by TJ Daly
It would be impudent of me to say how I first saw the woman. Indeed, if I had seen her in such a way, I could be called a madman. In a very conservative manner, I would just be labeled a liar. However, I must say it, because leaving that small part of our relationship out of the matter would make my infatuation seem somehow mad in itself.
When I was a boy of ten my father had been stationed at the US base on Okinawa. My first memory of Okinawa is of stepping off the plane and being assaulted by the humidity. We arrived in the early summer months, and it would rain a week later. It was the first time I had ever known it could rain during the summer. My clothes would stick to me constantly, and my lack of fortitude, my low constitution, meant I had been sickly. For that reason, I had always been a shy child, and for the longest time I clung to my mother’s side. There were many other American children there, of course, but their strange outwardness bespoke grim memories of prior harassment. I had to be privately tutored from our home.
Yet stepping off of that plane, on that day, I saw a strange figure in the distance. It stood on the other side of a chain link fence, and over the crowds of soldiers and tourists, it was staring directly at me. I could not tell them what the creature was, if it had even been a human or some Japanese animal my young and ignorant mind could not comprehend.
One day, in the following autumn months, I got into an argument with my mother. It had been some quaint, childish, debate, yet I swore and ran from her. In a fit of theretofore uninhibited abandon I fled our home. I ran into the streets, made my way through the backyards, under the fences, and into the small, yet dense, thicket nearby. I remember sitting with my face buried in my knees, my shorts muddied and wet. I cursed the humidity, the weather, I cursed the very island I had been taken to. That is when I saw the figure again, crouched behind a bush, watching me.
“Who is it?” I was afraid, frightened that it was a person coming to catch me, or an animal to eat me. Which had the more terrifying grip I could not say.
“I am sorry.”
A small, mouse-like voice came from behind the bush, but in the thicket I could not distinguish its size or shape. It sounded similar to a girl’s voice, but that may have been the hindsight betraying me. My own mad wondering overlaid above an otherwise normal scene.
“What are you doing?” I asked the bush. It shuffled, but the figure did not show
themselves. Looking back, it may have been deciding whether to leave or stay. To confront its prey or flee in discovery.
“I was watching you. I saw you on the plane, I saw you running down the street so I followed you. I am sorry, are you mad at me?” Its simple way of speaking, its direct nature, its concern as to my feeling of it, how odd this new being was.
“Go away, I don’t want anyone to see me crying so just go away.” There was silence for a time, but finally the figure shuffled away, unseen.
I crawled out of the thicket into the backyard of a family who had been in the middle of a barbecue. Needless to say, they were not so enthused to see the local shut-in boy wandering around their back forest. The father, who had worked with my own, loaded me up in his truck and started down the road. What followed, the strange circumstance, the terrible accident, had left my mind for many years. We could not have been going more than twenty or thirty miles per hour, yet in the road, while the driver had been scolding me, a little girl appeared. I shouted, he swerved, her parents cried.
The funeral took place the week after. My mother pressed her hand on my shoulder as the casket stood upon the podium. The priest mumbled his words, the white flowers blinded all in attendance. The mother of the girl had her face buried in the chest of her husband, stoically stern and looking off at some point in space that no longer existed. Perhaps his eyes could see the daughter that had been robbed from him by the invaders. The final sermon was read out in Japanese, and in its words, I could not help but cry myself. Yet what came over my ears as the mother laid her hand on the casket for the final farewell reminded me of a partly uttered phrase. A broken, bloodied, expression. I returned to the street for a moment, looking over at the limp body that was lying in a terribly unnatural way. Its head turned to me, and with beaming eyes, with red lips, the mother echoed her daughters own phrase;
“Mata…himade…”
From that day forth I never argued with my mother again. My father received an extension to his assignment, which would later lead to a more permanent position. When I reached middle school my tutor told my parents I was more than ready to join the other kids my age in classes. My parents gave birth to a little girl, my sister, as I entered high school.
By the time I arrived at college age my sister began her younger years, and I was only too proud of her. She had none of my poor constitution, none of my shyness. She took the world by surprise and kept trying to catch it off guard. She excelled in class; she skipped two grades in elementary, and one in middle school. As I settled into my own house on Okinawa, having become an electrician, she had been making waves at her high school.
She was a natural at any sport she took over. Her running scores were among the best in her grade, her standing jump the school’s all-time record. A life in professional tennis, her favorite of the sports, could only have been embraced. Indeed, as I hit the age of thirty-three, she had managed to enter her first regional tournament, easily achieving a sweeping victory. Using her status as a Japanese citizen she laid claim to the national title with ease, and shortly thereafter participated in the Olympics. It was only there that her winning streak reached its final conclusion, but she returned to her retired parents a new woman. A proud daughter.
