The Meaning of Family
Later that evening, I let out a long, exhausted yawn as I basked in a piping-hot bathtub. My breath blew wispy patterns in the steam rising out from the water before vanishing into nothingness, and it felt like all my fatigue was dissipating right along with it.
“Is the water hot enough for you, Kou-kun?” called a voice from the other side of the bathroom’s fogged-up glass door.
“Yeah, it’s perfect... Thanks for letting me use your bath...”
“Hee hee, that’s quite all right! Take your time and relax, okay?”
“Yeah, thank you very much...” Well, that was a pretty inane exchange on my part. I couldn’t help it, though. Living on my own had turned me into a slovenly shower person, and I virtually never had the time or opportunity to really soak it up in a bath. This was a rare event.
“Not sure if I should really be getting this comfortable here...” The drowned corpses of the little chibi angel and devil that were supposed to be arguing on my shoulders were bobbing up and down in the bathwater, so I was forced to play out my internal conflict single-handedly.
For the sake of understanding that internal conflict, however, I first have to establish how I ended up kicking back and relaxing in a bathtub in a house I’d never been to before while talking with an adult woman I’d only just met. I’m definitely not kicking off a flashback to buy myself more rub-a-dub-dub time, for the record!
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“Mmnngh... I can’t run another step...”
“Oh, great, more played-out sleep-talking...almost. Kinda. Actually, what? Isn’t it supposed to be ‘I can’t eat another bite’?” There was nobody nearby and conscious enough to appreciate my retort, but I went ahead and made it anyway. Kazuki, asleep on my back, failed to acknowledge my wit. It was well past the time that good boys and girls went to bed, and well into the time when bad boys and girls (plus part-time workers) woke up.
Thankfully, I had both a plan and a destination. I almost panicked at first and was just about ready to take her back to my place when her cell phone rang. The display read “Mom,” and, long story short, I managed to explain the situation and get directions to her house. It was pretty far away, but my own place was equally far in the opposite direction, so I didn’t really gain or lose any time by taking her there.
“Bluhh...”
“Eek?!” I felt a sudden, wet sensation on the back of my neck. Kazuki was drooling on me. I figured that carrying her on my back would look a lot less suspicious than carrying her in my arms, on the off chance somebody noticed us, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that she’d subject me to that sort of attack!
Her assault didn’t let up past that point either. Sometimes she’d squeeze my neck hard enough to half-throttle me, and other times she’d loosen her grip enough to almost fall off my back. It was just one thing after another. I somehow managed to cope with her drowsy offense and follow the directions I’d received to her place.
It turned out to be a perfectly normal single-family home in a perfectly normal residential neighborhood. Kazuki’s family name was written on a plate by the door, so no real ambiguity there, but even if I did have the wrong house somehow, I didn’t especially care. As long as there was a roof overhead, I could just chuck her inside and go home. I rang the doorbell, and a moment later, a voice rang out through the attached intercom.
“Yes, who is it?”
“Umm, It’s Kunugi! We talked on the phone just a little while ago?” I waited, but nobody replied. I don’t actually have the wrong house, do I? Just as a tinge of worry was beginning to set in, the front door opened, and a notably attractive woman stepped outside.
“Oh, umm, thanks for coming! Or maybe I should say ‘welcome home’?”
It was the same woman I’d spoken with on the phone. Her slow, somewhat gentle manner of speech was unmistakable. So this is Kazuki’s mother? She didn’t bear much resemblance to her ever-lively daughter, so I presumed that Kazuki must take after her dad instead.
“I’d say ‘welcome home’ works just fine. Hear that, Kazuki? C’mon, wake up!”
“Oh, I don’t think she’ll be waking up any time soon. I always have the hardest time getting her up in the mornings!”
“O-Oh, okay.”
“Why don’t you come inside for now?”
“Huh? Ah, I mean, sure. Thanks...” I couldn’t exactly dump her on the doorstep and leave at that point, so I ended up accepting her mother’s invitation and walking inside with Kazuki still on my back.
“Hee hee! Welcome home!” She greeted us again as I took off my shoes and put on a pair of slippers. She was talking to Kazuki, obviously, but for just a moment it felt like she was addressing me too. I felt a bit bashful. Then she sniffed me. “Umm, Kou-kun, was it? You smell a little strange...”
“Ah... Sorry ’bout that...” Even after everything that had already happened, the durian was still causing me trouble. I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time why the hell that lunatic felt the need to blow one of those up in my room.
