If left to her own devices, his mother would try to get her hands on anything that claimed to be effective against cancer; Kaoru had to keep a constant watch so it didn’t get out of control.
Hideyuki didn’t approve of his son spending so much energy on his part-time job. He felt that his son should concentrate on studying, and that splitting his time between that and working was essentially a waste. The idea that Kaoru was doing it on account of his own illness irritated him even more: Hideyuki insisted that he could pay for Kaoru’s school expenses, that they had enough money in savings. As far as talking big went, he was as healthy as ever; but the optimism in his words was Kaoru’s salvation.
In reality, Kaoru was the one who held the family’s finances in his hands, and he knew that they didn’t have much to spare. He had to keep his job. But of course he wasn’t about to complain to his father about their budgetary straits. There was nothing to be gained by letting his father know things were tight. So Kaoru lied to Hideyuki, telling him that he worked because he wanted more spending money.
When they were together, Kaoru wanted to set his father’s mind as much at ease as possible. It wouldn’t do to betray the fact that because his illness had decreased the family’s income, Kaoru and his mother were having to squeeze by. Luckily, as a medical student Kaoru had no trouble hanging out his shingle as a tutor, and in fact he made quite a bit of money that way. The hospital connected to Kaoru’s medical school had a lot of child patients whose parents didn’t want them to fall behind in their studies when they went back to school; tutors were always in demand.
One day early in his summer vacation, Kaoru visited the hospital to tutor a junior high schooler in math and English, and then had a light lunch in the cafeteria. His father was a patient in this very hospital. Kaoru had just heard that there was a possibility that the cancer had spread to his father’s lungs; his mood was black. His father had recently gone into his annual litany. This year, he said, we’re going to see those longevity zones in the North American desert. But the words had rung hollow. And then came—as if on cue—the indications that the cancer had spread.
Kaoru was sitting in the cafeteria, sighing over his father’s illness and his family’s future, when he saw Reiko Sugiura and her son Ryoji.
The cafeteria was on the third floor of the hospital, surrounding a courtyard on three sides; the walls facing the courtyard were of glass. There was a fountain in the courtyard, and sitting at a table in the cafeteria one was eye level with the top of its spray. The cafeteria was so carefully decorated, and its food so pleasant to the taste, that it felt more like a stylish outdoor café than part of a hospital. Gazing at the water from the fountain had a truly relaxing effect.
Kaoru’s eyes were drawn naturally toward the beautiful woman being shown to an empty table.
Her tanned body was sheathed in a summery beige dress, and her face was so nicely formed that it was eye-catching even without the aid of cosmetics. If it weren’t for the child at her side, she could have passed for ten years younger than what Kaoru guessed she had to be.
The woman and boy sat at the table the waiter indicated, which happened to be diagonally adjacent to Kaoru’s. Kaoru watched them seat themselves, and, after that too, he found his attention drawn to the woman, his eyes riveted to the legs stretching out from beneath her minidress.
He realized this was the same mother and child he’d seen at the hotel pool two weeks ago. One of his students’ grades had gone up so much that the kid’s parents had given Kaoru an all-summer free pass to that pool. On the first day he’d gone to swim there he’d encountered this pair, sitting poolside in deck chairs.
From the first moment he’d laid eyes on the woman in the green bathing suit, he was sure he’d seen her somewhere before, but when and where he couldn’t say. Kaoru was normally confident in his powers of recall, but poke about as he might in the recesses of his memory he couldn’t place the woman. The experience left him with an unpleasant aftertaste that wouldn’t go away. A woman as beautiful as this he wouldn’t expect to forget, and yet evidently he had. At the time, he’d tried to put her out of his mind, telling himself he was mistaken, but then something about her finally triggered memories of the star of a soap opera he’d watched as a child. He wondered if it was the same woman.
The boy made an odd impression, particularly his physique. The blue swim cap that he wore pushed back on his head, the goggles, the check-pattern shorts that Kaoru could tell at a glance weren’t for swimming in, his skinny bowed legs, and most of all his abnormally white skin. He resembled an “alien corpse” Kaoru had seen on some fake TV show a long time ago. Everything about the boy looked strangely off-kilter. The pair stuck in Kaoru’s memory: this woman he’d seen somewhere before and this weird-looking boy.
And now they were sitting at the next table over. Kaoru, sitting by the window so he could gaze down at the fountain, found he could catch their reflection faintly in the glass. He observed this instead of staring at them directly.
After a few moments, Kaoru figured out why his first impression of the boy had been of unbalance. It was his hair, or rather his lack of it. When Kaoru had first seen the boy poolside, his swim cap had been missing the bulge that would normally have told of a full head of hair.
Today, too, the boy was wearing a hat when he sat down at the table, but after a few moments he took it off, revealing his head to be perfectly devoid of hair.
Kaoru realized what that meant. The boy was here to be treated for cancer. He’d assumed mother and child were both here to visit a patient, but now it turned out that the mother was accompanying her son to chemotherapy. Hideyuki was undergoing chemotherapy, and his hair too had fallen out, but somehow seeing a child suffer that side effect was even more heart-rending. Kaoru thought about that day at the pool, that swim cap hugging the boy’s bare scalp directly—no wonder he’d left such a peculiar impression.
Kaoru rested his head on his hand and watched the beautiful thirty-something woman and her son, who was probably a fifth or sixth grader, eat their lunches without talking. Without being conscious of it, he was comparing them to his father, hospitalized here. His father was forty-nine, while this boy had to be eleven or twelve. Both were taking anti-cancer medication.
The mother in her airy beige dress looked too bright and cheerful for a hospital. Once in a while she raised her head and glanced out the window. She didn’t look like she was tasting what she ate—she was just eating to eat, looking at no one in particular with an expression that could have been a smile or the equivalent of a sigh.
She paused with her spoon in the air, then returned it to the plate, then started to bring it to her mouth again, and then suddenly shot a glance in Kaoru’s direction. At first her gaze was sharp, as if to ask, What are you looking at? But as her eyes met Kaoru’s her gaze softened. Kaoru found himself unable to look away.
It seemed she recognized him from the pool. She looked like she wanted to say something. Kaoru bowed his head slightly, and she answered with the same gesture.
And then her attention was taken up by her son, who chose that moment to toss aside his chopsticks and spoon and throw a tantrum. The sight of Kaoru fled her mind.
Even then Kaoru continued to watch the two. He was powerless to resist—it was as if his consciousness had been uprooted and physically carried to where they were.
Several days later, in the courtyard this time, Kaoru had the opportunity to speak to this mother and her child. By some lucky chance they ended up sitting side by side on the same bench, making it possible for a conversation to start naturally without either one making the first move.
The mother introduced herself as Reiko Sugiura and her son as Ryoji. Ryoji’s cancer, which had first appeared in his lungs, now looked like it had spread to his brain, and his days were filled with tests preparatory to radiation and chemotherapy.
Not only that, but it seemed that the agent that had turned his cells cancerous was none other than the recently isolated Metastatic Human Cancer