A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

In the days when she had sat each morning in the waiting room of that bus terminal, she had never dreamed for a moment that in the future she might find a job in Yokohama, live a married life there, lose one of the two children she bore all too soon, split up with her husband, and return home.

I suppose it’s a fact that the present is a result of the past. In other words, one is able to love someone in the present thanks to the past that made them the way they are. While genetics are surely a factor too, if that person had lived under different circumstances, they would have probably become a different person—but people are incapable of telling others their entire past, and regardless of their intentions, the past explained in words is not the past itself. If the past someone told diverged from the true past, would the love for that person be mistaken somehow? If it was an intentional lie, would that make it all meaningless? Or could it give rise to new love?

While both parents were overcome with remorse, Rié’s husband tried to rally her and Yuto to move past this calamity together as a family. But Rié was firm in her refusal and said that she wanted a divorce. Not because she blamed him for their son’s death. On the contrary, she agonized over the belief that it was her fault. Rather, she simply could not accept the idea of sharing her future with a person like her husband.

When Kido met with her husband as Rié’s attorney, he soon understood why her feelings toward him had hardened. Launching into a lengthy rant, the man emphasized his own suffering, railed against Rié’s stupidity and madness for pinning the responsibility on him, appealed to Kido as a lawyer and therefore fellow rational human being, described in tears the pain of losing a child, insisted on his great love for Rié, and finally pressed Kido to persuade her to get back together with him. In keeping with Rié’s appraisal of her husband, he did not appear to be a bad person. But it was heartrending for Kido to see how the man’s bloated sense of self-importance had hurt his wife, had put their young child through agony during what little time had remained to him, and was now in the process of bringing his own life to ruin.

The truth was, Kido had grown tired of his own hypersensitivity to prejudice.

But Rié was the one who quit her job, brought a folding cot to Ryo’s ward, and stayed by his side, caring for him during his three months in the hospital. Her husband did no such thing.

this desire, the wish to experience the life of another, was not exclusive to those who had lost all hope in the present. It was perfectly normal, an inevitable response to the human predicament, to our entrapment within a single, finite existence.

I was as shocked as anybody. But I tried to encourage him. Said, look, you can’t confuse a parent with their kid. They’re not the same. It’s your life to lead,

“You know how people are always saying, ‘Oh, you look more like your father’ or ‘You look more like your mother.’ Makoto couldn’t have that conversation. ’Cause saying he resembled his father was the same as saying he didn’t deserve to exist . . . His body and mind just didn’t mesh.

According to Japanese criminal law, anyone under nineteen fell under the Juvenile Act, and only perpetrators older than that were culpable. But it wasn’t as though cumulative negative influence suddenly vanished the moment a person reached adulthood, like a debt being reset to zero. Individual effort was surely worthy of praise, but did it amount to anything more than having the good fortune to encounter the right people and events to orient you toward it?

“I don’t doubt that some people hide their past with a yarn of their own devising . . . but my suspicion is that he empathized with Daisuké-san, much in the way we all do when reading novels or watching movies. It takes a certain kind of talent to come up with a story that you not only like but can project your emotions into. It’s not something that just anyone is capable of—moreover, I think it’s important to confront yourself through another. There is a certain kind of loneliness that can only be soothed by finding yourself within the tale of another’s trauma.”

“True . . . Perhaps his life merged with Daisuké-san’s or abides alongside it—but if that is so, then when we fall for someone, what part of them is it that we love, I wonder? When we meet a person who will become our beloved, we are attracted to who they are in the present and grow to love them as a whole, including their past. But if a lover finds out that their beloved’s past is in fact the past of a stranger, what happens to the love the two shared?” Misuzu looked at Kido as though the answer were obvious. “Once the truth came out, they’d have to renew their love,” she said. “I mean, it’s not as if you love someone once and that’s it. You renew your love again and again over the long haul, through everything that happens along the way.”

Though it was true that Sota’s resemblance to Kido overjoyed him, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that the resemblance could one day bring Sota anguish. I must live properly, Kido thought and, imagining himself making the decision to give up his son, felt as though his heart might split apart in his chest. The remorse would surely be torturous if I did that.

After all, even if you misrepresented the cause, an injury was an injury, and pain was pain.

After all this, she had to ask herself whether she would have loved Makoto if she had known the truth from the start. Did love even need the past? She wanted to say no. And yet, if she was honest with herself, she suspected that she would not have been capable of embracing a partner with such a tortured history at a time when grieving her own losses and raising Yuto had absorbed all her energy—ultimately, there was no way to know. But the fact was that, thanks to Makoto’s lies, they had fallen in love and she had been blessed with Hana.