Hatsukoi

by Hildred Billings

  She then imagined Michiko with her packet of cocaine, a bruise on her shoulder, and asking to forego sex because she “hurt down there.” Reina wadded up her unfinished letter and tossed it into the trash. I bet somebody’s told Mi-chan they love her before.

  Love was worthless.

  Reina pulled out a fresh sheet of stationery and sharpened her pencil – the latter feat she swore she hadn’t done since half-assing her homework during her high school days. She blew the shavings off the end and analyzed her blank paper. Nothing else to do on the biggest holiday of the year.

  As she pressed her pencil against the paper, she decided to let the words come to her in a stream of unguarded consciousness.

  To Papa,

  It’s another year. I am twenty now. I will have my Coming of Age Ceremony this month. I have a different job as an underpaid stage Idol. I am still friends with Michiko.

  Nothing else has changed. Mother hasn’t changed. She still looks like a ghost in this house. You know, she has been a ghost since you died. And she is still angry at me. The last time we fought, many years ago, I told her that you wouldn’t be angry at me, but she didn’t believe me. She told me that I was a dishonor on your memory. Am I? Have I dishonored you? I can’t believe you would care. I can’t believe anybody cares. You once told me I could be anything I wanted. Well, I “wanted” to be a lesbian. Is that so bad?

  So that hasn’t changed. I still date women. And they still use me. And I’m the dishonorable one? Whoever taught their daughters to use others’ daughters in this way should feel dishonorable. Whoever hits, rapes, and makes women carry their drugs should be dishonorable. Whoever uses women as socially unacceptable experiments to get their youth-time kicks and then ditches them should be dishonorable. That is not how you are supposed to treat people. When I went into middle school you said that I shouldn’t let any of the boys treat me dishonorably. Well, what about the girls? Is it okay for girls to treat each other this way? Maybe you don’t have the answer. I don’t expect you to. But they do. And I say it is wrong and dishonorable.

  But what can I do? I don’t mean to sound so defeatist. But maybe I am. Maybe there’s no point to anything. Mother thought she found eternal love with you, but then you left us. And then she left me too. I don’t think we’ve talked in a year, even though we still live in our house.

  I hope things are better for you, wherever you are. Because I wouldn’t recommend this world to anyone right now.

  Reina

  Two sheets of stationery later, Reina had her pointless letter. She folded it up and put it in an envelope before turning off her stereo, grabbing her jacket, and heading out the door.

  Her mother was in the midst of a break from her New Year’s cleaning, sitting in the living room and watching television. Reina slipped her shoes on and stole out of the front door without a sound.

  The first day of 1993 was as cold as the last day of 1992. Reina huddled in her jacket and stomped down the street with purpose coming from her shivering skin. Even with long hair whipping around her face, her complexion reddened from the biting cold, and her fingers numbed in her pockets. She wished she had taken a scarf and mittens before braving the Japanese winter.

  She rounded hidden corners and traipsed along forgotten roads. Every time she neared a Shinto shrine her walk came to a still as she fought between parishioners trying to get in their New Year’s prayers – Reina had no interest in those silly affairs. Neither did her mother. Not since Reina’s father died years before.

  He had been a professor at a prestigious university, until he was hit by a car coming home one night on his bicycle. Reina had been thirteen, too young to fully understand it but old enough to remember. Once she went to her family’s grave every month to visit her father – now her dishonored ancestors had to consider themselves lucky if she showed up once a decade. It’s my mother’s fault – she’s the one who said I had dishonored him.

  Reina jogged down another alley in order to avoid yet another packed Shinto shrine. New Year was such a bother. Between the cleaning and the faux religiousness, Reina didn’t understand why people pretended to care so much. For image. The same reason those girls act so dishonorably. But Reina had never been the type of person who understood traditions and the status quo. All she knew was that she hated both. Dishonorable.

