Peach Flower Boy

by EuGrace

Summary:

a Dazai coming-of-age story in 5 notebooks

Chapter 1: Notebook One

I. The First Time Dazai Wanted to Die

 

His last memory of Aomori was the sound of rain intertwining with his mother’s playing. He could never remember which song it was -- each time he thought he remembered, a chord would sound different than the one in his head, but it didn’t really matter. Memory was as fickle as sunlight.

He had finished the last of his packing earlier that afternoon, so he had just been in his room -- the room that was no longer his room -- lying on one of the chairs that had been moved there at the start of the month. His chest had felt tight, as if something was in his stomach and fighting to crawl out, but it settled down once he heard the familiar sound of Tane playing from the parlor -- the parlor that was no longer their parlor. Following the music, Dazai found his mother sitting at the piano bench, her black heels pressing gently on the pedals like they were stamp cards. All her hair, loose apart from a small clip that kept her bangs away from her eyes, was her signature chocolate brown, cut just above her slim shoulders. She had a small frame, but in Dazai’s eyes, she was a giant.

But, to his surprise, this giant was crying. The rain had come inside.

A part of him wanted to go to her -- it was the first time he’d seen his mother cry -- but he stayed frozen, listening as Tane completed the song perfectly with her elegant fingers dancing across the keyboard: black and white keys absorbing fresh saltwater, as beautiful as blue crescent moonlight when it dipped its cheek into a still pond.

It was only when she shut the piano and stood up from her spot did she turn and find her son gawking at her, too young to know what he was feeling, asking with his eyes for her to fill in the blanks.

As if a switch had been activated, her once red face immediately brightened. Dazai often asked about why she did that -- change her face like it was a shirt -- but she would just poke his nose and say it was one of her magic tricks.

Tane extended her arms out then, which Dazai ran into blindly. Determined, he buried his face into her torso. His mother let out a small wince and reminded him to be careful with her tummy since his baby brother or sister was growing in there.

Placing a small hand on her stomach, Dazai mumbled out, “Sorry, baby,”

Tane tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and pressed a cold palm on his cheek. “Are you all packed?”

“Uh-huh,”

“Me too. We should get ourselves dinner. Do you want me to order your favorite from Yuki’s?”

“It’s early,”

“We have to catch an early train tomorrow, love,”

“Why,”

“I told you, because our flight’s early in the morning and the airport needs us there even earlier,”

“Earlier than early?”

“That’s right,”

A pause. “Will Papa meet us there?”

“No, I told you Papa’s not coming with us to America, . . . Papa’s going to stay here with your grandparents,”

“And Melos?”

“Of course with Melos, your Papa and he were best friends,”

Dazai was quiet for a while, vaguely remembering the day his father sat him down on his lap and told him Melos had gone to heaven. Less than a year later he would go to heaven too. Dazai often thought about his Papa playing with Melos as he used to in their neighborhood park, but he wasn’t sure if heaven had parks, or grass, or happiness like the way his father was happy whenever he played with Melos. “. . . Papa can’t come with us because he died,” he whispered.

Tane, not one for miracles, took one of his hands in hers and squeezed it. “Yes,”

“I wish I died, so I can be with Papa and Melos in heaven.”

Tane, a newly single mother and grieving widow, accidentally pregnant in her early forties with her dead husband’s child, did not deserve to hear such words from her nine-year-old son, but then again, Osamu didn’t deserve to lose a father to suicide.

“You mustn’t wish that,” Tane said firmly, meeting her son’s eyes. “Promise me Osamu, you will never wish that again,”

She looked at him with such intensity that he was a little frightened, but he felt himself nodding nevertheless.

Satisfied, Tane kissed him on the cheek and led him to the kitchen -- the kitchen that was no longer their kitchen, but rather a skeleton with a sink, an empty fridge, and cupboards that seemed to have already forgotten what it was like to be needed. She called Yuki’s, willing herself not to think about how this would be the last time she’d order from there.

They ate in silence when the food arrived. Neither of them tasted anything. It was as if they had scooped up the sky and the wind with their chopsticks and swallowed it all down so that their bellies felt more like they housed ghosts instead of things that used to be alive, but weren’t anymore, because they had been cooked.

Mother and son slept. At 4 AM they got up to catch the early morning train. Dazai didn’t turn back to look at the house that wasn’t their house, and he would spend his entire life wondering why.

 

II. Dazai in Americaland

 

The first time he saw a white person -- really saw them, and talked to them not in the way you talked to an animatron -- was at the Aomori airport.

He’d seen foreigners around before, of course, but all of them had been fuzzy: at the corner of his eye and perpetually mysterious. When his father was still alive, he would have his American coworkers come over for dinner and they would grin at him with their ice-colored eyes and thin lips, attempting conversation in a kind of Japanese that sounded ugly and torn up in their mouths.

None of these perceptions must be confused with anything malicious, of course. Dazai did not hate them, (he was not capable of that yet), but, like with anything that did not seem familiar, and also looked down at him the way visitors observed a zoo animal, he was wary of their difference and therefore avoided them.

When they arrived at the airport -- the first one he’d ever been in -- everything was bright, like he was at the centre of a lightbulb. While Tane was figuring out their tickets, there was a blonde Frenchman in line for check-in beside him.

Dazai, tethered to his mother’s hand, felt himself look up at the white man and take in his strange features. The Frenchman, perhaps sensing he was being watched, looked down and caught the child’s eye and smiled. Before Dazai could process what was happening, the man had squatted down so that he was eye level with him and said, “Hello there,”

Dazai immediately widened his eyes in panic and tugged at Tane’s sleeve. His mother paid no attention to him, as she was busy flipping through a manila folder that contained all their travelling information.

Seeing his innocent distress, the Frenchman gave a small laugh, which made Dazai turn to him again. “How old are you, little one?” he asked, unbothered by the child’s evident wish to be rid of him.

“Nine,” Dazai responded once he realized -- as all children eventually do -- that his mother could not save him from interacting with other human beings.

“Oh! You’re as old as my son,”

“When’s his birthday?”

“April 29th,”

“Then you lied,”

“I’m sorry?”

“My birthday is on June 19th, so he’s older than me by 52 days,”

“Huh, well I suppose you’re right. You’re very smart,”

“Mama says I’m a genus,”

“Genius, you mean?”

“Yeah. Genus. Where is he?”

“Where’s who?”

“Your son,”

The man smiled again, but his eyes seemed to be focused on something far away. “He’s at home. With my husband,”

“Why aren’t you with them then?”

Paul Verlaine chuckled, feeling very much like he was talking to a soul that was 2000 years old. “That’s something I’ve been asking myself recently,”

The boy heard his mother calling his name, and just before he could say anything more Dazai felt his arm yanked aside and pulled away from the check-in into a crowd of weary travellers.

The boy tried to get a last glimpse of the Frenchman, but Tane had dragged him onto an escalator, and everyone’s faces became shuffled like a deck of cards.

 

. . .

 

He’d read about airplanes in books and magazines, but he never thought he’d be inside of one. To him, airplanes were giant metal behemoths that got people from one place to another, but he’d always thought those people didn’t have homes to stay in, and therefore had decided to live in the sky because there was nothing on the ground that waited for them.

Dazai barely retained the reality of the first flight nor the two connecting ones after that. What lingered in his soul after those two days of travelling amidst the salt-and-pepper clouds was the vague taste of peanuts and the sound of babies crying across multiple aisles swollen with humans. There had been a sticker book a Korean flight stewardess had given him to pass the time, as well as some word puzzle games his mother had bought at the gift shop to keep him entertained, but that was it. He had no memory of flying, just of the windows turning dark. He knew that he must’ve slept and that there were boarding times they had to catch and passports shoved hastily into bags, but everything else was simply blocked off. Tane was always there, a dehydrated look of worry on her face, but he’d only really registered that a distance had passed, that time had elapsed, and that Japan was behind him when their two brown suitcases finally appeared in the Boston airport’s baggage cart, and Tane, with a sigh of exhaustion, took out her phone and called her brother.

They’d taken a cab, but it was the lights that stayed in Dazai’s memory. It had snowed the night before, making the wheels crunch against slush and cold rocks. For the first time since he was small, he saw signs that held no meaning to them: street vendors with food he did not know, and people who didn’t look like him in the slightest.

Before the cab had dropped them off at Mori’s apartment, Dazai had undergone a process of acceptance that would hover over him for the rest of his life. Even though he was still very young, he knew then that he was vastly alone, and that what was unknown to him was known here, which automatically made him a stranger -- not just to this new city, but to himself as well.

“When are we going home?” Dazai had asked his mother two weeks after they’d arrived in Boston.

Tane just looked at him sadly before taking him in her arms and resting her chin on his head. She rubbed his back the way she used to when he was a baby, her eyes wandering to a pile of unopened boxes that were stacked up in the corner, smelling of styrofoam and dust from a hundred years ago.

Dazai didn’t ask again after that.

 

III. Little Japanese Boy

 

Tane enrolled Dazai in the elementary and middle school nearest to Mori’s apartment so that he could walk to and from school all by himself. On his first day, Dazai’s mother packed him a simple lunch and picked an even simpler outfit for him.

As he was about to head off, Tane took one last look at her son, smoothed down his moppy hair, and kissed his cheek. “Have a good day,” she said encouragingly. Dazai nodded obediently. Mori stood behind them in the foyer, grinning in that enigmatic way of his and not saying anything.

The boy had difficulty finding the classroom. Everything was in English, so all he really had to go on was the name of his teacher -- Mr. Melville -- that was on the sheet his mother gave him and signs on the wall that pointed to a number four, for fourth grade.

