“Hey, mister!” it said. “Over here!”
Koichi turned to see it was the thief from earlier.
“Oh, there you are,” he replied. “Took you long enough.”
“Don’t blame me,” said the woman. “You’re the one who planted yourself right in the middle of the crowd. You really think I could just waltz back in there?”
“Wait… So you were watching and waiting for me that whole time?”
“Yeah—though I almost fell asleep waiting for you to move your butt. Isn’t that right, kiddo?” the woman said to the infant, before holding up the onigiri she’d apparently pilfered earlier. “Bet you must be awfully hungry by now, huh?” she asked, waving it in his face.
The very instant the woman had taken the child back from Koichi and relieved him of his babysitting duties, he turned on his heel and started walking off.
“Hey,” said the woman, accosting him once more. “So how come you didn’t just put the baby down and walk away, huh?”
“I mean, how could I?” said Koichi, growing impatient. “What kind of monster would abandon a child in a place like that?”
“Well, well, well…” said the woman—evidently impressed by this response from the way she started circling him with great interest, sizing him up like a prospector who’d just dug up a diamond in the rough. “Aren’t you a decent fellow then, mister?”
Koichi tried to ignore her and just carry on his way home, but the woman quickly followed him, an eager grin on her face. Though he hadn’t gotten a good look at her during their brief encounter at the market, he could now see that she was quite young—in a better world, she could have been a student—and hardly seemed old enough to be a mother.
“Please don’t follow me,” said Koichi.
“Aw, come on…” said the woman. “You wouldn’t just leave a poor woman and a baby girl to die, now, would you? We have nowhere to go.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me!” Koichi barked, sensing that he’d be in for a world of trouble if he fell for this blatant appeal to the better angels of his nature. But no amount of yelling or attempting to shake her off would deter her, as she still followed him all the way home. Clearly, she was far more adapted to living in this world of black markets and charred rubble where houses once stood than he was, and willing to do whatever it took.
There was a rudimentary wood-fired cook stove just outside the entrance to Koichi’s home, which he’d taken the time to cobble together along with his shanty shack, but had yet to actually make use of. The woman borrowed a spare pot of his and began to make a thin, watery rice gruel from the onigiri she’d stolen.
“I want you out of here as soon as you’re done feeding her,” he said firmly.
“Awww… He’s a mean old grump, isn’t he?” the woman said to the baby instead of responding to Koichi directly. “Don’t worry. I’m sure his bark’s worse than his bite.”
Koichi felt slightly offended by this comment, to the point that he felt justified to ask a rather insensitive question.
“So what happened to your husband?” he said. “Did he get conscripted or what?”
“Husband?” said the woman. “Do I look like a married woman to you?”
It was true; she didn’t look that old. But that begged another question.
“Wait,” said Koichi. “Then why do you have a kid?”
The woman looked deeply unamused by this question.
“Why does it matter?” she said, turning away.
“Why wouldn’t it matter?” said Koichi.
There was silence for a time—until the woman caved to the awkward tension and answered in the tone of a confessional.
“I found her during the air raid…” she whispered. “Her dying mother entrusted her to me with her last breath.”
“So then…” said Koichi. “You have no relation to her, blood or otherwise?”
“Again, why does it matter?”
Koichi could feel an irrational fury start to burgeon in his breast.
“Are you a complete idiot?” he asked. “How can you act so happy-go-lucky about this? You really think you’re in any position to be taking care of a child?”
“Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing in my shoes,” said the woman. “You couldn’t bring yourself to abandon her back there at the market.”
This was a fair point. He was in no position to be criticizing her actions as though they were thoughtless or naive, given his own naivety today, which had led to this woman inviting herself into his home. He felt quite ashamed of his own foolishness, realizing this.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “You win…”
The woman didn’t even acknowledge Koichi as she proceeded to feed the baby sips of the rice gruel she’d just finished cooking. The infant must have been quite hungry as it slurped up the watery mixture obediently and with great eagerness.
“So do you have a name or what?” Koichi asked over her shoulder.
The woman didn’t answer but flipped up the edge of the infant’s cloth covering to reveal a name embroidered in bright red thread: Akiko.
“No,” said Koichi. “I was asking you, not the baby.”
“Oh, me?” said the woman. “Yeah, I’m Noriko… Why do you ask?”