“Hmm... Oh, I know! You should take a bath, Kou-kun.”
“Huh? Ah, but, I was just here to drop off Kazuki... I mean, to drop off Rena-san. I should really—”
“No need to make excuses, just take a bath. Besides, I already made dinner for you after we spoke on the phone. I can’t send you home without even thanking you for carrying Rena all the way here!”
“I, err, I mean... I-I guess I’ll borrow your tub, then...” She was smiling in a perfectly friendly sort of manner, but at the same time, she had this crazily intimidating presence that made it impossible to refuse. I agreed to stay in spite of myself. I discovered that she had one thing in common with her daughter after all: they were both really good at packing a variety of widely varied emotions into their smiles.
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So, yup, thanks to the old man and his durian, I got to take a bath. Rub-a-dub-dub.
“I’ll leave a change of clothes for you out here, okay, Kou-kun?”
“A change of clothes? I can just wear my uniform home; it’s fine.”
“Your uniform was just as smelly as you were, so I already put it into the washing machine. I’ll run it through the dryer, so it’ll be all ready for you tomorrow morning!”
“Huh? Wait, you mean...?”
“That’s right! You’re staying here tonight!”
Staying...here...? Getting covered in durian gunk ended up causing me to spend the night in a house inhabited by two beautiful women. You might be wondering, “How the hell does that follow?” and frankly, same. How the hell does that follow?
“Rena’s clothes might be a touch small on you, though...”
“More than a touch! They wouldn’t fit at all! She’s a year younger than me and a girl on top of it!”
“In that case, I’ll let you borrow some of my husband’s clothes! Oh, my husband’s working away from home at the moment, so don’t let wearing them make you feel uncomfortable, okay?”
“Th-That’s really not the problem here...” She laid out a set of clothes, then left the changing room. I spent a while longer soaking it up in the tub, pondering the fact that over an extended, step-by-step process, I’d somehow been coerced into spending the night.
And don’t even get me started on the house-inhabited-by-two-beautiful-women part! The thought crossed my mind, got stuck, and wouldn’t leave. Kazuki alone was bad enough, but her mother was on a whole new level.
I had a feeling when I was talking to her on the phone, and I knew I was right the moment she stepped out of the house: if the two of them were to go out on the town together, people would absolutely assume they were siblings instead of mother and daughter. She really did look that young, but at the same time, her figure was extremely filled out in a very adult-like manner. Unlike her daughter, who was quite slender on the whole, Mother Kazuki had a classic hourglass figure.
I, meanwhile, was a virgin who’d only just had his first kiss with a partner better left undiscussed. Actually, considering how that whole thing went down, I was even worse off than your everyday virgin! I was in no position to deal with this!
Anyway, I spent way longer than I actually had to in the tub getting beaten down by an incomprehensible, anguished internal conflict and was all pruney by the time I finally got out.
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“Man, talk about a nice bath, Senpai!”
“It’s your house, isn’t it?” After getting out of the bath, I’d made my way to the living room, plopped down on the couch, and sorta just sat there blankly. Kazuki had woken up at some point along the way and got into the bath a little while after me. She toweled off her hair as she walked over and struck up a conversation.
That spacing-out-on-the-couch period had been so unimaginably awkward, I’d wished that I could skip over the whole thing in a single sentence, so honestly, I was pretty relieved when she came over to talk to me. Not that I’d ever admit it, of course.
Her mother told me that she had to finish preparing dinner and holed herself up in the kitchen. Being left alone in somebody else’s house with nothing to do is the absolute worst. Like, seriously, if you tweaked the circumstances just right you could actually torture someone by putting them through this.
“Sorry to make you go to all this trouble,” she said.
“It’s fine. I’m the one who made you chase after me in the first place.”
“That so? In that case, I guess we can call ourselves even! I’m gonna sit down. ’Scuse me.”
“There’s plenty of space to sit somewhere that’s not next to me.”
“It’s my house, isn’t it?” She sat down on the same couch as me, though not close enough that we were bumping shoulders or anything. That was a bit of a relief.
“You feeling okay? Running until you pass out can’t possibly be normal.”
“No worries, happens all the time. Actually, I guess I should say that it happened all the time.”
“Can’t relate, no matter what tense you put it in.” When people get tired, they feel the urge to take a break. The psychological impact of being tired puts most folks out long before the actual physical exhaustion gets the chance.
