The Tabi Pouch from the Tango Region
“Say, Hiroshi. How about this photo?”
“You can do whatever you want, father. If you think it’s fine, why not?”
I said, as I looked through the dresser drawer.
“Ah geez. It’s not here either.”
I had already taken out hair accessories and cosmetics three times in a row, one at a time, and examined them one by one, and then a fourth time from the drawer that I had put back after confirming that I did not find what I was looking for.
I think I remember a month ago, there was a small white paper box in a drawer somewhere in this mirror stand ……. was it my imagination, or was I looking in the wrong place?
I looked back at the clock on the wall. It was 10:32 am. If true, I would have been driving to pick up my mother from the hospital.
About half a day earlier, my mother, who was supposed to be discharged from the hospital after a four-day short-term hospitalization for cardiac catheterization, suddenly passed away. At 9:43 pm, the day before she was scheduled to be discharged from the hospital. She was 69. Just as she was beginning treatment to prevent seizures, she collapsed from a seizure.
In the morning, my mother called me on my phone about the discharge procedure, and in the evening at 5:41 pm, I got another call. At that time, I was preparing dinner and my hands weren’t free, so I thought about calling back, but I was so busy that I forgot about it.
Dinner was served around 6:25 pm, and just as I called my father and started eating together, a call came on my father’s phone this time.
My mother sometimes calls my father if she can’t reach me. I thought that was probably the case, so I drank the miso soup without a care, but my father’s tone was respectful, so I thought, “Oh no”.
When he hung up the phone, my dad said.
“Her condition suddenly worsened, I should go right away.”
“Should I come too?”
“Well, that would be better, right?”
At that time, I wondered if there was anything we could do if we went, and if there was any need for the two of us to go together. The thought occurred to me. At the same time, I also felt that if an important decision had to be made, I could not leave it to my father, so I would definitely have to go with him.
We left dinner and got in the car. It would take us 15 minutes to get to the hospital if nothing else, but in reality, it would probably take 30 minutes due to the rush hour traffic on the road home.
It was almost winter, so it was cold in the car. It takes time for the heating to work.
On the way, my father, who was in the passenger seat, repeatedly said, “It’s so hard”. Because he was getting a little noisy, I said, “It’s no use rushing here. Calm yourself down a bit”.
My father said, “It’s not easy”, but he kept quiet for the time being.
When we arrived at the hospital, we were taken to a rest area where we had to wait for about 30 minutes. After that, we were taken to a private waiting room where we were told that the doctor was currently performing a catheterization and that it would take a while longer.
My father sat helplessly on the sofa in the quiet private room with only the sound of the air conditioner running, and said, “My heart hurts.”
I said, “Father, what can we do about your heartache? Stop it.” If even my father had a seizure here, it wouldn’t be unbearable. I wasn’t kidding.
To tell the truth, I was optimistic about the situation. Neither my mother’s family physician, who had referred her to this hospital, nor the doctor in charge of her case seemed to think the condition was serious at all. There was an air of confidence that the treatment itself would be completed without any problems, and that the problem was the rehabilitation that would follow.
Recently, my mother had been complaining of poor physical condition, saying that she gets tired easily when she walks. I repeatedly suggested that she see her internist, whom she has been seeing for diabetes. However, my mother was reluctant to go, saying that the internist there is an appointment system only, and that she would not be seen at a moment’s notice.
One day, she invited herself to go to a sushi restaurant, but as soon as we got there, she said, “Let’s go home”, which made me very angry.
“If you’re not feeling well, just go to any hospital! I’m not a doctor, so I can’t do anything about you saying you’re tired!”
With that, my mother finally called an internist who “wouldn’t see her out of the blue”. The doctor then told her to “come right away”. When I took her there, they found that she had fluid in his chest, and she was urgently admitted to a nearby hospital.
The paramedic who came at the time said, “It’s good that you found out sooner”. In other words, she was lucky that it was before the seizure occurred. That was a month ago.
After being admitted to the hospital, the progress was good, and although the fluid soon dissipated, subsequent tests revealed that my mother’s heart was chronically weak. However, as long as her narrowed blood vessels were widened, she would improve depending on the subsequent rehabilitation.
