Chapter Text
Nobuko had to clean. She HAD to. Cleaning was her constant companion through life.
She began cleaning when she was young in a bid to spend time with her mother. Nobuko’s mother had high standards for what a house should look like- a small speck of dust was unacceptable to her. Constantly flitting around their home, her mother barely focused on Nobuko before her attention was snatched by a small mess.
Nobuko wanted to be closer to her parents, but her father was usually out working and her mother was always on the move. Thus, she started helping her mother around the home.
Her mother shared stories of her own family, how she met Nobuko’s father, and her hopes for Nobuko’s future. Their family was poor and Nobuko’s best chance at a happy life was marrying a good man. Her mother overflowed with advice on how to be a proper lady and wife.
Years later, there was a brief period where Nobuko hated cleaning. Whereas previously her mother would hand her a dust cloth and allow the small child to run around randomly wiping surfaces, as Nobuko grew so too did the expectations placed on her. The tasks her mother assigned became more demanding, more grueling.
Nobuko was asked to clean with chemicals that stung her eyes, to kneel on the floor scrubbing until her knees ached, to lift baskets of laundry larger than she was. No longer seeing the fun in cleaning, Nobuko threw tantrums. She wanted to go back to when she could play like other children her age.
But that time of her life had ended. She was ten and her mother was preparing her for the future. Every time she complained, her mother would say “You’ll never attract a good husband acting like that.”
Ultimately, her mother was correct. Nobuko married when she was sixteen, but the man was not a good husband.
He was an American solider, a good man. He sought companionship when he was stationed in Japan following the end of World War II. After taking her out on a handful of dates and getting her father’s blessing, he proposed.
As part of their engagement, he gifted her a bolt of fabric so fine she could see her hand through it and pretty sewing needles with mother of pearl handles. She used both to sew her wedding dress.
Their wedding ceremony was American style per her husband’s insistence. The first words Nobuko learned to say in English were her wedding vows.
Things had been great at first.
Her husband’s military position paid well and he showered Nobuko with gifts. Finery her parents would have worked years to obtain doted the small home she shared with her husband. He bought her expensive cookware and asked she prepare traditional American food to counter his homesickness.
Nobuko changed the way she cooked to adapt to his tastes. At first she was hesitant, unsure how to use certain ingredients he requested. However once she finally created a satisfactory pot roast and got a genuine compliment, she worked harder to gain more of his approval.
He wasn’t very generous with compliments; Nobuko treasured every kind word she received from him more than all the precious jewelry he liked to decorate her with.
Her husband could passably speak Japanese, enough for them to get to know each other, but he insisted Nobuko learn English. Being young and clever, Nobuko picked up the new language fairly quickly; she was grateful for her mother who visited daily to clean their home and give Nobuko time to learn English.
Her husband was a good man who gave her the tools she needed to succeed. Learning English was necessary because his deployment in Japan ended a year into their marriage. They packed up their home, said goodbye to Nobuko’s parents, and moved to America.
Leaving the honeymoon phase, Nobuko’s negative attitude reared its ugly head.
Their American house was too large, filled with unnecessary additional rooms she had to clean. Her English speaking abilities were rudimentary and she no longer had as much free time to study the language. She wasn’t able to connect with any of their neighbors, a post-war America was suspicious of the Japanese; Nobuko was only tentatively tolerated within the community because she married a solider, a good man.
As Nobuko struggled, her husband became less understanding.
His tone became sharper, his gifts stopped completely, and he began doling out punishments when he deemed her lacking: not letting her call her mother when she left plates soaking in the sink too long, taking away books she brought from Japan when laundry was not folded to his exact standards, a firm hand to her backside when she overlooked cleaning an obscure corner in their large house.
Nobuko was miserable at cleaning and didn’t deserve a good husband.
She forced herself to get over her hangups, pushing herself to clean faster, better, and with no complaints. Luckily the 50s was a time of innovation to assist homemakers. It was easy for her husband to provide her with countless new cleaning solutions.
Her favorite was peroxide bleach. Their clothes never looked as stunning before she found it.
