Nayotake stood behind her mother, one hand resting on the doorframe.
She looked at Tsushima Kagami, her lips moving as if she wanted to say something.
But in the end she only softly echoed her mother's words: "Take care on your way."
Tsushima Kagami nodded at her, then turned and walked off into the night.
As he left the alley, he glanced back.
The figures of mother and daughter were still standing at the door.
Seeing him turn, Mrs. Shimizu waved once more.
He waved back, then turned around and continued toward the station.
When he got back to Shinjuku Station, Tsushima Kagami went to the convenience store where Rei worked part-time and picked her up just as her shift ended.
Together they went to the ramen shop where Nayotake worked—the one they often visited—and had a bowl of ramen each for dinner.
Only then did they head back to the apartment together.
Tsushima Kagami took off his coat and hung it on the rack, switched on the heater, and walked straight over to the table that doubled as both dining table and writing desk, sitting down.
Yukino immediately leapt up, standing on Tsushima Kagami's chin and nuzzling him affectionately.
He pulled that form out of his pocket and read it over once more.
Black ink on white paper, filled with the years of hardship and struggle of the Shimizu family.
He set it aside, leaned back against the chair, and stared blankly at the ceiling for a while.
For some reason, he thought of Dazai Osamu's Villon's Wife.
He had read it long ago, back when he was still just a university student with a passing interest in Japanese literature.
The husband in the story was a poet named Ōtani.
A drunkard and a thief, carousing with women outside the home, ignoring his sick child, treating the family like a shackle.
Meanwhile the wife faced the creditors alone, took a job at a tavern to pay off her husband's debts, and gradually found her own sense of worth.
What Dazai Osamu wrote about was postwar Japan.
It mirrored the exhaustion of postwar Japanese society and the weakness of its men.
While the women, by contrast, were the resilient, enduring ones—the ones holding the family together.
Now half a century had already passed.
In this present era, the status of Japanese women was of course far better than it had been after the war.
At the very least, men and women were equal under the law.
Tsushima Kagami recalled some idle chatter he'd overheard in the Shinchōsha editorial department back when he'd first crossed over into this world.
Once, an editor who'd had a few drinks raised his voice and declared:
"Women, huh? Once they marry, they should go home and raise the kids. What are they doing coming out to work?"
A few people nearby chimed in with laughter, and no one felt there was anything wrong with the remark.
He also thought of a trope he'd often seen in anime and manga.
When a girl fills out a career survey, in the column for "future dream" she writes: bride.
Back when he'd watched anime in his home country, he'd thought of this as a kind of endearing anime trait.
The sort of naive, adorable "love-obsessed" character that creators deliberately crafted.
But as he gradually came to understand this country, he realized it wasn't an exaggeration—it was reality.
This society's expectations of women began shaping them from the very moment they were born.
As children playing house, girls were taught to be the mother.
In school they had to learn tea ceremony, flower arranging, and home economics, because they'd need them once they married.
After high school they either went to a junior college for a token diploma, or went straight into the workforce.
And the work itself was mostly clerical or sales positions—the kind deemed "suitable for women."
Once married, they quit to become full-time housewives, supporting their husbands, raising the children, and keeping house.
It wasn't that they truly liked it this way.
It was that this society hadn't left them much room for choice.
And if you didn't do this?
If you married but still wanted to keep working?
If you had a child but still wanted to return to the workplace?
Then you could just wait to be gossiped about.
"That woman is really disgraceful."
"Her husband loses so much face too."
These whispers wouldn't be said to your face.
But they would seep into every corner of your life like a rising tide.
The neighbors would look at you sideways, the parents of your child's classmates would keep a respectful distance, and your husband, at his company, would be pointed at behind his back by his colleagues.
"That guy's wife is still going out to work, if you can believe it. Looks like he can't provide for his family."
This country's "reading the air" culture was a kind of invisible violence.
It didn't need to hit you or curse you; it only needed everyone to tacitly exclude you.
