We Have and We Don't Have

On a winter afternoon in December, a woman leaves her child in the bathroom.

His son is not yet two years old, cannot walk, let alone open the bathroom door. There was no heating in the bathroom, so it was certain the child was cold, especially when it was very late at night. We can imagine this child starving, and maybe trembling, and maybe scared.

The woman returned to the bathroom around ten the next day. He found his son still alive, still speaking, and crying. He took his son in his arms, carried him to other rooms, held him tightly as he moved to and fro. The other rooms were of course much warmer than the bathroom and the child cried slowly in tears. He fell asleep, looking peaceful, as if he had never experienced anything bad. But of course he is not fine. Being hit by the cold all night in the bathroom made one of his toes freeze, and hurt.

In the afternoon the woman took him to the hospital. In the span of time itself, the child wakes up several times and cries aloud. And the woman herself, at the umpteenth time the child woke up and cried loudly, finally cried too. Several times he poked his head against the wall of the house.

For nearly twenty hours of leaving the child in the bathroom, the woman went to several places. Initially he went to the park. He sat on one of the benches in the park, watching people milling around and lazing around. Some of them are walking with their dogs. There are also children who play and are noisy. And there was also apparently someone like him, someone who just sat on a bench, alone, and seemed to be thinking about something deep. He had guessed what someone was thinking while looking at him, but only briefly. Immediately he shifted his eyes and attention to other things, such as the sky that began to change color, or the leaves that move.

When it was getting dark, he left the park.

From the park he went to the cinema. He traveled a dozen minutes by bus. In the cinema, he chose a drama movie without really wanting to watch it. For almost two hours in the cinema studio he realized very well that he really wasn't really there; his eyes were indeed staring at the big screen in front of him but his mind was somewhere; like moving quickly from one place to another. Of course he occasionally remembered his child. The child is in the bathroom, alone, probably starving, and of course cold. He felt sorry for his son but he did not care and did not want to help him. He himself was cold at the end of the film and tried to overcome this by hugging himself tightly. Right at the second the studio light was on, he got up and descended the stairs quickly.

Then he went to Izakaya, about half an hour away by bus. There he ordered ramen, with curly noodles and pork and curry gravy. He was in no hurry to eat the ramen. He was alone, on a small table that was intended for two people. He had ordered Gyoza but it was canceled. He was not really hungry; he ordered ramen just to overcome the cold that was still in his body, which was still attached to his body. He had only finished the ramen for about forty minutes since he started eating it. At that time, it was really night.

On the way home on the bus, he remembered his son again. He knew very well that his child would cry. Cry and keep crying. And even though he was away from his child he felt like he really heard his cry, as if the child were in his lap, or even in him. He turned to his right, stared out the window, observed what was there. Tokyo at night, for some reason, always makes him sad. Lights, tall buildings, vehicles that are always invisible. Sometimes he saw people on the sidewalk and watched them as the bus slowed. He did not understand why those people were there, just as he did not understand why he was on the bus, watched them, and thought about this.

At times he closed his eyes, especially when he felt the speed of the bus he was riding was speeding up. Then at once, the shadow of his child in the bathroom reappeared, and he just let out a long breath. After almost an hour on the bus he pressed the bell. He descended not far from a konbini. He will not return to his home even though he knows very well that the child may have begun to suffer and despair.

At Konbini, he bought some snacks and drinks, also defecated. The night was very cold but he was wearing a thick jacket and now he even had a scarf around his neck, so he thought he was okay. While thinking about what he would do next, he snacked. He stood alone in the konbini court in the headlights, and snacking. He doesn't want to go home yet. He knows that. So this decision was taken: he would stop a taxi and return to the city center. He plans to stay at a cheap hotel capsule there. And so, he only returned to his house the next day.

Since her husband died in June the woman has indeed changed. He is no longer jolly. In fact, you could say he never smiled again, really smiled and looked happy. His daily life as a novelist allows him to not often leave the house and interact with people, and he really takes advantage of this; since June, he will only leave the house when food or drink supplies run out or his toddler needs a new diaper. The people at the publication who were connected to him themselves, like the editor, understood this difficult time, and they gave him the freedom to not quickly complete the text of his latest novel; they even refrain from contacting him; not even through email. In the initial few months, he can still take care of his child as usual and remain strong. But lately, precisely after winter arrived, he finally began to be overwhelmed.

