A Mother's Lie

I am not particularly skilled at inventing stories, so I cannot fabricate one out of thin air.

"A Father's Lie" was a story written in tribute to silent heroes.

Perhaps you cannot understand Yamashita Takuya's dream, or why he would dream such a thing. I cannot give the most exact answer. But I am willing to tell a story.

There is a small river in Shirakawa Town. Every spring and summer it floods, and fish hide among the grasses and thornbushes by the banks. At such times many people go there with nets to catch them.

One day a boy of thirteen or fourteen named Shota sneaked out without telling his parents, carrying a bucket and a fishing net taller than he was.

Unfortunately, he was swept off his feet and fell into the river.

Several strong swimmers jumped in at once to save him, but they found nothing. All they recovered were the bucket and the net.

Some people thought the current had dragged him very far away and that he might never be found again.

When Shota's mother heard the news, she fainted on the spot. After they carried her ashore and she came to, she struggled down to the river.

By old experience, people knew that the bodies of those lost in the water would often be found where the river bent, because the current grew calmer there.

But several people had already searched that place, and found nothing.

Shota's mother walked from the place where he had fallen, crying as she went and calling out, "Shota, if you can hear your mother calling, come out. I won't scold you. I won't hit you. I won't yell at you. Mother only loves you."

Her words were grief itself, and yet filled with a love so great it was almost unbearable.

Everyone listening felt heavy-hearted, and none of them knew how to comfort her.

At last she too reached the bend in the river. Broken twigs and dead leaves floated upon the smooth water as if even they had been moved and refused to drift away.

Her voice grew light and distant, as though she were calling back the ghost of her son.

If Liu Qian's stage magic counts as a miracle, then what happened next would make that look like a child's trick.

In an instant, and with no warning at all, Shota's body surfaced there in the water, in the very place where so many people had already searched up and down.

Someone leapt in and brought him ashore.

Why had so many people found nothing before, when in the end his mother called and he appeared in silence before them all?

Can you really say that was only coincidence?

If you are willing to hear such stories from Shirakawa Town, I know many more. Sit quietly and I will tell them to you one by one.

But do not ask me why. I do not know either. I am only the teller.

The moon in April was like a woman long past menopause, softened now, no longer giving off that cold light. The paddies around the school had already been planted with rice shoots, and under the moon they looked dark and muddy. A few frogs in the first fever of love called softly now and then. Aside from that, the whole world seemed very still.

Yamashita Takuya, however, was anything but still.

He lay in bed turning over again and again, unable to sleep. His roommate from the top bunk had secretly slipped into town to play games, leaving Takuya alone. It was a tiny dorm room with only two beds, tucked into the middle of the stairwell landing, hardly more than a third the size of an ordinary room.

Takuya was still thinking about what had happened that day.

A long time ago, so long that he could no longer remember exactly how long, he had stolen a fountain pen from a classmate named Chinatsu. Much later, once he was sure Chinatsu had forgotten all about it, he took the pen out and started using it. She recognized it instantly.

Why had she recognized it at a glance? Takuya could not make sense of it. He had tried to deny everything, but Chinatsu had exposed him with embarrassing ease, and once again his classmates had looked down on him.

He was used to that sort of contempt.

Every time he was caught red-handed, people despised him. At first he had not cared. But now he felt shame, or perhaps confusion, and it hurt worst of all when Misaki looked at him the same way the others did. It felt as if someone were pricking him with a needle from inside.

Had he really done something wrong?

But it wasn't that the things themselves were especially tempting. Some of what he stole he did not even like. Sometimes it was something ridiculous, like smuggled Nike shoes. What mattered was only the theft itself. No one could understand the joy in that moment.

And when he was little, whenever he pulled something stolen from his pocket, his mother would share the spoils with him. She never scolded him, never beat him, never told him it was wrong. On the contrary, she looked at him with encouraging eyes and a pleased smile, filling him with confidence for the next theft.

