Chapter 24

I was only four years old when my mother and I had to leave the big house. It wasn’t my mother’s fault—I could read it in the face of the tall grown-ups that my father had made some kind of big mistake. With the maid. He’d caused a problem that made my mother furious, and she’d declared she could no longer bear to live under the same roof as him. She decided to leave and take me with her. In retrospect, my mother probably did it for my sake. The maid left the house at the same time as us, and my mother did not hesitate to kick her in the ass. The maid was as delicate as tissue paper or gauze, gossamery and fragile. Her face, framed by long hair, had a dainty, beautiful profile. The only reason that kick didn’t knock her over was because she caught herself on the tall fence. My mother’s glare at the maid was murderous, and I thought she might kick her to death. But she didn’t. The maid was only smiling gently at us. She turned to me. “Bye-bye, Shiho.” I waved back at her, because even though I knew she’d done something bad, she had been my playmate for many years. The maid was waving happily as you would to a friend. My mother’s relatives let us stay at their house until my mother found a new job. To be precise, it wasn’t really a house, but a large, traditional Japanese inn that was even bigger than where we’d lived before. It was a good environment, I thought, but we stayed there for only three months. As a side note, those relatives’ last name starts with “ki.” For my alias, I took “Chi” from “Chitaira” and added my relatives’ “ki” to it. I spelled it with the characters from my mother’s maiden name. Once my mother found employment, the two of us moved into a small apartment. The fire extinguisher between our door and the neighbor’s was so rusty, it would probably be completely useless in case of an emergency—and that should tell you the state the entire apartment building was in. Because I’d grown up in a large residence, the move to an apartment that would have comfortably fit inside a Chitaira bathroom was a huge shock to me. To compare, it was barely bigger than Takasora’s home, I would say. In any case, my mother had grown up in a similar place, so she didn’t seem bothered by our new abode. As for me, I remember hating the cold winter, but I spent most of the time playing outside in the park, so I didn’t care that our home was so small. Maybe I found it easier to accept because I loved my mother more than my father. But only six months later, I was returned to the big house. My mother dumped me with my father. “I’m sorry. I do love Shiho, but there’s this one thing about her I just can’t stand,” she explained bluntly, not a hint of a guilty conscience in her voice. “Her eyes remind me of her father, and I don’t want anything to make me think of him.” With that, she turned on her heel and left me in the Chitairas’ house, discarding me. All because of my eyes? Rather than watch my mother walk away, I turned to look at my father. Despite his embittered expression, his eyes—the exact same color as mine—had a slight sparkle to them. Everyone in the Chitaira family had eyes of that particular color—hazel. It was in our genes, apparently, although nobody had any idea who we got it from. Because of my hazel eyes, my mother had rejected me. By the time I was returned to the Chitaira family, my father had lost his standing, and consequently, the treatment I received was different from before. Daddy’s princess, his pretty little butterfly, had been kicked back into the house like a soccer ball. My parents’ problems had affected other family members, too, and their children, sensing the grown-ups’ discontent, began to bully me with unrestrained cruelty. They knew nobody would defend me, and they would sometimes twist my arms or legs so hard, I wondered if they wanted to rip them off my body. I understood then why my mother had taken me with her when she’d left my father. But in the end, she had abandoned me to those people. Looking back, I was lucky to get out of there before it was too late. I really had the luck of the devil to make it out with all my limbs intact. I used my head to earn a safe space for me to live in. My forehead injury was much worse than I imagined, and I ended up bedridden with a fever for about a week, perilously near death. I’d bashed my head harder than I should’ve, which probably affected my mental capacities at the time, too. While I was lying in bed, waves of heat would come and go. Each surge made my eyes burn inside my skull, and sweat would pour out along my hairline. My breathing would stop, and I’d try again and again to inhale. After several failures and mounting desperation, I would finally get a little air. My mother was gone from my life. My grandfather was true to his word. Neither he nor my grandmother came to comfort me, but they did provide me with a spacious room and a large futon. I couldn’t move—it was as if my limbs were dissolving into boiling hot water—but I desperately searched for light. The other side of the sliding shoji panels was bright. I remembered thinking I’d seen light before hitting my head against the wall, too. Looking at it made my eyes throb with pain, and I could only vaguely make out what I was seeing, but the pain also made what I was sensing feel real, and I wasn’t yet feeling too nauseous from it. A thought occurred to me—being alive was being able to feel things in your body. When the hot waves passed, I slid the shoji open with my own two hands. What awaited me on the other side wasn’t light, nor any kind of special truth, but simply a well-maintained garden.