Earthlings, page 15
I tittered too, and she looked at me with repugnance.
Her womb and my father-in-law’s testes were tools too. They were ruled by their genes, yet they were aglow with pride—and even that pride was under the control of the Factory. I was amused by how cute these poor Earthling creatures were.
I wasn’t bothered about being treated as a tool by other tools. I was far more weirded out by the strange way my parents and sister had started fawning on me.
“I do understand how you feel, Natsuki. I was like that too when I was younger,” Mom said.
My sister nodded. “Yes, me too! But when you have a baby of your own, you’ll wonder how anything so adorable could possibly exist!”
Both Mom and my sister kept going on and on about how wonderful motherhood was, as if it were some kind of religion. I was still hoping to be brainwashed. But repeating “motherhood is wonderful” over and over like a Buddhist chant was hardly going to be enough to brainwash me on its own. It just made me feel uncomfortable. I listened to them both saying how much they understood me, wishing they would come up with something more effective.
After hours of being made to listen to all their talk, my husband and I were finally released from the cross-examination and allowed to go back to our own home.
“Ugh, that was awful!” my husband groaned. I sighed, and he hung his head apologetically. “It was all my fault that you got subjected to that interrogation too. I’m really sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’m an alien, so this sort of thing is nothing for me. But what about you, Tomoya. Are you okay?”
He nodded, but he looked pale. He probably wouldn’t be able to take much more of this I thought.
That weekend, Shizuka invited me out for dinner. My husband said he was going to meet an old classmate from elementary school, too, so we each went out to our separate evenings.
I’d already come home and was lounging around on the sofa when I heard a noise from the front door.
“Hi there, is that you?”
“Yes, I’m back.” My husband came in looking like thunder.
Seeing the look on his face I had a gut instinct. “I don’t suppose the Factory has been on your case?”
“You too, Natsuki?”
I nodded. Both my husband and I had been called up by old friends and had been excited about going out to meet them, but it had all been a trap set by the Factory.
Shizuka’s husband had agreed to babysit while we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant in the shopping mall next to the station.
“Actually, Natsuki, your mom asked me to do this,” Shizuka had started, and my heart sank.
I don’t have many friends, and I was happy when she’d invited me out. I’d felt exhilarated after having been released from interrogation and had gone in high spirits, but it turned out that she was colluding with my parents.
“I’m saying this because I’m your friend, Natsuki, but it really is strange, you know. You don’t even do all the housework when you’re not working, do you? From what you’d said, I always thought your husband was so good at helping you out. But I had no idea you dealt with everything completely separately: the cooking, laundry, cleaning, everything! Sharing tasks is fine but dividing them up is weird. It’s like having a roommate! That’s not marriage, is it? And I was really shocked to hear that you haven’t been intimate with each other even once!”
Now it was my turn to be shocked. How on earth did Shizuka even know about our nonexistent sex life? Previously she hadn’t noticed a thing and had even suspected I was pregnant. I didn’t know whether she’d been talking with my mom or my sister, but I wondered just how much information about us as a couple they’d exchanged. If they ever found out about the surinuke dot com website, we would probably be forced to split up I thought with a shiver.
But it appeared Shizuka didn’t know how we’d met. Perhaps it had been one of my husband’s friends who had let it slip. I’d heard that his friend had found out about the division of housework and had called me a toxic wife. Perhaps that was how Shizuka had gotten hold of that information, although I couldn’t be sure.
“It’s only after couples get intimate the first time that they really become a couple I think.”
Why were all the Earthlings calling sex being intimate all of a sudden? They probably infected each other with their words.
“I mean, look, if you really can’t get intimate with each other, I think it’s probably better to split up, you know. For the both of you. A couple that doesn’t get intimate, it’s abnormal.”
I put in the occasional “uh-huh” and “I guess” here and there and kept glancing at the clock, wondering how long it would be before I could go home to our condo.
It was apparently the same with my husband; his friend was in collusion with the Factory and had given him a merciless lecture. He sighed and covered his face with his hands.
“Why do we have to go through this? We were happy enough living together as we were.” He sank down onto the sofa, holding his head in his hands. “We’re being watched. People from the Factory are keeping an eye on us. There’s no escape.”
“On Earth, it seems that couples have to mate, doesn’t it?”
“I can deal with having to work. But I don’t want to mate. If I mated with you, we wouldn’t be ourselves anymore.”
“But our bodies aren’t our own. They belong to society. We’re tools of society, so if we don’t mate we’ll be persecuted.”
“But why? It’s my body!”
“Because those are the rules of the Factory. We’re slaves to our genes.”
My husband went still, his face turned downward. Maybe he was weeping.
The doorbell rang. Probably a delivery or maybe another envoy from the Factory.
The next morning my sister called saying she wanted to talk and I should meet her in the karaoke box near the station shopping mall. I was sick of being called up and given sermons, but she said, “It’s something I can’t say when Mom’s around,” so reluctantly I went to meet her.
I was always careful not to let anyone use my phone, but maybe she’d gotten wind of us having used the surinuke dot com site another way.
