When I was very small, I always thought it was a bit strange that I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like. Not as strange as it might have been, since I had no memory of her whatsoever, but strange nonetheless because you would have expected there to be at least one or two overlooked pictures left somewhere in a house the size of ours. But there was nothing. My father never took me aside to say: “Koutarou, your mother died giving birth to you” or “Your mother and I got divorced when you were very small” or even “Actually, you’re adopted.” It was like they wanted to wipe every reminder of her away that they could.
I grew up with my father’s second wife, a famous concert pianist, in the house. He married her shortly after I was born, as far as I can tell, when she was only eighteen (I know because I did the math to find out how old she was when I was seven). She was never my mother, though. She never tried to be and never pretended to be. It was made perfectly clear to me from a very early age that the woman who shared my father’s bed and sat at the diner table with us had no connection to me whatsoever.
A few months before my second birthday, that woman gave birth to a baby boy and named him Choutarou. My father may or may not have been present at the time, I can’t remember. One of my earliest memories, though, is of climbing onto a chair in the nursery to peer into the baby’s crib. I leaned over it as far as I could to stare at the fat, sleepy looking face below, and waggled my fingers down at him, finding it impossible to think that the tiny thing could have been related to me. Then I was lifted off the chair and politely scolded by a nameless servant as she carried me out of the nursery and dropped me gently in the hallway, shutting the door softly in my face.
I didn’t see a lot of him when he was that small, but eventually he started crawling, and then walking, and it was easier for everyone involved to let him go where he wishes, even if that meant he would frequently be following me around like a little puppy. When he was a bit older, he was moved out of the nursery and into a room in the same area of the house I lived in. I was five, maybe six, at the time, already in school, and I can remember the obvious disapproval in that woman’s eyes as servants put the finishing touches on the new bedroom while Choutarou and I watched from the doorway, trying not to get under anyone’s feet. Even when we were little, she just saw me as a potential bad influence on her little boy.
Forbidding Choutarou from spending time with me would be like kicking an obedient puppy, though. He would have obeyed, with a confused expression on his face, but his unhappiness would have been tangible, and everyone around him would become miserable as a result. It was easier to let him do as he wished, and prohibiting him from spending time with his older brother would have definitely raised eyebrows.
One of the rules of living in the Kakinouchi household was that you did everything possible to avoid making waves, especially if servants who could spread information and allow it to mutate into ridiculous rumours were around. So, if you hated the thought of your stepson spending time with your son, you just . . . ignored it, and ignored him.
Once, a bit after Choutarou was moved into his new room, that woman suggested that our father hire separate staff to look after us, since it was “unfair for the poor boy to have to spend so much time with a toddler like Choutarou.” Our father, however, didn’t build up his vast fortune and corporate empire by extravagantly spending it on hiring unnecessary staff, and the subject was never brought up again.
Our father was frequently away on business, in other cities if not other countries, but he always brought something back, some small token that one of his secretaries probably brought, to create the illusion that he was thinking of us. That woman didn’t give up her career when she married our father and she went on frequent tours, in Japan and sometimes to other countries, but not as often as our father did. It was not uncommon, then, for Choutarou and I to be left alone in the house for days, sometimes weeks, at a time, with no one to watch us but the servants and sometimes a random relative who could be trusted not to steal anything.
When Choutarou was old enough, he began attending the same elementary school I did, which delighted him as much as it irritated that woman. We were driven to school every morning by one reliable servant and picked up at the end of the day by another, only to be taken straight home, with no stops in between. Choutarou never seemed to mind, and spent most of his time leaning his head against the window of the car, watching trees and houses go past with a cheerful smile on his face.
I was eight when I began pressuring the drivers to go off-course after school and take Choutarou and I somewhere that wasn’t home. Some drivers were more agreeable than others, although the driver we usually had, a polite and easy-going man who we saw more often than our own father, was always willing to do anything we asked, especially if I could get Choutarou to support my requests. A year later, though, it required no effort at all. That woman had a miscarriage, and the drivers were charged with keeping us out of the house as much as possible.
Choutarou never even knew.
We spent a lot of time in museums and parks and libraries, anywhere that would keep us out of the house and keep Choutarou from seeing that woman while she was depressed. When we were home, we didn’t see her or our father; we ate all our meals alone for quite a while.
It was on one of the afternoons that we were in the library that I found the newspapers.
