Chapter Text
“I’m back”, Ogata mumbled as he closed the apartment door behind him. Stepping into the apartment, a blast of warm air hit him. It smelled of dust and beer, but also like home.
Kicking off his tiny shoes, he threw the letters he had taken from the downstairs box onto the pile on the floor. He tried his best to lift the bulging grocery store bag with one hand as he pushed his way to the kitchen from the entranceway. He almost tripped twice onto the clothes strewn about the hallway. He flipped the light switch on the wall. He glanced over the combined kitchen and living room.
“Hyakkuun! When did you get back?” Ogata’s mother slurred from the living room floor. She was half buried in the kotatsu situated in the middle of the room. The other half was covered in some gossip magazine she had been reading but had long forgotten about.
The child finished putting the food into the fridge before answering, “I just got back. Had to go to the store.”
“Eeh? Didn’t we still have hotpot? I just made some, right?”
“That was four days ago.”
“Oh really?”
Ogata joined his mother by the kotatsu that had become their dining table as they had no better piece of furniture to use. He took out his small wallet, a plush black pouch shaped like a cat’s head, and poured the coins and receipt onto the table. One coin rolled onto the floor and from there off somewhere. He could look for that later. He carefully counted the change, piled it onto the piece of paper and pushed it to her mother’s side of the table.
The mother yawned as she read through the list of purchased items, “Croquettes, convenience rice, milk, shampoo and some microwave meals. Huh? You remembered! Did you get my favorite brand?”
She was referring to the shampoo, to which Ogata nodded and lifted the bottle to the table.
“Thank you”, she rolled onto her other side, still laying on the floor, “Mommy will try her best and go to work tomorrow! Tomorrow I will go back to work! Then we can go out and eat something delicious! What would you like? Hamburgers? Curry? Mommy will make this up for you. Mommy promises.”
“You have stayed home for four days in a row.”
Ogata did not want to go out to eat. He just wanted to be home with his mother. They could cook together and she could read him a picture book before bed.
“I know! Boss keeps reminding me every day! I tell him every time that I am coming and he should just wait!”
“The teacher said that there is another parent and teacher meeting coming.”
“Oh? Tsurumi? I already told him that I can’t come. Those are always after normal hours, right? Tell him that mommy is out working hard during those times and can’t come!”
Ogata’s mother worked at the town’s only bar where she was a hostess and a bartender. She would still be sleeping after a long night of working when Ogata woke up, leave for work while Ogata was still in daycare and come home, usually drunk, when Ogata was already sleeping. The containers of anglerfish hotpot and the makeup strewn across the kotatsu were the only things that reminded Ogata that his mother had been there during the day.
Ogata would describe his mother as an ocean. There were days when she was calm and collected, looking like any other working mother, but then there were the days when she would scream, cry and throw everything in their small apartment around. She would then sleep and lie around like a dead body for about a week before she made a recovery. Sometimes it was longer, sometimes shorter. Both with the highs and the lows.
She had been brought to yet another low when she had been stalking her old lover’s social media page. Coincidentally that man was also Ogata’s father. She had sat the boy onto her lap one evening and showed him photos from her phone.
“Just look at her! Just what does he see in her? Just because she has more money than me and is a bit prettier!” she had clearly been drinking, Ogata could tell from the smell, “He really did leave me, us, for someone like her.”
Ogata’s mother had actually been a top geisha in Tokyo’s Asakusa district in the past when she and his father had met. The two had fallen madly in love. She had ended up quitting her work when she found out that she was pregnant with Ogata. The man had been happy, promising that they would move in together. He had even bought them an apartment, telling her to move in there first and that he would not be far behind. Then when the baby was born, they could live as a family and watch the little kid grow up.
But he never came. Ogata’s mother gave birth to him alone. Soon after her grandmother moved in with her from Ibaraki to help her take care of the baby. That must’ve been when something inside of her finally broke. The new mother would later learn that the man had bought them the apartment and made her move there, far from Tokyo, to get her out of the way. He would soon marry another woman and would never contact Ogata’s mother again. Apparently he had met her while at a party. A party for his company. He ran one of Japan’s largest IT companies and therefore had the money and means to brush a simple fling with a geisha under the rug and bury that rug underground under five meters of concrete.
It was hard for Ogata to exactly hate a man he had never met. He could always hate him for his mother and for what he had done to her. His mother would pet him on the head and tell him how much he looked like his father. That they had the same eyes. Looking at the happy faces in the photos, Ogata could not see the resemblance in his dark eyes.
