Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

I’m always at my most open-minded, not to say emotionally susceptible, on the Metro—it’s the lurking possibility of death by earthquake that does it.

I realize that to be a die-hard inhabitant of this city, you’re expected to smile demurely in the face of the almighty fault line that runs straight through it and place complete trust in whatever dinky gates we’ve come up with to protect ourselves, but there’s

this unshakable image of a ten-meter tsunami wall being totaled by a wave that flashes through my mind every time I’m hurtling through an underground tunnel in a metal tin.

Then there was a year or two after each of the children was born, when I felt as if whatever it was that separated me from the rest of the world had been ripped away, leaving all my surfaces completely porous. All the feelings in the world were in excruciating Technicolor and I had no method of filtering them out.

I cried at TV ads and the children’s first steps, at old people navigating the supermarket and pigeons wooing in Yoyogi Park. It was exhausting. Tatsu

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.

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

I was never convinced that was a hugely desirable look anyway, and apparently neither is the rest of the world. I remember the first summer I spent with Cassie, marching out onto her roof terrace in the heat of the day armed with magazines and bottles of lotion, specifically to “lay out,” toasting ourselves evenly on both sides like grilled omochi skewers, the caress of the sun on my back and its liquid warmth on my eyelids, so all the world took on a summer orange glow, the desirability of tanned limbs skimmed by minidresses and denim shorts.

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.

I suppose it’s unsurprising that one might question things sometimes, being in a state of indentured servitude to two small psychopaths.

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. You’ll be surprised to know that this detached serenity is not something I have yet achieved.

Despite all that, though, despite the emotional roller coaster and the guilt and the rage and the sheer, headache-inducing noisiness of life with my children, there are moments, whole half hours or even afternoons, in this life now that are so perfect it takes all my concentration not to give in to melancholy and weep that it’s passing even while it’s still going on.

No. I want him so consumed with remorse he can’t sleep, which is perhaps why the sight of his peacefully sleeping back is a nightly source of aggravation to me.

Buildings seem to disappear into the sky, restaurants and aquariums and offices and karaoke bars on every floor, a layer cake of hidden worlds.

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

I suppose that by the time I became a wife, a 家内, the kanji, reading “inside (内) the house (家),” meant it was inevitable; that it was written, in fact. Especially since I now had a 主人, a husband, or a “main (主) person (人).”

I was so busy being tortured and wronged that I didn’t even have the grace to react, just rolled my eyes and carried on pouring coffee. It’s probably one of the reasons I fear Eri’s adolescence; if there is any justice in the world, a massive comeuppance is coming my way.

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.

“Sometimes it felt like the part of me that my mother knew disappeared when she did. Because there wasn’t anyone else who saw it, it just faded away.” It’s hard to remember who you are without people who know you that way.

Later, we go to collect Eri, and Aki and I get into an altercation about his ability to cross the road. I don’t think that looking in one direction and then running across the street into the path of oncoming traffic is sufficiently cautious, whereas he vehemently disagrees.

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.

The feeling that’s been lurking shows itself long enough for me to identify it, and then vanishes like a trail of smoke in a gust of wind. It’s depression, or something like it.

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.

Surprisingly, I’m not indiscriminately into children and babies—kids, surely, are like people. Some of them are fantastic, and some of them are shitbags.

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.

I never imagined then that I would know him so long or so well. We’re adults, and we’ve built something, and we’ve both felt how precarious this life can be.