Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

I’ve got it all, a perfect life—beautiful children, beautiful husband, beautiful apartment. I know it, and I know how lucky I am. I know that any kind of whining is one major first-world sulk. From now on, I’m going to be happy, shut up all my demons, and make everyone around me smile.

As you can probably tell from the execution, I wouldn’t say this was exactly a planned attempt. More a total shit fit that fortunately nobody saw, a physical manifestation of the screaming inside my head that sometimes gets so loud I want to drill a hole in my skull.

If I’d had a career, I could change jobs, apply for a promotion, do something. If I’d stayed in New York, I could have had it all, couldn’t I? But I am a Japanese housewife, a proper, old-school job for life, and you get to choose your colleague only once.

Work in Tokyo is inhumane, and after Tatsu was promoted, his mind never left the office, and his body only rarely.

It was naive of me, to think that expressing your distaste for something means you can resist all the forces of family and society that propel you toward it.

All his energy was used up in the office, and what came home was a husk, a frowning stranger who used the apartment like some kind of hotel, volunteering speech only when something was out of line or we were getting in his way.

And he never heard that what I was really saying was “I miss you, I need you, don’t go and leave me alone.”

Parenting is savage—there is no other activity on earth that you could get up to do four times a night for two years straight, and at the end of it be merely in the running for mediocre.

It was immediately, blindingly obvious that there was nowhere near enough time in all my life and in all the world to give both him and his sister everything they needed and that I wanted to give them. The whole task was far beyond anything I was capable of, and the only possible outcome was failure of the most heartbreaking kind.

Pregnancy made me feel like I was a walking biology experiment—my main thought throughout labor was massive relief that this whole slightly revolting part of my life would be over soon and I could just be a normal human with children, not a semi-invalid with too many hospital appointments and carte blanche for medical professionals to ask inappropriate questions.

There have been periods when I’ve found myself submerged in motherhood for years at a time, lost myself willingly in the maze of my children’s needs and triumphs. Then suddenly one day I come to, catch sight of myself in the mirror, and think, What was I doing again? in a way that’s totally appropriate if you went into the living room to fetch something and had a distracting thought about an old lover, but not ideal if your reverie has lasted three years.

read in some parenting book that, ideally, your children’s moods and behavior shouldn’t affect you too much, because if they do, you’re giving them undue power—as well as screwing up your own life even more, presumably.

My children. My life’s work, my greatest loves, orchestrators of total psychological trauma and everyday destruction.

He was basically a Care Bear trapped in the body of an underwear model.

We were married a year later, because I was finding out that I loved him more every day, and because I’m not stupid enough to think that if life throws you someone that good and you let him pass you by, it’s going to let you hit the jackpot again.

You may notice that this method distinctly lacks the moment where the husband flagellates himself about how totally inadequate he’s been for nearly a decade and returns to the wife on bloodied and bended knee.

He’s made me invisible. With all the options I had, I chose him, chose him for life, for living, and he’s frozen me out into an existence that isn’t living at all. I’m in a cage without bars and I’m screaming but nobody can hear. I’m not even middle-aged yet and he’s faded me into the background.

The outside world, which I inhabited only a few hours ago with my children, is now grown-up, illicit and full of shadows.

I can blend into the Tokyo crowds, be nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother.

It makes me feel calm to think I could melt into the relentless pulse of the city without anybody noticing, disappear like a trick of the light.

Tokyo, if it doesn’t provide an answer to my angst, at least has the effect of making me forget the question.

Having a functional marriage is easy, it turns out. “Have a lovely day!” I call after him as he leaves. You just have to pretend you’re in an advertisement. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before.

“Is it a trick so I’ll cuddle you, Mama?”

While I always meant to become a mother, I didn’t set out to become a housewife.

Some days I can’t quite work out how I got here; I opted for the guy, I opted for the kids, I just didn’t realize that meant waving goodbye to everything else.