Dazai knew he was behind everyone in school. School -- the entire institution of education, really -- operated differently here: Almost half of the semester had already gone by and he had a lot to catch up on. Tane had gotten him a Japanese-to-English dictionary, some classic American novels (he thought For Whom the Bell Tolls was an odd title for a book), and guidebooks to help him figure out the enormous pile of homework he had to do if he wanted to graduate elementary on time. Mori promised he’d help, which had reassured Dazai’s mother, but it had only made the boy dread all the study sessions he’d have to endure with the doctor.

Dazai didn’t exactly dislike his uncle: The man had been nothing but welcoming to them since they’d come to Boston, but something in the boy didn’t quite like him either. They say children and animals have a sixth sense about these things.

When Dazai finally found his classroom, he knocked on the door sheepishly, feeling very, very tiny all of a sudden. Mr. Melville, a big man with a magnificent white beard, opened it and was surprised to see that the new student he’d been expecting this morning was a little Japanese boy. (He had never taught a little Japanese boy).

“Everyone,” he announced, recovering quickly from his astonishment. “I’d like you all to meet our new student. He’ll be joining our class from today.”

In total there were about twenty-five students in the classroom, and, typical of childish curiosity whenever something new presented itself, they all turned their attention to the small boy that Mr. Melville had now brought to the front. He wore a raggedy blue sweater and black pants. He was clutching at a red book, almost hiding behind the soft cover. What was most striking, however, was his almond-shaped black eyes that stared back at them, almost defiantly, but slant: They were so different from the eyes of these children’s parents and friends, who up until now had definitively comprised the entire human population. Aside from a few others on TV or in movies, Dazai’s classmates had never seen anything like him. Nobody knew it, but he’d singlehandedly shattered their oblivious white world into sharp, icicled fragments, and this made them afraid, for the world was suddenly not just about them anymore, and such an upheaval was as unpalatable as wet clay.

“Would you like to introduce yourself, young man?” Melville asked after a beat of silence.

He said it rather fast, but the boy understood. Taking a deep breath, he said, “He . . . llo. I am Osamu Dazai. Issh . . . niche to m-meet chuu.”

He felt sort of proud of himself for getting a full sentence out in English without stumbling (he’d practiced with his Mom the night before on how to say it), but he’d barely said the words before the entire classroom erupted into laughter and incoherent chatter that was sick with delight.

His face fell. Dazai couldn’t understand what the kids were saying, but knowing when someone was making fun of you doesn’t need any translation. A lingua franca wasn’t necessary for the American kids to see his humiliation either. Dazai’s cheeks heated up, his hand slipping underneath one of his sweater sleeves and anxiously scratching at the skin there.

He wished the laughing would stop.

Mr. Melville hushed everyone promptly, upset at such prejudice, but the look of mockery in his pupils’ eyes didn’t go away.

“Do you have anything else you want to say, Osamu?” Melville asked, ignorant of how he was making it so much worse.

Dazai’d barely caught what the teacher said, but he did distinguish that the man had called him by his first name. Tane had explained to him that in America people called each other by their first names, but this was the first time somebody had done so with him.

Knowing he had no choice, he continued his introduction. “I . . . I am from Hapan . . .”

Muffled snickering.

His cheeks grew hotter. Immediately looking down at the floor so he wouldn’t have to look at them anymore, he finished, “Sh-Shank yoo.”

Before anyone said anything else, he briefly popped his head up and honed in on an empty desk in the back of the class near the window. He sped-walk to it and sat down, setting his father’s suicide book -- one of the only things he had left from him -- atop the surface and fighting the urge to keep scratching. He knew all eyes were on him.

After what felt like an eternity, Mr. Melville started the class.

Dazai quietly brought out a notebook from his backpack and opened it to a blank page. Putting his name and the date at the top, he took a deep breath and looked up at the board.

Coming into this school, Dazai, with a sound kind of logic, expected that his new class would pick up from where he had left off at his old school. The last module they’d been doing was human anatomy. His Sensei had required them to remember the names and functions of important body parts, and he’d left the class just before the big quiz, so he was hoping he’d get to take that exam now.

To his perfect shock though, Mr. Melville pulled up a multiplication table chart and started talking about . . . the most basic math . . . that he’d already gone over . . . by the time he’d reached Grade 1 . . .

Huh?

Thinking this must’ve been a joke, Dazai looked around at his classmates to see if they were just as confused as he was.

They were, in fact, confused, but not in the same manner. On their faces, Dazai saw complete cluelessness and abject incomprehensibility, and he realized that, aside from a few kids who seemed to be following along the lecture, most of his peers were . . . struggling . . . with . . . multiplication . . .

He didn’t end up taking any notes.

When it was time to go to recess, Melville told everyone that there’d be a 20-question multiplication test in two days, so everybody should study for it. All the kids sighed in disappointment, but their looks of dismay quickly vanished once the bell rang, indicating temporary freedom from the educational imprisonment their four-walled classrooms represented.

Leaving behind his backpack at the desk but still holding onto the red book, Dazai followed everyone as they stampeded out of the classroom through a metallic glass door and into a big grassy field with play structures, a sandbox, and two sets of swings. There were kids everywhere, not just from his class. He’d learn later that everyone from Grade 1-8 was allowed recess three times a day, and sometimes there were even days when there was no class, just event days or what the board called ‘Fun Days.’

Quickly doing the math, Dazai realized that schoolwork -- actual schoolwork -- didn’t even comprise three-fourths of his school day. Not only was he wasting most of his time coming everyday, but he was encouraged to do so. Was this really what happened in America? How did white people learn anything about the world? And, if kids were only taught the multiplication table in Grade 4, . . . how long until Dazai could take that human anatomy test?

He stood at the edge of one of the playground structures, gawking at kids older than him running around the field and climbing monkey bars with an almost barbaric enthusiasm. One kid fell off a pole and just got back up again, flashing a small hand littered with peeling callouses as he reached and tried to lift himself up to use one of the gliders. Indeed, children were just as savage back home in Japan, as no amount of geographical borders could ever tame that innate devilry which all children possessed inside themselves.

But Dazai was quick to forget this.

Like in the classroom, Dazai had done a quick lookover of the area until he eventually honed in on a blue metal bench in the middle of the playground. Taking a deep breath, he hurried over and sat on it, using the red book as like makeshift desk to set his hands on as he quietly observed everything and everybody.

His investigation was cut short when he heard two nasally voices behind him. Turning around, he saw two boys -- one blonde with blue eyes and the other ginger with green eyes -- looking at him disapprovingly.

“You’re the Japanese boy in our class,” the blonde one stated, eyes burning, like he was accusing somebody of a dirty crime.

Dazai, confused, desperately tried to decipher what the boy was saying, but that was when the other one cut in, “Hey, are you listening? We’re talking to you. Are you dumb?”

Dazai just blinked at them. To him, everything that was coming out of their mouths was like weird static noise.

“He’s not answering,” the ginger one whispered to his friend John.

John nodded and smirked, lifting his chin up to make himself look big. “Yeah, he isn’t. He is dumb then,”

The other boy, Mark, added, “I didn’t see him take any notes in class even though we started the eight times tables today. He must be super dumb,”

John laughed, crossing his small arms. “He has to be if he can’t even speak properly,” Leaning forward, he barked, “Helloooooo? Can you talk?”

Dazai bit his lip. “. . . He-He . . lro.”

“Hero?” Mark repeated.

“I think he’s trying to say hello,”

“That didn’t even sound like hello,”

“He’s got an accent like my auntie from New York,”

“But she actually sounds normal. He doesn’t. Hey! Hey Japanese boy, speak Eeeengggliiiissshhhh,”

“I don’t think he knows how to,”

“I think so too. Remember in class this morning? ‘Issh ah niche to uh a meet chuu.’ Ha! What a dummy.”

The two boys laughed, unconscious of the fact that they had exaggerated the new boy’s accent to the gross point where it sounded more like vaudeville pidgin than anything authentic. It didn’t matter though. Even though Dazai couldn’t understand what they were saying, their uproarious laughing said enough, and it made his stomach sink.

After mimicking his ‘weird’ accent and botching the few words he had said that morning, John and Mark eventually grew bored with Dazai and ran off to play with the other kids.

Dazai stayed on the bench, scratching his arm under his sleeve, watching them go and feeling both relief and rejection at the same time.

When he came home that day, his mother was there to meet him. She had been anxious about her son all day; she hated that she couldn’t walk him to school like when he was smaller, but her brother reminded her that Dazai was at the age where kids started being independent. Nevertheless, she’d been worried and had spent all day trying not to think about all the things that could have gone wrong.

The moment she saw Dazai crossing the street to the apartment she immediately ran down the steps, clutching her stomach and smiling once her son met her eyes. Dazai was never an affectionate or cuddly child, so it surprised Tane when the little boy ran up to her and buried his face in her shirt, hands coming around to hug her tightly like when he was a baby.

Instinctively, Tane patted his back. They stayed like that for a while until she eventually pulled him away and looked into his blotchy face. She gently took ahold of Dazai’s wrist, but, to her horror, he winced in pain.

She grabbed his arm and pulled up his sweater sleeve to reveal reddened scratch marks all along his skin. There wasn’t any blood but the scratches looked mangled and angry, and it made her afraid.

“Osamu, what happened?” she almost shrieked. “D-Did someone hurt you?”

Dazai, who’d only now just seen how deep the scratches were, shook his head. “I did them myself,”

Tane didn’t know what to say. A cold feeling washed over her, and she had no idea how to get rid of it.

Standing up, she took her son’s hand in hers and led him back to the apartment building. Underneath the top floor where they lived, Mori had an independent clinic he manned day and night. He was at his office looking over charts when Tane came in with Dazai. She looked like she was about to cry, but, with a steady voice, she explained that Osamu had hurt himself and she’d like him to take a look at him.