Kazuki, in contrast, seemed to have no such sense of restraint. Her body could be in pieces, and it still wouldn’t be enough to keep her spirit down. Thanks to that, she could keep going till the absolute furthest limit of her physical capability until she literally collapsed. Yeah, this girl’s a monster for sure.
“I used to collapse all the time,” she elaborated, “but it’s been ages since I’ve really worn myself out like that.”
“’Cause you have more stamina now?”
“That’s part of it, but the main reason’s that my club takes up a ton of time, so I don’t have much left to actually exercise.” She exercises less now that she’s in an athletic club? What a peculiar, mysterious life form I’ve discovered. “Plus, it’s really hard to find people who’re faster or have more endurance than me, so I don’t get many chances to push myself to my limit. And speaking of, you were awesome, A-senpai! I’ve never run like that before—it felt like my life span was draining out of my body right along with my sweat! It was like I was running myself to death! It ruled!”
“Yeah, sorry, really can’t relate.”
“The closer you get to death, the more you appreciate the fact that you’re alive!”
“Stop, that’s terrifying!” Fixating on death doesn’t make you more alive; it just brings you closer to dying! And the only thing waiting for you beyond that point’s, well, death.
Although, I suppose that barely making it through by the skin of your teeth does have a way of making you appreciate how nice it is to be alive... That’s probably what she was trying to say in the first place. But I couldn’t really see things from her perspective and didn’t really want to either.
“Anyway,” I continued, “I guess we never really talked much before now, but now that we have, I know one thing for sure: you’re a huge weirdo.”
“Oh, like you can talk, Senpai.”
“What? I’m a perfectly normal, utterly average high schooler!”
“Well I’m a perfectly normal, utterly average high schooler too!” Or so she claimed, but I was having a really hard time imagining her fitting into that framework.
Even if you disregard her dedicated field of expertise, she was cute enough that rumors about her were even floating around in my grade level. Popularity like that’s hard to ignore. Incidentally, her sporty, boyish style garnered a fair bit of attention from some of the girls. Supposedly, they treated her as their “prince,” but mentioning that felt like it’d be kicking a hornet’s nest, so I decided against it.
“Kunugi-kuuun, Renaaa, dinner’s ready!”
“Ah, I’ll help set the table, mom!” I noted how she sounded even more boyish when she dropped the semi-polite tone she used to talk to me as she leapt up from the sofa. I followed along after her and volunteered to help as well.
“Ah, that one’s my cup, Senpai! You can put it right over there.”
“Gotcha.” She ended up handling most of the actual table-setting while I just followed her orders. Her mother let a chuckle slip as she watched us at work.
“You know, I can’t help but think that the two of you look less like lovers and more like siblings!”
“Huh?” I reacted with confusion while Kazuki let out a strangled gasp. We both froze up. I didn’t drop the plate that I was holding, but honestly, that was more luck than anything else. I was so shocked that it would’ve been totally unsurprising if I broke it—cliché though it would’ve been.
“We’re not dating, mom! Jeez!”
“Oh, you’re not? Weren’t you telling me about the upperclassman boy you’d taken an interest in, though?”
“That’s a different boy!”
“Oh, my!” She looked over at me, waiting expectantly. Best I could tell, she thought Kazuki was just too embarrassed to admit it.
“We’re not dating, ma’am.”
“Oh, not you too, Kunugi-kun!”
“No, seriously, I’m not kidding. We’re, well... The guy she’s into is a friend of mine.” The full story was a bit too complicated to sum up that easily. Kazuki had already confessed to me that she’d given up on her crush, after all. Glancing over, she looked a bit conflicted but was managing to cover it up with a slightly strained smile. Her heartbreak was still pretty fresh, and talking about it like that probably felt like pouring salt in the wound.
“Oh, is that so? I’m sorry, I suppose I was jumping to conclusions.”
“See, mom? C’mon, stop being rude to my senpai!”
Objectively speaking, I’d say that getting mistaken for Kazuki’s boyfriend was closer to an honor than an insult, but I couldn’t bring myself to joke around that flippantly considering the circumstances. It wouldn’t be funny, and unfunny jokes are basically never a good way to back people up.
That indescribably awkward atmosphere persisted as we moved into dinnertime. Kazuki’s mother served us a nice helping of curry. It’s the weirdest thing—curry’s normally considered Indian food, and yet when you make it in a particular way and serve it with a helping of rice, it becomes so Japanese that it’s practically our national comfort food.
“How is it, Kunugi-kun?” asked Kazuki’s mother. “Do you like it?”
“Yeah, it’s super tasty!”
