This morning a boy passed by my house.
When I told my sister Asako about it, she just said, ‘Dummy, you know there aren’t any boys around here.’
And she was right.
Long ago, the Earth was peopled only by women. They lived in peace until one day a certain woman gave birth to a child unlike any that had come before: its body was misshapen, it was rough and careless in everything it did, and it made a great deal of trouble for everyone before it produced a few offspring and then died. Such was the advent of man. From there, the number of men increased steadily. It was they who invented war and its requisite implements. Worse still, they began to toy with notions like revolution, work, and art, wasting their energy on all manner of abstract pursuits. And they even had the audacity to claim that this, this was the greatest characteristic of mankind – this zealous pursuit of adventure, romance, all things that were utterly useless in everyday life. Though men were adults they were children, seemingly complex but as simple as could be; they were utterly unmanageable creatures.
Women had something as well, something called ‘love’, but this was much more concrete. It was putting up with a crying baby, changing its diapers even though you were exhausted. It was sharing any food you found with the weak little beings in your care. But not with outsiders. Because if you did that, you and your bloodline would not survive.
As the number of men increased, the women had to keep a close eye on each and every one of them. This was a truly onerous task, but most women seemed to have the knack for it. They had to safeguard home and family.
With the passage of many long years, men came to dominate society through violence and cunning, and thereafter they made nothing but war. They seemed to find their raison d’être in conflicts both great and small. War found its way even into everyday life, and so were born ‘traffic wars’ and ‘admissions wars’. Such terms became so common that the word ‘war’ lost all meaning. This deplorable situation was of course the men’s fault. And, when the traffic snarls and college entrance competition got so bad that people could hardly bear it, they replaced the word ‘war’ with ‘hell’, coining phrases like ‘traffic hell’ and ‘exam hell’.
Factories continued to operate, and the age resounded with hymns of progress and harmony. But then, in the latter half of the twentieth century, a strange thing happened: the male birth rate began to decline. This was apparently due to something called pollution. The men who invented the steam engine probably never expected to set in motion events that would bring an end to their own kind.
In any case, men became scarce. For some reason women had developed the habit of each finding a particular man to love, so they were terribly sad about this. Nevertheless, the number of men continued to dwindle.
Nowadays, you’ll never even lay eyes on one unless you visit the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone.
‘You sure you weren’t just seeing things?’
Asako poured some tea. My confidence evaporated in the face of her question.
‘Maybe. But afterwards I looked it up in a book, and the clothes he was wearing were a lot like the ones boys wore towards the end of the twentieth century. His hair was short, and he was wearing trousers.’
‘Same goes for me.’
Asako’s hair was indeed cropped short, and she had on a pair of light cotton bell-bottoms.
‘I mean, sure, but his trousers were a lot tighter and not so wide at the bottom. And his chest was flat as a board.’
‘There are women like that too, you know.’
‘His whole vibe was different. He was solidly built and tall, with a spring in his step. There was something … intense about him.’
‘Wow. Well, looks like you’ve got all the answers, never mind the fact that you’ve never even seen a man before. The year I graduated high school we went on a field trip to the Occupancy Zone, but men turned out to be nothing like I expected. They were scraggly and smelled funny, and they all gave me the creeps. Maybe it’s because they’re stuck in that place, but they all seemed so lazy. You’ll understand when you go and see them. They’re awful. But you said you looked it up in a book. Where did you see a book like that?’
The publication of material concerning men is strictly prohibited.
‘A friend’s house.’
‘Well, how’d it get there?’
‘I guess her mother works for the Information Bureau. My friend doesn’t really know either. She opened the door to the study with a hairpin and said I could read any book I wanted.’
‘Such a little hoodlum.’
‘There were lots of films, too.’
‘If that got out, it would mean real trouble. Yūko, I know you don’t really understand, but that kind of thing could throw society into chaos. I want you to remember this: order is the most important thing. Abiding by the rules. If we all do that, humanity can avoid destruction.’
She gave this lecture gently, like a proper big sister.
I poured some milk into my tea. ‘By humanity, you mean women?’
‘Of course. Didn’t you learn that in school?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, there you go.’
‘And men?’
‘Men are an offshoot of humanity as well, but they’re a deviant strain. They’re freaks.’
‘But there was a time when they flourished, wasn’t there?’ They don’t teach us much about that in school. You only learn about such taboo subjects through whispered conversations among friends. Two or three years back, someone secretly published a pamphlet called On Men, and a friend showed it to me. Eventually the police cracked down and seized all the copies. The culprits were quickly caught and put in a detention facility.
The news posters branded it a dangerous publication because it ‘stimulated curiosity’.
My grandmother told me that when she was young they used to deliver the newspaper door to door each morning, and the transportation network extended to every corner of the country. Even now you can go see the massive concrete pillars that used to hold up the highways. You never know when they might collapse, though, so it’s dangerous to get too close. It was around the same time resources started to become scarce and they scaled back production in the factories that the number of men also started to decrease. We were taught that it was the men who had created that horrifying culture. By the end, they had used up almost all of the oil; the deposits are all but depleted now, so we rely almost entirely on the heat of the sun. Women have been left carefully husbanding the scant resources of a planet stripped bare by men.
