Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

All of which suggests that it was inevitable, that Kiyoshi himself was almost irrelevant, that he could have been anyone. That I, like a prefluffed adult performer, was waiting indiscriminately for whoever came along.

There’s a part of me that believes it could only have been Kiyoshi—that if it hadn’t been him, everything in my life would have continued as it was and any diversion from the path would have been effortlessly resisted.

Wasn’t Romeo madly in love with Rosaline four days before he killed himself for Juliet? What’s in a name? The boy was a raging bag of hormones set to obsess over whichever nubile young creature came into his line of sight. Does anyone need to get hung up on which one it was? (But it’s the ultimate love story! It’s destiny, and fate, and love greater than life!) What is love anyway?

I, unfortunately, have never been one for acting logically. Even though it’s a tendency that stays beneath a regulated interior, I’d say my true decision-making process mirrors that of an insane dog following his balls. I just happen to be fortunate enough to be sufficiently Japanese that the need to maintain appearances puts a tidy veneer on my animal instincts.

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.

it’s to protect the person of the highest rank and to do the work for them. The highest-ranking person should always be farthest away from the door, so if enemy samurai come in, they will be farthest from danger.” I take a sip of my coffee. “And you will be closest.”

I feel the familiar mixture of pride in the unfathomable complexities of Japanese culture and slight ennui at going through it with another amazed foreigner.

You will never, ever know them all, or understand them, and even when you think you do and think you’ve been accepted, you will be an eternal outsider. I should know.

Sometimes the days last forever, and still the weeks and months and years go whizzing unstoppably by.

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.

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.

Sometimes, living in the world created by my children, knowing them better than I know myself but still finding them baffling, I feel like the rest of the world is nothing but shifting sands around me. I read somewhere that the twenty identifiable traits on the Hare psychopathy checklist apparently don’t count in children, since they tend to display all of them. These include poor behavioral controls, irresponsibility, superficial charm, parasitic lifestyle, need for stimulation, lack of realistic long-term goals, and impulsivity. I suppose it’s unsurprising that one might question things sometimes, being in a state of indentured servitude to two small psychopaths.

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

I wasn’t going to fall for him, obviously, because it was too much. Where was the bullshit, the mind-fuckery that made relationships so exciting and traumatic?

If this were our first year, I would run a mile. If we’d been living together, or even married, but without children, this moment would be my exit cue. Who the hell is this guy?

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.

the way I knew exactly where in my chest my heart was, every time he said my name.

The grimness of death shocks me like a newly discovered horror every time I brush up against it, like the fresh confusion of a goldfish every time it reaches the edge of its bowl. It’s only marginally easier now than it was back then to resist spending all my time and energy trying to find chinks in its armor, a hidden clause in its finality.

Tatsu doesn’t have a controlling bone in his body, which was one of the reasons we used to get along so well. The fact that in recent years this has mainly translated to disinterest is, it turns out, very convenient: as long as whatever I’m doing doesn’t interfere with his life, he has no concern whatsoever about what it is,

The fact that Tatsu accepts this without question is almost offensive. And yet in another way, it endears him to me.

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.

if it gets so good you only need to catch his eye to know what he’s thinking, you are, it is blindingly clear, totally screwed. You’re doomed to start an affair with a time limit on it, like life condensed. You have to lie around nursing an aching bosom and bleeding heart, and stop taking delight in anything, least of all being in the arms of your lover, on account of the fact that you know it’s cursed, and everything in your life takes on a gray sheen, like it’s always drizzling, indoors. And who the hell wants to get involved in any of that?

Having a secret makes me feel like nobody owns me, and that any opinion of me could always be inaccurate; no one has the whole picture, so it’s like trying to judge somebody’s appearance from a shard of broken mirror.

I like to have everything clear—even if the clarity is only in my head and my decisions look fuzzy and badly thought out to everybody else. They’re not—they’re just perfectly in keeping with my own logic, which probably doesn’t correspond to yours. The way that, to you, the burrow of some underground creature might look like a stinky mess of leaves and twigs, but to the creature, the layout is perfectly clear, and it’s all meticulously arranged. You just need to understand the rules.

A brilliant legend for a hard-working nation, really—take your eye off the ball at your own potentially fatal risk. No wonder we never relax.

I like Tatsu so much more now that I need him less.

What are we, apart from the stories we tell ourselves and other people? I know all too well that I’m a flimsy construct, a flamboyant play set shot through with exaggerations and inconsistencies and secret compartments full of unsavory surprises. I made myself that way.

How many times have I wished I could be outside myself, outside all my limitations and neuroses, so I could make a different decision and live a different life? Now, when I remember what I wanted before I met Kiyoshi, I think it was just to start over, to do it all again for the first time, or maybe not do it at all. To have a clean slate. To be somebody else. But then there would be no Aki, no Eri, and life doesn’t work like that, does it? So I’m not leaving Tatsu for Kiyoshi, because that might be love, maybe, but it isn’t happiness, not for me or for anybody else.

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

But as soon as the children were born it was blindingly obvious—your heart can’t break unless it has something to love. The way you love your children, they take your heart with you everywhere they go. Suddenly you realize just how cruel, just how loud and brash and harsh and illogically cruel, the world is, and it turns out that other mother was right. When they laugh, when they cry, when they’re ill, when they grow, every moment they adore you and every step they take away from you—the whole thing is completely heartbreaking.

The rule is, modesty to the point of self-flagellation, and since our offspring are an extension of ourselves, everything they do is subpar.

I know it has started, the end of it, like we always knew it would. The end of it was in the beginning of it. I love you, I want to tell him, even though I never said it. I love you so much, and it isn’t any use to anybody.

But I suppose that’s part of love, or young love anyway—the deep desire to roll the dice and find out, always with the absurd hope, flying like a kite, that you might just be the ones who manage to hold on to each other through it all.

This is what we always do: say nothing, accept our fate, the fact that we have always known that this was in the cards. Underground, though, stoicism is harder.

It makes me wonder what I don’t know about him too, and the thought makes me feel, oddly, closer to him; it reminds me of us at the beginning, when we chose what to reveal and had the courtesy of shielding each other from things that were unpalatable, of being our best selves for the other, instead of knowing too much.

I wonder what will still matter when I’m as old as she is. I wonder who she loved, and what she hid, and when it stopped hurting her to remember, even while she was pretending to have forgotten.