Wanting to overcome the faults she developed, Nobuko trained herself to be as perfect as her mother. She cleaned the floors until they shined, refusing to allow her aching knees a break. She listened to tapes of English books as she worked, repeating the words out loud. She forced herself to inhale bleach fumes to get more comfortable near chemicals- eventually she began to love the uniquely clean scent.
The house was sparkling and her husband seemed pleased. However he was still stingy with compliments, never commenting on her work other than saying “It’s what a good wife does.”
Nobuko desperately wanted to be a good wife. Good wives get good husbands and a good husband was the key to a woman’s happiness.
A good wife learns English, a good wife cooks American food, a good wife cleans all day long. What else was she missing?
While sniffing peroxide bleach and doing laundry, Nobuko had an amazing idea (she had her best ideas when near bleach).
All these years she failed to clean something vitally important: the insides of her and her husband! Such an oversight was embarrassing for a dutiful wife.
The next time she prepared dinner she poured a heaping cup of bleach into the pot, hoping it tasted as good as it smelled.
When she served it to her husband, he immediately questioned the source of the dishes odd smell. She gleefully told him about her addition.
For some reason, instead of praise, her husband screamed and slapped the bowls to the ground.
Nobuko frowned and snapped, “How am I supposed to keep our home clean with you making messes?”
“You’re fucking crazy!” Her husband snarled. Which was a natural reaction to his quiet wife talking out of place like she did.
She needed to divert his focus before he lashed out over her backtalk.
“Dinner is ruined,” Nobuko lamented, looking at the spilt soup all over the floor.
“You ruined it. There’s something wrong with you.”
“I don’t- I don’t want be wrong,” Nobuko sniffed, “This was supposed to make you proud.”
“A wife I can’t trust in the kitchen is useless to me,” her husband lifted the leftover pot of soup from the stove and dumped it into the kitchen sink, roughly slamming Nobuko’s favorite large pot.
“Please, what can I do? I’ll do anything!” Nobuko begged, “I’ll be a better wife!”
Her husband gave her a long searching look, “I’ll make some calls. See what can be done.”
She made them sandwiches for dinner to replace the dumped out soup. Her husband watched to ensure she made the sandwiches correctly.
The next day, a white van pulled into their driveway. Two burly men got out and asked her to go with them. Her husband urged her to listen, saying the doctors would fix her and bring her back.
Nobuko followed their instructions. She was relieved they’d fix what was wrong and make her finally worthy of a good husband.
??? didn’t feel right. She thought the doctors were supposed to fix the mess inside of her but they made it worse. Things were slipping, mistakes piling up, her husband’s frown growing larger every day.
She briefly forgot how to speak English. Her husband asked her a question and she answered flawlessly in Japanese. She knew he understood her, he spoke Japanese when they first met. Why was he upset she used that language? It was easier for her, for some reason she now struggled to translate her thoughts into English.
When she tried making dinner she forgot how to make her husband’s favorite pot roast. The recipe was in one of the cookbooks piled on top the fridge but she couldn’t remember which. She opened a random one but it was filled with nonsense letters that didn’t resemble kanji at all. Deeming the cookbook a mess, ??? tore it to shreds. She didn’t need messes in her house.
Her husband later screamed at her for destroying ‘his mom’s cookbook.’ She was beginning to think her husband didn’t understand what needed to be cleaned or fixed.
??? knew the house better than him, she understood it in ways he never could. That was why he didn’t notice the roaches like she did.
There were roaches in the walls. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Scuttling around, creating messes, tainting her pristine house. She needed to trap them, she needed to kill them.
Her husband was a good man, too gentle to consider the murder of countless bugs. He insisted she was a lunatic and imagining the roaches.
Since her husband was unhelpful, ??? needed to be the ever resourceful wife and handle everything herself. He wouldn’t call pest control and, for some reason, all the chemicals in the house were locked out of her reach. She had to get creative.
Holding her sharpest kitchen knife, ??? patrolled the house. Once she found where the roaches were hiding, it’d be over for them. She practiced being stealthy so they wouldn’t hear her coming.
This is how she overheard her husband on the phone with her mother.
“Your daughter is defective. I did my best, but a lobotomy can only fix so much,” Her husband said. He was sitting with his back turned towards his office desk, looking out the window.