Apparently back then there was also something called a TV in every home. I can’t even imagine – all kinds of programmes coming at you from morning till night, at the twist of a knob. And all for free! I guess something called NHK collected money for it, but towards the end nobody paid anymore. TV was one of women’s greatest pleasures. Grandma says when she was a kid she used to watch it every day. Back then girls and boys alike were immersed in exam hell, but her mother didn’t give her any grief about school. Grandma wanted to be a singer. She told me so. Apparently at that time, these singers would appear on TV constantly. And since just about everyone watched TV, they were famous, and if you were famous, throngs of people would come to your concerts. I don’t really believe the part about everybody watching TV, though. Grandma also told me it was really sad when the TV stations went under and men weren’t around as much anymore.
‘Stop talking nonsense and go to bed already … It’s eight o’clock, the electricity’s about to get shut off.’
And sure enough, just as my sister said this, the already dim bulb went dark. In its wake, the moonlight lay in stripes across the tabletop.
‘Look, the moon’s so big and red,’ Asako pointed. ‘Look where it is.’
We sat together, sipping the last of our tea as we gazed out at the moon hanging low in the sky, its unsettling colour giving it a bloated, spongy look.
‘I wonder what Mum’s doing now.’
This was something we were never supposed to talk about. But my sister didn’t reprimand me. In fact, she tried to console me.
‘We’ll see her again next month.’
‘Yeah.’
But our monthly meetings only lasted for ten minutes or so. And there was always a guard present, so we could never say what we were actually thinking. Lately Mother had been getting weepy every time we had to say goodbye.
‘Why did they put her in a detention centre?’
‘Because she broke the law,’ Asako answered automatically. But the truth was, she didn’t know much about the circumstances of her arrest. One day some strangers showed up out of the blue and just took our mother away. Asako was four or five at the time, and she remembers it pretty well considering.
‘According to Grandma, she was harbouring a dangerous individual.’ Her tone started to falter.
‘What happened to that person?’
‘Arrested, of course, and most likely sent away someplace else. But it’s blessing enough that we get to see Mum face to face, since I’m pretty sure it was the secret police who took her away.’
‘Is there really such a thing?’
‘I think so … This is all just a guess, though, and you mustn’t tell anyone.’
‘I know that.’
‘I think they might be connected to the Information Bureau somehow, but keep that just between ourselves as well.’
‘Okay, I get it already.’
‘As far as anyone knows, our mother is dead. If this got out, it could upset the social order.’
‘Okay.’
I think my sister’s a little too high-strung. Maybe because Mum was taken away when she was so little.
‘I wouldn’t be able to go to work anymore, either.’
Asako’s such a nag. I lit a candle. It was a cheap, smelly thing, but it was better than what most of our neighbours used: wicks dipped in animal fat. They were smoky and smelled horrible. We decided not to be stingy when it comes to light.
‘I’m going to bed. I’ll do the dishes in the morning.’ I stood up to leave.
‘It’s fine, I’ll wash them tonight,’ my sister replied. ‘The stairs are dark, why don’t you take the candle with you.’
‘I’m used to it.’
I paused at the foot of the stairs. Here, too, moonlight was streaming in through the window. I had been up since early that morning and now I was exhausted.
I’d woken up around four a.m., unable to stand the sweltering heat. The little window in my bedroom was shut, so I went over and opened it up wide. That’s when I saw the boy, going by on the road below. No one should be out and about at that hour, so I studied him carefully.
In my room on the second floor, I opened my diary in the small patch of moonlight. The diary was a present from Grandma for my sixteenth birthday; I’d been writing in it for two years now.
I intended to write about what had happened that morning, but my sister’s words had shaken my confidence. My eyesight’s really good, but it’s not going to stay that way if I keep on writing by moonlight every night. Since I’d decided not to tell anyone else about the boy, I wouldn’t mention it in my diary either. I wrote the date, paused, and then thought for a minute.
Today our teacher took us to the theatre. They had the marquee lights on even during the daytime, and I was shocked at how bright it was. I’ve never been somewhere so lively, and so many things were new to me. Maki said, ‘I hear sometimes they put men on stage here. They do something called boxing.’ And Rei said, ‘Not here, they don’t. That happens at a gymnasium or something.’ Then the teacher walked by, so we all clammed up and went inside. The lighting on the inside was bright too, it was so pretty. On the way back we rode in a horse-drawn carriage.
Asako says that horse-drawn carriages are on the way out too. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen as many lately. Then again, it’s a real luxury just to ride in anything, whether it’s a horse-drawn carriage or the more common pollution-free automobiles. If it’s not going to take more than an hour or so, most people just walk. I was literally bursting with joy that I’d gotten to ride in a carriage, so I had to put it in my diary. Asako works at an energy research facility. She says they’re gradually implementing the use of uranium and plutonium. And solar technology is getting better and better all the time. But she also said something disturbing about how ‘the sun is sort of like a big cluster of hydrogen bombs’.
