trudged resolutely through the downpour to the bus stop. The rainwater streamed in torrents along the asphalt road, swift enough to create a channel. One false step and I’d be soaked up to my calves. The bus I always caught rumbled up the road behind me and passed by, its windows fogged white with the breath of the passengers. I could imagine the unpleasantness of the humidity inside.

What time was the next bus? Would it get me to school in time for homeroom? I really didn’t care now, one way or the other. I could hear Yuriko’s voice playing over and over in my head. What am I going to do? What can I do? That is all I could think about.

If Yuriko came back to Japan with nowhere else to go, we’d have to live together again like sisters. Without any other relatives to rely on, she’d have nowhere else to go but Grandfather’s tiny apartment. The very thought of having Yuriko there gave me goose bumps. As soon as I opened my eyes in the morning, there’d she’d be on the futon right next to mine, her dark eyes looking right at me, and then I’d be having tea and toast and jam with her and Grandfather. Shit!

Yuriko would hate the smell of grandfather’s cheap pomade. She’d be angered by the way his bonsai cluttered up the place, and she’d find the way we help out around the apartment complex a hassle. And as soon as Yuriko made her presence known around here, you can be sure everyone in the apartment complex and even the shopping arcades would be seething with curiosity about her. The comfortable balance that my grandfather and I shared would be shattered. Grandfather might even go back to being a criminal!

But what I hated most was the idea of being fascinated by that monster Yuriko again, of being enveloped by her presence. At no point did I feel secure. Suddenly I thought of my mother and her suicide.

I guess they can’t accept that a shabby-looking Oriental like me could ever produce a beauty like Yuriko. The reason my mother chose to end her life was not because she couldn’t deal with her loneliness, and it wasn’t because my father was cheating on her. Wasn’t it because of Yuriko? Because of her very existence? When I heard Yuriko was coming back to Japan, an unexplainable anger began to build in my head. I resented my mother for killing herself and I hated my father for his infidelity; then, just as suddenly, I began to feel sorry for my mother, and I knew a kind of affinity with her. Tears began to well up in my eyes. Out there in the rain I was able to cry over my mother’s death for the first time. Perhaps you will find it hard to believe, but I was only sixteen. Even I had my sentimental moments.

I heard the swish of a car approaching from behind, cutting through the water. To avoid getting drenched I took cover under the awning of a bedding store and waited for the car to pass. It was a huge black car—the kind a government official might use, the kind you hardly ever saw in this neighborhood. The car pulled to a stop right next to me and the window came down.

“Want a ride?” Mitsuru grimaced as the falling rain struck her face. I stared at her in disbelief and she waved me in. “Come on, hurry!”

I folded up my umbrella and climbed in. It was freezing inside and the smell of cheap air freshener wafted through the car. I guessed it belonged to the driver, a middle-aged woman with disheveled hair. She turned back to look at me.

“Are you the kid who lives in the P Ward government housing?” Her voice was so low and husky it sounded as if her throat had been raked with sandpaper.

“Yes.”

“Mother, isn’t that a bit rude?” As she scolded her mother, Mitsuru dabbed at my wet uniform with her handkerchief. Her mother focused on the traffic signal ahead of her and neither apologized nor laughed. So this was Mitsuru’s mother? Being naturally fascinated by human relationships and the way heredity functions, I stared at the woman intently, wondering what about her resembled my friend.

Her hair was unkempt and seemed to be growing out of a perm. Her skin was dusky and showed no signs of makeup. She was wearing some gray jersey outfit that you could hardly call a dress; it looked more like a nightgown. I couldn’t see her feet, but I was sure she’d be wearing sandals with socks or a pair of grimy sneakers.

Could this really be Mitsuru’s mother? She was even worse than my own! Discouraged, I compared her face to her daughter’s. Mitsuru felt my gaze and turned to look at me. Our eyes met. She nodded, as if in resignation. Mitsuru’s mother smiled, showing a row of tiny teeth that not only looked nothing like Mitsuru’s but were also ill suited to her face.

“It’s unusual, isn’t it, for someone from around here to attend that school?”

Mitsuru’s mother was a person who’d abandoned something. I suppose you could say it was reputation and social dignity. At the matriculation ceremony I’d sneaked glances at the parents of the other students. They were on the whole wealthy, a wealth they took pains to reveal discreetly. Or perhaps I should say that they were adept at displaying their wealth by keeping it hidden. Whichever way you looked at it, the operative word here was wealth.

But Mitsuru’s mother was completely indifferent to that attitude toward wealth. Perhaps she’d espoused it earlier and then abandoned it, walked away from it entirely. The parents of the wealthy children manifested pride in their offsprings’ intelligence. Even the salary workers refrained from being ostentatious. Mitsuru had told me that her mother had ordered her not to let anyone know she lived in P Ward, so seeing her mother looking so shabby was completely unexpected. I had assumed she would be the kind to make a fuss over her appearance.

