冬
You can swear you only looked away for a second.
You took the train from Yokohama because Kenzō wouldn’t stop talking about that cathedral in Tokyo, the one that had burned and come back with wings, and because there’s a bookstore nearby that imports foreign journals in brown-paper bundles. It was supposed to be one day. You planned the route, the transfers, even how long you’d let him stare at the department store windows.
Tokyo in December is dry and too loud. Cold air in your throat, crowds that swallow you like the sea. A hand on your bag, a hand on his wrist, the timetable in your head—and then his hand isn’t there.
You turn once, twice—too slow—and suddenly Tokyo is enormous, the lights are too close, and Kenzō is gone.
You were on Yasukuni-dōri when Kenzō started snooping toward the side street—because ever since the little Catholic nursery near your house, he’s been talking to that priest, and you’re more and more skeptical about the shūkyō he brings home—those tidy little morality stories about being good, being kind, helping people—like life is that simple—and you told him you needed to go further.
He made a face, but he obeyed, his hand still inside yours. And the next second he was gone.
You push through people, you call his name once, too loud, and taste how stupid and small it sounds here, you force yourself to stop, to breathe, to look lower, where a child would be, where Kenzō would be, not where your eyes usually sit. Paper lanterns, beer crates, beaded curtains, cigarette smoke, the sweet-sour smell of spilled beer, you hate these smells, you follow them anyway.
You go through a narrow doorway, there’s a—she’s one of these—you see the big blond hair, and the sharp shapes under the powder—oh thank heaven—this person is holding Kenzō’s hands, bent down so he doesn’t slip away again, talking to him calmly, like she’s practiced at keeping children from bolting.
You grab him and pull him in, too hard. You give him a big hug. You check all his fingers like they might have gone missing too—thumb, index, middle, ring, little—then the other hand, again, because your head won’t accept it the first time.
And then you stop. You can go back to your usual control.
You thank the—the woman, properly. Up close you see eyes narrowed, mouth set, like she’s bracing for you to start shouting. But you don’t.
She looks at Kenzō, then at you, and the worry loosens into a smile.
Outside, you tell him quietly what happens next time—you go home without him. He goes pale, the corner of his mouth trembling.
If Kenzō were your ex-husband’s son, you’d have to cushion him first, before you went back home, before your ex-husband heard about it and decided the little escapade needed correcting. With your current husband, you have to be the one who tightens things, because otherwise Kenzō will grow up thinking his kindness puts him above everyone.
春
The morning smells of grilled fish and coffee; the rice is topped with shirasu. The futons are folded away, the castella from yesterday is cut into neat slices on a plate. The newspaper waits at your husband’s place at the table, another piece of reality for him to unfold and underline with his eyes, and beside it a slim German textbook for Kenzō.
The home needs to be perfect and spotless: no dust on the low table, shoes lined up by the door, ashtrays emptied before your husband even thinks to look. You can’t allow yourself sloppiness. You are not a young, never-divorced mother like the office girl at his hospital.
You watch them both get ready for their Saturday: your husband folding his second son’s letter back into its envelope without reading it twice, then buttoning his white shirt for a case conference and a bit of paperwork at the hospital, and Kenzō combing his hair in the hall mirror, smoothing it down with hair liquid for a date after classes—another one that will turn the light in his eyes into something stale by the time he comes back.
The girl is from the kind of house where you learn to pour tea without a sound and apologize before you’re asked—top of her class at the girls’ school, already used to steering her younger brother back into line like it’s routine.
When Kenzō comes back, you bring him miso soup with asari clams. He’s on the Yamaha acoustic in the corner, playing the same quiet city song as always after a date—the one with the woman’s low voice and the plain guitar; the lyrics soft enough he only ever listens to it with the headphones plugged into the stereo, too tender for the loud Western bands his friends love and you hate.
