It was only once she had gone through the gate and was out on the street that Yui remembered she and her mother and daughter also used to share their dreams.
How had she forgotten that?
Yui, though she had never been a big talker, loved waking up in the morning and recounting what she’d dreamed about. When she was a child she used to tell her mother, and when she was an adult, her daughter. She tended to hold on to her dreams as if they had a deeper meaning, even if they didn’t.
As she stirred the miso soup, she would describe what had happened during the night: who she had talked to, what they had spoken about, the places she had visited, who (if she could admit it) she had fallen in love with. And she did so as if it were an integral part of the morning routine, like preparing the rice or cutting the bread, as if it were inseparable from breakfast. And so her daughter, who would allow herself to be lulled by the cheery tones of her mother’s voice, was quite used to fish or yogurt seasoned with Yui’s nocturnal reveries.
On the train home, Yui stood by the door, despite the fact that the carriage was almost empty, and looked out at the silhouette of Tōkyō against the molten lava of the setting sun. She remembered the day her daughter had started to give back the gift of words. And what marvellous dreams she came up with. With instinct and emotion, she would randomly assemble various parts of her little life: explosions of dresses and flowers in fields of elephants and lions and dinosaurs, alongside her fears and prohibitions, the latter echoes of the words she heard over and over again during the daytime.
Yui remembered how this was the start of a new daily ritual of sharing their dreams, and whenever her mother came to see them early she loved to take part in the game too. If someone had walked into their kitchen on one of those mornings, they would have concluded that happiness runs in families.
As Yui opened the door onto the dense silence of her house, she concluded that memories were like objects, like the football that was found on the coast of Alaska a year after the tsunami, 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Sooner or later, they always floated back to the surface.
chapter
forty-four
The Original Title of the Picture Book on the Afterlife that Yui Gave to Hana
Guillaume Duprat, L’Autre monde. Une histoire illustrée de l’au-delà, Paris: Le Seuil, 2016.
chapter
forty-five
SPENDING TIME WITH HANA WAS the biggest test for Yui. Projecting her own daughter, the life she could have had, onto Takeshi’s child was an involuntary but persistent instinct. It took time to put distance between the two girls, and to not feel guilty each time those thoughts came into her head. Imagining how Hana, in her own way, likely had the same concerns alleviated the anxiety that sometimes overwhelmed her.
However, just before they were due to meet one day, long into their relationship, a stray thought crushed Yui’s mood. She imagined touching Hana, or giving her a kiss on the forehead, and not feeling anything. Absolutely nothing. Nice, sweet, but that was all, like any little girl, no different from a stranger she passed in the street.
Oh God, she wondered, what if I’m really not ready to love her?
I’ll feel nothing, she threatened, and I’ll come out of it destroyed.
But then she remembered a line, or even half a line, she had read in a book on raising children. She recalled it very clearly because it had unsettled her. It said that distance makes us love better and with greater respect. That distance wasn’t, in fact, a bad thing. On the contrary, it was the lack of distance that could be harmful, and only the purest emotion, spontaneous and visceral love, was capable of healing a wound.
Ah, so, she remembered thinking, love is dangerous. And yet it’s essential.
On the day of Hana’s birthday, Takeshi organised a little dinner. In the afternoon they visited the shrine on the way back from the supermarket. Hana had chosen the evening’s menu: fried oysters, potato salad, cream of corn soup and a cake with Kiki the Witch and her cat Jiji on it.
Yui, who was more observant than Takeshi, noticed that Hana was more interested in the animal than in the witch, and gave Takeshi a hint about the little girl’s secret wish. Granting it was, ultimately, down to him.
It was November, and the temple was swarming with children dressed in kimonos in the bright colours of the Shichi-go-san, a festival for girls turning three and seven, and boys turning five.
‘Are you sad that you didn’t get to celebrate the festival for your third birthday?’ Takeshi asked his daughter as the two of them climbed up the stone steps. An old woman carrying bags bumped into them but she was so wrapped up in her own grandson that she didn’t notice.
‘No, but I want to do it when I’m seven,’ Hana quickly replied. She didn’t like talking about the past and how much she’d missed.
Her father hurried to change the subject. ‘Shall we buy an ema and hang it up?’
There was no need to ring the shop’s bell. There were so many people coming and going that, despite the icy wind, the miko kept the sliding door open. Takeshi asked for the wooden plaque. On one side there was a print of three children dressed up in festival clothes in front of a torii gate, surrounded by maple leaves. Hana handed over the golden coin she had just been given by her father, then they moved to one side.
‘So? What shall we write?’ Takeshi asked, smiling. ‘It’s your day, your wish, you have to decide.’
‘For our family to always be happy and healthy,’ Hana replied, as if repeating a set phrase. Takeshi didn’t question it. He put the bags down on the counter and took the lid off the pen given to them by the miko. He started to write the kanji that Hana would learn at school the following year.
