wait for the doctors to declare her officially brain-dead and take her off the respirator.
Slowly everyone in my family came to understand that no miracle would occur, and after that life became somewhat easier. In the beginning, because we had no knowledge to fall back on, we were hounded, again and again, by all sorts of ideas. We lived for a time in a kind of concentrated hell from which there was hardly any escape, torn between everything from superstition and science to our own heartfelt prayers to the gods; we even tried to make out the things Kuni said in our dreams. Then, once we had emerged, sort of, from that agonizing period in which we were constantly assaulted on all sides by conflicting hopes, we calmed down a little and made up our minds to do everything we could to keep my sister comfortable, and not to think or do anything she wouldn’t like. By then, we knew that Kuni wouldn’t be coming back—and it wasn’t just a matter of logic anymore, we could see with our own eyes that it was true. Though when we felt the warmth of her hands or saw that her nails were still growing, or when we heard her forced breathing or the beating of her heart, we couldn’t help imagining that something wonderful might happen.
That strange period we all lived through before my sister finally departed from this world forced us all to do a lot of thinking.
That very morning, the day I went to the hospital and found my mother absent, I’d started filling out paperwork again to go and study in Italy—a trip I had been forced to postpone and had been thinking of abandoning all together, depending on how things went with Kuni. We were starting to go on with our lives. Even if every sight that met our eyes was still alive with secret shadows of my sister.
The only one who didn’t seem particularly troubled was Sakai, the older brother of Kuni’s fiancé. My sisters fiancé had been so traumatized by the terrible thing that had happened to her that he had gone to stay with his mother. As a student in dental school, he knew very well that there was no longer any hope of a recovery now that Kuni’s brain stem had stopped functioning. My parents had made a formal request that the engagement be broken off, and the day before he had agreed.
Sakai came to the hospital pretty often, even though none of this had much to do with him—he happened to live in Tokyo, so he said he would like to come if that was OK with us. My family was pretty harsh with him in the beginning because we assumed he was only coming because he was ashamed of the way his useless younger brother was acting. This didn’t seem to be the case, though: he came regularly and sometimes tried to hit on the nurses. It didn’t seem to have taken very long for him to get used to this devastating state of affairs. I couldn’t figure him out.
His life was shrouded in mystery, though my sister had told me at some point that he and his brother had had a hard life. Their father died of some terminal illness, leaving their mother to raise them by herself, working all the while as head nurse in a local hospital. That, as far as I can recall, was the story my sister told me.
Whenever I remembered the time when my sister could still talk, I felt as if there were some sort of membrane around me. My sister had a thin, high-pitched voice, and she talked a lot. When we were kids, we were always dragging our futons into each other’s rooms, then talking together until dawn. We swore in the most adorable way that when we grew up, one of us would have to install a skylight in her house so that we could gaze up at the stars while we talked. In our minds, the glass skylight gleamed, shiny and black, and the stars glittered like diamonds, and the air was clear. In that future room, there would be no end to the topics we wanted to discuss, and morning would never come.
My sister was always so cute—there was something about her that reminded you of a fairy tale—but when love
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