Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Mother
So here is what he remembers:
The wooden floor of Grandma’s veranda felt warm under his back on that day. In the hills behind the house cicadas were singing the tune of summer. He was eating a watermelon while lying down. The juice dripped over his chin and neck until it soaked the collar of his T-shirt. There was nobody telling him to sit up.
He could hear the voices of his mother and grandmother muffled through the door of the kitchen down the hallway. They rose and fell and rose again, not unlike the shrill of the cicadas.
The door banged open and he heard his mother shout: "You don't care about me! You never did!"
Grandma's reply sounded tearful: "If I give you any more, you will just throw it into those awful pachinko machines!"
Glass crashed against the wall.
"Please stop."
"Don't fucking tell me what to do!"
Another glass shattered.
"Why don't you go back to him? He was such a good man."
"Shut up, bitch! It's none of your damn business!"
Fast steps approached and he was swept up, his arm pulled and his wrist clutched painfully tight as his mother dragged him towards the front door.
"We're leaving, Goro."
She didn't let up until they were way down the road and around the corner. He was out of breath from trying to keep up with her.
"Did Grandma give you a present?", she asked him out of the blue.
When he didn’t answer immediately, she patted him down roughly, scrunched her face in annoyance. There was nothing.
"Go back. She must have forgotten."
He nodded and hurried back up where they came from.
His grandmother’s eyes were unfocused and red when she opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you.” was all she said before shuffling back inside.
He waited on the doorstep until she returned with an envelope in her hand.
“It’s nothing special.”
“Thank you very much.”
He bowed politely and clutched the envelope to his chest with both hands.
“You can have this too, for the shrine.” She put a coin in his pocket, five yen, shiny and golden, with a hole in the center.
He bowed again. Her wrinkled hand ruffled his hair, then withdrew.
“Please don’t ever come back.”
She turned away and shut the door in his face.
His mother took the envelope from him the moment he caught up to her. She grumbled to herself, counting the bills inside as they walked on.
“Can I go to the shrine?”, he asked anxiously.
“Make it quick, the weather is killing me.”
“Thanks, mom!”
He ran off as soon as they reached the narrow flight of stairs leading up from the side of the road. His mother kept walking, so he needed to hurry.
Upstairs it was dark under ancient cedars and a small spring added a hint of cool to the oppressive summer heat. He washed the coin in the water, then placed it at the feet of the small female statue that guarded the spring. He clapped his wet hands, closed his eyes and prayed for the one coin to become many.
When he opened his eyes again, sunlight reflected from the ripples his hand had created in the water. It made the statue look almost alive. And weren’t the two stone-carved snakes that circled around the edge of the spring slithering and squirming and hissing in the pleasant afternoon sun?
He sprinted down the stairs, down the road after his mother, enchanted and eager to tell.
On the ride home they were almost alone on the train. He dozed with his head on his mother’s lap, while she ran her hands through his hair.
“Now it’s just us.” she told him. “You’re my only friend, Goro.”
He watched the suburban houses pass by outside and a plane fly high in the distance.
“Mom,” he asked, “who was my dad?”
She didn’t pause in her stroking, but did not answer right away.
“Your dad was a pilot.” she said after a moment. “I met him when I went to the airport for a trip abroad. It’s a wild story…”
His mom could tell the most wonderful stories. He would still love them when he had long realized that none of them were true. Her stories weren’t lies, mind you. Lying was what he did sometimes, it was wrong and it made her sad. It was the worst when she was sad for a whole year and he thought she might die from not eating and never moving. He tried to be her friend back then too, told her so, but she called him a liar. Which he admittedly was, because he had been angry at her deep down.
Her stories made her happy and that was so much better. He could listen and laugh and be with her. Sometimes they would sing along to a song on the radio together and she would say: “You know, I used to be a singer, just like that. Well, not on the radio, but as good as that. Your father was a music producer, he said I could make it. I had the talent. And the skill too, I am a hard worker. He wanted to promote me. I almost had a record deal, but then you came along.” And when he would look at her wide-eyed and the song would get stuck in his throat, she would smile at him: “Got your talent from me, Goro. No point in hiding it.”
She had been many things in her life before him. A singer, a dancer, an actress, a skilled inventor even and many other occupations he could not remember later. The tiny apartment they lived in was filled to the brim with trinkets and items of wonder and beauty, all claimed to be souvenirs of her past. He was allowed to revere, but not touch them.
She used to spend hours in front of her mirror, dressing up and decorating herself with her treasures. The whole process was magical to him. Especially the way her face transformed when she put on make-up seemed like a secret ritual that he watched in silent awe many times without understanding. It took his mother to an unknown place behind the mirror and replaced her with a princess of detached youth and delight.
“You and me, Goro,” the princess whispered at him through the reflection, “you and me, we got nothing. We aren’t clever or strong or rich. We gotta be pretty. It’s all we have.”
