by Robert Paul Weston

There have always been invisible people in the world, but I didn’t see one until I was twelve. It was the winter my mother said she couldn’t tolerate my father’s dreaminess, that had no choice but to live with her parents in the foothills of Mount Haku. I first laid eyes on Mr. Arai on a Saturday morning that same December.

Huge, windless snowflakes had filled the air for days. Each autumn, it was Mr. Morioka’s job to secure the zelkova trees with ropes and bamboo poles to protect them from collapsing under the weight of snow. I didn’t know it at the time, but those duties had already passed to Mr. Arai.

The snow played havoc with our building’s antennae. I was under the kotatsu watching cartoons when the picture faded. Father was outside, smoking on the balcony. It was mother who had pushed him out there with his cigarettes, but even in her absence, even in December, he couldn’t get over the habit of blowing his smoke over the parking lot.

As with all the apartments in our building, our balcony was small. My father filled it. He was the sort of man who had always been plump, but to me he was enormous. I heard that in his youth, my grandparents started him on a diet of chanko stew, in the faint hope he might some day make a decent yokuzuna. Unfortunately, their dedication to the cause never extended beyond the stewpot. My father developed an appetite for red meat and fatty fish that chased him to his grave. The prevailing memory I have of him is one of sedentariness, as if he never moved, but rather phased through a series of vanishings and reconstitutions. His bed. The sofa. The floor. The balcony…

“Dad? The TV’s not working.”

He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette down at the drifts of snow. “There’s why.”

“Can you go on the roof and clear it off?”

“It’ll melt.”

“But I was watching something.”

“You’ll have to ask the new maintenance man.”

“A new one? Where’s Mr. Morioka?”

“Dead.” My father squinted at me, taking a thoughtful drag. “Stomach cancer. So they got a new guy. Don’t expect much, though. I heard he’s a cripple. Something like that.”

Mr. Arai had taken the same room as Mr. Morioka, the one at the far end of the ground floor corridor. At the centre of the hall, a green-tinted mirror, set in a baroque European frame, hung crookedly on the wall. Each time I passed it, I paused to peer at the reflected images. The parking lot. The street beyond. The crumbling shrine next door (whose monk lived far outside the city and only came on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and special occasions). Everything in the mirror was washed a watery green. I don’t know where I got the idea, but I came to believe that green world was more real than the one I lived in.

I lingered in front of the mirror, nervous about speaking to the stranger who had taken over from Mr. Morioka. I stood at his door for ages before I knocked.

“Just a moment.”

I heard the screeches of furniture scraping the prefab floor. The door opened. I saw Mr. Arai like heat off a highway. Behind him were piles of unpacked boxes, but I focused on the man’s quavering shape.

“You can see me,” he said. “That’s rare. What do you want?”

He invited me up to the roof with him, something neither my father nor Mr. Morioka had ever permitted. Outside, his indistinct shape was interrupted by falling snow. Set against the paleness of the roof and the winter sky, I could only see the shovel Mr. Arai used to chip away the ice. Despite its heaviness, it seemed to float, no weightier than the flecks of white tumbling around it. When I returned to our apartment, the television worked perfectly.

Sometimes, my mother showed up out of the blue. She was a tiny woman, her stature further diminished by the fact that she never wore high-heeled shoes. When she had been a girl, her lower legs at been damaged in a car accident. It left her unable to stand on her toes without discomfort.

She told me once that she always dreamed of going dancing in stilettos, but it was impossible. She couldn’t wear anything but flats for more than a few minutes. Instead, she wore short skirts and knee-high boots. I can see now the former was meant to lengthen the appearance of her legs, while the latter hid the scars that dimpled her calves.

After their separation, my father refused to buzz my mother into the building. She would wait for me on the stone bench at the edge of the parking lot, built against the wall that separated the property from the shrine next door. She often came with gifts, usually a small trinket and something to eat: delicately wrapped boxes of mochi, oranges or chocolate.

“Who’s that?” she asked me one morning, pointing to Mr. Arai, who had come out to smoke under the zelkova that grew closest to the building. In the dappled shade of its branches, he was barely there.

“You can see him?”

“We have good eyes in this family.”

It surprised me to hear this. Once, I had stood with her in front of the framed green mirror. When I asked if she saw the same overpowering reality that I did, she said no. She pointed out that the frame was sagging, so perhaps the glass was warped. It might explain the illusion.

Mother shaded her eyes to make out Mr. Arai. “Who is he?”

I explained Mr. Morioka had died and had been replaced.

“He looks strong. Perhaps he’ll build you a treehouse.”

When I turned thirteen, a new family moved into the  apartment above our own. They had a daughter named Eri, who was a year older than me. She had eyes that didn’t quite match, the left one narrower than the right, drooping slightly. It leant her face an air of suspicion that I admired.

One day, she caught me pacing in front of the mirror. When I tried to explain myself—that the reflected world was the more authentic of the two—to my surprise, Eri didn’t need convincing.

