of the cliff, where the waves petered out. Figures as small as fingers.
Jump from here, and a second later I’m dead. The thought came, but I cut it off midway. At the words a second later. Overcome, not by the impiety of the idea, but by a dull lethargy like the start of a fever. Death is not so distant that I can play with it. Neither, of course, is it so close.
I was still gazing down the cliff when two hikers reached the base. They raised their hands straight overhead, stretching perhaps, and though I could not guess how such tiny, finger-sized people might be feeling, invigorated or sore, the scene was exhilarating. The wind sent the clouds careening, leaving only clear blue above. Manazuru. I mouthed the name to feel it in me, then stared for a time at the base of the cliff, and lusted.
I seldom lust for things with a form. Seldom, that is, anymore.
Sometimes it leads to joy, sometimes to a gut-wrenching loneliness, and sometimes it goes nowhere, only hovers, disconnected, lost. I call it lust, wherever it leads. This is nothing more, however, than a name I call it.
The door of the station-bound bus stayed open long after the recorded message announced that the bus was leaving. A man with a child climbed up into it. The child dashed to a seat all the way at the back. The man followed more slowly.
The bus took a road different from the one it had come by. It never filled up. Riders disembarked as new ones boarded, then those who had boarded disembarked. Aside from me, only the man and the child in the last seat rode to the final stop. The plaza in front of the station was full of cars. It seemed odd. Last night, it was so empty.
The child, led by the hand, stepped off the bus. The pair crossed the road at the crosswalk, and the child rapped on the window of a car parked across the way. The back door popped open; the man picked up the child and got in. They live here, maybe. Not just passing through.
I slid a thousand-yen note into the vending machine to purchase a ticket. I never intended to spend a second night. I asked only to hear the answer. Tonight, the woman and man named Suna would welcome crowds of fishermen. The wind was dying down. No sooner had I climbed the steps to the platform than a local train arrived.
“I’m home,” I said.
Momo sighed ambiguously. That was all.
Lately, she’s seemed sullen. She isn’t really in a bad mood; at her age, it takes energy to be cheerful. You think she is being sullen when she is simply being.
I brought you a present, I said, holding out a package of squid shiokara. She nodded. I had bought it at a stand in the station at Odawara, descending to the gallery below the tracks when I got off the local train to transfer to the express. Momo liked shiokara even as a child, despite its intense flavor. Squid fermented in its own salted viscera. My husband liked it, too. I can’t say whether or not she takes after him, though, because so do I.
Mother was out shopping. When I opened the door, the house had a subtly different smell. Mother’s cooking has a more pungent aroma than mine. What did you have for lunch? I asked. Momo thought for a second, then said, Chicken, it tasted sort of sweet.
I went to my room to change. The gray skirt I had considered wearing then decided against the day before was splayed on the bed where I had thrown it, frozen in the same disarray. I put it on a hanger, hung it in the closet. The air around me loosened. I had only been gone a day, but it takes less than that for the air in an empty room to harden.
When I returned to the living room, Momo had opened a magazine. Maybe I should get a haircut, she mumbled. You’d look nice with short hair, I said. And again she became sullen. We’re having hotpot for dinner, she said after a while. When did this happen? When did she stop being so close? She is too close to be distant, now, and too distant to be close.
When she was a newborn, I bathed Momo in a wash basin.
For the first month of her life, I never put her in the bathtub, I would clear the table and set a metal basin filled with warm water there, and wash her in the basin.
Opening my left hand, supporting the back of her head with my thumb and middle finger, each turned in to face the other, I uncurled her body face-up in the water. She was so buoyant she floated, almost weightless.
When she was first born her body was scrawny and shriveled, but in the course of her first two weeks she filled out, grew plumper. Deep wrinkles appeared around her ankles, her wrists, her joints. Matter gathered there. New skin formed, and the older layers collected in the wrinkles. One day was all it took: there was more old skin. It was like eraser fuzz. Except for its perfect whiteness. And it had no smell. It kept coming, more and more.
I carefully scrubbed all that off as I bathed her. Momo kept her eyes half shut as I cleaned her body. Sometimes she fell asleep. Only when the time came to wash her head did she begin to wail, wrinkles covering her entire face.
The moment I lifted her from the water, she grew heavy, recovering the weight of her substance. I laid her on the towel I had spread out and rubbed her dry. Then, right away, I opened my blouse and gave her my breast. She seemed thirsty, and gulped as she sucked.
No, loveable was not the word. For a second the heat of her lips repulsed me. I learned then that disgust and tenderness do not stand in opposition. I had never felt such a disgust for the male body. I had thought the male body, my husband’s body, was unquestionably necessary. The feeling that welled within me when I held Momo’s body was not need, but tenderness.
I could not fathom Momo’s mind. She was just a crying thing. A bud.
I learned a new word: mushiwarai, a bug smile. From time to time in its first two weeks of life an infant smiles. But it is not the infant smiling, it is the twitching of the smile bug.
Momo often smiled. Even so, I did not know her mind. I had only just given birth to her, I did not regard her as her own person, she was still my person. Not part of me, not exactly—what I felt was a simple sense of proprietorship. I cannot allow this to be damaged, I thought. It would be an awful waste. I felt tenderness for her. Loveable was not the word.
I felt no desire for the man, my husband. Momo was warmth enough. As long as I suckled her, my body had no desire for my husband. I had no tenderness for him. And yet, in the absence of any tenderness, in my mind I craved him. At night when my husband came to me, I received him willingly with the surface of my body. I had the idea that mind and body were distinct, but the truth is that it is all body. The mind is of the body.
But over time, Momo cooled. She lost her heat, settled into a form. She stopped breastfeeding, she learned to walk, she acquired words.
“Parents’ Day is next Wednesday,” Momo told me. She was on her way to her room when I walked into the living room, pulling my hair into a ponytail. There was an aroma. The smell of the shampoo she had used last night. Momo’s body no longer discards its old skin the way it once did. She has grown cold, solid, marvelously. She carried the scent of her shampoo.
Circle will attend and hand it in. Okay. Even as she spoke, Momo was leaving the room. I heard sounds from the front hall. Mother had returned. The air was shifting. Mother never liked my husband. She didn’t say so, but I knew.
As soon as Momo took shape, I began to desire my husband. Just as she stopped suckling. How clever it is, I thought. The body’s machinations. I yearned unabashedly for my husband, then felt ashamed. Desire quickly swallowed the shame.
How was Manazuru? Mother trilled, coming into the living room.
It was a strong place, I replied.
Mother gazed at me. Strong? she repeated, trilling again. Then looking me in the eye, she set down her basket of food. A finely woven shopping basket, a flipped trapezoid, short-handled, it bulged from her side when she packed it with vegetables and fish. I used to walk behind Mother as she cradled the basket, wanting her to lead me by the hand, but she wouldn’t, and so I walked with my hands behind my back, hiding them. My head didn’t even reach her shoulder.
“How many have you gone through?” I asked.
Mother gestured toward