Whether lightning struck, whether spears fell from the sky, whether it came out that Minoru was cheating on her, he still seemed to expect that she would make dinner for him. That was just how faithful his healthy, blinding ego was to his desires and his desires alone. Apparently, the reason he told Rie the truth wasn’t because of any moral obligation or guilt. He simply couldn’t take the weight of keeping a secret any longer.
Rie’s resentful tears dried up along with her tears of self-pity. She didn’t have an appetite. She was fed up. She got in bed and tried to process the insanity, but nothing helped. A twenty-three-year-old woman said she didn’t want to be alive if Minoru didn’t marry her, and Minoru said she was fun to be around. Rie didn’t know how to even wrap her head around that. She was at a loss. Minoru had always been rather popular with the ladies, something Rie used to be able to laugh and joke about at the dinner table, but she never expected for things to go this far.
Before she even realized it, she started feeling pain in her neck and fingers. She’d been curled up in bed with her big jewelry on still. Rie had a large frame, so every jewel she had was similarly large, and yet she still forgot to remove them.
Minoru peeked into the room.
“Hey…,” he timidly squeaked. “Um… Where’s the salt-flavored ramen?”
“Shut up!”
Rie was genuinely repulsed by Minoru in that moment. She jumped out of bed, then immediately threw the magazine by the bedside at him. It was so sudden that Minoru was unable to dodge in time, and it hit him in the chest.
“You don’t have to throw a fit like that…,” he muttered feebly.
Rie rarely got angry. In fact, this was the first time she’d lost her temper since they got married, so the pupils in his drooping, now furtive eyes shrank. Rie was always a kind woman who never showed anger or insulted others, so it must have been quite the shock for him.
“Geez. You’re scaring me,” he said, but that still didn’t put her in a better mood, so he narrowed his eyes and got mad back at her. “I should be the angry one. You seriously didn’t buy more ramen when you were at the store?”
He got grumpy when he was hungry. Rie had felt a rage burning in her stomach, but the moment she heard him say that, the anger suddenly left her body. Minoru always proved to have a screw loose at times like this, which Rie usually found amusing, but today, she immediately lost all energy to argue and listlessly replied:
“The ramen’s on the second shelf from the top.”
“Why didn’t you cry earlier?” Minoru asked later on. “You would’ve melted my heart with that pretty face of yours if you did.”
“Would you have changed your mind about leaving if I did?”
“I don’t know about that,” came his honest reply.
“Then crying would’ve been pointless,” Rie said with a laugh.
She was annoyed, but she couldn’t cry or beg. She couldn’t use her tears to get what she wanted. She couldn’t do something that was pointless, and there was nothing she could do about Minoru, who had a screw loose.
Now that she thought about it, maybe this Hiroko Ohara woman was a good match for him. Now that she was further along in her pregnancy, she’d apparently left her job and started working at a boutique near Sanjo Keihan Station in Kyoto. When Rie said she wanted to meet her, Minoru immediately called Hiroko up and asked her to meet Rie at the café across from the Kabuki theater.
It was a cold day with signs of snow in the sky, but she energetically walked right into the café in high spirits. Hiroko’s eyes were round, and her lips were round and full as well. She seemed bubbly.
She took off her faux-leather coat, revealing her unbleached, thick cotton loose-fitting jacket and pants of the same color, along with a brown velvet belt loosely tied. Her stomach didn’t stand out at all, perhaps due to her clothes.
“I’m Hiroko Ohara. You’re Minoru’s wife, right? He showed me your picture,” she said, unprompted. When she spoke, her lips made her look youthful like a little girl. Rie had thought about what she was going to say to her when they finally met, but she felt they weren’t the right words for a girl like Hiroko and immediately forgot what she wanted to say. Instead, her inner saleswoman kicked in and she asked curiously:
“I like your outfit. Where did you get it?”
“At the Tik Tak in America Mura in Osaka when they were on sale. They’ve got a Tik Tak here in Kyoto now, too, though. Right behind this place. I can take you there later if you want. They’ve got a ton of nice clothes.”
“Oh, I heard their clothes have gotten a lot nicer lately. Like a total rebranding.”
“Yeah, their style’s kind of similar to Mon Ami’s now, but way cooler.”
“Are you from Kyoto?”
“No, I was born in Okayama, but I went to high school in Kyoto and have been living here ever since.”
She sounded like she wanted to talk more about fashion, making it unclear why she even came to meet Rie in the first place. And yet with a smile on her face, she said:
“I decided to work at a boutique because I wanted to see pretty things and get excited about them. I thought it might be good for the baby, you know?”
She rubbed her stomach.
“‘Good for the baby’?” Rie repeated.
“Yeah, they say babies can hear noises outside the womb. If you fight or get mad or yell or say something mean, they’ll come out with a twisted personality.”
There was no way Rie could start a fight or insult Hiroko now.
“How do your parents feel about all this?”
It took everything she had to ask that.
“They were surprised at first, but I keep telling them I’m gonna have the baby no matter what. I plan on going back home after things cool off a little. My mom said she already booked a hospital.”
Hiroko was treating the entire situation like she was talking about Tik Tak again.
“I’ll have the cream parfait and some juice,” she then told the waiter. It could snow at any minute in this cold weather, and yet she was going to eat something cold.
Only a young person could do that. I’m impressed, thought Rie. Hiroko began licking her spoon and talking in between bites of her parfait.
“You should have a baby, too, before it’s too late. They say it’s hard for older women to get pregnant, let alone raise a child. The doctor told me I’m at the best age to have a baby.”
She wasn’t saying this out of spite or sarcastically. She was speaking joyfully from the heart. Once again, all the tension left Rie’s body. She felt ridiculous even trying to humor Hiroko. Common sense and manners were an afterthought to this girl. It was as if giving birth to a healthy baby was simply something fashionable to her, just like wearing clothes from Tik Tak.
“That’s wonderful. I hope you give birth to a very healthy baby,” Rie replied. She felt compelled to say that even though she didn’t want to.
She left without saying anything mean because that would be bad for the baby, but when she stepped outside, she found the streets of Gion in the middle of a blizzard. Only a few moments went by until she was covered in snow, and the freezing tip of her nose had turned red. She wondered what she did to have to suffer like this, and as the tips of her toes slowly grew colder, she felt a pang in her bladder.