A story by Hiroko Oyamada,
translated by David Boyd

Mothers
by Hiroko Oyamada
translated by David Boyd

I went outside, carrying my three-year-old in my arms. Mom was there, sitting on the veranda, dressed completely in black. Wild touch-me-nots were growing just beyond the toes of her sandals. It was almost evening and the sky looked thin and watery. When I sat down next to Mom and put my daughter on my lap, I realized that Mom’s clothes weren’t black at all. It was the same summer dress she’d been wearing for years: purple with purple polka dots. My daughter was looking down at her T-shirt, playing with the giant ribbon sewn to the front. Mom’s feet dangled off the edge of the veranda. She grumbled, “The garden’s a mess. It’s been like this ever since Dad passed. Dry, patchy lawn, unruly hedges … I can’t even tell the flowers from the weeds anymore.” She wasn’t entirely wrong. The garden wasn’t what it used to be when Grandpa was around. Still, it wasn’t that bad.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It’s a handful—always has been,” she muttered. Mom grew up in this house. Her husband had moved in when they got married, but he got sick and died before either of my grandparents. In this house Mom had cared for her sick husband, married off her daughter, and nursed her father; now she was looking after her bedridden mother. My little brother, who could never hold down a job, was living at home, too. He spent his days inside, happily glued to his computer.
There was a white plastic bag on the grass, not far from where Mom was sitting. I asked, “What’s that? Trash?” She looked at me like I was speaking another language. I pointed and tried again: “That white bag.”
“Oh, that?” Her eyes glazed over for a second or two, then she shut them tight, as if a bug had flown into her face. Slowly, she opened her eyes, leaned in and whispered in my ear: “Tomatoes.”
“Tomatoes?”
“Yeah.” Mom got up and turned the wrinkled bag upside-down. Three tomatoes came tumbling out. On the brownish grass, they were a brilliant red. “From our garden,” Mom said. We had a small vegetable patch at the back of the garden, and tomatoes were in season, but there was no way that these were ours. It was probably the weather, but most of our tomatoes had turned out misshapen and inedible. The bottoms were fully ripe, but the tops were green and hard as plastic. The three tomatoes on the lawn were nothing like those deformed vegetables. They were perfect, beautiful.
“You remember that guy?” Mom mentioned a name I’d never heard before, but she made it sound like it was someone we knew well. “He’s always coming into the garden, picking our tomatoes and handing them out…”
“Handing them out?”
“To neighbors, I guess.”
“Why?”
“He said Dad asked him to.” I could hear voices in the distance. A cicada was buzzing. “Really, I wouldn’t put it past your grandpa,” Mom said. “Those two go way back. Anyway, he said nobody wanted them—because they were overwatered or half-eaten by insects or something—so he brought them back.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s,” I stopped for a second to think how to put it, “terrible.” There was more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the words.
Mom nodded. “Yeah. It’s been this way ever since Dad died… Kei-chan!” Her voice rose sharply as she called my daughter’s name. I looked down. My daughter was staring at the tomatoes by Mom’s feet. A white light from the skin of the tomatoes was shining in the black of her eyes. Mom’s voice shook as she said, “Even you…”
“Hellooo.” A voice called from beyond the gate. There was a little old man there, looking at us. He seemed kind of familiar. He was bald and hunched over, with a friendly expression. He had a gray windbreaker on, like the one my grandpa used to wear. He grinned as he called out, “Furukawa-san!” Mom said nothing back. She hurried over, sat down and clung to me. “Furukawa-saaan!” That had been my name for so many years that I was about to answer him myself, but Mom clutched my knee like she wanted me to keep quiet. The only sound was that cicada, hissing like boiling oil. Then I felt something rising inside of me. Black—no, dark. In no time, it was darker than black. I couldn’t see the yard, or Mom, or my daughter on my lap. I closed my eyes. I felt something warm on my back. I jumped before I realized it was Mom. She had one arm over my shoulder and the other around my daughter, her body in the shape of a triangle. I followed her lead and held my daughter as tightly as I could. My daughter’s back rose and fell steadily with every breath. I put my cheek up to her and could smell her breath. Everything’s fine—nothing bad has taken her away. That’s all that matters. The smell of tomatoes filled my nose. I felt Mom’s body rocking while she held us. It was almost like she was stamping her feet. All I could hear was squish, squish, squish. It was already perfectly dark, but getting even darker.
The man’s voice came again from inside the darkness. “Furukawa-san, here they are, same as always.” I thought I felt something like water splash against my ankle. The strong smell of grass.
“Thanks so much, my mother will…” It was a woman’s voice, faint, shrill, a little shaky.
“Tell her to come over when she’s feeling better, okay?”
“Thanks so much, she’ll be so…”
“I know it won’t be easy, but she can’t stay in bed. Old age starts in the legs…”
“Thanks so much…”
“She’s got a lot of life left to live—her husband’s share, too.”
“She’ll be so happy… Thanks so much.”
The cicada crescendoed, then flew into the air.
“Be seeing you,” said the voice at the gate.
I felt Mom’s arms go slack, then I opened my eyes slowly.
Everything was just as it had been. It was evening and we were on the veranda. The sky was starting to turn a golden yellow. Bats were flying overhead. I saw the old man walking away from the gate—even from behind, he looked just like Grandpa. Mom took a deep breath, then let go of us. A breeze cooled the sweat on my back. When I looked over, there was a white bag next to Mom. Red was showing through the plastic. Inside were large, perfectly round—
“Tomatoes?” It was Grandma, calling Mom from the house. Mom got up and went in, leaving the plastic bag where it was. It tipped over and a couple of tomatoes rolled out. All of a sudden, the heavy smell of soy sauce and sugar filled the air while another cicada next to me started to buzz.

Translator: David Boyd

David Boyd (b. 1981) is an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He has translated three novellas by Hiroko Oyamada: The Factory (2019), The Hole (2020), and Weasels in the Attic (2022). He won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the second time for his translation of The Hole. His translations of Kuniko Mukōda’s “Nori and Eggs for Breakfast,” Hiroko Oyamada’s “Something Sweet,” and Kanoko Okamoto’s “Sushi” appear in vol. 1 of MONKEY. For vol. 2, he translated Oyamada’s “Along the Embankment” and an excerpt from the novel Takaoka’s Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. His translation of Oyamada’s “Turtles” appears in vol. 3. With Sam Bett, he co-translated three novels by Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs (2020), Heaven (2021), and All the Lovers in the Night (2022).

Author: Hiroko Oyamada

Hiroko Oyamada (b. 1983) is one of Japan’s most promising young writers. Her short novels The Factory, The Hole, and Weasels in the Attic were translated by David Boyd and published by New Directions. Her story “Spider Lily” was translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter and published in the Japan issue of Granta (Spring 2014). “Lost in the Zoo” and “Extra Innings,” translated by David Boyd, appear in vols. 6 and 7 of Monkey Business. “Something Sweet,” “Along the Embankment,” and “Turtles,” also translated by David Boyd, are featured in MONKEY, vols. 1–3.

More stories by Hiroko Oyamada