Grotesque Read online

  “Hardly.” Kazue plucked awkwardly with her chopsticks at the gummy noodles, picking them up and plopping them down. “She knows she’s not as smart as me, so she’s jealous. When I took the entrance exam I know she was hoping I’d fail. And if she flunks her test you can bet she’ll blame it on me for taking her chair! That’s the kind of brat she is.”

  Kazue finished her soba before I did and then proceeded to gulp down what was left of the pitch-black sauce. I’d completely lost my appetite by then and distracted myself by slipping the cheap disposable wooden chopsticks back in the paper wrapper they’d come in, pulling them out, and then sticking them back in again. Eating soba noodles in Kazue’s disheveled room suddenly struck me as incredibly pathetic. The room teemed with dust, not having been cleaned for who knows how long, and it smelled like an animal’s lair. I thought again of Yuriko’s phone call that morning and the way she’d described my mother’s recent behavior.

  My mother: sitting with her eyes wide open in the dark, shut up in a room without lights. Her fragile nerves—I wonder if I’d inherited them. It would have been a blessing if they’d gone to Yuriko, but compared to me Yuriko was uncomplicated and overly forthright in her own desires. I was the one who took after Mother.

  Kazue turned to me and asked, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “I’ve got a younger sister.” I answered bitterly. Just thinking of Yuriko made me bitter. Kazue swallowed. She looked like she was going to continue to ask questions, but I cut her off with one of my own. “You weren’t really going to have soba for dinner tonight. What would you have had if I hadn’t come?”

  “Huh?” Kazue jerked her head back as if to say, Why do you have to ask such bizarre questions?

  “I’m just curious.”

  I was interested in what kind of meal Kazue and her mother would fix. Would they make bean cakes of mud and mashed hydrangea leaves and salad of dandelion greens? Kazue’s mother looked like the kind of woman who only enjoyed “playing house.” She seemed so detached from the real world, performing her household tasks but more like a robot than a real person.

  “Father and you and I are the only ones eating soba tonight. My mother said that she and my sister would eat leftovers. We hardly ever order out; just that little bit of soba cost three hundred yen. It’s so stupid! But we got it specially because you came to visit.”

  I stared up at the light fixture, beginning to notice that the evening’s darkness was creeping into the room. In the center of the yellowish veneered ceiling was the kind of stark fluorescent light you’d see in an office building. When Kazue had switched it on, it made a slight hissing noise, like the sound of a flying creature flapping its wings. The light ringed Kazue’s profile in a black outline. Unable to resist, I asked, “Well, why did only you, your father, and I get the soba?”

  Kazue’s tiny little eyes sparked. “Because in our house there is an order to things. There’s that test you do with a pet dog, right? You line up all the members of the family and release the dog to see who he goes to first. And the first one is the boss. It’s like that. Everyone automatically knows the order of things—who has the most prestige and authority, I mean. And you accede to that order accordingly. No one needs to explain it, but everyone obeys it. Everything is decided according to this order—like who has the right to take a bath first and who gets to eat the best food. My father’s always first; that’s only natural, right? And then I’m second. My mother used to come second, but once I made it into the top tier on the national scholastic rankings for my age group, I got to be second. So now my father goes first, I’m second, then my mother, and my sister’s last. If she’s not careful, though, my sister’s going to pass my mom.”

  “You determine the pecking order in your family based on your scholastic scores?”

  “Well, let’s just say we go in the order of effort expended.”

  “But since your mother’s not ever going to take any entrance exams, isn’t that unfair to her?”

  Mother and daughters lined up in competition with one another. Wasn’t that absurd? But Kazue was deadly serious.

  “It can’t be helped. Mother lost out to my father from the very start, and there’s no one in the family who can best him. I’ve studied as hard as I could ever since I can remember. My greatest joy in life is trying to improve my scores. For the longest time I set my sights on trying to outdo my mother. You know, my mother always says she never had career aspirations, but I think she wanted to become a doctor when she was young. Her father wouldn’t permit it; besides, she wasn’t smart enough to get into med school. But she always regretted it. Being raised to be a woman is pathetic, isn’t it? That’s what she always says. She uses being a woman as her excuse for not getting ahead in life. But if you really try your best, you can succeed even if you’re female.”

  “Are you saying that—no matter what—all you have to do is try your best and you’ll succeed?”

  “Well, of course. If you try hard enough you’ll be rewarded.”

  Yeah? Well, you’re in the world of Q High School for Young Women now, my dear, and no matter how hard you try you’re not going to get your reward! We live in a world where almost anything you try to accomplish will be met with failure. Am I wrong?

  I wanted to say this to Kazue. Moreover, I wanted to teach her a lesson. If she should ever set eyes on a girl like Yuriko and her monstrously perfect beauty, Kazue’s efforts—no matter how prodigious—would just be laughable, wouldn’t they? But Kazue stared at the mottoes on her wall with a look of utter determination.

  “Do you think it’s true because it’s what your father tells you?”

  “It’s like our family code. My mother believes it, too. And the teachers at school, they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s the truth, that’s all.” Kazue looked at me in surprise, her little eyes mocking me, flashing with color.

  “Speaking of mothers, do you know what happened to me today?”

  It seemed like the right time to spring this on her. I glanced at my watch, wanting to go home. It was already past seven.

  “All I know is that it was Hana-chan’s birthday,” Kazue replied with a laugh, and then, as if remembering homeroom, her face crumbled into a frown.

  “My mother died,” I said.

  Kazue leaped up from her chair in surprise. “Your mother died? Today?”

  “Yeah. Well, technically it was yesterday.”

  “Shouldn’t you go home?”

  “Pretty soon. May I borrow your phone?”

  Kazue pointed wordlessly to the stairs. I inched my way quietly down the dark stairs toward a thin stream of light that leaked out from under a closed door. I could hear the sound of a TV. I knocked.

  A man’s voice called out irritably. “What?” Her father. I opened the door. The only noticeable feature in the cramped sitting room was the wood-paneled walls. Kazue’s younger sister, her mother, and a middle-aged man sitting on the couch in front of the TV turned simultaneously to stare at me. The dishes on the shelf directly across the room were all the kind you would buy at a supermarket. And the dining set, sofa, and chairs were the cheap preassembled kind. If the Q gang were to see this they’d have a field day, I thought. Kazue would be toast!

  “May I borrow the phone?”

  “Certainly.”

  Kazue’s mother pointed toward the darkened kitchen. There, just out-side the entrance, was an old-fashioned black rotary phone. There was a small handmade box next to the phone with the words ten yen. Kazue’s parents just sat there looking at me expectantly. Neither bothered to tell me I needn’t worry about the cost. So, I fished around in the pocket of my school uniform skirt and finally came up with a ten-yen coin to drop in the box. The coin made a dry sound as it fell. Apparently, few visitors stop by this house. To charge a fee for the phone was like a sick joke, I thought, as I dialed the numbers on the stiff rotary while carefully scrutinizing Kazue’s family.

  Kazue’s younger sister—who had been deprived of h