The Forest Brims Over, page 12
No, he shook his head as he peered into her face.
Rui was lying beside him, dressed in her pajamas.
The sounds faded into the distance. Before he knew it, he had leapt to his feet, glancing around.
There was no forest. The mysterious trees had completely vanished, leaving only the couple’s familiar bedroom. It must have all been a dream, he thought with relief, before immediately losing track of how it had even started.
In front of him was Rui, his wife, at the age that she was supposed to be. She rubbed her fingers, wet with his tears, several times against the blanket before inserting her hand under her pillow.
Teardrops spilled from the black, mirrorlike eyes staring back at him.
5
SHE BLINKED TO CLEAR THE WATER BRIMMING at the corners of her eyes, to restore her blurring vision and bring order to the objects bleeding into each other in front of her.
This brutal torture was no different from that which had befallen the legendary Monkey King Sun Wukong, Nowatari Rui thought. Her temples, the base of her nose, and the inner corners of her eyes all burned, while her head felt as though it were caught in an iron vice. The sense of reason that begged her to leave this person, and the body that gasped that it couldn’t, were both inescapably her.
Why was she unable to stop loving this man, Nowatari Tetsuya, who didn’t show her even the slightest ounce of consideration?
Why did the sight of this child stomping his feet, incapable of understanding the real problem here, fill her heart with a thousand disappointments? Why did it possess her with this senseless joy, this urge to cry, to feel sorry for him, to take him in her arms?
Nothing had been resolved. The moment that her husband laid eyes on her tears, his expression morphed into one of relief.
“Don’t cry. Come on, let’s go home. I’m sorry for making you feel lonely. We’ll be together from now on.”
Tetsuya spoke on the assumption that she had forgiven him. He didn’t think of her as someone from whom he needed to ask forgiveness.
“You didn’t want to quit your job at the restaurant, right? I understand. That was unreasonable of your uncle and aunt. I wish I could have talked them out of it. You can go back to work now, if you want. What do you think?”
Rui thought of Tetsuya as a gentle and clever man. Throughout the years, he had given her more than her own parents, whom she could barely remember, or her uncle and aunt, in whose home she had never been able to feel truly at ease.
Her uncle and aunt had never had much financial freedom, and so she had grown up helping out at the store from her midteens, leaving her with few opportunities to learn. She had never thought of herself as particularly smart, and she had always been filled with an inexplicable sense of awe by Tetsuya’s intelligence.
That was why she was so happy when he showed her his study, the walls lined with books of all shapes and sizes, old and new, and encouraged her to read whatever she wanted. As she sat in front of those shelves, not knowing which to choose, Tetsuya pulled one of the books out, handing it to her. It was a collection of essays by a female author, written in a simple, easy-to-read style. The dishes described in it sounded so delicious that she could hardly wait to try cooking them for dinner.
As soon as she found a book that she liked, Tetsuya would tell her that this one was similar, or that this author was the exact opposite, naturally escorting her from work to work and so broadening her thinking. He was a good teacher, and a good giver too.
But for the longest time, she couldn’t understand why her husband, who was so kind and clever, seemed always to be talking at cross-purposes with her. As her doubts piled up, her arguments would slip into some strange place, and she began to doubt whether he had ever truly understood her.
To begin with, Tetsuya was much more articulate than she was. In the middle of a conversation, he would often try to sum up her opinion. This is what you mean, isn’t it? But whenever he did so, he would gradually move further and further away from whatever it was that she had actually been trying to say, and she would end up left with something that she couldn’t control with words.
After a time, she realized that her tears must have stopped flowing at some point.
Tetsuya remained silent, merely pursing his lips at her, before glancing up at the ceiling and letting out a deep sigh. He scratched wearily at his neck, then reluctantly, almost unwillingly, opened his mouth: “All this time, you’ve been stressed out because we haven’t had kids yet, right?”
Ah, yes. In the end, they had kept putting off having children. Rui blinked, staring back at him.
“Sure, if we had kids, you might not have ended up in this weird forest,” he continued, his frown not letting up. “I never had time to think about all that, you see. I’m sorry for neglecting you, for always being busy with work. But things are looking up now. We’ve got a loan for the house and all that . . . If you want something to dote on, how about we get a dog?”
A dog? She had no idea what he was saying. How did a dog factor into all this?
He was the one who had always wanted a child. Ever since he laid eyes on a baby in a New Year’s greeting card that he had received from his parents, he would say from time to time that living creatures were only complete when they had passed their genes on to the next generation. He had urged her to experience the mystery of childbirth, had urged her not to put it off until it was too late. And she, vaguely, had agreed with him.
However, there had been no sign of pregnancy even after six months of trying, and she began to wonder whether they would have trouble conceiving naturally. She suggested seeing an obstetrician, but Tetsuya stopped her, and the question of children was put on the back burner.
Tetsuya continued to talk: “I thought if we couldn’t conceive naturally, we should just enjoy our lives together as a couple. But I guess this kind of thing is always harder on the woman. I wasn’t considerate enough.”