He didn’t expect his quiet wife to break his strict rule about entering his office during work hours. ??? normally adhered to this rule, but she suspected the bugs were taking advantage of his ignorance to hide inside the office.
“The doctors only made things worse. Her right eye is disgusting now; God knows why they went through her eye to reach her brain, modern medicine should have a more elegant solution than that!”
??? moved further into the room, keeping her eye on the ground in search of her foes.
“I’ve decided to send her back to Japan. Nobuko is your responsibility- she’s not fit to be a wife.”
She froze. Not… fit? Not fit? NOT FIT?
??? spoke his language, cooked his food, cleaned his house, hand-sewed his clothes, got an ice pick shoved through her eye. What more could she do?
Her husband paused to listen to the other end. ??? couldn’t hear the response but she recognized her mother’s muffled voice.
“How dare you say that! I was a perfect husband! Thank God I’m sterile or there would be two monsters stomping through my house!”
Her mother’s voice raised loud enough to hear, “Don’t call her that! She’s your wife, in sickness and in health-”
“I don’t care! You promised me a good wife, but she’s a mess! I’m sending her to you and that’s final!!”
He turned and slammed the phone down on the receiver on top of his desk. Huffing and puffing with a red face, he looked less like a man and more like a rodent.
??? questioned if he really was a good man.
“You don’t know what a mess is,” ??? surprised both herself and her husband by speaking up.
Her husband glared, “Nobuko. What are you doing in my office?”
“You make messes all the time,” she pointed at the papers he knocked into disarray when slamming the phone down “And I always need to clean them. Because you don’t know how to clean.”
“Nobuko,” her husband walked out from behind his desk.
“You don’t know how to use bleach or soap or ice picks correctly!”
“Stop talking-”
“And you don’t notice the countless bugs that trail behind you, living in the messes you make!”
Her husband came closer to her, “There are no bugs!”
“Countless bugs!” ??? repeated.
He planted a firm hand on her shoulder. Tightening his grip, he shook her, “That’s it. You’re going to sit quietly in your bedroom while I schedule a plane to Japan. I should have known better than to marry someone from that place.”
??? rolled her eye. He’d be living in a pigsty without her.
Then she gasped when she saw a small black shape moving across her husband’s stomach. A roach! She knew they were using her disgusting husband to hide.
Her husband was attempting to push her out of his office. She refused to let him continue shielding those bugs.
??? pulled her arm back, the one holding the kitchen knife her husband didn’t notice (he didn’t notice a lot of things). She jabbed it forward as quick as possible into his stomach.
Her husband screamed but that wasn’t important. She had missed the bug.
??? yanked the knife out and stabbed him again.
“You crazy bitch!” Her husband shouted, knocked the knife from her hand, and wrapped his hands around her throat.
He was a large man and ??? was very small, he only needed one hand to fully encircle her throat but he used two. Her husband was inefficient like that.
She reached for her knife, but her husband wouldn’t let her bend to pick it up. Rude, she knew he wasn’t going to be cleaning that up.
Fool man still didn’t notice the bug crawling over his chest.
Reaching into her pocket, she took out her sewing needles; her most precious wedding gift, the needles with mother of pearl handles. ??? kept them on her always out of fear her husband would take them away.
She stabbed him again and again with the sewing needles, following the line of the roach as it tried to escape her.
Her husband’s grasp on her neck tightened and he sagged forward, leaning his body weight onto her. He continued to spew insults at her.
??? giggled when she finally skewered the bug right when it crawled over his heart. Solving two problems with one, that also got her husband to stop swearing at her.
He fully collapsed, knocking her to the ground. His fingers were still around her neck, although looser than before. His large body pinned her arms to her chest, she couldn’t even waggle her fingers with him on top of her.
??? coughed. She finally realized she couldn’t breathe.
“Get off me,” ??? wheezed, “I have to start dinner soon.”
Her husband was unresponsive.
“What’s the matter?” she rasped, “Can’t speak English anymore?”
Brokenly cackling to herself, ??? slid her eye shut. Being such a good wife earned her the right to take a little nap.