If she ever told my parents-in-law, it would probably mean the end of our marriage. My sister was a great believer in romantic love, so somehow I had to convince her that I did actually “love” my husband. This was what was going through my mind as I sat down with her in the private room. I had just taken a sip of oolong tea when she came out with something totally unexpected.
“Look, I know all about it. Why you can’t be intimate, Natsuki,” she said. She went on, almost casually, “Back when you were in cram school, the teacher fiddled with you, didn’t he?”
My throat constricted and I couldn’t breathe. “Why . . . How . . . ?”
“I saw you. The day of the festival, you were late so I went to find you, and I saw you being taken by a man into a house. I was worried, so I went into the garden and looked inside. And you and your teacher were kissing.”
Had we kissed? My memory of that time was hazy, and I couldn’t say for certain that we hadn’t.
“At the time, I thought how lucky you were,” she went on.
“Lucky?” I repeated stupidly.
“I mean, you were still just a child, but you’d been chosen by that gorgeous man from such a good university. I was so jealous! I believed that people could only fall in love when God allowed them to. I was ugly, fat, and hairy, the laughingstock of the whole school, so I wasn’t allowed to fall in love. It was different for you, wasn’t it Natsuki? Not just Cousin Yuu, but even an adult man had fallen in love with you. I was so incredibly jealous.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“You know I always believed that however wretched and miserable I was, someday a Prince Charming would find me, like Cinderella. But back then, nobody even looked at me. God wouldn’t allow me to fall in love.” Then her tone changed. “That teacher died, didn’t he? Did you kill him?”
“Don’t be crazy!” I said immediately.
My sister nodded. “I guess it’s crazy. Still, Natsuki, you were just a child and didn’t know how lucky you were to have someone fall in love with you, so I just wondered. After all, you were still in elementary school. I don’t suppose you would have been able to kill an adult man.”
“A child wouldn’t be capable of that. Some pervert killed him. That’s what they said on the news.”
I did my best to keep my voice calm, but the end of my words trembled slightly. It was almost ominous the way my sister kept smiling as she crossed and uncrossed her legs. Unusually for her, she was wearing a skirt. She peered into my face.
“Right. Supposing it were true, though, I would have had to do everything in my power to cover for you, Natsuki. Being the sister of a murderer, nobody would ever have fallen for me. Life would be over for a woman like that.”
She smiled, and I saw saliva glistening on some lipstick stuck to her front teeth. Even as an adult, my sister entrusted the keys of her life to other people. Didn’t that scare her? How could she be so cheerful?
“But Natsuki, you can’t go on like this. I have to harden my heart to say this to you, but you won’t be allowed to carry on running away. You have to get intimate, have a baby, and live a decent life.”
“Who? Who won’t allow me?”
“Everyone. The whole planet,” she answered simply. “You know, I found adolescence really hard too. But now that I’m married, for the first time I’m able to lead a worthwhile existence. If my husband hadn’t found me, I never would have known such happiness as a woman. I am really so fortunate that he fell for me. And I will not allow anything to destroy this happiness. Natsuki, you too, you have to forget the past and quickly find happiness as a woman. That’s the most important thing for us as sisters.”
Abruptly I put my hand over my right ear. I could hear a shrill, electronic buzzing. My sister’s voice sounded far away, as though we were on the phone.
“Yuu seems to be turning respectable at last too. Right after you left, he told Uncle Teruyoshi that he was leaving the Akishina house. Now he’s temporarily lodging at Uncle’s place while he looks for a job and somewhere to live.
“Yuu is?”
So Yuu would also become a Baby Factory component, along with my husband and me, I thought vacantly as I listened to my sister’s voice penetrate the electronic buzzing.
I went back home and opened the closet. I gently took out the tin box and lifted the lid. Piyyut was lying inside.
“Piyyut, answer me. Please!”
I was talking to Piyyut for the first time in twenty-three years, but he didn’t answer.
“I want to use my magical powers once more. That was the Wicked Witch, right?”
Piyyut hadn’t been washed for a long time, and his spines smelled moldy.
I crouched down holding him to me. He didn’t make even the slightest movement. My trembling must have shaken the box on my lap, since the wire ring rattled inside it.
I must have fallen asleep like that. When I woke up, I was still wearing my clothes and makeup. I went out of my room to go wash my face and found my husband dressed in a suit, fixing his tie before the mirror.
“What’s up? Are you going somewhere?”
“Good morning, Natsuki.” His expression was stern. “I’ve decided to go along with the Factory. The first thing to do is find a job, so I’m going to Hello Work.”
“Ah.”
“Then I’m going to city hall to get divorce papers.”
“Divorce papers?”
“Natsuki, I want us to split up.” He turned to look at me, his tie still askew.
“Why?”
“It’s all over for me. I’ve been trapped by the Factory. But you, you can still get away. I want you to cut loose and escape.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but my husband stopped me, grabbing me hard by the shoulders.
“I know Yuu doubted whether you were really an alien. Maybe you do too. But you are Popinpobopian. You definitely are. I know it.”
