She’s done all there is to do and is sitting very still watching the baby’s sleeping face as the woman comes home. She kicks off her shoes at the door and rushes straight to the back room where the child is sleeping.
The woman doesn’t notice her sitting there. But she doesn’t go out of her way to make her presence known. There is no need to rush things. As the days go by, she will come to notice her gradually. She will come to sense her presence in the emotional stability of her child, in the tidiness of her apartment, and then she will be ready to accept her. When that happens, she can proceed to the next level, and make herself seen. She will be able to openly help her in all aspects of her life. She will be freed from the game of Russian roulette, and at some point, a friendship will begin to blossom between the two. It has always been that way in the past.
She can make her and the child happy. That’s the thing she feels the most proud of. It’s something they can’t do, something they don’t even attempt to do. But she can do it, and she will do it. That’s what sets her apart from them. She is relieved by how little resemblance there is between her and them. She watches her as she squeezes the child’s hand and lets out a big sigh, and she nods in satisfaction.
She touches her hand very gently to the child’s cheek, and then starts to change out of her work clothes. The slinky dress falls to the floor in a puddle, so she appears to be standing in a pool of still water. Her day’s work is over.
As one of them vanishes, the other takes a shower, burrows her squeaky-clean face next to the child, and falls asleep.
Enoki
At first, Enoki was utterly confused.
It started suddenly. Without any forewarning or explanation, people began visiting. They came in droves to find her. Initially, Enoki had no idea what they had come for. When she finally understood, she was flabbergasted.
Yes, she was aware that there was something a little unusual about her body. Specifically, she had two largish burrs on the lower section of her trunk. But she thought nothing of it. Everything and everyone has an idiosyncrasy or two, including hackberries like herself. It’s hardly anything to marvel at. Nowadays, people term it “individuality.” In any case, the lumps were no big deal to Enoki, and she didn’t give them much thought. Burrs were just burrs.
And yet, people said that Enoki was special. People took her knobbly, rounded outgrowths for something extraordinary. They stood in front of them and prayed, and carried off the resin oozing out of them. What on earth was going on? Their behavior bewildered Enoki. It seemed to her a kind of madness.
The women were particularly strange. Watching all these desperate women as they joined their hands in prayer and bowed their heads to her, Enoki felt she was missing something. It was something she never truly got used to, but in the beginning, when she was particularly unused to it, she would feel the rage bubbling up inside her. What the hell are you people playing at?
When it first occurred to Enoki that people saw her burrs as breasts and her resin as milk, she shuddered. Even now, when she recollects that day, there is only one word to describe her feeling, and that word is disgust.
Allegedly, the “sweet dew” that was Enoki’s resin had special properties. If mothers with trouble lactating rubbed the resin on their breasts, they would start producing milk. Give me a break!
Allegedly, Enoki’s “sweet dew” was no different from human breast milk, so if the rubbing proved fruitless, you could feed the resin directly to your babies and they would grow up healthy and strong. Give me a break, guys!
Every time she heard people around her in the shrine grounds spouting this crazy nonsense, Enoki would shout the same thing in her mind, flapping her leaves in frantic resistance, but nobody noticed. Everyone was so obsessed by her burrs and her resin, they had no time for anything else.
People loved to see things in other things. Enoki knew that very well. You could even say that this was the starting point for all religion, and moreover, that it wasn’t always a bad thing. But when people saw the burrs on her body as human breasts, Enoki felt a strong discomfort. Her burrs were just plain old burrs, and her resin definitely wasn’t “sweet dew.” In fact, she sometimes found herself worrying about the adverse effect it might have on the human body if ingested. Surely you really shouldn’t be feeding young human bodies that stuff? But the humans were just that eager to depend upon Enoki’s special powers—powers that Enoki herself didn’t believe in.
After years mulling over her inexplicable disgust, Enoki concluded that what she truly objected to was the way in which humans used their own yardsticks to affix meanings onto things that had nothing to do with them. They did this to objects around them, and even to elements of nature. People would pick vegetables that looked like parts of the human body, then feature them in TV news items about how “obscene” they were, when really the only thing making those vegetables “obscene” was the gaze of the people looking at them. A firm udon noodle was, for some reason, compared to the tautness of the female body; varieties of fruits were assigned women’s names. When she