I opened the window and looked down at the road below, but of course there was no one there.
Had my eyes been playing tricks on me that morning after all?
I got into bed.
The zelkovas were rustling outside.
I heard the stairs creak.
‘Are you asleep?’ my sister asked from the other side of my door.
‘Uhh …’
My non-committal reply came out sounding like a moan. ‘You understand, right? Not to tell anyone what you told me.’ Asako lowered her voice even further.
‘Yeah, I understand,’ I answered in a drowsy voice.
‘You can’t go around telling people you saw a boy.’
Enough already.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
I could picture Asako standing at the head of the stairs holding the candle. She was silent for a while. I guess she must’ve been mulling something over. Or maybe it was supposed to be one of those demonstrative silences.
‘… Right. Okay, good night then.’
She finally went to her room.
‘Night,’ I muttered curtly (though I don’t think she heard me) and pulled the covers up to my chest. I always lie awake in bed for two or three hours before I fall asleep. But this time I felt like I could drift off right away.
When I awoke, it was still dark.
I couldn’t tell what time it was. The clock’s in the living room, and it was too much of a pain to go check, so I just lay there.
I tried to reconnect the fragments of my dreams but without much success. And I felt well-rested enough that there was no point trying to go back to sleep. I wasn’t the slightest bit tired.
I got up and put my clothes on in the dark.
Opening the desk drawer, I took out a cigarette I had filched from my sister’s room. She smokes herself, so I wasn’t worried about the smell giving me away. And Grandma almost never comes upstairs.
I lit the cigarette and took a drag, and within a few seconds I felt like all the blood was ebbing away from my body. It was as if all the air inside my head had been let out. I started to feel dizzy, so I sat down. My fingertips felt cold.
In that moment the music from the previous afternoon’s performance came back to me. It was a new musical, a love story about a heroine named Sappo or Sappho or something, and everyone had been crazy about the actor playing her. Most of the students raved about how gorgeous she was, and it was clear everyone had a huge crush on her. I felt the same way, but I kept my mouth shut. It rubbed me the wrong way – I was finally at the age to start dating, but the most excitement I’d had in that department was an anonymous love letter or two.
During the intermission we went to the lobby to buy some sweets. There were lots of steady couples standing around together. The teacher was there so no one was necking or anything, but it was still aggravating.
Neither Maki nor Rei has a special someone either, so the three of us buddied up and ate some biscuits together. We probably seemed like the three class dogs.
‘That actress is gorgeous, huh? I’d love to be with someone like that!’ The area around Rei’s eyes had gone a pale peach colour. What’s got you so hot and bothered, I thought to myself.
‘What would you do if you were?’ asked Maki.
‘I’d whip up a nice lunch every day for her to take to work.’
‘Pssh, that’s ridiculous. Nothing good can come of having a crush on someone like that. She’d definitely cheat on you. She probably has little pillow queens all over town.’
You can use that kind of vulgar slang only among friends. There were rumours that Maki’s a top, not that she’s popular at all. One time she showed me one of her love letters, but everything she’d written was so crude that I rewrote it for her. She ended up sending the one she’d come up with on her own, though, which is maybe why she got her heart broken yet again. The younger girl she was hot for ran off with some good-for-nothing who was a lot older.
Maki was determined to show her by ‘becoming a hoodlum’, but other than taking up smoking (she gives me cigarettes occasionally, so I’m not complaining), she’s just as unpopular as ever.
Cigarettes are a real luxury item, and almost nowhere sells them. They have a terribly acrid taste and the packages look filthy, but you’d be lucky to get a pack for two kilos of rice.
‘Fuck actresses. They’re the enemy.’ Maki was getting herself worked up.
Graduation was coming up soon, so everyone had been out of sorts lately. September meant the end of school.
The kids from the Cinema Studies Club had gone to a secret screening recently, and it turned into a big thing. The newspaper even carried the story, and they all ended up getting expelled.
They’d watched an old movie from before the revision of the penal code. It was called American Graffiti or something, and not only does it feature lots of men, it doesn’t depict them the way the authorities think a movie should. The world was a really terrible place before it got to be like it is now, but apparently they don’t want anybody seeing this movie because it presents that time in an attractive light. Though it wasn’t the students themselves who’d taken it from the Cultural Centre, of course.
Men sometimes still appear in movies but only as adults. And even though they don’t show anything below the neck, no one under the age of eighteen is allowed to see them.
By the time I had finished leisurely smoking the precious cigarette, the world outside my window had begun making its way toward dawn.
I carried the chair over to the window and sat looking out.
If he hadn’t been a hallucination, there was always the chance that the boy might pass this way again. I waited with my elbows propped on the windowsill, but he never showed. Did he know I’d seen him? He might be on the run from the Occupancy Zone, in which case, did I need to warn him? It was one thing for me to spot him, but if anyone else did they’d report it to the police, no question.
With one eye still focused on the road outside, I returned to my desk.
‘What’s your name? Why are you here? I won’t tell anyone (I promise), so please answer. I want to be friends.’