Mori had obliged, and that was how Dazai first ended up with tight white bandages wrapped around his arms. His uncle had said he could take them off when the wounds healed, but he never did, because they never did: From the young age of nine, Dazai had unknowingly started his life-long habit of scratching that would never go away. Thus, the bandages stayed on, getting thicker and thicker with each new layer added in hopes of stopping the marks but instead just drove him to scratch other parts of his body that were still available, until he was completely covered in cottony gauze.

The next morning after Dazai’s first day, Tane found him still in bed with his alarm screaming on the side table. She turned off the clock and leaned down to where her son was lying under the covers. “Osamu? It’s time to go to school,”

“I’m sick, Mama,”

And that’d be his excuse for another week before he eventually got out of bed, healthier than ever, and made his way back to that classroom with paperwhite faces and hearts totally shut off from anything he could communicate with his broken English.

 

IV. Big Shoes

 

One day he found his mother unpacking boxes. He watched her from a distance, the gloomy afternoon light -- gray as rain -- filtered in through the window blinds and made her skin look pale and withered.

When she noticed him, she beckoned for him to come closer. He plopped himself in between her legs, facing the box. His head occasionally bumped against his mother’s torso.

Tane was organizing some clothes. There was a folded pile of sweaters and pants next to her, and as she dug deeper into the box she kept adding to the pile.

Dazai watched her wrists bend with the fabric as she folded down creases and tears she told herself she’d fix later. Eventually, she got to the bottom of the first box and found her husband’s old pair of oxfords. She’d bought them for him for their last anniversary.

Of course, at the time she didn’t know it would be their last, because no one ever knows.

The shoes weren’t as shiny as they were when they had been new, but they still retained a romantic sort of glow, like a candle that had only been lit once.

Dazai peeked up at them and, when Tane noticed, she laughed and let him touch the shoes. As his hands roved over the high-class leather, she patted his head and told him that he could have them.

“But Mama I’m too little,” the child said gravely.

“You won’t always be,” Tane mused. “One day you’re going to be a handsome, intelligent young man, just like your father,” She tried to hide the catch in her throat. She knew that if she let herself miss him it’d be the end of everything. “And a young man like that needs a good pair of shoes, don’t you think?”

“I’ll never fit them,”

“Of course you will,”

Dazai didn’t say anything more, but a mother knows when her child is pouting. She took the oxfords from his small hands and gently willed her son to stick out his feet. One by one, she fitted the shoes onto his socked feet and laughed at how big they were on him once she was done her work.

“I told you,” Dazai wailed, thinking he was being made fun of like at school, but this time it was his own mother. (Which was even worse). “I’m too little,”

“No, love,” she kissed him, suddenly terrified of when he’ll be grown and she could no longer hold him like this anymore. “You’re never too little,”

“Mori says I am,”

“Don’t listen to him. Despite being a doctor he is rather foolish,” She kissed him again. “And you should really call him ‘Uncle,’ darling, not ‘Mori,’”

Dazai shook his head, stubbornly trying not to grin. He liked all the kisses, it made his belly feel warm. “I’ll call him what I like,”

“And what if he called you what he likes but you don’t like it?”

Dazai was quiet for a moment, but his mother knew he was thinking the question over and patiently waited for his sound conclusion.

“I would . . .” The boy shook his tiny feet in the far-too-large oxfords, the shoes thunking against the apartment floor. “. . . Kick him with these,”

“You naughty boy. Kicking people is bad.”

“Then why do you like it when the baby kicks you?”

“Because that tells me it's strong,”

“Aren’t I strong, Mama?”

“Yes you are, Osamu. More than you know,”

 

V. Dazai’s First Fight

 

At some point he’d learned that the two boys who tormented him daily were named Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. Even when Dazai tried to avoid them -- he avoided everyone -- they were as determined as they were relentless.

Lunchtime was the worst since Dazai would have to sit at his desk and take out the bento box his mother prepared for him every morning. Back at home, she’d make him tasty meals like curry with boiled vegetables and tofu-laden soup. Ever since they’d moved, however, Tane found the American supermarkets to be so beyond what she was used to: She knew how to cook, but the ingredients she usually found without trouble at the marketplaces or street vendors in Aomori were scarce here -- and, if she did find something, it was too expensive, or only said it came from Asia when it quite evidently didn’t.

As a result, Dazai’s bento box had significantly decreased in presentation and quality. For one, his container was very plain. Back home, he had had a blue lunchbox with cartoon crabs on the sides, but, as with most of Dazai’s belongings, it had been left behind.

When he’d taken out his bento box for the first time in class, a wary silence automatically surrounded him, and he realized all the other kids were staring -- not at him, but at his food, which was just ordinary white rice, vegetables, and fish, with a bit of pudding as dessert.

His classmates particularly focused on the chopsticks he used. He didn’t know how to use a spoon and fork yet.

“What’s that?” somebody said behind him. A girl with dark pigtails pointed at his eating utensils.

Before Dazai could respond, Mark and John seized his bento box. The latter leaned in to sniff his food and visibly gagged in exaggerated disgust. “Ew, this smells like fish,”

“Is . . . Fish,” Dazai mumbled.

“For real?” Mark put a hand over his mouth and mimicked his friend’s gagging. “Eugh, it really stinks,”

John, who was carelessly holding the container, began to move it side to side between his two hands, making the contents slosh against the cheap plastic and eventually causing it all to spill onto the floor. “Yuck!” the blonde boy screamed when one of Dazai’s mackerel slices unceremoniously plopped onto his foot. Throwing the bento box away in disgust, John looked at his white shoe, which was now stained an odd yellowish-brown color that reminded him of dog shit. Pinching his nose, he let out a yell and tackled Dazai to the ground.

Everyone present, who had been watching all this time and not saying anything, spread out across the room to give the two boys a proper stage much like a wrestling ring. (Like the ones on TV).

John had put his entire weight onto Dazai when their bodies collided, causing the latter to crash onto the tiled floor and hit his head against one of the table legs as he went down. His ears were ringing, so it took a second for Dazai to fully process that John had tackled him and was now straddling his torso and yelling. His head started to throb.

“Mark! Nathaniel! Get me the box!”

“Sure but why?”

“Just get it for me!”

John didn’t explain. Instead, he waited until Mark handed him the mostly empty bento box that only had a few bits of sticky rice and vegetables still clinging to it. To the shocked delight of his classmates -- everyone was in between laughing and gasping at this point -- the little boy poured the rest of the box’s lunch onto Dazai’s face, cackling wildly when a piece of cauliflower hit him in the eye and caused the boy to wince.

Since there was recess right after lunch, they dragged him to the playground just as the bell rang. The fourth graders carried him over to a corner of the main building like some sort of hysterical funeral procession, attracting other kids to come and check out what all the fuss was about.

They dumped him on the snowy grass. Dazai tried to get up by grabbing onto the metal fence nearby, but that was when he felt a solid kick in his stomach. He didn’t know who it was that had landed the first blow, but once it was done a barrage of hits, kicks, and slaps followed soon after.

The assault only stopped once the school bell rang again about fifteen minutes later, and all his classmates, like a swarm of red fire ants, scattered away from the little mound now covered in dirt, gravel, grass, and bruises.

There wasn’t any blood, but to Dazai it had felt like a thousand swords had pierced his body, and, lying there, he couldn’t imagine ever standing back up or seeing his mother again.

The thought came to him that he hadn’t even had anything to throw up, since they’d taken his food before he could even eat any of it. He didn’t know if that was a positive or not. (After some thinking he decided it was mostly negative since his mom had done so much to make his lunch everyday and he had just wasted food).

After a while, he was able to sit up and lean against the metal fence, waiting for all the pain to go away. What came instead was a teacher: She had been patrolling the afternoon recess crowd and was just about to head back inside after looking over the whole field and playground. Upon seeing Dazai’s disheveled form, she quickly ran to him and called for help. Soon he was in the school infirmary, and the teacher who’d found him tried to ask what had happened, but Dazai didn’t answer. A nurse with cold hands wrapped him in (more) bandages while Mr. Melville was contacted and soon arrived at the scene. When he saw his pitiful new student, he felt his chest wrench in supreme pity, and he demanded to speak to the principal as soon as possible.

The room filled up with chatty adults so quickly that, to the little boy tucked into the wall cot, they looked like blue clouds glitching against the office wallpaper.

His things, including his bento box (it was broken), were brought to him and a man in a beige suit and respectable glasses came and asked him questions in useless English.

Mr. Melville made plain his anger to the principal, who promised to look into the issue and work it out accordingly.

By ‘working out,’ however, he really meant make one singular attempt at communicating with the bandaged child and, with no luck and a slight impatience with his inability to understand a word of English, the principal gave up (why did this boy’s parents bring him to America if he couldn’t speak the language? This is what happens when you let foreigners into the country, and exactly why they should all go back to where they came from if they were going to disrespect the majority dialect like that).

Every one of Dazai’s classmates was then called in.

After a few halfhearted interviews, one of the children confessed that it was John who’d been the lead culprit, and the young boy was soon summoned to the principal’s office, where one of the teachers -- Mrs. Steinbeck, his mother, who taught the grade above him -- and the headmaster bombarded him with annoying inquiries as to who did what and why did you do that and it should never happen again.

Yet John, not sorry in the slightest, was a smart child in that he knew of his charming innocence. Like a cherubin devil, he burst into hot distressed tears and moaned, “He made me do it! The Japanese boy made me do it he was being so mean to me and Mark.” This quickly put a stop to all the unnecessary scolding, and soon his mother -- Mrs. Steinbeck, who taught the grade above him -- rushed to her dear boy’s side and embraced him with infinite empathy.

