“Wow! Look at that bridge!”
“Wow! Look, the ocean!”
Josee shouted with joy until she was out of breath. (She had difficulty breathing sometimes, especially when she laughed too much or the wind blew right in her face. It felt as if she were being robbed of oxygen. This apparently had something to do with the fact that she was paralyzed from the waist down, although Josee herself didn’t really understand it. She’d been diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a child, but then another doctor said, “This is completely different from CP. She doesn’t have any of the classic symptoms.” Eventually, her doctors just settled on a cerebral palsy diagnosis and called it a day. Josee never really got any concrete answers about her condition, even now, at twenty-five years old.)
The wind blew right in her face, so she started choking. She tried to shout, but the wind drowned her out.
“Josee, close the window already! What, you like not being able to breathe or something?” said Tsuneo. Josee hurriedly pressed a button by the seat and closed the car window.
The last car they’d rented had a handle you needed to crank to open and close the windows. That was really hard on Josee, depending on the position of the handles, so she was thrilled to be in a car that had windows she could control with the press of a button. One press got her excited, so she pressed it several more times.
Tsuneo chided her good-naturedly: “Quit playing with the switch.”
“I’ve never seen anything so amazing…,” Josee muttered with evident mirth.
“There’s cars out there with even better features.”
“I’m talking about this trip. I’ve never seen scenery this beautiful before.”
“This is my first time here, too.”
“Don’t even try to compare your first time with mine. This is a way bigger deal for me. It’s only the second time I’ve ever seen the ocean.”
“Yeah, yeah. Brag all you want. Still the first honeymoon for the both of us.”
“Heh-heh.”
“Ever gone on a trip with anyone before, Josee?”
“I’ll just leave that to your imagination. I was very popular back in the day, unlike you, Caretaker.”
“Tsk.”
Josee only called Tsuneo Caretaker when she was in an especially good mood.
One day, Tsuneo had stepped into the bathroom before they went out. “Gimme a second,” he said.
“Stop. I didn’t say you could pee! Who do you think you are?! Get outta there!” Josee yelled from outside the door, clearly irritated.
“The heck’s wrong with you? Is that any way to talk to your husband?” Tsuneo said as he finished up.
“You’re not my husband!”
“Then what am I?”
“My caretaker!”
Josee had just said the first thing that came to mind, but she actually took a liking to it, and from then on, she started occasionally calling Tsuneo Caretaker. Sometimes, Tsuneo would preface his own opinions with, “As your caretaker, I think…” He was very flexible in that sense and could easily adapt to anything. He even started calling Josee “Josee” after she suddenly asked him to call her that.
“From now on, my name is Josee,” she declared one day, seemingly out of nowhere.
“How’d you get from Kumi to Josee?” Tsuneo looked puzzled.
“No reason. But Josee suits me better. I’m retiring the name Kumi.”
“I don’t think you can change your name that easily. No city hall or authority is gonna call you that.”
“I don’t care what the government thinks. All that matters is that I wanna be called Josee, so that’s how you’re gonna refer to me from now on.”
After some prodding, Tsuneo learned that Josee loved novels and often borrowed some from city hall’s mobile library (people with disabilities didn’t have to pay a membership fee to borrow books) which was how she became familiar with the works of Françoise Sagan. Josee had picked out one of Sagan’s books, thinking it was a mystery novel, but after reading it, she became hooked and read several more by the author.
Sagan had a habit of naming the heroines in her novels Josée, which Josee immediately fell in love with. She thought the name Josee Yamamura sounded so much better than Kumiko Yamamura. She felt as if the name were calling her, telling her something good would happen—no—that something good had already happened, and that good thing was Tsuneo coming into her life.
Tsuneo said that Josee was a weird name (he didn’t read too many novels, and he didn’t associate the name with anything when he said it), but after spending so much time together, he eventually started calling her Josee as well.
Josee sometimes adopted quirks of the singers she watched on TV, but this was the first time a name had ever made such an impact on her. She’d always had a strong personality, though. When her father remarried, his new wife moved in and brought her three-year-old daughter along. Josee’s father doted on the little girl. When Josee was fourteen years old, she started acting out in an attempt to get her father’s love and attention as well. But once she needed a wheelchair to get around and started her period, Josee became a burden to her stepmother, who sent her to an assisted living facility. Her father had visited from time to time at first, but he soon stopped coming altogether. Josee’s tough persona still stuck with her, regardless.
She didn’t remember her mother, since her mother left when Josee was a baby. At seventeen, she was adopted by her paternal grandmother and started living with her in the suburbs. Her grandmother was very kind, but she was too embarrassed to have people see Josee in a wheelchair, so she took her out only at night. Josee’s grandmother would gently bring her through the back door, but she was a frail old woman, so she was never that good at pushing the wheelchair around. Nevertheless, Josee still badly wanted to go out at night in the spring and summer.
One time when the two of them went out, they passed a store that hadn’t yet closed. “Give me just a second,” her grandmother said, then went inside to do a little shopping—detergent, toilet paper, that sort of thing. Josee was just outside the store, not far from her grandmother, but the street was on a slight incline. One side had a long fenced-in yard and was dark from the tree cover.
Josee briefly sensed someone nearby, and the next thing she knew, her wheelchair started moving. It was only later on that she realized the presence she felt was spite. Tsuneo once said it was probably just some drunk messing around, but Josee didn’t think so. While she was living in the assisted living facility, she became highly sensitive to spiteful presences.
A man passing by had pushed Josee’s wheelchair down the hill without warning before running away. The wheelchair slid down the hill at full tilt. Josee’s grandmother chased after her, screaming bloody murder, but Josee was so shaken up at the time that she didn’t remember. All she knew was that some stranger had shoved her wheelchair and that she had sensed his malicious intent. There was nothing she could do except scream.
Her shrieking startled a nearby man, who saw the wheelchair hurtling down the hill and threw himself in front of it. He was standing right at the bottom of the hill, which ended in a gentle curve. The impact knocked him to the ground, stopping the wheelchair’s descent.
“Are you okay?” the man asked as he quickly got to his feet.
Josee, meanwhile, was in a daze and couldn’t say anything. Getting worked up made it difficult for her to breathe, so she was desperately trying to take steady breaths. She looked dead lying there on the ground, so the man apparently started panicking, but it was all one big racket to Josee. Only after hearing her grandmother’s voice as she came rushing down the hill was Josee able to calm down.
“I can’t believe someone would do such a thing,” the man said, still quite agitated. He then offered to take Josee home in case whoever had pushed her was still around. The man who caught Josee at the bottom of the hill was Tsuneo, a college student at the time, who’d been living in a nearby off-campus apartment.
Ever since then, he would show up at Josee’s house whenever he was free and help her get around. Josee’s body had never fully developed, so she was very petite, which was why Tsuneo always thought she was younger than him.
“Kumi, you’re either totally clueless, or you know everything there is to know. There’s no middle ground with you,” he once told her. He was surprised, however, to learn that she was actually two years older than him. Tsuneo was right, though. There were a lot of things Josee was totally clueless about, since she’d spent so long cooped up in either an assisted living facility or her home. She never joined any clubs or activist groups for the disabled, so she never met any new people. Josee was something of a wallflower, always shy and anxious around the facility’s young volunteers. They started avoiding her, until one day, she ended up completely by the wayside.