This is the second part of Mutou's arc from my post-Lilly-neutral-end mosaic, 'After the Dream'.
It has been overhauled a fair bit, hence the designation 2.1 — it is much like the original part 2, but expanded.
In the AtD continuity, it takes place in 2012, between this part of Rika's story, and this part of Emi's arc.
Mutou 2: Choices of Life (T -12)
They sit together as they once used to, but now everything is awkward, and you would be able to see the strain on their faces, if you were there as an observer—which strictly speaking, you are not. This is the summer break, and they would have spent it happily together, if this were only twenty years ago—but it is not.
Akio Mutou knows this lady well, well enough to know that there are unusual circumstances about all this, and that there is a touch of fate and destiny in the air. And he waits, because he has always waited for her, even after there was nothing left to wait for.
*****
“Michi, how have you been?”
I look carefully at her face, perhaps with greater care than I used to. It is an altogether too familiar face, in some ways. Her slightly round face is still smooth and fair even without makeup; it tapers gently down to a small familiar chin, still sharp and firm. Her hair is still that lovely almost-gold chestnut-brown that runs in that particular branch of her bloodline, the legacy of a gene that’s rare in our race. She has not bothered with dye, and age has not silvered her.
“Well, the sense of failure does not go away easily. I know I was always a bad wife. It had nothing to do with my husband, apparently.”
I wince. Michiko’s tongue has not been blunted by time. The fact that her beauty remains as clear and sharp as her speech continues to pit my emotions against each other. I let the feelings fight while the rest of me concentrates. I toy idly with some of the excellent sashimi.
“Michi, I have always been sorry for losing you. You know that. I was not a good husband. But I still have care for your well-being, and that is why I am here.”
“Perhaps, despite what has passed between us. Akio, I’m moving back to Japan. That’s why I decided I should have a talk with you first.”
A lump of burning ice fills me. You might think a man of science would not respond like that, but you would be wrong. My love is deeply-buried, yet not lost. I have merely left it alone and starved it to sleep. Now here it is again, looking at me with a dangerous longing.
I let out my breath slowly. She is looking at me as if she expects a rebuff, or maybe anger, or blank incomprehension that would be a lie. All I feel is a great, sad, tiredness. I feel like a whale heading into the deep to die.
“Go ahead, Michi. I will listen. The gods know I never did enough of that before.”
She looks fiercely at me, but also sadly.
“I asked you out for dinner just to clear things up between us. We’re not ever getting back together again, I think, and you should know this. But because I’ll be around, one or both of us might be tempted. I don’t want to make that mistake again.”
I am hurt, but years of watching the angst of high-school students have hardened the windows of my soul. No tears, this time. Just the legendary Mutou half-smile.
“I understand,” I say, firm in my resolve. A man can only lose the most precious thing in his life once, after all.
She stares at me, then nods.
“Good.”
We relax a little, assiduously pick at the food before us, good stuff which really shouldn’t be wasted. She breaks the silence first.
“How are things at Yamaku?”
*****
My mind drifts back eight years, to a time when I dressed neatly, drove conservatively, and spent more time talking to people. We are at this same restaurant, which is rare, since we have been having difficulties, as they say.
“Akio, it’s a small favour for the family.”
“Whose idea was it to send her to Yamaku?”
“Where else would she go? Her previous school was problematic. Her parents are also problematic.”
“And so Aunty Michiko is now legal guardian?”
“You know it doesn’t work that way. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“There’ll be no nepotism. Just remind her that I’m not ‘Uncle Akio’ or something like that.”
“Akio, you are her uncle.”
“I’m her aunt’s husband. Michi, I’m also a professional. I know how things work around here, and I don’t want them to work the way they usually do. Listen, I’ll look after her, but nobody is to know. I don’t want to be owing favours to others, and I don’t want your family thinking they owe me favours either.”
“Yes, it’s always professionalism with you, isn’t it? You’re always better than others, a model teacher. I think you love your job more than you love me.”
She smiles, thin-lipped, really angry now. There are two deep red spots in her cheeks, but her face is as white as a Noh mask. I remember this particular conversation in great detail. Throughout, she never raises her voice. It’s the way she was brought up, I think inanely to myself.
“I shall be sure not to mention any more such matters to my excellent husband. One should not fill a busy man’s time with family trivia.”