That wasn’t what he had said before.
When she had told him that she was considering fertility treatment, he reacted with a look of disgust. “There’s no use trying to find someone to blame,” he said. Yes—looking back, they had always been talking at cross-purposes.
Something had been wrong this whole time.
This was much more serious than writing or not writing a novel, than going or not going to work, than having or not having children, but Tetsuya was forever unaware of it. In their relationship, it was always he who had the power to speak, and so any problem that he failed to recognize, no matter how serious, simply didn’t exist.
It was a dead end.
No, this wasn’t going to work. Not at all.
The iron vice gripping her brain prevented her thoughts from moving anywhere beyond that point. Rui held her head in her hands. The inside of her body turned black with sorrow. If she were smarter, she might have been able to point out exactly what was wrong with the two of them, to bring Tetsuya around and change the situation.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, and yet she couldn’t give up either. She didn’t want to live in this nonsensical place anymore. She wanted to go somewhere else, anywhere else.
The skin on her back burst into flame. The countless impulses that she had kept folded up inside her overflowed like a dam breaking. A slithery sensation spread across her back, rampantly unfurling.
She once again sprouted green buds from every pore of her body, becoming a mass of greenery.
“I’m sick of your theatrics,” Tetsuya murmured, without even trying to conceal his frustration. He leaned over, pressing his cheek against the headboard. “It isn’t fair to use your hysterics as a weapon, to break down crying like that all the time. It’s cowardly. When are you going to learn? It’s impossible to hold a proper conversation if you don’t even have a basic level of social ability. You women—well, it’s kind of charming in its own way, and it’s a shame that history never gave you all the right opportunities—but still, you’re too quick to get emotional. You can’t see that your lack of social skills is the root cause of all your problems, and then you misguidedly accuse us of discrimination and inequality.”
Inequality . . .
Was that the source of her discomfort—in short, the inequality between men and women? Rui tilted her head, sinking deep into thought to the sound of rustling leaves.
Tetsuya, his tone languid, continued: “Our postwar democratic society is already equal and meritocratic. The strong survive and the weak perish. Sometimes, those who don’t succeed are just unlucky, but most of the time, it’s due to their lack of ability. And that’s all there is to it. Everyone tries to make it sound more complicated than it really is. They don’t have the courage to own up to reality.”
The words, spoken quickly, took time to sink into her consciousness. She remembered the boy’s back as he nodded to her in the fitting room, the kimono spread open on the clothes rack.
“Are you saying the reason you couldn’t take over the family business was because you weren’t as talented as your brother?”
A deep silence engulfed the bedroom—a silence emanating from Tetsuya.
His eyes had opened so wide that they risked tearing themselves apart. Through his clenched jaw, a pale anger flooded the room.
At last, he exhaled through his teeth, glaring at her with a bestial cast to his face. “Shut up.”
It was a low, crushing warning.
She felt something writhing on her neck and back. “Why are you so angry?” she asked quietly.
But before she could even finish speaking, she was pushed violently away.
Her body bounced against the bed as she rolled over. In an instant, Tetsuya had inflated to twice his original size, transforming into a huge one-eyed monster covered in black bristles. He wanted to hit her, to control her, to hold her down. That huge, bloodshot eye radiated unrestrained hostility and spite. The next moment, as that black, mountain-like body raised its fists into the air, trees spilled out of her flesh with all the force of a flash flood.
Innumerable trunks and branches pierced through that huge eye, twisting and tightening as they lifted it into the air. Having fully ensnared that body, the trees began to exert further pressure. An eerie creaking filled the room as they squeezed its flesh, as they twisted its bones, until a scream, a man’s voice, leaked out.
The pale flesh at the base of the trees, only barely maintaining the outline of a person, let out a raspy voice: “Ah . . . So this is what it feels like to get angry. You know, you can’t get angry unless you know you won’t break. But I’m angry now. Really, really angry . . .”
Her pale flesh trembled, iridescent hairs erupting all over. A number of fist-sized spheres swelled beneath her skin, splitting the surface and opening up like fresh eyes.
Faced with that creature, with its soft hair and myriad eyeballs, Tetsuya forgot all about struggling and merely stared back. “Rui . . . Is that you?”
Those countless eyes, clear and white, watched him closely.
“Hey, let me down.”
“No. I don’t want you to hit me.”
“I’m not going to hit you. I won’t. Look . . .” Tetsuya lifted one of his arms into the air, showing her the mass of green leaves stretching from his ribs up to his neck. “See? I’ve got these now.”
“Oh . . .”
“Let me down.”
She didn’t respond.
“We can’t stay like this forever, can we?”
Blinking discontentedly, the rainbow-colored mass sank into the bed with Tetsuya, who was still ensnared by the trees. The white cotton sheets wrapped over them as their bodies pierced first the mattress and then the floor as they fell somewhere deeper.
When the sheets opened up again, they were sitting on the bed facing each other.
Rui, once again in her pajamas, gazed across at her husband, holding his knees with an expression of vague dissatisfaction.
