Authors: Kanae Minato
I know it’s an extreme example, but these kinds of accusations get made all the time, and for male teachers they’re very difficult to disprove. Since that incident, we’ve made it a policy to have a female teacher go in place of a male teacher when he has to meet with a female student, and vice versa. That’s also why we have two male and two female teachers for each grade. If one of you boys were to ask me to meet you somewhere, I would immediately get in touch with Tokura-sensei from the A Class and ask him to go in my place; and if something happened involving a girl from the A Class, Tokura-sensei would contact me. You hadn’t realized? There was never an announcement made, but we thought you’d figure it out for yourselves.
So now you boys are probably wondering whether it’s even worth contacting me when you’re really in trouble if Tokura-sensei is going to show up anyway? What’s that, Mr. Hasegawa? Yes, I remember when you had that problem in gym class. You told me it was serious, but in the bigger scheme of things it was quite minor. In fact, I doubt it’s more than a few times a year when one of you really needs me. I’m sure when you text me saying you want to die, you truly believe on some level that “life has no meaning,” as you all seem to like to say. And I’m sure that from your own self-absorbed point of view, you feel as though you’re all alone in the great wide world. That your troubles are completely overwhelming. But I have to say that I’m less interested in catering to your adolescent whims and more concerned that you grow up someday to be people who are capable of considering the feelings of others—for example, the feelings of the person who receives such a thoughtless message in the middle of the night. To be honest, I doubt that anyone who was truly despondent, who was actually considering doing something drastic, would send an email to announce the fact to her teacher.
You may have guessed by now that I was never the sort of teacher who thought about her students twenty-four hours a day. There was always someone more important to me—my daughter, Manami. As you know, I was a single mother. Shortly before Manami’s father and I were planning to be married, I learned that I was pregnant. We were a little disappointed that it had turned into a “shotgun wedding,” as they say, but the truth is we were delighted at the prospect of having a baby. I began getting prenatal care, and we decided it would make sense for my fiancé to have a physical as well. Quite unexpectedly, the tests revealed that he was suffering from a terrible disease, and all talk of the wedding stopped at that point. Because of the illness? Of course, that was the reason. Was it hard for him to accept? I’m sure it was, Miss Isaka. And of course some couples go ahead and get married even though one of them is ill. They choose to face the problem together. But what would you do in this situation? What would you do if you found out your boyfriend or girlfriend was infected with HIV?…HIV—the human immunodeficiency virus—better known as AIDS. But most of you already know all about this from the novel you read for your summer project. So many of your book reports said that you had cried at the ending that I decided to read it for myself. For the few of you who chose another book, it’s about a girl who contracts HIV while working as a prostitute and eventually develops AIDS and dies.
What’s that? You don’t think the story is that simple? You found the woman—the heroine—more sympathetic than I made her sound? I can understand that, but if you sympathized with the girl in the book, why did so many of you push your chairs back just now when I told you what happened with my fiancé? If you’re so sympathetic to people with AIDS, why did you move away when you found out that the teacher standing in front of you had sex with someone infected with HIV?
You look particularly uncomfortable, Miss Hamazaki, sitting here in the front row, but there’s no need to hold your breath. HIV is not spread through the air. The fact is you can’t catch AIDS from most kinds of physical contact—not from shaking hands or coughing or sneezing, not from the bath or the swimming pool, not from sharing dishes or from mosquito bites or from your pets. In general, not even from kissing. You can’t get AIDS from living in close contact with an infected person, and no one has
ever
caught it simply by being in the same class with someone who was infected—though I know the book didn’t mention any of that. And I apologize for keeping you in suspense—but I’m not infected, either. Don’t look so shocked. It’s true that sexual intercourse is one way of spreading HIV, but not every act of intercourse results in infection.
I was tested during my pregnancy and the results were negative, but because that seemed so hard to believe, I was retested several times. It was only later, when I learned the real infection rate from intercourse, that I understood why I had escaped, but I won’t tell you that figure since I know how easily influenced you are by statistics. If you want to know, you’re free to look it up yourselves.
