My Father No Longer Cuts My Bangs

My father quit his corporate job.

When I was born, my father decided to start his own business, saying, "I want to cherish my time with my family."

He got his license and became a barber.
He opened a small barbershop in town.

Ever since I was old enough to remember, mannequin heads for practice were rolling around everywhere, and I watched the red, blue, and white barber pole spin every day.

I didn't understand how the barber pole worked, so I came up with various theories every day. I wondered if it was twisting up from the ground, or if it was like a pencil sharpener grinding away, but I never found the answer.

When I looked it up after becoming an adult, it seems it uses an optical illusion. No matter how I look at it, it only looks like it's twisting upward, so I don't believe it.

I wasn't afraid of the mannequin heads.
More than that, I was afraid of the weird 'Hen na Ojisan' doll of Ken Shimura that my father won from a UFO catcher.

For some reason, the weird old man doll would hide on the shelf where the towels were kept. Sometimes my father would take it out and show it to me. I would cry my eyes out.
Now, I feel like I did something very disrespectful to the god of comedy.

In preschool, I would line up next to the barber pole to wait for the school bus. In elementary school, I would walk home with my backpack on, aiming for the barber pole.

Since Monday was a regular holiday, I would end up staring at the barber pole on Sundays too. For lunch, I would go to the bakery next door. I loved that moment when the smell of shampoo and steamed towels changed to the savory scent of bread.

I always bought a 'Giraffe' bread.
It was a long, thin bread with yellow custard cream and chocolate stripes. The Giraffe took on all the resentment I felt for not being taken anywhere even though it was Sunday.

The man from the bakery would also come to get his hair cut.
He would say, 'I'll bake plenty of Giraffes for you.' Every time I heard this cruel line as a child, I would imagine the bread and get hungry.


Mr. Oguma from the neighborhood would praise my drawings.
I would draw pictures in the waiting area or draw illustrations on the shop window with Posca markers. Seeing that, he would always give me his 500-yen change.

Thinking back now, there were times I would rush to the waiting area in a panic when it was time to pay. I hereby confess that it was a premeditated crime to get the change.

When I came home from elementary school, I would enter through the shop entrance, greet the customers, and drop my backpack in the back room.

But this day, things were different. The customer was a foreigner. Someone I had never seen before. His skin color was different. His scent was different. To my young self, he seemed like a scary presence.

He had his eyes closed while getting his beard shaved, so I snuck past behind him without making a sound. I understood how a herbivore feels trying to survive in the savanna. I didn't go to the back room, but hid in the car, waiting for the carnivore to leave.

His name was Gordon. Gordon became a regular customer. My father started learning English conversation on the radio. Once I knew I wouldn't be eaten, I stopped hiding even when Gordon was there.

I got an overseas version of Tetris and an overseas version of Tamagotchi from Gordon. We went to the supermarket together to shop. We even hit on a woman waiting in line at the register together. I felt hip-hop in that small rural supermarket. I think that was the moment I was most influenced by foreign culture in my life.

Of course, I also had my father cut my hair.
I would sit in the rotating black chair, feeling nervous about whether the weird old man doll would pop out when he took towels in and out.

When I asked him to 'make my bangs like Sailor Moon,' I ended up with bangs that looked like hijiki seaweed stuck to my forehead and I cried.

The hijiki became a trauma, and just when I didn't want him to cut my hair anymore, Hikaru Utada, my savior, appeared. I admired Hikaru Utada and kept growing my bangs out, but my school teacher said, 'You're a barber's daughter, what's with those bangs?' so I cut them off. They were cut straight across above my eyebrows and I cried.

If I was going to have straight-across bangs, I asked him to make them a bob like Kaori Mochida, but it goes without saying. I cried.

I didn't want my father to cut my hair anymore.
But I felt like it would be rude to go to another shop. So, when I was in high school, I pretended I cut it myself and had my friends cut it. I would stick my face out of a plastic bag in the schoolyard to have it cut. I thought my friends were better at it than my father, but I wasn't popular at all.

'I'll get my hair cut at a hair salon after I graduate from high school.'
I gathered my courage and told my father.
'Oh,' was all he said.
It was a reply that felt like it had been thrown at me.

And so, it was decided that he would cut it one last time.
When he asked, 'What do you want?', I just replied, 'Bob, perm, loose.' Even if I showed him a picture, it wouldn't turn out that way anyway, and I was doing my best just to have a minimal conversation.