‘Which one says family?’ she asked, examining the plaque.
Takeshi pointed at the two kanji for ‘house’ and ‘tribe’, and Hana placed the pad of her finger on – kazoku.
‘Family?’ she asked again, as if waiting for a definition. ‘Daddy, Mummy, Grandma and Hana?’
‘Yes,’ Takeshi replied distractedly, rearranging the bags that were threatening to fall down.
‘And Yui-san?’
Caught off guard, Takeshi hesitated.
An overexcited boy in blue ran behind them in the space before the altar while his relatives, no less excited than him, immortalised his breakaway through bulging hydrangea bushes and high stone lanterns on their smart phones.
‘Do you think that when Yui-san thinks about her family, she thinks of us too?’ asked Hana.
‘I don’t know …’ Takeshi responded. ‘But it would be nice if she did, wouldn’t it?’
Takeshi watched as Hana nodded, but then her face darkened. It reminded him of her perennially sullen expression just after she was born, when his wife would pass her to him to hold and baby Hana would seem to scrutinise him, deciding whether to accept being held in his arms or burst into tears.
‘What’s up? Doesn’t this make you happy?’
Hana stayed silent, staring at the ideograms penned along the veins of the wood. With her fingertip she started to tap the plaque along the lines that fell from top to bottom, the two short sentences written from right to left, ending with her name.
‘Her daughter was so pretty though,’ she said.
‘You mean Yui-san’s daughter?’
Hana had seen photos of the little girl at Yui’s house: licking an enormous ice cream that was about to fall, on a swing in her grandmother’s arms, with her mouth wide open crying, with her eyes closed and sleeping. The shots were concentrated in a single frame above Yui’s bed.
‘Hana, do you mean Yui’s daughter?’ Takeshi repeated.
Her chin pressed against her collar, she cast her eyes downwards to avoid her father’s gaze.
‘But you’re beautiful too!’
And she was; Takeshi had always thought it. And he was sure he was being objective in his judgement. Hana had sharp and intelligent eyes, and a long face like her mot
her’s that resembled certain Ukiyo-e prints. She had slender hands, perfect skin, her expression was engaged and always present. Yes, beautiful. How else could he describe her?
The little boy who had been running around was now screaming, held still by his mother who was struggling to tie up his loose obi. They could also hear the repetitive commands of someone further away, a photographer trying, with little success, to make a rigid and tense family smile under the reddest maple tree in the shrine.
Takeshi made an effort to focus on his daughter’s emotions. She probably felt inadequate. Just like he sometimes did.
‘Also, I’m really untidy,’ Hana added, defeat in her voice now.
‘Affection has nothing to do with how beautiful or tidy we are,’ Takeshi said. His voice rose in his urgency to reassure her.
Hana went quiet, her gaze lost in the raucous vacuum of all those families. The Shichi-go-san celebration, the prayer to the gods to watch over the children, was noisy. According to Shintoism, until a child is seven, their fate is in the hands of the gods.
Takeshi knelt down so he could look into his daughter’s eyes.
‘Hana, love has nothing to do with beauty or talent, believe me.’
The little girl remained silent, fiddling with the edges of the ema. Then, in a faint voice, she asked, ‘Really nothing?’
‘Nope, nothing. Otherwise it would be a rather fragile thing, don’t you think?’
Hana said nothing else, but she let her father stroke her head, which he took to be her agreement. Then, as if it to free herself from a conversation that was starting to get boring, she picked up the plaque and looked around for the iron bars to tie it to.
As soon as she’d seen them, she grabbed the ema and launched herself in the direction of the shrine, where families were still swelling and shrinking like swallows at dusk.
‘Here?’ she called, pointing at the dozens of other plaques hanging under the little wooden roof.
Takeshi smiled. ‘Yes, tie it on there.’
She was too far away for his voice to reach her, so he gave an obvious nod and made an OK sign with his fingers.
Then he picked up the shopping bags and went to join her.
That evening, after Hana had blown out her six candles and devoured almost half of the cake, Yui, putting her to bed, explained why she’d chosen her present. It was a white wooden frame, with leaves tumbling down the sides.
She told her about the frame man at the shelter, blotting out the darker tones of the story. Then she explained that the whole world was cut up into frames: big windows, small windows, keyholes, the space between lines.
‘And I think it’s easier to understand the world when we look at it through them.’
Hana, already lying in bed, lifted the frame to her face and carefully observed her bedroom ceiling, where there were hundreds of stars twinkling from the projector her father had given her earlier that evening. Then she brought it down to examine Yui’s face.
‘Even the most enormous things can be cut up into tiny parts,’ Yui whispered, stroking the little girl’s cheek with her palm. ‘Even the biggest problems. You can fit anything into a frame.’
chapter
forty-six
The Definition of Family that Takeshi Found that Evening in the Kōjien Japanese Dictionary (Fifth Edition)
Family
A small group that is established based on marital, parental or sibling relations. Basic unit of social composition.