My story is a short one, but that it should be longer the matter may be confused. My recollection be questioned. If I swore upon individual facts, day by day events, then my every inclination, my memory, would therefore be questioned. I lay out the facts as they are, as they were, and in the following account ask not to be trusted for my authentic retelling of events twenty years apart. I ask only to be trusted for the relation I have found between them. Time goes on in drawn out lines, many things happen of little importance, of little effect on the life of a person. Yet these two happenings are so full of value, so rife with personal weight, that to lay anything between but what may be absolutely necessary would be pretentious. Does it matter that I am an electrician more than to contextualize what I have done with my life since? Should I declare on and on each year of my schooling, every girlfriend I had, or that I became an alcoholic for three years? I think not. I am forty now, my parents have passed on into the next world, and the memory of those days’ rests solely with me. I will only tell what needs telling.
When she returned from her Olympic tournament, she remained bright, her boyfriend proposed to her. We were all happy, how could we not be? The first night she stayed in our parents house after her return, she never woke up. A coma, its cause? Unknown. A brain tumor the doctors theorized, but nobody could be sure. Her boyfriend, drawn thin by the stress, disappeared during the confusion of nurses and doctors. I have not seen him in the years since.
Her condition worsened, her heart had been failing and no doctor could tell us why. Eventually, and without knowing what we could have done differently, she passed on in the same sleep she entered when she came home. I was in the room at the time of her death, with a single nurse who had been standing to make sure and note the proper time. When it came there was only silence, no words of comfort, no reproach, only the faint sound of footsteps outside in the hall. My little sister had died right in front of me. I know the expression is cliche, but I could not even cry. It was too unbelievable, that a creature as pure and bright as her could simply expire. I fell into a chair in the room and sank deep into sleep.
When I woke up, I saw the woman. Standing over my sister, she looked strange. Japanese, well dressed in a black suit and skirt. Her face was obscured by a hospital face mask. Her muffled words as she read from a little book in her hand. I thought her to be a preacher who came to read the last rites of the deceased, and left my head sunk as though I were sleeping. When she had finally finished, she closed the book in her gloved hands, walked around the bed, and set a frail hand on my shoulder. Pretending to sleep as I was, I did not look at her directly as she removed the face mask and leaned into my ear.
“Until we meet again…” she whispered, and before I was able to raise my head, she had left. I felt weary, my head swam. My parents rushed into the room, the doctor stood in the doorway, and I left the hospital.
I walked to the street and sparked a cigarette, the traffic was quick, and somehow delightful. I stepped to the curb, gauging when the right time to jump would be, and threw my full weight forward.
Yet I was held at the waist, the car rushed by harmlessly, and behind me a soft breath grazed my ear. I had certainly been held by thin arms, yet all I could see when I turned around was the wind rustling the bushes around me. Okinawa has always had the strangest weather, despite having lived there so long I still was not used to it. Yet even though I cannot be trusted, even though my memory fails me in specifics, I know those bushes.
I see them still, and through the cigarette smoke I saw a tall, slender, figure in all black. I did not know her name, I did not know who she was. She stood there with a hospital mask over her face, and quietly walked back towards the hospital, leaving behind the bushes which swayed gently, until finally settling down. Motionless bushes, the sound of traffic.
When I went back up to say my final farewells to my sister, I felt sick. How was it I should die after her? It was impudent for her to go on ahead, so selfish. Standing over her, looking across at my weeping and wrinkled parents, I pressed my hand against her cheek. Goodbye felt too crude, too vulgar. I would see her in the afterlife, and we would joke about me pitiful goodbye all those years ago. She would surely laugh at my goodbye, and I would cry knowing that she was truly gone from this living world.
“Mata au hi made…” I murmured. I remembered the mother of that girl all those years ago, I remembered the disfigured body, and I began to scream.
For five years I was confined to a sanitorium in California. After my parents died I managed to return to my wits long enough to attain freedom. I got another job in San Francisco as an electrician, but in these last two years my life has been without hope. I am unable to look at anyone and not see my sister’s face, and over her the grim and vacant glare of the little girl. Sometimes, even, I see the shadow, that figure, watching me. She is just watching me, I know. I know she did not mean the things she had done, the pain she caused. Yet I had not meant to cause death myself. We are acts of nature. I shoved her away, and in doing so intertwined us two so dearly. I was once called mad, now I am ignored.
Now, having laid out the facts, I only hope to be justified. With a gun in hand, I go now, and into her arms I hope to be kept from the dark abyss from which none return. I do not do so because I am mad. I do not do it out of vengeance for that prevention that day. I only hope that I will be able to apologize for the wrong I have done to her. I could not face her that day, when I was only a ten-year-old boy, and I could not accept her that day my sister died. Now, thirty years after her little voice spoke its last, I only hope she can forgive me.
About the Author
TJ Daly (he/him) is an emerging writer and student from the East Bay in California. He studies Taisho and early Showa literature, and has used his study as inspiration for his writing. He has contributed stories to Bombfire Lit, Flora Fiction, and Literally Stories.