The result didn't betray my expectations. Only the hair on the sides puffed up, looking like Inuyasha's sideburns. I would be called 'Inuyasha hair' until graduation. I wasn't popular. I cursed it.

I graduated from high school and was finally free from the barber pole.
My first time at a hair salon. My heart felt like it was being ground away by a pencil sharpener.

Unlike the door to the barbershop, I felt its weight. Like a box that shouldn't be opened, like if I opened this, I could never go back. What spread out before me were stylish goods and magazines I had never seen at the barbershop. And a stylish scent I had never smelled at the barbershop gently enveloped me.

Having experienced firsthand that 'please make it look like this' never actually happens, I just said, 'Please make it look stylish.' What was reflected in the mirror wasn't a bearded old man with drooping eyelids. It was a young woman who looked like a reader model who had jumped out of the vintage clothing magazine I was reading at the time.

The hairstylist repeatedly asked me polite questions about what I meant by 'stylish.' She told me things like what designs were popular now or what colors would look good on me. My father had never done anything like that for me.

The finish at the hair salon was a romantic, sparkling Estelle. Cuticles shining like the jewelry on a shopping channel.

The hairstylist smiled and said, 'Thank you for your patience,' as she spun the chair. It was the first time I had been thanked for getting my hair cut. For my father, cutting my hair was nothing more than a task. It was also the first time I didn't cry or curse after getting my hair cut.


Looking at my glossy hair, my feelings were refreshed. But deep down, there was also a sound like a sandstorm. A sense of guilt remained a little.

I was afraid of the moment I would return home and face my father.
I worried he might try to fix it or say something snide.

I heard him say, 'Did you get it cut?' But I just looked straight ahead and went up the stairs as I was.

Around this time, there was no end to the fights between my mother and father at home. My mother started complaining to me about my father every day, and my father also started raising his voice every time he saw me. The gears of our family were going increasingly out of sync, and a damp, sewer-like atmosphere flowed through the house.

I shut myself in my room. To drown out the loud voices that I could hear even with the door closed, I played hip-hop at full volume.

And then, my father left home.

I no longer had to hear his loud voice. The hip-hop that used to play in the room calmed down to something like My Little Lover.

Even so, my mother's complaints never stopped.
Because I hated listening to her complaints, I would spend my time aimlessly hanging out at video rental shops or reading magazines standing up at convenience stores, just trying to kill time. Every day, I made sure to return home only after my mother had gone to sleep.

I couldn't even tell my friends.
Talking about family always makes the atmosphere heavy. Lacking the happy aura to brush off that weight, I didn't have the courage to bring it up.

“My father is a fictional creature; he might exist, or he might not.”
I told myself that and decided to live in a fantasy world. That was the easiest way.

The irrationality we experience as children is often dismissed with the phrase, “You’ll understand when you’re an adult.”
As they said, there is much I understand now.

After his shop closed, my father would often look around at the neighborhood hair salons. There would still be customers there, and the lights would be shining brightly. My father would sigh as he glanced at them.

After returning home, he would line up bills on the tatami mat one by one, sighing even more deeply.

He wasn't a barber, nor was he a father; he was just a cornered human being.

Even so, having spent so long in a fantasy world, even as an adult, I still cannot understand. My father's existence.

To me, my father is “the person who turned my bangs into hijiki seaweed and ran away from home after shouting.”
No matter how much I dig up memories of the past, they just spin around and I can't recall him.

I often hear people talk about wanting to drink with their fathers when they grow up, but in my fantasy, such an event quest never triggers.

I want memories other than the hijiki.
So, for the first time in a while, I walked past the barbershop.
The barbershop had become a vacant lot for sale.
The bakery next door had also become a construction company.

“How would you like your bangs?”
Even now, when asked at a hair salon, I can't answer well.
If I had laughed instead of cried when I saw the hijiki back then, would something have changed? Whether I tried to be Inuyasha or Sesshomaru, if I had kept sitting in that black chair, would my father have existed?

Even as an adult, there are so many things I don't understand. And there are many things I don't want to understand.

I, who used to be terrified of Ken Shimura and cry, was able to get laughs in high school with white face paint and traditional Japanese clothing. You never know how things will turn out.

I don't even know how my hair will turn out.

Even now, in front of the mirror, I am a little afraid that my bangs will turn into hijiki.

But I don't need to worry about that.

My father no longer cuts my bangs.