We were sitting at one of the long tables near the windows. We’d both finished our homework and I’d helped Choutarou find a stack of books he could read without much difficulty. He was sitting, curled up in a chair and paging through them slowly, reading them as best he could. He was in one of his moods where he was perfectly content to sit by himself, reading quietly, and wasn’t asking me to read to him, so I wandered around the library by myself, listlessly poking at the shelves, looking for something that I could amuse myself with. Eventually I found a stack of old newspapers, like the ones my father read over breakfast, on the rare occasions he graced us with his presence. I pulled several at random from the pile and went back to the table.
I went through the papers idly, reading what I could without much interest until I came across my father’s name.
It was the first time I had seen a picture of my mother.
At the time all I could make out of the article were the basics. She had been an European opera singer that my father met on a business trip and married on a whim. They had been married for five years when I was born (I’d never seen my own name in the newspaper before), and it was while she was pregnant with me that she found out that he was having an affair with a famous pianist. It was a scandal. The paper went on about it for pages.
My father, a man with all the musical talent of a rock, had always had a fondness for musically-inclined blonds.
I couldn’t even read my mother’s name.
I closed that paper and kept reading the remainder of the pile until it grew dark and our drive appeared to take us home.
I never mentioned the article to Choutarou. He was only seven, he probably wouldn’t have understood anyway.
I don’t remember how long it took for that woman to recover, but when she did, her interest in Choutarou intensified tenfold. She enrolled him in piano and violin lessons, and made a point of taking an hour of out every day to spend with him, if she was home. If she wasn’t, she’d call from whatever hotel she was staying in and talk to him on the phone.
I did my homework when they were having their mother-son bonding time.
For reasons of her own, shortly after Choutarou began his music lessons, she also enrolled me in extracurricular activities, without consulting me: fencing and voice lessons. Our lessons were at different times, which may have been intentional on her part, to limit the time we spent together, but Choutarou always managed to find a way to sweetly badger someone into taking him to watch me practice my fencing, and it was no trouble for me to attend Choutarou’s recitals.
When I was ten, we were finally allowed to walk to school, and walk home, if we didn’t have somewhere to be after school was over. Walking home, we would frequently wander off-course, wasting as much time together as we could, even doing things as silly and trivial and stopping and petting cats that wandered across our path. It was on one of those unnecessarily extended walks that we passed a tennis court, and Choutarou gradually slowed to a complete stop, watching the game with an expression of rapt curiosity on his expressive face.
By the end of the month, Choutarou had added tennis to his list of activities.
Seeing things from the outside, the lives of the Kakinouchi family might have looked nearly-normal for a few years, until I was twelve. I got into a good junior high school without any difficulty, although I still made a point of walking Choutarou to school, even though it always made me at least ten minutes late for my first class, and of walking past his school to pick him up after classes were over. That year, my father decided that I was at the perfect age to begin learning the ropes of the family business that I was going to inherit.
My father had me removed from my fencing and voice lessons, eliciting neither protest nor complaint from me, and hired a private tutor so I could improve my studies outside fo class. The tutor was a decent sort, just another one of those faceless, nameless people who were always found in my father’s service, and he never complained about the fact that Choutarou sat in on most of the lessons whenever he could, drinking in everything that was said like a little sponge.
When he could, my father had me sit in on his business meetings, and afterwards he would interrogate me about them. He taught me a lot of things, spending more time with me in my first year of junior high than he had ever spent with me in the first year twelve years of my life combined. I learned about business, the stock market, public image, the value of the truth, and the important of lies. It was a lot to fit into the head of a boy who hadn’t even hit puberty yet.
Sometimes, in the evenings, when we worked on our homework, Choutarou would ask about what I had done with our father that day, his voice full of longing.
I would invariably shrug, not bothering to look up from my work, and answer: “Boring stuff, Choutarou. I could barely keep my eyes open.” Some of the things my father taught me had no place being anywhere near someone as innocent and idealistic as my little brother.
In all the time I spent with my father, in that year and the years after, I never asked about my mother. I never asked about that woman, either, or why she hated me. I spent enough time watching my father work, getting glimpses of the sheer vast scope of the Kakinouchi Corporation that I could guess that woman resented me standing in the way of what would have been Choutarou’s inheritance, had the circumstances been different.
The next year, that woman began talking about junior high schools that might be so blessed to have Choutarou attend them, serenely ignoring Choutarou’s confused but polite questions about why any discussion was needed since he wanted to go to school with me.
I neglected my schoolwork for several weeks to devote myself to research, and one afternoon I went into the room where that woman was sitting, reading and quietly drinking tea.