Later, when the people he had stolen from came to the house, his mother would fight them ferociously. If she could not win, she would throw herself to the ground and roll about wailing like a wheel, always three rolls to the left and three to the right, back and forth without ever seeming dizzy, her clothes covered in dust and her hair matted with grass and scraps of paper. The moment the other people left, the tears still on her face, she would spring back up as if she had won a great victory and spit after them viciously.

"Bah! Think you can bully a widow and her orphan? Not a chance!"

Then she would dust herself off and go right back to her work.

Sometimes Takuya asked, "Is stealing wrong?"

And his mother would say, "My precious boy, whatever you do is right. So long as I still have breath in me, no one will ever get to bully you."

Sometimes she even led by example. At night she stole firewood from the neighbor's house, fine firewood that burned hot and long. One log tonight, one log tomorrow, never more than one at a time. She thought that with so much stacked there, a single missing log would never be noticed. But when one log disappeared night after night, the pile shrank little by little, and of course the neighbor noticed. They would stand outside cursing in hints and insinuations. His mother pretended not to hear a word. She would poke at the firewood and smile to herself.

"Such good wood," she would say.

As the stealing went on, Takuya too slowly came to feel that all of it was perfectly natural. In his mind the line between right and wrong disappeared entirely.

So why did being exposed now make him feel ashamed? Was it because of her?

Yamashita Takuya turned over again and thought of Misaki, the girl who stirred him more than anyone else, though she never properly looked his way. He had almost no friends in class, so it was hard for him to learn anything about her.

If only he could win her over.

Just thinking about her in secret made a delighted smile spread across his face.

Perhaps that is the common sickness of one-sided love. People say it is bitter, but at times it is sweet as honey. Only after the sweetness fades do you fall straight into a bottomless pit of disappointment.

Takuya rolled over yet again. He thought Misaki probably looked down on him as just another thief. But if he had turned out this way, wasn't it all because of his mother? If she had told him stealing was wrong, if she had scolded him, beaten him, taught him, corrected him, would he really have fallen this far?

He grew irritated. The more he thought, the more it seemed that everything was his mother's fault. Seen now from a distance, the way she had rolled and screamed in the dirt looked weak-minded and ridiculous.

Moonlight slanted through the window, bringing with it a patch of peace.

But Takuya could not sleep another minute. Quietly he got dressed and climbed down. Suddenly his heart was blazing with resentment. It filled him with a murderous rage. He felt that perhaps only by doing that could he become a new person. He swung himself over the wall like a monkey and then took the mountain road home like a wolf.

The mountain path twisted like a snake through the trees without the slightest hint of light. The dark masses of trunks on either side leaned in like collapsing walls and made it hard for him to breathe.

He quickened his pace again and again until at last he was running.

He was afraid of the wordless stillness in the dark and wanted, at the same time, to reach home as fast as he could. The rage in him filled his eyes with blood.

At last he arrived.

He circled to the back door, knocked lightly on the window, and called in a low voice, "Mom."

His mother woke at once. When she realized it was Takuya, she hurried down to open the door. She reached out to wipe the sweat from his forehead, but he jerked away from her touch in disgust.

"What's wrong with you?"

"I came back to get something."

As he spoke, he headed toward the kitchen, and his mother hurried after him.

"What do you need?"

"A slab of cured meat. Tomorrow our class is going on an outing and cooking outdoors. I came home to take some cured meat." He pointed at it hanging above the stove. "Get it down for me."

His mother moved to turn on the light, but he stopped her.

"Don't. I've got my flashlight."

She always gave in to him, so she dragged over a chair and climbed onto it to reach the meat.

A barely visible smile, cruel and thin, crossed Yamashita Takuya's face.

The slab of cured meat hung high above the stove, tied up by a rope. At the bottom of the rope was a loop, just large enough for a head to slip through.

His mother took the meat down.

And in that very instant Takuya climbed onto another chair, slipped the loop over her neck, pulled it tight, then jumped down, kicked away the chair she was standing on, and left her hanging.