I wrote this on a scrap of paper torn from my notebook and folded it up long and thin, then wrapped it around the neck of a ceramic rabbit and tied a ribbon over it to hold it in place. I’d bought the ribbon the previous Sunday when my sister and I went to the high street. It was dark blue, with gold lamé. It felt a little wasteful since I’d never even worn it once, but oh well.
Returning to the window with the figure of the rabbit in my hands, I continued my vigil. What if he couldn’t read? Going by what my sister had said, it didn’t sound like there were schools or anything in the GETO.
Eventually a figure emerged from the trees – the same person as yesterday. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, but he’d have been trying not to draw attention to himself, so who knows.
I dropped the rabbit out the window so it landed right at his feet, and he looked up. I smiled to put him at ease, and then grabbed a light cotton handkerchief that was sitting nearby and dropped it down as well.
I had embroidered the handkerchief myself, and it had taken three whole days. My sister hates handicrafts, so I’d gotten Grandma to teach me.
The boy (if that’s what he was) seemed startled at first and stared suspiciously up at my grinning face. His apparent fearlessness thrilled me.
He picked up the rabbit and gave me a questioning look. I nodded, and then moved away from the window so as not to scare him. Not that he seemed in the least bit frightened.
I lay on my bed and folded my arms under my head. I just spaced out for a while, not thinking about anything in particular, during which time a clear impression of the person passing below the window took hold in my mind.
I went downstairs and looked for something to eat, but there was nothing in the cabinets other than some bread and tinned goods. Not many households have refrigerators. Grandma says that in her day they were everywhere.
Has the world taken a step backward? Whenever I ask that question, my sister gets angry. ‘Looking at the world through the lens of progress is how the rivers and oceans ended up polluted,’ she says. But that’s not what I mean. Though one time she also said, ‘Time passes, the planet has its many histories, and things decline. That’s all there is to it.’
They say if you go to London or New York nowadays, it’s just the same as here. Though it’s incredibly difficult to leave the country in the first place. If you ever managed it, you’d be a celebrity anywhere you went. You’d be in all the newspapers (which are only distributed to schools and workplaces and other public facilities), and you’d probably even be on the radio. There are only two radio stations, and they broadcast from seven to ten in the morning and five till eight at night. It’s my dream to see other countries, but it’ll probably never come true.
I rested my elbows on the kitchen table and munched on a piece of bread that tasted like boiled roots. I’d have loved to eat something that actually tasted good. But our household gets by on my sister’s income alone. Since there’s a criminal in our family, we aren’t eligible for public assistance. Grandma does a little piecework on the side, but that barely brings in anything. We get by thanks to the free meals they give out at school and work. I spread some margarine on the bread. The hands of the clock pointed to 5:17. The person had passed under my window just after four.
Bread in hand, I put on my sandals and went outside. I inspected the area under my window – the ceramic rabbit and handkerchief were both gone. He’d accepted my gifts. How disappointed I would’ve been if they were still there!
I finished the bread where I stood, in the flood of morning sunlight.
~
‘Yūko, you sleepwalking or something? What are you doing with your bookbag? There’s no class today,’ Maki reminded me. ‘You’ve been kind of weird lately. Did you find a special someone?’
Rei was chewing on her pencil.
‘Umm, well … something like that,’ I replied vaguely. It’d been two weeks. I’d been waking up super early every day and keeping watch from my window at dawn. He comes by about once every three days. We still haven’t spoken. We just wave to each other.
‘Who is it?’ Maki raised her eyebrows.
‘It’s a s-s-secret.’ I pulled a suggestive expression. I tend to only play things up like that when there’s nothing actually going on, and so they both lost interest immediately.
‘Rei’s been writing letters to that actress every single day, sending her flowers even. What a moron, right?’ Maki said.
‘And?’
‘And here’s the thing. She got a response, but now she doesn’t know what to do.’
Rei continued wretchedly chewing her pencil.
‘She was writing I want to see you, I want to see you, and going to her house every morning to deliver her letter, then one morning they ran into each other when the actress was coming home from a long night out. And she said, “You’re cute” or something and took her hand …’ Maki turned to look at Rei, who frowned. ‘The truth is she did more than that, though, didn’t she? Didn’t she?’ Maki tickled Rei’s neck. Rei flinched and knocked her hand away.
‘So what’d she say?’ I asked dutifully. ‘I’d like to see you again or something?’ I didn’t think that actress was even the slightest bit attractive anymore. I hadn’t since that mystery person first showed up outside my window. I’d had my share of crushes on actresses and stars before, and I’d always looked forward to our semi-annual trips to the theatre, saving up my basically non-existent pocket money in advance.
‘That’s the thing. What she said was, I want to be with you,’ Rei answered gloomily. Though she was definitely happy about it.
‘Like, live together?’ It was a tedious topic. But I tried to play along anyway.
‘I’ll inform the office, she told me. We’ll have a ceremony, and I want to have kids.’
‘Wow, no shit?’
Once you’re above a certain age, if you decide you want kids, you go to the hospital. Even if you’re unmarried, it’s fine as long as you can raise them. They probably inject you with some medicine or something.
