Kimi no Na wa: Echoes from the Future

Maternal Truths

Early in the morning, Sayuri Mayugorô checked for the last time the cloth package containing the change of clothes and the bento box with the onigiri rice balls she would take to her son Goro. She closed it with a knot, and stared at it as she thought about her next steps.

She felt tired. Distress had kept her from sleeping the night before, so as soon as her husband went to his cobbler's workshop early in the morning, she finished as quickly as she could her morning chores and got things ready to go out secretly.

What was going on with Goro, why did they have to be going through these hardships in such a remote place lost in the mountains? These questions pricked at Sayuri's mind without pause. She took the bundle and stood up, hugging it, as if it were a small child, and closed her eyes, clinging to it. Images came to her mind of her childhood in Edo, at that time when her life was happy and simple. An additional pang of pain and melancholy crossed her chest.

When she met her husband and married, she had always dreamed of teaching her children to read and write. But her dreams were cut short with her older siblings. She was never able to teach them. Her first child was in diapers when they had to struggle to survive the tragedy of the great Edo fire of the Meiwa era, which forced her fledgling family to leave the city, never to return. They thus spent several years moving from one city to another without finding a place to settle down, until her husband found a job as a craftsman in the city of Minamisoma, north of Edo. And just when it seemed that things were going to get better, they barely managed to survive the great Tenmei famine. The family managed to survive this time by escaping southward, where they finally found shelter in the Hida area, arriving at the remote village of Itomori. It was a village lost in the mountains, but it had brought the family some prosperity and tranquility. It was only there that she was able to devote time to educating her children, especially Goro, the youngest of her sons.

Sayuri dreamed that Goro would be a well-educated man, like the members of her father's family in Edo, and to this day her son had lived up to her efforts and expectations. Until the night before, when she was informed that her son had been caught as a criminal.

To crown her anxieties, her husband's response left her even more worried.

She had raised Goro differently from his older siblings. That the boy could read and write made her siblings resent him and consider him conceited. In addition, Goro had not developed a favorable attitude for the family's manual labor, which caused him to have constant clashes with his father. And now this incident seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

When the two servants from Miyamizu Shrine showed up the night before to talk to her husband, telling them that they had caught Goro as a criminal, the frustration and contempt she heard in her husband's voice for Goro made her shudder. Was he going to disinherit him? Was Yamazaki going to expel him from the family?

But there was one question that ached in her heart more than anything else: What was the reason the son she adored was doing all that? Had he gone mad? Where had she gone wrong as a mother to make her son turn into a ruffian overnight?

She opened her eyes, and wiped away the tears she realized were falling down her cheeks. Taking a deep breath, she wiped her face with a handkerchief, put her hair back together and prepared to sneak out of the house.

When she peeked outside the door, she was blinded by the brightness outside. The morning was bright, but many gray clouds covered most of the sky. Her eyes adjusted just as she saw Sumi, her youngest daughter, sneaking up on her and looking in all directions as she came to her side.

"Father is in the workshop. I told him everything you told me, Mom: that we're going to the market and that we had a lot of shopping to do. Oh, and that we were going to be late."