Death and the Flower

by Kōji Suzuki

  “Maybe next time. I ought to go home tonight.” Rieko glanced at her watch and made to stand up. Her daughter’s sleeping face had suddenly popped into her head. She thought she heard a faint cry.

  “Then when can I see you again?” Fujimura asked, oddly formal, readily retreating. Since she’d said “next time” he must have decided there was hope down along the line.

  “Well …”

  Rieko was still trying to decide what to say to him when he spoke as if the thought had just struck him. “I’ll call you at exactly nine p.m. this Saturday.”

  Rieko had casually mentioned that only on Saturdays, rather than staying at her mother’s home, she spent the night with her daughter at her large new house on the outskirts they’d purchased upon the baby’s arrival.

  “You’d feel safe with Kiko there, right?”

  What do you mean, “feel safe”? Did it mean he wouldn’t attempt to pull any funny stuff in front of her child? Or that as a mother she’d feel safer with her daughter beside her?

  The majority of men who wooed her saying they’d been waiting for her to get divorced quite indifferently invited her to bed, and when rejected, backed off as quickly as they’d approached. They all had it wrong. They seemed to think that the body of a woman newly freed from marital life was brimming with desire and that she would indiscriminately bed anyone who crossed her path. How shallow. Rieko was confident that even if men shunned her completely from here on out she wouldn’t feel all that inconvenienced.

  Fujimura didn’t seem stupid enough to think that the male and female sex drives were the same. She appreciated how graciously he’d backed off when denied, and something about him made her sense that he understood her maternal feelings toward her daughter. She had never felt that way talking to other men. So when Fujimura said he’d call at nine on Saturday, Rieko indicated that she was looking forward to it. She believed that as long as it was someone she could readily communicate with, she wouldn’t get trapped in a quagmire.

  After giving Fujimura turn-by-turn directions to her home, she hung up, reapplied a touch of makeup, picked up the clutter in the living room, and used the vacuum she hadn’t touched in weeks. As she only stayed in the new house on Saturdays, she rarely vacuumed the place. The house with its three Western-style rooms in addition to two interconnected tatami rooms, plus a 300-square-foot living room, was too large for just her and daughter. Two years ago, she’d had an architect acquaintance design it on the assumption that she was going to have at least two kids. In an ironic twist, her relationship with her husband had turned frosty by the time the house was finished, and after only two months in their new home, her husband moved out. The land was in Rieko’s mother’s name and Rieko had paid the lion’s share of the construction costs, so it was only natural for her ex-husband to be the one to move out. Since then, as she couldn’t very well leave a young daughter behind while running about for work, they primarily lived at her mother’s home, only returning to the new house once a week to let the air circulate. Her mother, who lived alone, stubbornly refused to leave the house she was used to, so there was no choice but for Rieko to crawl back to her mother’s place.

  Rieko decided she would let the evening take its course. Her daughter was where she could constantly keep an eye on her, sleeping peacefully, her hearing aid removed. Even though Kiko sensed things, sounds would never wake her.

  Opening the door almost as soon as the doorbell rang, Rieko found Fujimura standing there with a beautifully wrapped gift tucked under his arm. His hair and the shoulders of his sweater were wet and he was obviously freezing. She showed him to the living room and offered him a seat on the sofa.

  “How’s Kiko?” he asked as he sat down.

  Was he really concerned about her deaf daughter? Or was he just trying to confirm the location of the nuisance? His true intent was unclear to Rieko. His asking about her daughter, however, did make her happy. Rieko was sure that Kiko was why she and her husband had divorced. When people asked about the separation, though, she cited her ex’s gambling problem as the reason.

  She had only learned of her husband’s vice six months ago. He’d started spending longer and longer away from home without notice, and his blatant lies were becoming more obvious. At first she thought he was having an affair, but after some questioning, he confessed he was hooked on auto-bike and motorboat racing. As Rieko sighed with relief and appeared to lose interest, her husband cast his eyes downward and confessed he owed money to loan sharks.

