Unsocial Distance (excerpt)

Translated from Japanese by Yuki Tejima

At ten, I stare down from the fire escape for hours, wanting to kill myself for the first time ever. At thirteen, I fight with my boyfriend and cut my wrist for the first time—something I will repeat for years to come. At sixteen, I get into drugs, waste away into nothing, drop out of school. I seesaw between bulimia and anorexia, pass the high school equivalency test, get into college. I try to do the college life thing but have nothing in common with my happy, bright classmates, and occupy myself with older rich men instead. I meet Kohki in class—he’s a year ahead of me—and we start going out. I quit the sugar daddies. The latest: me in a bed with an IV drip in my arm, staring up at the frosted glass window, wanting to die for the first time in a while.  

Why was my life like this? Why was I like this? Questions whirled in my head, woozy from the sedation, and I was just about to reach for the lock on the window when a soft voice called out, “Ms. Komine?” I turned. “Are you ready?” Words coated in sweetness to cover up something sinister. I nodded and rose from the bed, then followed the nurse with my IV pole in tow. I traced the base of my ring finger with my thumb. My ring was missing from its usual spot. On the operation table with my legs and arms secured, I was told to count, and I got as far as twenty-four. 

Wow, your vision really does blur.  

When I recognize Kohki in the haze, I’m glad it’s him I see and not anybody or anything else. I would have been gutted otherwise. 

“You okay?” 

I nod at the timid voice, then hear, “Go back to sleep.” I adjust my jaw and close my eyes, feeling my hand warm as Kohki wraps it in his. He was always asking me if I was okay. When he saw me staring out into space, when I was being more quiet than usual, when I slowed down as we walked. And when I smiled and said yeah I’m fine, relief swept across his face. He wanted to avoid, no, he was terrified of seeing me suffer in any way. Sweet, simple Kohki never doubted I was telling the truth; if Sana says she’s okay, she must be okay. 

“Hey…was I sleeping?” 

“Just for like, fifteen minutes.” 

“Oh…my head feels clearer.” 

“Do you want some water? You can have fluids now, right?” 

“Yeah. I have water in my bag. Can you grab it? Oh, and my ring too.” 

Given a job to perform, Kohki seemed to relax a little as he got my bag, took the cap off the water bottle before handing it to me, then pulled my ring out of his pocket. I hadn’t eaten in fifteen hours or had any fluids in eight, so I swallowed slowly, then slid my ring back on. Gradually, I felt myself return from an emergency state back to normal, everyday me.  

“Where’d you wait?” 

“The restaurant up the street.” 

“Were you able to read that book?”

“Yeah. It was crap.” 

I laughed, “You finished it?”  

He gave a nonchalant nod.  

“Liar. You skimmed it.” 

“I told you, it was crap!” 

Earlier, before the pre-op IV drip was attached to my arm, Kohki had shown me a book written by the CEO of the company where he’d recently been hired. Required reading before I start, he’d said with dread in his voice. 

“I could tell. The table of contents dripped with macho capitalist vibes.” 

“I’m going to be an employee there. Shoot me now.”  

Even in my current state, I worried about him. We were a couple of weak, helpless creatures who held each other up by worrying nonstop. You okay? You’re okay, right? That was the only way either of us could maintain our sanity. And in this moment, I was truly concerned for Kohki, who didn’t have the sense to choose a work of literature that might help him process love, sorrow, or death, thinking instead that the time was right for a vile book filled with some old dude’s crazy rants. 

This boy is going to lose his way at some point. That’s what I thought when I first met Kohki. But he kept proving me wrong, safely securing his college credits, safely submitting his papers, safely giving presentations, safely going about his job hunt, landing a safe corporate job. This sucks, he always said. He said it when he had to go to class or write a paper or give a presentation or go out for drinks or go home or call a restaurant for a reservation or study or look for a job or get a job. Why don’t you just not do it then? I almost snapped each time he said it, and it took everything I had to keep my mouth shut. Which I did, because even if he couldn’t stand whatever it was he was complaining about, he also cruised right through it; it was easy for him to go on living in this sad, sucky world. Unlike me. I’d barely made it this far, stumbling pretty much every step of the way. He got along with people and did fine in school, surviving without ever being dealt a death blow.  