“Oh, John, John, it’s alright, don’t cry,” she soothed. Turning to the principal, she said, “I knew there was something more to this. My John is a sweet boy. He would never hurt a fly. Never. I say call that child’s parents and have them find out the whole truth of it,”

When it was brought to her attention that her son, who seemed to have sustained zero injuries despite his desperate insistence that Dazai had been the one to provoke him, was clearly the one in the wrong, a maternal fire inflamed within her and, clutching her baby close to her chest so that his fake sobs were muffled against her bosom, she declared, “You’re wrong! There’s been a mistake!”

“But all the students said it was your son who started it all,”

“Children will say anything to get out of trouble! They’ve just decided to pick on my poor John!”

“But it’s clear that --”

“No! I refuse to believe this was a one-sided scuffle! That boy -- that filthy boy forced my John to hit him!”

This carried on for quite some time, with Mrs. Steinbeck becoming more and more convinced of her version of the story that, by the end of it, she threatened that she, along with her son, would quit the schoolboard and therefore put a stop to her husband’s generous annual donations, if these “villains” wouldn’t stop blaming “her John” and refused to get to the bottom of things. She demanded, “Why would you even trust what all that boy and the children say? Aren’t you the headmaster? Can’t you see with your own two eyes that there’s something far deeper here?! My John is a victim!”

Quite soon, just as the school day ended, the two boys -- oppressor and oppressed, though the distinction had now been irreparably reversed -- were brought into the same room and told to apologize to each other, for they had both committed equally punishable wrongs and needed to face the consequences of their joint savage misbehavior.

“I’m sorry!” John announced liberally, puffing out his chest like a bird of paradise -- much to this mother’s delight, who now saw him as a humble torchbearer of justice who stood up against tyranny and, at the same time, had also given her the sole privilege of assisting him in such a noble quest, for it was an endeavor far too daunting for a single child to face alone.

Dazai didn’t understand what was going on. The woman he had eventually realized was John’s mother glared daggers at him, like he was an insect instead of a child.

How do you talk to an angry giant?

After a while somebody nudged him on the shoulder in a hopeful attempt to prompt an apology out of him. It was as unhelpful as it was bewildering.

All eyes were on him, obviously expecting something.

Helplessly, Dazai tried to figure out what they wanted, but all he could do was slip his hands underneath his sleeves, past his new bandages, and scratch himself anxiously.

“He needs to apologize too,” Mrs. Steinbeck barked. “What’s wrong with him? Can’t he say sorry? He’s not a mute is he?”

Before the staff members could tell her the boy barely spoke any English, a small, suppressed voice finally murmured, “So . . . Sho . . . Sho . . .”

“Sho? Sho what?” Mrs. Steinbeck scoffed, thinking this dark child was mocking her. “Say sorry!”

“S-Shorry . . . Sho . . .”

“What was that?”

“Shorry!” Dazai cried, wanting nothing more than for her to just shut up. He hadn’t cried when they’d taken his lunch or when his entire class had gathered around just to beat him up in perfectly collected cruelty, but he cried now: fat, dripping tears that made him choke on his own tongue, forcing him to breathe out of his mouth with violent heaves as if he were in the water, away from shore, and drowning.

Not knowing what to do, all the adults, including Mrs. Steinbeck, froze where they were, mesmerized by the boy’s sobbing. It never occurred to them that the child was just a child.

It is also significant to note that, in the midst of all this blunder, nobody had thought to contact Dazai’s parents. To them -- even the ones with the best intentions and openest of minds -- the boy had simply appeared, with no lineage or history to his strange foreign name, at their school. In their eyes, he was not just without a home but had come into theirs so queerly that they couldn’t even begin to understand that he was part of that proud race called humanity, just as they and their ancestors were. Like a dandelion, they saw only the weed and never thought about the roots beneath it.

Dazai didn’t know when he stopped crying.

All he remembered from the rest of that day was stumbling into Mori’s clinic, his muscles sore and screaming, and finding a basket full of bandage wraps that he then took an armful of before hurrying upstairs to his room.

When his mother found him buried underneath a mountain of blankets it took a lot of coaxing to get the full story out of Dazai.

That night she gave her son a bath, changed his bandages in silence, and waited for him to fall asleep before she went to her brother and told him everything.

Mori listened and sympathized with her anger, though he did not replicate it.

“I’m going to go there tomorrow to talk to his principal and teachers,”

“And what will that do? They wouldn’t even understand you,”

“You come with me then! They made him apologize, Mori. They took his food, bashed him up, told him terrible things, and the school made him apologize --”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Mori sighed.

“Like hell.”

 

VI. A Friend

 

He was transferred to another school.

While this meant a fresh start, it also meant taking the bus every morning instead of just walking a few blocks by himself.

Tane waited with him at the bus stop every morning, as if doing so could make up for the brutality her son had gone through in his previous school, which she felt senselessly guilty of.

When the hulking yellow mammoth drove up and stopped for Dazai, he looked up at her only once before letting go of her hand and climbing on. He took an empty seat in the front row and waved at her through the window.

Thankfully, his first days at this new school were uneventful. Yes, the majority of the student body wasn’t Japanese like him, so there were a couple of stares and most people kept their distance, but nobody said anything rude or tried to harrass him just because he was a new kid from a different country.

Things only changed (though he didn’t know it at the time) when Dazai received the highest mark on his class’ weekly math quiz. After his teacher Miss Wells finished handing out the tests, she made an announcement congratulating their new student on his perfect score. She then led a round of applause, which made everybody turn their eyes on him at his desk in the outer second row.

He didn’t need to be fluent in English to understand he was being praised, but the attention made him uncomfortable.

He got 100% on the next quiz too, along with two other kids, which pleased Miss Wells. After that, he got another 100%, but this time there were three kids who followed suit.

One day Dazai’s class merged with the school’s other fourth-grade class for a joint outing to the school library. The students were encouraged to check out books to read during break time.

He never knew what to do whenever they went to the library. All the books were printed wrong (why was it right to left?), and it wasn’t like he could read anything they said anyway.

Nevertheless, the books really interested him. Aside from his father’s suicide book, he’d had to leave all his favorite novels and short story collections in Aomori.

Even though his school’s library eluded him, he still found comfort in just existing in it. He spent the time tracing his hand against the book spines. Some had plain covers with big block letters Dazai could barely make out, but they were thick and heavy which must’ve meant they were important. Others had expensive binding and elaborately decorated covers, with pictures of mythical figures or animals in painted meadows.

He picked one up from one of the shelves that had dragons and knights on the front. He’d barely flipped through a couple pages before a voice behind him said, “That one’s about fairytales.”

Dazai jumped, quickly shutting the book and turning to see a young boy his age with the most vibrant red hair he’d ever seen staring at him.

Dazai’s eyes widened.

Looking back on this moment, he would always remember the feeling of shimmering familiarity that enveloped him just then. It wasn’t world-changing or loud, -- totally forgettable, in the grand scheme of things, really -- but it was collapsible, like dipping your toe in the water and immediately knowing you’d dive in.

He’d find out later, after the two immediately engaged in a petty argument over which fairytale was better (he said “Snow White,” the other said “One-Inch Boy”), that the boy was named Chuuya Nakahara.

He was Dazai’s first friend. He was possibly the only first friend Dazai could’ve ever made because, out of the entire fourth grade, Chuuya was the only one who could actually talk to him.

When he’d pointed out the fairytale book to Dazai, he’d spoken in Japanese -- awkward Japanese, but Japanese. Dazai had understood him perfectly, which is why he had been so shocked.

Up until then he had been invisible. People had seen him, but it was never enough to just be noticed. His fragile soul was lonely, and, even without Dazai’s knowing, it had been wishing for someone to talk to.

“How can you talk to me?” Dazai asked, dumbfounded.

“My parents speak Yuhpanese to me,”

“Japanese,”

“Eh?”

“Japanese. We’re talking in Japanese,”

“That’s what I said, dummy,”

“You’re a dummy too you can’t even say Japanese,”

“Shut up I can say it,”

“You can’t speak English too?”

“I can,” Chuuya squared his tiny shoulders -- like a king -- before reciting,“‘Once upon a time there was a peach flower boy alone at a library and he looked like he needed a friend,’” in perfect English. He gave Dazai a smug grin, which told the other boy that he was being made fun of.

“Oi, what did you just say?”

“None of your business,” (This in Japanese).

“You can speak English and Japanese?”

Chuuya nodded.

“How?”

“My dads and older sister talk to me in Japanese.”

“Are they Japanese?”

“No, only my sister and me. My parents adopted us when we were little and didn’t want us to lose the language,”

“You’re adopted?”

“Yeah. Are you?”

“No, I have a Mama. She’s gonna have a baby soon,”

“That’s cool. Maybe you’ll get a sister like my Ane-san,”

Dazai frowned. “I don’t want a sister,”

“Brother then?”

He shook his head. “No,”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want Mama to love me and only me,” Dazai said, surprised at his own words. He immediately knew that what he’d said was bad and selfish, and that if he had said it in front of Tane it would’ve made her really upset.

No one outside of his mother and uncle had really spoken to him in over a month, so he’d gotten the habit of never putting his thoughts into words.

It occurred to him then that what he’d said was something he’d been feeling for a while now, and once it was out he desperately wanted it gone.

“You really are a dummy,”

Chuuya’s voice took him out of his thoughts. “I’m not a dummy,” Dazai huffed, a little angry now. “I’m a genus!”

