All the World for Rabbit Girl

My name is Tao. I was the child my parents should never have had. To bring me into the world, they had to pay a fine of thirty thousand, which only made our already strained household poorer. Worse than that, I still was not the son they had wanted, because our family already had one excellent, perfect daughter: my sister Nene. Nene once told me that when I was born, my mother took one look at me, screamed, "This isn't my child," and pushed me away. I was so small then, wailing with all my might. How could I have known that I had been born with a cleft lip, a malformed child, ugly and ill-tempered, the green leaf set against Nene's bright flower? But Nene was still the sister who loved me most. When Father chased me with a clothes hanger, she would shield me with her thin arms and hide me behind her. When Mother bought Nene pretty dresses and left me with nothing, Nene would secretly lend them to me. Ever since I was little, she had been the angel in my heart. On so many nights, when my parents made me kneel in the living room, I would see Nene coming toward me with a quilt in her arms, and behind her white feathers seemed to drift in the air, as if she had spread a pair of wings. Even with her protection at home, I was never spared at school. In fourth grade, a pack of bored older girls surrounded me. They yanked at my collar, wrote ugly freak across my face with black watercolor pens, and ordered me to run laps around the field. They dumped me on the track. My useless tears came streaming down, turning the black paint on my face into a blur. I ran in circles like a panda with no sense of direction, and then I ran out of strength. Misery and humiliation rose together inside me. My eyes burned, and I let out a great raw howl. That was when a boy crawled out of the grass. He was dressed in black, solemn-faced and silent, like the wordless mole from a cartoon. He crouched beside me, his handsome face close to the tip of my nose. His hair curled a little, and his glass-bright blue eyes, clear as blue agate, stared at my dirty, tear-streaked face. "Are you a rabbit?" he asked, pointing at my mouth. I covered my face with my arms and cried even harder. Then he sprang up, grabbed me, and dragged me into the girls' restroom. The girls inside screamed and ran out. He dumped me in front of the sink. I took the hint and turned on the tap. When I tried to sneak a look at the strange blue-eyed creature behind me, he glared, and I hurriedly splashed water over my face until the mess was gone. Afterward the girls complained to the teacher, and the two of us were punished with cleaning the track and both restrooms for a month. That was how, at ten years old, I met the arrogant, swaggering mixed-race boy who became my only friend. His name was Harasaki Minami. When I was in fourth grade, he was in sixth. When I reached sixth, he was still in sixth, and in the end I even landed in the same class as the boy who had repeated a year. A person who dragged me into fights and always slipped away first, who stole sausages buns and left me to be caught, who yanked off my swim ring and put it on himself, really should not have been clever enough to say what he said. "Why are you always in sixth grade?" I asked him once. Minami tilted his mouth and gave me a sly grin. "Idiot. Because I've been waiting for you." I never quite believed him, because every time we got into trouble and somebody had to take the blame, his words never came true the way he said they would.