“Well, Noriko-san, if you really have that child’s best interest in mind, shouldn’t you knock it off with all the petty theft? It’s going to come back to bite you sooner or later, and acting like a street urchin isn’t going to secure a better future for either of you.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do?” said Noriko, glaring at him. “You want me to go sell my body to the occupation soldiers like all the other desperate young girls and teenage runaways?”
“I didn’t say that. But these are hard times for all of us. And if you don’t have anyone else you can rely on, you’re going to have to get creative somehow in order to survive.”
Noriko didn’t have a good retort to this as she simply stirred the rice gruel with a sullen look on her face.
“Do you not have any family?” asked Koichi.
She shook her head, then looked up at the pair of wooden nameplates Koichi had placed atop a box in a corner of his shanty.
“Are those memorials?” she asked him.
“You could say that,” said Koichi.
“For your parents?”
“Yeah. Died in the air raids, according to my neighbor.”
A look of shock crossed Noriko’s face.
“Wait…” she said. “So you’re in the same boat as me, then…”
Did she mean that her parents had perished in the bombings as well? Koichi thought on this for a moment, then looked at the bundle of photographs wrapped in oilpaper to the side of the nameplates. They sat there, beside the memorials, as if to serve as an eternal reminder of his deep guilt. Unable to even look at them for long, he turned his gaze back on Noriko and the baby—only to discover they had both nodded off.
“Hey!” said Koichi. “Come on, don’t fall asleep in here!”
He stood up and, for a moment, was planning to shake her awake but couldn’t bring himself to after seeing the look of calm upon the infant’s sleeping face. Relenting, he clicked his tongue, then grabbed his only blanket and draped it over the two of them.
A few days passed, and Noriko was still staying at Koichi’s residence.
She showed no intention of leaving anytime soon, either. In fact, she’d even begun proudly bringing home bits of furniture and materials to reinforce the structure and preparing meals for the three of them using foodstuffs she’d procured from who knows where… It seemed she intended to live with him for the foreseeable future.
Then one day, as Koichi was walking back from the watering hole with a heavy bucket in hand, he found his neighbor Sumiko watching him with a dubious look in her eyes. He tried to ignore her gaze and quickly pass by, but then she called out to him.
“So what’s the story there, hmm?” she asked, gesturing toward his shanty.
“What’s the story with what?” he replied.
“Don’t play dumb with me. I’m talking about that woman and child you picked up off the street. You trying to play Good Samaritan or something?”
“I didn’t pick anyone up. They just decided to live with me of their own accord.”
“Same difference, if you’re too spineless to kick them out. A little late to decide you want to play hero, don’t you think? Oh, forget it… I’m too old for this.”
But just after shaking her head and turning to enter her shack, Sumiko stopped.
“Wait…” she said. “Can that woman breastfeed or not?”
“Well, she’s not the child’s mother, so no,” said Koichi.
“What do you mean, she’s not the mother?”
The next thing Koichi knew, he was watching Sumiko feed baby Akiko some rice gruel inside his home. She did it so naturally that one would almost think she was the mother and with such doting sweetness that he couldn’t believe this was the same woman who’d been so horrid to him as of late.
After feeding the baby a good helping of rice gruel, Sumiko turned to face Koichi and Noriko, who were both sitting on their knees in formal posture.
“At this rate, the poor thing’s going to die of malnutrition,” she said. “What were you thinking, adopting a child like this when you have no means of supporting it?”
“I know,” said Noriko. “I’m sorry.”
All she could do was apologize. She knew it was irresponsible—reckless, even. But as she explained to Koichi previously, she just couldn’t bring herself to leave Akiko to die with her mother that night as the encroaching flames had grown higher and higher.
“You probably think you saved her life,” said Sumiko. “But if you’re so ill-equipped to raise her that she ends up dying anyway, then you just prolonged the child’s agony, and you might as well have abandoned her in the first place.”
With that said, Sumiko pulled out a small bag filled with white rice and placed it in Noriko’s hands.
“That’s not for you, just so we’re clear,” she said. “You’re adults, so you can eat whatever you need to in order to survive. You give that rice to the baby, you hear me?”
On that note, Sumiko stood up, gave one last full-faced smile to Akiko, and then saw herself out of their home. Both Koichi and Noriko stood up in a fluster and followed her outside, where they bowed their heads deeply to her in gratitude as she trudged back to her own shack. Only once she was inside and out of earshot did she mutter to herself:
“Well, there goes my last bag of rice. These troublesome kids, I swear…”