Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

The smell of grilling fish came wafting down the corridor together with his mother’s voice. “Food’s ready, Yoshio.”

On the table was an extra rice dish and plate of fish. “Is someone else coming?” Kita inquired.

“It’s your father’s portion,” his mother said.

She’d never in the past gone through this kind of performance. Perhaps she just wanted to pay her respects to the dead there today?

Kita stirred the miso soup about with his chopsticks. It contained some slivers of the dried white radish, sliced onion leaves, and seaweed flakes. His mother had made this soup without a saucepan. She had just put the stock powder and miso into a bowl, added the reconstituted white radish, then poured boiling water from the kettle over it all and stirred, finally adding the onion leaves and seaweed.

“This was the way to make miso soup that you came up with so that Dad could make it even on his own, wasn’t it Mum?”

“That’s right. He really liked it.”

“I guess you used to make it this way before they ever started selling instant miso soup in packets, eh? It’s quite an invention.”

“In the days before stock powder, I used to use Ajinomoto. This mackerel’s good. So who’d you get the food from?”

“I bought it at Atami. Like I told you.”

“What did you go to Atami for? You’re not into shoplifting again, are you?”

“Shoplifting dried fish? I’m not a cat, you know.”

“You on holiday today?”

“I’ve taken some time off. Till Friday.”

“What’ll you do with all that spare time? Planning to get up to some mischief, I’ll be bound.”

What could she be imagining? The conversation wasn’t going too well so far. “Come on, let’s stop messing about, eh?” he said, forcing a smile. “You’re throwing me off.” Then he looked at her face. He hadn’t really gotten a good look at her face when he first arrived, but now he saw that his mother’s eyes were somehow misty, and when she looked at her son’s face, she did so with the kind of straight gaze a child would use. She was close to sixty, so no doubt her eyesight was getting poorer and her field of vision narrowing, but there was something completely innocent about her look. Then there was that bewildered look on her face, as if she wasn’t quite catching on.

When he was fourteen, Kita had realized there was no fooling his mother. He’d fallen in with bad friends, and gotten into shoplifting. At the time, he’d felt his survival hinged on his loyalty to these friends. He was balanced precisely on the boundary between the bullies and the bullied, and every action was monitored and judged by the “gang.” Ultimately, what it amounted to was that Kita had managed to ensure his own safety by committing a series of deeds encouraged by the gang, but it had not been without pain. He had of course felt guilty when the gang first enticed him into shoplifting, but once he’d complied with their demands, he’d have been branded a traitor if he attempted to pull out again, so he could only do his best to stick with them and not make any blunders.

If I’m going to shoplift, Kita thought, I should go for something cheap at least. He’d also got it into his head that it was somehow less sinful to steal a book than food or clothing or stationery. He was probably simply balancing appetite for food against appetite for learning, judging that it was better to sate the latter. He was in this thing unwillingly, and he wanted at least to be able to make distinctions where he could. In contrast, his friends were only interested in shoplifting for its own sake, and saw greater value in stealing something difficult.

Still, it was amazing how his mother had picked up on his shoplifting. He didn’t think he’d been acting particularly guiltily around the sitting room.

He tried asking his mother about it now, as she poked at her dried fish. “How did you know I was shoplifting? Back when I was in second grade, remember?”

“Intuition. Your feelings always show on your face. If you’ve got anything to hide, you suddenly clam up and lose your appetite. You’ve been that way since you were little. If you didn’t like someone’s question, your nose would twitch. You get that honesty from your father. When you were doing that shoplifting you had no appetite at all, did you? You did eat up all the eel, it’s true, but you left the rice with the gravy on it. Then you went straight off to your room after dinner. Then there was this book that you wouldn’t have been able to buy on your pocket money.”

“Oh yeah, that book of Dali’s paintings. That was really hard to steal.”

“It was a real shock to me. But you gave it up right away, didn’t you? You started Zen meditation instead. You must have had a guilty conscience.”

“No, actually I was doing it as a kind of sport.”

“But that zazen gave you a bit more staying power, don’t you agree? You had that classmate who committed suicide. Miura, wasn’t it? If he’d done some zazen he’d still be alive today, instead of going off and killing himself on a passing impulse. Such a pity, when he could’ve had good things happen in his life. It was a great shame.”

Let’s change the subject, thought Kita uncomfortably. Still, come to think of it, why was she hauling out this long-gone incident right now?

“I don’t care whether it’s for sports or whatever, but you should keep up the zazen .”

“I gave it up long ago.”

“How come? You’ve only just begun.”

It was twenty years ago that he’d gone along to the temple in Azabu to do zazen . It was exactly twenty years ago that Miura had committed suicide. Had she remembered it through an association with shoplifting leading to the zazen ?

Could it be possible that she suspected he was planning to kill himself this coming Friday, he wondered a trifle uneasily as he sipped his cold miso soup. The taste of the soup was just as it used to be. He could guarantee that it was made by his mother. Only his mother would be capable of making a soup like this. So it stood to reason it could only be his mother sitting in front of him now, he thought.

His mother seemed to be harbouring some doubts about whether this man was her son or not, as well. There’d been no particular strangeness there when he’d called in four months ago. Of course, there’d never been any hint of a need to reconfirm that they were indeed and undoubtedly mother and son. They just were, without saying so.

No, maybe what was disturbing her so much now was the kind of sharp intuition that came precisely from her being his mother. Did he really look so suspicious?

Whatever, he couldn’t stay long. His plan had been to just drop in, have a meal, and leave again. But his mother seemed to find something dubious in the way he was behaving. She drew a deep breath, and finally decided to speak.

“You’re very quiet. What are you hiding? You’ve been acting strange ever since you got here.”

Rather than go over the same conversation again, Kita said, “Do I look to you as though I want to die?”

There was no way to guess what his mother was thinking, but she looked like she’d seen through him somehow. Kita pulled a funny face, in an attempt to cover up his thoughts. But his mother barely glanced at him. Eyes down, she murmured, “No, I was just thinking how quickly people age. You must be tired, surely? You seem to have aged six years in three months. Is anything worrying you?”

“I feel like I look about normal for my age really. Surely you haven’t forgotten how old I am?”

His mother looked puzzled, and said nothing. She picked up the thermos and topped up the teapot with hot water in an apparent attempt to fill the silence. Then she turned over the two cups that were sitting face down on the tray and, pouring tea by turns into each, she murmured, “I thought you were your father when you first arrived.”