“And this right here is your younger brother. Look”, Ogata’s mother had swiped to reveal a photo of three people smiling at a beach. The woman was the wife his mother hated so much and the man next to her the man Ogata would never call father. Or as his mother would call him ‘the shitbag’. She did have more colorful names for him as well but those were reserved for her angrier outbursts. The third person Ogata had not seen before. His mother had shown her many photos, but never this one.
Ogata had been five when he had first learned that he was a big brother. And that the man that had deserted them had had another little boy with another woman. Another little boy who looked nothing like him. Nothing like his big brother.
“He is about two years younger than you. Look”, her mother had pointed to the smiling boy in the middle of the photo, “That is your younger brother. His name is Yuusaku.”
Whether it was the resentment his mother felt for the couple tainting his mind or something else completely, Ogata could not tell. All he knew was that he wanted to wipe that stupid smile off the younger boy’s face. Maybe if it wasn’t for him. Maybe if he had not been born Ogata’s mother could still be with that man. Then she would be happy all the time. She would pet Ogata’s head and tell him that they would go out and feed the ducks together after she picked him up from daycare.
“How was daycare?” the mother tried her best to start a conversation.
They had settled down to eat dinner. Ogata had pushed his mother to take a nice hot shower now that they had shampoo again. Meanwhile Ogata would prepare their meal. He had carefully piled the rice and croquettes on two plates and warmed them both up in the microwave. Then he got some sauce and a piece of cabbage from the fridge. He smelled both items to make sure that they had not gone bad too before cutting the cabbage. His mother probably would not have let him use a knife of any size. She did not have to know. Ogata settled on the smallest knife he found and cut the cabbage into crude and way too big pieces before piling those on the plates as well. Finally, he poured them both a glass of water and set the table.
“There was a new kid?” Ogata tried to fit an especially large piece of cabbage into his mouth. Mother liked cabbage with fried food, so they had to have cabbage if they had croquettes.
“Now?”
Ogata nodded.
“How was he? Or was it a girl?”
“A boy. He is from Russia. I guess he was nice”, Ogata mumbled the last part under his breath.
“Must’ve been a very special case then. You usually just call them ‘ok’”, she laughed, “Are you making friends then? Can you understand anything he says?”
“Dunno.”
The mother sighed, sometimes her son could be a mystery even to her, “Say what, I’ll take care of the dishes and cleaning. So take a shower and go to bed early. Did you get any homework?”
“Did them already”, Ogata liked to try and do as much of his homework in daycare as possible.
Tsurumi would give the older kids homework, telling them that he wouldn’t get mad if they did not finish it, but to those who would finish he would give a sticker. With ten stickers you got to pick a topic during art class, what they would play together during recess or sometimes they could even get a small treat. Positive reinforcement, Tsurumi had called it. He would use some of their first period to go through the homework if he noticed that there had been a bigger than usual percentage not doing them at home. The homework had usually been something they had gone through the previous days, to make sure that the kids remembered and knew it.
“Tomorrow mommy will go to work, okay? I’ll leave you some money on the table so you can go buy yourself something to eat after school”, the mother shouted after Ogata.
Ogata could hear her cursing at the pile of unfinished dishes in the sink. It had been her idea to clean them.
After a quick shower, Ogata dug through his bookshelf for a very specific book. Finally he found it by the well-worn back and pulled it out.
It was the fairy tale the Uckly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen. It was the book Ogata remembered his mother reading to him the most, so it was his favorite book.
She would hold the book in one hand and stroke Ogata’s back with the other as she read the story to him. They’d lie in the boy’s bed together before bedtime, the book lit by only a star nightlight on the wall socket.
Ogata packed the book in his bag to take it with him to school tomorrow. He could show Vasily the duck and swan illustrations in the book so he could understand the difference. Then Ogata could draw the boy another swan to make up for the ruined drawing from today. He checked that he had his color pencils with him as well before putting in his drawing notebook. He closed the packback and put it by the door to wait for tomorrow.
“Good night Hyakku!” his mother said from the living room as Ogata turned his lights off. He could hear the TV, his mother cracking open a beer.
“Night”, he slipped under his covers. They had cats on them. All kinds of cats. They were Ogata’s favorite. Although they were well worn out already, Ogata would not let his mother throw them away.
He would make sure to make up with Vasily tomorrow. Ogata found himself wondering why it bothered him so much if he was on good terms with the boy or not. He could hit Usami right in the face and they would be normal the next day. Of course right after Usami had hit him in the face as well. A punch for a punch was a fair price. But Ogata did not know what would be a good enough price to pay for ruining someone else’s work. He hoped that a drawing by him would be good enough.