The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside

by Kazufumi Shiraishi

  This isn’t a feeling; it’s the truth.

  A human being who fails to grasp the profound meaning of the fact that he will die one day will, without fail, end up having to choose between either killing himself or killing another. The alarming cruelty of this world lies entirely in the fact that we’re compelled to face such a dilemma.

  A good example of this is women.

  Just like my mother; just like Honoka’s mother; just like Teruko Onishi, who began to talk about wanting to have a child on a whim; just like Tomomi, who goes out with me while still having half-hearted feelings for Park after bearing Takuya against everyone’s advice; and just like Eriko who wishes to take me to Suwa to see her parents and eventually marry me; and just like all those mothers who entrust the care of their forty-three-day-old newborns to total strangers, women are so obsessed with their own desires they simply can’t forsake their egos. They’re neglectful of their own deaths and continue instead to readily bring about the deaths of others.

  It never occurs to them that having a child is, in the end, an act that results in the death of the child. And it’s likely that they never realize, not even for a fleeting moment, that they themselves, in this sense, are the true

  murderers.

  I was bothered by such benightedness in women.

  The world is filled with people who lead reluctant lives because they never had to be born; nobody possibly can—while he or she is on the way to fulfilling a fate of certain death—find any contrary evidence in him or her that could disprove this truth.

  Just as that lady Buddhist wrote, … if you thoroughly scrape out from human existence, using a bamboo whisk perhaps, all things that pass and fade away, including youth, beauty, love, emotion, material wealth, social status, and worldly abilities, the skeletal frame that remains in the end will be merely made of—for everyone alike—old age, illness, and death. This is absolutely true.

  Even my mother, even Honoka’s mother, even Teruko Onishi and even Tomomi and even Eriko all avert their eyes from this telltale and unavoidable skeletal frame of life common to us all; instead, they succumb to the allure of their unconscious sense of superiority, their arrogant thoughts as they thirst for short-term happiness, driving those whom they should be loving and cherishing the most to the brink of their cruel deaths.

  The Lord Buddha accepted all this as suffering, and preached deliverance from this suffering. And Machiko-san, on that day, a long time ago in my distant past, said to me, You don’t have to be ashamed of yourself at all, Naoto-kun, as long as you witness yourself feeling ashamed. Eventually, there will come a time when Naoto-kun will part from Naoto-kun to merge with a whole lot of other people who have passed away, and then, Naoto-kun, you’ll become a gust of wind somewhere. So that’s why I want you to, while you’re alive, forget about yourself as much as possible and become the kind of human being who thinks for other people. You see, the Lord Buddha teaches us that everything in this world is all one and the same. Humans, animals, even stones, flowers, and the air—they’re all like one big connected dream. I believe everything—before birth, while alive, even after death—must be all one and the same. I’m sure you are me, and I’m you, and anyone about to be born is me, and I was once someone else who died a long, long time ago. Perhaps you’re still too young to understand, Naoto-kun, but there’s no difference between you and a stone, a blade of grass, an insect and an animal; they’re all, in the same way, just you, so in reality, there really isn’t anything to worry about. If you think you’re suffering, then you’re suffering; if you think you’re having fun, you’re having fun. That’s all you can say about this world. And so, even though someday you and I will die, Naoto-kun, there’s nothing sad about that at all. You really don’t have to be sad about that—you don’t have to grieve. If I die, you’ll go on living, and if you die, there will be others who will go on living, right? If you think like that, you’ll see that there’s nothing to be afraid of. And that’s why I want to abandon myself and be considerate to others, to take care of them, to cherish them, no matter who they are. Just to be clear, it has nothing to do with whether I like you or not, Naoto-kun. I’m only being nice to you because of my belief. There’s no need for you to thank me at all. I’m merely doing it for myself, and believing that, in doing so, it would eventually be good for you too.

