The Chick's Name

“My child is the least attractive one here.”
My mother reportedly said this while looking at the row of babies through the glass of the newborn nursery.

My mother gave birth to me at the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center in Hiroo.
It is what is now called the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center.
I believe there were maternity clinics in the neighborhood, but as someone from the countryside, my mother likely wanted her first child to be born at a well-known facility with proper equipment.
My mother looked at me, a newborn, and sighed once more.
“And she’s the darkest-skinned one, too.”


It wasn’t maternity blues.
My mother had always had a sharp tongue.
And she was a little—no, quite a lot—eccentric.

Before my younger sister was born, when we were living in Nara for my father’s work.
One day, a massive typhoon struck.
The two-story apartment building where we lived was built on a small hill, so the fierce wind and rain lashed against it relentlessly. Every time it shook violently, I was terrified as a child that it might collapse.
However, my mother didn’t seem scared at all, so I figured it must be fine. Just then,

ROAR! RIP! CRASH!!!

With a terrifying sound unlike anything in this world, half of the roof was blown away somewhere.
Painfully large drops of rain poured down on my mother and me from the pitch-black void that had opened up (my father was away, of course, at a time like this).
My mother put a raincoat on me, grabbed a flashlight in her right hand, and took my hand with her left as we ran down the outdoor stairs.

For some reason, I have no memory of what happened after that.
Did we evacuate to the landlord’s house nearby, or perhaps to the house of a woman we knew on the first floor?
Either way, the sound of the ripping and crashing must have been so intense that it exceeded the capacity of my young mind to process.


When we returned to the room the next day, the tatami mats were soaked, and the dishes were scattered everywhere, shattered into pieces—a sight too miserable to look at.
“Mom.”
I instinctively grabbed my mother’s hand as she stood next to me.
Then, looking up at the ceiling, my mother said,

“What nice weather.”
“Huh?”
Following my mother’s gaze, I could clearly see the clear, blue sky after the typhoon through the ceiling where half the roof had been blown away.
It was nice weather.
It certainly was nice weather, but still.

My mom might be a bit strange.
I thought that while looking at my mother’s profile as she gazed at the sky.




A year later, we returned to Tokyo, and my parents, my younger sister who was born after that, and I lived together in the house of my mother’s older sister and her husband.
I transferred to a kindergarten midway through, where bullies would pull my braids and tease me every day for my Nara dialect.
“Stop it! Stop it!”
“Buy it, buy it, buy that for me!”
YANK (sound of pulling braids)


“I’m not going to kindergarten anymore! They pull my braids and it hurts.”
Every morning, my mother would mercilessly peel me off the pillar in the Japanese-style room where I clung with both hands. Even so, when I would throw myself onto the tatami in protest, one morning she simply snipped my braids off with sewing scissors.
“There, now you’ll be fine.”
“!!!?”
It was the spring I learned about unreasonableness at the age of four.
Since that day, I have never grown my hair long.


The house we lived in at the time was an old, single-story detached house, much like the house in the manga Sazae-san.
When I returned from school, my little sister and I would often play in the garden.
My mother, as evidenced by the braid-snipping incident, was a decisive person, for better or worse.
When the goldfish in the bowl died, she would just toss it out into the garden.
“That’s terrible! It’s not trash.”
“If it were trash, I wouldn’t throw it away.”
“At least bury it.”
“Then bury it yourself.”
I would pick up a shovel, cursing my mother.

Such a mother, despite her sharp tongue, was somehow good at growing flowers, and seasonal flowers were always blooming in the garden.
However, there were also many mysterious insects equal to the number of flowers.
Black bugs with white spots on their backs, mysterious giant insects that flew around with a buzzing sound, and white, shell-like bugs that curled up when touched.
In that garden, my mother would diligently sow seeds and grow flowers.
And the insects that were unfortunately labeled as pests by my mother were crushed underfoot one after another.
I wasn’t fond of bugs, but I was a million times more afraid of the soles of my mother’s shoes than the bugs themselves.

When I was in the fourth grade, my younger sister was rushed to the hospital with a condition called sepsis. She remained in critical condition, and visits were restricted for days.
Even after my parents were finally allowed to visit, I, being a child, was not permitted to see her for a while.