“Have you been crying?” Mitsuru asked.

I looked at her without answering. Her eyes were brimming with an ill-temperedness that I’d never seen before. I had seen her demon. Just then, for a fleeting moment, I had caught hold of her demon tail. Was she embarrassed? She averted her eyes.

“I got a phone call just a bit ago. My mother’s dead.”

Mitsuru’s face darkened. She twisted her lip between her fingers as if trying to wrench her mouth from her face. I wondered when she’d start tapping her big front teeth with her fingernail in her usual manner. I felt I was in a battle with her. But then she caved in completely.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So, your mother died?” Mitsuru’s mother looked back at me from the driver’s seat and spoke in a voice that was little more than a rasp. Her manner of speech was coarse. She sounded exactly like the people who hung around with my grandfather. Frank, open, and more concerned with substance than façade.

“Yes.”

“How old was she?”

“About fifty, I think. No, maybe still just in her forties.” I didn’t know my mother’s exact age.

“Then she’d be about my age. How’d she die?”

“She killed herself.”

“Why? Was it the change of life?”

“I don’t know.”

“A mother who commits suicide certainly leaves her children in a tough spot! You should excuse yourself from school. What are you doing out?” she said.

“True. But my mother died overseas, so there’s not much I can do sitting at home.”

“But there’s no reason for you to be making such a fuss to get to school, especially in a downpour like this.” Mitsuru’s mother studied my face in the rearview mirror, her sharp deep-set eyes looked me up and down, inch by inch.

“I need to be at school today.”

I didn’t want to mention Kazue and her discrimination protest, so I stopped there. Mitsuru’s mother seemed to lose interest in my needing to mourn.

“Wait a minute, are you half?”

“Mom! What difference does that make?” Mitsuru interrupted and I began to hear her nervously tap her teeth with her nail. “Her mother has just died. Stop asking so many questions!”

But Mitsuru’s mother was not to be silenced.

“You live with your grandfather, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And is your grandfather Japanese?”

“Yes.”

“And your mother’s Japanese. So what’s the other half?”

Why was she so curious? But I was enjoying her questions. They were questions everyone always wanted to ask but never did.

“Swiss.”

“My, my, what a pretty pair!”

Her mother said this with a smile, but I could tell she didn’t mean it. Mitsuru whispered in my ear, “I’m really sorry my mother’s so rude. It’s her way of trying to be nice.”

“I’m not being nice.” Mitsuru’s mother turned back to look at us again. “You seem like a tough kid. Mitsuru’s such a bookworm. It’s ridiculous. I want to go to Tokyo University Medical School, she says; she’s so stubborn. She doesn’t want to lose to anyone. And she certainly doesn’t want to be anyone’s fool. That’s all she ever worries about. And so she said she wouldn’t live out here anymore and she went and rented her own place. In middle school she had to put up with some hateful bullying, so she’s learned to arm herself. But I really wish I’d let her drop out of this god-awful school way back when.”

“Why’d they bully you?” I asked Mitsuru nonchalantly.

Mitsuru’s mother answered before Mitsuru had a chance. “Because her mother runs a bar, that’s why!”

She pulled up right in front of the school gate, going out of her way to attract the curious stares of the other students on their way in. She was hell-bent on nettling Mitsuru. When I thanked her for the ride, she said to me, “Be sure to tell your grandpa to come by the bar next time he’s out. I’ll give him a good deal. It’s the Blue River, right in front of the station.”

I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected the bar was some kind of cabaret chain.

“Are there any bonsai there?”

“Why?”

“Grandpa prefers bonsai to women, that’s why.”

Mitsuru’s mother didn’t know quite what to make of my joke and craned her neck around to say something to me, but whatever it was I didn’t hear, because by then Mitsuru had already slammed the door shut. She held her umbrella over me while I unfolded my own.

“My mother’s a real piece of work, huh? But she just plays at being bad. I can’t stand it. Someone who goes out of their way to say hateful things like that is really a coward, don’t you think?”

Mitsuru spoke in cool, measured tones. I nodded, letting her know I understood completely. She did not measure up to Mitsuru’s ideal. It was the same for me. Children do not get to choose their mothers.

“Are you okay?” Mitsuru asked, with a worried look.

“I’m okay. I feel like my mother and I already parted long ago.”

“I know what you mean. I feel I said good-bye to my mother long ago too. Now I’m just using her, you know, for rides and such.”

“I know.”

“You’re a strange girl.” Mitsuru glanced up at me when she said this, but then she caught sight of one of her friends waving at her. “I’ve gotta go.”

“Wait a minute.” I clutched at her blouse. She turned to look back at me. “When you were bullied, your mother said you armed yourself. How?”