She had still been immersed in the joy of seeing her son.

By the time she understood what was happening, her body was already swinging in the air. In that instant, she thought this could only be a dream.

In the darkness she fluttered like a sheet of paper. Takuya heard the hoarse choking sounds forced out of her throat, and listened until there was no sound anymore.

Then he slipped out the door like a cat. He shut it carefully behind him. He had even pulled plastic bags over his hands as makeshift gloves.

As he ran back toward school, he tripped and smashed his knee into a stone so hard that he hissed through his teeth.

And in that sharp pain, he woke.

His knee still hurt fiercely. That convinced him, for one terrible moment, that the whole thing had not been a dream at all but reality.

The moonlight remained gentle, but Takuya realized he was crying. His vision blurred. He squeezed his eyes shut and forced the tears out, and for that instant his whole world went black.

When Yamashita Takuya woke again, it was already time for morning exercises. He rubbed his swollen head, splashed cold water on his face, and found that the ache in his knee was still there, slight but real. He rolled up his trouser leg and studied it carefully for a while, then muttered to himself, "How'd I smack it on the bed frame again?"

He tucked the blanket into place so his knees would not hit the iron frame anymore.

He decided that everything the night before had only been a dream.

But when he tried to remember it again, it was like a damaged disc, parts of it blurry, parts of it unbearably clear. What remained clearest was the realization that so many of his mother's words had been lies. Those lies had wrapped around him like a thick shell, protecting him from the world, but also deceiving his heart.

He discovered that he truly hated her a little now. She had guided him step by step into the pit of wrongdoing, and turning back was harder than he had ever imagined.

It was a craving he could not restrain, something inside him always wanting to be filled, and behind that craving there was only helpless struggle and confusion.

During morning exercises, Takuya kept his eyes fixed on Misaki's back, watching her hair swing cheerfully, feeling his own heart jump with it. He forgot everything else around him.

Slowly, people beside him started looking. More and more of them. He noticed nothing at all until the homeroom teacher jabbed him and said, "What are you thinking about?"

He heard suppressed laughter and only then realized that while everyone else was exercising, he had spent the whole time staring at Misaki. He reacted quickly.

"My knee is hurt, sir. It aches whenever I move."

He calmly rolled up his trouser leg to show him. The morning mist was still thin enough to blur details. The teacher certainly wasn't going to crouch down for a closer look, so he only warned, "Don't make the whole school laugh at you."

Takuya felt pleased with his own cleverness. Just then Misaki turned and glanced at him, very briefly. At once he grew awkward and deliberately looked away, as if he had been watching something else all along. A swallow skimmed low over the paddies and stole a little bug from the rice shoots.

What a heroic thief, stealing to rid the rice of pests.

Many things were like that for Takuya. He always wanted to cast a romantic light over theft. That swallow taking the bug, someone slipping eggs out of a chicken coop, the constant stories on television about noble thieves. All of it felt to him like a kind of celebration. He liked to link everything in the world to stealing and then find what he thought was the most reasonable explanation.

If no one came to save him in time, Yamashita Takuya would undoubtedly become someone beyond saving.

But who would save him?

Takuya never paid attention in class. His deskmate Haruka, however, was his complete opposite. She listened intently, and even her notes were careful and orderly. Most of the time Takuya simply copied her homework and called it done. Haruka was often reluctant because she believed she was only harming him, but Takuya would always snatch her notebook when she wasn't looking, and in the end she gave up trying to stop him.

Perhaps because they shared a desk, Haruka understood him a little better than the others did. She was the only person who did not despise him.

But Takuya did not especially like Haruka. She looked ordinary, and the other students said she had epilepsy, which was why they all avoided her.

One afternoon during study hall, Takuya had a martial-arts novel hidden beneath his textbook and was reading it with relish when Haruka suddenly said, "The teacher's coming."

As always, Takuya calmly covered the novel and began reading his actual lesson as if nothing had happened.