So, for the time being, she was discharged from the hospital after two weeks, and was to undergo treatment in the form of repeated short-term hospitalizations. This time, two weeks after leaving the hospital, it was the first short-term hospitalization.
2 hours of waiting in the waiting room. Finally, the doctor called us in for an explanation.
According to the doctor in charge, the treatment he had performed the day before had been completed without any problems, and there were no particular abnormalities in the patient herself. However, at 6:20 p.m., an alarm went off indicating that the EKG monitor she was wearing had gone off, and they rushed over to find she was in cardiopulmonary arrest. After that, she was given a cardiac massage and the like, and although her heartbeat returned for a while, it weakened again, and now they are forced to use medication and machines to create circulation, but this is just barely enough to keep him operational, so the outlook is very grim.
In addition, although the cause of cardiopulmonary arrest was investigated, blood flowed through the treated blood vessels and other narrowed blood vessels, there was no clogging, and there were no other symptoms such as bleeding in the brain and other organs, so it seems that no apparent cause was found.
He asked me if I had any questions, but there was no way a layman could say anything that even a specialist doctor could not understand. In fact, judging from the videos and images shown to us, it certainly doesn’t look like a fatal problem has occurred.
At that moment, one of the nurses came over and said some jargon. I didn’t know the terms, but I knew what they meant. Things are not looking good anymore, so let the family be present for the end.
We were led into the observation room and saw my mother receiving a cardiac massage. Then a diagnosis was made and she was pronounced dead.
My father broke down in tears. That was very surprising to me. I didn’t think he was the kind of person who would cry over his wife’s death.
I didn’t cry. Just said it in my heart.
―― Did you really die in a place like this? Did you die before me?
I don’t call my mother “mom”. I was never polite or familiar like that.
There is a clear reason why I call her that.
When I was in the lower grades of elementary school, when I went to the supermarket on Mother’s Day, and bought a bouquet of carnations with the 900 yen I had left over from my weekly allowance of 200 yen. I presented it to my mother.
Then, my mother yelled at me in an awful manner. The bouquet contained white carnations in addition to red and pink ones. The white carnation was meant to be sent to a dead mother, so how dare I give her such a thing? My mother dragged me to the florist and had me replace the white carnation with a red one. The white carnation cost 100 yen and the red one 200 yen, so I paid the difference.
Since then, I rarely gave my mother gifts and stopped calling her “mom”.
Speaking about it, my mother said, “It’s good that you now have an excuse not to give me gifts”.
This happened often after that. Whenever I helped around the house, my mother would yell at me when she found something that didn’t please her.
I was thinking of leaving home as soon as possible. I even thought about setting up my own business after graduating from middle school without going to high school. However, due to various circumstances, I ended up staying at my parent’s house, and it has become a rotten relationship.
I wondered if my mother really loved me. I also wonder if she would cry if I died. Because of this, I often had suicidal thoughts, but I have been able to avoid dying due to the extremely cool view that if I die, I will not know the consequences.
Therefore, I honestly did not realize that I would have to meet my mother’s death. There were times in the past when I wanted my mother to die quickly, but these days I have become indifferent. Right now, I don’t feel like she had it coming or anything like that. It just seemed like a purely unrealistic sight.
We had to temporarily return from the observation room to the waiting room, because it was necessary to get the appearance of my deceased mother in order. My father clung to me with trembling hands. When I went back to the waiting room to support my father, he collapsed on the couch and broke down crying again.
My father did not cry when his own parents died. And, like me, my mother was constantly complaining about everything he did, so I thought he would never cry when she died. My mother must have thought that my father didn’t love her, but when I thought that he loved her enough to cry at her death, I wished I could have shown her this spectacle. There are things that you don’t know until you die.
After my father stopped crying, we discussed the arrangements for the future. You need to call the funeral home to pick up the body and arrange for the funeral.
My mother herself had often said that a simple funeral would be fine and that she did not want to be buried with her father’s side of the family and that her ashes should be scattered at sea, but she had not made any specific preparations, so it is difficult to carry out such an innovative funeral service. In the end, we decided to do it in the same way as my grandparents’ funerals, but on a smaller scale, with no one invited. That’s why I called a funeral home that we have known for a long time.