He was the kind of guy who never seriously participated in anything but was everywhere all the time in a half-hearted kind of way, which meant nobody loved or hated him and he could continue to occupy space without anyone questioning his presence. He didn’t seem to have a whole lot going on inside but was able to wade through the world with a kind of shrewdness. That had been my impression. Which was why I didn’t expect him to confess out of nowhere that he didn’t like who he was at all. Do you ever think about dying? I asked, and when he mumbled, Yeah I do, looking both somber and insecure as he waited for my reaction, he became, for the first time, someone I could see myself with. 

Kohki held my hand, which I covered with my other hand, onto which he rested his open hand. We were like the world’s tiniest supergroup, existing solely to fulfill a shared mission.

“I guess I’m not ‘expecting’ anymore.” 

Expecting, he smiled sadly. Our baby was now dead, scraped from my uterus and suctioned with a machine. And a part of me had died with it. Maybe I could have the baby, is there any way I could have the baby, I’m scared to have it but also scared not to have it, is there any other way out of this? The things I used to worry about nonstop, I didn’t have to think about anymore. I’d been banished from one hell and propelled back to my everyday one. Both were brutal but seeing as how I was now free from swollen breasts, discomfort in my belly, and early-stage morning sickness, I guess this could be considered a solution, as lame and generic a conclusion as that was.  

“It just wasn’t our time, but we’re gonna be okay.”  

Kohki’s normalness, his simple wish to find happiness, his innocent belief in the possibility that the world could be a decent place—I loved and hated him for these things. He complained about 99% of the spaces he inhabited and supposedly couldn’t stand people, school, and socializing, yet he got away with playing the part of a nice, harmless guy, even as he looked down on everyone and everything. He never let on how distorted he really was, pretending to be a good person when he wasn’t one at all, admiring the self-centered though he could never be selfish himself. He hated who he was but didn’t make any visible effort to change. He expected to live a safe, unremarkable life that culminated in a natural death, and so he plodded along without ever straying from the pre-destined path, muttering This sucks the entire way. I loved and hated him for all of it.  

Following the operation, I was prescribed antibiotics and a uterotonic, and we left the OB-GYN, pumping hand sanitizer into our palms outside the clinic door. I thought about the pregnant women in the waiting room. “Must be hard being pregnant right now,” I said, then felt sorry for myself for not being able to stay pregnant. Kohki took my hand and asked if I was okay, and I mumbled that I was hungry.

“Are you allowed to eat? Do you want to grab something?”

“They said I could have dinner, so I should be okay. What about you? Do you have to get home?” 

“I’m good. Let’s get something around here. We can cab it back to your house after. I’ll drop you off. You don’t feel dizzy or nauseous?” 

“I feel pretty normal, actually. Bleeding’s not that bad.” 

“Good,” he said, but I could sense his uncertainty. He was veering off his intended path, and it was all because of me. If I hadn’t been in his life, he would never have become the guy who got his girlfriend pregnant. I felt bad. We walked into a Chinese restaurant and without thinking twice ordered stir-fry noodles, char siu with spicy green onion sauce, and beer. 

“I thought you couldn’t drink.” 

“You have it. I just want a couple sips.” 

“Okay. So how many times a day do you have to take your medication?” 

“Twice. Morning and night. For five days.” 

“I’m checking in with you every morning and night for the next five days.” 

“I’m not a baby,” I laughed. 

“But you’ll forget, I know it.” Kohki laughed too.  

We discussed Covid-19 and dished about random people from class and I started to feel a little better. The emergency was over, I thought vaguely. From here, my life would be attending company orientations one after another, doing internships, alumni interviews, resume after resume, endless written exams and interviews—and though I couldn’t picture it now, I’d get an offer from some company, and once I had a job lined up I would complete my thesis and then, just like Kohki did once he’d cleared all these things, I’d groan about not wanting to start work. 

“I give up. I’m full. I think my stomach shrank.” 

“I’ll finish it.” Kohki started to stuff what was left of my noodles into his skinny body.  

“Didn’t you have pasta at the restaurant?” 

“Yeah. But it wasn’t that much.” 

“You didn’t say you were seeing me today, did you?” 

“No.” 

“Is dinner going to be waiting for you?” 