My fiancé contracted HIV overseas, during a wild period in his life when he hadn’t cared much what happened to him. I’m afraid I found it difficult to accept this part of his past. It had been a terrible shock to learn that the man I was planning to marry was infected with HIV, and despite the tests I continued to worry that I was infected, too. Even after I was sure that I was safe, I lay awake at night worrying about the baby in my belly. While I never stopped respecting my lover, I have to say that at times I truly hated him for what he’d done. And I suppose he could sense that. He apologized to me repeatedly and pleaded with me to go ahead and have the baby. But I have to say that the thought of ending the pregnancy never crossed my mind. Irrespective of politics, it felt like murder to me.
I should also tell you that my fiancé didn’t dissolve into self-pity after learning he had AIDS. On the contrary, he seemed to feel that he was simply suffering the consequences of his actions, and he was always careful to distinguish between his situation and that of hemophiliacs and others who had contracted the virus through no fault of their own. Still, I can’t imagine the despair he must have been feeling.
Eventually I realized I’d been wrong—partly because I so much wanted my baby to have a father—and I told him that we should go through with the wedding, that as long as we both understood the situation, we would find a way to face the problem. But he refused quite stubbornly. He was strong-willed, and he was absolutely determined to put the child’s happiness above all else. Prejudice against people with HIV is terrible in Japan—if you want proof, just remember how you all held your breath a moment ago when you thought I was infected. Even if the child turned out to be HIV-negative, how would she be treated when it was learned that the father had AIDS? If she made friends, would their parents forbid them to play with her? When she was old enough to go to school, would the other children—or even the teachers—mistreat her and try to force her out of the cafeteria or gym class or anywhere they thought a problem might occur? Of course, a child with no father can also experience prejudice, but the challenges are much less serious and she has a much better chance of finally winning acceptance. At any rate, we decided to call off the wedding. I was left to raise our daughter alone.
After she was born, Manami was tested and turned out to be HIV-negative as well. You can’t imagine how relieved I was. I made up my mind to give her the best care a mother could, to protect her at all costs, and I poured every ounce of my love into her. If you were to ask me which was more important, my students or my daughter, I would have answered without a moment’s hesitation that my daughter was far more important. Which was, of course, only natural.
Manami asked me about her father only once. I told her that he was working very hard, so hard he couldn’t come see her. And this was, in fact, quite true. Having given up the right to call himself Manami’s father, he had thrown himself into his work as though the rest of his life depended on it. But his sacrifice was meaningless in the end.
Manami is no longer with us.
When Manami turned one, I put her into day care and returned to teaching. In the city, day care centers will keep a child until late into the evening, but out here in the countryside, even extended care ends at six o’clock. So I consulted a placement service for seniors looking for part-time work and found Mrs. Takenaka. She lives just behind the school swimming pool. Yes, that’s right, the house with the big black dog named Muku. I’m sure some of you have fed Muku your leftovers from lunch through the fence.
At four o’clock when the day care center closed, Mrs. Takenaka would go to get Manami and keep her for me until I finished work. The two of them grew very attached to one another. Manami loved Mrs. Takenaka and called her Grannie, and she loved Muku, too, and was very proud of the fact that she was often given the job of feeding him. This arrangement continued for three years, but at the beginning of this year, Mrs. Takenaka fell ill and went into the hospital.
Because we had been so close, I felt uncomfortable looking for a replacement simply because she was laid up for a few weeks, so I decided that I would go get Manami from the day care center myself until Mrs. Takenaka got well. In general this worked well enough, since they were willing to keep Manami until six o’clock and I was usually able to wrap things up at school by then. But on Wednesdays, our faculty meetings often went later, so on those days I would get Manami at four o’clock and have her wait for me in the nurse’s office. Miss Nait
ō
and Miss Matsukawa, you often played with her while she was there, didn’t you? I’m truly grateful to you for that. She loved those afternoons. She told me that you girls said she looked like her favorite cartoon character, Snuggly Bunny. She couldn’t have been more delighted.
