When Hannae and I returned to Tokyo, Grandpa thought it best that I go back to school as quickly as possible. In those weeks, he came to collect me himself. When he could not come he sent Hannae and she held my hand all the way home. I was not to go with anyone else, Grandpa told me, not even a friend. I was therefore surprised when my father walked into the classroom one day. I had not seen him since the divorce, and even before then, his mercurial presence in my life had always been rather sporadic. Like so many salarymen he worked long hours, he was rarely at home, and my school was certainly not his domain; it was yet another place where he was defined by his absence, by the groups my mother socialised with before and after their separation. Before it, she had chatted with the married mothers at school functions, and after it, she joined the single mothers who talked of having to be both ‘Mum and Dad’, who lifted their kids onto their own shoulders at Disneyland because there was no man to do it for them. I had only ever known Mama to lift me in any case.
My father took a while to locate me. His eyes scanned the circular tables and the children seated in the small blue chairs and he frowned when he could not find me, for I was not sitting at a table; I was standing in a corner of the room, alone.
That morning we had been given a test. It would evaluate how our minds worked, they told us. This exercise replaced our usual calligraphy lesson, and I had felt surprisingly energised and curious. We took our places at the tables, and I squirmed and fidgeted trying to get comfortable. I put my knees on the chair and knelt, leaning over my sheet of paper. I looked with interest at the other children, at the tests that would map out each of our minds, but I gasped as the teacher hauled me off my seat, lifting me by the hand. She accused me of cheating.
At the mid-morning break I was allowed to tidy the school with the others. We worked in pairs to sweep the halls and empty the bins before collecting our cups of juice from the canteen. Still people stared at me, and after the break I was told to stand in the corner once more. From that day on, rumours spread around the school that I was becoming a difficult child. It was my first experience of being judged.
I watched my father speak with the teacher and wondered if she had been the one to call him. I wondered if Grandpa knew how bad I had been. I had seen other parents of naughty children bowing repeatedly in such a manner, and I grimaced. My father glanced at where I was standing in the corner of the room and snapped his fingers at me, gesturing to my bag and coat. He did not speak as he led me outside to his car.
‘I wasn’t cheating,’ I whispered.
‘What?’
‘I didn’t cheat,’ I said more forcefully.
My father sighed and turned the car keys in the ignition. ‘Try to behave yourself, Sumiko.’
I was quiet as we drove through the city and into a residential area of low condominiuMs We stopped outside a large building with cream walls and brown glass windows. It reminded me of the place they took us for juku, the cram school I now attended so that I would get into the right secondary school. All the children I knew came to juku – we called it ‘Future Club’ – and every day we gathered together in the sports hall for the afternoon chant. We stood in rows, hundreds of us, red and white bandanas tied tight around our heads, shouting the same statement into the air: ‘I will get into Myonichi Gakuen!’ This gakuen was everyone’s goal, the best secondary school in Tokyo; the name means ‘School of Tomorrow’. And so inside a cavernous hall, throughout the year, we shouted every afternoon as though force of will is all it takes. What I learned is that people rely on reiterative ideas and statements; they ask the same questions and repeat the same thoughts, as though comfort might be found there.
My father entered the building and I followed closely behind him. A model of Peepo, the mascot for the Metropolitan Police force, stood on the main desk. Peepo is a tubby orange fairy from a family of orange fairies. He has large ears so he can listen to the populace, big eyes to see around every corner, and an antenna to sense the mood of the city. This one was stuffed and covered in felt. I was reaching up to touch him when the officer bowed to my father and opened a panel door in the main desk to let us through.
The room we were taken to contained a greyscale map of Tokyo that spanned one wall. Before he left, my father took me by the shoulders. ‘Just tell the truth, Sumiko.’ He looked at me closely, his hands gripping me hard through the cotton of my blouse. ‘The truth,’ he said.
Alone, I studied the map above my head, following the sprawl of the city as it spread over the bay, the skein of streets stretching out like a tracery of my mother’s palm. I wondered where she was on that map, where her body might be. When Grandpa first told me she was dead, I had refused to believe him. When I was not permitted to see her, this suspicion only grew, and it blossomed when Hannae and I went away and my mother’s funeral took place without me.
I started as the door to the room opened and I was joined by a woman in a white silk blouse and black skirt. She carried an oversized jacket stuffed with shoulder pads. Chunky gold earrings hung from her ears, and as she moved I smelled a sweet, cloying perfume that intensified and stuck in my throat.
The woman put her arm around me and smiled; she spoke in a high chivvying voice. She drew me towards a low table and placed a file in front of me. It was made of brown card and it contained pictures of my parents. She began to ask me about my mother. I moved away from her and sat cross-legged on the floor, but she joined me, awkward in her high heels. Had I met anyone new at my home? I shook my head. She began to ask me about my grandfather. Was he a good grandpa? Did I like living with him?
When I remained silent, she began to flick through the photographs. She showed me an apartment I did not know and a small bedroom, partially decorated and painted pink with a border of silver stars on the two finished walls. There was a single bed and a white bookshelf, empty except for a copy of Where the Wild Things Are; my mother used to read it to me when I was small, but I had not heard it for some time.
The woman showed me a photograph of a man I did not recognise and one of a man I did – he was a friend of my mother’s. She leaned towards me and the scent of her perfume struck up a throbbing pain in my head. I said nothing. I hated her.
After a time, the woman fetched some paper and crayons from a cupboard in the corner of the room and placed them before me, watching as I began to draw the things my mother had taught me: circles for faces, petals for orchids, the things her own mother had taught her. The woman knelt once more, looking at my drawings, but when I began to sketch the plants in our greenhouse in Shimoda, her impatience returned. She started to lay out the photographs again, one by one, asking me if I had seen the pink bedroom. In the end, she pulled out a final photograph of the man I recognised. He was standing next to my mother with an arm around her shoulders. She pointed at him, jabbing at his face with her manicured nail. ‘Do you know this man, Sumiko? Do you?’
I looked at the photograph, at the two of them smiling together with dabs of pink paint on their faces. I stared at the picture and wondered if my mother could truly be dead. It was hard to believe that she would leave me; indeed, I have always felt her with me, throughout my life. Always there, just out of reach. Grandpa took me to our family tomb and said that Mama was resting inside, but I could not imagine my vibrant mother in a ceramic jar, reduced to ash. The woman kept on asking, stabbing at the photo with her finger. Eventually, I pulled it into my mouth and bit her, feeling the crunch of flesh between my teeth.