Then, looking like he had just woken up from a dream, Tetsuya glanced up at the ceiling. “Hey, where are we?”
“The bedroom.”
“I can see that. But this isn’t our normal bedroom, is it?”
Was that the most important thing on his mind right now? She wondered why she had done as he had said and released him.
“You haven’t apologized yet.”
She could only barely put the sense of incongruity she felt into words.
But a bitter taste welled up in her mouth when she saw Tetsuya’s unresponsive face.
“What do you mean? You did the exact same thing. There are no men or women in this weird place, right? You did that to me, and I did it back to you. So we’re even.”
But the problem wasn’t about where or how many times an act of violence was perpetrated, and striking back the same way certainly wouldn’t solve anything.
She felt as though her head was trapped in a deep fog, and she pressed her hands against her temples. For some reason, she had thought that Tetsuya would apologize to her. She had assumed that he would understand what had just happened, that he would reflect on what he had done and say sorry. And yet it didn’t even look like the utter dreadfulness of his actions had so much as registered with him.
She couldn’t express herself well. She couldn’t think properly.
“What’s wrong?” he asked simply.
For him, everything had been reduced to a simple, banal question.
Rui stared back at him, her numbed tongue mouthing: Apologize?
Wasn’t it common sense in this day and age just how awful it was to hit a woman? Wasn’t he ashamed of himself? Every word that rose to her lips felt somehow inadequate. What exactly was this day and age? The word normal seemed like a pitfall. And was it really a question of shame? She was the one who had been faced with violence, she was the one who had been filled with disgust and repulsion, and yet the only words that came to mind were borrowed from somewhere else. In the first place, her plea for him to apologize didn’t make any sense. If Tetsuya had been in her position, he would have told her that she was acting out of line, he would have denounced rather than implored her. He would certainly never have begged her for an apology.
Perhaps then, she should tell him that he was being inappropriate?
Changing the words out of line to inappropriate would greatly diminish the strength of the demand. Yet she couldn’t articulate herself as directly as he could. She hadn’t been brought up in that kind of culture.
Why was Tetsuya free to speak however he pleased, while her mind was crippled, her mouth practically sewn shut?
“Rui?”
“Wait here,” she said, stepping down from the bed.
Tetsuya’s eyes bulged. “Here?”
“Yes.”
“Will you return to me as a lily a hundred years from now?”
“What?”
“No, it’s nothing.” His lips twitched slightly in amusement.
Rui stared at her husband curiously, then turned her attention to the large bookshelf along the bedroom wall. It was a solid fortress of wisdom, filled with thick, intimidating books that might spill off the shelves at any moment. From the shadows, a mass of vines coiled out invitingly.
She peered into those shadows, her fingers intertwining with the vines.
Inside, the forest was expanding.
SHE FOUND HER as soon as she started paddling through the green dimness.
She was guarding a small, blue-tiled house in a round, open space beyond a break in the trees, setting up a table and chairs outside when she called out in greeting: “A visitor. How wonderful. No one ever comes here.”
There was a pot of hot tea, some simple baked sweets, and a vase of pretty wildflowers lined up on the table.
“I’ve been waiting for him for so long now.”
Her lover, it seemed was somewhere far away.
“I want us to live a happy life together.”
Her voice as it tickled her ears was as clear as snow thawing in spring, free from even the faintest inkling of doubt.
“But he has an important job to do.”
She had a pure, well-balanced face, a youthful neck, and lush, radiant hair. Her waist was so slender that a man might have been able to wrap his fingers around it, while her breasts had a solidity that could be seen even through her clothes.
“Once he’s finished, he’ll come back to me. Then, he’ll take me away from here, he’ll cherish me, and I’ll give him sustenance. When he reaches out to me, I’ll leave these branches behind and fall into his arms.”
The scent of fresh apples and pears oozed from her body—a cool, sugary aroma of fruit almost on the verge of spoilage.
She had known her since she was a child, yet Rui stared at the woman as though only now meeting her for the first time.
“Won’t you come out of this forest? Isn’t there anything you want to do?” she asked.
“I’m already doing what I enjoy most—loving.”
“If love is what makes you happiest, where’s your partner?”
“Loving is my role. He has a wonderful task of his own that he has to finish.”
“Why can’t he love you and do that wonderful task of his at the same time?”
The woman smiled. It was a tolerant smile, the kind that all but said: You don’t understand yet, but you will, one day.
Rui continued: “Hey, do we really like loving so much?”
“You love your husband too, don’t you? You’ve built this ridiculous forest because you’re desperately trying to reason with him, to accept him, to forgive him.”
A damp breeze blew into the clearing, the surrounding trees rustling in unison. The undergrowth stretched taller, rising and swelling like dark-green waves. A solitary flower drooped helplessly, muddying the water as it moldered away. The wind had a familiar smell—a scent of cooking mixed with the aroma of sweetened soy sauce.
A voice, crying with all its might, rippled through the air. We have to stick together! he wailed. Give her back! Give her back! Beside the table, a pale mass of light in the shape of a child stomped on the ground in frustration.