“Probably.” 

“Won’t you be full?” 

“I’ll just have a bite.” 

“Why don’t you say you ate already?” 

“Because I don’t want to be asked who I ate with or what I had.”

Hmm, I said and swallowed some beer. Kohki’s mom hated me. He couldn’t tell her he was out with me because she recoiled at the mere mention of my name, which meant he usually lied when leaving the house. It wasn’t so much that he was spineless or weak-willed; he just never wanted to rock the boat. Then again, maybe not rocking the boat was a choice made by the spineless and weak-willed. My means of survival had been to reject and eliminate everything from my life that I couldn’t stand, and here he was trying not to make waves. We might agree on some fundamental things, but in every other way, we were opposites. 

“I wonder what your mom would do if she found out about the abortion.” 

“Probably tell me to stop seeing you. She thinks you’re to blame for everything that happens to us. She’s out of her mind.” 

“But doesn’t she think that because you haven’t told her how you really feel about us?” 

“I told her. That you and I are serious and we want to get married someday.” 

“But she thinks I brainwashed you into talking nonsense, right?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t believe anything I say.” 

There’s an element of brainwashing in romance. It’s similar to religion in that way. If only Kohki was the type of person who’d counter with an argument like this. But no, he was powerless and had no energy to combat negativity of any kind. He never pushed back, not even when his opinions were denied or dismissed. He would just think, This person doesn’t get me, and crawl into his little shell. What complicated things was that even when he holed himself up like that, he could still somehow get along with people, I have no idea how, with or without a connection. 

“Don’t force yourself to eat, okay?” I said, knowing I couldn’t just scream, Come out here! and drag him out of his safe place. He knew his vulnerabilities better than anyone, which was why he took shelter inside a rock-hard shell in the first place, and I feared it would crumble like an old clay pot if I tried to pull him out. No matter how exasperated I felt, my irritation melted when I saw his groggy expression in the morning, caught sight of him staring hopelessly at his messy hair in the mirror, noticed his expression ease when I hugged and kissed him, watched the way his awkward hands tried to serve food from a big plate, knew he wouldn’t come during sex until he was sure I was satisfied, and saw how, when he was naked, his toned muscles made him look like a sculpture.  

I didn’t blame his mom for not understanding why her son with the flawless grades, appearance, and manners, the boy who had never stolen money from her wallet or taken a stranger’s umbrella from the rack, could go out with a nutjob like me, whose only talent was to make her boyfriend go off the rails. Kohki had probably never rebelled against his parents, disobeyed his teachers, or fought against injustice in society–never.  

“Hey, I was thinking...” 

“Yeah?” 

“That I could see us having a kid someday. And I’d be good with that.” 

“I thought the same thing,” I said, and Kohki reached over the table for my hand.  

I’ve never once thought about having kids. 

Can you imagine bringing a kid into the world who hates himself like I do? 

Things are so good between us. Can’t it be just the two of us? 

That was Kohki whenever the topic of kids came up, even though he broke out into a huge grin every time we passed a baby or toddler. Regardless, I found myself relieved to hear he’d given our situation some actual thought, though he couldn’t seem to wrap his head around it exactly. I thought I was the only one agonizing about our baby’s future. The fact that he made me think this at all was proof he wasn’t cut out for any of it, but I knew this and stayed with him anyway, and I had to admit, his words made me feel better.  

Is there any chance of a future in which we have the baby? I’d asked once we’d made our appointment and were now just counting down the days until doomsday. The look that crossed his face then. His reply? I don’t think now’s the best time, personally, but if you really want the baby, I’ll work hard to support us, and I don’t know if it’ll be enough, but I want to do everything I can to take care of you and the child. If this is what you want, I want to respect your decision.  

He’d pretty much nailed it. What to say when you don’t want a baby but your girlfriend does. Good ol’ Kohki. I wouldn’t have expected anything less.

“I’m sure we’ll have another chance,” I said. For some reason, I was now the one doing the cheering up, while he nodded with tears in his eyes. His face had turned crimson from the half-cup of beer—I’d ended up drinking the other half. I slid my hand from his angular cheekbone to his chin. “You’re all red,” I said, and he looked at me with those vulnerable eyes, then covered my hand with his.