THE GIRLS’ FESTIVAL DOLLS

Here we go!”

Dad was pulling small boxes from a larger cardboard box and lining them up on the dining table. Where the Christmas tree had stood atop the cabinet two months earlier, Mom was setting up a pair of magnificent dolls.

Kun observed the proceedings from the staircase with great interest.

“What are those?”

“Dolls for the Girls’ Festival.”

“Festival?”

Mirai was swaying in the bouncer where they’d put her down for a nap. As Kun’s father unpacked and unwrapped the tiny raised trays and platters that would join the dolls in their display, he answered his son’s question.

“It’s a festival where we pray for little girls to grow up healthy and strong.”

“Ohhh,” Kun said in a silly voice. He tried climbing onto the cabinet, but Mom put a stop to that.

“No. Those are Mirai’s, so you can’t play with them.”

“I want some, too.”

“But you’re a boy, not a girl,” Mom replied, wrapping her arms around him and carrying him away from the dolls.

“Sniff, sniff, sniff.”

Yukko was hopping up toward the dolls and trying to smell them, but Dad rushed over and pulled him away from the cabinet.

“Don’t touch, Yukko! You’re a boy, too, y’know.”

“Whiiiine.”

When Mirai was born, Mom and Dad had decided to buy a new set of dolls for the Girls’ Festival. After many trips to department stores and specialty shops in search of the perfect ones, they finally chose a male-female pair. They put together the display in the dining room in mid-February, a few weeks before the day of the festival on March 3, and the empty cardboard boxes ended up in a corner of the living room where they wouldn’t be in the way.

March 3 arrived. Although the Girls’ Festival was nicknamed the Festival of Peaches, there weren’t many peach blossoms or other flowers out at that time of year. Mom had managed to find some mustard and quince flowers, which she stuck in a vase as decoration for visitors.

The E233 train rolled down the Negishi Line in the soft sunlight, and not long after, the doorbell rang. Granny and Granddad had come from the countryside to celebrate Mirai’s first Girls’ Festival.

“Good to see ya!”

“Welcome!”

“Yokohama sure is warm, isn’t it?”

Still wearing their coats, Kun’s grandparents rushed over to look into the bouncer. With her stuffed bee in one hand, Mirai opened her mouth wide and yawned.

“She’s adorable! Girls are so cute when you dress them up. Not like boys,” Granny commented.

“I can’t believe she’s already three months old,” said Granddad.

“Her weight’s doubled since she was born,” Mom interjected, taking the present her parents had brought out of its paper bag.

Granny turned toward her and asked, “Can she hold her head up yet?”

“Yeah, just about.”

Granddad took out his tablet and started recording a video.

“Mirai, look at Granddad! Mirai!”

In response, Mirai waved her toy bee and cooed softly.

That was when Kun filled in the tablet’s screen.

“Hi!”

“Kun, don’t block the view. I’m taking this video for your great-granny,” Granddad scolded before filming the baby again. “Miraaai!”

“Do me, too! I wanna be in it!” Kun insisted, pulling on Granddad’s arm.

“Okay, okay.”

Kun posed proudly on one leg. With no other choice, Granddad filmed him, but somehow the camera panned naturally back toward his granddaughter. “Miraaai!”

“Record me!” Kun demanded with another tug on his arm.

“Sure, sure.” Again, he recorded a little of Kun’s one-legged antics, and again, the camera drifted back toward the baby. “Miraaai… Huh?”

He noticed a red mark on her right hand when he zoomed in. He put down his tablet and took her little hand in his for a closer look.

“What’s this? A birthmark?”

“Where?” Granny peered down at the baby.

“Right here.”

“Oh, you’re right!”

A large, clearly defined red birthmark stretched from the base of Mirai’s index finger all the way down to her wrist. Mom sighed.

“She’s had it since she was born.”

“Did you have the doctor look at it?”

“Yeah. She said she didn’t know if it would go away or not.”

“Really? If it doesn’t, she might be self-conscious about it in the future.”

“I know.”

As the grown-ups spoke in hushed voices, Mirai’s gaze darted back and forth among them.

When the sun went down, Dad took out a large serving platter and put it on the dining table. A pile of festive sushi rice with toppings like shredded egg crepes, young pepper leaves, salmon roe, and raw tuna filled the enormous plate, and they also brought out a clear soup of clams, pepper leaves, and spongy, flower-shaped pieces of wheat gluten. Once everything was on the table, the family gathered around the celebratory meal.

“Thanks for getting all this ready,” Granddad said as Dad was sitting down.