  Ever since that summer night, I’ve been ruminating over Machiko-san’s words, thinking about them again and again. And the more I pondered them, the more I felt they were loaded with meaning.

  I also firmly believe that Raita will soon come face to face with the significance of those profound words left behind by Machiko-san. At that time, I wonder what kind of answers he’ll find. This thought was troubling me. There was so much sadness in his life right now; it was overflowing with misfortunes that could easily lead him to false answers. For one, there was his relationship with Honoka, a girl who was deeply wounded because of her parents; then there was the sadness of watching his former boss fall ill and ultimately retreat to his hometown with his wife, laying to waste all they’d built up over the years, even while suffering the pain of losing their child; and then there was the death of President Nakagaki this time. However, what was even more troubling was the fact that Raita was convinced he’d killed someone.

  All I could see was the figure of Raita driven into a corner, teetering on the brink of self-destruction.

  Eriko suddenly tapped me on the shoulder and I lifted my face.

  The train had apparently arrived at Tokyo Station while I’d been lost deep in thought. The scenery through the window—completely changed from before—was filled with the brightly lit view of the comings and goings of a throng of people moving across the station platform.

  I hope the weather clears up tomorrow, Eriko said in a lifeless voice, rising from her seat ahead of me.

  18

  ON JULY SEVENTH, IN the middle of the night, my sister informed me over the phone that my mother’s condition had taken a sudden turn.

  Although I’d heard that she’d been suffering from complications of a cold and hadn’t been able to eat anything, I didn’t expect to hear that she was in a critical condition. Fortunately, I was slated to take a one-week vacation beginning the following day, which fell on the eighth, on a Monday, so I packed my bags and boarded the first flight next morning to Kokura, Kitakyushu, my hometown.

  From Fukuoka Airport I rode a taxi straight to the general hospital where my mother was hospitalized and found her moved into a single room, receiving no treatment save for an oxygen mask placed over her mouth.

  My younger sister was seated beside the bed, her face haggard. She told me that Mother had suffered throughout the night, but she was now sleeping with the aid of painkillers and sleeping pills; according to the chief physician, since her heart had completely weakened due to pneumonia, it was only a matter of time now. Her consciousness was already drifting from confusion toward a comatose state.

  My mother, whom I hadn’t seen in two years, had lost a lot of weight. The folds of her dark blue yukata gown with floral patterns were slightly parted, exposing her chest, and there was a light cotton blanket covering her up to her waist, but the thin bulging outline of her legs, from the waist down to the tips of her feet, now appeared as thin as withered branches, laying bare for all to see the tragic state of a body whose life was for the most part worn away.

  Her face, chest, hands and feet, which literally looked skeletal, were ridden with innumerable pockmark-like blisters—the adverse side effects of drugs—appearing all dried up and scabbed now.

  The next day, Mother regained her consciousness once before dying; though it might have just been that her eyes had opened reflexively for a moment.

  I looked into my mother’s tanned, wrinkled face, stared into her eyes, from which all the light had gone out, and gripped her hand. Just then, I thought I saw the subtly quivering needle of her consciousness, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I said Mummy and kept on crying out to her d
ozens of times until I’d become mindful of my surroundings, my voice gradually dwindling. I then said, having become tired, You can relax now, okay? You tried your best, didn’t you? In the end, without showing any response, Mother closed her eyes again, and by the time my younger sister brought the doctor over, she seemed to have breathed her last.

  The doctor had no sooner laid his eyes on his watch than my younger sister burst into tears, as if a dam had broken inside her. I too was tempted to cry just then, believing it was all right under these circumstances to get swept away by emotion, and so I imagined that my eyes were actually on the verge of welling up, but the tears didn’t come at all.

  I tried to think about something related to my mother’s death, but before I did, my mind began to buzz with the things I’d been considering throughout the day—the arrangements I needed to make for planning and carrying out the funeral. These thoughts had simply popped into my mind, as if on cue, and so I ended up deciding it would be all right to leave all the grieving to my younger sister for the time being, while I went about handling the requisite tasks.

