Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

physically I don’t look all that different. But nothing about me is inviting or mysterious or alluring. And where would I be luring anyone to—a den full of Hello Kitty tea sets?

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.

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.

“I’m sure Aki would love that.” He would—it’s me who would hate it, making big actions with too much enthusiasm, like a children’s television presenter, while everybody watches and coos. Hell on earth. And yet this morning, I don’t mind at all, because it isn’t all there is.

On occasion, my whole life can feel like a pileup of unintended consequences.

Once it was clear that I’d reached the apogee of my personal musical trajectory, that, Alice-like, first the top of my head and then my ear were jammed up against the glass ceiling with nowhere to go unless I worked out a way to shatter the whole structure through sheer force of will, the sleaze, the voyeurs, and the grinding poverty lost a fair wattage of their shine.

Kiyoshi approaches the whole thing as he appears to approach everything, with straightforward enthusiasm and a not-always-wholesome glee, so it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s messing around.

Tatsu had just received another promotion, a great honor that he accepted like a posting to Siberia,

The day was eating sand and noisy weeping because shells were hurting Eri’s feet, and Tatsu, gray with fatigue, sat there twitching like a dictator’s corpse we’d somehow wrestled into leisure clothing.

“Aki, stop it, that hurts. Aki.” He stops and swings his legs around so he has one heel on my trachea and the other on my upper lip. “My feet are on your face,” he chortles appreciatively, his giggle still liquid, the laugh of a baby rather than a child. My eyes close again and I wonder if I can snatch ten more seconds of sleep in this position.

Having finished his meal, the man stabs his chopsticks vertically downward into what is left of his rice, a rite that is only performed at funerals. The people around him just manage to resist a collective intake of breath and avert their eyes. Yoriko is staring at the chopsticks as if he has just flung a corpse on the table and, in her tipsy state, is on the verge of saying something, when a waiter, alert to Kiyoshi’s every eye movement, swoops in and removes the offending item. The group visibly exhales.

Once we’re inside, my shoulders practically dislocating thanks to the small space I’m trying to fit myself into, I peer down at my legs. I can feel Aki’s arms around them, but not see his face. “Aki-chan?” I wonder if he’s going to suffocate. He wriggles his head around and grins up at me, unbothered by the squash.

His turquoise Shinkansen T-shirt pops against the colors of the office, and the thought of something so small and bright believing that being a cog in this tightly programmed machine is the only option for the future makes Tatsu’s enormous office claustrophobic. Don’t worry, I want to tell him, you can be a mountaineer, or a graffiti artist, or a lion tamer.

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.

Once, when I was thinking of something else, I had a fleeting image of a parallel universe where Kiyoshi and I had built our life, and the way he held our child. I quashed it.

My daughter. With a streak of her mother’s uncontrollable temper, poor thing. I find myself trying not to smile, and she glares at me with a yet more towering indignation. She is going to be formidable.

The door gives a couple of centimeters. Without a word, the man standing opposite me starts to pull at the other door, and someone else materializes to help me pull on my side. My shoulders burn, my arms are numb. Every grain of my being is focused on opening the doors, all the fury and strength that has ever been in me. If they don’t open, we will smash the windows. We are leaving this station before anything else happens, before the station realizes what hit it and crumbles in on itself, or an aftershock arrives. We are getting out.