But this was the sort of secret pleasure borne of separation, and I knew that our conversation would grow stale within forty-eight hours, that little differences would start to crop up, little irritations, and slowly we’d begin our journey toward leading unremarkable, socially acceptable, boring lives like everyone else; and yet, all the same, we ended up getting married. That moment in Narita had shown us there was nothing more important than being close to each other at all times, close enough to touch. Sliding in next to Masako to help her push the luggage cart was enough to envelop the entire right side of my body in her warmth, and, as my hand covered hers on its handle, it was as if I were a little boy again, trembling in the face of the sheer miracle of coming into contact with the world beyond myself, and as I felt a similar tremor move through her body, it was like an epiphany: this was the feeling of being alive.
The clock showed me it was 3:15 in the morning. If only we could reawaken that feeling and make love again, I thought ruefully as I softly slipped out of bed, trying not to wake my wife. Masako had gone to work at a major automaker after returning from Peru and finishing her master’s, so she had to wake up early in the morning like everyone else. I, on the other hand, worked in publishing, and it didn’t matter if I got there in the morning or afternoon, which meant I usually ended up sleeping through the morning, but I try at least twice a month to coordinate my sleep schedule with hers and today was such a day.
I went to the bathroom and, shivering in the cold, washed between my legs with a spray of hot water. I went into the kitchen/dining room to turn on the heater, and put the teapot on the range to boil water to make some of the maté one of Masako’s friends had sent her from Peru, and then I walked over to set my mug on the table. Small and round, it was crowded with magazines and houseplants, leaving only a tiny space to eat on. I’d been consumed with potting the plants as they proliferated, but now I thought, we could stand to get rid of one of those, as I looked down at what must have been at least four pots of arum plants. We should get rid of some of the ivy too, it breeds like marmots. I trim the plants back when they get overgrown, but Masako always saves the clippings, telling me not to be wasteful, and puts them in water until they sprout roots and I can plant them in yet more pots. I eat surrounded on all sides by this tropical profusion, hunching my shoulders to fit, and I feel eaten at by the greenery sometimes; it gets on my nerves, and I shout, Throw them out, just dump them outside on the ground! Masako promised we’d take them with us the next time we visited her parents, but that kept failing to happen until finally, eight months later, she’s going to go and visit them this Saturday, three days from now.
Wait, now it’s only two days from now, the day after tomorrow. Thinking about it like that, the plethora of potted plants didn’t seem so bad. The week before last, during the New Year’s break, we hadn’t gone to visit her family when they’d gathered at her grandparents’ house in Mizuto, so this weekend her family pressured her to make up for it, told her to come up and visit her parents in Takazaki when her grandparents were going to be there. “And bring Naruto, too,” they added, and she finally gave in.
I wondered if the battle from eight months ago was going to pick up where it left off.
“It’s not like you’re asking us to buy a stuffed animal or something,” Masako had said then, upset. “We’re the ones who’d have to take care of it, not you!”
Some cousin of hers had just given birth to her second child, and a former classmate was pregnant too, and these things had kept entering the conversation until it was just a matter of time before someone said, “And so, do you two have any plans …?” And while I figured that Masako would just play it off like she usually did, saying, “Well, you know, sometime down the line perhaps …” and then trailing off to leave me to bear the ensuing awkwardness in silence, instead she exclaimed, “Look, it’s none of your business!” And suddenly all the years of unspoken dissatisfactions between them came boiling forth all at once.
“Oh, I know, everyone feels like that at first.” Masako’s mother acted as though she’d been rebuffed like this time and again, but she was going to control herself, allow not a trace of irritation to color her voice as she responded.
“When I first married your father, his father was after us right away, demanding grandchildren, grandchildren from us all the time, and I took it pretty hard too. But looking back now, I think it would have been better if I had had my children earlier. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve drawn more and more strength from having had them.”
“So you should be completely satisfied now, then, right Mom? Good for you!” I could feel Masako’s impatience prickle me as she spoke.
“Please try to see it from my point of view. I get asked all the time, not just by blood relations but ones on your father’s side, too, ‘Aren’t they thirty already? Isn’t it getting a bit late to be starting a family?’ And I always take your side, I always say, ‘I respect my daughter’s wishes,’ but dear, there’s a limit to how much I can be expected to put up with.”
“Dad, shouldn’t you be protecting Mom from that kind of thing? Why do they need to prod excuses out of her? You should just state the matter clearly, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to have children,’ and that should be that.”
“Don’t say you don’t want to have children!”
“It’s the truth, so why shouldn’t I?”
“Oh, stop it. Both of you, stop it, stop provoking each other like this,” her mother broke in, her voice sounding drained and powerless.
“I’m not saying you have to have children. There are a lot of things to consider, I know that—your finances, your careers, your time commitments, this modern lifestyle with both of you working—I’m not saying you have to pretend you’re living in the past. It’s just your grandparents, and you know, Yoriyasu-san, everyone really, they’re worried that you don’t have any intentions of starting a family at all. So we just want you to make it clear that you do want to start a family someday, and don’t worry, it doesn’t matter to us when.”