“Right,” Chuuya rolled his eyes. Without warning, he grabbed Dazai by his sleeve and led him to a nearby spot in the library that had comic books. “C’mon, Mr. Verne said we’re going soon and I need to pick something to read,”

Dazai pointed out that books with only pictures on them didn’t really count as real books, much to Chuuya’s annoyance. The two boys bickered about this issue until their teachers called everyone back, forcing them to each go their separate ways.

Dazai took out the book of fairytales.

Before the other class left the library, he spotted Chuuya’s bright hair in the group and ran over to him. “Help me read this,” he demanded once he caught up to the other boy.

Chuuya, who had been chatting with a classmate, was surprised for a second since he thought Dazai had left with his class. When he realized what the other boy was saying though, Chuuya gave him a lopsided smile and nodded. “Sure!”

Dazai smiled too. He hugged the book to his chest and ran back to his class, giving Chuuya one last look behind him before he got lost in with the other kids.

“Do you know him, Chuuya? That Japanese boy?” his classmate Louisa asked, curious.

“Yeah he’s a big dummy. A peach flower boy big dummy,” He turned to her. “Why do you call him Japanese boy?”

“Because he’s Japanese,”

“I’m Japanese,”

At this, Louisa’s face turned scarlet. “What? I-I thought you were American --”

“I am, but I was born in Japan,”

“W-Well then why can you speak English and he can’t?”

“Who says he can’t?” Chuuya crossed his arms, waiting. “When you were first born you couldn’t speak at all either, could you? It’s like that, except you didn’t know anything as a baby. At least he knows Japanese, yeah?”

Louisa had nothing to say.

 

VII. Japanglish

 

Class trips to the library weren’t so bad after that. Chuuya was always there with his classmates and he would help Dazai pick out easy stuff to read.

It turned out their library had books that were first published in Japan but had been translated into English. Dazai took out a book written by the same author he knew his uncle had books of in his office. When he got home, he took Mori’s books and compared the Japanese writing from his uncle’s library with his English copy. He did this with several other books, and, after a few months had passed, Dazai could read and speak some English, much to the pride of his mother.

“He’s picking it up faster than I am,” she’d say, beaming.

Mori would just smile in his mysterious way, obviously pleased but not like Tane was.

Dazai never found out if the doctor knew he’d been ‘borrowing’ the books in Japanese, but if he did, he must’ve not minded, so Dazai kept doing it.

Chuuya also helped him at school. Even though they were in different classrooms they could still meet up during recess, lunch, outings, assemblies, and break times. Chuuya talked to him in both Japanese and English, using the familiarity of the former language to bolster Dazai’s understanding of the latter. Dazai, to his credit, was a fast learner.

During this time Dazai also learned more about Chuuya.

He learned that his two fathers had both come from France, where they had met at the Lycée Condorcet (Dazai had a hard time pronouncing that one) and started dating. After they both graduated (Paul as a lawyer and Arthur as a journalist), they quickly wanted to start a family together. France’s adoption policy required them to be married before they took in a child, but, due to problems on both sides of their families Paul and Arthur couldn’t for a long time. After a bit of searching, and after Arthur had been transferred to Tokyo as an English teacher for two years, they decided to adopt through a Japanese agency, which allowed single-parent adoption. It was only supposed to have been Chuuya, who was a newborn, that they would adopt, but, after learning he had an older sister Kouyou who’d been tossed around in the foster care system up until then, they also took her in. When the papers were finalized and Arthur’s teaching internship had ended, he flew both of them back to France, where he and Paul were eventually married. They moved to Boston with Kouyou and Chuuya soon after because Paul was offered a job there. They had a dog named Baki (“It’s short for Arahabaki,” “My dog was named Melos, but he died,” “That sucks,” “It’s okay because you’re a lot like a dog,” “Eh? What’d you say?”) and lived downtown in an expensive modern apartment.

Kouyou was four years older, but she had transferred to a French immersion school on the other side of the city a few months prior. Chuuya didn’t want to go with her, so he’d stayed behind and was perfectly fine with that. When Dazai learned about this he was secretly grateful that Chuuya hadn’t followed his older sister, since that meant Chuuya would’ve gone to a completely different school and they never would’ve ended up friends.

That in itself was also a sort of miracle, because it didn’t take long for Dazai to realize that Chuuya had a lot of friends. His whole class and even some kids from Dazai’s group loved him, and everywhere he went it seemed like a flock of people -- kids and adults, even animals (one of their classmates had a service dog and it loved getting headpats from Chuuya) -- swarmed to him. This puzzled Dazai for two reasons: One being that, if Chuuya was so popular, why was he even hanging out with him, the new kid who didn’t even speak English? And two:

“How come they don’t look at you weird?”

Dazai asked this one day at recess after a group of boys had come up to where they were on the field and asked Chuuya to join them for their next game. Dazai, of course, wasn’t asked (he was never asked), which was what made him bring up the question.

“What do you mean?” Chuuya said once the group had left after he turned them down.

“They don’t look at you like they look at me, even though we’re both --”

“How do they look at you?”

“C’mon, Chuuya, you know what I mean,”

“Well, so what?”

“So why don’t they think you’re weird?” Dazai could hear the grouse in his voice, but he kept going. “Why do they like you and not me when we both . . . we both look different than them?”

Since Dazai had come to America, his difference bothered him. His time at his first elementary school had worsened it: it was there that he’d realized what was wrong with him was skin deep and physical, and that he was born with this difference, thereby incapable of changing anything to make them like him or his background. When he’d met Chuuya, he was glad to see somebody who looked more like him, like his mom, like people he was used to, but he quickly realized that the boy didn’t share the same solitude as he did. He wasn’t outcasted. In fact, he was very much accepted, asked for, like a prize -- even by the ones who never gave Dazai a second glance -- and it made Dazai think back to his difference and how it must’ve kept him apart from others on an intrinsic level: it wasn’t just about the shape of his eyes or the place he’d come from, but rather something else entirely deep inside him that must’ve been wrong. Wrong and wrong and wrong.

He was happy to have made a friend in Chuuya, but everyone’s kindness to the other boy -- all their love and all their joy -- bathed him in a light that only brought more attention to the shadow Dazai lived in. It made him shrink and it made him restless. He’d never be able to prove it, but something in him just knew John and Mark wouldn’t have bullied Chuuya like they’d bullied him. Mrs. Steinbeck wouldn’t have looked at him the same way she glared at Dazai that day he had to apologize for something he didn’t even do.

Everyone liked Chuuya. It was a natural reflex, like being given a gift and having no choice but to adore it.

Dazai, on the other hand, felt more like one of those medals they awarded you for participation: Not completely unwanted, but altogether unremarkable.

And it wasn’t necessarily jealousy or anything childishly bitter that Dazai felt. From a very young age he’d known he was more closed-in than most, that it was always going to be him, his loved ones, and then everyone else at a far, far distance. He preferred it that way, despite his parents wishing for him to make more friends or be more outgoing like most kids.

He was content with only letting a few people in. But, when Chuuya had shown up -- come into his small bubble that until then had only had his mother and a dead father in it -- Dazai had begun to believe that he would always be unacceptable, -- like someone who got disqualified even before the game had even started -- in a way even he couldn’t understand or put a name to.

He never told Chuuya any of this, mostly because he didn’t know how to, but sometimes it spilled out in minuscule drops, which was why Dazai’d asked the question so randomly: “Why do they like you and not me?”

It wasn’t what he said, but really he was asking, “Why are you loved and I’m not?”

The bell had rung just after he’d said it, and Dazai, a little embarrassed now, stood up quickly and mumbled a “See you later” to Chuuya before he dashed back into his classroom.

He never brought it up again, -- he made sure to never bring it up again -- and his friend never pushed him about it, so he never got his answer.

Eventually Dazai came to realize that there really wasn’t one.

It was just how things were, like how the earth span around the sun every twenty four hours, or that sometimes you couldn’t trust the words of a suicidal father, no matter how much he loved you and said he was happy.

It was just how things were.

VIII. Month Eight

 

One evening in January, he woke up from a bad dream in the middle of the night. He couldn’t remember what it was about, so he decided to get up and grab a drink from the kitchen.

His mom was there sitting at the dining table. She was breathing slowly and her face was scrunched up in obvious pain.

Scared, Dazai ran up to her and placed a hand on her leg. “Mama? What’s wrong?” To his surprise, the fabric on Tane’s pants was wet, and when he brought his hand back and looked at it, his palm was red.

His whole body went cold.

Tane, upon hearing her son’s voice, opened her eyes and saw Dazai looking up at her terrified. She touched his cheek and tried to smile -- change her face like a shirt -- but a sharp stab of pain shot through her, making her wince and hold onto her stomach.

It passed after a few minutes, but she knew it’d come back sooner than she’d like it to. She’d started having mild contractions earlier that day, but they’d gotten more intense during the last half hour. From her last pregnancy, she knew she’d experience small contractions that’d help her body prepare for the birth as she got closer to her due date -- Braxton Hicks, they were called. However, when her water broke just a few minutes ago, she immediately knew something was wrong.

There had been blood. Too much blood.

The sight of it paralyzed her. If Dazai hadn’t come in when he did then, she would’ve just stayed in that position, frozen, until God knew how long.

Her son snapped her back to reality. Trembling, she took his hand in hers and looked him in the eye. “Osamu,” she said, knowing they were both going to have to be very brave right now. “Go get your uncle,”

Without another word, Dazai dashed to the hallway where Mori’s bedroom was and found it dark and empty. Letting out a weak groan of frustration, he ran back to the main area and took the stairs to the clinic below. He took three steps at a time, tripping as he descended while also trying to fight against the lump in his throat from metastisizing into a planet. When he got to the bottom, he followed the lights leading to Mori’s office, where he found his uncle seated near a cot looking over a clipboard and charts. Not wasting any time, Dazai ran to him and grabbed his arm, dragging his uncle up the stairs and almost ripping his lab coat sleeve as they made their way back to the apartment.