I begin to reply, perhaps even to apologise. But she moves her hand just a little bit, as if to show that I’d be wasting my time.
“Thank you for dinner. I am so sorry, Mutou-sensei, to have wasted your time.”
I nod stiffly, my pride hurt. I say nothing, and to this day, I regret that.
And she is gone again. In hindsight, there won’t be many more such occasions, before she is gone for good. For the Akio Mutou of that time was a damned fool.
*****
Back in the present, we’ve been talking a while. It’s the kind of conversation in which one person has asked a question to be polite and the other person is answering to be equally polite, and both are getting nowhere. I think I’ve brought her up to date on Yamaku and the last few years.
“She liked you, you know.”
I smile apologetically. In the past, the old Mutou wouldn’t have heard a thing; he’d be totting up test scores in his head, planning the next semester’s lab projects, all the little things that brought his marriage to the brink of death.
“My apologies, Michi; I beg your pardon. You were saying?”
She actually smiles back.
“Accepted. I was saying that she used to tell me how you were such an interesting character, and that most students came to like you. Apparently she used to tell new students this.”
“Really? That’s sweet… but it does make me a little uncomfortable.”
“Come on, Akio. She made every effort to avoid you, and I’m certain nobody knew she was your niece. I told her you’d be angry if anyone found out, and she said in a very solemn voice that she wouldn’t want to make you angry because she wanted to grow up and marry someone like you.”
I grimace. Some wounds remain fresh for too long. Sometimes, they vent their poison into the future and ruin people’s lives.
“Ah. Well, it took me years to find out that there was another one of them. How was I supposed to connect the dots between your eldest sister and some angry little girl whose father refused to speak to me when she had problems in my class?”
Families. They can be the source of so much confusion and grief, when dysfunctional. Family events, a bad cluster of genes, a death too soon; all these things can make or break us. I remember the breaking point.
*****
“Akio, it’s bad news.”
“You had amniocentesis without telling me. How could it be good news?”
She moves her head as if I’ve slapped her. I feel terrible. But I don’t know what to feel, when I’m told something like this. The procedure can be dangerous, and I would have preferred that it had not been carried out.
In a very small voice, she says, “Our child has my fragile-type X. It runs in the family.”
“But the girls are fine.”
Then I realize what I’ve just said. The girls are fine because girls have two X-chromosomes, and if one is normal, it offsets or ‘covers up’ for the abnormal one.
“Yes, it’s a boy,” she whispers.
Working at Yamaku steels you to be a better teacher because you deal with human frailty and build normality out of it. If our hearts were broken each time that they should be, the Yamaku staff grave would be bottomless. But what if the child is yours? It is harder than it should be, I can say, because I’ve been there.
In Japanese males, ‘fragile-type X’ makes the child grow large and foreign-looking. There’s a tendency to autism, and many other neurological difficulties. Girls may suffer neurological deficits, but they generally work out fine.
Yet, this is not the breaking point. We will survive this. It’s a challenge that this version of Mutou-sensei can handle. His mistake is that he thinks of it as his own challenge, not theirs, shared. So what happens two months later bends our strained marriage, and then snaps it like a twig.
It’s just a bit further on, round a blind corner on our lives’ road. It’s right after we walk down the long hill from the small grave that should not be there. That’s where our one road becomes two, both sloping away in different directions.
And this is why, as our conversation moves on, old sorrows colour everything we say. How does one forget the death of a child who hasn’t been born? Is there such a thing? As I tell my students, you can assess a phenomenon from the effects it has on its surroundings, even if you can’t perceive it directly.
*****
“So how are they? They don’t know I’m here, and they’ve no reason to know.”
I’m snapped back into a more pleasant present. Michiko looks dignified, precise; she’s someone who knows where she’s going. There is a single star sapphire on a fine gold chain around her neck. I know it well.
“Your other niece has grown up a lot like you, but with dark hair. Your nephew has grown up looking a bit like your sister’s husband. They are both very bright and will go far.”
A thought crosses my mind.
“Did your family let them know about… us?”
“No, I don’t think they’ve put it together. Remember, my sister is… was more than a decade older than I. Nobody really cares about the youngest sister in the fairy-tales…”
Michiko looks down at her food. She absent-mindedly snares a morsel of pork and pops it into her mouth. There are crows’ feet beginning around her eyes. She doesn’t look at me after she swallows. Instead, she sips tea and pauses before continuing.
