My older brother is truly alive within me.

#nana56b


Synopsis

On our family altar, there is a memorial tablet
that’s a size smaller than the others. On that
tablet—which is less than half as tall as the
others—the single character “Kaname” is
engraved.

To me as a child, it was a symbol of
“oppressive pressure.” My dad and mom would
say it at every opportunity: “You have to work
hard for your older brother, who died before he
was even born.” If I got a bad test score,
they’d say, “You have to do it for Kaname’s
sake too.” If I caught a cold, they’d say,
“You have to be strong for Kaname’s sake.”
Those were suffocating days, as if my life were
being watched over by a dead person whose face
I’d never even seen.

Every morning, after my mom opened the altar
doors to light incense, she would always slam
them shut at the very end. When I asked, “Why
do you close them?” she would simply reply,
“So I don’t catch a cold.” A dead person
can’t possibly catch a cold. Still, I
understood that this was a sacred, untouchable
ritual in our household.

When I started high school, I went off the
rails, as if to escape that pressure. I hung
out at the arcade behind the station and
resented my family’s metalworking shop, which
reeked of oil. Even when I was inside the
house, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the
small memorial tablet was glaring at my back.

It was a rainy day. To pay back a debt I owed
a senior at school, I tried to steal
my mom’s wallet from the kitchen drawer. This
was the third time I’d done it. That’s when
my mom showed up.

“Give it back.”
“Shut up!”
“I said give it back. How can you even look
Kaname in the face after doing something like
this?”

Those words lit the fuse.
“Well, then, Kaname should’ve stayed alive!
You should’ve given birth to Kaname instead
of me!”

The moment I yelled that, the room fell
deathly silent. The blood drained from
my mom’s face.
“You’re right… It would’ve been better
if you were the one who’d disappeared.”

It was right after my mom said that, as if
she were squeezing the words out of herself.

“Don’t say things like that, meee!”

The slurred voice of a young child echoed
deep inside my head. My mom and I both turned
simultaneously toward the Buddhist altar room
where the voice had come from. There, the
doors of the altar—which my mom had always
kept tightly shut every morning—were wide
open on both sides. There was no breeze. The
windows were closed.

My mom collapsed right where she stood and
began to cry with a voice like a wild animal.
“He forgave me… He’s been forgiving me
all along…”

That night, I learned the truth about “my
brother” for the first time.
It turned out it wasn’t a miscarriage after
all. Kaname and I were conjoined twins who
had been born joined at the chest.

Kaname’s body was much smaller than mine,
and his arms and legs were underdeveloped.
…