“Oh, Yumi cooked it earlier. All I did was set it out.”

Granddad started pouring him a beer and replied, “Don’t be so modest.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’m in a good mood because you invited us for the party!”

“You’re welcome anytime.”

They clinked glasses.

Next to them, Mom and her mother were explaining the dolls to Kun.

“There’s a woman doll and a man doll, and they’re married.”

“Married?”

“Right, like Mommy and Daddy, and Granny and Granddad, and Great-Granny and Great-Granddad.”

“Kun, do you remember going to your great-granddad’s funeral last year?”

“Uh-huh,” Kun said, stabbing a gluten flower with his fork.

“Speaking of which,” said Mom, lifting her bowl to take a sip of soup, “is that story about Great-Granny and Great-Granddad true?”

“What story?”

“The one about how he saw her at the Ikeda Clinic and asked her to marry him, but she told him only if he beat her in a race, and then he did, and they got together.”

“I never heard that story directly from either of them,” Granny replied.

“Really?” Mom leaned forward. “But Uncle Yamato told it at the funeral.”

Granddad interrupted their conversation. “He had a bad hip, so I think the whole story is fishy.”

“You think it’s a lie?”

“Who knows? That’s why we call it a story,” Granny said, closing her eyes and drinking some soup from her bowl. Watching her reaction, Mom sensed there was some truth to the family lore.

She wished she had asked her grandfather about it before he passed. At the end of his life, he spent his time tending his vegetable garden and visiting his wife in the hospital every day. Even at the age of ninety-four, he was full of energy and didn’t have a single health problem. But one morning, he fell down in the kitchen of his house and never got up. A slice of bread was still in the toaster. He must have been in the middle of making breakfast. It was incredibly sudden.

“If I recall,” Kun’s red-faced grandfather said, turning to his wife with a glass of beer in hand, “wasn’t there some kind of story about the dolls?”

“You mean the saying that the daughter will marry late if you don’t put the dolls away right after the Girls’ Festival?” Mom offered with a hint of skepticism. “No one pays attention to that anymore…but how late do they mean, I wonder?”

“They say one year for each day the dolls stay out,” Granny said.

“Oh, please. What are those numbers even based on?”

“It’s just a saying.”

Mirai stared at her grandparents from the bouncer, holding her toy bee in one hand. It was as if she was absorbing the whole conversation.

The screen of Mom’s phone read MARCH 4.

It was 7:24 in the morning.

“Ack!”

Dressed in a suit, she fixed her makeup in front of a small mirror in the dining room and yanked her coat off its hanger.

“I’m gonna be late!”

Years ago, she had made a habit of keeping her makeup in a corner of the dining room instead of in the bathroom. This might have seemed like an oddly cramped place for applying makeup, but she had a reason: She wanted to keep her children in view as much as possible. Unfortunately, she had developed a tendency to get nervous if she didn’t do everything near them.

But things would have to be different from now on. She was returning to work this spring, and she had to count on Dad, who worked from home, to look after the children. Of course, she was deeply concerned about this arrangement, but she would have to find a way to deal with it.

Slinging a big purse over her shoulder, she hurried around the table to where Kun was munching on his breakfast.

“Kun, Mommy has to go on a work trip today and tomorrow, so I won’t be home.”

“No!” he objected, screwing his face up into a mournful pout. He threw down his bread and climbed off his chair, chasing after his mother. Dad followed her down the stairs, too, with Mirai in his arms.

“Be good while I’m gone.”

“No!”

“Let Daddy know if you need to go potty, okay?”

“Don’t leave!” Kun bounced up and down by the front door with a worried look on his face.

Mom smiled warmly back at him and kissed him lightly on the cheek, making sure not to smudge her makeup. She kissed Mirai, too, and Dad.

“Take good care of the kids.”

“Will do.”

“Mommy, don’t go!”

“Oh, and take down the dolls.”

“Sure thing.”

“Mommy!”

“Okay, everyone, see you soon!”

The door slammed shut.

A junior high boy with smooth, lustrous hair walked past the schoolyard where the little flowers of the winter daphne were in bloom. Despite being on the short side, he made a handsome picture in his high-collared school uniform that accentuated his long neck. A cluster of girls around the same age followed a few steps behind him, giggling excitedly now and then in their sailor-style navy-blue uniforms with red neckerchiefs. Their cheeks were flushed red underneath their winter scarves but not because of the cold. No, it was because they had reached the tender age of first love.

Dad hurried past them, dragging his whining son toward the nursery school.

