Tears

When I had just been born, I often went along with the other babies and cried with them so I wouldn't stand out.

Newborn babies couldn't stay by their mothers' sides for long. After I was born, I barely had time to meet Yuanyin before I was sent to a nursery shared by more than a dozen babies.

As times changed, medicine and technology advanced. The crude nurseries of the past had been nothing more than sealed, temperature-controlled boxes. Now, not only did they have advanced medical equipment, but they also had thoughtfully installed viewing windows.

For almost a month after I was born, that window was my only entertainment.

Being a baby was boring. Being shut in a nursery was even more boring. So my daily source of enjoyment was waiting for Yuanyin to appear at that window.

I waited every day, and every day she failed to come. The parents of the babies around me might have been unsteady on their feet or laden with bags, but whenever they passed this place, they would put aside whatever they were doing and stop to look at their children.

I envied them, but I understood Yuanyin, too. This was her first time experiencing the pain of childbirth in this life.

Yuanyin never came. Toji did.

The first time Toji and I met, that window stood between us. I felt like a rare animal in a zoo, the kind that only went on display once every hundred years. And he seemed like someone visiting a zoo for the first time in his life, taking an unusually keen interest in this once-in-a-century specimen.

That day, he bent over and watched me for a long time. When he noticed that I had the same green eyes as him, he even gave a faint smile he didn't seem to notice himself.

I had wanted to smile back, too, to thank him for contributing to my entertainment that day. But babies were as unpredictable as the weather. A collective crying fit that even I couldn't anticipate gave neither of us a chance to react.

The cries rose suddenly like a tide. Before I could join in, I caught sight of the man hurrying away out of the corner of my eye.

My first impression of Toji Zenin was probably that he seemed to hate the sound of children crying.

(1)

This teacher really wouldn't let it go.

My silence and lowered head gave her the mistaken impression that her tone and words could awaken my most basic, childlike goodness.

Especially once she had decided I was lying to cover something up.

She kept offering leading remarks, as though this exchange would become the most memorable conversation of her life. The little beansprouts around me were inexplicably excited, probably because they hadn't expected today's drawing class to be so entertaining. The chubby boy closest to me, in particular, grinned and snickered away.

Normally, I would simply walk away from an embarrassing situation like this. I didn't waste too much emotion on people who were just passing through my life. I had precious little of it to begin with.

Just as I impatiently prepared to get up and leave, the man who had been dozing against the doorframe pushed open the door and came in.

"She didn't bring any. Those are my things in there."

Toji was tall and broad. In this world of beansprouts sitting on low stools, he was like a century-old towering tree, imposing without even having to look angry.

The teacher shuddered and stammered, "Oh, I see. But if she doesn't have any drawing supplies..."

Toji glanced at the chubby boy, who was still smirking mockingly, then grabbed the child's green backpack and dumped every colored pencil and crayon inside it in front of me.

The multicolored crayons fell like a brief, explosive shower. The instant it stopped, the child beside me burst into disbelieving tears.

It was probably his first lesson in how some kinds of entertainment came at a price.

A child's crying was like an infection that couldn't be contained. Once one started, cries soon answered from every direction, joining forces for an all-out assault.

Toji was surrounded by heartbreaking wails.

His brows were tightly knitted, impatience practically spilling from his eyes. If I listened closely, I could even hear a fleeting hiss through his teeth.

But even so, Toji remained standing straight beside me, never moving away.

Was it because I was still here?

The thought struck me as unbelievable, and I immediately wanted to test it.

I got up and left. When I reached the doorway, sure enough, Toji was following me.

We abandoned the crying beansprouts and hurried out of the noise disaster zone. Back on the street, where the volume had dropped sharply, I folded my arms and asked Toji curiously, "Why did you bring me here?"

The adult who was used to never explaining himself still clung to his bad habit of not communicating with children.

He chose silence, but he didn't abandon me and storm off, either. He simply looked utterly indifferent, leaving me unable to work out what he wanted.

If he wouldn't tell me even when I took the initiative to ask, what would happen after I was gone, when only he and his son remained?

God, I could already imagine how much they'd torment each other as father and son.

"Toji, I know you mean well, but I need to know why you brought me here. Okay?" For some inexplicable reason, I showed Toji a trace of the patience I had reserved exclusively for Yuanyin.

Those forest-green eyes watched me for a while. Then he took a crumpled ball of paper out of his pants pocket.

I accepted it. Simply holding it, without even unfolding it, I knew it was my avant-garde masterpiece.

I felt embarrassed, but also amused. It even made my eyes grow a little hot.

With the paper clenched in my palm, I looked at the person before me and actually found myself wanting to make sure he would be all right, at least before I left.

Let me save him, too, just as he was trying to save me now.

(2) Interlude

Toji had enjoyed a rare good night's sleep. Maybe last night's Hamburger had been so satisfying that his taste buds had overpowered the nerves that kept disturbing his sleep.