‘You’re not going to look for a job?’
‘I’m not cut out for it,’ Rei replied shamelessly. ‘Even if this doesn’t work out, I’ll just find an arranged marriage.’ Rei has a pretty face and pale skin, giving her good reason to be confident of finding someone to support her. Long ago, it was normal for the men to work while the women took care of the household chores, and that arrangement hasn’t really changed – all that’s new is that it’s the more masculine woman who goes to work, while the more feminine partner takes care of the sundry other tasks at home.
The bell rang.
‘What’re we doing today?’ I asked Maki.
‘Field trip to the GETO,’ she replied, a disgusted look on her face. ‘Gross, right? Why would anyone want to go see that? But it’ll be educational at least, so I guess I’m not gonna not go.’
Women live with other women. The strange thing is, one of them always does her best to emulate what we’re told masculinity was like in the old days. Maybe that’s what she meant by ‘educational’. Not that a bunch of young girls’ notion of masculinity is worth much.
The bus came to a stop outside the GETO, on the outskirts of town.
‘Looks like an ancient Roman coliseum, huh?’ said Maki. ‘From the outside, anyway.’
With its towering walls, the place looked like an impregnable fortress to me.
‘I keep expecting Davy Crockett to pop out.’
‘Who’s that?’ Rei could barely keep her eyes open.
‘From the Alamo,’ I replied.
‘Oh, history from before.’ She sounded totally disinterested.
‘Okay, everyone, time to get off the bus. Form two lines,’ the teacher shouted.
We filed down a narrow stairwell that led underground. Muffled giggles and secret conversations echoed off the cement walls.
‘Why’s it underground?’
‘They have a vegetable garden on the surface.’
We came to a guardroom where two armed guards sat side by side smoking cigarettes. The grey uniform suited the one on the left to a tee, but the other had enormous breasts and it looked odd on her.
Our teacher showed the field trip permit at the window. The guards took a headcount and made a cursory survey of our faces as if that might flush out any guerrillas lurking in our midst. If they’re so worried, why not stop having these field trips in the first place? Though anyone who missed this opportunity would most likely never discover what sort of thing a male really is.
One of the guards unlocked the iron doors. The students filed through, gabbling excitedly.
‘Are there still boys being born?’
‘Of course there are,’ answered Maki. ‘You’re so ignorant.’
‘Then why don’t you ever see them in town? You only ever see girl babies in prams.’
‘Because boy children are incredibly rare. The pollution had genetic effects too, you know.’
‘Still.’
‘Plus, when a boy child is born, they take him away immediately. I guess when a boy is born they announce it as a stillbirth. That way everybody can breathe easier. But it’s like the whole thing gets hushed up. I mean, being born a boy is like a deformity, you’ve got no choice but to accept it.’
Maki really knows a lot.
There were fluorescent lights installed in the ceiling of the long underground passage. The complex probably had its own electrical generator. They have them in hospitals and big hotels, after all. The facility was much larger than it had seemed from the outside.
At the end of the passageway there was another guardroom and two more guards, plus someone who seemed like a guide, all looking totally bored.
One of the guards was scratching her head as she read a book, raining dandruff down onto the open pages. A faint beard emphasized her jawline, probably the result of some hormonal imbalance, but she also had an ample chest. It made me uncomfortable. Who knows, she might’ve even been given male hormones at the hospital.
At the time I couldn’t help but feel kind of repulsed on seeing a woman with a crew cut, wearing trousers, her breasts bound. I’d been feeling that way ever since I first encountered the boy I gave the ceramic rabbit to. There was something refreshing, invigorating about him. Now when I see these women who try to emulate the masculinity of the old days without really knowing anything about it, I feel weird, like I can’t breathe. Fortunately, there aren’t so many these days. ‘That’s an old trend. Things are cooler now. We’re all the same sex, so what’s the point of trying to maintain a gendered division of labour?’ I’m pretty sure Rei said something like that, anyway.
There was an iron door here as well. The guard opened it and the guide stepped through. ‘Okay, we’ll begin with the kitchen.’
The place seemed huge inside, maybe even bigger below ground than the walled-off area up above. You could tell just from the size of the hallways and rooms. Who knows, the underground part might even be three or four levels deep!
They only show students a small part of it, I imagine.
‘This place is like an enormous hospital,’ the guide told us. ‘Here we see to the needs of those poor souls unfortunate enough to be born male.’
The kitchen was cavernous and deserted. Huge pots and ladles lined the walls.
‘It’s lunchtime right now, so everyone’s in the dining hall.’
There was nothing interesting to see. It was like exploring an empty cruise ship, though pitifully grimy in comparison. It must be an old facility, I guessed, to be so shabby.
‘And this is where they sleep. There are a number of rooms like this.’
The beds stood in ranks. In one lay a man with a face like a rat.
‘Hey, you there, what’s wrong with you?’
A murmur passed among the students as the guide addressed him, everyone whispering their impressions to one another.
‘My stomach hurts,’ whimpered the man (of indeterminate age, though there was nothing youthful about him). Then, pretending to avert his eyes, he flicked a series of sidelong glances our way.
