She had spoken without flinching even once. It then became clear to me that I had my answer to the mystery of those undergarments.
Kanako drank her whiskey in one gulp and went on. “That person used to be taciturn, very sincere, and hardworking back when my parents were still alive and well. They were sure fond of him, but I could never tell what was going on in that mind of his. Naturally, they liked him. That wasn’t surprising, seeing that they were into anyone who would answer to their beck and call and toil away for them day in, day out, you see.”
Kanako stared into the amber liquid before moving on to tell her tale with deadpan indifference: her passionate college years, Shigeki’s birth, and her reluctant marriage to Taichi.
“You see, I hate my parents. I sometimes still wonder why they chose Taichi to be my bridegroom instead of Nakahara. They knew I loved him, yet they would say things about him like, ‘He’s an uneducated nobody from nowhere.’ Well, if that was the case, then what do you call their lousy choice for heaven’s sake? Now there’s an uneducated nobody for you! But I’m certain they chose him because he didn’t have any troublesome relatives except for his mother. Yes, to my parents Taichi was merely an expedient choice that served their purpose well, the purpose of protecting the Tachibana estate. That’s all they were concerned about, really. Nakahara was a musician and dreamed of going to America. But I think there’s one more reason. I think they meant to punish me.”
“Punish you?”
“Yes,” Kanako went on, allowing herself to reveal something she’d kept hidden for a long time. “It was simply inconceivable to my parents that their daughter would go against their will and wind up getting pregnant. They were past the stage of rage. They were in that strange state of mind. How does that saying go? The greatest hate springs from the greatest love? At any rate, my feelings didn’t matter at all.”
Kanako explained to me that after her father passed away, Taichi’s former self vanished and was replaced by someone who began to dominate Kanako and Shigeki. Kanako and Taichi were man and wife only in name, and Kanako, unable to forget her beloved, never shared a bedroom with Taichi. But the night of her father’s funeral, when Kanako had been inconsolable, Taichi walked into her bedroom without a warning.
“Good god, the look he had on his face then. Just remembering it now gives me the shivers. His face had completely transformed. He didn’t look at all like the conscientious, modest clerk I had come to know. His face was, how should I say, the face of a shameless man—no, of a beast. He was a brazen-faced beast.”
A chill ran down my spine.
“I hadn’t even untied the sash of my mourning dress yet,” Kanako continued. “He just stood there. I was frozen in place as he stared quietly, as if to devour me with his eyes. He said, ‘As long as I’m around, I’ll see to it that neither you nor your mother ever ends up out on the street.’ Right then it became clear to me what position this man had put me in. I wanted to flee, but I simply couldn’t leave behind my child and mother, and it was also inconceivable to carry on being a Tachibana without his support. So I was now completely under his control. He had been waiting for this moment to arrive, you see. I had no choice but to let him overpower me.”
Help. Help. Somebody help.
KANAKO: TWO
“He became strict with Shigeki, telling him that he needed to discipline him. If anything Shigeki said displeased that man, Taichi would tie my boy to a chestnut tree in the backyard, even during the winter. He’d even rouse him out of bed at the crack of dawn to make him clean the pond, tearing off his futon cover and forcing him to wash his face with the icy water.
“Even during dinner, if Shigeki happened to spill his food or leave it unfinished on his plate, Taichi would grab him by his collar and take him to the hill out back, wrap him up in a hemp sack, and roll him down the hill. Before long the child turned into a nervous wreck. How could he not? The mere shadow of Taichi would land him in the grip of terror. Whenever I confronted Taichi, he’d simply overwhelm me with force. Seeing me beaten and kicked, my dear Shigeki would try to protect me, rushing over to receive Taichi’s punishment in my place, saying, ‘Father, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ ”
Anna. Anna, you live here, too.
I was speechless.