  After a half hour of meandering, she came upon a quaint cemetery stuffed between an abandoned bakery and somebody’s suburban house. In the scheme of Tokyo cemeteries, it was small, holding a total of perhaps twenty-five plots as opposed to a hundred or more. The gate in the front was frozen shut from disuse, but with a little finagling, Reina knocked the ice off and bust the gate open, tumbling through like an uncoordinated goof. She straightened herself up and looked around – no one else occupied the cemetery and had seen Reina fall. Some honor saved.

  She took her letter to the middle row, center tomb. The name “YAMADA,” emblazoned in Japanese characters, trailed down the front obelisk, and to either side were the names of those interred.

  There must be a thousand “Yamada” graves in this city alone. But this was the one Reina had been brought to all her life, and the one she stood at when her father was interred. So she stood there now, staring at a tomb that hadn’t been cleaned in months.

  Her jacket sleeve brushed off the dead leaves, but she didn’t wash the stones, nor did she burn incense. She just sat in front of her father’s name and stared into the etchings, the cold breeze kissing her face and her hand fumbling over her letter.

  In the end she left it in the slot where people could leave their business cards. Reina clapped her hands together, not in prayer, but in an effort to get blood flowing through her limbs. She never said a word since everything she had to say was in her letter.

  I’m sorry for being dishonorable.

  But she didn’t believe her father would think that about her. In the years they had known each other, Reina knew a liberal man with radical ideas about modern traditions and their futures in society. So when she found herself on a non-traditional path in life, her confusion was great when her mother told her it went against everything her father’s memory stood for. My sexuality has nothing to do with my father. That’s what she wanted to believe.

  Reina slumped in front of the tomb and knocked her head against the marble. At the rate she was going, she would die and be interred next to her father and other ancestors, since all those dishonorable women wanted nothing to do with her when it came to adopting her into their families.

  Fuck them all.

  Screaming children ran up and down the hallway while Aiko attempted to find her oldest brother somewhere in the house. She checked the living room, the upstairs bedrooms, the toilets, even the Japanese-styled room downstairs, but never thought to look out in the tiny front yard where she eventually found him. He stood with the other Takeuchi son and the two brothers-in-law, discussing the changes to have occurred in the neighborhood since they last lived there.

  Aiko gestured into the house and out popped one of the screaming children, her oldest brother’s daughter named Eri. She was seven that year, the oldest of all the grandchildren, but still commanded her father’s attentions as if she should be the only person in the world.

  With one of the louder children settled, Aiko slipped back into the house and attempted damage control in the hallway. Eri had knocked over the ceremonial New Year’s decorations, leaving Auntie Aiko to clean it up while the other children wailed for their mothers and the adults pretended not to notice. These family get-togethers on the first Sunday of the new year were always nice in theory, but in practice, Aiko usually found herself wishing everyone would just go home.

  She was rearranging the shoes in the genkan when Shizuka appeared. Her and her mother, Junko’s younger sister, were the only members outside of Aiko’s immediate family to show up that day. Shizuka took one look outside and quipped, “It’s shit like this that makes me glad I’m an only child.”

  Good for you. Ai
ko pushed past her cousin. On the table next to the genkan was a stack of postcards, mostly from extended family and some friends. She thumbed through her own, but once again found nothing from Reina. Before Shizuka could disappear into the toilet, Aiko asked, “Do you get New Year’s postcards from your coworkers?”

  Shizuka left her hand on the door handle. “Hm. No, I don’t think so. Why would you want to know something like that?”

  Aiko gulped. Shizuka still didn’t know about her and Reina. “Well, erm, one of my friends said that it’s not popular to send New Year’s cards in non-corporate atmospheres so… I was curious…”

  Shizuka hesitated a little longer before opening the door to the toilet. “Nope. Oh, wait!” She swerved before putting on the toilet slippers. “Now that I think about it, I think I got a basic one from…”

  Aiko stopped breathing.

  “Mi-chan.” Shizuka hustled into the toilet, slamming the door behind her and locking it before a cousin could follow her.