Minami's mother was a beautiful, graceful Frenchwoman who had thrown away everything and come all the way to Japan to marry his father. From her he inherited those blue eyes; from his father, black hair. Mixed-race children really did have no business being that beautiful. During the summer after we graduated middle school, his mother taught him French at home. Whenever I went to raid their refrigerator, I would half-listen and mix myself into the lesson, which later led to Minami staring at me with a head full of question marks. "Doesn't idiot pig mean hello, and stupid donkey goodbye?" I rolled my eyes and bit into a sandwich I had just dug out of his fridge. A strange taste spread in my mouth. Minami beat his chest in despair over hearing his lovely French turned into something like that, while I smacked my lips and kept rummaging for food. That afternoon I rubbed my swollen stomach, pulled his grass-patterned quilt over myself, hugged his teddy-bear pillow, and lay sprawled across his bed flipping through magazines. "Minami, if I eat this much of your food, are you going to hold a grudge?" "Of course," he said, intent on his computer game without so much as turning around. "I'll poison you, dead rabbit." The moment the words left his mouth, my stomach began to rebel. It gurgled and cramped as though my intestines had tied themselves into knots. Beads of sweat sprang up on my forehead. Hearing me groan, Minami threw down his mouse and rushed over. "What's wrong? What's wrong? Are you about to give birth?" he demanded, face tight with worry. It hurt as if my body were being split open. Half-closing my eyes, I twisted his arm with all the strength I had left in protest, but I could not even get a full sentence out. I only rolled back and forth on the bed. Minami did not waste another word. He scooped me up sideways and ran to the hospital. I locked my arms around his neck and used the last of my strength to mutter, "Minami... if you poison me to death, I won't let you off... even as a ghost." At the hospital, after the doctor took his stethoscope away and left, I curled in the corner of the bed, touching my stomach and looking at Minami sheepishly. Luckily I had only eaten too much, with a little expired food on top of it. "Serves you right," he said. "Who told you to stuff food into your mouth like an idiot without even looking?" I stuck out my tongue and lowered my head. Outside, rain came crashing down in sheets. Wind spun the pinwheel on the windowsill without pause. The room was so still that the only sound was water dripping onto the floor. Then I turned and noticed that Minami's curled hair was plastered to his head, soaked through. Rain slid down the hard lines of his face. His clothes were drenched. He was hugging himself and shivering with cold. Only then did I remember the sight of this fool charging through the storm with me in his arms, covering me with his body so every drop struck his back instead of mine. He had looked like a drowned chick. I wrapped him up in a blanket until he resembled a white teru-teru bozu, pushed him onto the bed, and with pretended expertise stuck a thermometer into his mouth. When I pulled it out a while later, it read 38.5. His cheeks were hot and red as giant tomatoes, but with the thermometer still between his lips he was muttering, "Tao, you pig, you weigh a ton." I insisted that he was delirious with fever, and under my relentless persuasion he quite naturally ended up as the patient in the next bed.

Minami seemed to understand everything. Moonlight spilled through the window into the black ward. In the blur of it, a great dark shape pressed down, and I clutched the blanket in fear, fists clenched, not daring to open my eyes. Then something soft brushed my head. Minami tucked me into his arms and enclosed my tight little fist in his hand. His warm breath touched my face. My heart thudded so loudly it felt as if the whole hospital could hear it. In my ear was the low murmur of a lullaby Minami was singing, so gentle it was like being wound round in silk. I slowly closed my eyes and stayed obediently in his embrace. Minami was not cold the way my father and mother were. He was really, truly warm.

After I entered high school, Nene told me, "Tao, if you don't want people to bully you and you want to be liked, then you have to learn to smile. Smile at everyone, even if they're your enemies, even if you aren't really happy." So every morning I stood before the mirror and practiced. I used my fingers to push up my stiff cheeks. My cleft lip stretched wide enough to show the eight teeth my sister had prescribed, and the smile looked uglier than tears, but the number of people who wanted to be my friends really did grow. Only later did I realize that all any of them wanted to talk about was Minami. They called him the Glass Marble Prince, because his eyes were a rich jeweled blue, bright and translucent as gemstones. I was nothing more than their mailbox for love letters, their transfer station for chocolates. Minami often skipped class with me. On television, mixed-race boys were always elegant little princes, but Minami, as an oddity among them, was lively as a monkey. He perched on top of walls with practiced ease and watched me scramble over the high wall behind the school in a posture fit for a dog. He would ride me out on his bicycle to the overpass in the suburbs. Beneath the bridge there was a wide stretch of wild grass up to our waists, and in the middle of it a narrow stream, clear to the bottom, with floating white clouds reflected in it while airplanes roared overhead. Each time we went there, Minami would fold a great many paper boats, load the love letters and chocolates he had received onto them, and send them drifting away. It was very artistic and extremely bad for the environment. So many times I wanted to persuade him to open even one letter, but he was stubborn as an ox, as if nothing in the world could enter his eyes. Once, after a great deal of effort, I pried open his mouth and shoved a chocolate from another girl between his teeth. He spat wildly, as if he had eaten something filthy, shouting, "You can't just go around eating other people's food. That's unhygienic." Yet the moment lunchtime arrived, he would bounce over to me and boldly pick through my lunchbox, chewing away with great relish and leaving me nothing but plain rice. Ever since the hospital incident, he had had a perfectly legitimate excuse to sample my food first: he was helping me test it for poison. When Minami bit into my rice balls in great mouthfuls, flecks of nori stuck under his nose like two tiny moustaches, and he looked adorable. Minami always said we were rice-ball siblings scooped from the same rice cooker and could never be separated, but when I stood in the crowd and saw him blazing with light on the stage, I realized how far away from him I really was. He used to dangle himself before me dozens of times a day, asking, "Tao, are you thirsty? Tao, are you hot? Tao, are you tired? Want me to rub your legs for you?" His massage skills were no joke. But lately my little shadow had turned into a soft sleepy bug. He propped up his book and snored through class, then slunk straight off to the arts club after school. Girl A told me Minami was going to host the English performance competition with Nene. Minami, being mixed-race, spoke English smoothly by nature, and my excellent sister Nene had always been the first choice for hosting every big event. I stood among the people in the hall, hearing over and over again, "What a lovely performance," "What a perfect pair the hosts make," and a nameless anger burst inside me. To me, the makeup on Minami's face was unbearable, his stage smile unbearable, the whole sight of him unbearable. At the end of the show, even the hosts joined the performance. Nene wore a pink ballet dress and rose to her toes while Minami, behind her, lifted her with his hands and performed a beautiful Swan Lake. The two prettiest people in the world looked like vines on a wooden trellis, twined tightly together in sweet happiness. I, by contrast, felt like an offshoot growing crookedly from the vine, and like my own name, which sounded too much like something extra, I became a cumbersome, unnecessary presence. Thinking of the way Minami had held me in the hospital, I suddenly found his long clean fingers unbearably dirty.