“Well”—Mitsuru signaled to her friend to go on ahead so she could talk to me—“I let them use my notes.”

“But then you’re just letting them use you, aren’t you? How can you be so nice to the kids who picked on you?”

Mitsuru tapped her big front teeth with her finger. “I’m only telling this to you, okay? The notes I lend them are not my real notes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have two sets. My real notes are much more thorough and detailed than the set I let them see. That set has a few of the important points, so they won’t notice. But the notes are faked.”

Mitsuru was whispering, as if she were discussing something embarrassing. And yet the tone of her voice was so buoyant she could hardly conceal her glee.

“Their audacity really disgusts me. Since it’s their habit to intimidate others, they think nothing of borrowing someone’s notes. The only way to defend yourself against their brazenness is to be self-assertive and strike a deal. Because I let them copy my notes, they stopped bullying me; that’s the trade we worked out. Those girls are quick to catch on. They figured out right away that I was more than just some weak kid they could push around. I could be useful to them, so they transferred their aggression to another student.” Mitsuru smiled faintly and shrugged her shoulders. “You don’t know what the bullying was like in junior high. It was awful. For a full year not a single soul said one word to me. The only ones who talked to me were the teachers and the women who worked in the school store. That’s all. Even the other kids who had entered that year bullied me. They thought bullying an outsider might make them an insider.”

The first bell sounded. Homeroom was going to start any minute. We hurried off to the classroom. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how someone as cute as Mitsuru could be bullied.

“I just don’t understand why they targeted you.”

“Because my mother came to observe classes during the orientation period. This is the way she introduced herself in front of the entire Parent-Student Association: ‘I’m just so thrilled that my daughter is finally a Q School student. She’s had her sights set on this school for a long long time. I had hoped she’d get in from elementary school, but when that didn’t work out I dreamed of her getting into the junior high school. I saw that she studied hard, and it paid off. Now I hope you’ll all get along well with my little girl and become really good friends!’

“It was just her typical kind of greeting. But from the very next day I was the target. That morning there was a drawing of my mother on the blackboard. She was dressed in a bright red suit with a big diamond ring and alongside the drawing were the words Finally, a Q student! But what it meant was, whether I had entered at elementary school or junior high, I would never be one of them.”

“I understand perfectly.”

“What do you think you understand?”

“About your mother.”

I wanted to add that I knew she was ashamed of her own mother. But Mitsuru frowned. “I’m sorry…. I mean, about your mother. With her dying today and all.”

“No, it’s okay. You know, we were going to have to be parted sooner or later.”

“Cool. You are just so cool.”

Mitsuru laughed happily. We both understood that something had passed between us at that moment which only the two of us could appreciate. From that day on I cherished a delicate love for Mitsuru.

I entered the classroom and immediately searched for Kazue. She was glaring at the blackboard, her face pale and strained with tension. When she saw me, she stood up and walked over to my desk with that jerky gait of hers.

“Hey, I’m planning to bring up that topic this morning.”

“Yeah? Good luck.”

“And you’ll say something too, right?”

Kazue peered into my face. Her tiny eyes hemmed by black lashes pored over me. As I returned her gaze, I felt my hatred for her multiply. What a complete idiot she was. The more she screwed things up for herself here, the more I could imagine a different life for me and Mitsuru. You say my attitude is offensive? That was the way things worked in my world.

“Sure. I’ll back you up.” I said it, but I didn’t mean it.

Kazue looked relieved. Her eyes sparkled. “That’s great! What’ll you say?”

“How about if I just confirm that whatever you say is true?”

“Okay. If I start, then you’ll raise your hand, right?” Kazue gazed forlornly around the room as she spoke. The outsiders were all sitting smartly in their seats waiting for the instructor to arrive; the insiders were clustered in the back of the room whispering away. “Well, here goes.”

Kazue turned toward her seat, looking confident. Then the classroom door opened and our homeroom teacher breezed in. She was the instructor in charge of teaching the classics, and we all called her “Hana-chan.” She was a single woman, close to forty, I’d say. She always wore a nicely tailored suit of either navy or gray and a blouse with a white collar. Invariably, a slender string of pearls hung around her neck. She carried a dark-green leather notebook, and her cheeks were pale white without the slightest hint of makeup. She had entered the Q School system from the elementary level and had continued on through university, and she was proud of her heritage.

Kazue, looking flustered, rushed to her seat. I didn’t take my eyes off her.

“Good morning, girls!” Hana-chan greeted the class with her rapid-fire, slightly nasal voice. She gazed languidly out the window. The rain was still pouring down.

“They say it’ll clear up by evening. But I wonder if it really will….”