The homeroom teacher seemed to have seen every move. He came straight over, tapped on Takuya's desk, and said, "Come with me."

Takuya stood, scraping his chair loudly across the floor, and followed him outside.

The teacher led him to a policeman and said, "This is Yamashita Takuya."

At once Takuya felt that something terrible was about to happen, and in the same instant he remembered the strange dream.

"You're Yamashita Takuya?" the policeman said, sounding as though he were simply making conversation. Then he went on. "At noon today your mother's body was found hanging in your house by a neighbor, so the police were called..."

Takuya felt as if his head had exploded. He heard nothing more. He shrank backward, clutching at his head and shouting, "That's impossible. Impossible..."

The policeman turned to the teacher and said, "His mother's death has hit him very hard."

When Takuya returned home with the police, his mother's body had already been laid out in the middle of the main room. From the policeman's brief description, everything matched his dream exactly. He looked especially at the hook where the cured meat had hung above the stove. Even the slab of meat was gone, just as in the dream. Then he remembered that in the dream he had thrown it into a pool not far from the school.

His mother had died of asphyxiation by hanging. There were no other injuries. Nothing in the house had been disturbed. Robbery was ruled out. The police knew nothing about the missing cured meat. The neighbors seldom entered the house, so they did not know either.

Only I know, Takuya thought numbly.

I will never hear your lies again. Never again.

He leaned against the wall and wept soundlessly. Sunlight passed through the tears on his face until they looked like clear beads of glass.

"Either suicide," said the policeman at last, "or a carefully planned murder."

He did not linger over Takuya. Instead he watched the faces and movements of the villagers gathered around. They did not believe much in murder. To them, no one would go out of their way to kill someone so pitiful.

By dusk the police had left. The kind villagers, forgetting all the trouble his mother had caused, busied themselves helping with the funeral arrangements.

Yamashita Takuya knelt there in a daze. He seemed to have lost the ability to think. The only thought moving through his head was:

Who stole my mother's life?

The coffin was a thin one, hurriedly built overnight by a carpenter and not even given time for a coat of lacquer. It smelled of fresh wood.

When everything was finally finished, Takuya threw himself onto the bed and wondered whether he should even return to school. But he could think of nowhere else to go, and Misaki was still there, so in the end he went back.

He even made a point of going to the pool where he had thrown the cured meat in his dream. He tossed in several stones, but no slab of cured meat floated up. He wanted very badly to strip and dive to the bottom to look for it, but in the end he gave up.

He wanted to believe it had only been a dream.

Takuya noticed that his classmates had become kinder to him. Sometimes when they passed him on the road, they even greeted him or smiled. Even though it was only sympathy, he found it strangely comforting.

Still, his hands itched. Once he stole the principal's hat. He secretly put it on, found it didn't suit him at all, and tossed it into a toilet.

At noon one day Takuya went back to the dormitory and saw Misaki coming toward him like a cheerful bird. He worked up his courage and greeted her.

"Hi."

Misaki slowed, smiled, and answered, "Hi."

Her smile was beautiful. Takuya's heart immediately burst into bloom. Stammering, he asked, "Is anyone in the dorm?"

Misaki answered gravely, "There are people in our dorm. As for yours, I have no idea."

Takuya's face flushed at once. "Oh. Oh."

He hurried off so fast that Misaki was left laughing softly behind him.

He only dared look back after he had gone a very long way, but by then she was already gone. So happy was he that he casually stole a pair of traveling shoes someone had left drying in the corridor and stuffed them into the cardboard box under his bed, where he hid many of the things he stole. Later that night he intended to move them to a safer place.

He told himself that he was beginning a new life. He listened in class, took notes, began doing his homework properly. Even if he still drifted off and read martial-arts novels now and then, for him, a new life had already started.

The hardest thing to stop was stealing glances at Misaki's back. Every lesson he stole several. If only she would become my girlfriend, he thought again and again.

