21 Sayoko

He was a good boy, but he was not always savvy. Her son had left the massive pillbox with its twenty-eight daily receptacles on the kitchen counter, something Angelica never would have done. Then he had left the condo to meet the media outside the complex, down at street level, to deliver scripted statements at the ministry’s urgent request. He did not truly have to do it, since the government had already accepted his resignation. But he was dutiful, Ryo Itou. More like his father than like her, in many ways.

Of course, that wasn’t to say that Japanese culture had not seeped into her after all these years. For example, she knew it wasn’t right to be a burden to others. There was nothing wrong with ending your life, no matter what the public service announcements said.

Feeling merely curious, or so she told herself, she tried to open the bottles, but her arthritic fingers couldn’t do the job. The pillbox, though: that was easy. Each lid of each mini-receptacle popped open readily. The shapes and colors were impressive. Her son would never notice how many were missing.

In the living room, she turned on a television program, skipping past the teledramas (how had her mind been weak enough to tolerate those for so long?) and settling upon the history channel.

When Ryo burst through the front door, he called out, “Are you all right? Do you need tea?”

He had offered her tea a half-dozen times that day, and she had accepted, mostly to please him. He was good about offering tea. He’d done it as a boy, at her bedside, trying to get her to start the day, whether it was 8:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. She did not know what to do or say now to acknowledge all those years she had half-ignored him. It hurt to think about it.

But it bothered her even more to realize she had put that all out of her mind for most of his adult life. She understood him better now that the memories had been brought back into the open. She could see the boy in the man, still, and that made the passage of time less painful, because at least there was continuity and the sense of a reliable inner core. Ryo Itou was the same person he had always been. She was proud of the work he did, impressed with his self-sufficiency and stamina. And yes, he was sensitive, too. She should never have discouraged his artistic side.

Ryo hurried into his bedroom, then came out again, pausing by her armchair.

“What are you watching?”

“Something about kamikaze pilots.”

“Good,” he said. She knew he was relieved to find her occupied. He could fulfill his next duty: taking part in a long video call with his former boss and a team of media experts, crafting the public relations strategy they would use in days ahead to counter the trashy news stories.

“Ah, the tea,” he said, disappearing into the kitchen. She smiled as he reemerged minutes later with a cup. “Anything else?”

She would not tell him she hadn’t had lunch. He’d forgotten to prepare it. She would not tell him he’d forgotten about the midday pills—and all the better, in case he noticed the pillbox looked different now. What he needed now was for her to be without needs.

“The tea is perfect,” she said. “Go work.”

“Just to the bedroom. We’ll be done in a few hours.”

She knew how he hated to bring any kind of digital device in there. For years, he had refused. But he was stuck inside this condo now, for as long as Hiro was away.

“Go,” she said. “Ganbatte.” Do your best.

She watched the program, fingering the pills in the deep front pockets of her blouse. She should be brave. Look how brave those boys were. The youngest ones were the easiest to sympathize with, because they did not look like the Goblin Fox or most of the officers who had raped her. Some didn’t even look like boys. They had rosy cheeks and unlined faces. Soft helmets and big goggles covered their heads; their necks and lower chins were swaddled in white scarves. In one photo the documentary kept coming back to, five pilots posed with a puppy. They were babies. In real life, she might have thought differently, but she wanted the luxury of distance at this moment, the experience of seeing history as merely interesting or poignant, rather than as deeply personal. She had earned that distance. She had also earned the right to control her own destiny.

She watched the historic footage of planes crashing into ships. Kamikaze. Spirit wind. She thought of Daisuke saying that anything could have a spirit, and also, that spirits could be gentle, or violent. There is a dark side to everything. A light side, too.

Nearly four thousand suicides, the program informed her. But only eleven percent were successful in doing damage.

“Eh?” she said out loud. This was something new. She’d always heard they were more successful than that. Maybe the documentaries were getting a little more honest, these days. Old people die, young people move into their places, new ideas become acceptable. It was a good thing. No one was meant to live forever. She fingered the pills again.

She started to nod off, then woke to the feeling of leakage. Not a full accident, but enough to make her uncomfortable. All those cups of tea. Angelica would never have brought her so many. Hiro would have asked her every hour whether she needed to use the facilities. But they were empathetic and experienced. Her son was old enough that in ten or fifteen years more, he might need his own personal caregivers. Men didn’t age as well as women. Then what?

She needed to get herself to the bathroom, but she needed to summon her energy first. On the screen, the war scholars tallied ships sunk and lives lost—all less interesting to her than the photos of the boys themselves. And maybe she was fooling herself, pretending these young men were nothing like the men who had made her days a misery. These boys recruited toward the war’s end, when all was lost, might’ve been just as corruptible, and those officers who had served their country from the beginning might have harbored some aspects of innocence. That last part, especially, was hard to swallow. But no mistake: she was not moved to any kind of forgiveness. At the same time, she felt tired, and teary, without enough energy for hate.

The narrator read aloud their diaries, pages filled with philosophy and poetry, allusions to both Shakespeare and Shinto, and letters to their families back home. One young man said he did not love the emperor. Another asked how it had all come to this, and noted that the abstract notion of death was nothing like facing the real thing, tomorrow. There was less talk of beautiful “shattered jewels” and more talk of reluctant surrender.

This was not what she had learned as a younger woman. She was not even sure she was glad to know such grim facts now. This must be how others felt, forced to confront the issue of so-called “comfort women” and wishing to simply forget and move on, rather than admit that not a single aspect of war was romantic.

“I do not truly wish to die,” a seventeen-year-old wrote to his mother.

She was not the only one. Sayoko took her hand out of her pocket.

And still, there was the matter of getting to the bathroom.

She did not want to see another sepia-toned photograph of chubby-cheeked boys in aviator caps, or pretty girls waving cherry blossom branches on airstrips. She pushed herself up and out of the armchair and used her walker to get to the bathroom. There, she relieved herself, leaving her soiled underwear and damp pants on the floor. She stood, naked from the waist down, looking in the mirror.

And now what?

Part of her hoped that the sounds of her footsteps, the closing bathroom door and the running sink would prompt Ryo to leave his room and come to her aid. Another part of her wanted no such thing, because she would not let her son see her like this. She had not thought to fetch clean clothes first and she refused to amble down the hallway naked and stinking. No one would ever make a beautiful documentary about moments like this.