Please don’t cry, girls. Those are happy memories.
Manami loved rabbits, and she loved anything that was soft and fluffy. So of course she was crazy about Snuggly Bunny—though in that she was no different from most of the girls in Japan, even those in high school. Just about everything she owned—her backpack, her hankies, her shoes, even her socks, had his little face printed on it. She would climb up on my lap every morning with her little Snuggly Bunny hair bands and ask me to make her look like Bunny, and on weekends when we went shopping, she would always spot some new sort of Snuggly Bunny product that made her eyes sparkle.
About a week before Manami died, we had gone out to the shopping center. There was a Valentine’s display with all kinds of chocolate, including a whole selection with especially cute packaging, probably for girls to give to one another instead of to boys. Manami was drawn to the display and immediately spotted a Snuggly Bunny–shaped bar of white chocolate that came in a Snuggly Bunny–shaped fuzzy pouch. Of course, she wanted me to buy it for her, but we had a rule that she could only buy one item when we went shopping, and I’d already bought her a Snuggly Bunny sweatshirt that day—the pink one she was wearing the day she died. I told her she could get the chocolate bunny the next time we came shopping and began to lead her away from the candy.
Normally she would have followed me quietly enough. But for some reason that day was different. She sat down on the floor in the middle of the store and began to cry, telling me that she didn’t want the sweatshirt and that I had to buy her the chocolate. But a rule is a rule, and I wasn’t about to let her get away with that kind of behavior. I told myself I would buy it for her another time, when I was alone, and give it to her on Valentine’s Day. I reminded her about our rule and told her that she needed to behave herself. As a mother, I’d had to learn that there was a clear difference between loving your child and spoiling her. But just then Mr. Shitamura happened to appear from somewhere. You had apparently been watching the whole thing, since you came up and offered your opinion without being asked. You seemed to think I was being unreasonable to deny Manami something that cost only ¥700. Fortunately, Manami was embarrassed to have you see her sitting on the floor having a tantrum, and she immediately calmed down and stood up. “Okay,” she said, puffing out those little cheeks, “but next time I’m getting it for sure.” Then she gave you a smile and a little wave and we left.
Of course, with Manami gone before Valentine’s ever came, I regret not buying her that chocolate every day.
The faculty meeting ended just before six o’clock that day. The school nurses attended the meeting, so their office was empty. But several of you girls were kind enough to look after Manami until the school closed at six, so she never complained about being bored or lonely, and she was always waiting patiently for me when I got out of the meeting. That day, however, she wasn’t in the office. I checked the restroom, but she wasn’t there, either. It was just as after-school activities were winding up, and it occurred to me she might have gone to find some of you girls in your club rooms, so I wandered around the school looking for her, not particularly concerned at that point. I ran into Miss Nait
ō
and Miss Matsukawa, and you told me that you’d gone to play with Manami in the nurse’s office around five o’clock but that she hadn’t been there. You’d thought she hadn’t come to school that day. Then you helped me look for her.
It was dark by then, but there were still a number of people in the school, and they all joined in the search that evening. Mr. Hoshino, you were the one who found her—after you’d finished with baseball practice. You said you hadn’t seen her that day but that you remembered seeing her once coming from the direction of the pool, and you went there with me to look for her. The gate was chained for the winter, so we climbed the fence, but the chain was loose enough to let someone as small as Manami slip through. The pool was full, even though swimming classes were over for the year. The water was cloudy and dark—it had been kept in case it was needed to fight a fire.
We found Manami floating on the surface. We pulled her out as quickly as we could, but her body was icy and her heart had stopped. Still, I continued to call her name and perform CPR. Despite the shock of seeing Manami’s body, Mr. Hoshino went right away to call the other teachers. Manami was transported to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The cause of death was determined to be drowning. Since there were no injuries or any sign that she’d been attacked, the police concluded that she had fallen in accidentally.