The next day the school corridors were plastered with posters of Minami and Nene from the performance, and countless pink hearts floated around his head. "Morning, rabbit!" Minami arrived at the start of the day with a lovestruck brightness that made him obnoxious to look at. I took several deep breaths, gathered all my strength, forced a smile onto my face until it almost cracked, and wished him good morning. "Here. Freshly baked." I handed him the little love letter warm from my schoolbag. He was about to toss it away as usual when I blurted, "Wait, wait, wait. My sister wrote this one." Minami stared at me unhappily, took the envelope, pretended to hold it up to the light and inspect it, and then sent it flying in a neat arc into the trash can. I could not tell whether I was happy or sad. Nene had pestered me into staying up past midnight to help her write that letter. My sister, who had never chased after anyone before, had suddenly set her heart on Minami. At two in the morning she had still been bubbling over with energy, chattering to me about all the little incidents from their rehearsals. Before I could finish speaking, Minami had already slung an arm around my neck and dragged me off down the corridor, shouting loudly to himself, "Our rabbit sure has a lot to say today! Her owner ought to stuff her mouth full of greens and carrots." That summer break was the longest holiday of my eighteen years, because Minami was gone. They say there is a wasting disease that comes from longing, that girls can fall sick from missing someone too much. If missing a person really is an illness, I thought I had reached the last stage. Minami had gone to France on vacation with his mother. As a child with half-French blood, he felt an immediate and intense pull toward a country he had never been to before, and so he ran straight for that beautiful shore across the sea without even saying goodbye to me. On LINE he told me he had gone to Provence to see the lavender, to the Alps to see the snow, and that he kept wondering whether his rabbit had starved to death. Ten days later I went to the pay phone downstairs to make an overseas call. He did not answer. After the tone, I touched the soft new fullness of my double chin, gripped the receiver, and left a message saying I had not eaten in forever, that I was starving, and that he had better come back fast, fast, fast. Then I heard someone knocking on the phone-booth door behind me. Three knocks, like the spell of a witch in a fairy tale. When I turned, Minami had been conjured into existence by magic. The man before me looked exhausted, but he was the real, living Minami, fresh off the plane, not even over the jet lag. I threw myself into his arms and wiped snot and tears all over his plaid shirt while shouting, "What do I do? What do I do? Just now, my parents got divorced." Just like my name, I had truly become extra at last. The crumbling castle of my parents' marriage finally collapsed that day. At noon they signed the papers at the family mediation office. Nene went with my mother, but neither parent wanted me. I grabbed their sleeves and screamed and cried, but they walked away without even turning their heads. I had no choice but to go live with my grandmother, who was already past eighty. "Minami, am I really that dispensable?" I asked. "Of course not. To some people, you're one of a kind." "Are there really people like that in this world?" "There are. For example, me." My eyes had blurred with water, and I could not make out his face clearly enough to tell whether he was serious or joking. The gray sky pressed down so hard it was hard to breathe. Damp air gathered under low dark clouds, and then a heavy rain crashed over us. It hit me like an army, and I fell apart.

