By Janice Valerie Young

Her husband packs his bento lunch box and uniform into his backpack, hitches it on his boney shoulders, and heads out to work at his tin can recycling plant.

His wife washes the breakfast dishes, anxiously checking her watch. Their son Hiro would be home from America before lunch. She sighs, thinking, we had a real chance when my father gave us money to start up a business. What would I have done differently if I had the chance now? How far would I go back and change things?

She replays the ugly conversation she’d had with her husband over breakfast. "I’ve paid a high price in this relationship, it can’t be denied. I’ve always hated this dump of village, but one must keep up appearances, mustn’t one? A nest of a village deep in the mountains, miles away from Tokyo, where the air reeks of rotten fish! How can a village hundreds of miles from the sea stink of fish! You promised me a life of travel and adventure in the French Foreign Legion, and instead you gave me—you replaced it with—the stench of rotten fish."

"And this stinky village has been good to us, don’t forget, putting Hiro through the best high school and university in America," he puffs up his chest, wiping the sweat off his bald head.

He notices the darts in her eye vanish. She seems inexplicably soft, like freshly made soba noodles. The makeup on her face becomes transparent, exposing a soft weakened woman. She folds her arms on the table with an exhausted sigh. "Our only child went to the best schools in America so he could come back to this village and run the recycling business, not to mention your share in the town dump, now that you’re ready to semi-retire and want to spend summers in Hawaii. Don’t you see the mistake, the utter waste you are making of your son’s life?"

He slurps his tea, his eyes glazing over, as they had begun to recently, since he sent the letter calling his son back home. "Do you remember what I told you when I was sixteen, sixteen and so full of hope for the future?"

She nods grimly.

"I said marry me, Erika-chan, and I promise we will run away. I will join the French Foreign Legion and we can travel the world, from France to Africa."

"Do you know how sweet those words were to a farm girl from Hokkaido? I dreamed of our exotic life far from Japan, far from any village like this. I was so excited. I wrote the French Foreign Legion and they told me no married soldiers were allowed—"

"And I told you it didn’t matter! We would marry anyway and I wouldn’t tell them. It would be risky, but it seemed like nothing could stop us back then."

She lights a cigarette. "But then everything stopped us, didn’t it? But I refused to stop believing in you. I believed your promise. That’s what my love, our marriage, was based on."

He wipes the sweat off his head again. "Don’t give up on me yet. We will be in Hawaii every summer from next year, once I train Hiro."

"Yes, we will be those wrinkled old grapes on the beach pretending we’re young, ripe peaches, but really all that’s left is the rotten pit! While our only son decays here, taking care of other people’s garbage!" She shamelessly reaches for the half-empty bottle of Jinro liquor, splashing some in her juice glass. Appearances suddenly mean nothing to her anymore.

*

Hiro bounds in the front door, his take-out takoyaki in one hand, his suitcase in the other. "I’m home," he announces bitterly in English before sitting down at the dining table, unwrapping his food. Nodding hello to his mother, he grumbles, "I don’t know what that damn Murata’s problem is. He picked me up at the train station and wouldn’t even wait till I finished my food."

"Your father told him not to waste time—it’s getting busy at the dump these days," his mother sighs, carrying a basket of laundry over to the table and sitting across from her son. "Hiro, you’re really here. You really came home. Why? Why didn’t you stay in America?"

"Now that’s a stupid question and you know it. I came home because I thought you would disown me if I didn’t," he growls, cracking his disposable chopsticks apart.

Shaking her head, his mother continues sorting the laundry and starts to weep. "But all that time you were gone, living in America, I was so hoping that you would disown us. That you would disown a life of sorting other people’s garbage, discarded junk. That you would disown the demands of your father and mother and demand freedom—demand to become your own man, to have your own life."

Hiro leaps from his chair, the bonita from his takoyaki flittering to the floor like sakura blossoms falling from a tree. "What?" Sauce drips onto his chin and he remains motionless, one chopstick in hand, one wobbling on the edge of the plastic container.

"You still don’t understand? I wanted you to be free!" she wheezes.

"But you’ve been telling me for years, the whole ten years I was abroad that I would have to come home and take over the recycling business. That’s what I thought you wanted. Isn’t it?" Hiro demands. "Isn’t it?"

Wiping up the fallen bonita with a tissue, his mother sighs, "That’s what your father wanted, no doubt, but it’s never what I wanted for you. I wanted to protect you from this life. To give you a chance to be something better. I wish you never came back here, to this dirty job and this dirty town. Dirty life!" she rests back in the chair, tossing the soiled tissue into the nearby garbage can.

Hiro scratches his head with the chopstick. "I didn’t come home because I wanted to take over the can recycling business. You know that. You and dad have always known I never wanted anything to do with this smelly business of yours. Who would?"

"Then why did you come back, when you had built a life for yourself, when you really did have opportunities and possibilities I only dreamed of? I can’t take this humidity!" She marches over to the window and slams it shut, then kicks the air conditioner. It whirs and hums into life.

"You know why I came home. I came home for the same reason all sons and daughters, all Japanese who are the oldest child, or the only child, come back home, although they fight with themselves and scream against it in their heart, ignoring their lovers’ pleas to stay," he whispers with venom.

"Why?" His mother begins to frantically pick the lint off a towel.

Hiro hangs his head.

Clutching the towel in her hands, she bolts into the kitchen, fishing out a notebook hidden among her cookbooks. She waves it in the air, shaking and not even attempting to wipe her tears away, although she knows her mascara is surely streaked all over her cheeks by now. "Don’t even say it—don’t even say it. You came back to us because you were afraid if you stayed in America, you our only son, that we would die a lonely death because we wouldn’t be able to take care of ourselves in our old age? That we would revert to an inexplicably helpless stage of infancy?"

He nods, reaching out for her hand.

"Then I have failed. I have failed you worse than I imagined, and I had imagined a true epic failure, of my life, and of your father’s. How could you think we were so weak? I made you! And I made you strong! Oh, but I understand, underneath my skin, underneath it all, we are weaklings." she chokes just then, and Hiro moves toward her to pat her back.

"And underneath it all you were pinning all your hopes on me? I never knew what you were thinking, or how you felt, underneath it all."

"I realized the way things would be when your father bought this recycling business and gave up our dreams to travel the world. That’s when I started writing this. Now it’s time to give it to you. Opening the nondescript notebook, she shoves it in his hand.

Searching for sense, to understand this strange, passionate woman his meek mother has so unexpectedly become, his eyes devoured her evenly written words, starting at the title: How to have a better Life than mine. He scans page by page, stopping at "don’t blindly believe your husband, but trust that he can give you another chance to do better with your life—through children, or just one child, as in my case."

*

Her husband returns home from work and bursts inside, shouting, "Hiro, Hiro!" He pops his head in both bedrooms, notices the bathroom is open and empty and there aren’t any strange shoes in the genkan. He turns to his wife who is drinking her spiked oolong-cha deeply.

For the first time she can remember, her husband’s dishelvedness doesn’t irritate her, nor do his stained work clothes, or his sweaty bald head and toothpick arms. "Hiro left," she reveals, smiling.

"What are you talking about? Murata-san picked Hiro up after lunch and drove him here." Her husband washes his hands, peeling off his sticky, smelling clothes and rinsing off in the shower.

"He’s gone. He escaped to America, and he’s not coming back," she grins, crossing her fingers, something Hiro had taught her when he returned for the summer from the best high school in America, a long time ago.