‘What about the other one, with the sprained ankle?’ inquired the guide.
‘Oh, B-0372? He went to the refectory on crutches.’
They don’t even have names!
That’s because they’re not considered human. That is, they aren’t human. But even cats and dogs get names … Not to mention that females still need male cooperation to have children.
I don’t know too much about it, but apparently males are raised in these facilities in order to collect some kind of secretion they produce. Beyond that, I’m pretty much in the dark.
‘Like keeping honeybees?’ I asked Maki, always an authority on such matters.
‘Hmm, no, not quite. Though the sexual morphology of our society is maybe similar. Except that with honeybees, there’s only one queen.’
‘And we’re all queens,’ Rei cut in, bursting into giggles.
‘We all have the potential to be, anyway,’ I replied, showing off some meagre wisdom of my own. ‘Since all you have to do to have a baby is go to the hospital. And those who don’t want to, don’t have to. That’s how we took care of the population problem.’
There was nothing charming or interesting about the rat-faced man, and the students all blithely returned to their idle chatter. But for me it had been a real shock.
That feeling stayed with me for the rest of the trip. The thing is, the males in that place were nothing at all like the boy who passed by my house on those early mornings. They didn’t even seem like the same species. Even though I’d never exchanged a word with the boy, I was certain that he wasn’t female. But no matter how much I searched for the same aura among the males in that place, it was nowhere to be found.
They seemed to be uniformly apathetic and timid, their vacant expressions suggesting low intelligence.
The other students were getting bored and antsy. The orderly line began to fall apart, and people started horsing around.
‘Quiet, everyone, quiet!’
Our teacher was sweating bullets, but the guide was beaming.
‘How nice it is to be in the presence of so many young women for the first time in what feels like forever. You’re all so wonderfully lively. Working here isn’t very rewarding, you know. No matter what we do for them, we get no gratitude, and when someone does say thank you, they don’t really mean it. The men are all infected with a terrible indifference. Nothing to be done about it, though, that’s just how men are.’
Hang on. That doesn’t seem right. I’m pretty sure if I was locked up in a place like that for my whole life and never allowed to leave, I’d end up apathetic too.
Then, when the tour was over and we were about leave, something happened.
Mealtime had ended by the time we passed by the refectory and there was no sign of anyone inside, but suddenly a man leapt out and threw his arms around one of the students. She shrieked, and our teacher and the guide grabbed hold of the man and pulled him off her right away.
The guide began reprimanding the man and pressed a buzzer. Three guards charged up and seized him.
The student stood there startled, but she didn’t faint or anything.
‘My apologies, young lady, I’m glad you’re alright. This isn’t the first time that man has done something like this. He’s not mentally ill, but there’s clearly something wrong with him. Although this is the first time he’s attacked a student … How many times will he have to do this sort of thing before he’s satisfied, I wonder.’
Deciding perhaps that it would be inappropriate to say more, the guide left it at that.
‘They’re so dangerous,’ remarked our teacher.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she thought that. But, more important, I couldn’t understand why that man attacked a student. If he resented the world outside the GETO, you’d think he would’ve used a weapon, a knife or a meat cleaver or something. I couldn’t quite figure out what had motivated him to attack her, to wrap his arms around her the way he did.
Maybe our teacher didn’t know either.
In the bus on the way back, the students were all saying, ‘That wasn’t what I was hoping for at all,’ and so on. At school right now, manga from before is really trendy. Most of the movies and books from before are banned, but what used to be called ‘girl’s manga’ is still permitted. The males who appear in it are quite young for the most part, and they’re all extremely charming. Most of the girls who imitate men nowadays use these characters as their point of reference. They’re all convinced that’s what men are like.
The heroines of these stories typically fall in love with skinny guys. Big fat men do appear sometimes, but only as comic relief; they’re never the protagonist. The love interests have long spindly arms and legs and delicate features, and they’re detached or sweet or naïve. You never really see passionate men in these comics. According to Rei, the actresses who get super popular on account of their manliness are all ‘extremely passionate’.
Anyway, it was because all these schoolgirls had been reading manga from before that they were so disappointed by the men they saw on the field trip.
‘They gave me the creeps.’ This was Rei.
‘Not even one of them was attractive at all. None of them had white hands or long fingers or anything!’ They’d all been hoping for beautiful men.
‘It was like a zoo.’
‘Not really, but it sure was like they were a different species or something.’
‘Why on earth did people marry men before?’
‘Maybe because the men before were like the ones in manga?’
‘They’ve gone downhill, no question about it.’
‘Or maybe the manga from before was just pure fantasy. Maybe the actual men weren’t like that at all, maybe they were stronger. That’s what my great aunt told me, anyway, and she used to live with a man. She said that most men used to be way more reliable than the guys in girl’s manga.’
‘But, come on, didn’t you notice the smell? It stank so badly I thought I was going to pass out.’
‘Yeah they smelled awful, it made me wanna puke.’
‘The volleyball club locker room smells the same way.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
Everyone was so revved up.
But I was miles away, lost in my own thoughts.
