Sublime

Makiko, the one visiting me today from Osaka, is my older sister. She’s thirty-nine and has a twelve-year-old daughter named Midoriko. She raised the girl herself. For a few years after I turned eighteen, I lived with them in an apartment back in Osaka, when Midoriko was just a baby. Makiko and her husband had split up while she was pregnant, and

We grew up on the third floor of a little apartment building near the ocean. Just two rooms, one more cramped than the other, no wall or anything between them. Izakaya on the ground floor.