To tell you, through silence and estrangement:
You don't fit in. You aren't normal. You aren't worthy.
A frog boiled slowly in warm water, until you suffocated.
Later the economic bubble burst, and Japan entered its "lost decade, lost two decades, lost three decades."
The economy stagnated for the long term and even regressed, and a husband's salary alone could no longer support the whole family.
Only then did society begin encouraging women to go out and work.
But even so.
When married women went out looking for jobs, most of what they could find were part-time, dispatch, or temp positions—non-regular employment.
No room for promotion, no social security, wages only half those of full-time employees, or even less.
They were called "pāto shufu"—part-time housewives.
A term that sounded gentle and harmless, yet behind it lay the fact of being nailed firmly to the bottom of society.
Why couldn't they go back to a company as full-time employees?
It was ironic to say.
A large part of the reason actually stemmed from the liberalist grandstanding of years past.
What followed was an even more catastrophic blow to women's social status—and a backlash against it.
For instance, many large corporations became unwilling to hire female staff at all.
Since female employees would take maternity leave, take childcare leave, file discrimination complaints at the drop of a hat, and make this demand and that—
then they simply wouldn't hire them.
After all, the mainstream view in this society was that a woman's proper place was the home to begin with.
No one would say anything about them not hiring women.
Big companies cut their female hiring quotas one after another, and the proportion of women in leadership—already low to begin with—now plunged to rock bottom.
Later the government could no longer stand it and enacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Law for Men and Women.
It required companies to guarantee that a certain percentage of their employees were women.
And so, the [Tea-Service Section] was born.
No matter what qualifications a female employee held, just toss her into the tea-service section.
Pouring tea, organizing files, making copies, receiving guests.
Spend ten years in the tea-service section, and you'd still be in the tea-service section.
Prettily dressed up as "women are suited to meticulous work."
When in fact it was simply this:
We'll obey the law, while also making sure women don't get in the way.
Tsushima Kagami felt they had it coming, too.
Though there were surely innocents caught up in it as well.
But Tsushima Kagami still felt it was simpler to condemn them all with one broad stroke.
Before crossing over, he had always held to the belief that there were no innocent souls beneath the atomic bomb.
He loved anime, loved Japan's animation, manga, and games.
But that didn't stop him from disliking this country.
Just as many of these Japanese folk also loved his homeland's culture—loved Han-dynasty poetry, loved calligraphy, loved Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Practically everyone in Japan's upper echelons was even a scholar well-versed in Chinese studies.
Yet that likewise didn't stop them from hating his homeland, finding new ways to sicken you day after day.
Back then he had stood in the position of a bystander, able to remain outside it all.
Watching all the absurdity and oppression of this country, looking on coldly, with the smug pleasure of gloating over others' misfortune.
But what about now?
He thought of Mrs. Shimizu and Nayotake.
He thought of Mrs. Ijichi and Seika.
These people—they weren't the ones who had it coming.
They were ordinary people crushed to the bottom by this society's structures, rules, culture, and prejudices.
They had done nothing wrong; they had merely been born in this country, born as women of this country, and so they had no choice but to face all this.
He used to be able to say, quite bluntly, "All Japanese people deserve to die."
But now, he too was immersed within it.
And the people he'd met around him were all kind and lovely.
There were concrete, specific people at his side now.
There were kind people.
There were people who treated him sincerely and needed his help.
The him of now could no longer bluntly say things like "all these Japanese folk deserve to die" the way he once had.
Though he wasn't foolish enough to think that everyone in this parallel world might just be kindhearted.
The truly deserving-to-die sort.
Could never become his friends.
There would be no such people in his social circle.
He and they would never have any point of intersection.
This was probably what was meant by birds of a feather flocking together—people gathering with their own kind.
When you'd built connections with certain people, when you'd come to accept them.
When their pain became real and tangible, rather than just a few lines of ink in a news report.
You could no longer maintain that detached coldness.
People really were creatures of double standards after all.