“She missed them a lot, you know. They were very young when she… left them. My brother was an ass about it later on; he said that since they were in the enemy
koseki, there’d be no point telling them. So she was buried before they could have known. A terrible thing to do to young people, I’ve always thought. His own daughter stormed out of the house and didn’t return for weeks. She was dragged home by the police.”
I listen. It is her story, not mine. What else can I do? Science or not, humans honour the dead. We have empathy, we feel for the living. And at the end, we all have our gods—of old chaos, of cheerful serendipity, of constancy and uncertainty. I’ve done what I can for my nieces, as I would have done for any of those placed in my care—one who has received it only as a teacher’s kindness, one who has pretended it was nothing because that’s what she was told to do.
“I believe your sister’s husband was profoundly affected. But she was no longer his wife when she died, and your brother ensured he had no outlet for his grief.”
“Well, that’s the past. I have nothing to do with that family, and apparently, not much more to do with mine either.”
“May I ask why that is?”
“Family matters. My brother can’t be bothered with Japan now, so I’ve taken possession of the northern residence. Bought it from him, the stingy bum. I’ll be there if you need me, but otherwise, don’t bother.”
It’s a bit hard-edged, even coming from her. I wait, because with Michiko, it’s always been better to wait.
She sighs. It’s a long, unsure kind of thing, almost forlorn, as if her breath doesn’t know quite what it wants to do.
“Akio, we did have good times. Your work, unfortunately, was too much for me. I still think of you as a friend. I think of myself as your friend. You need anything, I can be there for you.”
“I appreciate that. I do.”
Indeed, I do. I also note, with sadness, that it’s about my work, and not about the event that we cannot talk about.
“I’ve come to believe that we hurt each other, but there’s an end to that. So, friends. But not more, mind.”
I blink. It’s never easy figuring out a woman. You cannot just plug in the equations and calculate the right frequency and intensity of absorption.
“One last thing? I never told you, but I had to put you on the Register before we were married. You have as much a vote as any other Family member. You’re even qualified to hold Family assets or transact Family business. You deserve to know, Akio—you’re a decent man and there aren’t enough of them in the Families.”
I bow my head to her and I’m silent for a while. It’s a valuable confidence that my former wife has shared. I have nothing of comparable value to return to her.
She sees it confirmed on my face when I look up, but she has already sensed it.
“No, no. It’s something from long ago, it’s nothing new. But as you’ve always said, ‘information determines capacity; knowledge determines power’. Think of it as part of my family’s betrothal gifting.”
I smile at her, a more genuine version this time. I used to lecture her because it was the only way I knew how to speak to people. One day, she blew up at me for ‘treating her like a student’. It seems this is no longer a sore spot with her.
“Thank you, Michiko.”
As I settle payment, she digs around in her small black purse. I turn to her to see if I can help, but she only hands me a simple card with her name and some contact information on it.
“For emergencies only, Akio.”
She is beautiful in that dove-grey dress. Me, I have nothing left but Yamaku.
*****
It’s almost midnight when Goro’s call interrupts my journal-reading. I look up with a start. My notepad has little sketches of Michiko on it. I click my tongue with irritation and answer the phone.
“So, how was your date with the ex-wife?”
He sounds cheerful, which is more than I can say for myself.
“Good. Settled a lot of things, I think. How was yours with the not-wife?”
“Ha, you’ll never believe it. Meiko got rid of me because her daughter’s coming home tomorrow to stay for the weekend. Apparently Emi sounds as if she has something on her mind and Emi’s mother needs to sleep so that she’ll be ready for whatever it is.”
“Kaneshiro-san, how sad for you.”
“Mutou-san, not as sad as you must be.”
That hits a nerve. I look at my notepad again and absent-mindedly sip some brandy.
“Yes. Well, not all of us have opportunities to be Doctor-san and heal the world. I need to sleep too. Night.”
“Sleep well, old trenchcoat!”
I grimace and flick the phone off. And I think very carefully about Michiko’s gift. It means I am technically Family. I should be taking a greater interest in the doings of the other Families.
No, I don’t think I will be sleeping that well tonight.
=====
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