Manazuru

by Hiromi Kawakami

  WHEN SHE WAS a newborn, I bathed Momo in a wash basin.

  For the first month of her life, I never put her in the bathtub, I would clear the table and set a metal basin filled with warm water there, and wash her in the basin.

  Opening my left hand, supporting the back of her head with my thumb and middle finger, each turned in to face the other, I uncurled her body face-up in the water. She was so buoyant she floated, almost weightless.

  When she was first born her body was scrawny and shriveled, but in the course of her first two weeks she filled out, grew plumper. Deep wrinkles appeared around her ankles, her wrists, her joints. Matter gathered there. New skin formed, and the older layers collected in the wrinkles. One day was all it took: there was more old skin. It was like eraser fuzz. Except for its perfect whiteness. And it had no smell. It kept coming, more and more.

  I carefully scrubbed all that off as I bathed her. Momo kept her eyes half shut as I cleaned her body. Sometimes she fell asleep. Only when the time came to wash her head did she begin to wail, wrinkles covering her entire face.

  The moment I lifted her from the water, she grew heavy, recovering the weight of her substance. I laid her on the towel I had spread out and rubbed her dry. Then, right away, I opened my blouse and gave her my breast. She seemed thirsty, and gulped as she sucked.

  No, loveable was not the word. For a second the heat of her lips repulsed me. I learned then that disgust and tenderness do not stand in opposition. I had never felt such a disgust for the male body. I had thought the male body, my husband’s body, was unquestionably necessary. The feeling that welled within me when I held Momo’s body was not need, but tenderness.

  I COULD NOT fathom Momo’s mind. She was just a crying thing. A bud.

  I learned a new word: mushiwarai, a bug smile. From time to time in its first two weeks of life an infant smiles. But it is not the infant smiling, it is the twitching of the smile bug.

  Momo often smiled. Even so, I did not know her mind. I had only just given birth to her, I did not regard her as her own person, she was still my person. Not part of me, not exactly—what I felt was a simple sense of proprietorship. I cannot allow this to be damaged, I thought. It would be an awful waste. I felt tenderness for her. Loveable was not the word.

  I felt no desire for the man, my husband. Momo was warmth enough. As long as I suckled her, my body had no desire for my husband. I had no tenderness for him. And yet, in the absence of any tenderness, in my mind I craved him. At night when my husband came to me, I received him willingly with the surface of my body. I had the idea that mind and body were distinct, but the truth is that it is all body. The mind is of the body.

  But over time, Momo cooled. She lost her heat, settled into a form. She stopped breastfeeding, she learned to walk, she acquired words.

  “Parents’ Day is next Wednesday,” Momo told me. She was on her way to her room when I walked into the living room, pulling my hair into a ponytail. There was an aroma. The smell of the shampoo she had used last night. Momo’s body no longer discards its old skin the way it once did. She has grown cold, solid, marvelously. She carried the scent of her shampoo.

  Circle WILL ATTEND and hand it in. Okay. Even as she spoke, Momo was leaving the room. I heard sounds from the front hall. Mother had returned. The air was shifting. Mother never liked my husband. She didn’t say so, but I knew.

  As soon as Momo took shape, I began to desire my husband. Just as she stopped suckling. How clever it is, I thought. The body’s machinations. I yearned unabashedly for my husband, then felt ashamed. Desire quickly swallowed the shame.

  How was Manazuru? Mother trilled, coming into the living room.

  IT WAS A strong place, I replied.

  Mother gazed at me. Strong? she repeated, trilling again. Then looking me in the eye, she set down her basket of food. A finely woven shopping basket, a flipped trapezoid, short-handled, it bulged from her side when she packed it with vegetables and fish. I used to walk behind Mother as she cradled the basket, wanting her to lead me by the hand, but she wouldn’t, and so I walked with my hands behind my back, hiding them. My head didn’t even reach her shoulder.

  “How many have you gone through?” I asked.

  Mother gestured toward the basket, her eyes questioning what I was talking about.“I have no idea,” she said. She crooked her fingers, one at a time. The first was before you were born. The next was after you started school. Since then, let’s see, I must have worn out two, maybe three.