“Heh heh, Senpai, you sound like a little kid!”
The curry she’d made really was delicious. It was my first time experiencing that sort of simple-but-maternal home-cooking flavor, and I was genuinely sorta moved. I felt like I might start crying if I let my guard down. Kazuki might’ve assumed that my overenthusiastic response was sarcasm, but the gentle, almost protective smile her mother turned towards me made it clear she was under no such misapprehension.
“You have quite an appetite!” Kazuki’s mother giggled. “I made plenty for you to have seconds, so don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Okay!” It suddenly struck me that her curry was the first proper meal I’d eaten all day. The thought that I’d almost fallen prey to Renge’s hellish cooking made me all the more enthusiastic about scarfing my meal down. Kazuki and her mother were both smiling in their own distinctive manners, which was a little embarrassing, but hunger brings out the honesty in people. I ended up polishing off a full five plates’ worth of curry. In other words, way too much!
“Thanks again for cooking...” I moaned.
“You’re very welcome,” replied Kazuki’s mother. “Rena’s my only child, but it’s sort of nice to have a boy around who can eat as much as she does!”
“Seriously, Senpai, where’d you put it all? Guess I ate a ton too, though!” She really did—a full three plates of curry. Funny how “three” sounds small on its own but huge when you’re talking about plates of curry.
“Do you have any siblings, Kou-kun?” asked her mother.
“Huh? No, I don’t.”
“I see, I see! Like I said, watching you and Rena chat makes me imagine what she’d have been like around an older brother if she had one. I think it’d be a lot like how she is with you!”
“I dunno about that,” said Kazuki. “Maybe if it was Ayase-senpai.”
“Ayase-kun is the boy you have a crush on, isn’t he?”
“Ugh... Y-Yeah, mom.” Even if she’d never actually asked him out, telling her parents she’d been heartbroken would still be a pretty tall order. Part of me wondered why she’d told her mom about her crush in the first place, but that sort of made sense too. It’s natural to want to talk about the good things in your life and hide the bad stuff.
“How about you, Kou-kun? Do you have a girlfriend or a crush on anyone?”
“Nope. Neither.”
“Oh, I’m surprised.”
“You are? Why?”
“Well, you’re quite the cutie, after all!”
“I-I am...?” I almost never got complimented on my appearance and could feel myself blushing. She was probably just flattering me, of course.
“Looks like you’re pretty bad at handling my mom, huh, Senpai?” cut in Kazuki.
“Wh...? H-Huh?!”
“Feels like you’re juuust a bit weirdly focused on her, you know?” She smirked as she called me out. It’s not like I didn’t like her mom, and I certainly wasn’t trying to fixate on her, but now that she’d pointed it out it was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Oh, my! You know you can always join the family, Kou-kun.”
“C’mon, not you too, mom!” I retorted sarcastically.
She let out an amused little shriek, then slapped me on my back. “‘Mom’?! Oh, Kou-kun, you rascal!” I guess that joke landed better than expected; she was really getting into the whole thing. It didn’t hurt, but it did make me feel really awkward again. Meanwhile, Kazuki Junior was still smirking at my expense.
“I think I found one of your weak points tonight, Senpai.”
“Shut it,” I grumbled. Turns out girls, and particularly mother/daughter combos, are pretty tough. They had me completely at their mercy, and all I could do was put on a strained smile and stick it out as they toyed with me. On the other hand, though, it got me thinking.
What would my life be like if I had parents?
Renge’s father, Gouki, viewed me as the son of his relative. He never treated Renge with the sort of familial intimacy that Kazuki and her mother expressed for each other—or at least, he never did so in front of me. That was probably partially just how their relationship worked and partially out of consideration for me on account of my own lack of parents.
As such, it sort of felt like this was my first time witnessing a real family. It was my first time experiencing the certain, distinctive warmth that comes along with it.
I never knew my mother or my father. My former self took all those memories with him when he vanished. I’d seen them in videos that were left over in the Myourenji household, but I couldn’t think of the people I saw on the screen as anything other than strangers. It seemed somehow right to think of them that way. I didn’t feel anything as I watched them, least of all pain.
And yet, for some reason, in that moment I felt a slight, sudden impulse to learn more about my parents. It wouldn’t help me feel the fact that they were my parents, and I knew it, but I still wondered if it might help me understand.
Maybe it would help me understand why the curry Kazuki’s mother made was so delicious.
Maybe it would help me understand why their smiles were so warm and dazzling in my eyes.