  “How much?”

  “About 2.5 million yen …”

  It was an amount he couldn’t repay without her help, he said, and he’d been waiting for the right time to consult with her.

  “Tell me the truth, from the beginning,” she demanded harshly, expressing disbelief at her husband’s irresponsibility when their daughter’s care was costing them a small fortune. Apparently he had owed 500,000 yen around the time they got married and been paying back 50,000 yen each month. He found himself incapable of quitting, and over the last three years, his debt had neither increased nor decreased. During that stretch he was somehow managing with his own pocket money, so it was not unforgivable. Yet after a certain period, his spending on gambling suddenly shot up, the stable debt becoming a thing of the past last January. Essentially, his gambling worsened around the time of Kiko’s birth. That alone was something Rieko simply could not forgive.

  Shouldn’t it be the opposite? You’re supposed to stop gambling once you have a child, Rieko shouted in her heart. Especially with her hearing problem … His lack of love for his baby, or rather, his resentment at the child being born at all was there boldly laid out in numbers. It was like taking a peek into the depths of her husband’s heart. She felt badly betrayed. If the debt had stayed level, the marriage might have lasted, but her husband had never once bought anything for their daughter and sunk large sums into gambling.

  “This is for Kiko,” Fujimura said, handing Rieko the gift wrapped in lovely floral paper. Rieko made a dramatic expression of surprise and bowed in gratitude, then immediately opened the present. Inside were pajamas with the same floral pattern as the wrapping paper. A rapidly growing infant could always use more pajamas.

  “They’re adorable!” Rieko practically screamed and gave him a huge smile. In place of thanks, she asked, “How about a whiskey and water?”

  “Please. Sorry, I feel like I’ve intruded,” replied Fujimura, all of a sudden oddly formal, his voice lowered so as not to wake Kiko.

  “It’s okay. She’s already asleep. Besides …”

  “Oh, right.” Fujimura ducked his head awkwardly and, seemingly at a loss, glanced around the room. He looked so pitiably stiff and nervous that a drink to loosen him up certainly seemed in order.

  Rieko mixed a double whiskey with water and handed it to him.

  Even under the living room’s unforgiving fluorescent light, Fujimura did not look like a 35-year-old man with a wife and a young child. He’d said he’d only pitched up to high school, but his body was still firm with no excess fat, and his artless nature coupled with traces of boyishness in his features gave him a youthful appearance. He didn’t seem to sport any affectations, and the way he backed off when he sensed tension was extremely reassuring. Otherwise, she would never have let a man she hardly knew into her home so late at night.

  After an hour, Fujimura and Rieko had put away three glasses of whiskey and water each. Under the bright fluorescent light, Rieko’s cheeks were tinted red, and her oval, lightly made-up face glowed.

  During a lull in their conversation, he leaned in towards her and called her name in a sweet voice.

  She looked away. She pictured in her mind’s eye how the situation might unfold just a few seconds later—imagined that he would reach out and pull her to his chest. Part of her wanted to let things run their course, but she felt strangely cool and disengaged from herself. Perhaps she’d been waiting for this all day. She could deny it mentally, but the depths of her body seem
ed ready to accept him.

  Yet that syrupy moment lasted only a second. Rieko was yanked back into reality by a forlorn cry like a cat meowing in the distance.

  Kiko’s hands wandered about in search of her mother, who should have been right at her side. Rieko sprang up and ran into the adjacent Japanese-style room. Fujimura, who had gone into a half-crouch, could only sit back down again.

  Since Kiko refused to go back to sleep and Rieko didn’t seem to be coming back to the living room anytime soon, Fujimura tried to listen through the sliding door. Even though Kiko couldn’t hear, Rieko was nevertheless enthusiastically talking to her. Though the baby’s cries grew louder as if in response, Fujimura didn’t sense from them the signature vitality of a child’s tantrum. He could tell how the communication between mother and daughter in the dark room on the other side of the sliding door relied on touch.