If I hadn’t gone to New York, let’s be honest, a lot of outlandish ideas concerning my own freedom, equality, and happiness would probably never have occurred to me and, arguably, I might have been happier and considered myself more free and more equal.

I always got the impression he was smiling his way through life—chatting with the children who came into the shop to spend their pocket money, making sure a generous gift was sent to his assistant Onō-kun’s wife when she had a baby—and working nonstop was just the way he lived.

Since he died, and since having my kids, the questions I wish I could ask him are never-ending. I wonder now what decisions he made to keep our tiny family afloat, what inevitable sacrifices there were.

New York was a revelation. Everything I’d suspected was missing from my sleepy hometown was there, glorious and dazzling, rushing past at speed.

At school in Japan I could wear shorts to play sports, but only with my jersey and headband, and it had literally never occurred to me that you could do a math lesson in anything other than a long-skirted school uniform.

I found that my one year abroad had been sufficient to turn me into a combination of village idiot and foreign weirdo.

Messing up school is kind of a drag in Japan, because it doesn’t just mean you’re not very good at science or you didn’t do advanced math—it means you can’t read properly.

My mother wept that my morals had been corrupted by America, as she’d always known they would be, and I was going to get fat like a Westerner and be shot and never come home. It wasn’t clear whether she was more concerned about the weight gain or the fatality.

But for sheer size and its ability to put you in your place, even New York can’t compare with Tokyo.

I wanted this life, wanted my children. I guess that, like with so many other things, I just didn’t count on the fact that opening one door would mean closing another one so firmly.

There are thirty-seven million of us in Tokyo alone—it has the effect of making it damn clear just how unimportant you are. Which is heartbreaking or relaxing, depending on how you look at it.

I’m glad that there’s no empty shop in the squat little modern house my mom lives in now, and that she sleeps in a single bed, not looking at a space next to her where another futon should be rolled out.

It’s a strange feeling, spending time with somebody who’s succeeding in doing what he dreamed of doing, an impossible thing.

In an optimistic daze, I put the piece of paper in a file, ready for the day when I have finally morphed into the kind of woman who will sit down with a cup of coffee and attend to these things.

“I want to see the poo, I want to see the poo, I want to see the poo,” Aki keeps up.

Does it really matter if he has another sweet? Probably not. But to give in to someone who has gone purple with rage and stiff as a board over sugar doesn’t seem a wise decision either.

Therapy isn’t really a thing in Tokyo; you do what you do, and if you really can’t take it anymore, you take the honorable way out and leave your shoes neatly paired at the edge of the bridge when you go.

You can accept yourself, here, but only if you’re fulfilling your obligation to society. I guess that’s why America is the land of the free, but we have lower crime rates and litter-free streets.

It’s depression, or something like it. For a long time, the beautiful Tokyo sunset set me on a downward spiral, everything about it promising excitement, and intimacy and life, but not for me.

“I’ve always felt that being a mother would be a fulltime job in itself,” Tamao says carefully. “It would be very difficult to commit yourself to two jobs.

Maybe in all those years of happy marriage, Tatsu thought that Nice Wife Mizuki was the Real Me and was disappointed when the fault lines started to appear.

What are we, apart from the stories we tell ourselves and other people?

Who “deserves” to be happy? I live in Tokyo, not some poverty-stricken, war-torn nation; I have a family, a home, food, a functioning society. I have so much. Reaching for anything else surely just makes me greedy.

But my deciding to be with Kiyoshi wouldn’t make anyone happy. Not really. Not leaving the children, or bringing them with me and breaking their life; not the look on Tatsu’s face that I’d never be able to forget; not wondering always, always, if I made the right decision or if I didn’t and I’m selfish and I fucked everything up. Like so many other things, I can see how that would work for somebody else, but not for me.

I don’t do very well on no sleep. It’s one of many reasons that “mother” might have been an unwise life choice.