It felt wonderful to finally open up to somebody in her mother’s absence.
Ms Oka asked if she was sure about this, handing over her diary, and she said yes – everything she wanted to talk about was in there.
They met once or twice a week after that, in the same room at the same time. Talking like this with someone, and being listened to, Kana began to understand what she was experiencing. It wasn’t only homesickness. Homesickness she could manage. This was something far stronger – loneliness unlike any she’d ever known. (Years later, putting on her researcher’s hat, she could say that it had been nearly off the scale.) She felt invisible. Only Ms Oka could see and hear her.
Ms Oka could see that she was losing weight. In her lowest moments she had no energy to cook and put a meal together. She lived on rice, quick and cheap and easy to make. For days, weeks, on end she ate nothing else.
‘Oka-sensei, what do you suggest I do?’
She suggested that Kana invite her mother to Tokyo.
When Hiromi saw her daughter, all forty kilos of her (thirty-eight and a half, to believe the bathroom scales, and every single gram of them weighing on her), she saw the extent of Kana’s struggles. The student had lost all the vigour gained from her mother’s cooking.
‘I didn’t want you to worry,’ Kana said.
They had to find a doctor, a psychiatrist, and consult him. Hiromi wouldn’t hear of taking her bullet train home before they did. It was evident that her daughter was in much distress. They went to one of those big glassy modern medical centres they have in Tokyo, where a pot-bellied man in a starched suit and tie bowed as they came in and sat around his desk. He had dyed black hair and eyes enlarged by metal-rimmed spectacles. ‘What brings you here?’ he asked Hiromi.
‘It’s my daughter,’ Hiromi said. ‘To be honest, Kana’s always been different, ever since she was an infant. Always walking around on tiptoes.’
Kana watched her lap as the psychiatrist listened to Hiromi, averting her eyes from the certificates that covered his walls. From time to time, she ran a hand under the lip of the imposing desk.
‘I started noticing it more when she started elementary school. The scenes at the school gate when I dropped her there for class. The slightest touch from the teacher was like an electric shock.’
The memory came hurtling back to Kana; she heard her six-year-old voice repeating ‘no’, yelling at the top of her lungs, felt herself writhing in the grasp of the woman who was not her mother.
‘Then there was the moment every afternoon when she came home from school. “How was your day?” I’d ask, and she’d give a minute-by-minute report of each of her lessons. No detail was too small. And, another thing, she referred to everyone in the class as her “friend” as if she didn’t entirely understand what a “friend” is. If a teacher happened to call her Kana-chan, the teacher became her “friend” as well. It took a long time to get her to say simply “classmate”. Truth is, it’s never been easy for her to make friends.’
Hiromi broke off and glanced at her daughter to see if she was blushing too.
It was true, everything that her mother was saying. But that did not mean she had always felt alone. Sometimes, it had been enough to aim her thoughts elsewhere, on the pleasing shape of a stone or a phonetic symbol, and that had protected her. She’d give no thought then to the siblings other single kids often longed to play with, nor imagine, later on, taking up the life of a doting wife, a young mother, as did many teenage girls.
‘Please continue,’ the pot-bellied man said in a tired voice.
‘If I think about it, it’s not just the word “friend”. Sometimes she won’t say watashi, “I” or “me”. We’ll be out for a walk together in the evening and I’ll say something like, “Let’s start back for the apartment, I’m feeling chilly,” and she’ll say, “Kana, too” instead of “me, too”.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said the man.
‘It’s like she speaks her own Japanese. Like she doesn’t always understand other people’s.’ And Hiromi told him about the time she and a teenage Kana had been in town and she’d needed to dash off on an errand. ‘Wait for me outside this store, and don’t wander off,’ she remembered saying to Kana. ‘Here,’ she pointed. ‘I’ll meet you right here in half an hour.’
‘Well, then, not ten minutes after I leave, what do you know, the heavens open. And what does Kana do? She just stands there on the pavement, waiting for me outside in the pouring rain. Twenty minutes out in the pouring rain. “Why didn’t you go inside the store and wait for me there?” I said to her when I got back. You should have seen her. Drenched through and through.’
‘You said, wait for me outside the store,’ Hiromi remembered Kana replying.
The young woman sat motionless, her head down. She kept her gaze on her lap to camouflage the frustration that was building inside her. Nothing would come of all this talk, she realised, not with this man. They should not have come here.
There was nothing wrong with her daughter’s brains, Hiromi added. ‘But since she began at Tsuda she’s been texting all these messages home saying how unhappy she is. And when I come here, I discover she’s lost 10 kilos. Too sad and stressed to eat, she says. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do.’
When Hiromi finished speaking, the psychiatrist cleared his throat and projected an annoyingly know-all expression.
‘I’ve seen cases similar to your daughter’s,’ he announced. ‘A form of depression that we find in young, intense, educated women who push themselves too hard. These women tend to suffer from an anxiety disorder whose precise origins and nature are unclear.’
Finally, Kana looked up at the man sitting in front of his certificates. As he spoke it seemed that he was making less a confession of helplessness than asserting a status quo of medical incuriosity, which was self-explanatory and absolute.
‘We can reduce your daughter’s symptoms with medication. Antidepressants. I’ll write a prescription now.’
The psychiatrist didn’t ask Kana how she saw her future. He would not have known what to tell her, to comfort or to reassure her. She would have talked around his question. You don’t see or hear, you don’t understand, Kana imagined herself retorting. The words depression and disorder do no justice to the person in front of you.
‘Here you are,’ he said, handing the prescription to Hiromi. As he led the women to the door, Kana thought she heard him give an impatient sigh: Those silly, female, anxiety-prone nerves.
A waste of time and money, it seemed to Kana. As if she needed another person to misunderstand her. What her future wellness depended on could not be found in any pill. But at least her mother had been reassured enough to take her train home the following week.
And, not long after this disappointment, Kana began gradually to recover herself. All the time spent with her mother in Tokyo, and the regular sessions with Ms Oka, were having their effect. She felt sure that she had seen the last of doctors like the pot-bellied man. (Janine, the perceptive psychologist she’d see in Boston, would be the one finally to put autism’s name to her difference.) She was coming to a momentous decision, inspired by an incipient self-confidence she owed for now to Ms Oka.
‘Oka-sensei, can I ask, how did you become a clinical counsellor?’
She almost wanted to say, ‘How did you become you?’
‘I studied in America.’
This was what Kana heard. Her counsellor said much more, by way of detail and explanation, but it was this word, America, that grasped her imagination and would not let go.
America! And so before long it was decided, and Kana went about switching course and country.
✲
When Kana got back from walking the puppy she went to her computer and set to her research. This time next week, she told herself again, without finishing the thought. For a time she was able to work with total concentration, her fingers typing and her feet tapping to the ballet music that filled the room. And then she found herself remembering something the British author had said to her.
