11. High School
After my father passed away, my mother, older sister and I lived together in Kurume where I enrolled in the local junior high school. Although money was tight and we lived modestly, I must say I enjoyed this fleeting moment of tranquility in our lives. Unfortunately, by my third year of junior high, my grandfather and his wife decided to adopt me.
Whatever their motivations, I was desperately against the arrangement, but my mother bowed to her father-in-law’s ultimatum. As a result, I had no choice but to move back to Kurakata, where I reluctantly took the entrance exam of a local high school. I didn’t really want to pass the exam at first; however, on the day of the test I happened to run into some old friends from elementary school. Seeing them, my mood lifted somewhat, and, with a little luck, I managed to pass. Two months later, in early April, my high school life began.
It was 1964, the year of the Tōkyō Summer Olympics. A generation that knew little of the destructive war that had ended only 19 years earlier had become adults. In the meantime, Japan steadily modernized: The transportation system, such as trains and buses, were improving. More and more families had a TV set, a washing machine, and a rice cooker; more leisure time to enjoy themselves. Society was changing, too: you could say there was more freedom and democracy. But, while the life of the average Japanese was tangibly much better than ever, my own went from bad to worse.
There were three live-in maids, plus an additional three or four apprentice nurses in our home at the time. They came into my grandfather’s employ in order to support their families once they had finished junior high school, the minimum compulsory education. We were all about the same age. While they did the housework, cleaning, washing and cooking, in our house, I went to high school.[1]
Now that I look back on it, I suppose that Hiroko must have been happy at first to have a daughter she could call her own, but such sentiments didn’t last long. For one, I was never able to warm up to her and refused to call her my mother no matter what a document at City Hall said.
Complicating matters were rumors about Hiroko that I had heard from my own parents. Looking back, I suppose I should have been more mature, more tempered in my judgment toward the woman, and given her the benefit of the doubt. That, however, was impossible for a sixteen-year-old high school girl who felt as if she had been kidnapped.
No sooner did I start going to high school than the harassment began. Hiroko did all she could do to stoke up envy among the young maids. One day I overheard her talking to them about what a good-for-nothing I was, how I never helped out with the housework. She then gave them firm instructions: none of them were to ever assist me, even if I asked nicely. And so, the very next day, one of Hiroko’s lackies prepared a miserable lunch on purpose and handed it to me with a cold, hard look.
One evening, Hiroko told me that it was time for me to take my bath. I had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss, so I went to the bathroom. In Japan, the head of the household customarily takes a bath first, and in our home that person was my grandfather. On this particular evening, however, he was out for a meeting, so Hiroko suggested that I go ahead and bathe.
As I put my leg into the bath, I was shocked to discover that the water was scalding hot, far too hot for anyone to take a bath. In those days, bath water was heated by a fire just outside of the house. If the fire burned too hot, the bath water could boil. If the fire burnt out, the water would cool. As you might expect, it was difficult to maintain the temperature of the water just as you liked it.
I called down to a maid to add some cold water from the well outside as tap water alone wasn’t enough to cool the water.
Hiroko stopped the maid, saying in a hushed tone, “You shouldn’t help Motoko. She needs to start pulling her own weight in our house.”
I was dumbstruck. Wasn’t I doing what she had told me to do in the first place? But that was typical of her in those early days. No matter what I did, she would manipulate it and use it as one more opportunity to criticize me in front of the others, further hardening their hearts against me.
Only then did I realize what was going on behind my back. I had never heard words so full of venom, but they encouraged me to stand up on my own two legs, to become independent. And from that day on, I did almost everything without any of the others’ help.
Now, going to school in the morning was no trouble at all for me in those days, but returning home always made me feel sick to my stomach. I never knew what to expect and just coping was a daily struggle. Hiroko would spy on me, waiting for any chance to embarrass or scold me in front of the others. If I received a letter, she would open it before I returned home from school. One day, a boy from my high school wrote to me, so she read it aloud before the live-in staff then laughed with derision. This constant—drip, drip, drip—of harassment and bullying almost drove me mad.
One day on my way back from school, my head was clouded with peculiar thoughts such that I felt as if I were losing my mind. It was so odd: I wondered why a person stopped when the signal turned red. And now that I had stopped, I no longer remembered how to walk. I just stood there at the crosswalk, disoriented. How on earth will I ever learn to walk again? I wondered. Should I start with my right foot or left? Now that I think about it, I was probably exhibiting signs of neurosis.
It’s no wonder then that I was often physically ill in those days. I once broke out in a terrible, painful rash. Even though my grandfather was a famous dermatologist, I couldn’t tell him or his wife. So, I just suffered in silence.
After several months of this abuse, I started to miss my real mother and sister and decided to travel to Kurume to visit them. It was just after the end of the first term of my first year in high school, and summer vacation had begun. The trip seemed to take forever, but at long last I had returned.
“Tadaima!” I called out when I arrived. “I’m home!”
My mother gave me a long hard look and, then rather coldly said, “You’ve changed.”
I happened to be wearing an expensive order-made dress. It was not the simple casual dress most high school students wore in those days, so when my mother saw me in it, she grew wary of me.
Hiroko had made me wear the dress the day before. I suppose that she had hoped to convey to my mother that I was being taken care of, but the extravagance ended up sending the wrong message.
And if the cold welcome wasn’t a rude awakening enough, I received another shocking blow the following morning. When I sat down at the table and started to have breakfast with my sister, my mother remained standing in a corner of the kitchen. I told her to join us, but for some reason she wouldn’t come to the table. Urging her to take a seat, I looked under the table to pull a stool out for her only to discover that there wasn’t one. Only then did it dawn on me, that my mother had not bought a chair for me. The one I was sitting on was hers. A cold sweat dripped down my back as I realized that I no longer belonged in her home in Kurume and should not have come back.
And so, thoughts filled with dread, I walked back to the station by myself and boarded the train for Kurakata. I do not know why, but I didn’t cry out. Instead, I trembled—the whole way back—terrified of the hardship the coming years had in store for me.
Mustering what little strength I had left within me, I resolved then and there that no matter how badly my step-mother treated me, I would just have to grin and bear it, if only to make life for my mother and sister easier. I no longer cared what would happen to me so long as the two of them were okay.