  After about twenty minutes, Rieko finally reappeared. She didn’t miss the look of disappointment that flashed across Fujimura’s face as soon as she emerged. Kiko was tied to her back with a sling, the band of which dug into her modest cleavage.

  “I’m sorry to come out like this. She just doesn’t want to go back to sleep.”

  Fujimura gave a strained smile, took Kiko’s hands in his, and said, “Good evening.”

  With her hands thus held, Kiko’s face relaxed, and she smiled showing her small white teeth, belying her tears from just a moment ago. Rieko tilted her head to examine the shift in her daughter’s expression.

  “Oh? Weird. I thought you were supposed to be shy.” She wasn’t trying to flatter Fujimura. Kiko was almost guaranteed to burst into tears when confronted with a strange man.

  “I’ve lost a daughter too,” Fujimura said, still holding Kiko’s hand.

  Startled, Rieko narrowed her eyes at him. What do you mean, “too”? I’ve never lost a child. Kiko’s just deaf.

  Ignorant of Rieko’s silent protest, Fujimura dropped his gaze to the carpet and began to talk about his daughter.

  It happened when his daughter was a year-and-a-half old, the day after his wife, a nurse, had worked a night shift at the hospital. Since his wife went to sleep as soon as she got back from late-night stints at the general hospital, it fell to Fujimura to take his daughter to daycare. As usual, he took her on his bicycle and dropped her off.

  “Okay, Yoko. Take care.” He pat his daughter gently on the head, waved multiple good-byes, then set out for his office in Yoyogi. There’d been no sign that anything was amiss with his daughter since she’d woken in the morning. Her appetite had been normal, and she didn’t seem to be in a bad mood. Yet, less than an hour after he dropped her off, he received a call from the daycare informing him his daughter had just died. The words from the president of the daycare didn’t immediately sink into his brain. It was impossible to believe a little girl who had just happily waved goodbye to him had died just like that. As she was playing, she had rolled onto her stomach and stopped moving. By the time the caretaker realized something was wrong and walked over, Yoko had already stopped breathing. At first they thought she had died of suffocation, but an autopsy revealed that she had a congenital heart defect.

  Fujimura’s wife was in a worse state than he was. She blamed herself for going to sleep. It was her day off, she should have been taking care of Yoko herself. If her daughter had been within her reach, it would have never happened. She kept going over the what-ifs, blaming herself, expressing ire over the daycare’s slow response.

  Nothing was more unbearable to Rieko than hearing about parents losing their children.

  “So, your kid now?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the next year we had a son.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Yeah, but as it turns out, he was born with a weak heart, too, so …”

  Rieko was lost for words.

  “I mentioned this before, but I played baseball all through junior high and high school and my wife was the captain of the tennis team. I have absolutely no idea how genetics work,” he said almost as if he were enjoying the destiny he’d been burdened with.

  “How old is he now?”

  “He just turned two. He hasn’t had a fit yet. Most babies born with heart defects die before their first birthday. They say if he doesn’t have an attack by the time he’s seven, he can live a relatively normal life.”

  Rieko suddenly remembered her ex-husband. The man whose gambling habits escalated with the arrival of their daughter overlapped in her mind with Fujimura, who’d left behind an invalid child to come all the way to Shimizu to sleep with someone other than his wife.

  “Don’t you love your son?” challenged Rieko, despite her readiness to be an accomplice in the affair.

  “Of course, I love him very much.”

  Then why? she almost asked, but held her tongue. Like her husband, this man probably couldn’t come up with a decent explanation. She didn’t want to hear pretty excuses anyways.

  Rieko stood near the wall, rocking back and forth in order to soothe her daughter. Fujimura leaned against the wall next to her. Standing around chatting when they were at her home was rather odd.

  “And your wife?” Rieko asked, meaning to inquire about the state of their marriage.

  “She’s stronger than me,” Fujimura said with some force and shook his head.