Mori, who had never seen his nephew so wound up, followed dumbly, too stunned to ask questions.

When Dazai brought him to the kitchen and his eyes landed on his sister, hunched over the dining table and clinging painfully onto her stomach, he didn’t need an explanation.

“Something’s wrong,” Tane managed to say, the sweat on her forehead pooling. “It doesn’t feel like it did with Osamu, this is --”

He took control of the situation with a well-trained efficiency only a doctor could possess. He knew Tane had already packed a bag for the hospital, which he told Dazai to fetch.

While waiting, he helped his sister stand up and brought her down the stairs to the parking lot outside his clinic. It was raining slightly. He called a cab. He heard someone crash down the steps and turned to see Dazai panting and holding up a duffel bag. Mori took it.

Tane beside him, who had been taking deep breaths per his instruction, suddenly let out a cry that almost made her knees give out. Mori put an arm around her shoulders and tried to soothe her by rubbing her lower back. “The cab will be here soon,” he said. “It’ll be alright,”

Tane cried again, nearly falling down on the pavement and taking Mori with her. “It’s too early, I’m only at eight months, --”

“It’ll be alright,” Mori said again.

“Something’s wrong Rintarou, something’s wrong,” she kept insisting.

“Some babies are born before the nine months are up, it’ll be alright --”

“Mama?”

Both adults froze.

Tane was the first to move. Inhaling sharply, she reached out a hand for her son. Dazai walked to her, wanting to hug her, but his arms hung motionless by his side.

“Osamu, oh no,” She turned swiftly to Mori. “The nanny left. Just yesterday she called saying she had to go on a weekend trip for a family emergency. I told her it was alright since I was only on week thirty, but --”

“I’ll give her a call,” Mori interrupted, catching sight of a small cab making its way down their block. Relieved, he helped his sister get into the vehicle, using the duffel bag as a sort of umbrella to shelter her from the rain.

Once Tane had gotten into the car and Mori was about to get in too, she grabbed her brother by the arm. “Osamu. What about Osamu?”

“I will call the nanny,” Mori said calmly.

“But she’s not here, I told you!”

“I’ll work something out, I promise,”

“But Osamu. Who will stay with Osamu? We can’t just leave him here!”

There was no consoling her. Irritated now, Mori sighed and told the driver to take her to the hospital. “I’ll stay behind with Dazai. I’ll get another cab and catch up with you soon,”

Tane, relieved, could only nod in frantic agreement before the cab sped off and disappeared down a street corner. She had enough strength to look out the rear window to try and catch a glimpse of her son, but Dazai was gone.

Mori ran back to the clinic and found him standing at the entrance. With hurried step, he moved past the boy and went to the phone that was mounted on the wall behind him. He called another cab and tried to contact the nanny, but the line just kept on ringing.

When he set the receiver down after his third try, he felt his nephew’s eyes on him.

“Dazai,”

The boy started. “Yes?”

Mori walked to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Looking into his eyes, he said, “Listen to me. This is what’s going to happen. You are going to go back upstairs and lock the door. Lock it, just like your Mama showed you. You’re going to go back to your room -- lock it too -- and you’re going to wait until I come back for you and then -- and only then will you open the door,”

It was the first time Mori had given him orders in that stern, officious way that would sear itself into Dazai’s memory forever. Nodding meekly, not needing to be told twice, the boy went back to the apartment and did what he was told.

When he was halfway up the stairs a car whistled into the lot. He heard the sound of a door opening and closing, and then wheels skidding away.

Hurrying to his bedroom, he shut off all the lights and locked the door. Something in him told him it wasn’t enough, so he grabbed what little he could -- a few books, his laundry basket, even his bedsheets -- and piled everything up against the exit as a type of barricade. He sat at the farthest edge of the wall. His eyes never left the door and his ears barely registered the sharp stinging on his arms. In the middle of everything he’d scratched off a layer of his bandages and had accidentally reopened a wound, but he couldn’t feel it. The lump in his throat wasn’t a planet, it was an entire galaxy, it was God, and the feeling of it bursting inside him was the last thing he recalled before everything plunged to black.

 

IX. An Apartment Above a Clinic

 

The sound of keys unlocking his bedroom door woke him up. His brain had only just figured out that someone was coming inside, but before he could grab anything to protect himself against a maybe intruder, the outline of his uncle filled the doorframe.

Like always, Mori looked composed, albeit a little tired. “Oh, why are you on the floor?”

Dazai looked dumbly at him.

Mori opened the door wider, leaning an arm on the knob. “You must be hungry,”

He wasn’t. “Where’s Mama?”

A shadow fell across Mori’s face, but, just like his sister, it quickly changed into a strained smile. “Your mother’s still at the hospital. Congratulations, you have a new sibling. Perfectly healthy, given the circumstances --”

“Why is she still at the hospital?”

“Well because she just had a baby,”

“But women are usually fine after having babies and can move around easily soon after and that’s why they’re better than men,”

Mori frowned. “There were . . . some problems,” He grimaced. “She had to undergo an emergency C-section.”

Dazai had heard the term before but didn’t quite understand it.

“It’s when they cut open the belly to get the baby out,” his uncle supplied once he saw the boy’s confusion.

“Cut open?” Dazai repeated the words slowly. “Is Mama okay? Did they hurt her?”

“She and the baby have to stay at the hospital until further notice,” Mori said curtly. Dazai immediately understood that it was the end of the conversation.

Without another word, Mori gestured for him to follow him to the kitchen, where his uncle sat him down at the dining table where his mother had been just a few hours before. Mori set an opaque glass cup in front of Dazai and a tumbler of water, then turned to the bottom cupboards and found a frying a pan. He promptly went about making eggs and bacon for his nephew, fully knowing the child was boring holes into his back with the number of questions that were surely racing through his mind.

When Mori set the plate of food down in front of him, Dazai ate it all mechanically. The yolk tasted like paste on his tongue.

It was only then that he checked the time on the microwave clock: 2:03 PM. He’d missed school.

As if reading his mind, Mori, after taking the seat across from him, said, “I called your teachers and explained the situation to them. You have today off, but tomorrow you’ll have to go back like usual.”

Dazai braced himself. “But what about Mama?”

That irritation Mori had felt last night in the midst of all the rush came back. He was usually a patient man, but he found children especially bothersome. Male children, most of all.

“Surely you’re old enough to go to school by yourself, right? That’s what you’ve been doing for months now, after all. If you’re worried about food I’ll give you some money to buy yourself lunch,” Mori reached into his coat pocket and took out his wallet, handing the child a few crinkled bills, which Dazai took almost as mechanically as he ate his breakfast. “And the bus will be here same time as it always is, so you won’t have a problem getting home.”

The chairs of Mori’s seat scraped against the tile flooring. He got up to check inside the fridge, back turned to Dazai once more.

“When can I see Mama?”

“Soon. Soon,” Mori promised. “For now, you need to focus on your studies,”

Dazai wanted to point out that he was already at the top of his class, -- well, except in English -- so there wasn’t any reason to concern himself with school, especially when his mother was gone and sick.

“Dazai,” Mori’s voice made the boy’s head perk up. “You don’t want your mother to worry any more than she already is, right?”

Dazai blinked, then shook his head.

“Listen to me,” his uncle said in that severe tone that made his bones shiver. He sounded grave and sure, like he was addressing Dazai the way he’d talk to another adult and not a kid. “If your Mama asks who stayed with you while she was at the hospital, you say it was the nanny, alright?”

Dazai stared at him for a few seconds before slowly nodding.

“Good. I’m going to be going back and forth here and the hospital for a while,”

“Can I come with you?”

“Not yet, but soon,” Mori promised again. “But until then you’re going to have to be by yourself for a little while. I’ve been trying to call your nanny, but she just isn’t picking up. I’m afraid I don’t know any other person capable of taking care of you. All my colleagues and acquaintances either have children of their own or a career as demanding as mine,” The man sighed, suddenly looking older than he really was. “Listen to me. When you find yourself alone in the house, remember what I told you last night: Lock the door. Lock it, and only open it when it’s me on the other side,”

“What about if Mama comes back?”

“She won’t. Only me. Got it, Dazai?”

He nodded.

“I’ll go out and get groceries later today so you can have food and drinks for later. If it runs out, there’s a convenience store that’s ten minutes’ walk from here. There’s some spare money in a jar on the top kitchen counter. You know where that is?”

Dazai nodded.

“Good. I know I said to only open the door when it’s me, but if you really need to go outside to get something, or you have to go somewhere, you leave me a note and come right back here when you’re done. Don’t invite anyone over either. If you hear noises outside or see something strange, leave it alone. If someone rings the doorbell or knocks on my clinic door, you stay put and don’t answer it. Same goes for if the mailman comes with a package, or if the phone rings and it’s not me. Like I said, only open the door if it’s me. Only answer the phone when it’s me,”

Dazai nodded again.

Mori left to run errands after that. Before he went downstairs he gave Dazai one last look that said, “Remember what I told you.” It was like the same look his mother often gave him, and it made Dazai miss her all the more.

He spent the rest of the day alone in his room. He tried to watch TV, but Mori wasn’t subscribed to any of the good channels. He tried to read his uncle’s Japanese books, but the words kept swimming in his eyes and hot tears only stained the long paragraphs. Time passed agonizingly, as it always did when a child wanted nothing more than for something to happen.

He slept, drank some water, turned the TV on and off.