One day, there was a teddy bear wrapped in transparent plastic sitting in the entryway.
It was a large, fluffy, pink stuffed animal.
“Where did this teddy bear come from?”
I asked my mother in the kitchen.

“Your father bought it. I’m taking it when I go to the hospital tomorrow.”
“Maybe I’ll go too.”
My mother was going to the hospital every day at that time, so she was often not home when I returned from school.
So I thought if I went with her, maybe we could have lunch together near the hospital or eat ice cream.
However, my mother immediately rejected the suggestion.
“You can’t visit yet anyway. Just stay home and watch the house.”

“Then I’m not going.”
I threw down my school bag and turned the faucet in the sink.
I didn’t really want to go visit anyway.
I hate hospitals.
And I don’t want ice cream either.
As I scrubbed my hands endlessly,
“You’re wasting water!” she scolded.


Three months later, my sister was safely discharged.
The night before, my mother told me she would be coming home tomorrow, so the next day, I ran home as soon as school ended.
My sister was standing in the garden wearing her best red checkered dress, holding the large pink teddy bear in both arms.
I felt like she had grown a little taller.
“Welcome back.”
I felt a bit shy and could only say it in a blunt way.
I still remember my sister’s shy smile.

At the end of the summer of the year my sister was discharged.
I found a chick at a festival stall I went to with my mother.
Those tiny yellow creatures chirping away were fluffy and truly adorable.
I asked to buy one with the money I had saved from my New Year’s gift, but my mother wouldn’t easily agree.

“Why not?”
“Because they die right away.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. Stall chicks can’t live long anyway.”
My mother said something incredibly rude right in front of the stall owner.
I don’t know what kind of face the man made while listening to our exchange, but I still wouldn’t leave the chick’s side.
“It can live a long time. It definitely, definitely can!”
Perhaps finding her stubborn daughter troublesome, my mother reluctantly agreed.
I chose the one chirping the most energetically among the many chicks. The chick I lifted with both hands was surprisingly light and very warm.

I put lots of torn-up newspaper in a cardboard box and made a bed of white cotton in the middle.
When it was warm during the day, I kept it on the veranda, and at night, since it got cold, I placed it on a cushion in the corner of the living room.
When it slept, I covered the cardboard box with a blanket.
The chick chirped energetically and walked around briskly.
I could watch it eat feed with its tiny pink beak forever without getting bored.
When I gently held it in my hand and stroked it with my fingertips, the chick would start to doze off.
That was when I first learned that they close their lower eyelids when they sleep.
It felt as if a warm color had been added to my tiny world.

I named it “Pee-chan.”
It’s a name as common as Tama for a cat, Pochi for a dog, or Taro and Hanako for a human, but it felt like the perfect fit.
Even though the rest of the family called it Pee-chan, for some reason, only my mother kept calling it “chick.”

In the morning, the first thing I did was go to see Pee-chan.
I’d confirm it was healthy and then go to school.
When I got home from school, before taking off my shoes, I would call out to my mother.
“Is Pee-chan dead yet?”

Not “Is Pee-chan doing well?”
Not “Is Pee-chan still alive?”
“Is Pee-chan dead yet?”


Why did I say it like that?
A twisted, mean-spirited way of speaking.

But perhaps, I was so afraid of the chick dying, so afraid of being told it had died,
that I was preparing for the worst that might come someday—the “someday it will die.”
It was a twisted insurance policy I made to protect myself from my mother’s words, who had said “stalls chicks can’t live long,” and the “See, I told you it would die” that would follow.

“Is Pee-chan dead yet?”
“It’s alive.”
“Is Pee-chan dead yet?”
“It’s alive.”

That strange exchange between my mother and me continued for many days.
Pee-chan might grow up to be a fine chicken. It might become a big chicken and crow loudly first thing in the morning, causing complaints from the whole neighborhood.
Just when I started to think that, that day suddenly arrived.

I came home from school as usual and asked my mother as usual.
“Is Pee-chan dead yet?”
“It died.”

My mother told me flatly.
That one word felt like a lump of pitch-black lead.

Inside the cardboard box where the chick had been, the feed and water I had given it in the morning were still there.
Pee-chan had died while I was at school.
My mother said that when she found it, it was already cold and stiff, so she wrapped it in cotton and buried it under the loquat tree.