  Who cares if it’s ripped, it serves me perfectly well, I don’t need another. I won’t replace it, she would say, day after day, walking with her torn, misshapen basket. Only when the tears had outgrown mere tears would she give in and grudgingly buy a new one.

  Another of the same, please, she would say, proffering the battered basket. The store, run by an aged couple, sold sundry household items. Straw hats, tin hot-water bottles, screws and nails, and shopping baskets. A large S-shaped metal hook hung from a rod that cut across the store, just below the ceiling, and from its tail-like bottom curve two or three baskets dangled.

  The same kind, sure thing, hold on a second, the old woman replied. Without a word her husband stood on tiptoe and lifted a basket from the hook. The sunlight has faded it, I’ll give you a discount on it. A hundred yen off. I remember her saying that once. The baskets were unadorned, roughly woven, and in the summer the jutting bits of straw would prick your bare arm. You get this same basket every time, don’t you? Don’t you ever want to try another kind? the old woman asked. I never tire of this one. It’s easy to carry, Mother said, and curtly handed her the money.

  I go there once in however many years, and every time that woman says the same thing, Mother grumbled when we left the store. There was ice in her voice. I glanced up, surprised, and there was a smile on her face. There was ice in her smile.

  Mother took four quarters of a napa cabbage from the basket. Chrysanthemum leaves and shiitake. For a second the air smelled green.

  AFTER DINNER THE television came on.

  When we had dredged the final strands of udon from the bottom of the earthenware pot, I lifted it, putting a dishrag between the handles and my palms, just in case, though it was no longer too hot to carry with bare hands, and made for the kitchen. The television clicked on.

  “It came on by itself!” Momo cried, laughing.

  “No one even touched it!” Mother laughed, too.

  Seconds later, a noise like the cascading chirp of an alarm clock. It’s one of those, Momo said, gesturing toward a row of knobs. A red light glimmered there. It says ALARM, Momo said. She pressed the red light with her fingertip. The chirping stopped. The television stayed on.

  It was eight o’clock on the dot. Somehow, without our knowing it, the alarm had been set. Who did it? Momo laughed again. Her laughter is childlike. I set the pot in the sink, turned the faucet on, filled it to the brim. Let it soak, I thought as I turned the faucet off. There are times, when we do a thing, when we think it in words, and there are times when we think it not in words but in pictures, and there are times when we think nothing. Let it soak, I said to myself once again, to see how it felt.

  Grandma, Momo asked, did you do it? It wasn’t me, Mother answered. Who knew it had an alarm, I had no idea. She takes the television manual from its drawer, puts on her reading glasses, starts reading. I guess it must have been set for eight o’clock when we bought it. It never went off before, though. It’s funny, I wonder why, all of a sudden.

  The television was still on. A man appeared on the screen, running. The picture cut to a blue sky. Waves surging on the shore. Manazuru. I said the name to myself, watching the man on the screen. The slight hollow of his cheeks made him more handsome. The name Manazuru and the image of the man drift apart without ever having fused. Manazuru. I hadn’t repeated the word, but the feeling lingered.

  The screen went dark with a click. Momo had the remote control.

  MY HUSBAND’S NAME was Rei. I only called him
by his family name, Yanagimoto, once. The first time we met, repeating after the person who introduced us, to make sure I had heard correctly. Only that once.

  I had trouble calling him by his name at first. I wanted to, I had no choice, but I mumbled. I tried to avoid speaking his name, and my speech grew strained. As if something terrible were sitting right beside me, on one side, and since it wouldn’t do to let him see too clearly how I was avoiding it, I struggled to maintain my poise while simultaneously, unconsciously, I shrank, my body pulled away, my motions forced, unnatural—that was the feeling, as my speech unraveled.

  “So . . . how was it?”

  “What, how was what?”

  “Yesterday’s event, you said you were going to.”

  I wanted to ask who had been at a gathering he’d gone to, what they had talked about, but when I couldn’t say his name even this simple question died on my lips. Then one day his name exploded from me like a cork from a bottle, and it was no longer a problem. Sometimes, however, even so, it unraveled. Because when I said his name, my mouth grew moist.

