Every time I saw it on the news it was a mystery to me. What kind of environment allowed for such a thing to happen? How could a mother get away with hitting a baby hard enough to bruise it or break its bones? Surely her husband would notice. Even if he were in on it, someone in the neighbourhood would notice – or a relative or a public official. I couldn’t think of an environment in which you could get away with beating a baby to a pulp. People paid attention to and took even better care of babies than I had imagined.
I lived in an apartment with my husband, and with this blob that could only be called a baby, though at first glance you couldn’t make out its face or sex. My mother-in-law would drop in all the time to see it, my parents pestered me to send them photos of their grandchild almost every day, and the apartment manager would peek into the pushchair and go on about how cute it was.
The whole world loves babies. How could you possibly find a chance to abuse one? I guess you could always shut everything out – lock the door, unplug the phone, close the curtains and beat the child to your heart’s content, or at least until someone broke the door down. But in the end, you’d be caught. A little crying at night was all it took to be reported to the police. You’d be arrested, and your name and the dead baby’s would be all over the news. I couldn’t take that. What about those parents who beat their babies to death? What the hell were they thinking? All I could figure was they had no imagination.
It was different from bullying someone at school. You needed a plan if you were going to attack something as fragile as a baby.
But I could never hit a baby. Not because I’d feel sorry for it or because people weren’t supposed to do things like that. It was for the same reason that I couldn’t kill a bug. I hate bugs, but I can’t kill them. When you killed one, even if you got it with a tissue, or used a rolled-up newspaper, there was no way to avoid that squishing sensation in your hand. If you killed it in the house, you had to clean it up – the ooze and broken body parts. For that reason, I gave up killing bugs. I hate them, but I’m through with killing them.
Given how traumatic it was for me to kill a bug, I knew I could never hit a child. I knew from the start that I couldn’t bear the sensation of each punch or stand the sight of their messy, injured bodies. You could starve a child to death, but that wasn’t an option for me either. Just the idea of an emaciated baby gave me the creeps. I got sick thinking about a thing like that hanging around the house.
There were other methods, like letting them die from neglect – never changing their nappy or bathing them – but I couldn’t do that either. It would bother me long before the baby would mind. But even if my fastidiousness and aversion somehow disappeared, leaving me free to hit a baby, as I said before, society wouldn’t let me get away with it. If I did happen to hurt the baby even a little, the evidence would be immediately found on its body, and I’d be arrested.
What about those parents who were in fact arrested? Their environment must have been exactly right for them to get away with beating the baby to death.
But in my case, my husband came home from the office like clockwork and loved me and the baby. Our relatives and even the apartment manager loved the baby. I loved everyone except the baby and didn’t want to betray any of them. That’s why I was relieved when I heard about the spread of the radiation.
I wasn’t troubled at all when I saw the news about the huge earthquake and the explosion at the nuclear power plant that spewed radiation. The quake was fantastic, but after it passed, that was the end of it. The nuclear power plant was far enough away from where I lived that I felt little urgency. But everyone was making a big deal out of it. When I took the baby for a walk the next day, there was hardly a soul about; everyone was afraid to go outside because of the radiation. My usual pharmacy was closed due to the disaster, so I headed towards one of the chain stores near the train station. The streets were so quiet, it was the first time I’d ever heard the wheels spinning on the pushchair. I’d only gone a few hundred metres from my apartment, an area as familiar as my own garden, when I was seized by a sense of disorientation, like a child lost in an unknown place. It struck me that there should be others here at this time of day, not just a full-time housewife like me.
The issue of food safety came to the fore soon after the accident at the plant. When my husband saw the extensive news coverage of contaminated vegetables on the TV that night, he remarked on how terrible it was. ‘I know,’ I said as I spooned baby food into the child’s mouth. It fussed as the food ran down its face. But the minute I heard the news, a deep feeling of relief ran through me, as if someone had assured me that everything would be okay. It’s hard to put into words, but I felt encouragement spreading through my body. I didn’t understand it at first myself. How could I feel this way when a foreign substance was covering the earth and contaminating the very food we put into our mouths? Only when I was boiling water to sterilize the baby’s bottles did I realize the origins of my newfound ease. When the news reports warned us not to give tap water to infants, I embraced this new sense of security.
Spinach. Lotus root. Napa cabbage. Watercress. Sweet potatoes. Mizuna. Mustard greens. I went to a few different supermarkets, carefully choosing those vegetables we’d been warned to avoid, the ones with high radiation levels. I hurried home, the carrier bags stuffed with contaminated vegetables hanging from the hook on the pushchair, the baby sound asleep. My baby loves to go for walks, falling asleep as soon as I put it in the pushchair.
I got home, put the baby in the cot and headed into the kitchen. I threw away what baby food there was in the freezer. I heated the spinach and mustard greens in the microwave, added tap water, and ground them up. I flavoured the spinach paste and divided it up into small plastic bags. I accomplished all this without a tinge of emotion.
Then I heard a cry from the bedroom. The baby was sobbing, flailing its short arms and legs. I was filled with sadness and pity at the sight of this baby, its face bright red, its body writhing, eyelids full of tears. I don’t know if you call this maternal instinct. I put the nursing cushion on my lap and pushed the baby’s face to my breast. The round lump clamped on and sucked with tremendous force. In the half year since this thing had been born, I had never failed to perform my duty.