“Well, then I’ll make it as clear as I can: I don’t intend to ever have children.”
“Never? In your whole life?”
“Till I die.”
“I don’t know if you should say ‘never’ like that. Just a mother’s opinion.”
“Everyone becomes a parent! It’s nature’s law, your duty as a person!”
“You probably won’t understand this, Dad, but talk like that is considered discriminatory these days.”
“It’s discriminatory to become a parent?! Such foolishness. So childish, only a selfish child would refuse to be a parent.”
“Fine, then. Fine. I’m a child. You treat me like a child, I’ll act like a child. You think I’m just a child anyway, you don’t respect my opinions at all.”
“I said I respected your opinions just now, didn’t I?” “If you meant it, then you’d accept it when I said I didn’t want to have a baby!”
“Does Naru agree with your decision?” Masako’s father asked this without looking at me.
“You always do this, Dad. Don’t be a coward, ask him yourself!” Masako looked at me. Her eyes communicated nothing. They didn’t urge me to hold the line with her, they didn’t challenge me to disagree, they just regarded me. And so they made guilt well up within me all the more.
“We agree completely on this issue,” I said to her father. Masako was still looking at me, and so I returned her gaze. It remained as vacant of meaning as before.
“Really? You don’t need children either, Naru? Such an adult you are,” he shot back, perhaps as strongly as a father-in-law could at his sonin-law. My mother-in-law threw me a lifeline, asking what my father-in-law had yet to.
“I’m not saying this to criticize you or anything like that, I’m just curious: why is it that you don’t want children of your own?”
“We have enough to occupy us just with ourselves, I’d say, and we’re happy enough with that.”
“Just wi
th yourselves, you’d say?” My father-in-law’s tone was ironic.
“We live in a time when it’s believed that there cannot be society without individuals. I understand where you’re coming from, I do. But if starting a family brings us pain, we lose our reason for being alive in the first place. It’s so hard to find a reason for living these days. It’s simply no longer the case that having children or starting a family will automatically give you one. Or at least, that’s what we’ve discovered in our lives together. Right now, our reason for living is something other than having children.”
“So you’re saying we have no right to expect grandchildren or great-grandchildren? Don’t you realize that your elders need reasons to live, too? Well, you don’t have your parents anymore, maybe you can’t understand what I mean.”
“Dad!”
Masako protested loudly, and I tried to calm her, saying, “No, it’s all right, after all, it’s the truth. I’m used to it.” My father divorced my mother while I was too young to remember, and I’ve never met him, or even know if he’s still alive. My mother took pride in raising me alone, and three years ago, after seeing the face of the woman I was to marry, she died an early death from stomach cancer.
“I know you don’t understand, but if you think about it a little, you’ll see that it’s increasingly the norm for our generation to defend their right not to have children, and you’re caught in the middle of that transition, though I think it’s a bit of an overstatement for you to say the wishes of the younger generation come at the expense of those of the older. I believe that it’s better for society to give the younger generation this choice than for us to get married and have children just because that’s what’s done, and then end up creating unhappy households because we’ve never had the chance to determine for ourselves what the meaning of our lives might really be. It might try your patience, but it’s not like we’re just playing around, doing whatever we like—we’re barely getting by, barely able to hang on as we try to live our lives.”
I believed in what I was saying, I knew it was true, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just spouting a bunch of conventional wisdom. My chest swelled almost to bursting with the feeling that I was just using these words to avoid saying what I really believed. And not just me, I knew that what Masako was asserting so fiercely was also just so much conventional wisdom to her as well. I knew Masako’s passion was directed not against the expectations of her parents or her family or the world in general, but rather against me. After all, the truth is Masako and I have hardly discussed the issue at all.
It’s really my fault. The subject came up just once, right before we got married. Masako brought it up, asking, “What do you think of having children?” I hadn’t thought much of anything about it, so I just said, “Hmmm, well …” and then stopped speaking. I was thinking that I had no qualms about discussing it, that in fact I thought we really should talk about it, but nevertheless I lost the power of speech. I felt my face grow pale as I asked myself, What do I really think about this? And no answer came. I couldn’t even think of possible responses to choose from. Perhaps because the question itself didn’t seem real to me.
I’m a quite unnatural creature. I wanted to be more natural. I wanted it to be natural to me either that I’d want to have children or that I wouldn’t. Though to long for such a thing is itself unnatural, which irritated me further.
I certainly wasn’t against having a child. Once I even lived with a woman who had children. She was a single mother. She had a four-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. I made a good substitute dad, if I do say so myself. I felt affection for the kids, I was able to scold them when necessary, and I had even been willing to put my name in their family registry if it came to that. She changed her mind about the relationship before it came to that, but I had no regrets that I had considered it.