There were men in her life, coming and going. He didn’t like it when they were there, because they took her smile away from him. When they showered her with gifts, with murmured secrets of incomprehensible adventures, she laughed louder than ever and he could not dream to compete. All he could hope for was to be of use, buy drinks and cigarettes from the corner store, even carry scalding hot cup ramen up from there to the apartment during power outage, and do his best to stay out of her way.
“You trained the brat well.” the men would say and it always made her giggle.
After they betrayed and left her, which they all inevitably did in a more or less violent way, he would never ask why she put up with this.
The only man he remembered by name was Yusuke. The praiseworthy thing about Yusuke, according to Goro’s mother, was that he dressed to the latest fashion and freely took whatever he wanted.
“He doesn’t like fussing around with kids, he’s a man.”, his mom informed him, so whenever Yusuke stayed over, Goro was put out to roam the streets around their apartment block until late at night, then sneak back in to sleep on the spare pillows in the closet.
In order not to hear the scary sounds the two of them made at night, he always shut the sliding door of the closet tight and lay awake in complete darkness, surrounded by the smell of dust. It was his little cave outside of the world, just cut out for him to squeeze into. The scratchy cushions and wooden panels touched his body from all sides like a sand paper embrace. He couldn’t even stretch his legs, but it was fine just to disappear.
One humid summer night, the old wood of the closet door got moist and wouldn’t open again. He was thirsty, so he pushed and clawed at it with clammy fingers, but it was no use. It never came to his mind that he might make noise to get the adults to let him out. He held his breath to save air until he fainted.
His mother and Yusuke found him by accident in the morning and laughed.
“Are you hiding in there sweating on all the pillows? Get up, get out.”
“He’s so stupid.”
Under Yusuke’s influence, his mother developed expensive tastes not only in clothing but also in drinks. Goro’s shopping assignments got longer and more complex. When he brought the bottles home in summer, they would sometimes be lukewarm. His mother would take a sip and spit it back out: “Are we supposed to drink this piss? If he leaves me because of this, it’s your fault.”
The spending on drinks meant less spending on food. Yusuke sometimes brought sweets or mom would cook yakisoba to impress him, but it was irregular and far between. They both liked to eat out at restaurants which mostly left Goro to his own devices. To distract himself from the gnawing pit in his stomach he started to chew on the fabric of his sleeves. His mom told him it would make his teeth fall out, which to his horror they actually did at some point. He hid them.
Around that time, he started going to school and he hated it. Being smaller and skinnier than most other kids made him a target from day one. His constant hunger also gave him a hard time concentrating and keeping up, he was irritable and restless to the extent that he repeatedly had to stand outside during class. On breaks, his classmates avoided him and made retching noises when he tried to approach them. After a while, they made it a game to get close to him when he wasn’t looking, then push him over or poke him or pour milk over his head. His uniform got dirty and he had to sit in class with it day after day, since his mom couldn’t be bothered to wash it.
Before entering school, he had hoped to find friends there, but in the middle of all these repulsive kids, he felt lonelier than ever. Each day when he got home he immediately hid in the closet and read some manga with a flashlight in the dark. Joe of Tomorrow, about a lonely boy who found friends through boxing. He often dreamed of disappearing.
Disappearing wouldn’t work though, and there came after all the day when he had enough.
The teacher had called him to the front of the class and on his walk forward through a chorus of whispered “Ugh, stinks!” and “Ew, it’s Garbage-Goro” he grabbed the back of a boy's head and slammed his face into the table. It was surprisingly easy. The following chaos made his body brim with excitement and a smile spread across his face.
Several such incidents later, he still hadn’t made any friends and the principal called his mother into school for a talk. Seeing her enter the school grounds in her newest dress and clicking heels was like seeing two worlds collide. He smelled her perfume as he sat next to her in the principal’s office, and stared at his shoes. There were other mothers, those of the kids he had hurt, grey and bland like mice. They raised their voices at his mother and she squeezed his hand when he tensed to defend her. “I understand that you care for your children.”, she stated calmly. “I care for my son, too.”
On their way out together she whispered to him: “It’s good that you fight back. Don’t let these boring losers walk all over you.” She winked at him with her shimmering blue shadowed eyelid. When a row of boys blocked their path to stare at them she commanded: “Get out of our way.”, like a queen.
His heart sang.
While this made him stronger, it didn’t make things any better. In addition to the comments about his dirty appearance they would now slander his mother. She had certainly made an impression on everyone, and the kids repeated what they heard from their parents: “A bar lady.” “Not even married” “Easy with men, you know what I mean.”
Of course they didn’t know what it meant, but Goro had a vague idea and a lot of rage.
When he slashed a metal ruler across a classmate's ear, almost cutting it off, he was expelled.