  He called me Kei right away, very easily. He liked to build things. I hear the sound of him calling me, Kei, his voice, as he saws the wood, wields his hammer, assembles the pieces. The nails sank easily into the rattling board. The hard wood seemed as soft as sand. Sometimes a nail would bend under the powerful blow of the hammer, but the heads always looked new, unblemished, as though they had been pressed in with a soft rubber ball.

  “I love how neat the nails are,” I said.

  Rei smiled. “Say my name,” he said suddenly.

  R-e-i. I felt jittery saying it. Clasping two nails between his fingers, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine. Don’t. I drew back, slightly, and Rei’s shoulders stiffened. Oh, I thought, then hurriedly spoke his name again. R-e-i. The nails dropped from his fingers. He picked them up immediately. The tips are sharp. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt. He had his excuse. He gathered the nails, held them to the board, lost himself in their immersion in the wood. He didn’t turn to face me again.

  His creation became a shelf for Momo’s picture books. It is still there, in her room.

  I DEBATED WHETHER or not to take down the nameplate: YANAGIMOTO.

  Five years had passed since Rei disappeared, and I had admitted to myself that he wouldn’t be back. The nameplate became a question.

  It was too soon for him to be declared legally dead, but enough time had passed for a divorce. Suddenly I disliked having to live my life in the shadow of my husband’s nameplate. Now that we were living with Mother, it hung beside a second nameplate, TOKUNAGA, my maiden name, and I also disliked seeing them there, side by side.

  “Are you mad at him?” I asked myself. I was alone. Momo would be in her morning class at elementary school, sitting there in the middle of the classroom, staring blankly at the blackboard; Mother hadn’t yet emerged from her room—she takes sleep in little snatches, that is how she is made, sometimes at odd early morning times I would be startled to find her sitting quietly in the kitchen—I sat alone now and asked myself, straight as could be, Are you mad at him?

  “Yes, I’m mad.” The answer came. I myself, answering myself.

  Maybe mad is too strong a word. No, it isn’t too strong, if anything it’s too weak. I’m mad at Rei. I need, in my anger, to know why he left.

  I didn’t take down the nameplate. I still go by his name. I am mad, but my anger assumes no form, it is in the cloaked depths, deep in my body’s core, that I rage at my husband.The core of me rages, but it also yearns. I have Seiji, but there is something that I can’t keep down when I am with him. Rei was the only one. Not just because he was my husband, but because he was the man he was, he was Rei, with him I could keep it down.

  Maybe that was why Mother disliked him. Something close made distant, he knew how to carry things, leaving behind no fragments or clippings, his box was the right size, nothing had to be pushed in and no empty spaces remained, he held me ever so easily, he carried me away. I had been so close, and that man, Rei, distanced me, Mother’s daughter.

  Now that we were living together again, were we close? Three women, our three bodies. Like spheres joined in motion, that is how we are. Not concentric spheres, each sphere cradles its own center, not flat but full, that is how we are.

  The nameplate reading TOKUNAGA is hung first. Yanagimoto Momo. It’s too hard to say, I’d rather be Tokunaga Momo. I remember Momo saying this. She was laughing. She laughs often. Even now that she is sullen, laughter gushes easily from her.

  IT WAS HARD with Rei, but I could call Seiji by his name right away.

  Seiji is five years older than Rei, who was two years older than me. Seven years my senior, and we got to know each other through work. I could call him by his name. And softly stroke his shoulder or waist from behind, all of a sudden. Seiji’s voice is gentle.

  “Ms. Yanagimoto,” he calls me. He maintains the same formality. Occasionally he drops from a yes, remote as the day we met, to a yeah. But he keeps switching back. I am different. I am almost too easy with him.

  “Seiji, do me,” I say, things like that.

  Sometimes he responds, and when he can’t he says, “I’m sorry.”

  That same remoteness.

