after the quake

Plus, there was bound to be a terrible outburst if he were to announce all of a sudden that he was leaving home. He was sure it had never once crossed his mother’s mind that they might someday live apart. He recalled all too vividly her profound heartbreak and distress when he announced at the age of thirteen that he was abandoning the faith. For two solid weeks or more she ate nothing, said nothing, never once took a bath or combed her hair or changed her underwear. She only just managed to attend to her period when it came. Yoshiya had never seen his mother in such a filthy, smelly state. Just imagining its happening again gave him chest pains.

Yoshiya had no father. From the time he was born there had been only his mother, and she had told him again and again when he was a little boy, “Your father is our Lord” (which is how they referred to their god). “Our Lord must stay high up in Heaven; He can’t live down here with us. But He is always watching over you, Yoshiya, He always has your best interests at heart.”

Mr. Tabata, who served as little Yoshiya’s special “guide,” would say the same kinds of things to him:

“It’s true, you do not have a father in this world, and you’re going to meet all sorts of people who say stupid things to you about that. Unfortunately, the eyes of most people are clouded and unable to see the truth, Yoshiya, but Our Lord, your father, is the world itself. You are fortunate to live in the embrace of His love. You must be proud of that and live a life that is good and true.”

“I know,” responded Yoshiya just after he had entered elementary school. “But God belongs to everybody, doesn’t He? Fathers are different, though. Everybody has a different one. Isn’t that right?”

“Listen to me, Yoshiya. Someday our Lord, your father, will reveal Himself to you as yours and yours alone. You will meet Him when and where you least expect it. But if you begin to doubt or to abandon your faith, He may be so disappointed that He never shows Himself to you. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“And you will keep in mind what I’ve said to you?”

“I will keep it in mind, Mr. Tabata.”

But in fact what Mr. Tabata told him did not make much sense to Yoshiya because he could not believe that he was a special “child of God.” He was ordinary, just like the other boys and girls he saw everywhere—or perhaps he was even a little bit less than ordinary. He had nothing that helped him to stand out, and he was always making a mess of things. It was like that all through elementary school. His grades were decent enough, but when it came to sports he was hopeless. He had slow and spindly legs, myopic eyes, and clumsy hands. In baseball, he missed most fly balls that came his way. His teammates would grumble, and the girls in the stands would titter.

Yoshiya would pray to God, his father, each night before bedtime: “I promise to maintain unwavering faith in You if only You will let me catch outfield flies. That’s all I ask (for now).” If God really was his father, He should be able to do that much for him. But his prayer was never answered. The flies continued to drop from his glove.

“This means you are testing our Lord, Yoshiya,” said Mr. Tabata sternly. “There is nothing wrong with praying for something, but you must pray for something grander than that. It is wrong to pray for something concrete, with time limits.”

When Yoshiya turned seventeen, his mother revealed the secret of his birth (more or less). He was old enough to know the truth, she said.

“I was living in a deep darkness in my teen years. My soul was in chaos as deep as a newly formed ocean of mud. The true light was hidden behind dark clouds. And so I had knowledge of several different men without love. You know what it means to have knowledge, don’t you?”

Yoshiya said that he did indeed know what it meant. His mother used incredibly old-fashioned language when it came to sexual matters. By that point in his life, he himself had had knowledge of several different girls without love.

His mother continued her story. “I first became pregnant in the second year of high school. At the time, I had no idea how very much it meant to become pregnant. A friend of mine introduced me to a doctor who gave me an abortion. He was a very kind man, and very young, and after the operation he lectured me on contraception. Abortion was good neither for the body nor the spirit, he said, and I should also be careful about venereal disease, so I should always be sure to use a condom, and he gave me a new box of them.

“I told him that I had used condoms, so he said, ‘Well, then someone didn’t put them on right. It’s amazing how few people know the right way to use them.’ But I’m not stupid. I was being very careful about contraception. The minute we took our clothes off, I would be sure to put it on the man myself. You can’t trust men with something like that. You know about condoms, right?”

Yoshiya said that he did know about condoms.

“So, two months later I got pregnant again. I could hardly believe it: I was being more careful than ever. There was nothing I could do but go back to the same doctor. He took one look at me and said, ‘I told you to be careful. What have you got in that head of yours?’ I couldn’t stop crying. I explained to him how much care I had taken with contraception whenever I had knowledge, but he wouldn’t believe me. ‘This would never have happened if you’d put them on right,’ he said. He was mad.

“Well, to make a long story short, about six months later, because of a weird sequence of events, I ended up having knowledge of the doctor himself. He was thirty at the time, and still a bachelor. He was kind of boring to talk to, but he was a decent, honest man. His right earlobe was missing. A dog chewed it off when he was a boy. He was just walking along the street one day when a big black dog he had never seen before jumped on him and bit off his earlobe. He used to say he was glad it was just an earlobe. You could live without an earlobe. But a nose would be different. I had to agree with him.

“Being with him helped me get my old self back. When I was having knowledge of him, I managed not to think disturbing thoughts. I even got to like his little ear. He was so dedicated to his work he would lecture me on the use of the condom while we were in bed—like, when and how to put it on and when and how to take it off. You’d think this would make for foolproof contraception, but I ended up pregnant again.”

Yoshiya’s mother went to see her doctor lover and told him she seemed to be pregnant. He examined her and confirmed that it was so. But he would not admit to being the father. “I am a professional,” he said. “My contraceptive techniques are beyond reproach. Which means you must have had relations with another man.”

“This really hurt me. He made me so angry when he said that, I couldn’t stop shaking. Can you see how deeply this would have hurt me?”

Yoshiya said that he did see.

“While I was with him, I never had knowledge of another man. Not once. But he just thought of me as some kind of slut. That was the last I saw of him. I didn’t have an abortion, either. I decided to kill myself. And I would have. I would have gotten on a boat to Oshima and thrown myself from the deck if Mr. Tabata hadn’t seen me wandering down the street and spoken to me. I wasn’t the least bit afraid to die. Of course, if I had died then, you would never have been born into this world, Yoshiya. But thanks to Mr. Tabata’s guidance, I have become the saved person you know me as today. At last, I was able to find the true light. And with the help of the other believers, I brought you into this world.”

To Yoshiya’s mother, Mr. Tabata had had this to say:

“You took the most rigorous contraceptive measures, and yet you became pregnant. Indeed, you became pregnant three times in a row. Do you imagine that such a thing could happen by chance? I for one do not believe it. Three ‘chance’ occurrences are no longer ‘chance.’ The number three is none other than that which is used by our Lord for revelations. In other words, Miss Osaki, it is our Lord’s wish for you to give birth to a child. The child you are carrying is not just anyone’s child, Miss Osaki: it is the child of our Lord in Heaven; a male child, and I shall give it the name of Yoshiya, ‘For it is good.’ ”

And when, as Mr. Tabata predicted, a boy child was born, they named him Yoshiya, and Yoshiya’s mother lived as the servant of God, no longer having knowledge of any man.

“So,” Yoshiya said, with some hesitation, to his mother, “biologically speaking, my father is that obstetrician that you… had knowledge of.”

“Not true!” declared his mother with eyes blazing. “His contraceptive methods were absolutely foolproof ! Mr. Tabata was right: your father is our Lord. You came into this world not through carnal knowledge but through an act of our Lord’s will!”