“Some mirrors are like that,” she said. “My aunt has one like this in her bathroom, only it’s smaller.”

Eri had an uncle in Gifu who taught evening judo classes. He believed it was important for a young woman to learn to defend herself, but he refused to teach Eri any of the groundwork and grappling because of what he feared “it would do to her ears.”

We believed him. I met the uncle only once, but I’ll never forget how his ears were as shiny as polished lacquerware and so swollen his earholes had vanished. I’ve seen the same thing many times since, but I’ll never forget the ears of Eri’s uncle. His were the worst.

Instead of the throws and ground work that would mash her ears into cauliflower, the uncle suggested Eri ought to master pressure points. Her grip having no effect on her uncle’s implacable joints, Eri needed someone on whom she could practice. That was me, and this was how we started our holding game.

There was a disused storage shed on the grounds of the shrine next door. It was boarded over and locked, but the wood was rotting, with gaps large enough for us to enter. We sat in the dark and Eri dug her fingers into the my palm, my elbows, the flesh above above my knees.

It became a competition, squeezing and twisting each other’s limbs until one of us cried out, always in a whisper. I don’t know why we only played in a musty shed. We must have known it would have looked strange to an uninformed observer, especially my father or any of Eri’s brothers and sisters.

In the end, it was Mr. Arai who discovered us. Eri was crushing the muscle below my collar bone so ferociously my whole arm went limp, but I didn’t want to cry out. I focused my attention on a narrow slat of blue sky, gleaming through the cracked wood. It wavered like ripples on a pond. I assumed that was because my eyes were beginning to water with pain, but no. It was him.

“You two better not come out,” Mr. Arai warned us through the gap. “Your mother’s come for a visit,” he said to me. “I’ll tell her you’re not here, if you like.”

He strode quickly across the parking lot to the stone bench. His speed surprised me. I was accustomed to Mr. Arai moving with gentle precision. It was a self-imposed limitation, a strategy to avoid sneaking up on people. I appreciated the swiftness with which he approached my mother. He was clearly on our side, eager to keep us concealed.

My father had always promised my mother that one day he would quit his job at the post office and the two of them would open a tea house near the park. The fact that it was never going to happen lay at the heart of my father’s “dreaminess.” Watching my mother from the darkness, I wondered for the first time if she couldn’t match my father in terms of aimless abstraction.

Eri released me from her grip. “You and your mother,” she said. “You can see Mr. Arai, can’t you?”

“It runs in the family.”

“Describe him for me.”

I shook my head. “I only see an impression, but it’s a normal enough shape.”

Our games ended when Eri started high school. Over winter break, my father got her a temporary job sorting the glut of nengajo greeting cards. I was jealous. Why Eri over me? My father’s explanation was succinct: Nepotism is immoral. Meanwhile, I knew was speaking from to Eri that the work bored her.

“There have so many rules,” she told me. “All these messages, right there in front of you, but you can’t read a single one.”

I didn’t see why this was a bother. “I thought all the messages were the same.”

“I thought so, too. All computer templates, right? But there was one yesterday. It fell out of the stack and when I picked it up, something was scribbled in pencil. It said: ‘I’m sending this, but I no longer believe you exist.’ Weird, huh?”

“Where was it going?”

“Somewhere in Hokkaido, I think. I wanted to keep it. I figured it wouldn’t matter since the person didn’t exist, but it was impossible. The manager doesn’t trust us because we’re young and temporary. He watches us like a hawk.”

“Sounds rough,” I told her, without much conviction.

“How’s your mother?”

This was a surprising swerve in the conversation. “She’s fine. Why?”

“Last night she seemed upset.”

“Last night?”

Eri looked at me strangely. “I saw her down here. I thought she had come to see you.”

I had been home all evening, but no one had buzzed the entrance phone. Then again, it was easy to imagine my father seeing her first, starting an argument, then sending her away. Eri put her hand on my arm. Through the thickness of my coat I hardly felt it, but I remember it was the first time she had touched me since the holding game had ended.

“I’m sure your mom’s fine,” Eri told me. “She looked like she had gained weight. It’s a sign of happiness.”

It was the last thing she said to me. It’s a sign of happiness. Immediately after the New Years rush, without any warning, Eri’s whole family moved to Nagoya. I didn’t find out until my father told me and they had already been gone for a week. Eri’s father worked as an accountant with one of the prefectural ministries. It was stable but nondescript work, always prone to sudden shakeups.

One month after she moved away, my mother did the same. Just as with Eri, our final meeting had a hidden finality that I didn’t immediately perceive.

She wasn’t waiting for me in the usual place, out on the stone bench. Instead, she was two blocks away, on the corner of the last rice field in our neighbourhood. Once, Kanazawa was comprised almost entirely of gold mines and farmland, but now it looked like anywhere else, like an ordinary city. Eri was right. My mother’s face was plumper than when I had seen her last. A sign of happiness.