When Kenzō thanks you for the soup, he sets the guitar down and gives you that small, earnest bow, and for a moment the melancholic teenager turns into the sweet little boy who used to hide under your kotatsu blanket. The contrast is so clear: his arigatō gozaimasu still reaches you. You don’t want it to thin out into your husband’s polite, automatic dōmo, tossed in your direction without him even looking up from the bank forms his older son left spread across the table.
Your husband comes back later than he planned to. You don’t mind the stranger’s smell soaked into his shirt and hair—you catch sharp soap and menthol-cool, and under it milk candy sweetness—you mind him thinking his name is the only one on the paper.
夏
You go through Kenzō’s room on a regular basis; all is, of course, a housewife’s job.
The cicadas rasp outside, and the air coming in from the veranda is warm and smells of hot dust and rice straw. You move his shirt off the chair, pick up a tankōbon with a wide-eyed boy mid-sprint, knees high—drawn so clean and earnest it makes you suspicious—and stack it back with the exam-prep books and the medical texts.
You don’t find what other mothers would call concerning. Instead, you find a book buried flat beneath the manga and medical books—a novel that leaves you with an ugly picture in your head: Kenzō still young, still handsome, but with a ruin in his head and soul and a knife through his stomach.
You take the book, wrap it in paper, and dust it with salt.
You go on a long walk. The wind shifts once and brings brine and ship diesel. The book’s ink stays hidden inside your head.
You pass a boy in a rubber mask, too big for his face, and you remember the one time Kenzō came back upset from school; protecting a bullied boy from his classmates was so much harder than protecting someone from a teacher.
Your husband told Kenzō he’d done the right thing. He said it was kind, yes. Then he asked, calmly, who saw. Whether a teacher saw. Whether the other boys’ parents saw. Then he said future hospital directors don’t sit next to the child everyone laughs at, and straightened Kenzō’s collar with careful approval.
Your neck bristles as his words ring in your ears, so clear it’s as if his voice has swallowed your own.
You fill the empty space on Kenzō’s shelf with a German article on SDAT nursing care.
秋
With typhoon warnings crawling across the TV, dinner goes the way it always goes. Your husband talks about the hospital in the calm future tense he uses when he means something is settled—when Kenzō takes over, when the staff gets used to it. You wait until he looks satisfied. Then you pour him more tea and say his second son would be better suited—better with staff, better at smoothing things over, less likely to disappear into one patient and forget the rest.
Kenzō doesn’t argue. He listens. Then he says, carefully, that he’s found a German paper published in a medical journal written by a professor whose name he pronounces with one-stroke precision. He says he’ll leave the hospital to his brother and go study in Germany instead.
Your husband thanks you for the tea without looking at Kenzō. His expression settles into the pleasant blankness he uses with staff. He inclines his head toward you—or toward the room—a note too formally.
After that, Germany becomes possible.
At night, your husbands hand closes around yours and strokes it, and you feel his breath in the quiet quiver of his body against yours.
無
You escort Kenzō to the airport—your husband isn’t there, but his older sons are, in his place, like guarantors.
You hope Germany won’t be Kenzō’s last point—you know it has its own shigarami. But at least it has more exits.
You take his hands. You try to fix the weight and warmth of them in your memory, the way his fingers still curl around yours like they did when he was small. Then you cup his face—thumbs on the high line of his cheekbones, the skin under his eyes, and a brief press along the bridge of his nose, to remember how he looks now, before Germany and whatever comes after.
You breathe in—controlled—and it catches; you let it out too slowly, blinking less, keeping your hands steady on his face while trying not to dig your nails into his skin.
Just before Kenzō turns to go, one brother slips a small wrapped bundle into his hand. You catch a glimpse of the item: the weathered black cover of a German–Japanese dictionary, the same edition that sat on your husband’s desk for years. Kenzō’s fingers tighten around it.
You hope this isn’t the last time you see your little boy.
teach me how to play Rabbit Nabokov 