From the Fatherland, with Love, page 61
Kenta was glued to the TV screen, scraping honey from the waffle’s lattice grooves and licking the spoon but otherwise leaving the food untouched. “Eat your tomatoes!” she told him, and pushed a piece into his mouth. He chewed, then went “Waah!” and dribbled sticky red juice down the front of his bib. Chikako turned off the TV and wiped up the mess. Kenta seemed to think she was cross with him and kept his eyes down, looking tearful. “It’s almost time to go to school, so at least have a bit of milk,” she said gently, but he recoiled dramatically at the word “school.”
Chikako lived in a public-housing complex in Momochi, and Kenta’s kindergarten was opposite Central Park in Nishijin. When traffic was light it was just a few minutes by car, but on Monday mornings the roads were always busier than usual, and she had to leave a little early. She put the cap with the kindergarten’s logo on Kenta’s head, eased his schoolbag over his shoulders, and pushed a handkerchief into his pocket, then led him toward the front door. But Kenta slumped to the floor, his arms hanging limply at his sides. Not again, thought Chikako. She’d hoped things would get better once he reached the last year of kindergarten, but she’d been too optimistic. For some reason or other, he’d started to hate going there.
She took hold of his hand and tried to make him get up, but he shook her away with surprising strength. Then he tore his cap off and lay down there in the hallway. “What’s wrong?” she asked him, but he just said, “Not going!” and tried to shake himself free of his bag. “But what about Yoshi and Kimi and the others? They’re all waiting for you.” Taking him under each arm she picked him up and, holding him close, tried to reassure him as she left the apartment. Kenta struggled in her arms, then burst into tears. One of the neighbors, a housewife, was coming down the corridor and smiled at the crying child, commenting dryly, “My, we are in a good mood this morning!” Chikako gave her a brief “Good morning” and got into the elevator. This past week, everyone in the housing complex seemed different in the way they behaved toward her. It wasn’t that anyone had been nasty, but they’d been rather keeping their distance.
Maybe she should have turned the mayor’s request down. Her neighbors all knew that she’d been seconded from City Hall to the KEF command center. Following the incident in Ohori Park and news of the backup fleet setting sail, more and more people seemed eager to get in good favor with the KEF. Several of her neighbors had asked her about the execution on Saturday. Although she explained repeatedly that she’d been in the hotel and hadn’t actually seen anything, they kept pestering her with questions like “It wasn’t shown on TV, but I heard it looked like their heads exploded! Is that true?” or “Do you think they’ll start executing local people too?” or “Are they going to hold lots of executions there from now on?” Then there were those who came with requests such as “I want to open a barbecue place near the temporary housing in Odo. Can you introduce me to the person I need to speak to in the KEF?” or “I once wrote a lot of bad things about North Korea on an Internet board. Can you fix it so I don’t get arrested?” or “What qualifications do I need to work for the KEF?” and even some who wanted to donate things or make contributions. Nobody seemed to think the Japan Self-Defense Force was capable of attacking the fleet, which meant that by this evening the KEF’s control of Kyushu would be sealed.
In the elevator, Kenta hung his head, sobbing. There were still some bits of tomato around his mouth. Chikako moistened a handkerchief with some saliva and wiped it clean. Kenta had hardly eaten anything for breakfast. The cherry tomatoes were from an organic farm in Shizuoka and cost a fortune. Risako had eaten half of them, but Kenta had only tried a mouthful. The waffles were handmade, and a pack of six cost eight hundred yen, while the fresh orange juice was two thousand yen for a liter bottle. Her health-food club gave a discount, but even so, with inflation the way it was, prices had doubled in the past year.
Her own breakfast had been the remains of last night’s grilled fish, chopped up on top of a bowl of rice, and green tea, while the healthy stuff was for her children. Kids treated with care and affection early on had things better when they grew up, were generally liked, and had the kind of self-confidence that would go down well with prospective employers. Giving her kids good food was her way of showing how much she loved them. Things full of natural flavor didn’t just help them grow, they were good for them mentally, according to one child expert, and she agreed. When Risako was born, she had joined an Internet mail-order health-food club that delivered things to her door every three days, albeit at a cost that was disproportionate to her salary as a local-government worker.
When her boss in the construction department had first sounded her out about a possible secondment to the KEF, he’d told her that she would be given an extra five thousand yen per day as an expense allowance. That was certainly tempting, but it wasn’t the only reason she’d accepted. The mayor himself had summoned her to his office and said she’d been singled out as someone who could hold her own regarding the KEF and get the job done. And it wasn’t about doing whatever they wanted, he’d said. “To begin with, there’s the garbage and raw sewage of five hundred people in the camp to deal with. That’s a major job in itself. But a bigger problem is what to do when the reinforcements arrive. I don’t want them requisitioning land or buildings all over the city. As far as possible, I’d like to keep them in one place—in Odo. That’s where you come in, Onoe-san. I want you to use your powers of gentle persuasion on them.” Being told this by the mayor himself had tickled her pride. She’d turned thirty-eight last year, and in the personnel reshuffle earlier this month a female colleague of the same age had been promoted to general manager. Whichever way you looked at it, that colleague had been less capable than she was. She realized, to her dismay, that her prospects had been affected by the divorce.
