All her knowledge had come from reading or the TV.
“I used to play in this huge yard that had a swing set and a pond with dozens of koi swimmin’ in it. My old house was massive,” she’d boasted to Tsuneo. However, those were things she’d seen in books and on television. She’d never attended school, since she was exempt from enrollment, although her father had taught her how to read and write katakana, hiragana, and kanji. She learned the rest of her kanji from books and her ABCs from English-language fairy tales people had given her.
Josee also played a lot of shogi with her father, since he taught her the rules. When her father was at work, she would listen to baseball games on the radio. He’d taught her about baseball, too, but she wanted to see a real game so badly that she ended up having him carry her on his back to watch one in person. It was at Koshien Stadium, and she got to see the pitcher Murayama. She also vaguely remembered spying the shortstop Yoshida, whom she really liked. Her memories of the games she saw on TV, the ones she heard on the radio, and the game she saw in person with her father were all jumbled together in the back of her mind.
“It rained during the second half, but he put his jacket over me so I wouldn’t get wet.”
That was another memory Josee shared with Tsuneo, but in truth, she’d actually been watching that game on the TV at her assisted living facility. The skies opened up, and the fans in the stands frantically covered their heads with newspapers and coats. It left such a strong impression on Josee that it got jumbled together with the childhood memory of her and her father seeing a baseball game in person.
“My dad was a real nice man, y’know. He’d do whatever I asked,” Josee bragged.
But then Tsuneo teased, “If he was so nice, why’d he send you to that facility?”
“Shut up! Fuck you, asshole! Like I give a shit about that.”
She was furious to the point that she almost started having trouble breathing again, so Tsuneo kept his mouth shut. That was when he realized: Josee wasn’t lying as much as she was saying what she wished were true. These were her dreams, and while they weren’t real, they were an undeniable part of who she was.
Josee and her grandmother were on welfare, but they could sometimes splurge enough to treat a poor college student like Tsuneo to dinner. He lived off instant ramen whenever he was in between part-time jobs, so Josee’s grandmother’s home cooking was like heaven. There would be tofu with konjak and spinach and miso soup and so many other treats. Sometimes, she would cook old-people food like squid and radish boiled in soy sauce, but those only added to Tsuneo’s delight. Soon, he started spending more and more of his days at the pair’s quiet homestead.
“What’s this mean?” Josee would ask Tsuneo when she didn’t understand something she had read. Josee couldn’t walk, but her upper body was just as strong as an able-bodied person’s. She didn’t like listening to tapes of volunteers reading aloud to people who were permanently bedridden; she wanted to read books for herself. That said, listening to the tapes would be much less work…
Tsuneo wasn’t so much tripped up by Josee’s bookworm tendencies but rather at a loss for what to do about her domineering personality. His college degree had absolutely nothing to do with social welfare, so he had no clue about working with people with disabilities.
Tsuneo consulted a friend who had experience as a volunteer caretaker. He told Tsuneo that many in the disabled community could be combative because of all the discrimination they faced, and that commonly made them come off as abrasive. But Tsuneo didn’t feel like that applied to Josee. She hated doing anything in big groups and wasn’t the type to pressure the local government through protests or demonstrations. Far from it, she led a very quiet, private life.
Some of that had to do with her grandmother’s reluctance to let her leave the house. She didn’t want Josee running into any bill collectors or people working for the city.
Josee’s only access to the outside world was Tsuneo. He took her to a bathhouse far away (at around eleven PM when it was about to close and the owner didn’t mind her coming in) and once she finished, he picked her up off the floor and put her in her wheelchair, then hopped over to the men’s bath for a soak. He figured he might as well while he was there.
“The hell do you think you’re doing, making me wait in the cold? I’m freezin’ out here.”
Josee chided him while she waited for him to finish up his bath.
“What did I do to deserve being treated like that?” Tsuneo mumbled as he pushed her back to the car. But for all his complaining, he had a feeling that her haughtiness might be due to her emotional dependency. They were two sides of the same coin. However, he knew saying that would only make her furious or cause her to have trouble breathing, so he kept it to himself. Tsuneo was neither used to nor capable of analyzing and articulating the intricacies of the human psyche.
He’d never met a woman like Josee, whose beautiful doll-like features belied such a filthy mouth. All the girls on campus were shameless and bold like a pack of tigresses. They had this sexual energy to them. Josee, on the other hand, wasn’t particularly enticing, and Tsuneo always felt like he had stolen an old doll out of the cellar whenever he accompanied her. But her brash attitude suited her to a T.
All the homes in Josee’s neighborhood still had outhouses, but once the sewage system was up and running, the city’s welfare division gave Josee’s grandmother a subsidy, which they used to get a modernized toilet. They were even able to get a footstool installed around the toilet and safety rails to make things easier for Josee. It was Tsuneo’s job to relay Josee’s thoughts about the new toilet’s design to the contractors.
She complained relentlessly, telling him the footstool was too high or the safety rails were too low. Tsuneo would then ask the contractors directly, “Hey, sorry, but do you think you could make some adjustments to these?”
Josee’s grandmother was already in her eighties by this point, so staying on her feet was becoming too much of a hassle for her, even in the kitchen. Josee decided to take over, but the counter was too high, and that made cooking in a wheelchair extremely difficult. Tsuneo liked building things, so eventually, he made her a table, installed a shelf, and gradually fixed up the old house until the kitchen was wheelchair accessible. Josee had a bevy of tough requests, and Tsuneo would get fed up from time to time.
“You don’t honestly think I can do something that complicated, do you?” he’d tell her. But they didn’t have enough money to hire a professional, so they had no other choice but to make do with Tsuneo’s amateur skills.
Josee could cook, albeit very slowly. She took her time cutting vegetables that made for excellent stews. She could do laundry as well and had no issue using the laundry bar Tsuneo modified for her. Josee could hold herself up on crutches, so while she still couldn’t go outside on her own, she could at least get around the house more easily. One of the sets of crutches Tsuneo made was shaped like a snowshoe at the bottom to prevent Josee from falling. The other set, which Josee called her roller skates, was fashioned from two poles stuck into half an old vacuum cleaner he’d found in a junkyard. Whenever Josee leaned into the poles, the casters on the bottom of the vacuum sent her rolling forward. One time, she almost threw herself off the porch by accident.
Tsuneo didn’t spend every waking minute at Josee’s house, though. He made the most of his college days, went on vacations, visited family back in his hometown near Hiroshima, and enjoyed skiing. Finally, it came time to graduate, and he started panicking when his job search didn’t bear fruit, which kept him from going over to Josee’s house for a little while. Eventually, he landed a municipal job in one of the smaller neighboring towns. But when he visited Josee’s place for the first time in a long while, a different family had moved in.
“The old lady who used to live here died, and her handicapped granddaughter started living on welfare in the apartment up the street. She’s apparently on her own,” they told him.
He immediately went searching for the apartment until he found one with a wheelchair sitting outside, covered in a plastic sheet to protect it from the rain. When he knocked on the door, the person to answer was none other than Josee, a snowshoe crutch under one arm and a roller skate one under the other.