Lying on the couch, he stared at the slightly damp ceiling. The moisture had raised a fragile blister in the plaster. He watched it for a while, feeling that it wouldn't take an earthquake for the blister to crumble on its own, followed by the ceiling and plaster breaking apart like tofu.

For some inexplicable reason, Toji found himself imagining buildings collapsing and the entire world being destroyed in an instant.

There was an indescribable sense of release in destruction.

He was a man who acted on his thoughts. Just as he stood on the couch and prepared to crush the blister with his fingers, Yuanli's door handle moved.

Like a guilty thief, though he had no idea what he had to feel guilty about, Toji ducked back onto the couch as fast as he could. Then, furtive as a cat, he peeked over its back to watch his daughter, who hadn't left her room all morning.

Carrying a black plastic bag, Yuanli opened the front door with a displeased expression. Then, looking as though she couldn't wait to fling something filthy a thousand miles away, she set the trash bag outside with obvious disgust.

Once Yuanli returned to her room, Toji quietly opened the door, poked his head out to look around, and crouched in front of the trash bag.

He would never rummage through trash. It was just that the bag had split open all on its own when he opened the door, and a few particular balls of paper had rolled squarely in front of him. That was all.

Without the slightest qualm, he crouched in the doorway and examined the crumpled papers. Their contents successfully amused Toji, who had thought he would never truly laugh again in his life.

They were simply that mentally scarring, and that shocking.

But as he laughed, his laughter faded. Toji wasn't an idiot. How could he fail to recognize who his daughter had been drawing over and over?

When it came to the photo, he had been in the wrong first.

He stuffed one paper ball into his pocket and went out with nothing but a key, not even taking any money.

There was nowhere in Kanagawa's East District he felt like throwing money at.

After passing a few snack shops, he reached a somewhat livelier shopping street. The pedestrians wore plain clothes, and most had straw hats on, looking as though they had just stepped out of the fields.

In this slow-paced rural place, even cursed spirits were scarce. Compared with Kyoto and Tokyo, it was practically paradise.

Toji wasn't one to pay attention to passersby-unless they were holding something that interested him.

A garish flyer was thrust into his arms. Its highly saturated colors and childish, ridiculous drawings, surrounding a blunt advertising slogan, actually made Toji stop.

[Future Artists' Introductory Education. Children's Drawing welcomes you! Address: XXXXXXX]

He memorized the address and threw away the flyer. Toji felt he had found a way to make it up to Yuanli.

(3)

I didn't want to reject Toji's good intentions, but drawing classes for children clearly weren't a good choice. I had intended to look around the shopping street some more, but it was getting late, and I remembered Megumi was still at home. Toji and I headed back the way we had come.

It was nearly dusk. As we walked along the riverbank, fragments of gold shimmered on the water, as though ten thousand tiny suns, crushed during the day, had hidden in the river as the sky darkened.

Kanagawa really was a place that inspired both love and hate. I resented its underdeveloped medical care, yet couldn't help loving the scenery along the route Toji and I walked.

Treading the boundary where light and shadow retreated little by little, I suddenly wanted to talk to Toji.

I wanted to ask about his past, and about his plans for the future.

But when I turned and saw the emptiness in his eyes, I realized that wanting to ask something didn't mean I would get an answer.

Toji was the kind of person who guarded his past and his true self fiercely, never revealing anything. Just like Yuanyin.

They were actually very similar, both in personality and in the impression they gave. They were like people caught in between, who had escaped a life of bloodshed but couldn't adapt to peace and stability.

They needed an anchor, something that could hold them firmly in place even as they constantly drifted.

Once, Yuanyin had had me. Now, I hoped Toji would have Megumi.

I no longer wanted to be an anchor. Everything Yuanyin had done to me in this life had made me wonder whether I had once held her hand too tightly, so tightly that I hadn't even noticed when it hurt her. Perhaps that was why she had pulled away from me so desperately, even abandoning me.

I no longer dared to hold anyone's hand, or to become anyone's anchor.

The faint sadness and the scenery were shattered by the roar of motorcycles on the road. A gang of bikers came charging up behind us, whooping and hollering.

As the last motorcycle was about to pass me, its mohawked rider glanced at my backpack on the side nearest the road and made a habitually criminal move.

He reached out with a hand clad in a studded, fingerless leather glove and seized my backpack strap. What he hadn't expected was that Toji's flying kick would be even faster.

The mohawked rider was kicked to the ground, but his hand still clutched my backpack strap. Under those circumstances, the pull should have sent me flying along with him.

But I was a strongwoman in training, and I was also gripping the backpack strap for dear life. And so, before multiple witnesses, the brightly colored backpack was torn to pieces like a dismembered body.

The tools I had kept hidden in my backpack scattered across the ground like flowers strewn by a heavenly maiden.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a familiar kitchen knife from home embedded straight in the ground, just one millimeter from Toji's shoe.

At that moment, I felt I was done for.