“That man tormented the two of us, Shigeki and me—mother and child. I don’t know how many times I thought about strangling him to death as he slept.” Kanako looked into her empty glass. “As if to follow my father to the other side, my mother’s heart gave out. Good thing, though. I’m glad she died sooner than later. The hell she ended up experiencing here on earth was brief.”
Kanako told me that Taichi’s abuse ended when Shigeki was in the fifth grade and the wine-importing business took off, helping improve the company’s overall performance. That was also when Taichi began womanizing. But Kanako found something new to live for. She became driven to see Shigeki admitted into a famous junior high school.
“Every day I looked forward to Shigeki’s return from school. Once he was home, I would take him to an after-school tutor for advanced lessons. At night, I’d help him review his homework and would be glad at times, sad at others, about the test results he’d bring back. Our lives were fulfilling then; the two of us were working together in solidarity to survive the exam wars. And my, what drive, what resolve we had! Shigeki’s history lessons also used to take place as he climbed up the staircase. I had plastered the steps with flash cards in chronological order, you see.”
(And you also swatted Shigeki on the head with a slipper, let’s not forget!)
“But then one time,” Kanako continued, “I realized that his pet puppy became frightened every time he approached. It reminded me of Shigeki getting scared whenever my husband approached. The dog would edge back into a corner of the room, trembling. Shigeki would say the dog ran away, and on many occasions it didn’t return. One day I followed Shigeki and saw him take the puppy to that hill out back. He put the dog inside a hemp sack and tied it shut before kicking the poor thing up into the air, like a soccer ball. The puppy’s bawling was a hideous sound made all the worse by the silence that followed.”
I thought of Pierre with blood oozing from his lips after being punched by Shigeki. My head began to reel. I couldn’t tell if it was the whiskey or hearing Kanako confirm the truth of Shigeki’s cruelty. But Kanako couldn’t care less. She was too absorbed in the telling of her story to register my state of mind. The last wailings of the dog remained stuck in my ear for a while.
“The child was doing what was done to him,” Kanako said.
She eventually withdrew from Shigeki’s studies. But even though his grades suffered as a result, he still managed to pass his entrance exam and get admitted to a prominent junior high school. At the same time he had a growth spurt, after which he towered over Kanako and Taichi.
Taichi became strict with the money. In fact the more his business thrived, the more he tightened Kanako’s and Shigeki’s spending.
“That man said the money was there because he earned it, as if to say it didn’t belong to the Tachibanas, that it was separate from the family. He forbade us to lead a life of luxury. He even reduced Shigeki’s allowance by half. Now what can anyone buy with four, five thousand yen? Still, the child submitted humbly to Taichi without saying anything and simply squirreled away the money, which was all well and good in the end, because he went on to buy a surfboard. Back then having fun at Shonan Beach was all the rage.”
When Taichi came back drunk, occasionally he would take out his frustrations on Kanako. He was high-handed and despotic with Shigeki, too, picking quarrels over trivial things.
“When he found the surfboard by the front door, he said, ‘What? A surfboard? For a junior-high kid, goddamn it. Shameless extravagance, that’s what this is. Kids these days, it’s all play, play, and play for them. That’s all they spend their money on.’ He kicked the board. Shigeki ran down from his room and stood before Taichi. The brute stiffened all the more a
nd said, ‘What the hell’s that attitude, boy,’ and went on to knock him off his feet with a slap.”
Shigeki ran off. Taichi then stamped on the surfboard. Shigeki returned from the living room with a wine bottle in his hand and looked ready to fight Taichi.
“I thought the child was going to kill him just then. His eyes were frightfully serene—which got me to thinking that maybe the puppy he killed had been a stand-in for Taichi and that he had been waiting all along for this moment.
“I quickly stepped in to intervene, and he kicked me as if I was some kind of pest he could brush away.”
This was the first time Kanako came face-to-face with the bitter hatred lodged deep inside Shigeki’s heart. Putting on a bold front, Taichi retreated and walked away from the entrance, pretending to be drunk.