Initially he was so lazy to get up when he found her crying. Often he let the child cry long enough, and all he did during that time was listening to the crying, lying on his back on his bed. He and his son would sleep in the same room, a relatively small distance — less than ten steps. When he finally got up and walked over to his child, and the child was still crying, he was crying too; this mother-daughter both cried in the same room. His son usually stopped crying only after he had held him in his arms and carried him to and fro, moving from room to room. She was almost no longer breastfeeding her child after winter arrived. Sometimes he imagined his child never existed, or he who never existed.

When her husband was still alive and still accompanying her in the house, the presence of the child actually helped her through day after day. She is not a productive novelist like Murakami Haruki, nor is she an ex-actress who has a beautiful face like Matsuda Aoko, so in her eyes the quality of her novel is the only thing she can offer to readers. Therefore he is often depressed when he finds that what he wrote does not match what he imagined; and often he is in a situation where he is eager to erase everything he has written and start over. At times like these, the behavior of the child is like comforting him; even if the child just cries out for his attention, or just the milk. Her good and humorous husband certainly helped her feel better. She was always grateful to have been given life whenever her husband hugged her tightly or kissed her gently, or made jokes that sometimes made her stomach ache.

But her husband was gone and that made everything different. Same house, same toddler, same routine, but feels much different. He could not even write in the past month; the manuscript of his novel, which had been abandoned by 70% and he did not know when he would touch it again. In fact he also wants to do the same thing to his child, but he is well aware that is impossible; however the toddler still needs his attention, his hugs, his affection.

In his second novel published four years ago he presented a woman who could not escape her maternal instincts, where in the end she always returned to caring for her child lovingly even though she had a strong desire to keep her child away from him, to break the bond that was already between the two of them. And now he is in a situation like that. Not exactly the same, but more or less like that. The woman in the novel finally succumbs, throwing away her wishes earlier. He wondered if he would do the same.

Her kind and humorous husband died of suicide. He dropped down from the roof of his office building during office hours, when his coworkers were wasting energy and thought to fulfill the demands of their superiors. He himself was supposed to do that too, but that afternoon he suddenly rose from his chair and with quick steps he headed for the door and after that the corridor and after that the elevator; and the elevator took him to the roof of the building, precisely to the second floor below. He did not look one bit. None of his coworkers tried to stop him or chase him, or just call him. They are, perhaps, too depressed to even do it.

The woman in the story that we enjoy certainly doesn't know to that degree. The company where her husband works only told her that her husband had fallen from the roof of the office building. Only that. There is no last message. There was no record of it either on a piece of paper or on a company computer or personal laptop or smart phone. Absolutely nothing. The reality of this one is apparently more painful for the woman than her husband's suicide.

She always thought that her husband loved her, and that they lived a perfect home, which was always full of happiness; even her husband could always make her laugh when she was bored, or sad, or sick. What did he miss? What did she never know from her husband? Questions like this keep buzzing within him. And he began to think that the life he had lived so far was only an illusion; just something that never really happened, that never really existed. He remembers one of the important figures in his first novel had put forward something like this. Over time, he began to think the life that the characters in his novels lived was more real than his own life.

When he decided to leave his child in the bathroom, that was what came to his mind again. His life is not real; the things he faced never really existed; none of this ever really happened and he was just trapped in an illusion. Previously for the past month he had felt so foreign to his child; he felt that there was something wrong between them that should not exist, but he could not find anything either. When he lets his child cry and continues to cry, he often imagines he is in another place, in another situation, and maybe not as himself. When he was on the bus home that morning, he imagined his child was gone. Nothing, in the sense that the child disappeared. Completely vanished.

But as described earlier, the child was still there, in the bathroom, crying for his attention, as well as his help. In the seconds he heard the cry of his child he was disappointed. In the second he opened the bathroom door and saw that he was still disappointed. But this disappointment began to fade when the child was in his lap, when he patted slowly the buttocks and back of the child, when he touched his cold nose to the nose of the boy who was also cold, when he just kissed the child in his forehead, on his cheek, on his nose, on his lips.

As described earlier, the child falls asleep, then wakes up some time afterward and cries again, falls asleep again, then wakes up and cries again, continuing like that. At the umpteenth time the child woke up and cried, where the woman too cried and flopped her head against the wall, she was disappointed again. Really disappointed. But his disappointment this time was different from earlier. He knew, this one, was another disappointment.