After an eternity, he heard the clinic door open and the sound of paper bags rustling downstairs. “Dazai?” Mori called.

The boy ran to the top of the stairs and peered down, spotting a glimpse of his uncle near the bottom of the steps.

“I bought some groceries. Do you know how to put them away?”

Dazai nodded.

“Good. I’m going to the hospital again now. Remember what I told you.”

Dazai fought the urge to ask if he could come with him.

He carried the grocery bags up the steps and set everything there was on the dining table. He ordered all of them into categories like ‘FRIDGE’ or ‘PANTRY,’ and when he was done putting it all away, he dug out a cup ramen for himself and heated up some water. That was dinner.

He must’ve fallen asleep soon after he finished it.

 

. . .

 

He went to school the next day. He couldn’t have cared less about the material he’d missed, but as soon as he walked into class the following morning Miss Wells asked if she could talk to him outside.

Still not used to being talked to by someone other than his family members, Dazai agreed just before he stole a glance at his desk at the front. The four other tables, along with the classmates that usually sat near him, were gone and had been moved. This worried him, but he didn’t ask why.

When they were in the hall, Miss Wells led him to a bench and they sat side by side. She clearly had something on her mind. “How are you doing, Dazai?”

He had to take in the words slowly, but he eventually got what she said. That’s how it usually was with English now. “I am okay,” he replied, not really sure what his teacher expected of him. He appreciated that she called him by his last name though.

Miss Wells, who had been informed of the child’s situation and had been especially conscious of her new student since he’d first transferred here, knew that both their ability to communicate with each other was limited, but she wasn’t too discouraged. The year before, a student of hers had had a death in the family, and she was quick to offer support and condolences. She believed children should never have to experience such grief, but she knew all too well that that wasn’t reality.

Strangely, though, as she looked into Dazai’s eyes she found no want for pity or reassurance. It was unnerving, seeing him look composed, like a doll. She hadn’t a clue what he was thinking, -- he was a child, but one that eluded her -- so she decided to get right to the point. Clearing her throat, she said, “Dazai. You might have noticed that our seating arrangements have changed while you were gone yesterday,”

Dazai nodded but didn’t say anything.

“You missed the weekly math quiz, --”

“Sho -- Sorry, miss,”

“No, it’s alright don’t apologize. I know you know the material, I don’t need to test you,” Miss Wells smiled, hoping the compliment would cheer him up, but Dazai’s face remained neutral. She went on. “That being said, your absence yesterday revealed something interesting. When you were gone, all four of the students who sat around you received zeroes, when before they had all been getting 100s like you. Do you understand?”

Dazai did.

He’d had a feeling that they’d been looking at his answers for a while now, but it never really mattered to him much since kids would do that to him at his old schools too. It is the fate of every child too smart for their own good to be taken advantage of by others who envied him for being better in the eyes of adults.

The first time it happened back in his elementary school in Aomori, he’d tried telling his Sensei, but that had just made the kids angry, so he learned his lesson. He was a naturally shy boy after all, and he preferred to avoid making unnecessary trouble.

“Did you know they were cheating off of you?”

A pause. “No,”

“Well, I spoke with them -- and their parents -- yesterday afternoon. It didn’t take long to get the truth out of them. As punishment I’ve moved them to the back of the classroom and separated them from each other so there won’t be any distractions. They’ve been told to apologize to you, so expect that today.”

Dazai nodded, but he had a feeling no such apologies would come up. And, even if there had been, he doubted they’d be sincere. The image of little John Steinbeck sneering at him flashed in his mind.

Satisfied with their talk, Miss Wells dismissed him and they went into class together.

The morning dragged on aggravatingly. The only thing Dazai received from his four classmates were glares.

He dreaded recess, because that was when he and Chuuya usually met to play together on the field. He would have questions as to where he’d been yesterday.

Sure enough, when the bell rang, his friend had run up to him from the other side of the playground with a big smile.

“Hey, Mackerel!” (This being the nickname Chuuya had given him, since all Dazai ate for lunch was the aforementioned fish and never grew tired of it. Ever since he was little he had been a picky eater, which made the kinds of foods he’d be guaranteed to eat when he was out on his own quite limited. To make matters worse, the move to America had definitely made the boy abhor Western food, so all he could usually stomach were the few dishes he was used to eating from Japan).

“You weren’t here yesterday. I tried asking your classmates and Miss Wells but nobody said anything. Did you skip out on me and go somewhere with your mom?” At the idea of this, Chuuya smirked (one time his sister had skipped class and had taken him on an outing downtown), but it soon fell away once he saw the empty look in Dazai’s eyes. He looked like he was about to cry but was holding it all back.

Worried, Chuuya asked, “What’s wrong? Hey, what happened?”

“My Mama had the baby,”

“Oh! That’s good, isn’t it?”

Dazai shook his head. “No. She got sick and has to stay at the hospital with it,”

“For how long?”

“‘Until further notice,’”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I probably won’t get to see Mama for a long time,”

“What about your uncle?”

“He goes back and forth to take care of my mom,”

“Do you have a babysitter?”

“. . . No,”

“What? So he just leaves you there all by himself?”

“Yeah, but my mom can’t know,”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to worry her.”

Chuuya didn’t know how to respond. His friend really did look like he was going to cry.

He took Dazai’s hand. “I’ll hang out with you then,” Chuuya decided.

Stunned, the other boy began to protest. “My uncle says I can’t let anyone in the apartment,”

“Yeah but he’s talking about strangers. I’m not a stranger.”

Dazai saw the logic in this, but he also knew it was lacking. Chuuya wasn’t very good at being convincing, (as he’d learned early on in their friendship whenever they started to argue about anything and everything), but the selfish part of Dazai -- the part that really just missed his mom -- told him to ignore all that and give in.

His mouth wrinkled and came out lopsided: kind of a smile, but not exactly. “Okay . . . how will you get to my house, we don’t go on the same bus?”

“I’ll ask my dad to drive me. He has the day off,”

My dad had a car too. He killed himself in it, Dazai thought, but he kept it to himself.

Both boys agreed on this plan, but for the rest of the day Dazai kept thinking that they would never pull it off and he’d make Mori really angry.

Truthfully, he didn’t believe their plan would actually happen until he heard the downstairs doorbell ring about an hour after he got home and opened it to reveal Chuuya with a dark-haired man outside on the foyer. Hesitantly, Dazai opened the door wider.

Chuuya grinned at him, both hands holding onto his backpack straps. The dark-haired man smiled down at him. “Hello,” he said (in Japanese!). “Nice to meet you. You can call me Arthur. Chuuya’s told me a lot about you,”

Dazai blinked at him. He wondered if he’d ever get this talking with adults thing right.

“May we come in?”

Before Dazai could answer, Chuuya burst into the house and started jumping up and down around the mud room. His dad had let him have some ice cream when he’d gotten home, so he was understandably very hyper. “Hey, Mackerel, where’s your room?”

“Up the stairs,”

“Race you!” And he was gone.

Despite the worthy challenge, Dazai stayed where he was, an uneasy feeling in his stomach.

“Chuuya told me you have an uncle who’s a doctor,”

He’d almost forgotten Arthur was still there. He looked at him and nodded.

“Where is he?”

Dazai scratched the inside of his palm. “I don’t know,”

Arthur was perplexed. Just then they both heard clamoring upstairs and Chuuya reappeared at the top of the steps, basking in his easy victory over winning the race even though he understood it wasn’t really a competition if the one he’d challenged hadn’t participated. Seeing his dad, he waved down at him, which Arthur returned before looking back to Dazai. “Are you saying you’re . . . all alone?”

“. . . Yes,”

“Your uncle left you alone and didn’t tell you when he’d be back?”

He does that a lot, Dazai thought, but he knew it wouldn’t help.

Arthur took his silence as answer enough. Resigned now, he took off the red scarf around his neck and hung it on the nearby rack. “I’ll stay with you boys until he comes back,” he said.

“. . . Mori will be mad . . . He said not to let anyone in but him . . .”

Arthur’s face softened. “Well, that’s a good rule, but I still would like to stay here with you two until he returns. I can’t bear the thought of you boys being alone,”

Dazai, who by now had gotten quite used to being by himself, even before he’d had to stay alone in Mori’s apartment, couldn’t make sense of this, but if there was one thing he knew it was that arguing with adults was fruitless, and Arthur didn’t really seem like he was going to change his mind anyway.

It was then when he felt someone grab his arm. It was Chuuya. He’d ran down the stairs because he’d come over to play and he was annoyed that there was no such playing being done.

After some coaxing, Dazai eventually relented and went upstairs with the other boy, followed by Arthur who made himself comfortable on the living room couch with last week’s newspaper that was just tossed onto the coffee table. Chuuya wanted a tour of Dazai’s room (which ended up being rather short, seeing as Dazai still hadn’t finished unpacking his things), and after a while both boys forgot Arthur was there altogether.

Mori came back about two hours later. Arthur heard the front door open and had come back downstairs to meet him, much to the doctor’s surprise. Like Dazai predicted, Mori was not happy that his nephew went against the instructions he took great care to emphasize. Arthur sensed this and decided to take matters into his own hands.

He introduced himself as a fellow guardian, which rightly caught Mori’s attention. Arthur then succinctly told him how he and Chuuya had ended up here in crucial detail, finishing his story with a gratifying reprimand, “I was shocked when Dazai told me his uncle had left him alone in the house,”

“Yes, well, I was only out for a bit,”

“You were gone hours, Mr. Mori,”

The doctor frowned. He really hated these types of people: overprotective guardians who turned everything into a lecture about proper child-rearing. The slight French accent made the man even more irritating to him.

