Breasts and Eggs

She reminded me of Mum. I couldn’t tell if it was just in the way that daughters start to look like their mothers over time, or if the things that happened to Mum’s body were happening to her now, too.

The brochure for her favorite place was glossy black, printed on thick card stock. It had something the other brochures lacked. You could say it looked expensive, but I thought it looked aggressive. The lettering was thick and gold. No trace of the cutesy, happy, undemanding purity normally found in ads for clinics geared toward average women. Its

If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know. I remember telling this to someone once. I can’t remember who it was, but she real

In Shobashi, there were a million kinds of bars, including the onabe bars, where the hosts were born as women, but identified as men, and dressed like men, and interacted with their customers as men. The ones who were straight dated women, as guys. But Osaka is a big place. At the fancy clubs in Kitashinchi, the hostesses were of a different calibe

People like pretty things. When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value. But some people never experience that personally. I was young once, but I was never pretty. When something isn’t there, inside or out, how are you supposed to seek it out? Pretty faces, gorgeous sk

when I was in high school (and still use on occasion). That was 1998. Ten years now. I seriously doubt at twenty that I saw myself, in my vague dreams for the future, still being in Tokyo at thirty.

Shobashi comes alive at night. From appearances, it’s a dump. And from sundown to sun-up, on the third floor of a building throbbing with karaoke reverb, you’ll find the bar where Makiko works, five nights a week, from seven until around midnight.

One of them picked up a shovel and spaded earth. Since coming to the camp, their guilt had died and left behind a husk, whose hair and flesh were crackly like onion skin. We buried the husks and covered them with dirt, each scoop sending them further away, to some far-off place. All of us were crying never-ending violent tears. Then over on the sun

A little after two, we made it back to Minowa, the closest station to my place. Stopping along the way for a 210-yen bowl of noodles, we braved the heat and walked the ten minutes home, while the cries of cicadas smeared the atmosphere.

After we had that other fight, the big one, it hit me. It was because of her job. It all started when she was riding on her bike, in that stupid purple dress she wears for work, the one with the gold fringe, and a boy from my class saw her and made fun of her in front of everybody. I wanted to say shut up or I’ll make you shut up, but all I could d