He could not stop remembering the way she had smiled at him that day. Each time the memory returned it made his whole mind sway. Misaki too seemed to have noticed his staring in recent days and would sometimes let their eyes meet for a moment. That only gave rise to even wilder hopes in him.

Impossible... maybe... maybe not.

In the end, Yamashita Takuya gave himself that hopelessly vague conclusion.

Then Misaki gave him an answer.

One day she was walking a little ahead of him when a letter slipped from her pocket. Takuya rushed forward to pick it up and return it, only to see a few words written on the envelope:

For Yamashita Takuya.

Misaki had written him a letter? And she was handing it over in such a secretive way? What could possibly be inside? Takuya looked around in a panic. No one seemed to have noticed him. Misaki was already some distance away. His heart pounded wildly. He hurried back to the dorm and opened the letter with shaking hands.

Inside were words praising him. That he had presence. That he had depth. That he was an extraordinary boy. The writer encouraged him to study hard and get into Shirakawa University, one of the country's famous top schools. Most unbelievable of all, Misaki seemed to offer him a promise:

See you at Shirakawa University.

Did that mean the two of them would get into Shirakawa University together and then fall in love?

Takuya read the letter over and over. Misaki had not said so plainly, but surely that had to be what she meant. He was so happy that he jumped around the dormitory like a lunatic. Then he straightened his clothes, even washed his face, and went to class humming. He deliberately entered through the front door and looked at Misaki. She glanced at him, then quickly lowered her head.

Still shy, he thought happily.

He sat down and began doing problems. Haruka stared.

"Well, look at that. The sun's rising in the west. You're working hard all of a sudden."

Suppressing his joy, Takuya said, "From now on I only have one goal. I'm getting into Shirakawa University." Then he added, with false generosity, "You should try for Shirakawa too. Then we'll still be together. Maybe we'll even be deskmates again."

Haruka's eyes dimmed at once. "I won't get in. If I can make it into any second-tier university, I'll be satisfied."

"Where there's a will, there's a way," Takuya declared confidently.

Haruka lowered her head in silence. It was the first time Takuya noticed sadness in her, but he paid it little attention.

A few days later he realized the way his classmates looked at him had changed again. Their eyes no longer held sympathy, but ridicule, together with the astonishment reserved for a toad trying to eat swan meat.

Had they found out about the letter Misaki wrote him?

How could they possibly?

Just as Takuya was spinning through these thoughts, Cheng Xiao'an came over and leaned his enormous backside against a nearby desk, making it creak dangerously.

"I hear some beauty wrote you a love letter. Your luck with women's not bad at all," he said, stretching his words out in a painfully fake television-host accent.

"How do you know?" Takuya asked. He did not deny it. Then he remembered that Cheng Xiao'an had always liked Misaki too. Of course he must be jealous.

"The whole world knows. But you don't actually think it was real, do you?" Cheng said, making faces.

"What do you mean?"

Cheng burst out laughing. "I mean she didn't write it at all, obviously. So you really believed it. You really thought you had presence and depth and were extraordinary, huh? Though looking at how hard you've studied these last few days, maybe you really can get into Shirakawa University after all."

Everyone else started laughing too.

How did he know what was in the letter? Takuya was stunned. He looked toward Misaki.

She was laughing too.

Laughing happily. Laughing without restraint.

Takuya felt as though he had been toyed with. His eyes reddened. He could feel murderous rage gathering all over his body. Yet Cheng Xiao'an paid no attention to the change in him. He did not think Takuya worth fearing.

At that moment Haruka came back in from outside the classroom. In a singsong voice, Cheng said, "Well, look who wrote the letter."

The whole class exploded again.

Haruka seemed to realize what had happened. She froze where she stood and looked at Takuya. Takuya looked back at her, equally frozen. He wanted to rush over and slap her twice, hard.

He stood there, wooden with pain, struggling to understand.

Why you?

Why wasn't it Misaki?

Haruka shut her eyes and tears spilled down her face. She did not want to look at anyone.

