Earthlings, page 6
“He looks like he’s asleep, doesn’t he?” I said in a small voice.
Dad looked at me and nodded. “It was rather sudden, but he passed away peacefully.”
“What does pass away peacefully mean?”
“It means he had a gentle and easy death. He lived a long life too. He was in hospital a while, but he didn’t suffer and died in his sleep. That’s why he looks so peaceful now.”
“I see,” I responded. “May I touch him, just gently?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
I squeezed Grandpa’s hand. It was cold and had turned into a thing. He was not a real person anymore.
“I’m scared,” said my sister, who had been silent all this time.
“Why’s that, Kise? He passed away peacefully, which is a good thing, you know. Well, others are waiting, so let’s move on.”
I looked behind me and saw Yuri in her school uniform and Ami in a black dress standing in line with tears in their eyes.
I went back to the front door and saw Aunt Mitsuko there with Yuu, who was dressed in a long-sleeved black blazer.
Our eyes met, and Yuu looked closely at me with a worried expression on his face.
Aunt Mitsuko, in floods of tears, was clinging to him. “Mitsuko, are you okay?” Yuu asked her. He looked more like her husband than her son as he rubbed her back.
“The wake will be tonight,” Dad said. “And the funeral’s tomorrow.”
“It was so sudden!” Mom said with a sigh. “There’s still some time until evening. You must be tired. Why don’t you take a nap?”
“I don’t feel well,” my sister said and went to lie down, still wearing her uniform.
“What about you, Natsuki?”
I shook my head. I was wide awake, my eyes bright. I could still feel the sensation of Grandpa’s lifeless hand on my fingertips.
I noticed Yuu standing in the garden, wearing a black coat. Quietly I slipped away from the bustle of the house and went to his side.
“Yuu.”
Hearing my voice, he turned to me. “Natsuki, are you all right?”
His arms and legs had grown, making his face appear smaller. Even so, he was still shorter than me and doll-like.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m picking some flowers from the garden. Have you heard? Grandpa’s going to be buried.”
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t know. What does that mean?”
“He’s not going to be cremated. He’s going to be buried in the ground.”
“Wow, really?”
I recalled having seen funerals in TV dramas where the body was cremated and then everyone picked out bones using special chopsticks. I’d assumed that Grandpa’s funeral would be the same, but now I couldn’t picture what it would be like at all.
“Granny said he must be feeling lonely now, so we should give him some flowers from the garden.”
“I’ll help you pick them.”
“Maybe you should get some scissors?”
“Yuu, I want to ask you a favor,” I said, without looking up. “I probably won’t be able to see you again.”
“What?” he sputtered, looking at me in surprise. “Has something happened? Are you moving away?”
“Um, you see, I won’t be able to come here anymore,” I said in a small voice. He stared at me uncomprehendingly. “Yuu, did you find the spaceship?”
After a few moments, he shook his head. “No. I stopped at the shrine on the way here, but it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.”
“Oh. In that case, we definitely won’t make it in time. Look, you and I are married, right? I really don’t have time. Please, Yuu, I want you to have sex with me.”
“Eh?” His voice came out like a hiccup.
Paying him no attention, I went on, “Please, Yuu. I’m begging you. Before my body stops being mine, I really want to be physically married to you too.”
My voice shook. He stared at me in astonishment.
“But that’s what grown-ups do, isn’t it? It’s not possible for us.”
“Yuu, have you ever thought that your life doesn’t belong to you?”
For a moment he couldn’t get his words out, but then he said in a small voice, “Children’s lives never belong to them. The grown-ups own us. If your mom abandons you, you won’t be able to eat, and you can’t go anywhere without help from a grown-up. It’s the same for all children.” He reached out a hand to cut a flower from the bed. “That’s why we have to try hard to survive until we’ve grown up ourselves.”
Yuu’s scissors cut through the sunflower stalk. Now a corpse, the sunflower sagged and leaned against him. He caught it as it fell.
“You know what?” I murmured. “It’s possible I might be killed. That’s why, before I die, I want to marry you. Not just a promise between children, but really married.”
Yuu looked at me in surprise. “What’s going on, Natsuki? Who’s going to kill you?”
“A grown man. Nobody can stop him.”
“Isn’t there anyone who can help you?”
“Children are powerless against him. He’s strong. And the grown-ups are all too busy living their own lives. They won’t help a child. You know that, Yuu.”
A sunflower petal fell from Yuu’s arms as he stood there in silence.
I looked up. “Hey, Yuu, maybe those are edible.”
“Eh? What?”
“The sunflower. It’s already dry. Maybe we can harvest the seeds.” I pointed at the black center of the sunflower.
Granny always sent us sunflower seeds at the end of summer. I often used to eat them at home in the garden when fall arrived.
I stood up and rubbed the drooping sunflower’s black face. Small seeds dropped out into my hand.
“Are these the same things Granny always sends us?” Yuu said, peering cautiously at them.
“I think so. Haven’t you ever harvested sunflower seeds before?”
“No.”