After school started again, Nene came to see me all the time. My kindest, gentlest sister always brought study materials, cakes, fruit. As she had when we were children, she held me and told me she missed me, missed the days when we had hidden together under the covers laughing and crying, missed the stray cat we had fed behind the house, missed the stone-paved lane at the mouth of the alley that she had led me across by the hand. And in the end Nene said, "Tao, I'm going to be with Minami." The smile in my sister's eyes was the happiest smile I had ever seen. A shy flush rose in her face, like a lotus blooming in a pond of happiness, and the starlight in her eyes was so bright it hardly seemed real. Minami had not told me this good news. I mumbled the thought to myself, not knowing how desolate my face must have looked. I could not keep hold of my sister's trembling hands, and it felt as if the whole world were beginning to split apart. Even when classmates disliked me, even when my parents abandoned me, I had never been this miserable. But this time I felt, with an almost violent certainty, that I had lost the whole world. Nene began to come look for Minami often. I, like a plague god everyone wanted to avoid, went the long way around them. Minami, who did not understand any of it, said I was starting to act less like a rabbit and more like a turtle, shrinking my neck and scuttling away every time I saw him as if I owed him money. I nodded and made vague sounds, my head down, afraid of seeing in his eyes the same starry happiness that shone in Nene's. After class I went into the little woods behind the school. Though the leaves cast a screen of shadows, they still could not hide Nene and Minami in each other's arms. Even from far away, I could see the tears of happiness in Nene's eyes.

In the alley behind the school gate, Minami was fighting a bunch of young punks. Nene had crumpled to the ground behind him, crying her eyes out. In the last light of sunset, Minami, battered all over, faced three yellow-haired thugs by himself. Nene, safe behind the wall of his body, could only flail helplessly. The boys had wooden sticks in their hands, and they brought them down viciously again and again on Minami. His face was mottled with bruises, and blood was running from the corner of his mouth. When I saw the sticks lifted that high, saw that they meant to beat him to death, I was terrified, yet courage came from I did not know where, and I charged forward with my eyes shut. I ran straight in front of Minami. The raised club came crashing down onto my head. Gold exploded behind my eyes, and I folded to the ground. The lamps of the world went out all at once.

When I opened my eyes again, half a month had already passed. The hospital room was empty except for Nene, sitting by the bed and crying in silence. I patted my sister's head. She lifted her face and looked at me in joy. "Where are Mom and Dad?" I asked. "Tao, you're finally awake." Nene did not answer. She stuffed pillows behind my back and helped me sit up, and suddenly my head hurt as if it would explode. I knew then that Mother and Father must be very busy, too busy to care about me, just as they had been all the many times in childhood when I was left behind. Even if I vanished one day, they probably would not notice. "Do you want some fruit, Tao?" Nene asked, looking worried. I neither nodded nor shook my head. I only turned toward the window and felt, all at once, that the world outside had become strangely blurred, as if covered by a faint mist. Nene gave a soft sigh, got to her feet, patted my shoulder, and said she would go buy me something to eat. The moment she left, the doctor came in with a stack of papers. "Tao, you've been unconscious for a long time," he said. I smiled, and at once I seemed to know what was coming. A little while later Minami pushed open the door. He was in a wheelchair, wrapped all over in bandages, even his handsome face swollen like a baguette. The doctor finished speaking, understood at once, and quietly withdrew. Minami immediately rushed up and grabbed my hand. "Stupid rabbit. Thank God you're all right. Why did you charge out like some idiot bull?" He tapped my head in complaint. The wound hurt so much I cried out. Minami panicked, then bent and blew gently over my forehead, murmuring, "Go down, bump, go down," like someone soothing a child. I laughed. Then, still grave-faced, he suddenly pulled me hard against him. The plaster on his body dug painfully into my skin. A cool breath brushed my neck. Minami's warm breathing stopped a hair's breadth from my lips. I jerked my face aside, dodging his kiss, and lowered my voice into a smile. "Minami, from now on you have to protect my sister the way you protected her that day. Stay with her properly. My sister already has the whole world's love. The only thing she doesn't have yet is your share of it." After saying that, I quickly lay down, turned my back, and pulled the blanket over my head. I was afraid of seeing tears in Minami's sapphire-blue eyes. I was afraid he would discover the falsehood mixed into my smile. Outside the blanket, the room was terribly quiet. His wheelchair rolled lightly over a syringe the doctor had dropped on the floor. A sharp crack sounded. I did not know whether that was what a heart breaking sounded like. The ward door was eased shut, and I heard Minami's low voice on the other side. "Your sister may have all the love in the world," he said, "but what about you?" Tears surged out of me. I bit my lip so hard I did not dare let a sound escape, only a small, muffled sob. I remembered what the doctor had just told me in plain terms: Tao, you cannot cry. If you do, your vision will deteriorate faster. You were born malformed. Some of the organs and tissues in your body were never properly developed. This blow to the head has severely injured your optic nerve. You can still see for now, but no one can say for how much longer. Minami, how I wanted to force myself to look at you clearly, to see whether your jewel-blue eyes truly held any trace of me.