Mori had worked as a general practitioner’s assistant back in his medical school days and the number one thing he’d learned from that experience was that full-grown patients, who’d come in concerned only about their own individual maladies, not someone else’s, were the ideal. He knew leaving his nine-year-old nephew to fend for himself was irresponsible, but what else could he have done? The nanny was MIA and he had his sister and his job to take care of. Yes, Dazai was a child, but he’d proven himself to be mature for his age, so Mori hadn’t felt any regret about leaving him alone.

That was, until Arthur showed up.

Not the type to give long lectures, the man went over to the clothes rack and put his scarf back on. “Chuuya! We’re leaving!” he called. Turning to Mori with a look of evident disapproval, he said, “If I didn’t have work I would offer to supervise Dazai along with my son until needed, but today was just an off-day and I have to go back to my office tomorrow. My eldest daughter is almost fourteen. She completed her babysitter’s training two years ago. I’ll ask her to take the bus after school and come here to watch the boys. Me or my husband will pick them up at 8 o’clock.” Arthur frowned. “If Dazai doesn’t have anyone to watch him past that time, we will gladly welcome him into our home to sleep over for as long as he likes. I’ll arrange for Chuuya to take Dazai’s bus here.”

Mori’s mouth twitched into a condescending smile. “How . . . could I ever thank you?” he demurred, much to Arthur’s satisfaction. He hadn’t expected Mori to be so easily persuaded.

And the doctor wasn’t, at least over matters that didn’t benefit him. The truth was that Mori was fully aware that he was being ruefully scolded for his unconventional child-rearing (even though Dazai wasn’t even his son), but this initially unpleasant situation had now delightfully yielded good outcomes for him: With this setup, he no longer had to keep trying to contact that incompetent nanny nor come back home as often to check on Dazai.

It was perfect. Tane never had to know.

Making a mental note to ensure Dazai’s silence later, Mori, like an upstanding host, watched Arthur and his orange-haired son walk out the door with an air of hospitality that was blatantly out of character.

Dazai, who had up to then been bracing himself for a round of yelling (his father always yelled at him), was surprised when Mori simply shut the door after them and carelessly hung up his coat before stepping through his clinic’s entrance.

Neither of them brought up what happened after that, which, to be fair, was usually how most ongoing arrangements, like laws and marriages and death certificates, came to pass in this world.

The next day, Chuuya joined Dazai on his bus after school and went home with him.

Kouyou arrived about a half hour later. She was really pretty, albeit bossy. Her apricot hair matched Chuuya’s, but she possessed a certain grace and feminine charm that her nine-year-old brother did not have but was sure to develop later. She was very insistent that they eat the snacks she brought for them every time they came back from school.

She took her role as a sitter very seriously and even directed a lot of her strictness onto Chuuya, who was used to having a laid back yet still responsible elder sister, not someone that acted more like an adult. He teased Kouyou about her sudden maturity, but she just rolled her eyes and held firm.

Seeing his friend playing the little brother was interesting. Watching them argue and banter made Dazai think about how he had a sibling now too.

He wondered if they’d get along.

 

X. Kyūsaku

 

He was allowed to come see his mother a week after the baby was born.

If it had been up to Mori, Dazai wouldn’t even be allowed in the hospital. (From personal experience he knew hospitals were all-too-inviting labyrinths to children, who often took the bait of adventure and, more so than not, ended up lost, much to the chagrin of the adults who then had to look for them).

They took a cab in the afternoon. At the entrance, there was an old woman who was selling flowers, so Dazai griped until Mori gave him some money to get a small bouquet for Tane.

His mother was in the ICU. Even though they’d only been separated for a little over a week, Dazai thought she’d aged several years since he last saw her. Her once-fluffy chocolate hair seemed to sag more. Her mannerisms were haggard, like she hadn’t been eating much. The smile she greeted him with looked extra pained. It unnerved him, but he quickly forgot about it once his mother gestured for him to climb into her bed so he could give her a hug.

She still smelled the same.

She loved the flowers and thanked him.

A nurse came in then rolling a white pram. Tane’s eyes locked onto the stroller instantly, a look of anticipation evident on her face. Since she’d given birth and gotten sick she hadn’t been allowed much time with her new baby. They didn’t even let her breastfeed or hold it.

When she’d woken up from all the anaesthesia and immediately felt a sharp, empty pain in her abdomen, it was like her body knew it was missing something, and before she’d even opened her eyes she was aching to hold the child, but instead there had just been a doctor who told her she’d have to be separated from the newborn for at least a while. It broke her heart.

The nurse set the pram on Tane’s bedside and gently reached in, his arms enclosing around a bundle wrapped in a fuzzy blanket with stars on it. Tane encouraged Dazai to get a better look.

“Careful,” the nurse said soothingly as the boy awkwardly extended out his arms. The bundle was incredibly light, like a dream.

Its eyes had been closed, but once Dazai took it, they opened, revealing brown irises that matched his. The only difference was its differently shaped pupils, with the right being a yellow star, and the left a similar ring. The baby’s hair (which was sparse on its head) was two-toned too, with the left side being white and the right a dark brown.

The two siblings looked at each other for the first time.

“Kyūsaku,” Tane whispered, placing a hand on Dazai’s shoulder and looking at her new treasure. She stiffly waved a few fingers over the baby’s forehead to catch its attention. “Hi little one,” she whispered. “This is your big brother. From now on he’s going to protect you, okay?”

The baby blinked, not understanding, which made Tane laugh softly. “Just like you when you were first born,” she murmured, catching Dazai’s eye. “Very adorable,”

The boy felt something tug inside his chest. Looking into her eyes, he knew she was thinking of his father.

Their father. Tane had two kids now. It wasn’t just Dazai anymore.

The family were only allowed an hour together before Kyūsaku -- ‘Q’ -- had to be taken back to the nursery so that Tane could rest. The minutes had passed by too quickly.

When the nurse who’d brought in the pram came back with a sad and apologetic look on his face, Dazai wanted to throw a tantrum. He wanted to stay with his mom and the baby. How was he supposed to be a big brother if he wasn’t even near his sibling?

Tane sensed her son’s frustration. Taking the newborn from his arms, she tried to give him a reassuring smile. “You’ll get to see Q again soon,” she promised.

“And you too?”

“And me too,”

“When will you come back home, Mama?”

Her face fell. Her eyes met Mori’s, who had taken a seat in the far corner of the room to let his sister and nephew catch up.

“Dazai,” he said, standing up and walking to Tane’s bedside. “Your mother is still very sick. It might be a while until she gets to come back home with us,” He paused. “She might have to stay longer here in order to get the care she needs,”

“But what about Q?”

“Naturally, a baby should be with its mother,”

“Actually,” Tane interrupted, making both of them turn their attention on her. She folded her hands on her lap. “The reality is that I’m not much use to Kyūsaku.” A shadow fell on her face. “In fact, I’m more of a danger to the baby than not,”

“What do you mean?” Dazai blinked.

His mother just smiled at him in that way that told him it was something he was too young to understand.

The truth was that the birth and emergency C-section had significantly traumatized Tane. There had been some complications with her morphine dose: They couldn’t wait for it to fully enter her bloodstream before they had to start the operation, otherwise the fetus would’ve most likely died. She hadn’t exactly felt the pain of the scalpel’s incision, but the dissociation from her own body, coupled with the anaesthetisa’s disorienting effect, had made the experience numbly terrifying. Waking up a few hours later just to be told she couldn’t nurse or hold her baby added onto the discomfiture.

When she did finally get to see her child, holding Q had felt like nothing. She had no attachment to it despite the fact that she’d wanted nothing more than to see her baby for the past few days. On a literal level she understood this was her child -- she had carried it and had brought it into the world -- but she didn’t feel the same sense of connection she had had when Dazai’d been first born. It scared and overwhelmed her. There was even a moment when she didn’t even believe this was her baby. She felt both drawn yet also unsettled by the bundle in her arms.

The nurses found her with her back against the headboard, knees to her chest as she stared down in horror at the newborn she’d put back in its pram. When they urged her to try holding it again, she’d started spiraling. It didn’t help that she also developed a slight fever soon after her surgery. She had delusions and hallucinations soon after she’d woken up from the morphine: asking where her husband was, why she was in America, and pointing at ghosts that weren’t really there.

Her doctor diagnosed her with postpartum depression and possible psychosis. When they explained it to her on one of her more controlled days, it felt like a joke. She’d never in a million years thought she would experience anything like it.

She had always felt like she was meant to be a mother. Having Dazai had been so easy.

Maybe it had been the shock of the C-section. Or maybe it was how Tane went through an especially difficult pregnancy and later delivery due to her age. Maybe it was because Q had come out premature. Maybe it was because Tane still hadn’t really come to terms with the fact that her husband was dead and she now had two kids to raise on her own until she actually held her second child and didn’t know what else to feel but emptiness.

All this Dazai would learn later on.

Even though he knew it wasn’t Tane’s fault, a part of him felt ashamed of his mother: Q wouldn’t remember it, but there had been a time -- the first time they’d been on earth -- when their mother couldn’t help but reject them. It was like she had been expecting a different baby -- the right one -- to show up and the nurses would tell her they’d made a mistake, and that’s why she’d felt nothing. It was all just a bad dream.

On the drive back to Mori’s apartment, Dazai looked back at the hospital through the rearview mirror until it disappeared from his line of vision. It hurt to think there was a baby in there who hadn’t been loved from the beginning.

He was its big brother now. Tane was sick and couldn’t take care of it. His dad was gone and never coming back.

He would love Q for all three of them.

He wasn’t nine years old anymore.

Notes:

You can find me on Twitter doing English major nonsense: @eu_gi_oh

Curious Cat: Ask me anything!