I put one of the seeds in my mouth. “It’s still a bit green.”
I still couldn’t taste anything. I couldn’t detect even a hint of the fragrance I always smelled when eating sunflower seeds. I could tell just from the feel in my mouth that the seeds weren’t yet dry.
Yuu also hesitantly put a seed into his small mouth. “Yuck, they don’t taste of much, do they?”
“They have to dry out more,” I said knowingly.
Yuu’s mouth moved nervously. “Natsuki. I’m your husband, so I’ll do anything for you,” he said. “Do you really want to do that? Will it save you?”
“Yeah.”
Yuu tilted his head as if he didn’t really get it but said okay.
“Really? You really don’t mind?”
“No. As your husband, I’ll do whatever I can.” He gave a little smile.
I looked down at him. He was still smaller than me. “Me too,” I said. “As your spouse I’ll do whatever I can for you. I’ll protect you, Yuu.”
“What does spouse mean?”
“You don’t know? Um, I guess it’s like a partner in life, so . . . we’re family,” I said, wishing I had a dictionary to look up the proper meaning of “spouse.”
Yuu smiled happily. “Oh I see! Because we’re husband and wife. That means we’re family.”
“That’s right.”
Beneath the sunflowers, Yuu and I furtively held hands. His hand was soft, like a girl’s.
The next morning, I put on my black dress again and went downstairs to find Grandpa lying in a coffin in the big tatami room where we usually all sat around the long table at mealtimes. The aunts and uncles were dressed in mourning clothes. They were kneeling in rows before a priest, who was chanting sutras.
A line of people waited to burn incense at the altar. Once that came to an end, it would finally be time to take the casket out.
Everyone got into position following Uncle Teruyoshi’s instructions: those most closely related over there, the eldest son here, and so forth.
“Do you want to help carry the coffin, Yuu?” Yuu gave a small nod. “In which case you come here. Now, Yota, you’re more closely related than Yuu, so you’d better come here.”
“I want to help carry it too,” I said.
Dad looked a bit taken aback.
“But you’re a girl, Natsuki,” Uncle Takahiro said awkwardly.
“Well, you can just rest your hand on it,” Uncle Teruyoshi said. “Come over here.”
I did as Uncle Teruyoshi said and went to the back of the coffin.
“Right then, let’s get going.”
We all filed onto the veranda, slipping on our shoes as we carried the coffin out.
I looked behind me and saw Mom and Kise walking close together. My cousins and aunts had formed a line behind Granny. All dressed in black, they looked like a column of ants.
We carried the coffin on a path through the rice field to the burial ground, the one we always visited at Obon. A rectangular hole had been dug in the soil.
“Who did that?” I asked Dad. I wondered when my uncles could have found the time since they’d been busy until late with the wake. Dad told me that the villagers had all pitched in to help.
We lowered the coffin into the hole.
“Shall we say our last goodbyes, then?” asked Uncle Teruyoshi.
They opened up the coffin. Uncle Takahiro, his voice hoarse, said, “Well old man, you got long in the tooth, didn’t you?”
The aunts looked at Grandpa’s face and choked up.
Dad peered into the coffin. Then he simply said, “I guess he’ll rot quickly in the summer heat.”
They closed the casket, and everyone took turns to shovel some earth on top.
I was just thinking that it was going to be a lot of work to bury him when I heard Uncle Teruyoshi say, “Well then, let’s go back.”
“But we haven’t finished filling in the grave. Is it okay?” I asked Dad.
“The villagers will finish it off for us,” he told me.
I wondered where all these super-helpful villagers had sprung from, but I just nodded meekly and followed everyone back to the house.
We arrived to find lots of people I’d never seen before helping to prepare the feast. I was surprised by how many people there were in the village. The banquet ended up going on forever.
“When the old man in the house down the road died, the earth didn’t fall in for ages, did it?” said Uncle Teruyoshi.
“Right. But when I looked at his grave just now it had.”
I didn’t understand what they were talking about, so I asked Dad, “What does it mean, the earth falls in?”
“When you bury a body, the earth is mounded up over the top of the grave, right? When the coffin rots away, it collapses and the earth falls in,” he explained tersely.
Once the main banquet ended, they closed off the doors between the two main tatami rooms to provide a space for close family members to continue grieving alone while the other guests chatted and slowly dispersed.
“Well then, time for the after-party,” Uncle Teruyoshi said jovially.
“Okay, okay,” the aunts said and went off to the kitchen to make snacks.
“I guess it’s about time to get the prayer beads out,” Uncle Teruyoshi said around nine o’clock when everyone other than close family had gone.
We sat together in a circle holding a long string of prayer beads I’d never seen before and rotated it while chanting the Nenbutsu.
By the time we’d finished, everyone was tired. The aunts started getting ready for bed. Even the uncles didn’t seem in the mood to drink any more alcohol and had switched to tea.
“You kids must be tired too. Take turns to have your baths, okay?” one aunt said, and my cousins and I all chorused, “We will!”
