My Mother

Back at home, my mother seemed to have grown sicker in the day I'd been away. Or perhaps it was just that I'd managed to forget how ill she was.

Mr Hiroki's house had smelled of smoke and pine, but ours smelled of her illness in a way I can't even bear to describe.

Yukiko was working in the village during the afternoon, so Mrs Yoshiro came to help me bathe my mother.

When we carried her out of the house, her rib cage was broader than her shoulders, and even the whites of her eyes were cloudy.

I could only endure seeing her this way by remembering how I'd once felt stepping out of the bath with her while she was strong and healthy when the steam had risen from our pale skin as if we were two pieces of boiled radish.

I found it hard to imagine that this woman, whose back I'd so often scraped with a stone, and whose flesh had always seemed firmer and smoother to me than Yukiko's, might be dead before even the end of summer.

That night while lying on my futon, I tried to picture the whole confusing situation from every angle to persuade myself that things would somehow be all right.

To begin with, I wondered, how could we go on living without my mother? Even if we did survive and Mr Hiroki adopted us, would my own family cease to exist?

Finally, I decided Mr Hiroki wouldn't adopt just my sister and me, but my father as well.

He couldn't expect my father to live alone, after all. Usually, I couldn't fall asleep until I'd managed to convince myself this was true, with the result that I didn't sleep much during those weeks, and mornings were a blur.

On one of these mornings during the heat of the summer, I was on my way back from fetching a packet of tea in the village when I heard a crunching noise behind me. It turned out to be Mr Yoshiro—Mr. Hiroki's assistant—runs up the path.

When he reached me, he took a long while to catch his breath, huffing and holding his side as if he'd just run from Senzuru. He was red and shiny like a snapper, though the day hadn't grown hot yet. Finally, he said:

"Mr Hiroki wants you and your sister . . . to come down to the village . . . as soon as you can."

I'd thought it odd that my father hadn't gone out fishing that morning. Now I knew why: Today was the day.

"And my father?" I asked.

"Did Mr Hiroki say anything about him?"

"Just get along, Akemi-chan," he told me.

"Go and fetch your sister."

I didn't like this, but I ran up to the house and found my father sitting at the table, digging grime out of a rut in the wood with one of his fingernails.

Yukiko was putting slivers of charcoal into the stove. It seemed as though the two of them were waiting for something horrible to happen.

I said, "Father, Mr Hiroki wants Yukiko-san and me to go down to the village."

Yukiko took off her apron, hung it on a peg, and walked out the door. My father didn't answer, but blinked a few times, staring at the point where Yukiko had been.

Then he turned his eyes heavily toward the floor and gave a nod. I heard my mother cry out in her sleep from the back room.

Yukiko was almost to the village before I caught up with her. I'd imagined this day for weeks already, but I'd never expected to feel as frightened as I did.

Yukiko didn't seem to realize this trip to the village was any different from one she might have made the day before.

She hadn't even bothered to clean the charcoal off her hands; while wiping her hair away she ended up with a smudge on her face.

I didn't want her to meet Mr Hiroki in this condition, so I reached up to rub off the mark as our mother might have done. Yukiko knocked my hand away.

Outside the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, I bowed and said good morning to Mr Hiroki, expecting he would be happy to see us.

Instead, he was strangely cold. I suppose this should have been my first clue that things weren't going to happen just the way I'd imagined.

When he led us to his horse-drawn wagon, I decided he probably wanted to drive us to his house so that his wife and daughter would be in the room when he told us about our adoption.

"Mr Yoshiro will be riding in the front with me," he said.

"So you and Shizu-san had better get into the back."

That's just what he said: "Shizu-san."

I thought it very rude of him to get my sister's name wrong that way, but she didn't seem to notice.

She climbed into the back of the wagon and sat down among the empty fish baskets, putting one of her hands flat onto the slimy planks.

And then with that same hand, she wiped a fly from her face, leaving a shiny patch on her cheek. I didn't feel as indifferently about the slime as Yukiko did.

I couldn't think about anything but the smell, and about how satisfied I would feel to wash my hands and perhaps even my clothes when we reached Mr Hiroki's house.

During the trip, Yukiko and I didn't speak a word, until we topped the hill overlooking Senzuru, when all of a sudden

she said: "A train."

I looked out to see a train in the distance, making its way toward the town. The smoke rolled downwind in a way that made me think of the skin being shed from a snake.

I thought this was clever and tried explaining it to Yukiko, but she didn't seem to care. Mr Hiroki would have appreciated it, I thought, and so would Kuniko.

I decided to explain it to both of them when we reached the Hirokis' home.