I was left alone after that. They didn’t even move me to another room. A young woman came in with a glass of water and I asked if I could see my father, but she only smiled at me and left. As the afternoon drew on, I curled myself into a ball on the floor and thought of my mother. I remembered her voice and the very last time I had heard it. She had called me at the house in Meguro. She was speaking quickly over the phone, rushed and breathless, but still my mother.
I had been waiting for her since I got back from school and I remembered holding the receiver beneath my chin, listening to the warm timbre of her words. ‘I’m coming, Sumichan,’ she said. ‘I will pick you up and we will go to Shimoda.’
I thought about the homework I still had to do for juku and the written kanji exercises I’d been given, but I didn’t care; I was tired of living with Grandpa. ‘Will you stay with me, Mummy?’
‘Yes, Sumi,’ she said. ‘I promise. I am coming to get you.’ She paused. I could hear her fumbling with her keys. ‘Tell Grandpa to expect me. I’ll be with you in an hour, okay?’ I nodded and then gasped ‘Yes’ into the phone. I was so excited. ‘I’m coming, Sumi,’ she repeated. ‘I’m coming!’
I lay on the floor beneath the greyscale map as the minutes ticked past. I was cold and they had taken my coat. I wondered if my father had left a bento for me. Eventually, another woman entered the room. She was dressed in a simple black trouser suit and she held a briefcase in one hand and a large leather handbag in the other. The woman paused at the threshold of the room and her pearl earrings caught the light as she turned her head and quickly shut the door.
She approached me slowly. ‘Hello there,’ she said. Her voice was soft. ‘Has anyone brought you lunch?’ I shook my head. The woman looked at my bare arms in my light school blouse, at my legs in their thin white stockings and plaid skirt. ‘Are you cold?’ She went outside for a minute and returned with my coat.
‘This is nice,’ she said as she wrapped me in the camel-coloured wool, admiring the black bows down the front. ‘Did your mummy buy this for you?’
I nodded.
She slipped off her high heels, placing them by the wall, and sat on the floor beside me. ‘Here,’ she said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a small box. ‘You can have my bento. I brought it from home.’ She opened the lid to reveal barbecued eel and pickles on a bed of rice with sesame. ‘Is this all right?’ she asked and I nodded. She handed me some chopsticks. ‘These are a bit big for you,’ she said, ‘but we’ll manage.’ I took them from her, feeling the smoothness of the lacquer between my fingertips, and bit into the eel, smiling as it melted in my mouth.
She did not ask me any questions as I ate my lunch, and her briefcase remained closed. When I had finished, she opened her handbag and brought out a portable Shogi set. ‘This is no way to spend time away from school, is it?’ She opened up the box and I looked at the flat white tablets inside with fine black characters imprinted on them. I liked this game, it was like chess, but I thought it was strange that she would carry it around and so I looked up at her in question. ‘It’s magnetic,’ she said, lifting up the board to demonstrate, shaking it slightly so I could see how the pieces adhered to the plastic. ‘My husband bought it for me – so I can practise on the train home.’
She set it down in front of me and waited. I did not really feel like playing, but the lady had been kind to me. She looked at me and smiled, and when she did there was something so illicit and fun about our being together that I did not want to refuse her. She glanced towards the door and it occurred to me that she had somewhere else to be, that she might not have time to play with me. I began to set out the pieces, choosing my side of the board. She settled down to play, although for a time she remained distracted, alert to the sounds that passed outside. In the end she played the first game so badly that I actually laughed.
As the afternoon drew on she relaxed and we chatted about my life, what I’d been learning at school, the activities I liked to do, my favourite dinner at Grandpa’s house. Gradually, I began to answer her questions and we spoke about my home in Meguro. She asked when I had last lived with my parents. She asked about my parents’ friends – did any of them visit us? I shrugged and tried to answer as best I could, but I was closest to Grandpa and Mama. I grew quiet as I mentioned my mother. ‘When did you last see her, Sumiko?’ she asked. I shook my head and the silence stretched between us. ‘When did you last speak to her?’ she continued. I was quiet as she looked at me. When I refused to say anything more she moved closer to me on the carpet and placed an arm around my shoulders. Eventually, I allowed her to pull me against her and rest her cheek against my hair. I could smell the scent she wore, a light musk, like my mother’s. ‘The last time you spoke to her, Sumi, was it on the phone?’ she asked softly.
‘She didn’t come,’ I whispered, as the pain in my chest began to swell and spread. ‘She didn’t come.’
The woman picked me up, drawing me half across her lap. She held me tight, rubbing my back. ‘It’s okay, baby, everything is okay,’ she murmured as I gasped in sharp, wet sobs, leaning into her neck, soaking the collar of her shirt. She was still holding me when my grandfather opened the door. I have never seen him look so angry.
Ties That Bind
I remember exactly where I was standing in Grandpa’s study when I received the phone call from the Ministry of Justice. I can still see everything just as it was, in the home I had lived in nearly all my life. For a long time after that call, I remained very still, staring at the carpet. There were twists of white twine dotted here and there and in tangled piles beneath Grandpa’s armchair. My fingers tingled. I rubbed their tips together reflexively as though to soothe myself with movement.
The twine was made from very thin, tightly wound paper that writhes against your fingers as you try to tie it. During the final exams for the Supreme Court all our handwritten essays have to be bound together neatly with this string. Every lawyer I know, anyone who has ever practised law, will have spent hours and hours tying and retying twine, for if you cannot bind the exam papers correctly, you fail the year. No one writes up until the end. In the final flurry you can hear the slide and tap of papers being stacked and then the silence as everyone in the auditorium bends to secure their answers with loops and knots, pulling the string taut.
These events were so recent that coils of twine were still scattered across the floor of the study, yet that phone call had jarred me from my present life. It had mentioned my mother, dead for twenty years.
Standing at my grandfather’s desk, I picked up the receiver again. I returned the call to the Ministry of Justice and was put through to the prison service. My name was not on their records, they said; they could not release any information about the prisoner. I mentioned the phone call I had received and that the caller had hung up, but they were sceptical. ‘Our staff are extremely professional, Miss Sarashima. If there were an accident with the line, they would have called you again.’