There wasn’t much time, so my sister and I went to the bath together. It had been ages since we’d last done that, and it felt a bit creepy. Kise’s breasts and thighs had rounded out. She resembled the ancient Dogu clay figurines I’d seen in a textbook at school. I felt a bit scared and tried not to look at her body as I washed myself. She also averted her eyes.
When we got out of the bath, still not speaking, and went into the corridor, Yuu was standing outside holding his towel.
“The bath’s free,” I told him.
“Thanks,” he said.
Kise went straight upstairs. I went to the living room where the grown-ups were drinking tea and said good night. Then I went upstairs too.
I could hear Kise and my cousins snoring. I lay staring quietly into the darkness.
“Are you sure nobody saw you?” I whispered to Yuu.
It was two o’clock in the morning. We’d both slipped out of the house. Yuu had been waiting for me beside the storehouse half-hidden by flowers, just as we’d agreed.
“Yep. Everyone was asleep, even the uncles.”
I was carrying the backpack I’d hidden earlier in a cardboard box near the front door. Inside I had a flashlight, but it would be a disaster if the light were seen. We walked as far as the road in the dark, holding hands.
“Maybe it’ll be okay now,” I said, taking out the flashlight and turning it on.
There were no streetlights. The only light came from the moon and the stars. I shone the flashlight into the pitch-black before our feet.
“Where shall we go?”
“Where we won’t be found.”
I hadn’t realized it would be as dark as this. It was always night when we carried a flame to guide the ancestors at Obon, but those times Uncle Teruyoshi and all the children would be lighting the way with flashlights so it felt completely different. The most our single flashlight could manage was a dim circle of light at our feet, and I couldn’t see Yuu’s face.
“Which way should we go?”
“Shh. I hear water,” Yuu said.
I peeled my ears, and it was true. There was the faint sound of running water.
“Let’s go to the river.”
We headed toward the sound of the water. We always called it the river, but actually it was just a shallow stream that only came up to your ankles. That same river now sounded so loud.
“Careful you don’t fall in.”
“You too, Yuu.”
I passed the flashlight to Yuu, and we walked close together following the sound of the river.
When I felt we’d walked some distance, I muttered, “Where are we now?”
“I don’t know. If I raise the beam up, someone might spot us. Plus, we won’t be able to see where we’re putting our feet.”
“Let me have a try,” I said, taking the flashlight from him. I shone it around just a little, but it was like being in a dark hole. I couldn’t see a thing. I could tell there were fields planted with fresh green rice, but I couldn’t see any kind of landmark I recognized.
“Have we come down the mountain?”
“I don’t reckon so. Oh!” Yuu said in a small voice. “We’re not far from Grandpa’s grave.”
“What? No way!”
I thought we’d walked quite a long way, but actually we were near the burial ground in the rice fields where we’d held the ceremony for Grandpa that afternoon.
“What shall we do?”
“Should we go to the grave? I don’t know what else there is farther along this way.”
“Okay.”
We made our way carefully toward the graves along a levee between two paddies.
Next to Grandpa’s grave there was a patch of exposed earth. For some reason we held hands. Maybe we were both a bit scared about being in the place where Grandpa’s corpse was buried.
With the sound of water and the rustling of the rice plants, it felt like being next to a big dark sea.
“This is where we got married too,” Yuu sighed.
“Should we do it here?”
“What? Here?”
“Are you scared?” Although I myself wasn’t quite sure what might be so scary.
Yuu thought about it a moment, then answered, “No, I’m with my ‘spouse,’ so I’m not scared.”
We sat down next to each other in a small space next to the grave. I rummaged around in the backpack with the flashlight and brought out a large piece of cloth and a candle I’d found in the attic. I also took out a sex education book that I’d borrowed from the library.
“What’s that book?”
“It tells you how to do sex. I borrowed it from the library.”
“Oh.”
When I took out a mosquito coil, Yuu said in surprise, “You’re well prepared, aren’t you!”
I placed the candle and the mosquito coil next to each other and lit them with a match. In the dim light, I could finally kind of see Yuu’s face. We took our shoes off and stood on the cloth.
“It’s a bit like playing house,” Yuu muttered.
“Yuu, I get the feeling I’m the alien. I want to touch you with my whole body, except my mouth.”
“Why not your mouth?”
“Well, you see, my mouth was destroyed recently. So I can’t taste anything, and it doesn’t belong to me anymore. But everywhere else is still okay. My hands and feet and belly button are all still mine, so I want to touch you with them.”
“Okay.”
He was used to me saying weird things. He meekly assented without asking anything more about my mouth.
First we tried hugging each other. He smelled of the orange fragrance of the soap in Grandma’s bathroom.
“I want to get closer to you, Yuu.”
I had a vague idea about sex as “getting closer” to each other.
I nuzzled all the exposed skin of my body against him. His skin was soft, like an entirely different creature to the rough hands of Mr. Igasaki, I thought with relief.
“I want to get even closer,” I whispered urgently.
The sounds of insects and frogs was loud enough to drown out my voice. I worried whether Yuu had heard me, but then he responded, “Even though we’re this close already?”
