Baba teaches Mei how to make tempura for the hegi soba noodles. They score the back of the prawns, removing the black intestinal tract. They push the muscles forward until the meat snaps open and the tail is straight. They slice white stars into mushroom caps and cut fluffy rectangles of kabocha. They mix flour and ice-cold water and kewpie mayonnaise with chopsticks in a bowl and coat the perfect mouthfuls in the batter. Baba’s grip is warm and strong as she holds Mei’s hand in her own, explaining that the tempura is ready when you can feel it wiggling in your chopsticks. Baba moves from side to side in her apron and laughs with eyes bright and Mei thinks she understands. They serve the hegi soba in a wooden tray with dipping sauce, yellow mustard, sesame seeds, finely chopped spring onions. They all sit together and eat, Baba looking up from her bowl, taking in the scene of everyone together at the table, slurping. Encouraging everyone to eat more, saying there’s plenty , that everything must go .
Mei crunches into the tail of a prawn, pulls the long soba to her mouth and eats her way back home.
She wonders when they will tell her how Mama died.
She wonders how to ask such a thing.
They look at a tree. Its branches heavy with purple plums.
Haruka points at the base of its trunk where a small stone monument is wedged into the ground and says,
Mama.
Oh.
Hai.
Right.
Mei squats down by the grey stone. It is small and clean, with a bamboo ladle next to it, the remnants of burnt incense. She touches the dry earth. Mei can feel the eyes of her grandmother and sister, watching her, waiting. Expecting some kind of breakdown. She feels nothing. She looks at a stone that is meant to contain her mother. All that she was and still is held up by a single slab of granite.
Can I . . .
Mei points at a yellow wildflower growing up through the grass. She picks at the air.
Can I—
Baba makes a noise and starts pulling at the garden floor, picking flowers, pressing them into Mei’s palms. The two of them tug at the earth, at spilling flower beds, splitting stems with fingernails. The arrangement is messy, heads bobbing, hanging with wiry roots, leaking sap, the milky shoots of the anemones and the bell flowers covered in green flies. Mei rests them under the shadow of the plum tree next to the headstone. The three of them stand back, observing the grave, and Mei is reminded of a Greek chorus at the end of a tragedy, plaintive and wan. She looks at the back of her sister, at her long black hair and wonders how she is feeling in this moment. If she too is unmoved by a slab of stone, or if this moment hurts her like it’s meant to.
The grief Mei had felt as a child had only recently begun to take shape, sharpening into focus the edges of Death, its mouth and teeth glinting through the softness of her childhood. And now that grief required a grief of its own, a death within a death where her past, or what she thought was her past, must be eulogised and forgotten. Haruka hadn’t had the cushion of childhood like Mei; the full force of death would have shattered her growing teenage body.
Mei wonders if it is better to have more time. Or if in the absence of a person there is room for shelter.
Haruka turns, looks directly back at Mei—and there it is again, that flash of recognition, something shared, swiftly clouded over. Mei offers up a smile, but Haruka turns away, leaving Mei grimacing at her gloss of hair. Haruka walks forward, pulls at a low-hanging plum from the tree, its roots buried in the ground, along with their mother.
Umeshu, she says, holding up the plum.
Umeshu . . . Mei says, nodding. It’s a plum?
Mmm. We make o-sake. Wine. You want to make?
Ah! Sou ka! Baba says clapping her hands together.
Now?
If you want?
Ah. Hai, Mei says, searching her sister for feeling.
She follows Baba and Haruka to a garden shed. A little wooden hut with a dusty window. Baba takes out a key and the door shudders open, the smell of must and forgotten things hitting them as they step inside. A moth taps against the glass. Yellow sunlight leaks through. The floor is covered in leaves and broken things. Glass, insect wings, sawdust. Mei watches Haruka lift up a step ladder leaning against a cardboard box. As she brings the ladder towards herself the box behind it tips forward, falling against her and then onto the floor.
Haruka stops.
Looks at her grandmother.
Gestures to a box at the back of the shed.
Says something in Japanese.
Baba looks at her and there it is again. The unspoken.
Dust drifts in a channel of light. Haruka passes the ladder to Mei and pulls at the second box, revealing a violin case behind it. The box sits heavy against her chest as she backs out into the sun, its bloated sides thunking onto the ground.
Mama, she says.
Pointing at the box.
When you find the divorce papers your father sent your mother for her to sign, no note, no apology, just pages and pages of official documents that even a fluent English speaker could not begin to comprehend, that is when what is keeping you up, your emotional scaffolding, breaks. Then there are the formal letters from lawyers full of notations and question marks in the margins. Paragraphs and paragraphs of poorly written English scratched out and re-written. A mother’s desperate attempt at a custody statement in a second language. Character references, English textbooks, leaflets from different lawyers, all unequipped to fight a foreign legal system, all outside a convenience store worker’s salary.
It is one thing knowing your mother left you as a child. It is another thing knowing she tried to get you back but was stopped. That second truth may feel like a blessing, but it is not. That second truth is the thing that obliterates you. It is the thing that keeps you up, night after night. It boils your insides. It makes you want to kill. Not a merciful, quick kill. A drawn out, torturous kill with implements and sharp edges. The kind that cuts through bone.