It had been three years now. Her ex-husband was still in hospital and not paying anything toward the children’s upkeep. Their marriage had been pretty much arranged by their parents, right from their first meeting up to the wedding day. After graduating from Kyushu University, her husband had gone to work in the Fukuoka branch of a major printing company. He was dependable and earnest, but weak-willed. Four years earlier, one of his friends from university had set up an agency selling cosmetics in north-eastern China, and had invited him to join it as sales manager. He had dithered, not wanting to give up his job but reluctant to turn down a request from a pal, but in the end he’d gone with the friend. Unfortunately, the outfit had gone bust even before the Beijing Olympics. To succeed in business in China you needed ample funds and powerful connections as well as know-how, but his friend was an amateur, unaware even that demand had dried up and that China was in a credit crunch. He was typical of the many people and companies trying to do business there at the time and getting burned.
As a business associate, her husband had to shoulder some of the liabilities, and they had lost the condo on which they’d only just made a down payment. He couldn’t forgive himself for letting this happen, and before long depression set in. He withdrew into himself, and eventually was admitted to a hospital in the suburbs. It had been his endless self-reproach, apologies, and grumbling that had made her decide to divorce him. He kept saying, “I should never have left the printing company! But I believed in that guy. If I hadn’t listened to him, we’d have been celebrating Risako’s birthday in the condo. Why didn’t you stop me?” As far as she was concerned, he simply hadn’t quite understood that choosing one thing meant giving up another. She listened in silence to his constant complaining, but it went on week after week, and finally she couldn’t take it anymore. When she’d gone to get his signature on the divorce papers, her mother-in-law had said nastily, “A good wife doesn’t leave her husband just because he loses his job. I guess you weren’t trustworthy after all, were you, Chikako? You’re not particularly nice or pretty, and not even from a good family, but we thought at least you’d be reliable—that’s why we accepted the match.”
Everyone had always told her she was reliable—she’d been at the top of her class in elementary school, on the student council in high school, and the only girl in her year to get a place at Kyushu University to study economics. And then she’d ranked second in the entrance exam for the City Council. New employees were given a number that was theirs until retirement, used for salary payments as well as things like the mutual-aid association, and Chikako’s number was 95002. The first two digits signified the year; the first zero her job classification, office worker; and the last two digits her place in the civil-service exam. She’d always thought of herself as just an ordinary woman with no special talents, but that 02 had boosted her self-esteem. Which was why it had come as such a blow when a colleague had been promoted ahead of her. And the real reason she’d agreed to be seconded to the KEF was because the mayor’s confidence in her had helped restore her pride.
Chikako had borrowed some money from the employees’ mutualaid association, got lucky in the lottery for public housing, and managed to protect her livelihood from the inflation that followed the freeze on bank accounts. Civil servants had been hard hit by inflation, and she’d heard of some female employees turning to bar work and even prostitution to pay back the loans they’d taken out for their kids’ college education. There had been a number of suicides and cases of clinical depression. In the midst of all this, however, she had somehow managed to provide for her two kids. After some thought, she’d decided to change their surnames to Onoe as well. They were usually well behaved and no trouble, so it had come as a surprise when, shortly after New Year’s, Kenta had burst into tears and refused to go to kindergarten. At first she’d thought it might have something to do with the way his sister treated him. Since about fall last year, she had started cracking down on her little brother, scolding and even hitting and kicking him for little things such as being untidy and dribbling on his clothes, or not putting his toys away, or watching too much TV. This violent side of her was something new, and very disturbing.
When she asked the kindergarten teacher about Kenta, she was told that yes, he seemed more withdrawn nowadays, but the signs had been there from the outset. Even when playing with other kids, he would suddenly burst into tears for no apparent reason. Chikako said nothing about Risako to the teacher. She had discussed her daughter’s rowdy behavior with her parents, but they had dismissed it as a phase that would soon pass. She also confided in her former boss in the Ports and Harbors Authority, Mizuki Nobuyuki. He was the only person in the whole of City Hall she could go to for advice. “Children are surprisingly difficult,” he’d said, starting out in typically long-winded fashion. Mizuki was exceptionally competent at his work. He was responsible for having initiated numerous business collaborations between government and the private sector in East Asia, and he’d worked hard to attract high-tech companies to the city’s new industrial park on reclaimed land in Momochi.
“Kids can get stressed out about all kinds of things,” he told her. “Like if their parents divorce, or have another baby. Some kids are good at expressing how they feel, but others aren’t. Maybe you should be thinking along those lines.” Of course, both Risako and Kenta must have been affected by the divorce, and Risako had begun positively to radiate unhappiness whenever she thought Kenta was getting more attention than her. Maybe Kenta’s refusal to go to kindergarten was his way of expressing his own feelings.
Come to think of it, Chikako remembered something similar having happened to her, too. She’d been four years old when her little sister was born. Her sister had attracted all the attention as the pretty one, and Chikako had felt left out. The two of them didn’t dislike each other, but they never really got along all that well, and she clearly remembered that twinge of jealousy she used to get whenever the subject of her sister came up. She’d continued to feel that way even as an adult, and it was only in her thirties that she’d been able to recognize the source of these feelings—the emotional wound she’d suffered when her sister was born.