By recommending such a clerical matter, my father seems to have calmed down a little. He didn’t break down crying anymore, but instead became whiny. She kept repeating things like, “She shouldn’t have been hospitalized”, “This treatment was meaningless”, and “Why did this happen?”.
I said.
“In the end, this hospitalization was futile, but it was a treatment to prevent sudden death, so if we hadn’t done it, she would have died. She could have been resuscitated in a much better environment than if I had had a seizure at home, and she didn’t die because of the surgery in the first place.”
“Is that so? It must be because of the surgery, that’s why.”
“You received an explanation earlier, remember? There were no complications and there were no problems with the treatment part.”
“That’s just what the doctor said.”
“Actually, the images were exactly as described. Besides, if there was a failure in the catheterization, there should be other problems. I’ve looked into it before.”
He was silent for a moment. He said abruptly.
“Poor thing. Her life hasn’t been very good, has it.”
“No, Father, that’s not true.”
“The only good thing in her life was you, Hiroshi. She was sick all the time and couldn’t go anywhere.”
Should I be happy to know that my father seems to love his son at least a little? Or should it be taken as flattery? Or is that not the point?
It is true that my mother was prone to illness. She had been in the hospital with diabetes for a long time. However, her hospitalization was only temporary, and she spent most of her time doing whatever she wanted in the real world. Her dietary restrictions were also rather moderate.
For the past few years, she has not gone out much, saying that she gets easily tired, and even when she does occasionally go out, she immediately says that she will go home, but her heart must have been deteriorating since then. Because she was not aware of it, it seems to have gradually deteriorated without examination. She would say it was probably a side effect of her diabetes medication. In fact, it is more correct to say that the diabetes was masking the heart issues.
Whether or not mother’s life was happy is for her to decide, but I guess if she had heard the line she would probably say, “I don’t want to hear that from you!” or “If you think so, why didn’t you take better care of me?!”.
It is true that mother was hard on father, but he also left her to take care of things. He had left most of my paternal grandmother’s care, funeral, and legal affairs to my mother, without a word of thanks. He often complained to me about my mother’s attitude, “You don’t have to do it, but if you want to do it, do it”. I think that was true.
Also, my father didn’t like crowds in the first place, and even when he was a healthy young man, when he went out, he would go to amusement parks on rainy weekdays when even the Ferris wheel was stopped, or to the zoo on weekdays when the animals were mostly cooped up inside because of the rain. If you feel sorry now that you couldn’t go anywhere, why didn’t you just take them somewhere more enjoyable? I don’t understand.
We were taken back to the observation room when they had finished preparing her. On the way, my father couldn’t seem to walk properly and was supported by the nurse.
Aside from the fact that my father was once again crying his eyes out in front of my mother, we had a practical task waiting for us. Like picking up the luggage she had brought with her during his stay in the hospital. There were four bags stacked by the side of the observation room, and I managed to carry them all in one go to the car.
When I came back, I was handed an additional purse and a cylindrical cosmetic bag. Apparently, they did her makeup with the cosmetics she had brought along. Giving my thanks, I received the bag. I guess I don’t need to go back and forth to the car just for this again.
By the way, when the purse was handed over, there was one more thing to do. That was a refund procedure for a TV card.
In this hospital, you need to buy a card and plug it in to use the TV. When you leave the hospital, they will refund the remaining credits. My mother was a huge TV enthusiast, and she told me that when she was a child, she used to go over to the neighbor’s house where there was a TV every day and never came back, so her exhausted parents had no choice but to buy a TV. So there’s no reason not to buy a card.
But no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find the card. I told the nurse to check the room for the card. In the end, the card was nowhere to be found. Maybe it got lost in her luggage.
Anyway, when I opened the cosmetics box I was carrying, it didn’t have the card, but her smartphone was in it. My mother was not machine savvy, and she has often relied on me to operate her smartphone, so this smartphone is actually familiar to me.
When I checked, the last call history was at 5:41 pm. It was addressed to me. I don’t know what she wanted to say, but she was probably trying to tell me what time she wanted me to come to pick her up on the day of her discharge from the hospital. It’s too sentimental to think that she wanted to say a final goodbye.