“Your father’s being difficult,” she said, looking over the field’s brilliant green. “He was glaring at me from the balcony and I couldn’t stand it.”

There was nothing I could say to this. I stood there with the airy detachment of any child of separated parents.

“I heard your friend moved away. You must be upset.”

I was, and it made me feel worse that my mother, whom I only saw at random intervals, possessed information that should have been mine. It must have been my father who told her, but I couldn’t think of when. Or why.

“I brought you something,” she said. To my surprise, she presented me with a hakone zaiku box, one featuring a typical repeating pattern. The lid glided smoothly away to reveal an even more intricately patterned interior.

“It’s very special,” she told me. “You should only use it to hide true treasures.”

The interior’s dark, polished wood cast a foggy reflection of my face, tattooed with the hypnotic crisscrosses of the artist’s pattern.

“I’m going away for a while,” my mother told me, “but I’ll see you again soon.”

It wasn’t true. I wouldn’t see her again for many years. How could I know this would be the last time we spoke.

After high school, I went to Meijo University in Nagoya where I studied pharmaceutical technology. I had other choices and, even though it wasn’t a conscious decision, I know I chose Meijo because I believed I would find Eri there.

Pharmaceutical technology was a six-year degree. I spent much of my leisure time trying to track her down. There was no trace of her. I began to wonder if her family had truly moved here. It was possible my father had misheard. Perhaps they had moved to Nagano, Niigata, Neyagawa. There was no way of knowing.

At university, I dated a number of women. There were even a few I took home with me for visits to Kanazawa. They all seemed to say the very same thing: I’ve always meant to visit your city, I just never got around to it. When I took them into our building, I always stopped in front of the mirror on the ground floor of our building. None of the girls saw what I did, the impossible reflection of a heightened reality.

It was in my final year at Meijo that everyone began to die. My father went first, by way of a heart attack, which we all took to be inevitable. It surprised me that my mother refused to attend. Mr. Arai, however, was there, shimmering at the back of a tiny crowd of strangers. There was an ex-girlfriend who hung herself with the belt of a bathrobe. There was the car crash that killed five of the guys from my dormitory.

Mr. Arai drowned on a solitary fishing trip to Noto. It took months for anyone to find him, not merely because of his condition. They had long since canceled the train service and buses were limited, so foot traffic in the hinterlands was rare. His identification relied heavily on circumstantial conjecture. I could have gone back west to help, to see if I could make out what was left of him, but I was much too busy with exams.

Finally, after I had graduated, moved to Tokyo, and started doing chemistry research for Otsuka’s offices in Saitama, I received the letter about my mother. It came from my aunt in Seoul, who had married a Korean businessman. The letter said she was very ill and had returned home for treatment. Brain cancer. By the time I arrived, she was already lost to the coma that would kill her.

The only thing I brought to the hospital was the wooden hakone box. It was empty, having sat unused for years, tucked away on top of a succession of bookcases in my apartments in Nagoya and Tokyo. The exterior had acquired an encrustation of dust that obscured the wooden pattern and which I couldn’t wipe away. On the inside, however, the surfaces gleamed as flawlessly as ever. The same reflection I had seen years earlier looked back at me, just as hazy.

My mother was precisely as I expected. Grey, fragile, seemingly on the verge of cracking to pieces. Her head had been recently shaved. Soft white stubble grew everywhere save for a hideous red scar slithering across the crown of her skull. The nurse told me my mother hadn’t opened her eyes in more than a week, but that I ought to talk to her. There was always the possibility that, hearing a familiar voice, she could revive, if only for moment.

I told her about my research job and the loneliness of Tokyo. I held her hand, squeezing it tightly. The squeezing pulled me into the past. I told Mother about the old shed beside the shrine, about the game I played with Eri, how I often wondered what had happened to her, and whether or not she was even still alive.

When the air in the doorway began to shimmer in the shape of a woman, I said the only name in my head.

“Eri?”

“My name is Naomi.”

I saw her the same way I saw Mr. Arai, like ripples of heat.

“You know my mother?” I asked.

“She never talked about me, did she?”

When she said this, her voice crackled with the brittleness of youth, and I understood.

“She’s your mother, too.”

It explained the unannounced visits, the fitful gifts, the reason Father was always so angry with her. It explained why, that day in the dark, as I watched through the gap, Mr. Arai had strode so swiftly toward her. They weren’t strangers; they were quite the opposite, but I had never noticed. Suddenly, it struck me as appropriate that I had come to the hospital with nothing but an empty box.

The figure in the doorway came inside and stood beside me. She didn’t speak. We listened to the hum of the equipment and the chatter of voices from the corridor. I made a silent vow to learn everything about this young woman, Naomi. My half-sister.

I opened my bag and gave her the hakone box. I told her to fill it with treasures.

Rice Fields and Gold Mines