I burped the baby, prepared the bath, and while I was catching a few minutes of a TV drama repeat, my husband came home. As soon as he walked into the living room, his face lit up and he hugged the baby. The baby let out a high-pitched giggle. I loved to watch this more than anything. I was ready to burst with joy, wishing we could all die of happiness right then and there.
I prepped dinner while my husband bathed the baby. Today’s menu was white rice, miso soup with plain and deep-fried tofu, squash boiled in soy sauce, dried daikon radish strips and amberjack teriyaki. I didn’t dare use the contaminated vegetables. I wouldn’t risk my or my husband’s health by eating such horrifying things. My husband sipped his soup and watched the news, looking grim.
‘Don’t worry, I used mineral water,’ I told him.
‘We’re fine, but they’re saying not to give babies tap water,’ he replied.
‘I know,’ I said as I fed the smooth, freshly bathed baby the food I’d made with contaminated vegetables and tap water. According to the news, when you boiled water its concentration of radioactive particles increased. Starting tomorrow, I’d stop breastfeeding and give the baby formula made with tap water.
From that point on, I poisoned the baby every day. I continued to feed it, allowing contaminated food and tap water to build up in that small body. I don’t know exactly why, but babies are more susceptible to radiation than children or adults, and they have increased rates of childhood cancer.
The national government keeps telling us that there is ‘no immediate danger’ from contaminated food or tap water, which amounts to them declaring that there is bound to be a danger at some point. So if I keep giving the baby contaminated food and water, it will die. I had the nation’s word on that.
The baby showed no signs of change. No hair loss, no odour, no discolouring of the skin or clouding of the eyes. It grew like a weed. Which was lucky for me. Had the baby started showing symptoms, I couldn’t possibly take care of it. Physical changes like that would really give me the creeps. Worse, though, people would find out that I had been filling the child’s body with poison.
No, people finding out was not the issue where poisoning was concerned. Even if other mothers weren’t doing it intentionally like I was, they were filling their children with poison, too. I wasn’t the only guilty one. There was no real difference between what I was doing to my baby and what they were doing to theirs. Other mothers were supposedly stocking up on vegetables from distant areas and mineral water from overseas in an effort to protect their babies. But it was impossible to guard against radiation completely. A nuclear power plant had exploded in the middle of our country. Every day, little by little, radioactive material was building up inside those tiny bodies. No matter how careful you were, nothing could change that.
Giving them milk, feeding them, airing their rooms, hanging out the bedding, taking them for walks, bathing them, putting them to bed. These everyday chores – even those done to make them more comfortable – were fraught with danger. Radioactive particles would come in when you aired the room, you’d be showered with them when you went for a walk, they’d coat the bedding when you hung it out to dry, and they’d get mixed in with the bathwater. I made formula with tap water and baby food with contaminated vegetables, but other than that, I wasn’t doing anything special. I aired the room, hung out the bedding, took the baby for walks, bathed it and put it to bed, that’s all.
I was just like all the other mothers. All the other mothers were just like me.
Dosage and intentions aside, the minute they exposed their babies, even a little, the other mothers were no different from me. I did my best every day to contaminate my baby. The baby seemed to think it was being fussed over even more than normal, and cheerfully wrung that lovely voice from its throat. The sight of that face – round like a meat bun, opening its mouth in laughter to show off its two little front teeth – was so cute it ripped my heart out.
My mother-in-law came by one holiday, dropped some bottles of the now hard-to-get mineral water in the entryway, and announced that she planned to evacuate me and the baby to her ancestral home. Her birthplace was in the countryside, far from here and the power plant.
‘This is so sudden, you’re putting me in a difficult spot,’ I said, but in fact it was no trouble at all. I was a housewife and the baby was not in pre-school, so if we decided to go, we could go right away.
When I looked to my husband for help, he said, ‘It’s a good idea. I’ve been worried too,’ and, hugging the baby, he rubbed his nose against its head. The baby squealed with the tickle of it. The decision was made – the baby and I would leave in a week. My mother-in-law stayed late, so we ordered in sushi. As she cuddled the baby, she kept talking about the importance of going to a place where the nuclear accident wouldn’t affect us as much. My husband nodded in agreement. ‘I wish things would get back to normal soon,’ he said. But I knew that was never going to happen.
I couldn’t sleep that night so I surfed the internet as I nursed the baby. I was looking for information on the current state of radiation dispersal from the plant. Sure enough, I found it, plenty of it. Various countries, universities and organizations had taken measurements. There were so many maps comparing the readings against different standards using different instruments that I couldn’t make sense of them all. I sat in the pale glow of the computer listening to the baby sucking on my breast and saving images of maps to help me figure out what I was going to do come next week. I found any number that showed the worst possible scenario.
My husband drove us out of town. My mother-in-law had gone ahead and was waiting for us. The baby seemed excited by the long drive. Lying in the car seat, it sucked on its fingers and cried out in delight. Sitting next to it, I rubbed the baby’s belly. It was nice and warm. I wondered how much poison had already accumulated there.
‘I’ll be lonely, but I’ll visit at weekends,’ he said.
I thanked him, trying to imagine what kind of environment we were heading for. There was nothing I had to do. Keep nursing, changing nappies and following orders. Same as always. Which is why I had felt so relieved to learn that hell was spreading all around us.