Sweet peas the scent of royal milk tea are cut from the garden and put in glass vases. Napkins are ironed. The futons are shaken and aired on the balcony. Jiji goes to the convenience store to buy handheld fireworks for Meiko’s arrival. Baba takes long shopping lists to supermarkets, buying marbled slabs of meat and forest mushrooms, telling every neighbour on the way that their English granddaughter is returning to them. Haruka, anxious and afraid, picks at the scabs on her legs.
Haruka was coming round to the reality that Meiko would soon be a living thing. A person with beliefs, birthmarks and split ends. Or more likely she was the kind of girl that Haruka had always imagined her to be, with breath that smelt of white peaches, skin with perfectly placed beauty spots. She would inevitably be smarter, prettier, kinder than Haruka. The kind of granddaughter whom grandparents cherish and give fatter envelopes of cash to. The kind with a smile to cure cancer.
Haruka was comfortable living alongside the fantasy of someone. That was something she had done all her life. And with it came a kind of control. Her father, who at first was shapeless, grew into something close to a hero. Then, as the years went by, a villain. Meiko too, was an idea, a fantasy that filled the shape of a big sister. Even Haruka herself had been a fantasy, a parallel girl, a buffer between reality and the truth. A fantasy that she had introduced when the men got too close, or too far. White lace knickers and schoolgirl skirts. Leather paddles.
A year or so ago, Haruka had spoken to a free online counsellor that Mizuki had recommended. The counsellor had suggested that Haruka might be sleeping with men for money because she was trying to punish her father. Haruka told the counsellor that if she wanted to punish her father, making great money and occasionally orgasming was not the way she would do it. If she really wanted to punish him she would hunt him down and make him teach her how to barbecue a T-bone or throw a baseball—whatever it was that fathers do.
Throughout the sessions, of which there were only seven, Haruka had uncovered a memory from her school years. She had recalled how she had started looking for her dad in her fifth year of primary school, when a girl called Naoko had taught her about sex.
Naoko’s parents were liberal-minded doctors, and they had taught their daughter the basics of sexual intercourse with a child-friendly book. On a playdate after school, Naoko had shown Haruka the cute illustrations of men and women kissing in bed, the smiling uteruses and little floppy penises with big purple arrows pointing up next to the word erection.
Images of her mother and a smudge of a man had filled Haruka’s brain.
When she told Naoko that she hadn’t been created with sex because she didn’t have a father, Naoko had laughed and said,
That’s impossible! Everyone has a father.
Naoko was precocious that way.
Until that moment Haruka had been a child of woman. A miracle assembled in the womb where a man was surplus to requirements. She had felt stupid and betrayed. That evening, she’d stood in front of Mama’s desk, paperwork piled high, the lamplight stark and aggressive, and had demanded to know who Mama had had sex with, who her father was. Mama had recoiled from Haruka, looking at her like she was a disease. That look was something Haruka still carried with her. That look came to her when she found herself in particularly degrading moments, when she felt her most disgusting.
After that conversation with her mother, Haruka was never allowed on playdates to Naoko’s again, and she never again asked about sex. She was left alone to make those discoveries all by herself.
Now and then she had found the courage to ask her mother, and later her grandmother, about her father, but it was always met with the same murky story. He had been a friend that had moved away. Her mother had never said where, or mentioned a name. He was a shadow. Left to the imagination of a child.
After Mama had died, Haruka had looked for the remains of her father in the notebooks and letters left behind, but there were no traces of a scorned lover, no handwritten, regretful goodbyes. She wanted to see behind the abandonment, to reason and history. But, she gradually learned, the best keepers of secrets are the dead.
This was something Haruka could find comfort in when she wanted to. A make-believe father cannot disappoint, in the same way a make-believe sister is yours and yours alone to colour in. There is no dissatisfaction or disappointment on either side of the relationship. The love her sister and her father have for Haruka is entirely dependent on how generous she’s feeling towards herself. Sometimes it is an abundant love, distant but powerful. Other days it is barely there, cold and fibrous. Either way, Haruka can control it. The fantasy always ends with her.
Slicing the thin layers of beef, ready for the teppanyaki that night, Haruka’s hands shake.