“You know what? I sent Shigeki to America to finish high school. Removing him from this household was the one motherly thing I did for my boy. Yes, among all the things I ever did for the child, that was the one motherly thing. I’m sure of that. He came back as a fine young man by anybody’s standards. Don’t you agree?”
Mayu. Mayu. Mayu.
I could hear that person whispering, pleading for help. It felt the same as with Anna. I drank my whiskey to drown my response.
KANAKO: THREE
Shigeki was popular among young women, thanks to his proficiency in English, his sporty car, and his affluence. But according to Kanako, he would never get seriously involved with anyone he dated.
“The one trait he shared with my husband was his womanizing. He’d make women cry, one after another. They’d whimper like puppies, poor things. I think that somewhere inside Shigeki there was a part of him that hated women. After all, that child not only hated the treatment he received from Taichi, but he also hated me for not being able to prevent the abuse. But you know, I was hurt too. His pain was my pain. Why can’t he see that? I suffered too.
“I kept silent, letting him do whatever he pleased, but when he brought Sophie along and said he was going to marry her, I was shocked. At first I thought he was doing it out of spite for us, retaliation for his miserable childhood. She was a poor immigrant prostitute, for heaven’s sake. Surely this must be a joke, I thought. I stubbornly refused to recognize their engagement, believing it, too, would end quickly like all his other flings. As for Taichi, he refused to be in the same room with Shigeki. One year later, Raiki was born.
“Shigeki was my revenge, I thought. Some form of poetic justice. I now understood how my parents must have felt after my situation. Still, to think that Shigeki had married this lowly woman, this bar hostess he’d met at some nightclub in Ginza, it was profoundly revolting to me. There was no way on earth I was going to allow her to remain a daughter of the Tachibana family.”
Both our glasses were empty. Kanako rose from her chair and left the room. I sat there, dumbstruck by everything she had told me. She returned quickly, leaving me no time to process any of this. She had brought with her the whiskey bottle and an ice bucket. She poured us each another drink, sat down in her chair, and continued, as if she was talking to herself.
“Terashima Industries operates bars on a large scale, and we sell them our wines wholesale. Reika works there managing the bars and escort girls, and she’s a rather formidable character, mind you. I have no idea when Shigeki and Reika began seeing each other. But it was necessary for the Tachibanas to get along with Terashima Industries for the sake of business, so I was in favor of seeing Shigeki’s relationship with her last.”
So here she was, basically telling me that as long as the relationship was for the sake of business, there was nothing for me to get worked up about, that I shouldn’t care, that life was still a bowl of cherries.
Even after Raiki’s birth, Kanako couldn’t accept Sophie.
So one day Kanako visited Reika to confess her troubles. The two of them tried to devise a way to ship Sophie back to the Philippines. Even after Raiki’s birth, Kanako had remained blind to Shigeki’s feelings. She was behaving exactly as her parents had.
“Although Reika never lost her cool, I suppose she couldn’t help feeling jealous that Shigeki had a child with Sophie. She always wanted to remind Shigeki of Sophie’s background.”
It was Kanako’s habit to trace her Venetian-crystal necklace, bead by bead. She had left it on the dresser before her shower and now she picked it up. Dangled around her right hand, the necklace began to slowly revolve, one bead at a time. It reminded me of a television show I once watched about nomadic people in a foreign land praying, as they skillfully turned prayer beads with their right hand while holding a scripture in their left. But Kanako’s left hand was busy shaking her glass of whiskey and turning the melting ice cubes, making them rattle.
“When Taichi first got the boat, he used it for fishing. It relaxed him,” Kanako continued. “It was also a great way to entertain clients. The entertaining became more and more over the top, with wild parties and escorts arranged by Reika. Then even when there weren’t parties or clients, there were women. One day I visited Sophie at her apartment and told her that Taichi was hoping to see her. Mind you, I had never been to the boat. But Reika had told me all the details, and I conveyed them to Sophie, telling her to treat the meeting like a job interview.”