“I want Mommy to take me! Not you!”

“I know, I know.”

From inside the baby sling, Mirai stared at the junior high girls as her family went by.

At this time of day, the sidewalk in front of the nursery school was packed with parents dropping off their children. Kun and his father got there moments before the gates closed. As Kun changed into his indoor shoes, Dad scanned the day’s announcements, then turned right around and headed back up the hill to their house.

When he was washing the dishes, a plate slipped from his hand and shattered.

“Oh no!”

He forgot to pick up all the toys and picture books on the floor before he started vacuuming.

“Shoot!”

He went to do the laundry, but he didn’t understand the washing instructions on the tags and had to look them up on his phone.

“Oh man!”

He made formula for Mirai, but she leaned away from him and refused to drink a single drop.

“Dang it!”

He looked at the clock and jumped up.

“Wow—already?”

It was almost time to pick Kun up from school. He took out the leftover sushi from the refrigerator for lunch. It was so hard and cold that when he dug in his chopsticks, the rice came up in one big clump. He took a bite anyway. Still chewing, he buckled the baby sling behind his back.

“Waaaaaahhh!”

Mirai wouldn’t stop crying. Was she hungry, sleepy, or just grumpy? He had no idea.

When he arrived at the nursery school, it was already crowded with other parents. Trying to soothe Mirai had made him late. Kun was changing into his outside shoes.

“I don’t want you, Daddy.”

“I know, I know.”

As his son whined, Dad pulled him up the hill to their house.

Back at home, he took his screaming daughter out of the baby sling.

“It’s nap time, okay?”

As soon as he put her in the bouncer, she fell asleep. So she had been tired after all.

He very carefully covered her with a blanket, withdrew his hand, and crept away, mindful not to wake her.

“Phew.” He sighed as he sat down at the end of the dining table to do some work. He opened his laptop, but…

“…”

…he was too tired to think or make any progress at all. He closed the laptop and lay his head down on the table. The sound of soft snores joined the warm, languid afternoon sun.

“Zzzzz…zzzzz…zzzzz…”

After a few moments, the snores stopped, and silence descended.

Dad was perfectly still.

Then…

Suddenly, he jerked up, rubbed his sleepy eyes beneath his glasses, and opened his laptop again. He shuffled through a file of papers, set it behind him, and buckled down to work.

“Hmm…”

He clicked and typed away on the 3-D modeling program.

One of the projects he’d done just after going freelance had unexpectedly won a prize. As a result, although he wasn’t young, he was getting considerable attention as an up-and-coming architect. Projects big and small flowed in from inside and outside Japan, and soon, he couldn’t believe how far ahead his schedule was booked. Despite the prizes and clients and attention, however, he was still doing just about everything by himself at the end of a dining table.

“Daddy, play with me.”

Kun stuck his head out from under the table and put a snack on the edge. It was a crunchy cookie shaped like a dolphin.

“Don’t you want to play with Yukko?”

“No. I want to play with Daddy.”

Kun reached into the bag of assorted sea-creature cookies and placed an octopus and a tuna in a row on the table.

“I thought you didn’t want Daddy.”

“I do want you. Let’s play.”

He put down a shrimp, a shark, and a sunfish and carefully lined them up with the edge.

“Okay,” said Dad, but his eyes were still glued to the screen.

“Let’s read a book.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s watch a movie.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s spin tops.”

“…Okay.”

“…”

“…Okay.”

“…”

“…Hmm.”

Dad was so absorbed in his work that he couldn’t hear a thing. He didn’t even see Kun’s row of cookies. Kun gave up and retreated under the table.

Mirai was fast asleep in her bouncer.

“Mirai.”

“…”

He said his sister’s name, but she made no sign of waking up.

“Mirai, have you ever seen a whale?”

He held up a whale-shaped cookie for her to look at.

“…Mm…”

Mirai turned over in her sleep. Kun gave up and ate it.

“I don’t like you, Mirai.”

He took another cookie out of the bag. It was a whale again. He stared at it, then gave a crafty smile.

Mirai kept sleeping even after Kun rose and walked away.

“…Mm…”

She moaned a little, as if she was uncomfortable.

Of course she was. Her whole face was covered with cookies. Squid, shrimp, sunfish, sharks, tuna, and octopuses had been carefully balanced on her forehead, cheeks, and chin. Under her nose, a whale-shaped cookie gave her a little mustache.

“…Mm…”

She had no idea what had happened to her. She just moaned softly, as if having a bad dream.