  Not that it really mattered now, but my mother’s life had been chaotic and miserable.

  I was in a small assembly space of a municipal dwelling house when this thought occurred to me; I was bowing my head, along with my sister, to each and every visitor from the neighborhood offering his or her condolences, wondering all the while what I should say in honor of her memory at the service.

  My mother was still shy of twenty when she got married for the first time, and her partner was a student from Kyushu University who used to frequent the bar where she was working. A year later I was born, and apparently this student dropped out of college to work full-time. But just when I was about to turn two, he abandoned my mother and me and fled back to his hometown in Oita. Thereafter, I’ve not met him, and have pretty much remained clueless about what kind of life he has been leading, or even whether he’s still alive. One time, it seems a man who claimed to be his older brother dropped in and left a decent amount of money, and at that time, according to this man, his younger brother had acquired the qualifications to become a lawyer and was doing well. By then, my mother had remarried and my younger sister had been born, so she was able to settle any disputes without much friction.

  It was only after the failure of my mother’s second marriage that her life began to go downhill.

  Her bar, which she’d started in Tobata with a loan, went bankrupt, and after my mother’s promiscuity drove my younger sister’s father to leave, she repeatedly got into so much trouble with money and men that even she herself was shocked. Although she kept blaming her parents for her inability to keep an honest job, saying that they never gave her a satisfactory education, as far as my sister and I were concerned, it was just her slovenly nature that kept her from leading a sound and steady life.

  When Mother was working as a bar hostess in Kokura, we were living at the back of a factory zone in Tobata, in a filthy apartment the size of six tatami mats, but it wasn’t a place you could relax in the daytime, with all the cacophony. Fed up with the apartment, Mother used to repeatedly stay out, so whenever my sister and I returned from school, we always ate tofu, instead of a proper snack, and killed time outside at the grassy field beside the factory.

  I’d fallen in love with a guitar my neighbor, a young bartender, had given to me when he moved out, and it was on that very field that I came to pluck the strings of that guitar for hours on end, every day. If I remember correctly, I was in the third grade at the time. The gentle melody would get muffled and drowned out in the din of the factory, but not before reaching my ears. The experience taught me that, no matter where I was, at whatever time, it was easy to create a small, silent stillness in me, just for myself.

  Once in a while my mother would return to the house, and whenever she did she’d prepare a scanty supper in a hurry, and instead of joining us kids at the dining table, she’d get dressed in a flashy outfit and rush back to a bar or to a man again.

  By the time I entered high school, she rarely came back home, having settled into a footloose and fancy-free life as the mistress to a president of a real estate company who was many years older than her. Perhaps she finally regretted how bad she looked in the public eye, having her children raised in a shabby dwelling, so—thanks to the connections of the real estate tycoon, her new patron—she got approved for a municipal apartment in Kokura and made us kids move out abruptly, not giving a damn whether our studies were affected in the process.

  Although she parted company from this patron after two years or so, she continued, as ever, to get entangled in complicated relations with men, even after I’d moved to Tokyo.

  Her wild adventures with men did finally come to an end three years ago though, but it was because she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Mother was grief-stricken by this sudden illness, but, frankly, neither my younger sister nor I were able to feel sorry for her.

  When the disease was discovered the doctor repeatedly insisted on performing a complete hysterectomy. But I suggested radiation therapy and anticancer drugs. I’d decided this was the best option after I turned to a few doctors, whom I personally knew, for their opinions, showing my mother’s test results to them. But she wasn’t persuaded and went ahead with the operation, putting her faith in the doctor. The operation backfired though, bringing about unfortunate results; her recovery was unexpectedly poor, and with her entire immune system crippled by the invasive surgery, the cancer cells, which were lodged in her abdomen, ended up metastasizing to the liver in less than half-a-year’s time.