After I left the hospital, I withdrew from school. I hid my condition from everyone and told only my grandmother. I could never stop crying, and my sight grew blurrier and blurrier. I began reaching for the wrong things, stumbling because I could not see the road, failing to recognize my grandmother when she stood in front of me. Then one morning, when I woke, I fell at last into an endless darkness. I was afraid of the dark. More than anything I wanted Minami beside me, holding me and singing a lullaby the way he used to. Instead I could only cling to my grandmother and scream myself hoarse. One old woman and one blind girl: how desolate we were. Later a kind neighbor, pitying me, introduced me to a job at a radio station. Every night at midnight I sat in the booth and comforted the people who called in crying. I told them my name was Little Forget, forget as in forgetting, because all things, every last thing, had to be learned out of memory. But one day the caller who came through was Nene. She wept as she apologized to me, again and again. She was sorry that when we were small her mischief had frightened my mother into an early labor and left me born malformed and frail. Sorry that she had spoken ill of me before family and classmates and left me lonely. Sorry that she had taken advantage of Minami's softness. Sorry that she had called those street punks to the alley and had them beat Minami so he would say he did not like me. She told me that after I disappeared, Minami searched the whole world for me. He let his beard grow, let his hair grow, and ran down roads like Forrest Gump, saying over and over that he was looking for a girl who looked like a rabbit. I could not listen any longer. I shoved the radio music as loud as it would go and hung up on Nene. I remembered the story she used to tell me when Mother locked me in the basement and Nene snuck down to keep me company at night. It was the story of the Happy Prince, who asked a swallow to take the ruby from his sword and the blue sapphires from his eyes and give them to the poor, until his own splendid beauty had dimmed and even his lead heart split in two, yet he was still happy. All this time I had tried, just as Nene once taught me, to keep smiling, believing that like the Happy Prince I, too, was happy. Even when I was sad, even when I said cruel things to Minami, I suddenly realized that what I had thrown away was the precious blue jewel in his eyes. A Mayday song was playing on the radio, singing that some smiles are only camouflage. It felt as if every word were meant for me.

Long afterward, on some distant day, I sat in the yard before my little one-story house, listening to cicadas in the trees and frogs in the pond out back. The summer wind touched me gently once more, though by then I could no longer see the green that filled the world. Then footsteps entered that hollow, airy world and broke my quiet. They came nearer and nearer, and before long I felt someone take my hand lightly in his own. The warmth was as familiar as yesterday. It was so familiar that I could almost make out the lines in his palm. He did not speak. He only traced words against my hand. My nose stung. Tears rose all at once. I knew what he was writing. It was French.

Back when I was at Minami's house, that was the one sentence I had studied most seriously. Minami crouched before me as he had when we were young. The soft pads of his fingers brushed over my empty, sightless eyes. He did not say a word, and yet I knew what he wanted to tell me. Still, I wanted to flee. I stood up, but Minami seized my wrist hard. His voice was so hoarse. "Don't go. Don't go. Don't go." Word by word, he drained the strength from me. My hand groped in the air until at last it found his face. Warm liquid ran into my palm. Minami clasped my hand back in his, and in that instant I felt the self that had once been so precious in those jewel-blue eyes of his. Suddenly I understood the ending of the Happy Prince. People always said he had nothing left, but he possessed a heart full of love. He was truly happy. Je t'aime, Minami. All this time, that is what I have wanted to say to you. The truth is, I love you.