Yes. It was Haruka who had written the letter. She had wanted to help Yamashita Takuya turn over a new leaf and become a better person, so she had thought up this method, hoping to save his fallen soul.

Other than Takuya's mother, she was the only person in the world who had ever cared for him.

That day she had secretly called Misaki aside to an out-of-the-way place and explained the entire plan. Misaki had not wanted to agree. What kind of person Takuya became had nothing to do with her. But Haruka begged so earnestly that in the end she relented.

After handing over the letter, Haruka told her again and again that she must keep it secret. Absolutely no third person could know. Otherwise the whole thing might have the opposite effect.

"It might even cost a life," Haruka had said very seriously.

"It can't be that bad," Misaki had answered carelessly. "Still, don't worry. I won't tell anyone. Being tied to Yamashita Takuya is hardly the sort of thing I'd want ruining my reputation."

Haruka believed her.

And Misaki ignored the warning completely. The moment she had handed the letter to Takuya, she turned around and told her best friend. Of course she told her friend not to tell anyone else.

And so each person who heard it passed it on, always with the same instruction not to tell anyone else.

At that moment the homeroom teacher appeared outside the classroom again with two policemen and called Yamashita Takuya out.

One of the policemen spoke politely. "We've already got some leads and quietly brought the suspect under control, but there are a few things we still need your help with."

Takuya lowered his head and said nothing. But he noticed that the other policeman had walked around behind him. One stood in front, one behind, hemming him in completely. He suddenly found it hard to breathe.

"According to villager Liu Xiangtai, she visited your house a few days before your mother's death and saw a slab of cured meat hanging above the stove. After your mother died, though, that slab was gone. Everyone says your mother never would have eaten something good herself. She must have been saving it for you. But you hadn't gone home or had any time off. So I'd like to ask you something. Was there really a slab of cured meat hanging above the stove in your house?"

At once the slab of meat began to swing before Takuya's eyes and slowly turned into his mother's swinging body. Then suddenly the meat was in his own hands.

Takuya gave a startled cry and flung it away.

"No! There wasn't any cured meat hanging in my house!" he screamed hysterically as he bolted down the corridor like a frightened calf and burst out onto the playground. He began flailing his arms as though performing some strange dance, shouting over and over, "There wasn't any cured meat hanging in my house..."

"What's wrong with him?" the two policemen asked each other in shock.

The homeroom teacher forced himself to sound calm. "Maybe... maybe there really wasn't any cured meat in his house."

Just then another policeman came running up from the patrol car, excitement plain on his face.

"We've got the murderer. Just as we expected. He took that slab of cured meat on the spur of the moment and already cooked and ate it. He tried to run, but the men we had watching caught him. We didn't even have to question him much before he confessed. But what's wrong with that boy? Has he gone mad?"

Yamashita Takuya really had gone mad.

After that he forgot almost everything. Only two things seemed to remain clear in his mind.

One was the letter hidden in the pocket inside his clothes. He guarded it like treasure. Every time anyone passed near him, he had to touch the pocket to make sure no one had stolen it.

The other was that whenever he grew hungry, he would wander past the rice-ball stalls in town. By the time he left them, there would be a few rice balls in his pocket, though he never remembered how they got there, just as he no longer remembered who had written the letter. So he spent all his time thinking about those two things, like a silent philosopher.

Once he wandered into the place where he used to hide stolen goods because it looked strangely familiar. When he came out again, he was wearing a neatly pressed suit and a pair of shiny black leather shoes. He remembered the place after that and returned every so often to change his clothes there, then stroll about the campus until the original owners nearly coughed blood from outrage.

While Yamashita Takuya was dancing madly on the playground, Haruka, back in her seat, suffered an epileptic seizure. Tears were still standing in her eyes, too cold to wipe away, and seemed to sink straight into her heart. Strange sounds came from her throat as she slowly lost consciousness.

The others scattered in panic like floodwater bursting through a broken dam.

But where, really, was there for them to run?