In my mind I began to hear the sound of that cry from far away:
Help. Help. Somebody help.
Kanako was feeling the whiskey and she really started to vent, releasing a flood of pent-up emotion like a dam had burst. I dreaded what she would share with me next. All I could do was listen.
“So the next day I had Shigeki go to the harbor to welcome the clients. Seeing Sophie step off the boat, my son must have finally remembered who she was—and what she really was,” Kanako spat out.
As she spoke, Kanako disappeared from my vision and was replaced by Simone, just as her trial had ended. As she was being taken into custody, Simone turned back for an instant to glare at me, spit on the floor, and say, “I had no choice. A bitch like you would never understand.” She had spoken in a voice only I could hear—a low, whispering simmer—and the look on her face then was the look on Kanako’s now. They were one and the same.
(I did it to survive.)
Was that a justification for a mother to do anything to her child?
In the end, the fact that an underprivileged woman had married into the Tachibana family, a celebrated name with a lineage dating back three hundred years, was too hard for Kanako to swallow.
“But who would have thought,” Kanako continued, “that Sophie would commit suicide? I certainly didn’t. Wasn’t it just business as usual for her?”
I simply couldn’t believe the coldness of what I was hearing. I sipped my drink, but the whiskey didn’t help. It failed to penetrate my numb disbelief.
“She dropped some sleeping pills into her drink and ended her life right there on the boat. It was intentional, I tell you, to stage her death on the boat like that. Now that’s harassment at an excessive level.”
Up until this point, I’d thought that Kanako was remorseful and was confessing to repent for her sins. But she was wallowing in self-pity, feeling sorry for the pit of loneliness she had dug for herself. She was blaming Shigeki, Sophie, and even Raiki for making her life miserable. Kanako and I did not share a common language; we did not see the world in the same way. A torrent of violence ran through me as I realized how she was using my sympathy. I was so angry that I wanted to shatter the glass of whiskey in my hand and wield it against her. I found myself grateful I didn’t have Pierre’s knife with me for fear of what I might do with it.
I stood up and gradually moved away from Kanako until I was backed up against the door. How depraved were Taichi’s abuses really, in light of what I knew now? Whether they involved being thrown into the sea or stuffed into a hemp sack and kicked away, such things seemed like mere bruises.
Kanako had committed murder—murder of the soul.
She had impaled Sophie’s and Shig
eki’s souls. She robbed Raiki of his mother. Yet Kanako remained ignorant of her guilt.
I saw Simone’s glare. I was shouting at her, and at Kanako.
True suffering is born of women like you!
KANAKO: FOUR
Raiki was riding on a crane. It was attempting to fly into the dark night sky. Tilting his neck, Raiki waved his small hand good-bye. I yelled as loudly as possible, “Wait, don’t go, Raiki, watch out!”
Raiki fell, whirling in the air as he dropped. I reached out my arms and caught the child, only to realize what I had caught was a badly bruised, slimy lump of flesh. Desperately, I licked the thing. If I didn’t, it would stop breathing. The blood oozing out turned clear, and I shoved the thing into my womb, where it landed with a thud. It was too early for the lump of flesh to be born, and I was convinced that it was Shigeki. I felt a strange sense of relief and happiness arising from the knowledge that I had Shigeki back at last.
Ms. Sato shook me awake. My head throbbed as I wondered when and how I had returned to my bed.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow!”
“You drank too much, that’s why! Didn’t I tell you that Madam Kanako grew up in a sake brewery? You’re thirty years away from being able to match her drinking pace.”
“All right already, ahhhh, ow, ow!”
I curled up into a fetal position and remained still to keep the dream from escaping me. I wanted to commit it to memory. I wanted to continue keeping Shigeki secure in my womb.
“What time is it?”
“It’s already noon.”
I Hear Them Cry Page 10
