____________

Noriko

 

 

 

Twenty more minutes.

Just twenty more minutes until I was—

“Norikoooooo,” my sister Emi’s voice called through our house. “Where’s my other schoolbag?” I could hear her rummaging through our cupboards. Morning light filtered through our shoji walls, panels of thin paper in wooden frames.

I let out a soft sigh as I finished folding the futons, the thin mattresses that my two sisters and I slept on, stacking them in the corner along with our comforters and pillows. Emi was thirteen. She just started high school, which meant she was now obsessed with her appearance. Which meant it’s the impractical but so-hot-right-now choco-pink schoolbag or nothing.

“Have you checked near the front door?” I called out without bothering to turn and face her.

There was a pause, then the movement of feet across our thin mat flooring. “Got it.”

Now that the whole family was awake, I slid open the fusuma, the sliding panels of our rooms, creating a larger space. I walked over to our small shrine in the corner of our living space and lit an incense stick for Mama. I miss you every day, I said silently to her as the spicy thick scent wafted around me. Then I squashed the worm of my anger wriggling in the dirt of the hole she left behind. The hole that I was now expected to fill.

Fifteen more minutes.

I hurried to the kitchen where the rice in the cooker was probably cooled enough to touch. “Your tie is crooked,” I called to Tatsumi, my middle sister, as I passed her. She was putting on her sailor-style school uniform while dancing to Gwen Stefani, a western pop singer she has been obsessed with, blaring from the tiny player.

She cursed behind me.

“Language,” I called back.

“Sorry.”

In the kitchen I formed the rice into little balls around a small piece of leftover fish in the center, before rolling them in seasoning, my practiced hands moving quickly. I had four lunchboxes laid out. As I finished each onigiri, I placed them in alternating boxes.

“Can you do my hair, Nori-chan?” Tatsumi called.

“Only if you want an updo with rice bits and fish. Ask Emi.”

“She can never do it as well as you can.”

Tatsumi had always been concerned with her appearance. Lately it’d gotten worse. She admitted to me the other day she has a boyfriend at school. Fifteen is too young…too damn young to have a boyfriend. But I knew telling her not to would make her more determined to. I was hoping her crush was a phase. “Let me finish making lunch first,” I called back to her. “You finish getting ready.”

Footsteps ran up behind me. She threw her arms around my waist and squeezed. “Love youuuu. You’re the best.”

If my hands hadn't been covered in rice and smelling like fish, I’d have hugged her back. “I love you, too, little brat.” I smiled, my chest warming. “Now go or you’ll be late.”

She ran off. I quickly finished our lunches, did Tatsumi’s hair, then shoved the girls out the door so they could catch their bus. From the door of our house, I waved and called my well-wishes for their studies as they chased each other down the dirt country road.

I was alone.

At last. Alone.

My nerves tingled. I had this place all to myself. I felt like I could breathe again, the heaviness that hung around my neck like a metal collar, shrugged off. The door of the cage around me temporarily flung open.

I loved my sisters, I loved my father, but I yearned for the stillness of the house. No chatter, no demands, just the whisper of leaves against the paper walls.

I could just...be.

Instead of…should.

If only I could spend all my days alone. I wouldn’t have to hide my secret. I wouldn’t have to keep it wrapped up and tucked against my soul, constantly fearing that I’d one day drop it and it’d spill to the floor.

My secret...

You see, I was a bad sister. A bad daughter. Pretending to be a good one.

I was too selfish. I felt too much. I wanted things that I shouldn’t want: to see all the galleries of the world, to spend my days making art, studying art. To be reckless with my life.

I didn’t want to marry a stable man with a decent income and have his children like I was expected to. I wanted to run out screaming from behind everyone else’s lives.

I dreamed—wild and shameful dreams—of being free, of being unburdened by all my responsibilities. It was like an ache that I swallowed, now sitting like an undigested stone in the base of my gut. I loved my family, even if loving them imprisoned me. I hated myself for wanting such selfish things.

I ran over to my drawer, my one personal drawer just for my use, pulling out the large sheets of paper and the tubes of paints my father saved up to buy me for my last birthday. He had handed it to me like an apology. “I thought you should have this. Before you finish your studies,” he said, because he knew that once I went out to work, I’d never again have the time for it. Work. Marriage. Children. Death. It was what was expected.

Still, I’d promised myself one form of rebellion. I refused to marry unless it was for love, the kind of ageless love that one was lucky to find, even luckier to keep. The kind of love my parents have. Yes, have. Even though Mama has gone from this world, their love is still alive. It still crackles in the air around me. It still shines in my papa’s eyes.

I spread the paper across the tatami mat floor and laid out my paints, the tubes bulging with magic.

Yes, I was much too selfish. Look at me now. Without anyone around, I was indulging in fruitless wants, in dreams as whimsical and thin as smoke. Who ever made a good living out of art? What a waste of my time. Laundry needed cleaning. Dishes needed washing. Dinner needed prepping.

All these things fell away as I lifted my brush. Every slash of color cut me free from the ropes around my heart. My soul mirrored every dot and stroke of vibrant paint. While I painted I forgot my responsibilities. I let go of my gray, dusty life. I lost myself in dreams and stardust. From nothing grew water lilies, then a lake and around it, a French garden.

I’d never been to France. I’d never even left Japan. I’d painted this scene from memory from a book on Monet I found in my university library when I should have been looking up a book on statistics.

I pulled back from my work, studying it with a critical eye. I shook my head slightly, a small smile on my lips. I could never get the light glinting off the water right. How did Monet do it? How did he capture sunbeams and press them into the canvas? Did he use magic?

Art is never finished, only abandoned. Leonardo da Vinci said that.

This work would definitely have to be abandoned. I sighed when I spotted the time. I needed to get ready for my lectures at university. Painting would not pay the bills. That’s why I was studying something realistic—international business with a major in English—even though I was already fluent, thanks to my father.

The child inside me withered at the thought of a lifetime of working in this dry, dull field, my wild mind stuffed into a box, my future laid out. Endless hours in a cubicle in an anthill city, saving money to send back home.

I had no choice.

Papa wouldn’t be an English teacher forever. At nineteen, I was the eldest and I was responsible for this family, even if I wasn’t a boy. Perhaps it would have been better if I’d been born a boy. Or not born at all. My resentment hung out like an untucked shirt before guilt’s hand shoved it all back in and straightened out my facade.

“Noriko,” a familiar male voice called to me.

I looked up to see my father standing at the front door, slipping off his shoes, the dying light glinting in his silver hair.

“You’re home from work early.” I smiled. “I have some ongiri left over in the fridge, if you’re hungry.”

He didn’t smile back. “I didn’t go to work today.”

Something jarred inside me. He didn’t go to work? He didn’t tell me that. He usually told me everything. I thought it was strange this morning when I woke up and he was already gone. “Where did you go?”

He ignored my question. “I need to talk to you.”

“Can it wait, Papa? I have classes.”

“No,” his voice trembled. “It cannot.”

I frowned as I looked closer. His face was drawn and pale. He suddenly looked ten years older than his forty-one years. Oh God.

Something was very, very wrong.