I looked up at him in surprise. His eyes were pitch-black, the color of space as seen from Akishina.
“You have to get free and escape the Factory alone. I will become its slave, and my life will be a living death. But I want you to survive. If you can live as a Popinpobopian, I’ll be able to survive too.”
My husband knew me better than I knew myself. It was true. Part of me did think I was actually an Earthling. Sometimes I thought being a Popinpobopian was effectively a mental illness that I had needed in order to protect myself, and the only way I would ever recover was by becoming a slave of the Factory. My husband knew that was what I thought.
“I . . . I probably killed someone once,” I said, looking up at him.
He replied smoothly. “Really? But you’re a Popinpobopian, after all. It’s not much different from the way Earthlings kill mice. So what?” He sighed.
“Aren’t you scared of me?”
He let go of my shoulders and resumed adjusting his tie. “What I’m really scared of is believing that the words society makes me speak are my own. You’re different. That’s how I know you’re from another planet.”
I threw my arms around him. He was surprised and stiffened, then he relaxed and stroked my back. I felt his body heat for the first time. It was low, and his chest and hands were cold.
I pulled away from him and declared, “I am Popinpobopian. And you are too. It’s catching. Just like being an Earthling is infectious, and that’s how people all become Earthlings. It’s the same with our planet. So you’re definitely a Popinpobopian by now.” I took his cold hand in mine. “Let’s escape together.”
“Where to?”
“A village near the stars.”
“In that case, let’s take Yuu with us. If being Popinpobopian is catching, then he must have been infected. Let’s go to Akishina, where Yuu’s waiting.”
“But he’s not there anymore. He left the house right after we did and went to Uncle Teruyoshi’s place. I never told you this, but actually he is Popinpobopian. He told me that when we were children. He’s probably lost sight of it now, but he definitely is.”
“What? In that case we have to save him!” my husband shouted. “If we don’t, he’ll be infected by the Earthlings!”
We quickly packed our bags and jumped in a taxi to the station.
“Do you know where your uncle lives, Natsuki?”
“Yeah, it’s in my address book.”
“Great. Let’s head straight there!”
“How come you take Yuu so seriously?”
He tilted his head, as if he didn’t understand the meaning of my question. “I mean, he took us in, didn’t he? That’s not all. He let me speak my own language. Earthlings probably don’t realize it, but meeting someone like that is rare in life. That’s a miracle in itself. I want to do something for him in return.”
“Thank you.” I squeezed his hand. “I’m so glad I came to this planet and married you.”
Outside the window, the pure white Baby Factory raced by. Inside it, numerous breeding pairs were confined to their nests. They would multiply again today.
Uncle Teruyoshi’s house wasn’t far from the station.
As far as I could recall, this was only the second time I’d been there. It wasn’t that he and Dad didn’t get along, but my uncle was extremely sociable, so my taciturn father found it tiring to spend time with him and usually turned down invitations to go there on the way back from our Obon holiday. We stayed over only once when we couldn’t get home because of a typhoon.
Even though we’d called out of the blue from the station, Uncle Teruyoshi had cheerfully told us to come right over.
He welcomed us in and showed us through to the living room, telling us, “Yuu’s out shopping, but he’ll be right back.” The house felt bigger and quieter than I remembered. Last time my aunt had also been there, and there had been a lively atmosphere with Yota and his brothers running around, but Uncle Teruyoshi had been living alone since his wife’s death.
Apparently Yuu had come straight here after leaving the Akishina house and was now lodging temporarily in what had been the children’s bedroom.
“Yuu said he was going to look for a job and somewhere to live, but I put my foot down. I told him it wasn’t going to be easy, so he should stay here for a while.”
Yuu had first looked for a job in Nagano, but in the end he couldn’t find anything suitable, so next week he was going to move to a studio apartment in Tokyo and attend interviews with several companies.
“Although I told him he should stick around here for a bit longer, there was no need to push himself. He’s been through so much. I wanted him to feel free and happy. He’s a good boy, that one.”
As Uncle Teruyoshi talked, there came the sound of someone opening the front door.
“Ah, speak of the devil. That must be him now.”
Yuu had apparently gone to buy a suit for his interviews. When he came into the living room and saw us there, his face hardened.
“They were worried about you, Yuu, and came especially to see you.”
“Speaking of being worried, what about you two, Natsuki and Tomoya? How are things? Are you sure it’s okay for you to be here?”
“We left the Factory today,” my husband answered.
“Tomoya!” Yuu admonished, shooting him a warning look.
Uncle Teruyoshi seemed to think he was talking about an actual factory. “It’s getting really tough in this recession, isn’t it?” he said to my husband. “Well, I’m sure you’ve got lots to talk about, so I’ll leave you to it. I have to take the dog out for his walk too. Take your time.”
“People will think you’re strange if you say such odd things,” Yuu said after checking that Uncle Teruyoshi had gone. “And once they think you’re strange, life will get really hard for you, you know.” He sighed and sat down.