Looking at the browser history, it seems that she searched for the names of diseases such as angina pectoris, hospitals, doctors, etc. Others were searches for rehabilitation-related nursing homes.
When I checked her email, I found that in the two weeks between her last emergency hospitalization and discharge from the hospital to the day she was admitted to the hospital, she had been exchanging emails with two recently estranged friends. Also, an email from my father. My father said he didn’t know how to send out emails and didn’t want to send out the e-mails he needed when he needed them, so he informed me to send him emails every day while he was in the hospital for practice. In the end, I only sent out one day in three days.
The funeral will be just me and my father, but I should tell these friends later that my mother passed away.
After a while, the undertaker arrives, takes the body, and we go to the funeral home to have a meeting.
There are a number of things that need to be done, but the most immediate issues are a photo for the portrait and some mementos to be placed before the casket. And then there is the money to pay for the funeral, offerings, cremation, and so on.
Household funds are in a bank account in father’s name, but mother managed it and hid it from him. My father has a weird sense of money, and if you let him have a large sum of money, you never know what he will spend it on. That’s why she was careful not to let anyone get their hands on it.
In any case, the most important thing now is cash, so it was my job to search for it. And while we were at it, we would also look for something to put in the casket before the casket was placed in the cemetery.
When we returned home, a cold dinner awaited us. My father ate it without even reheating it. Then I started looking for the album.
I had no appetite. I wanted to get on with my work.
――Well then, let’s get back to the beginning of the story.
I was looking for the bankbook and seal, but I wanted to find something more than that. It is a Tabi Pouch made of Nishijin silk fabric.
This is one of the few items I sent to my mother. I think it was in the sixth grade of elementary school, when I went on a school trip to Tango, and I was about to buy something made of Tango crape with all the allowance of 3,000 yen I had brought with me.
In the first place, there were almost no Tango crape products that could be bought for 3,000 yen, but I finally found a purse and bought it.
My mother was delighted, but she never used the purse. I’ve always wondered about that. Why didn’t she use it?
After I became a high school student, when I asked what happened to that purse, I was told that it was not a purse, but a Tabi Pouch. I mistakenly bought it as a purse, but she kept it to herself.
My mother doesn’t use a Tabi Pouch, so it was left in a box for a long time. I often found them when I cleaned out the house, but it was usually in a closet drawer with unused bags and the such. Then, a month ago. When my mother was hospitalized, I found it tucked away in the back of a drawer of the mirror stand when I packed her things.
I have been through a lot with my mother, but it doesn’t matter what I say to someone who has died. I thought I’d put that pouch in, but at this crucial moment, I didn’t know where it had gone.
After going through it a lot, I gave up on the mirror stand and finally decided to brute force it. One by one, I pull out the drawers in the closet and replace them, making sure that there was no Tabi Pouch, bankbooks, or seals, and I stack the contents in the corners of the room.
In the meantime, the bankbook and seal were found. Each came out of one of a pile of unused bags. This solved the immediate problem, but I couldn’t find the Tabi Pouch.
I looked at the clock. Current time: 2:15 pm. I haven’t slept in over a day. As expected, my head was starting to feel light-headed, but I still had work to do, so I shook my head and stood up. Then got in the car.
I headed to the neighborhood market. I put bananas, apples, rice balls, and other offerings that the undertaker told me to buy in the basket before heading to the cut flower section. Using my dull brain, I circled the same spot three times and finally found what I was looking for. It is a white carnation.
It was not an attempt at retaliation or harassment. I just needed her to receive something that she had not received at the time. And it was something my mother needed as well.
When I got home, I filled a bucket with water, put the carnation in it, and placed it at the front door. Then my father came in carrying an album. For a moment he looked at the bucket of flowers suspiciously, but didn’t mention it.
According to him, the person in charge of the funeral home had recommended that I ask a local photographer to do the photo enlargement and processing for a reasonable price. So, I decided to go to the photo shop.
At the photo shop, the clerk asked me which photo I wanted to take, and I was astonished to see what my father pointed out. It was a picture of my mother when she was at her fattest.
Father said.
“This was the happiest time for her.”
No, I don’t know about that, but I thought she wouldn’t like this picture.