Children tried their best to adapt to circumstances, but perhaps it was inevitable that things would resurface sooner or later. “Kenta, let’s both try hard together—Mama at work, and Kenta at school,” she murmured soothingly, but the boy shook his head, sobbing. “I want to go to Granny’s! Not school!”
Kenta was sitting in his child seat in the back of the car, stuffing his face with chocolate and smearing it all around his mouth in the process. Chikako had bought it for him at the convenience store next to the parking lot, and he had cheered up a little. He knew that sweets weren’t allowed in the schoolroom, so he was trying to finish it before they got there. He wasn’t even tasting it, just cramming it in, and Chikako couldn’t bear to watch.
A car pulled up alongside them at a stoplight and the driver stared at her. On the windscreen of her Mazda Familia was a sticker issued by the KEF with PERMITTED VEHICLE written in large Hangul lettering. At first she had even had stones thrown at her, but the harassment had let up after the Ohori Park incident. Half the local residents had lost trust in the government as a result of that, she reckoned.
“How’s the choccy?” she asked, but Kenta just nodded mechanically, his face expressionless. She reached over and stroked his cheek and then prodded it gently with her finger. He smiled briefly, turning his face away as if to say, “It tickles!” People who don’t have children can never know just how soft a child’s cheeks are and how good it feels to touch them, thought Chikako. She had never been all that fond of children, but when she first held Risako in the delivery room, she’d been amazed at the softness of her skin, and affection had welled up in her of its own accord. Right then and there, she promised herself to always take care of this child.
When Risako smiled for the first time, Chikako wondered how on earth she’d known how to do that when nobody had ever taught her. Life might be a mystery, but it wasn’t all that complicated; it seemed to her that it was all in a baby’s smile—and the warm, fuzzy feeling that smile inspires. In time she decided it was thanks to those soft cheeks, the comfort she got from them, that she could carry on raising her children. However exhausted she felt, however stressed out by office politics, she only had to touch their faces gently as they slept to feel calm and balanced. For the first time she knew what it was like to have her mind and her emotions in perfect alignment: it was a feeling of fitting neatly into the world around her.
Kenta’s teacher had told Chikako he wasn’t being bullied by the other kids or anything like that. She would know, since she was with them all through the day. “Kenta,” Chikako called, looking at him in the rear-view mirror. “Mm,” came the unenthusiastic response. “Next day off, how about taking a picnic to the beach?” He looked up and said, “What beach?” It’s impossible to understand exactly how kids feel, Mizuki had told her, and advised her just to try and make things fun for the boy.
“Which beach would you like to go to?” she asked him, and he blurted out: “Where we saw those big boys flying like birds in the sky!” Last summer she’d taken the kids to Jigyohama, and they had spent the whole time watching some youths parasailing. Jigyohama was the beach overlooked by the Sea Hawk Hotel, in the area now controlled by the KEF, and was out of bounds to residents. “Got it,” she said. “We’ll go to Jigyohama.” Kenta clapped his hands, beaming. If the backup fleet arrived this evening as planned, the KEF would be moving to Odo, which meant they’d probably lift the ban on access to the beach.
The kindergarten was next to a Baptist church attached to Seinan Gakuin University, in a well-heeled neighborhood with luxury condominiums and tree-lined streets. Chikako could see Kenta through the window of the playroom on the far side of the grassy grounds. He was sitting quietly on one of several chairs laid out in a semicircle, eyes downcast, legs dangling. On their arrival the teacher had taken his hand, and he’d gone inside without looking back. She’d felt relieved, but also a bit sad. She wished he could enjoy himself at school, and not feel lonely or bad about things. He would stay there until after lunch, when he’d be taken by the school bus to a day-care center near their apartment. “Good morning, Onoe-san!” Chikako turned to see some of the other mothers there. They were getting out of their cars and leading their children to the school gate, where the teacher was waiting for them.
They all had expensive cars. The new Toyota hybrid belonged to the wife of a young entrepreneur who ran a foodstuffs company; the deep red Nissan Skyline to the wife of the president of a local bank; the dark blue BMW to the wife of a section head at Sony Fukuoka; the deep green Saab to the wife of the owner of a long-established eel restaurant in Tenjin; and the cream Benz to the wife of a real-estate agent who’d developed some fancy property around Nishi Park. All five were married to men who had benefited from the present financial situation. “It’s no joke,” the bank president’s wife told Chikako. “They’ve got to open accounts for a hundred and twenty thousand people, so my husband has been in meetings nonstop. He stayed over in a hotel all weekend.” She had short hair with a red streak in the bangs, and was dressed in tight leather pants and jacket, along with boots. Finding herself surrounded by the five, Chikako sneaked a look at her watch. A quarter to eight—she could chat for fifteen minutes or so. Work wasn’t supposed to start till nine, but the workaholic KEF officers always showed up half an hour early, and the City Hall staff were advised to follow suit.
