When Shigeru was little, Okumura would always show up at the house with a present for him: plastic models of planes and tanks, or baseball gloves and balls, or what have you. He never played catch with Shigeru, though—he merely presented him with the gear. Okumura didn’t look like the type to play baseball, anyway.
One time, when Shigeru opened up the flat rigid parcel that Okumura handed him, he found a picture book inside. The title read Where the Wild Things Are, and the cover illustration showed a horned monster fast asleep in a seated posture, with a sailboat in the background.
Okumura and his mom were sitting together, drinking and chatting. Shigeru flopped down on the floor in a spot where he could be seen and began to leaf through the book. He thought that doing so would make his mom happy. The TV was blasting out a popular variety show. The summery evening breeze that slipped in through the open window was musty and warm. Shigeru’s feet were bare, just like the monster’s on the cover of the book.
The main character in Where the Wild Things Are was called Max, a boy of about Shigeru’s age. Max got in a sailboat and sailed for a year and a day, until he reached the place where the wild things were. Then Max got to dance and play with the wild things. The wild things in this book hadn’t been made kid-friendly or cute. They were huge, and they looked properly scary. Shigeru liked that. They had pointy fangs and claws, and staring, goggly eyes. They were pretty cool.
At the end, when Max made to go home, the wild things said to him, “Oh, please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”
Aghast, Shigeru looked up from the page toward his mom. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was laughing at something Okumura had said. Her expression somehow became one in Shigeru’s mind with the words in the picture book he’d just read: “I’ll eat you up—I love you so!” Then Shigeru looked at Okumura’s face. “I’ll eat you up—I love you so!” He looked every bit as happy as Shigeru’s mom did.
At the wake, the now-gray-haired Okumura made no attempt to conceal his grief. Raising his head from Shigeru’s mom’s coffin, he came right up to his son, tears and snot coursing down his face. Before stopping to think it might be rude to do so, Shigeru found himself backing away in fear until his shoulders brushed up against the black-and-white-striped banners hung on the wall, and he could go no farther. With no hesitation, Okumura took both of Shigeru’s dry hands in his and squeezed them tight.
If one were to give a summary of the incoherent, sob-punctuated rambling that ensued for the next five minutes, it would go something like: “I’m sorry,” “I’m truly sorry,” “I’ll make sure you’re taken care of until you graduate,” “I’m sorry from the very bottom of my heart.” Last of all, Okumura said, “There are times when something that is more important to you than you ever knew, more meaningful than you ever thought, is torn out of your hands and carried so far away that you can never get it back.” He let his shoulders slump, patted Shigeru’s hand a few times, patted Shigeru’s shoulders a few times, and then shuffled away with little tiny steps, like a man who’d lost all hope. Watching Okumura as he walked away, it struck Shigeru that people could just burn out. They got old and they burned out. But then, Shigeru was in his early twenties and he was just as burned out as Okumura was. He didn’t feel any particular desire to shout at Okumura. Shigeru stood in the corner of the room all night, watching the adults as they cried and shouted and blew off steam however they felt like it.
The timing was unfortunate, to say the least: all of this took place in Shigeru’s third year of university when he was supposed to be venturing out into the turbulent sea of job-hunting. Shigeru felt barely capable of surviving a gentle wave lapping up on shore, let alone a turbulent sea. Between him and a sand castle built by a kid with a plastic spade, Shigeru suspected he’d be the first to collapse.
He had gone along with his cohorts to a job-hunting seminar held in one of those big lecture halls, but as he listened to the speakers going on about how to keep up one’s motivation and fill in “winning” application forms, he realized that all this was impossible for him, and left the room. Just being around all that positivity left him mentally drained.
Shigeru had sat down on a sun-bleached wooden bench in the courtyard and drunk a can of coffee as he waited for his friends to emerge from the lecture hall. He had no motivation, no energy, and no desire to apply himself. The idea of presenting his “achievements” in the best possible light on an application form seemed like the greatest torment imaginable. Why did you have to sell yourself, to fill out a stupid application form, to start working? There was just no way he could do that.
Now, watching the convoy of little sticks gliding past in the factory where he worked, Shigeru thought about the incense holders that stood both at his mom’s altar and beside her grave. Since his mom had died, Shigeru would light a stick of incense at their home altar every day without fail, and he visited her grave with great regularity. In the graveyard, Shigeru felt calm. As long as he was there, he could believe that his mom, who had vanished so abruptly, was actually with him, beneath that stone slab.
Sometimes, when Shigeru was standing in front of his mom’s grave, he would hear the faint strains of a song. He