  When it became clear that she’d suffered a relapse, I seriously thought about quitting my job and returning to Kitakyushu to find some other work there so that I could devote myself to nursing my mother, but it wasn’t economically feasible, and when I thought about it carefully, I saw that such an urge was, for the most part, meaningless. There was actually no link between me and my mother’s death, and I concluded that, in effect, all she could really do was to pass the one or two remaining years of her life alone, in her own way.

  I left the nursing to my younger sister and returned to Tokyo, never to return to Kokura again, except the one time when the doctor performed an embolization of the hepatic artery. Mother was discharged three times in the meantime, but only for a short period each time.

  As for my not returning to see her, I had no particular reason. I was busy and tired all the time, and just didn’t want to return. That was all.

  And so, in the end, for these past twenty-nine years, the total number of times my mother and I’d come into direct contact with each other—not counting my early childhood years—was terribly negligible. To this day I remain mostly in the dark about the fifty years of my mother’s life, and to a similar extent, so did my mother about me.

  On the day of the funeral, several classmates from my high school days showed up to offer their condolences. I asked them to help out with miscellaneous tasks and they saved me a whole lot of trouble, going to great lengths

  to complete the tasks. But I parted from them without having a decent conversation. Many of them looked into my eyes and nodded slightly, but I found this gesture, performed in lockstep by pretty much all of them, quite laughable. After we nailed the coffin shut, we moved in sync to the melody of the funeral march, loaded the corpse into the hearse, and left for the crematory.

  The crematory was in a valley about forty minutes away from Kokura, but the rain had graciously let up on the day of the funeral, July the tenth, letting the cloudless blue sky stretch out for the first time in a long while. But while everyone was invariably happy about the fine weather for the sake of the departed, I didn’t feel a thing.

  As my mother burned, I sat down on a wide and luxurious sofa, the kind you might find in a hotel lobby, and let my entire body bask in the sunlight pouring through a bay window. I got lost in thought, musing that the rays were declaring an end to the rainy season, and then dozed off, partly because
I’d been sleep-deprived for the past three days or so.

  It then occurred to me that even when Machiko-san died, the world was awash in a bright light like this, even though it was the middle of winter then. At that time I was moved by how the light was truly in character with who she was—remembering this, I thought Mother, setting out on her journey to the other world, would surely, just like Machiko-san, become beautiful and peaceful before returning to heaven.

  In the immediate vicinity of the municipal apartment in Kokura, there was a huge temple called Koboji. I’d always pass by this temple on my way to school; beyond its magnificent main gate stood a splendid, old-fashioned hondo, the main hall, and on the left-hand side of the spacious temple enclosure there was a cemetery where you could see row after row of gravestones ranging all the way back, and on the right-hand side, there was a tenement house—also antique-looking—which was where the abbot of the Buddhist temple lived.

  On my way back home from school, I often used to walk into the precincts of the temple, sit down under a huge camphor tree, and read a paperback book. Koboji’s main hall was open to the public, so I occasionally read in there as well. In this hall, where the Sakyamuni Buddha—the principal object of worship—was enshrined in the center, the lights were always bright and it was usually silent and deserted too, so whenever I was in there my mind would magically quiet down. The hall was connected to the tenement house via a covered passageway, and in a Japanese-style room—the size of around fifteen tatami mats—found at its entrance, there was a bookshelf, filled with many books, taking up an entire wall. Not only was it lined with works on Buddhism, but also an entire series of world and Japanese literature titled Masterpieces of the World and Masterpieces of Japan, and the complete works of Soseki, Ougai, Takeo Arishima, Saneatsu Mushanokoji, Soho Tokutomi, the Luha brothers, Yukio Mishima, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Masao Yamakawa.

  Having had no choice in those days but to borrow books from my school library or the city library, or buy a paperback sometimes from a secondhand bookstore for a hundred yen a copy, I simply couldn’t contain myself when I stood in front of this bookshelf for the first time.