I dropped the brochures into her lap.
Slowly, she shut her book and lay it to one side, balancing her cup on top of it. “What’s this?”
“Choutarou says he wants to attend your junior high.”
I stared at her flatly, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m going to be fourteen next year. I don’t need a little kid like Choutarou tagging along after me.”
“It’s a boarding school,” she said, trying to sound disapproving.
“He’ll get used to it,” I countered lazily. I was certain the same thought was running through our minds as she examined the school’s tasteful advertising. ‘If it gets him away from you . . .’
“Your motives are transparent.”
I shrugged.
“What does your father think of this?”
“He approves. He even asked if I could go and look at the school with Choutarou next Sunday,” I lied. Our father spared as much thought for Choutarou’s well-being as that woman spared for mine.
“I suppose there are worse schools he could attend.”
I held back a smile and merely nodded.
“You know, you’re quite like your father,” she said randomly, moving to pick up her teacup again. “In some ways. All the vices, none of the virtues.”
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what virtues she could possibly think my father had. I gave her another shrug in response and went to the door.
“What will Choutarou think, when he finds out you’re trying to get rid of him?”
“Does it matter?” I met question for question before shutting the door behind me.
Choutarou was in the music room, seriously practising the piano with an abstract, content expression on his face that only faltered into mild irritation when he tried to stretch an octave with hands that were still too small. I waited in the doorway, listening, until the music began to repeat and then I wandered over, casually pulling myself up to sit on top of the piano.
Choutarou kept playing even as he lifted his head to shoot me a mildly annoyed look and murmured a chiding “Aniki . . .”
I grinned and ruffled his hair. “It sounds good.”
“It might sound better if someone wasn’t sitting on top of the piano.”
“It’s a tough piano, it’ll be fine. Besides, you didn’t even have it open,” I wrapped my knuckles on top of the piano in illustration, “and the muting pedal’s down.”
“I didn’t want the noise to bother Mother. She said she had a headache.”
I bit back an uncomplimentary remark about that woman and simply said: “Her loss.”
Choutarou played a scale absently as he looked at me. “Shouldn’t you be studying for your history exam?”
“It’s fine, I already know the text book backwards. You busy next Sunday?”
Bemused, Choutarou shook his head.
“Great. We’re going on a little trip, then. Just the two of us.”
Choutarou arched an eyebrow at me, smiling.
“And a driver,” I amended, sticking my tongue out at him.
“Where?” he asked, running his fingers over the keys.
“Hyotei Gakuen. It’s a boarding school near the outside of the city.”
“Aniki . . .”
“It’s great, you’ll be able to study practically anything, the music program’s one of the best in the country, their tennis team is massive, it’s perfect, you’ll love it, I swear.”
“Breathe, aniki,” Choutarou murmured. “I don’t want to go to a boarding school. I’ve been over this with Mother at least ten times by now. I want to go to school with you.”
“I know, but you can’t. I don’t want you too.”
“Aniki . . .”
I winced and squeezed his shoulder, praying he wouldn’t start crying. “Look, Choutarou, I’m not trying to get rid of you or anything stupid like that. This school really is perfect for you.”
“But . . .”
“Do you really want to go through the rest of your life as Kakinouchi Koutarou’s little brother?”
“I don’t care!”
He really didn’t, either. I cursed in the privacy of my mind. “Choutarou, I think . . . I think it’s really important that you go out there and make a name for yourself without being connected to the family. You never really know if people are being sincere with you, when they know your father’s a millionaire and the owner of a multinational corporation.”
Choutarou just stared at me, innocent and clueless as always.
I sighed. “Just trust me on this, okay? I bet you anything I can get you enrolled in Hyotei. We’ll use your mother’s name, no one’ll ever know – ”
“I’m not ashamed of our family, aniki,” Choutarou interrupted reproachfully.
Only because you haven’t seen first-hand the things Father has to do to keep that fortune of his, I thought, and put on a smile to hide unpleasant thoughts. “Don’t you trust me, Choutarou?” I asked.
“Of course, aniki, but – ”
“Then trust me when I say this is a good idea, okay?”
Choutarou sighed and nodded. “Alright, aniki.”
“Thanks, Choutarou.” I grinned at him, slid off the piano, and dropped a kiss on the top of his head.
“You going to stay and listen?” he asked, repositioning his fingers on the keys.
“Nah.” I grinned, linking my hands behind my head and wandering out of the room, “I should go study.”