However, the albums that my father brought were all from about the same period, in short, mother was fat in everyone, and it couldn’t be helped, so I decided to choose the best one and recommend it. In the end, that was the decision.
After returning from the photo shop, my father drove off on a mission to withdraw money from the bank for immediate needs.
I returned to the living room, which was a mess of stuff I had brought home from the hospital and taken out of the closet. There is nowhere to put my feet. There are several albums scattered about, so I decide to put away the ones that have served their purpose anyway.
At that moment, I found that only one of the albums was carefully wrapped in a paper bag. When I took it out of the bag and opened it, it was a picture of my parent’s wedding. The photos were professionally taken, so they were very beautiful, mother was slim, and father was handsome. Moreover, since the size of the photo is large, it is also suitable for enlarging. I exclaimed.
“Why didn’t you choose this, you fool? Why, you idiot!”
Ah! I shouldn’t have left the important work to my father. But it’s impossible for me to do it all, no matter what. I have to ask my mother to put up with it.
Anyway, my job at the moment was to look for the Tabi Pouch. But hunger and drowsiness no longer give way. Before I knew it, I was dozing off, surrounded by piles of clothes and bags.
By the time I woke up, it was almost dinnertime. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to eat anything. I needed to finish my work before I could settle down.
But I needed to give my father something to eat, and I should eat something, too. I decided to just heat up the leftovers from yesterday’s dinner. I had made more than enough for the three of us to eat when we got home. I had originally planned to make one more dish, but I didn’t have the energy to do so.
I called father over and the two of us ate the same meal as yesterday in silence.
As we shoveled dinner into our mouths, we thought about the future. If it’s not in the mirror stand or the closet, the only thing left is the drawer of the former TV stand, which contains books, documents, sundries, wallets, medicines, and so on. The TV has now been moved to a separate drawer, and the area for the VCR and other items is filled with books, magazines, and unopened jams. However, since this area contains only frequently used items, I didn’t think there would be anything in this area. But there’s nowhere else to look.
As soon as I thought of it, I wanted to do it, so I slowly crawled to the former TV stand and checked the drawers one by one. Sure enough, there are only recent receipts, coin purses, calculators, batteries, instruction manuals, insulin needles, and so on.
However, I found something strange in the midst of it. It is an envelope with a picture of me when I was in kindergarten. I know this area well because I open and close it a lot, and sometimes I clean it. I am sure that until very recently, there was nothing like this. I don’t know when or where they brought it and put it in.
In the bottom envelope of another unused bundle, I found a birthday present, also sent by the kindergarten, with a photo attached to an origami medal. I’m not surprised that she kept this kind of thing somewhere, but it was surprising that they would turn up in such a place.
Although there were some unexpected finds, in the end, there was no Tabi Pouch.
Before I knew it, my father had finished eating, put away his own dishes, and went back to his room.
Unfortunately, I was already at my physical limit. I would have to give up on the Tabi Pouch. I had better get some sleep for tomorrow.
There is one last thing, and I know exactly where it is. I opened a small chest of drawers used as a telephone stand. There is a case containing a mother-child notebook and my umbilical cord.
My mother used to tell me to put the umbilical cord in the coffin when she died. She said she would show it to Enma.
At any rate, I was ready. After a short break, I finally regained my appetite. As I put my hands on the leftover meal, I wondered if there was anything else left to do.
Suddenly, a cosmetic box caught my eye. Speaking of which, I had yet to properly go over the items I had brought back from the hospital. I should probably check it to make sure my TV card was in order.
I put down my chopsticks and pulled the cosmetic box closer, opened it, and took a quick look around. There was nothing that looked like a card. Come to think of it, did I check that there was no card?
However, at the bottom of the box, I found what appeared to be a small pouch. Made of Nishijin silk fabric. When I picked it up, it felt elegant to the touch. When I took it out, it was a fabric with a delicate floral pattern and a beautiful gradation from red to ocher.
When I opened it, I found a nail clipper, a small pair of scissors, and a safety razor inside.
I pulled them out and stared stunned at the empty pouch. I clenched it in both hands and let out a laugh and shouted.
“What the hell! No wonder I couldn’t find it!”
I held on to it and for the first time in the past two days, I shed tears.
Sads Translates 