At dawn I sat by the window.
It had become a habit of mine to wait there, whether he ended up coming or not.
Today was the day – I was going to say something. I was determined to make friends with him. Obviously I had decided not to go school. I couldn’t let Grandma or Asako find out, though, so I’d asked Maki to deliver the message.
‘Why aren’tcha coming?’
‘I’ve decided to become a juvenile delinquent.’
Maki gave a weird chuckle and accepted the mission. I had no doubt she’d be able to pull it off.
The boy appeared around the same time as usual. He mimicked a birdcall below my window, so that my sister wouldn’t suspect anything. She was always talking about how she couldn’t sleep, though, and she’d finally got some illicit sleeping pills from a pharmacist friend of hers, so it was probably fine anyway. And Grandma is conveniently hard of hearing.
I wrote ‘I’m coming down, wait there’ on a scrap of paper and dropped it to him. He read the note, put it in his pocket, and gave me a big thumbs-up.
I snuck down the stairs, clutching the big bag I always carry with me. The staircase creaked with every step.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked the waiting boy in a hushed voice.
‘Hiro,’ he replied simply, and started walking.
‘You’re a man, aren’t you?’
I fell into step beside him. He was much taller than me, which I hadn’t been able to tell when I was looking down on him from the second floor.
‘Yup.’
‘Then, how come you’re hanging around here? Males are supposed to be in the Occupancy Zone, aren’t they?’
‘Shh!’ He put a finger to his lips.
He walked quickly, and I had a hard time keeping up.
We didn’t have to go far before the houses started to peter out, giving way to fields and the overgrown ruins of old factories. He seemed to want to steer us away from places where we might run into someone.
‘Wanna come to my house?’ he asked as we walked along the wall of an automobile plant that had shut down long, long ago. I nodded. I really couldn’t say why, but I was suddenly overjoyed.
‘You can’t tell anyone else about it.’ In spite of this admonition, it was clear he had trusted me from the start. ‘I don’t have a home of my own, so I’m borrowing this place.’
He ducked into the automobile plant through a break in the wall. Somewhat removed from the main building was a small shack, like a school custodian’s office or a night watchman’s room. He headed towards it.
‘I almost never go outside. That’s why it was such a stroke of luck that I met you. Sometimes I want to go out dressed as a boy so badly I can’t help myself, but I only do it maybe once a month, and always in the middle of the night.’
‘Once a month?’ I repeated. He locked the door from the inside. It was dark. There were windows in two of the walls, but the shutters were closed.
‘Yeah. But after you gave me that rabbit, I sort of started to feel like I wanted to see you again right away. So I went out anyway, over and over again. Even though it was risky. I’m lucky I never got caught. Gives me the chills right now just thinking about it.’
There seemed to be two rooms. He took off his shoes, then picked them up. I did the same.
‘You don’t have to. Since they’re girl shoes,’ he laughed. ‘These shoes, they belonged to my father. They’re still a little big on me.’
‘Fah-thur?’
‘It means a male parent.’
‘Wait, a man can be a parent?’ I was taken aback and kind of appalled, and my voice came out sounding idiotic. Did that mean that being involved in reproduction was all it took to be a parent?
‘Uh-huh. You must have a male parent yourself,’ he said calmly.
‘No way. I don’t even have a mother.’
‘But you used to, right?’ Hiro was laughing.
I suddenly wanted him to know everything about me, so I started blabbering about my family and school and stuff.
‘This “sister” of yours, are you related by blood?’
I was startled by how perceptive Hiro’s question was. My mother had been living with my grandma, unmarried, but she’d adopted a child. That was my sister. Me she gave birth to herself.
‘Knew it. Can’t hide something like that. I mean come on, two women can’t make a baby, no matter how long they live together.’
‘Obviously. They make them at the hospital.’
‘But if a man and a woman are living together, they can make one naturally.’
Which is exactly why the males have to be kept in the GETO. If they were allowed to roam free, the radiation or whatever it is they emit would make all the women around them pregnant.
When I voiced this thought, though, he laughed at me. ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Hiro had been laughing pretty much the whole time.
‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Because being with you is fun.’
‘Why do you live in a place like this?’
‘Because I ran away from home, obviously.’
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘She lives near here. Not so far from your house, actually. When I go out during the day, I wear girl’s clothes, it’s safer that way. But I can’t stand skirts. When I was little, I didn’t mind dressing up like a girl at all, though.’
Hiro said he didn’t know where she’d found him, but his mother had been living with a man. Apparently, he stayed hidden up in the attic so no one would find out. It was a big place on the outskirts of town and the neighbours were pretty far away, so he would go for walks in the garden at night. Then one winter he died of some disease. They couldn’t take him to the doctor, naturally.
When she got pregnant, his mother had asked a friend who worked at the hospital to forge a permit for her. Then a few years later the other woman had used that favour to blackmail her.
‘In your case, they probably couldn’t arrange a permit like that. Take a look at the birthplace listed in your family register sometime. I bet it gives the address of the detention centre where your mother’s being held.’