I didn’t want to cry in front of my mother at all.
I put my school bag on the veranda and went down to the garden with a calm face.
There was a small, mounded spot at the base of the loquat tree.
I was glad Pee-chan hadn’t been just tossed away.
But it must be dark and very cold under the soil.
If I had been there, I would have put it in a pretty candy box and wrapped it in even more warm cotton.

I placed a white flower that was blooming in the garden on the soil.
The flower, which looked like a sunflower, was yellow only in the center.
“Pee-chan, I’m sorry.”
As I stroked the cold ground, the round yellow color blurred before my eyes.



Autumn passed, winter came, and spring visited again.
Around this time, my mother began to spend more time in bed.
Perhaps because she had suffered from pneumonia when she was young, she would invariably be bedridden once a month.
When I came home from school and couldn’t see my mother, she was usually sleeping in the back Japanese-style room.
There was a water pitcher and a washbasin covered with newspaper by her pillow, and it smelled a bit sour.

I was always depressed while rubbing my mother’s back.
I was afraid of the sensation of her protruding spine feeling bumpy against my palm.
To keep her from realizing how I felt, I would talk about what happened at school today in a deliberately cheerful tone.
“Mom, you know what?”
But at those times, my mother would interrupt my story and always say this:
“Because I won’t live a long life.”
My answer was always the same.
“You’ll be fine if you see a doctor.”
“A doctor’s medicine won’t work.”
“That’s not true. You’ll be fine if you take it properly.”
My mother let out a big sigh.

I’m the one who wants to sigh.
Why do you say things like that?
I don’t want to hear words like that.

I actually wanted to say that.
But it was probably like casting pearls before swine—or rather, like chanting sutras to my mother.
My mother was extremely stubborn.
“Because I won’t live a long life.”
The words repeated every month were like a spell.
What could I have said to satisfy her?

When I was in the sixth grade, we moved to Chiba.
My father, mother, sister, and I, along with my aunt, were together.
My uncle didn’t come.
My uncle, a dandy who wore a trench coat and a hat and bought me many books.
I was sad, but I couldn’t do anything.
My aunt and uncle divorced, and our family of six became five.

The new house was two stories.
Soon after moving, my mother planted kumquat and peach saplings in the small garden.
As a child, I was happier with a newly built house, even with a small garden, than an old house with a large garden, but I wonder how my mother felt.

When my sister’s marriage was decided, she had a separate room prepared at the hotel for my mother to rest in on the day of the wedding reception.
However, on the morning of the ceremony, my mother vomited blood.
To us, who were trying to call an ambulance, she stubbornly insisted, “I’ll be fine if I rest at home. I’ll go to the hospital tomorrow.”
“Don’t say such stupid things. There’s no way I can leave you here alone, Mom.”
“It would be pitiful for the bride if there are few relatives. If I feel worse, I can call an ambulance myself, so just go.” She wouldn’t budge.
After the argument continued for a long time, we eventually left my mother behind and headed to the venue.

On the day my sister and her husband safely left for their honeymoon, my father and I accompanied my mother to be hospitalized.
After finishing the various procedures and returning to my mother’s hospital room, my father, who had been there just a moment ago, was gone.
“Huh? Where’s Dad?”
“He went to the restroom and hasn’t come back.”

I had a bad feeling and headed to the men’s restroom.
“Dad?”
There was no answer.
“Dad, if you’re in there, answer me.”
I steeled myself and entered the men’s restroom.
One of the stall doors was closed.
“Dad! Dad!”
Even when I knocked on the door, there was no answer, and when I peeked through the gap at the bottom, I saw my father’s familiar shoes and trousers on the floor.
I could feel the blood draining from my own face.
I immediately called a nurse to force the lock open, and found my father collapsed as if clutching the toilet.
It was a miserable sight with vomit and blood.
Several nurses carried my father to the treatment room. While accompanying my father, I thought:

This is bad.
Two funerals during my sister’s honeymoon is bad.
Absolutely bad.
I must avoid that at all costs.

I truly thought so.
My father was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer after tests, and while a funeral was avoided, he was hospitalized that same day.