Kazue drew in a deep breath and stood up. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. Hana-chan looked over at her in surprise. I stared at Kazue’s back, spurring her on with telepathic force. Do it! Say it! Finally, in a voice thick with phlegm, she started. “Um, there’s something I wanted to bring up for discussion. It’s about clubs.”

Kazue glanced at me nervously, but I acted like I didn’t know what she wanted from me and rested my chin in my hand. Just then, the girls in the cheerleading squad rushed up to the front of the room. Kazue stared at them in disbelief. The girls lined up and, standing straight and tall. began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In no time at all everyone else chimed in. The girls leading the singing were almost all insiders, most of them having started together in elementary school. Hana-chan crumbled into gales of laughter.

“How’d you know it was my birthday?”

The cheerleaders began waving their pompoms and pulling party crackers, followed by clapping and cheers. At the sound of the crackers, Kazue sank back into her seat. A cute student with her hair curled up in a flip pulled a bouquet of roses out from behind her back and thrust them into Hana-chan’s hands.

“Oh, I’m so thrilled!”

“We all wanted to drink a toast to you, since you’re celebrating your fortieth birthday!”

When had they made the preparations? I wondered. There they were, pulling soda cans out of a paper bag and handing one to each student. “Everybody, open your cans and let’s drink to Sensei! Happy birthday!”

Some students were confused and wondered if it was really okay to drink in the classroom. But no one wanted to be a party pooper, so they all acted like they were having fun. I started sipping the soda, which fizzed on my tongue and made my teeth thick with sugar. Kazue grimaced with humiliation.

“Sensei, say something!” Carried away with themselves, the students urged and cajoled.

“Well, I’m just stunned!” Hana-chan hugged the bouquet of roses to her chest. “But all of you, thank you so much! Today I am forty! I’m sure I must look like an incredibly old lady to you. I also studied at this school, you know. My homeroom teacher—when I was in my first year of high school—was exactly the same age that I am today. I thought she was ancient, so I assume it’s the same for you. How distressing.”

“You don’t look old!” one of the students shouted, and the class erupted in laughter.

“Well, thank you! It’s really a privilege to have you as a class! Independence, self-reliance, and self-respect is a motto that will serve you well in the future. You are all blessed. But precisely because you are so blessed we can bring you up to be self-reliant and proud. So please, study hard and keep growing!”

What an unbelievably pathetic speech. But it was greeted by applause and whistles, so loud that the teacher from the classroom next door poked her head in to see what was going on. But I knew that no one was really moved. Hana-chan was just being played.

When I looked over at Mitsuru, she had her hands clasped in front of her breast and was looking at Hana-chan, her face wreathed in smiles. Sensing my gaze, she turned back to look in my direction and wrinkled her nose at me. I felt happy, as if Mitsuru and I were partners in crime. All Kazue could do was look on, her hopes for vindication cruelly dashed by the cheerleaders.

When school ended that day I collected my things and headed outside. The sky was blue as far as the eye could see, as if the morning storm had never happened. I suddenly remembered that Yuriko would be returning to Japan, and I headed toward the station in a gloomy mood.

“Wait up!”

I turned around and saw Kazue thumping noisily after me. She was wearing bulky rubber navy-blue boots, and the students behind were poking one another with their elbows and laughing at her.

“Hey, what happened today really ticked me off. You too, huh?”

It would be more accurate to say I was disappointed, but I nodded without saying anything. Kazue thumped me on the shoulder. “So do you have to hurry home?”

“Not really.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, it’s my birthday today too.”

Kazue had brought her mouth close to my ear. I could smell the dank sweetness of her perspiration.

“Happy birthday.”

“Won’t you come to my house?”

“Why?”

“My mother told me I could bring some of my school friends home with me today.”

I was curious to meet her mother. On the day I learned of my own mother’s death I met Mitsuru’s mother, and now I had a chance to meet Kazue’s.

“Please come! Just for a bit. I can’t tell her no one’s coming.” A look of pain spread over Kazue’s face, as if she was recalling what had happened in homeroom. Based on the little bit Kazue had managed to say before being interrupted, it was now common knowledge around school that she had tried to bring up the issue of the club discrimination. Here she was on the brink of becoming the next Mitsuru, the next target of torture, and she had no idea about Mitsuru’s bullying experiences. No sooner had this thought crossed my mind than I heard Kazue mention Mitsuru by name.

“You’re good friends with that girl named Mitsuru, aren’t you? Do you think you could ask her to come too?”

I was pretty sure Mitsuru planned to spend the afternoon studying. She’d left as soon as she could.

“No, she’s already gone,” I replied curtly.

“The really smart students are always busy, aren’t they,” Kazue said, her voice full of disappointment.

“Well, get over it. She doesn’t like you anyway.”

My lie silenced Kazue. “You don’t have to come either,” she said, looking at the ground.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll come.”