Masatsugu Ono - Lion Cross Point

But wearing the same clothes every day or not taking a bath didn’t kill people. Takeru thought of his time in Akeroma. One morning when it was cold and the days were short, Joel came to visit them. He brought his few household items and gave them to Takeru, along with a folded ten-thousand-yen note. The blankets had a spicy smell. After that, every time he thought of Joel that smell came back to him. Joel told him he was going home for Christmas, and that he might not be able to come back to Japan. There was sadness in his large eyes. Takeru wondered how Joel knew he might not be able to come back, so he asked. Joel replied, in his slow, stumbling Japanese. He seemed to be saying that if he left Japan he might not be allowed back in. He used words like “permit” and “visa,” which Takeru didn’t understand, even in Japanese. Unless someone was dead, why would they be unable to come back? Takeru was already in the village by the sea when he heard about the big earthquake that had happened early in the New Year. The name of the country seemed familiar, and although it had been over six months since the disaster happened, Mitsuko found an article for him about it in an old newspaper. The Chinese characters in the article were too complex for Takeru to understand everything, but the map looked familiar and he got that over three hundred thousand people had been killed. The number was beyond Takeru’s imagination. Was that the country Joel came from? He wasn’t sure. For all Takeru knew, Joel might be back in Akeroma by now, worried that Takeru and his brother weren’t there or, perhaps, relieved they weren’t.

A strong gust of wind blew down the hill, dispersing the smell of Joel and lifting the sheet on the laundry pole. The sheet gave a flapping sound like the wings of a large bird, though its movement was more like the squirm of someone concealing something under their coat. The young woman was busy hanging out more laundry. Neither Takeru nor Saki could take their eyes off of her and the baby on her back. Takeru began to feel hot at the back of his neck. Perhaps it was sunlight filtering through the mass of leaves, or perhaps it was the gaze of the monkey in the tree. The baby started to cry. The mother left the laundry for a moment and turned around.

The baby stopped crying.

The mother didn’t seem to see Takeru and Saki. If Takeru felt the power of the monkey’s gaze behind him, why couldn’t the mother notice his own burning stare?

It was the baby. That’s why she didn’t notice. The baby could feel his gaze, but it wasn’t crying yet. Takeru stared harder.

It began to fidget.

That’s it! Be miserable!

Don’t! Don’t do that!

But Takeru didn’t listen. He knew that whatever Bunji said, even if it sounded negative, was an affirmation of everything about him.

The baby bawled. But time was running faster now, and so the mother’s reaction was fast too. She’d already turned away from the laundry pole.

Perhaps that’s what Takeru had wanted to see her do. Perhaps that’s why he’d put so much effort into his stare.

The mother turned around. But not, of course, to meet Takeru’s gaze.

The baby wasn’t going to share its mother with anybody. It monopolized the mother’s attention and entirely negated anybody else who might be staring at her longingly. It was as though Takeru had been staring at the baby, trying to make it miserable, because he had wanted to see the mother’s emotion channeled toward it, her love bound to it.

It made Takeru want to cry. But no, maybe his sadness came just from seeing the baby’s impotence—though it cried with all its might, its whole body convulsing, it was, in this vast world, entirely helpless. But Takeru was helpless too. Perhaps he was sad because the baby’s crying made him realize just how helpless and alone he was.

“Sounds healthy, don’t it?” Saki said.

Her voice brought Takeru back to earth.

“It’s doing its job… crying,” he said.

“It’s so cute!” said Saki, though she couldn’t see the baby’s face.

“Babies have one other job too,” said Takeru. “Do you know what that is?”

“No,” said Saki.

“Don’t just say no… Think!”

Saki crossed her arms and cocked her head. A mischievous look came to her eye.

“Poopin’.”

“Bull’s-eye!” said Takeru, laughing loudly.

“Shh,” said Saki, putting her finger to her lips, “she’ll notice us.”

But the woman seemed conscious only of her crying baby—all other sounds were blocked out entirely. She cradled it in her arms, not looking up the hill once. Yo-i yoi, yo-i yoi, she chanted, swaying the child from side to side. The cry seemed out of keeping with her youthful appearance, her neat, dyed-brown hair. It sounded like an old person’s. But why?

The newly washed sheet must have been heavy, but it moved easily in the wind, as though the sun had already dried it out. It rose and fell like a wave, and with it the mother’s loving voice bobbed gently up and down: Yo-i yoi, yo-i yoi . The baby’s crying gradually faded away, breaking up like smoke in the wind. Takeru’s body shook, tickled by rising laughter. He inhaled deeply, and as the smell of grass and leaves flowed through his nose to his chest, he no longer felt the helplessness of a baby. Yo-i yoi, yo-i yoi.

The hill of the graveyard behind the temple was not that high, but the view extended over the head priest’s residence to the houses beyond. Windows and roofs glared with reflected sunlight. The telephone wires linking the houses swayed from time to time, shaking off birds and the clinging air. Farther away was the sea. The sea and the sky slumbered like twin beasts, their breath, heat, and bodies kneaded inseparably together. Time too lay still. Takeru had a strange feeling that he wasn’t here. No, Takeru was here. He was here, but it seemed as if “here” was inside someone else’s memory. Yo-i yoi, yo-i yoi. The mother’s tender, gentle, soothing voice wrapped around him, lifting him up from a place higher and further than the light of the sun, and taking him away. If Takeru were inside someone else’s dream, that person hadn’t noticed him. The clear sunlight played with the shining tiles. It squabbled with the shadows, jostling to be the confidant of the green leaves and grass that quivered and whispered in the wind. But Takeru was not noticed. He wanted to lift his hand and wave.

Because he feels uneasy being forgotten? Is that why he wants to wave? No, that doesn’t frighten him at all. But doesn’t he feel uneasy waving, when this isn’t his place? He doesn’t know. But he wants to communicate that he is here. He simply wants to declare the fact that he is filled by something big, strong, and positive. Hey!… Hey!

But then he heard a voice.

There was something like hatred in it. And it shot him out of the sky. Irrespective of whether this was his place or not, his mind had been expanding to cover the entire world. But the voice stopped that.

Takeru turned around. The monkey in the tree was beaming, laughing, its canines jutting from its ecstatic mouth, its bright red face strangely contorted. Perhaps it had been into the liquor on the graves. Takeru immediately turned his back. He stumbled and almost fell. Was he drunk from the monkey’s stare?

Takeru was laughing. Laughing, sounding happy. And it wasn’t just Takeru and the monkey—the laughter in the air was so loud and boisterous it was as if all the dead in the graveyard might have been laughing too. It whirled around inside his head. He could hear nothing else. He could not hear the cicadas. Where were the mewing kittens? Was the baby crying? The flapping of the sheets and diapers in the wind… he couldn’t hear them either. No, he could. He could hear all sounds. And so he could hear nothing. He could think about nothing.