When I returned to my mother’s room, perhaps having heard about my father from a nurse, she looked at me and asked anxiously.
“Is your father going to die?”
“No, no, he’s not going to die. It’s just a duodenal ulcer.”
“I see. That’s good.”
Perhaps relieved, my mother relaxed her mouth a little and looked up at the sky through the hospital room window.

“What nice weather.”

Oh, come on. Talking about the weather even at a time like this?
Could her past life have been a weather forecaster?
Thinking that, I also looked up at the sky through the window.
It was a dazzling blue May sky.

Some time after their marriage, my sister and her husband built a two-family house for my mother, who was repeatedly hospitalized, and my aunt who lived with her.
On weekends, I would take my daughter, who was still young, and go stay over to see my mother.
My mother was sleeping in a bed my sister had prepared in the living room so she could see everyone’s faces at any time.
After finishing dinner and taking a bath, my daughter got ready for bed and went to greet my mother.
“Grandma, goodnight.”
Then my mother stared at the pajamas my daughter was wearing. They were pajamas with many small monkey pictures on yellow fabric.
“Ha-chan. Those pajamas are cute.”
She said that and gently touched my daughter’s pajamas.



Five years later, on a cold day in January, my mother passed away at the age of 70.
The cause of death was bronchiectasis.
“Because I won’t live a long life.”
Just as she had kept saying to me as a child like a spell, my mother did not live a long life.

That night.
When I was taking over from my father and sister who had been with my mother in the hospital room since the evening, my sister said, “I’ll stay a little longer,” but I urged them to go home, saying, “There’s always tomorrow, so don’t push yourselves.”
After the two of them left, as I was moistening her dry lips with gauze and massaging her feet, a nurse who came to check on her rushed out of the room.

“Can you hear me? Mom, I’m here.”
My mother looked at me and nodded slightly.
“It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. I’m here with you.”
I held my mother’s thin shoulders with both hands and hugged her.
“Mom, let’s try taking a deep breath. Breathe in deeply, and breathe out.”
When I showed her how to take a deep breath, my always-stubborn mother breathed in and out as obediently as a small child.
“Good! Good! Now one more time, breathe in, and breathe out.”
This time, too, my mother obediently breathed in.
And with her mouth left slightly open, she never breathed out again.

A few days later, I received a call from my mother's nurse.
She said there were many unopened medications under my mother's bed. Her blood oxygen level was not at a level where a person could normally survive, and her weight had dropped below forty kilograms.
My mother was stubborn and headstrong until the very end.

While I was meeting with the funeral director, my father, who was standing by the coffin, suddenly broke down in tears and collapsed.
"Mom has died."
It was the first time I had ever seen my father so distraught, sobbing out loud.

I remembered something my mother used to say with a hint of pride.
"Your father, you know, he got so desperate the moment he heard about my arranged marriage proposal that he proposed to me right away."
In the end, my father's blood pressure spiked over 180 and he ended up bedridden,
so my husband had to step in as the chief mourner on short notice.



After the mourners had all left, save for a handful of relatives, I was sitting in front of my mother's coffin when my younger sister, who had been organizing her belongings, entered the room.

"Big sister, you'll catch a cold."
She handed me a red knitted lap blanket and sat down next to me.
"Thanks. How's Dad?"
"He's okay. He's calmed down. I thought we might end up having two funerals when he started crying so hard and then suddenly collapsed."
My sister's words made me think back to the 'toilet incident' in May five years ago when my mother was hospitalized, and I couldn't help but smile bitterly.
"Seriously, two funerals would be bad."
Then, I voiced the knot that had been in my heart for so long.

"I'm sorry about that time. I said I'd stay a little longer, but I sent you home, and I ended up being the one to watch her pass away alone."
My sister stared at my mother's portrait, surrounded by lilies.
"Mom once told me something. She said that while her grandchildren were so cute she could eat them up, the child she gave birth to herself was still the most precious. That's the kind of person she was, right?"

I remembered how my mother would visit the hospital every single day when my sister was hospitalized, even though visitors were restricted.
That's right. My mother adored my sister.

"Mom is happy. Because Mom loved you the most, big sister."
"Huh?"

It was like hearing a language from a distant land; my sister's words didn't sink in at all.