What I find impossible is imagining myself with children of my own. Even with that woman’s children, knowing that for all intents and purposes I’d become their father, I couldn’t imagine the four of us really building a household together. I could imagine all sorts of things about my future with the mother, how old we’d be at different points in our lives together, how our relationship might evolve, but when I tried to include her children into these imaginings they’d break down, my head filling with sandstorms of static like a television screen, my thoughts frozen.
Masako watched me freeze up and gingerly offered, “Well, it would be better if we did it before we turn thirty …” And even these soft words, really little more than a sigh, struck me like a blow. “We don’t have the money,” I said, finally, and that’s how it’d been left ever since.
All I’ve done since then is avoid confronting both my real feelings and Masako’s, striving instead simply to soothe any possible tensions or hurts that may come up between us. And as I did, I left Masako hanging, ignoring the stress she was surely feeling. Little by little, even our sexual habits changed. It wasn’t just that we did it less and less frequently, it was that I would grow uneasy inside her even with a condom on, and after a few thrusts I would switch, entering her anus instead. Masako neither encouraged nor discouraged me. I myself didn’t like anal sex, it felt dirty to me, but I was equally unable to stop doing it. I felt like we were two pieces of a wooden puzzle, built to fit this way and that was that.
I poured the rest of my maté, now cold, into one of the arum plant pots. If we didn’t have all these plants we wouldn’t have to go up to Takazaki, I thought, selfishly. And then I plucked every arum and ivy plant from their pot, roots and all, and dumped them into the compost pile near the sink. It was already past four.
As I reached my hands into the sink to wash out the cups and teapot, the lid on the teapot started clattering by itself. My hands froze. A deep rumbling resounded as the ground began shuddering beneath my feet, the arum and ivy tendrils trembling as they stuck out every which way, the dishes rattling in their rack, the picture frame over the phone crashing down with a bang.
Another earthquake. Surprisingly big. I reached quickly to steady the dish rack and yelled, “Earthquake!” toward the bedroom. Then I changed my mind and headed into the bedroom, but by then, the tremors were already winding down. Masako was sitting up in the bed, still half asleep, her short hair sticking up where it had been mussed against the pillows. She seemed to return to her senses when she saw me, and then she buried her head in a feather pillow.
“Are you okay?”
As I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked the back of her head, her body stiffened. “You unfeeling shit,” she said, the pillow muffling her words. “I thought you’d abandoned me.”
“Did the earthquake wake you just now?”
Masako nodded and said, “I woke up, and you were gone.” And then she buried her face again in the pillow.
“I was drinking some maté out there,” I explained, pointing to where the light was still on in the kitchen. Masako drew a cherry-blossom pink cardigan around her shoulders and used the remote to turn on the heater in the room. She put the blanket over the cardigan and huddled beneath it.
“I thought you’d run off without me.”
“God forbid.”
I turned on the little TV mounted next to the closet; NHK came on. The news hadn’t started yet. I put my right arm around Masako’s blanket-shrouded shoulder and used my left to press her head against my chest. She relaxed, putting an arm around my middle. We stayed like that for while, and then she sat up away from me as the news came on and announced that a magnitude 4 earthquake had hit Tokyo. Tokyo had been experiencing a series of midsized earthquakes lately; this was the third quake since the end of last year to score a 4 on the Richter scale. Last year had also seen a series of volcanic eruptions occurring throughout Japan, and this, coupled with the end of the century approaching, made people suspect, without evidence, that the Big One was coming any minute, and emergency supplies had been selling out all over.
“It was big enough, real
ly, but at the same time it was just another 4. I’m getting used to them.”
Masako looked at me, her brows furrowed, and then pointed at the floor, saying, “Looks like a lot of stuff fell on the ground.”
“And why didn’t you actually come in the room, why did you just stay out there yelling ‘Earthquake!’ at me? I was still asleep when it started, and it scared me. Things were falling all around me and you weren’t here beside me, so of course I got scared, I thought I’d been abandoned to fend for myself now that the Big One had finally hit Tokyo.”
Masako shrugged off the blanket and sighed as she buttoned her cardigan. “I was so lonely.”
“I’ll say it again, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. But I knew it wasn’t a big earthquake, and I was right, it wasn’t. Can’t we leave it at that?” I was trying to choose my words carefully. These days, I’ve been choosing my words carefully with Masako a lot. The news informed us that this morning was the sixth anniversary of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that hit Kobe.
“It’s been six years already?”
“Yeah, six years.”
“Six years, and now we’re in our thirties.”
I said this while turning off the television, my back to her. She shook her head when I asked if she wanted me to put some tea on for her.
“Six years since then … you know what I mean, ‘since then.’”
“Since we were apart, and the earthquake hit Kobe.” “Yeah,” Masako said quietly, “As long as you remember.” “So what you really want to say is that six years ago you were lonely in Peru because you’d thought I might have been hurt in the Kobe earthquake, but even now that we’re together, you’re still scared that you’ll die alone and abandoned when an earthquake hits. Isn’t that right?”
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 7