  I was determined to fall for him. When I felt I could love him, I made up my mind to love him. He did not refuse. The current of my feelings flowed his way. This is my loving. The stronger emotions, and the weaker ones, turned and surged, not straight at him, only toward him. I was grateful that he hadn’t refused. After Rei’s disappearance, I had no place. I didn’t know where to channel what I felt. When the path ahead is still unformed, we lose all sense of our location. The fear in me resembled the inability to tell upstream from downstream, to perceive the direction the water was going.

  When we do it, he is vocal. Yet he never laughs aloud.

  THERE WAS A sign, written vertically, that read INSTRUMENTS & RECORDS.

  Head south from the station, walk straight until you come to the sign, then turn left beneath it. The road narrows somewhat, not enough to call it an alley, and then you turn into another street with a soba shop on the corner. There, a few doors down, was the building where Rei lived before we were married.

  “What do they call this? An apartment building? A luxury residence?” I asked.

  Rei cocked his head. “Do you really have to know?” he asked in return.

  No. I was just asking.

  INSTRUMENTS & RECORDS. There was a picture of a guitar on the sign. And a round disk, presumably an LP. That store looks kind of old, huh? Have you ever bought a record there? Once again Rei cocked his head. Don’t remember. Maybe I did. Or maybe not. Rei was such an easygoing sort. Not a man you expected to disappear. I never imagined it.

  I went into INSTRUMENTS & RECORDS once. By myself, on the way to Rei’s apartment. Whenever I could find the time, I visited his apartment. Not only when he was there; I went when he wasn’t there, too.

  “You’re a nesting animal, I guess?” Rei asked.

  “I’ve never been like this before,” I said, “never.”

  Rei laughed. He laughed often, just like Momo.

  It was brighter inside INSTRUMENTS & RECORDS than I had thought it would be. A popular song was playing—the voice was male. The clerk was a young man. He was about twenty with a long, thin face and long hair, and he was rocking back and forth, to a rhythm different from that of the music playing. There were no other customers.

  Flipping through a box of LPs in the “Western Music” section, looking at each one, I was overcome by an urge to go to Rei’s apartment. Even though it was practically next door. Even though I would be there in almost no time. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait.

  There was no reason not to leave empty-handed, but instead I selected an LP at random and hurriedly paid for it. The jacket had a photograph of a woman, in monochrome. I assumed it would be vocal music and that the woman would sing, but it was all instrumental pieces with a neat, d
riving rhythm. As soon as I stepped into Rei’s apartment I tore off the cellophane wrapping and put the record on.

  Wow, this is great, Rei said. I like it. So I gave it to him. When we married, I discovered that monochrome jacket among the few dozen records Rei brought with him, and it made me happy. Reunion. I thought the word. Reunion. Now that Rei has disappeared, it is hard for me to think it. Inside INSTRUMENTS & RECORDS, everything was faded and warm.

  YEAR AFTER YEAR. I can’t get used to Parents’ Day.

  The classroom’s dustiness; the samples of calligraphy tacked to the wall, paper curling at the edges; the warmth of the mothers’ bodies, and their perfumes; and mixed in, every so often, a father or two, always wearing, for some reason, black or navy blue. It is unfathomable that I, too, once sat day in and day out in a classroom just like this. When I was in junior high, that classroom felt right. In elementary school, that classroom felt right. Maybe because I had nowhere else to go. Or maybe back then I didn’t feel this restless burgeoning, this seeping out.

  Feeling right was not a matter, then, of thought. Being with Rei felt right almost immediately. So good that I decided to marry him, to let my life become our life. Feeling right is not a help. It is like a mirage. A distant vision, trembling on the sea.

  Ill at ease at Parents’ Day, I sit in a line with the others, head down. When your turn comes, I’d like each of you to tell me how your children have been lately, any concerns you may have. I’m undecided as to whether or not I should let him have a cell phone. Ever since she entered ninth grade, she’s gotten so argumentative, I don’t know how to deal with her. He tells me he’s always exhausted, he ought to know it’s no help to be too busy but somehow he can’t learn to manage his time. She’s been sickly since she was little and she still has to go regularly to the doctor, so for the time being I just want her to build up her strength.