"Mom really cherished the bag you gave her with your first paycheck. She still has it now. She didn't seem that happy when I bought her presents."
I hurriedly denied it.
"That's not true. Every time she saw my face, she'd just make snide remarks about how you were fair-skinned and cute, while I was dark-skinned and had no charm at all."
"But Mom loved you the most."
My sister pouted and said that, looking sulky.

I was left alone in the room after my sister left.
My mother's catchphrases during her illness were "The kids are waiting, so hurry home" and "I don't want to live so greedily that I become a burden to you all."
They were trauma-inducing mantras, right up there with "Mom won't live a long life."
But only now do I finally realize.
My mother must have been someone who wasn't good at relying on others.
And perhaps, so am I.
When was the last time I relied on my mother?
It was so long ago I can't even remember.
Mom.
The child who wasn't good at relying on others has become an adult who isn't good at relying on others.

I wonder how long I had been sitting there.
Before I knew it, my elementary school-aged son was standing next to me.
"Mom, don't cry."
He said that and looked at my face with concern.
It was only when my son said that that I realized I was crying.

After greeting the relatives and acquaintances gathered in the waiting room, I crossed the lobby and went outside the crematorium.
The time given to me by the person in charge of the cremation earlier was much shorter than I had expected.

The January air was cold, and it was too chilly to be outside in just mourning clothes, but I wanted to feel the outside air.
A gloomy, gray sky.
When was the last time I looked up at the blue sky with my mother?

I was remembering my conversation with my sister.
"When I die, make sure to put my teddy bear in the coffin with me."
"What are you talking about? You're four years younger than me."
"Ill weeds grow apace, so you're definitely going to live longer than me."

My sister still treasures the teddy bear our father bought her when she was hospitalized as a child.
The pink bear, which had absorbed a massive amount of my sister's tears and snot, became a shrunken, matted gray bear after being washed.
Even so, it remains my sister's treasure.

Put the teddy bear in with me, huh.
She's still a child no matter how old she gets.
Teddy bear.
A sharp pain pricked deep in my heart.

Since we were little, my sister called the pink stuffed animal 'Teddy Bear.' My mother called it 'Teddy Bear' too.
Because my sister called it that.
Then why did I only ever call P-chan a 'chick'?
Perhaps.

It's my twisted habit of taking out the worst-case insurance so that the wound in my heart would be as shallow as possible.

Mom.
Did I inherit this twisted habit from you?
A thin, white line of smoke rose into the overcast sky and vanished.

The announcement for the bone collection will probably play soon.

A small cemetery on the banks of Teganuma.
My father, mother, and aunt all rest in this place where flowers bloom in every season.
The ancestral grave of my father's side, as the eldest son, was in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Nagano, where it was snowed in during the winter.
And apparently, they used earth burial until recently. Perhaps because of that, my mother had been complaining about it every chance she got for years.

"I absolutely hate that gloomy place, even if I'm dead."
"You won't know once you're dead, will you?"
"It's hard for you guys to come visit the grave, too."
"We'll go once a year as a summer retreat."
"Then just scatter me somewhere around here."
"I'll scatter you. I'll scatter you while shouting 'Demons out! Demons out!'"

I said that at the time, but since I couldn't just scatter her anywhere, my sister and I bought a new grave.
I wonder if she's at least a little grateful.


In front of my husband, who was carrying the offering flowers, and me, my son's family and their grandchild were skipping along happily, holding hands.
Every time they did, the little braids would bounce up and down.

Come to think of it, I remember walking with my mother to a department store in Ikebukuro to buy baby clothes for my sister who was about to be born.
That was before my braids were chopped off.
It was a very hot day, and the hand I held with my mother was sweaty, so I wiped my hand on my skirt many times without her noticing and held it again.
Back then, there weren't many tall buildings, and I remember many red and white advertising balloons floating across the wide blue sky.

Mom, you know.
I still have those yellow monkey pajamas you praised me for.

There is something I want to ask if I ever get to see my mother again.
About the small, yellow, fluffy creature.
About the chick that was supposed to become a big chicken.

P-chan, are you dead yet?
I'm alive.
P-chan, are you dead yet?
I'm alive.

Mom.

Actually, I was very sad at that time.
What about you, Mom?


I want you to tell me someday.
I'm not in a hurry for the answer.

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