Defending your friends, finding excuses for those close to you, unconsciously tipping the scales in their favor when passing judgment on right and wrong.
This wasn't anything noble.
But this was precisely what made a person human.
What Tsushima Kagami could do was try, as much as possible, to influence some of the people around him.
To make their stances lean as much as possible toward his own.
To make the double standards in his heart, in defense of his friends, seem a little more defensible.
He would surely return to his homeland someday.
If the company grew large enough, he'd definitely open a branch over there too.
Even the charitable organization that was, for now, only in an embryonic stage—he intended, once it grew large enough, to establish it back home as well.
He hoped the friends around him would all come to love that place from the bottom of their hearts.
Tsushima Kagami snapped back to himself, frowning.
Indeed, this mono no aware literature couldn't be written too much—even copying it wholesale still affected his mood somewhat.
It had left even him feeling sentimental and melancholic.
Once he was famous enough, he'd have to write more of those Japanese versions of Reader and Yilin—those saccharine chicken-soup-for-the-soul pieces—so everyone could gorge themselves happily.
And let himself have some fun too.
"What's wrong?"
"You've got such a solemn look on your face."
Yukinoshita Shizuku had just finished running the hot bath in the bathroom.
As she walked back into the living room, she caught sight of Tsushima Kagami's deeply furrowed brow.
She stepped up and gently smoothed out Tsushima Kagami's furrowed brow with her fingers, bit by bit.
Only then did she ask with a smile.
Tsushima Kagami shook his head and said with a faint smile.
"I think I really am suited to being a master."
"Master Yukinoshita?"
"Or should I call you Master Tsushima now?"
Yukinoshita Shizuku recalled that scene back at the ramen shop, when Tsushima Kagami had said he would become Master Yukinoshita.
The corners of her mouth couldn't help but curl up even higher.
"Either one is fine."
Tsushima Kagami said.
"So why do you think you're suited to being a master?"
Yukinoshita Shizuku asked once again at this point.
Tsushima Kagami said with a slow, leisurely smile.
"Because I'm kindhearted."
"I can't bear to see the poor suffer."
After hearing this, Yukinoshita Shizuku no longer took it as one of Tsushima Kagami's jokes.
She put away her smile and came around behind Tsushima Kagami.
She reached out and wrapped her arms around his neck.
From behind, she pressed her face against his cheek.
And said softly.
"You've already done better than the vast majority of people."
"There's no need to be so hard on yourself."
Tsushima Kagami felt the warmth and gentle fragrance radiating from Yukinoshita Shizuku's cheek.
Smiling, he nuzzled Yukinoshita Shizuku's face with his own cheek as well.
"Shizuku, help me get some paper and a pen ready."
"Alright."
Smiling, Yukinoshita Shizuku left Tsushima Kagami's cheek and loosened the arms wrapped around his neck.
She walked over to the storage box on the table off to the side and took out manuscript paper and a fountain pen.
She laid them out neatly on the desk for him.
Tsushima Kagami, at this moment, closed his eyes and sank into deep thought.
Meanwhile Yukinoshita Rei dragged over a stool and sat quietly to one side, resting her chin in her hands as she watched Tsushima Kagami lost in thought.
Yukino, for her part, lay curiously on the table, wagging her tail and eyeing this man and this woman with curiosity.
After a long while, Tsushima Kagami opened his eyes, picked up the fountain pen, and began to write on the manuscript paper.
____
Walnut's Note: I really liked this chapter, it brings much more human reflections on the China/Japan conflict in our current present. The character's development on this front is clear: before, as a distant observer, it was easy to have thoughts like "they're all enemies," but now, forced to become one of them, interacting with many people and realizing that not all of them are the monster he'd built up in his mind, he can no longer hold onto that mindset. The resentment is still there, wounds from the past don't fade easily, especially when the history books make a point of reminding him of it, but now he understands that this resentment can't be directed at everyone. No one chooses where they're born. Unfortunately, I doubt this conflict will ever be resolved in our own world, but regardless, a great chapter.
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