  “You don’t like strong women?”

  “She’s stronger than I am so she doesn’t need me.”

  “Is she still working?”

  “No, I guess you could say she’s on temporary leave. Now she’s at home with the baby, but I think she plans on going back to work.”

  Rieko wondered about her own situation. Come to think of it, ever since Kiko was just an embryo inside her womb, she felt herself growing stronger by several degrees. It was true that time, too, when five months into her pregnancy she’d been diagnosed with measles. On the way back from seeing the doctor, Rieko and her husband went over the possibility of terminating the pregnancy.

  Since her husband simply asked her what she wanted and fell silent, unwilling to share his own views, Rieko, as far as she could recall, pushed her own views on him. According to the doctors, contracting measles during pregnancy meant the baby had a three-in-ten chance of developing a congenital defect of the ears or mouth. A thirty percent chance was very high, and the doctor had delicately suggested that they consider an abortion. Rieko, however, insisted on keeping the baby no matter what. This was their first conception after two and a half years of trying. She feared that it was her only shot at becoming a mother.

  In the end, her husband never gave his own opinion, Rieko held to hers, and she gave birth to Kiko.

  It was obvious upon birth that Kiko’s mouth was normal, but it was impossible to test her hearing until she was out of infancy. When Rieko clapped her hands and called her name, it seemed as though Kiko was reacting. Convincing herself that her baby could hear just fine, Rieko postponed a more thorough evaluation. Deep inside, she was afraid to learn the truth. On the recommendation of her doctor, she finally resolved to have her daughter’s hearing abilities tested via EEG. That was when Kiko was revealed to be completely deaf in her right ear, while her left ear suffered a hearing loss of 80 decibels …

  Rieko had no choice but to become even stronger upon hearing those results. She bought all the books she could find on hearing impairment and studied intensively. She found an ear doctor and asked him to make every possible effort. She had always wanted to go back to work even if it meant leaving her baby at a daycare, but all her plans needed to change. She decided to dedicate as much time as she could to helping Kiko develop normal speech, speaking to her constantly via her hearing aid. Before she knew, her husband was totally out of her sight and mind.

  Whenever anyone asked, Rieko always blamed the divorce on her ex’s problem, but the ongoing gambling was the byproduct of a mismatched marriage. She felt the direct cause might be her husband’s silence during that period, and her own strength that had brought on that
silence. Who was it that had placed a weight on her husband’s mouth? It was very likely that he didn’t support her decision to have Kiko but couldn’t voice his thoughts. He had probably given up from the start, figuring that even if he’d shared his views, Rieko would have overruled him.

  Although she was being rocked on her mother’s back, Kiko still refused to go to sleep. Her hearing loss had probably made her other senses that much more developed. It was as if she sensed a disturbance in the house’s atmosphere and was keeping an eye out to make sure her mother didn’t go down the wrong track.

  “How could you leave such a beautiful girl?” Fujimura wondered aloud from her ex’s perspective.

  “I don’t think he thought so.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Oh, really? Wanna know what he said the last time he saw her? He just spat, ‘She’s still just a runt.’ Can you believe that?”

  “No way.”

  “It’s true.” Rieko, worn out from standing, sat lightly on the edge of the sofa.

  “You seem to like children a lot,” she observed, keeping the conversation on the topic of kids as Fujimura, sitting down beside her, made to hug her shoulders.

  “No, I had to make an effort to like them,” Fujimura replied. He reached out for his glass, not knowing what else to do with his hand.

  Fujimura’s answer surprised Rieko. Unlike a mother, did a father not feel an immediate outpouring of love for a newborn? Not knowing her daughter was deaf, Rieko never stopped talking to her the nine months she carried her in her womb. No wonder the moment a mother heard her baby’s first cries, deep love and excitement overwhelmed her. It was a force that had nothing to do with effort.

  “So, you made an effort.”

  “I don’t know. But I did take her to daycare a lot. I liked picking her up a lot better than dropping her off, though.”