  A sigh rippled through Aiko. She hadn’t heard anything from Reina since December – and though that was a few days before, it was starting to feel like torture. Maybe she’s playing with me. No, she’s just busy. Everyone was busy at New Year’s. But Aiko would have to go back to classes soon, which meant less time on any day not Sunday to spend with her…girlfriend? Aiko still didn’t know what to call Reina.

  Just as she went to crawl into the living room, the phone rang.

  Since she was the closest one to the hallway phone, Aiko ambled up and answered with a casualness her mother would have scolded her for.

  “Ai-chan?”

  Aiko almost dropped her phone; then she almost squealed. She managed to keep her composure by facing the wall and pushing the receiver to her lips. “Hello! Happy New Year!”

  After waiting a whole grueling few days to talk to her again, Aiko thought she and Reina could have a proper conversation, full of “What have you been doing?” and “What are you doing next week?” But instead Reina was only interested in flirting, completely unconcerned over Aiko’s protests that she was surrounded by nosy family. When Reina trekked down “I can’t wait to kiss you again” territory, Aiko just knew half family heard it via inconvenient ESP. How could she even respond to that? In the end she said “Me too,” as if Reina’s following “I also can’t wait to fuck you again” could be responded to without causing an explosion in the hallway.

  The more children ran by and brothers and sisters conglomerated between all the rooms, the more Aiko wanted to run out and find Reina or just hang up. She couldn’t handle both. If any of them knew she was having dirty talk with a girl, then…

  Shizuka sauntered up like she was drunk. “Who are you talking to, eh?” She covered her mischievous mouth. “Is it a booooy?”

  “Kora!” Aiko then gasped and said into the receiver, “No, not you!” Her voice descended into a whisper. “I like the way you talk to me.”

  “Ah! I heard it! You’re talking to a boy!” Shizuka waved her arms around and shouted at all the family members passing by, “Little Ai-chan is flirting with a boy on the phone!”

  When Aiko thought she would finally die, Reina asked, “Is that Shi-chan? Does she think I’m a boy?”

  “Er, yes…”

  “Ha! Well, in that case, next time we meet I’ll be sure to fuck you like one.”

  Oh, dear. Aiko mumbled a request for Reina to call her back later and then hung up before anything naughty could pass again. Completely inappropriate to get wet in the middle of the hallway while cousins burped and aunties bemoaned their incontinence.

  Shizuka hovered near Aiko, hair tumbling out of its bun. “Since when do you have a boyfriend, Ai-chan? This is new!”

  Aiko averted her eyes and scooted away from the table. “I don’t have a boyfriend.” True, at least. She stuck to the wall as the male members of her family shuffled by and filed into the living room to watch TV and talk about baseball.

  “Not your boyfriend? There’s something going on though, huh?”

  Ignoring her cousin, Aiko escaped into the Japanese-styled room where her mother and aunt, Noriko, sat at a low table and played the slap card game karuta. Better than her brothers and father infesting her with testosterone in the other room.

  “Ah, Ai-chan.” Junko gestured for her daughter to sit beside her. Aiko slumped down at the table and stared at the cards spread out across the table. “We need somebody to read the poems. Your auntie keeps cheating.”

  Shizuka followed and sat next to her own mother. The pair of them looked nothing like Junko and Aiko, aside from the full cheeks that ran down their mutual maternal line. Otherwise, Aiko and Shizuka were both products of their unrelated fathers more than their related mothers. “Ma,” Shizuka said with a slap to her mother’s arm, “give me that and I’ll read them so you’ll stop cheating.”

  “I am not cheating.” Noriko flipped her cards over in resignation. “I’ve never cheated in my life.”

  They cleaned up the cards while Junko got up to get tea for everyone. The table was clean by the time she returned with four cups and a streaming pot; Aiko stood to help serve the familial guests before taking a sip herself.

  “Yesterday I saw a program on TV about New Year’s in America,” Junko began, her aged know-it-all demeanor dominating the room. “It said Americans only have one custom at New Year’s, and that’s to make a wish for the new year. Apparently it’s a very big thing.”