I had even opened up to him about that. But because he’d shown himself to me, he was vulnerable too, so I wasn’t worried.
When it got to be around noon, Hiro got out some bread and juice. Apparently, his mother brought him food sometimes, and other times he would go out and buy it himself, dressed as a girl.
When we were finished, I took a cigarette out of my bag. He told me he’d never smoked one, and I showed him how. It made him dizzy, I guess, and he fell over backwards. He wasn’t getting back up, so eventually I leaned over and peered at his face. Suddenly he hugged me, then flipped me over and pinned me down like we were wrestling. At first, I thought he was just messing around. But he wasn’t. Not in the slightest. Hiro wasn’t messing around at all.
I spent the rest of that day learning the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life. Learning it with my body.
When I got home that evening a little after seven, my sister was already there.
‘You’re mighty late.’
Without a word, I started to go upstairs.
‘What about dinner?’
‘I ate at my friend’s house.’
I went up to my room and collapsed onto the bed.
‘There’s something off about this society. Women and women? What kind of a world is that?’
Hiro had said this as I was leaving to go home. He’d been rough, but he had also been tender in his own way. He said it had to stay our secret, but that was obvious. He also said that what we did was natural. Maybe so, but what a dreadful thing it was!
I plunked my elbows down on the desk and spaced out. Then I smoked one of my precious cigarettes.
Asako came in without warning.
‘I’ve been knocking for a while, why didn’t you answer? And where did you get that? Aha, so you’re the little sneak thief.’
‘What do you want?’ I replied finally, frowning.
‘Grandma’s calling for you.’
I stood up lethargically.
Why the hell would Grandma be calling for me at this hour?
‘Can’t you just tell her I don’t feel well?’
‘No, I can’t,’ declared my sister sternly. How could she be so self-assured? There were things in this life she didn’t have a clue about. But it’s precisely because they don’t know about the dreadful stuff that ignorant people are able to be so confident. But that glittering gaze of hers still somehow made me feel small.
‘What’s wrong with you? You seem out of it.’
‘Nothing, I’m fine.’
She could never imagine what I had done. She didn’t have the knowledge or experience. In fact, Asako would most likely live out the rest of her life without ever experiencing that dreadful, spine-tingling thing for herself. And she was lucky. I could never tell anyone the unthinkable truth I had learned that afternoon.
Grandma was sitting in an enormous chair, eating candy. Her skirt was immoderately short. So short that when I opened the door, for a second I thought she wasn’t wearing one at all.
‘I was going through my wardrobe, and I found some of the clothes I used to wear when I was young. What do you think? Funny, huh?’
Was she going senile or something? I shook my head.
‘Oh, come on, it’s kind of funny.’
‘No, it’s not.’
Neither of us spoke for a while. I stood by the wall, staring at my slippered feet.
‘I’m sorry to say I’m not all that hard of hearing,’ Grandma finally said. ‘I heard a strange little bird this morning, and it took my granddaughter away with it.’
She must know everything.
‘Asako’s different, but you’re just like your mother. You’d best let that go, though. That man isn’t there anymore, anyway.’
Recalling something Hiro had said to me, I was overcome with tears.
This is what he said: ‘Humans are animals, we pair up to mate. And two women can’t do that, it’s gotta be a man and a woman. You and me, for instance, the two of us, living out our lives together. Relying on each other. I think my mother was happy. And my father too, of course.’
‘What did Mother do?’
I asked my grandma the one question I was never supposed to ask. I had never put it into words before. I was sure that the answer was somehow connected to what Hiro had said.
‘The same thing you did, more or less. And because of that, my daughter was taken from me. That time I accepted it because it was what she wanted, and I even helped her, but not this time. Not with you, not at this age. You’re safe now, though. I took care of it. I expect that man is already in the Terminal Occupancy Zone by now. Your sister doesn’t know anything about it, though, and she doesn’t need to, so keep it to yourself.’
I nodded.
‘Alright then, I’ll show you something neat. Open up that box on the right-hand side of the wardrobe and look inside. Dammit, can’t even listen to records in the open anymore.’
Grandma closed the window and put on a record. It was totally unexpected; I’d had no idea we had such a luxury item as a record player in our house.
We sat there until eight, listening to the Rolling Stones and the Blues Project and the Golden Cups.
‘What is it, anyway?’ I asked, thinking about everything that had happened.
‘An adolescent fantasy. But it’s over now,’ my grandma answered in a condescending tone.
When I returned to my room, I noticed that my anguish was almost entirely gone. Women and women. Just as it should be. But now that I’ve learned about that thing, I know I’ll think of it often. For the next ten years. Twenty even. Poor Hiro, though, locked up in the GETO, rendered apathetic and feeble-minded – he might very well forget. I took out my diary. I didn’t care anymore, I would write the truth about what had happened that day.
And yet … I put the pen down again before I was done. Now that I know about that thing, how can I ever be happy? To doubt this world is a crime. Everyone but everyone believes implicitly in this world, in this reality. I and I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs.
Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday.
Shuddering, I turned back to my diary.
Someday, surely someday … something will happen. Still shuddering, I finished the entry.