“A parent’s selfishness hurts the child the most.”
“The child is always the greatest victim in these situations.”
“Bringing such misfortune on her own child! What a cruel-hearted woman she must be!”
She goes to work. So that she and the child can get by, she works morning and night. Her mind and her body suffer, and still, she continues to work. They can hardly believe it. What is she thinking, working like that all the time and never spending any time with her child? Can such a person even be called a mother? No, let us be clear. A person like her does not deserve to be called a mother.
What’s more, to go by what they’ve heard, her night job is an, ahem, night job. Well, there you have it! A perfect fit for a woman of such loose morals! It’s all turning out just as we thought, they say, shaking their heads. They shake and shake, throwing their heads from side to side with such force it’s a miracle they don’t snap off. Everything is proceeding just as they imagined. It’s always the same with women like her—they all make the same mistakes. So dumbfounded are they by her flagrant lack of morals that they look to their own lives, their own lifestyles, and are relieved to discover how upright they appear in comparison, how little resemblance there is between them and her.
They don’t know this (and if they did they’d most certainly fall into a spluttering fit), but when she goes out to her night job, she takes the risk of leaving her daughter alone in the house. She doesn’t have parents or friends who can look after the child, and she cannot afford to pay for a regular babysitter.
Please let her behave today. Please don’t let anything happen to her.
Every day when she goes out to work she has to pray like this, as if she’s gambling, as if she’s writing a wish on one of those little slips of paper they hang up in the supermarket in July during the Tanabata festival. At work, all decked out in her slinky dress, speaking in a slinky voice, she can’t shake off her anxiety. Life feels like a never-ending game of Russian roulette. Just because today was okay doesn’t mean that tomorrow will be too. There is no end in sight. And yet she can’t do anything about it. She has no way out.
So she decides to step in and help. She has been observing the tricky situation of the woman and child. That’s part of her job.
First of all, she makes sure she has a thorough grasp of the issue. She then summarizes it in a report and submits it to her boss. Her boss passes eyes framed by thick black-rimmed spectacles over the report, immediately approves it, and sends her out on the case.
After the woman leaves for work, she quietly watches over the child. The room is somewhat messy. She decides to tidy up a little—not so much that it’ll be obvious right away, but just a bit.
The child notices her there right from the start. At first, the child pretends to play on her own, but then she can’t contain herself anymore and moves over to the corner, where she sits dead upright. Not easily intimidated, the child reaches out a hand to her kimono in amazement. She seems fascinated by the feel of it, so different to the clothes that she herself is wearing. Looking down with great tenderness at the child stroking her kimono, she produces a sweet from the fold of her wide sleeve and hands it to the child. The child gladly takes the sweet and begins sucking it. Each time the sweet moves in the child’s mouth, a lump appears in one of her cheeks. Seeing this, she smiles in satisfaction.
Sweets are her secret weapon. With sweets, she always manages to win children over. For a long time, she used to pay daily visits to the sweetshop, but at some point she realized it was an ineffective way of going about things, and instead started to carry a stockpile around with her. The owner of the sweetshop seems pleased by her decision to visit more infrequently too, although she could never understand why he found her presence quite so terrifying. Now she pops one into her own mouth, and looks at the child, mirroring the child’s one-cheeked lump. Soon they are old friends. After all, in the past she had gone by the name of the Child-Rearing Ghost. That wasn’t a title they gave you for nothing. There were very few children who didn’t take to her. “Hey, ghost lady!” they would call out to her affectionately.
As soon as she began babysitting, she felt absolutely certain that this was what she’d been born (and had died) to do. (It should be acknowledged that she was headhunted for the position. Someone must have noticed her suitability for the work before she did.) While alive, it never once occurred to her that she’d find a job so perfect for her in the afterlife. In fact, she had never worked in her life. But jobs aren’t at all bad—that’s her view on the matter now.
When the child falls asleep, exhausted from all her playing, she gives the room a cursory cleanup and waits for the mother to come home. She looks around the room she shares with the child. She sees boxes crammed with stuffed toys and picture books, walls plastered with crayon drawings the child has made, a somewhat dingy balcony where clothes have been hung out to dry.
She’d like to show them this place. She thinks the same of all of the homes she visits. Here is a place where two people go about their lives. A place where two people are living, striving to keep going. What right do they have to bad-mouth her when they’ve