  Noriko snorted into her teacup. “What’s the point of only making a wish? Anybody can wish for something at any time! You have to make your wishes come true with good fortune.”

  “What does that even mean?” Shizuka laughed. “Now you’re just saying words.”

  While mother and daughter bickered, Junko said, “It got me thinking about what I would wish for. Maybe I will wish for my husband to get a raise at his job. I want to take a trip for Golden Week.”

  Junko’s words distracted Noriko and Shizuka long enough to get them thinking as well. “I want a dog.” Noriko looked to her daughter for affirmation.

  Instead, Shizuka tilted her head back forth as if in deep, afflicted thought. “I think I want to get a new job this year. Mine now doesn’t pay enough for all the trouble.”

  “Sou, sou!” Noriko patted her daughter’s shoulder. “You’re always complaining about those Americans, and that other no good one.” She tossed her hand at Junko and lifted her nose into the air. “My poor Shi-chan’s coworkers at the theater are just so unbecoming. Two rude foreigners and another girl who just smokes and drinks all day.”

  Aiko tightened in her seat. She’s talking about Reina… She may have smoked a lot, and even drank on occasion, but she was nowhere near as offensive as Noriko, a woman who had never met her, made her out to be. Aiko looked to her cousin in hopes she would go on the defensive.

  “They are really bothersome sometimes, yeah.” Perhaps not. “So much arguing and fooling around. It’s amazing we ever finish on time. I need a new job.”

  As Noriko tssked at her daughter’s misfortune, Junko turned to Aiko. “What do you wish for this year?”

  The rest of the table fell silent and waited for Aiko to answer. What do I want this year? Many things were solid candidates: good grades in her classes; good health for herself, her family, and her new friends; going on a splendid vacation for Golden Week. But when Aiko really sat and thought about what she wanted at that moment, she could only imagine herself wrapped under the covers with Reina, engaged in all sorts of self-indulgent affairs.

  “I guess I want to spend more time with people,” was all she said. So much time that I learn everything about Reina I possibly can.

  “That so?”

  “Ara, Ai-chan is so sweet and thoughtful.”

  Shizuka didn’t buy it. “So, what you mean is you want to spend more time with your boyfriend.”

  A quiet draped across the table, all eyes on Aiko. She squirmed on her knees and sank to her buttocks, the thump of her weight hittin
g the tatami mats like a boulder crashing in a canyon – thanks to Shizuka, New Year’s with the family just got more annoying. “I never suggested…”

  “When are you going to tell us more about this boy, eh?” Junko entered disapproving mother mode, complete with a wagging finger and furrowing brows. She turned to her sister and continued, “She’s been dating this boy for almost a month now, and has barely told me his name. What was it? Ren Itou?” Junko didn’t wait for Aiko to confirm. “But that’s it! No picture, no meeting, no nothing. You’re almost as bad as your older sister.”

  Aiko bristled at the thought: her oldest sister had been the most obnoxious sibling growing up, getting into fights at school and sneaking out of the house to hang out with boys from a gang. Yet Aiko couldn’t imagine her mother approving of a lesbian relationship more than she had her other daughter’s, who talked about divorcing her husband every chance she got. At least her husband is a man.

  “Eh, she’s what? Twenty?” Noriko laughed. “Sometimes a girl just needs a secret a two. You know I kept my husband a secret from Mother and Father for a whole two months before ever mentioning him.”

  “Yes, and it’s the kind of heart attack my mother had that I never want to experience.”

  Somehow, Junko thought this enough ranting to do about the subject, and stood up to clear away the tea items. Noriko followed her out, and they continued their sisterly rumblings about “secret boyfriends” and “my no-good divorcing daughter.” Aiko also thought she heard the name Daisuke, but ignored it.

  Shizuka tapped her nail against the table, a wry smile the size of her whole face searing into Aiko. “So you have a mysterious boyfriend now? Hmm, I never pegged you as the type of girl to keep a relationship secret.”