“Why must you be so hard-hearted?”
“I’m the only one who still talks to you.”
“I’ve said I’m sorry enough times.” Etsuko tried to control her voice, but the waitresses heard everything, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore.
“I made the appointment.”
Hana looked up.
“The day after tomorrow, we’ll take care of your problem.” Etsuko looked straight at her daughter’s pale, angry face. “You shouldn’t be a mother. You have no idea how hard it is to have children.”
The steady line of Hana’s lips crumpled, and she covered her manga-pretty face with her hands and began to cry.
Etsuko didn’t know if she should say something. Instead, she put her hand on her daughter’s head. Hana winced, but Etsuko didn’t immediately pull her hand back. It had been so long since she had touched her daughter’s satiny hair.
When Etsuko lived in the cramped, three-bedroom house in Hokkaido with its leaky roof and tiny kitchen, certain labors had sustained her. At this moment, with a kind of pinprick pain, Etsuko recalled watching her sons devour the shrimp that she had fried for dinner, piled high on paper-lined plates. Even in the middle of July, it had been worth it to stand in front of a hot tempura pan, dropping battered shrimp into bubbling peanut oil, because to her sons, Mama’s shrimp was better than candy, they’d said. And it came to her like a tall and dark wave how much she’d loved combing Hana’s freshly washed hair when her cheeks were still pink from the steamy bathwater.
“I know you didn’t want us. My brothers told me, and I told them they were wrong even though I knew they weren’t. I clung to you because I wasn’t going to let you just leave what you started. How can you tell me how hard it is to have children? You haven’t even tried to be a mother. What right do you have? What makes you a mother?”
Etsuko grew silent, utterly transfixed by the realization that how she saw herself was actually how her children saw her, too. They thought she was a monster.
“How can you think that I didn’t want the three of you?” She recalled all the letters, gifts, and money she’d sent, which the boys had returned. And worse, the phone calls to the house to check on them when her husband wouldn’t say anything beyond moshi-moshi, then would hand the phone to Hana because she was the only one who would take the receiver. Etsuko wanted to justify herself—her numerous and repeated attempts—to offer proof. Being a mother was what defined her more than any other thing—more than being a daughter, wife, divorced woman, girlfriend, or restaurant owner. She hadn’t done it well, but it was who she was, and it was what had changed her inside forever. From the moment Tatsuo was born, she had been filled with grief and self-doubt because she was never good enough. Even though she had failed, being a mother was eternal; a part of her life wouldn’t end with her death.
“But, but, I didn’t marry Mozasu. I don’t even live with him. So I wouldn’t make things worse for you and your brothers.”
Hana tilted her head back and laughed.
“Am I supposed to thank you for this great sacrifice? So you didn’t marry a Korean gangster, and you want me to congratulate you for this? You didn’t marry him because you didn’t want to suffer. You’re the most selfish person I know. If you want to sleep with him and take his money to set up a fancy place and not marry him, that’s your self-serving choice. You didn’t do it for me or my brothers.” Hana dried her face with her shirt sleeve. “You don’t want to be judged. That’s why you haven’t married him. That’s why you left Hokkaido to hide out in the big city. You think you’re such a victim, but you’re not. You left because you’re afraid, and you slept with all those men because you were afraid of getting old. You’re weak and pathetic. Don’t tell me about sacrifices, because I don’t believe in such crap.”
Hana started to cry again.
Etsuko slumped in her chair. If she married Mozasu, it would prove to everyone in Hokkaido that no decent Japanese man would touch a woman like her. She would be called a yakuza wife. If she married him, she’d no longer be considered the tasteful owner of a successful restaurant in the best part of Yokohama—an image she only half believed herself. Mozasu must have thought that she was a better person than she actually was, but Hana wasn’t fooled. Etsuko picked up Hana’s travel bag next to her chair and nudged her daughter to stand up to go.