House
chapter
forty-seven
YUI AND TAKESHI TOOK THINGS – everything – very slowly. They both knew that children understood little about life and that change had to be administered slowly. You could never predict how they would react to new things.
One Sunday morning the following January, they bought Hana a cage and made an appointment at the animal shelter.
The little girl had been restless for weeks: the thing she had not been able to give a name to on the day of her birthday had been getting bigger. It felt as if their bizarre family had grown out of a single magical bean planted by chance in their garden.
Hana wanted to wear her frilly dress and Kiki the Witch backpack. She asked her grandmother to stay in so that someone would be there when they got home.
The three of them – Hana, Takeshi and Yui – went together. Sitting on the spartan benches at the animal shelter, they listened patiently to the long and detailed lecture that was obligatory before adopting an animal. Yui took meticulous notes, accurately transcribing the statistics concerning the most common diseases in felines, sterilisation and the daily routines that should be respected for a successful cohabitation. She didn’t want to miss anything.
Hana tried hard to understand all the sections, but she got lost in the diagrams, the percentages and the unfamiliar terminology that the vet used. Her father squeezed her shoulder when he saw her looking confused and she returned to staring at the bright screen and the vet’s white shirt. Screwing up her face, she exerted all the effort and attention she could muster.
After the lecture they were taken into another room, where three kittens were curled up in a box. All different ages and colours, they each had a complicated backstory. Hana, overwhelmed by the idea of leaving two of them behind, asked her father for help choosing.
The decision was swift: they would take the little cat with black fur and lemon-yellow eyes called Tora, tiger, although she didn’t look much like a tiger at all. She was thin and bony and put up very little resistance as she was lifted into the cage.
Of course it was important for Hana to learn how to look after something, her grandmother had whispered to Yui and Takeshi when she saw the cat for the first time, and having a pet was a good lesson in sharing space. But wasn’t this one a bit scrawny? What if she died? Weren’t they putting Hana at risk of yet another trauma?
But Takeshi was confident: the vet had said she was a very capable kitten who had survived as a stray. She was stubborn, and that stubbornness meant she wouldn’t die without putting up a fight.
It was true, though, that none of them had any experience with cats. Only Yui had owned a pet as a child, a mustard-yellow Welsh corgi with no tail that her mother had been given by a neighbour who was moving to Europe. Yui had fallen in love with that dog, making him the centre of her life. When he got sick, she felt like she was going to die too.
But she knew nothing about cats; in fact, from what she had heard, people who liked dogs couldn’t like cats and vice versa. Worse than football fans. And so, as she always did when faced with something new, she bought many books on the subject and began to study. She read them on the metro on her way to work and in the advert breaks on the radio. Her colleagues teased her, saying nyan nyan, amused by the ever-growing mountain of books on her desk.
‘And it’s not even my own cat. Can you imagine!’ she scoffed at herself.
At the till in the bookshop when they asked her if she wanted a paper book cover, Yui usually said no, she didn’t need one. Who cared if people knew the title of the book she was reading? They were more than welcome to ruminate over her banal interests; Yui was not concerned about privacy in that sense.
But when she bought a manual on preparing children for elementary school and helping them get the most out of the school experience, she anticipated the cashier’s question. ‘I’d like a paper cover, please,’ she asked, before the barcode had even been scanned.
The expert had repeated the same concept in different guises, chapter after chapter. There was no need for a total break from the previous life, but a revolution had to be set in motion. A R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N. A revolution! Oh God, how on earth were they supposed to do that? Coups d’état, tearing down statues of despots, throwing stones, armies in the streets: the phrase evoked only terrifying things in Yui’s mind.
That winter and early spring were full of conversation: there was a lot to do. Yui and Takeshi discussed everything at length, hoping to somehow make sense of it all. From Janua
ry to April they spoke of little else. It took place mostly after dinner, once Hana had gone to bed and the projected stars were flickering on her bedroom ceiling. Sitting at the clean table with a hot mug of tea in front of him, dipping the bag in and out of the water, Takeshi would voice any doubts that had come into his head and the advice he had received at the hospital from colleagues with grown-up children. Twirling a spoonful of honey in her own mug, Yui would then pose possible solutions to his questions and report back on what she had read in the manual (which had, in the meantime, tripled).
‘What she should wear, for example. How do we keep her PE kit in good condition over the year and prevent it from getting worn out? Or all the gadgets that need to be attached to her rucksack: you wouldn’t believe the range of things children need to be equipped with these days.’
‘Seriously?’ Takeshi asked, alarmed.
‘Also she’ll need to learn the route from home to school off by heart and try it a few times before the year starts. The best thing is to identify other children she can walk a bit of the route with. I heard there are little committees of mums who take on the task of monitoring crucial points in the neighbourhood, junctions where the children have to cross the road or turn a corner.’
‘I hope they’ll make do with me,’ he said.
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World Page 10
