world in which Hiroshi worked. They were hoping that their daughter would find herself a respectable husband.
They talked it over and decided that the best thing to do was to pay a formal visit to her parents after the baby had been born. Surely when her parents saw the baby’s little face, they would forgive her on the spot!
She handed in her notice the following month. She moved out of the factory dormitory and into Hiroshi’s little apartment, bringing as few things with her as she possibly could.
Alongside his job at the bar, Hiroshi got himself a part-time gig delivering newspapers. He would work until the early hours of the morning, then head straight for the newspaper delivery office. He got home at around 7:00 A.M. and slept through to the afternoon. He was able to keep up this routine because he was physically robust and capable of holding his liquor. Hiroshi always said, “It’s for our family. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
She made a doll for the baby she was expecting. Not knowing if it was going to be a boy or a girl, she kitted the doll out with a blue-and-pink-striped sweater and gave it longish hair. With all the Japanese pop groups copying the Beatles, plenty of men had started growing out their hair too.
Even if they were not well-off, they were happy. They weren’t expecting anything bad to happen to them.
Then, on a Friday morning the month before she was due to have the baby, the janitor knocked on the door of their apartment. “Phone call for you,” he said.
Hiroshi had collapsed while he was out delivering papers.
She rushed to the hospital. She almost fainted at the sight of Hiroshi laid out in the ward. Someone had placed a white cloth over his face.
It was a cerebral hemorrhage. The doctor wasn’t sure what had caused it. He said that overwork could have had something to do with it.
She cried for three days and three nights. After her tears finally dried up, she sank into deep despondency. She didn’t want to do anything and she just stayed in bed all day.
That was when she unexpectedly went into labor, almost a full month ahead of her due date! She dragged herself on all fours to the janitor’s room, where the startled man called an ambulance.
She had a baby girl weighing roughly five pounds. Holding the little body against hers, she felt joy and bewilderment in equal measure. How was she supposed to go about her life now?
She had barely any money. She had no way of paying next month’s rent. And she couldn’t very well go out and work now that she had a baby to take care of.
At a loss what to do, she delayed registering the birth. Throwing herself at the mercy of her parents back home wasn’t an option.
One day, she fainted in the apartment. In addition to not eating properly, a lot of her energy was being diverted to the baby in the form of breast milk. She was lucky she’d had the attack indoors. It could have been much more serious. She shuddered when she
what would have happened if she’d been holding her baby daughter at the time.
I can’t go on like this. As she looked down at the baby sleeping peacefully, she made a decision. She couldn’t bring up the baby by herself. In the long run, it would be better if she gave her up.
She could only think of one solution. There was an orphanage not far from the textile mill where she’d been working. She had no idea how the place was managed, but she did remember seeing the children when they had come to visit the textile mill on a field trip. They had all looked healthy and happy. She’ll be well looked after there, she thought to herself.
Autumn came. On a slightly chilly day, she left the apartment. She was holding the baby in her arms and had a basket in the crook of her elbow. It contained a few spare clothes, a blanket, and the doll she’d made herself.
She took a train and then a bus. When she was close to the orphanage, she got out and sat down in a park a certain distance away, waiting for night to fall. She ate a sweet bun and breastfed the baby. The knowledge that this was the last feeding she would ever do made her weep uncontrollably.
When it got dark, she went into action. She wrapped the baby in a towel and placed it in the basket. She slipped the doll in beside her before putting the blanket over them both. If they took off the doll’s clothes, the people at the orphanage would find what she’d written in Magic Marker on the doll’s back. It was the name she and Hiroshi had planned to give their baby. They had thought of it together. It was a name, in kanji, that would work equally well for a boy or a girl.
When she reached the orphanage, she stopped in front of the waist-high gate and examined the place. It was a cluster of solid-looking buildings. There were lights on in the windows.
She glanced around. There was no one nearby. If she was going to do this, she would have to do it quickly. Her plan would fail if anyone spotted her hanging around.
She went up to the gate and placed the basket on the ground next to it. Although she’d promised herself not to take a second look at her baby, she couldn’t help herself and turned back the blanket slightly.
The baby’s round white face was illuminated by the moonlight. It was asleep, breathing peacefully, and its eyes were shut.
She touched one of its cheeks with her fingertips. I will never forget the feel of her skin as long as I live, she thought.
She felt the tears coming. Fighting them off, she pulled the blanket back up over the baby’s head. She was hoping that the orphanage staff would find the baby in the morning.
She got to her feet and walked away. Don’t look back, she told herself. Imagining that she could hear the sound of whimpering behind her, she struggled for breath.
She had no idea where she was going. Eventually, she found herself sitting on the train without knowing how she’d got there. Looking at the darkness outside the window, she wondered what the point of going back to Tokyo was.
1
Sonoka Shimauchi popped into the grilled chicken joint after emerging from Ayase Station with all the other commuters and before heading to her usual bus stop. Today was her day to make dinner, but she’d let her mother, Chizuko, know that she would be picking up chicken takeout. “Cutting corners again, eh?” Chizuko had joked. Since she actually liked grilled chicken, she didn’t mind really.
Sonoka frowned as she looked up at the menu. The quails’ eggs were sold out. What should she do? There was another shop she liked, but it was a bit of a walk away.
She pulled out her phone and called her mother. They both adored quails’ eggs. She didn’t want her mother to give her a hard time for having given up too easily.
No one picked up. Chizuko had said she was doing the early shift today. She should be home by now.
Sonoka waited for a minute or two, then called again. Once again, no answer.
Oh, what the heck. She decided to buy something else at the same place. They could get quails’ eggs another time.
She bought a couple of mixed chicken grills and caught her bus. The smell of chicken wafted out of the bag on her lap.
The sun had now set fully. She contemplated the city going by as she rocked along with the motion of the bus. It was a succession of gas stations, big electronics stores, and car dealerships, with small stores, private houses, and office buildings filling up the spaces in between. It was a cityscape she knew well. In a day or two, it would be four years since they moved to this part of Tokyo. The time had gone by so quickly! They were living somewhere new, but living together with her mom, just the two of them, was as much fun as ever. Sure, they fought from time to time, but they had never had a serious falling-out.
When Sonoka was a child, most of the children at the place where Chizuko worked had no parents, rather than just one. As a result, Sonoka didn’t feel that she was different. She had a vague idea that her father was dead.
It was only after she’d been at primary school for a while that she started thinking about him. Most of her school friends had two parents. She was eager to discover what her father had been like.
Chizuko couldn’t bring herself to lie.
“Your father worked at the same place where I was working. It’s a long time ago now. Circumstances prevented us from getting married. Mommy wanted to have a baby anyway, so I had a baby with him, and that baby was you.”
That was the explanation Sonoka got the first time she asked. She kept on asking the same question over and over until she finally learned the truth. It was simple enough. Her father already had a family of his own. When he found out that Chizuko was pregnant, he didn’t want her to have the baby and told her that if she went ahead and had it, he would refuse to acknowledge it. That was when Chizuko had made the decision to bring up the child as a single parent. She broke up with Sonoka’s father and never contacted him again. That was why Sonoka had never met him.
None of this came as any great shock to Sonoka. When she asked Chizuko what sort of man he was, she was told that he was “very kind, very nice.” That was good enough for her.
She was still sunk in these old memories when the bus reached her stop. She climbed down onto the sidewalk, the bag of grilled chicken in her hand.
She walked along the road for a few minutes. There was the two-story wooden apartment building off on the left. ...
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