Short story by R.S. Pinner, first published in New Writing (2019)
I heard the news about Riku Saito and I was upset, but my initial reaction was more like acting than actually feeling. My wife told me about it, at the time I was cooking Turkish pide for my family, a strong gin and tonic in my hand although it was only Thursday. She told me about a little boy who had been neglected by his father. His body found in an apartment full of litter. Horrible. But then, the thing that got me was my wife, so close to tears. She told the story in a way that forced my empathy. After telling me the outcome, she saw I’d only heard it, not felt it. So, she poured that little boy into my head. Forced me open and filled me up with him and his tragedy. She told me about the little boy whose mother left. They were too poor or something. Kept arguing. So she left and it was just the boy and his father. She was one of those mums who leaves her kid with the dad. Kimie had tears in her eyes as she said this. The boy was three, maybe four, a little older than our own boy who was in the corner, quietly playing with his big fire engine with the broken siren. My boy, whose mother loved him so much, turned into that boy who was abandoned by his mom. And then the father had trouble caring for the little boy. He was a truck driver, worked nights. Sometimes he’d be away for a couple of days. He’d just leave the boy alone in the apartment. Some little place in Yokohama, I don’t know why he couldn’t find someone to care for the child. One day the boy wandered off, his father didn’t come back for days but when he did he found his boy and took him back. To stop him wandering off again he sealed the apartment up with duct tape. Then back to work. Somehow, this man found a new girlfriend, and as a result he often forgot his little boy, sealed up alone in that apartment, waiting for his Papa to come back to him. The little boy only knew two words, Papa and gohan, which can mean meal. The father left a few packs of bread and left again. One day after a long time without coming back, the father returned. His little boy was so weak and emaciated that he couldn’t stand. He was too weak to open the bread, too weak to chew. Couldn’t even keep it down. The father got scared by his little boy’s weak condition, so he sealed up the apartment and never went back there. My wife told me about her picturing this helpless little boy, hungry and alone in the sealed darkness, abandoned by the father who couldn’t even be bothered to bring him the bento boxes anymore that used to be his only form of contact with the outside world. Of course, it wasn’t just the parents but the whole system that had had failed this poor child. My wife wanted me to be there in the dark long hours, to feel the weight of the days and weeks of being alone and hungry, and just a few words here and there, and the fact that she was close to tears, that was enough to lodge that boy’s ghost in my mind. And I didn’t know the details, just the story. I read the newspaper the next day when I should have been doing something else. My mind was a hard lump, a sodden clump of mud which could not absorb anything. Just black stinking mud, saturated with humanity’s capacity for blackness. And the horror of the story lessened when I read the details, much less gory than the Japanese report, but the English report told about facts and details. The boy’s mother had been found, she was being investigated. The apartment had been sealed, the floor full of rubbish, all carted off for forensics – a pointless exercise no use to anyone. The boy’s remains had lain on the floor for seven years without discovery. The father, despite his low salary, had kept up the rent on the rubbish strewn grave of his son while living somewhere else. He told the police he’d kept up the rent to avoid the body being found. It was something about the local school registry that had finally led to the remains being discovered. Still lots of unanswered questions. Not just logistics style police detective questions, other questions. Questions I as a father could not bring myself to ask, nor forget.
Riku, the boy’s name was Riku. It means agony of separation. What a horrid little irony, I wish it wasn’t but that was his real name. This boy would have been 13 on the day they found him, but he died when he was 5.
My mind ran with that boy and his two words. Papa. Gohan. I saw him run to his Papa when that man came through the door the first time he’d left his son all day. So happy to see his Papa. So hungry for the bento he had brought for his little boy. So grateful for it. Crying hard as only a child can cry when his father left him again next day. His little heart breaking the first time his papa didn’t come back. This had happened in 2006, the papers said, October. That was when my wife and I got married, over ten years ago now. The boy died in January 2007, that year my wife and I moved to Morden, a nicer house. Then seven years passed. In those years our lives had become redefined, first around each other, then around our own little boy. It was unthinkable that all that time this boy lay dead, just a pile of little bones surrounded by litter. And the father, he was driving his truck at night. Did he picture his son as he stared at that road? Did he see his son’s face when he ate alone in a roadside diner? That faraway look on a person’s face, was he just another lonely anonymous man wearing that same faraway look. Did he listen to Radiohead? Did he have redeeming qualities that people who knew him saw, or was he just nothing? A man who had turned life back into death. I became obsessed with it. I looked at the photo of my son I use as the screensaver of my phone. I thought it could bring me comfort.
I couldn’t help it. I started to drink more. I grew irritable, people falling asleep on me on the train, I would elbow them. I shoved past people standing in doorways. I said no to favours, stopped being visible online. Everyone I saw in that sea of nobodies that is Tokyo, everybody and everyone I wanted nothing to do with them. I’d get home and my wife and son were there, but I wasn’t there. I’d had enough horror in this world. When I was a boy, my parents brought horror into our home and I’d had to live with it, live alongside it. Live with those horrors and be counted as one of them too, as their horror broke the thin glass that was meant to keep us all from breaking. Splinters of that glass got stuck in my reality, and I’d been trying to forget those shards for too long. Now I’m standing on the edge of the tracks and I don’t think I’ll be able to pull away.
Story Rationale
This story is actually based on real life events. In 2014, Japanese Police near Yokohama arrested Yukihiro Saito on suspicion of having starved his then 5-year-old son Riku to death. The story relates the events as accurately as I was able, and does not try to mask the identity of the case. It is also true that my wife and I were deeply affected by the news. I found it unthinkable that Riku Saito’s body had laid undiscovered in a flat since 2007.
I am well aware that stories involving the death of children are for some reason quite common in fiction submissions, and I have read editorial notes to submitters that this topic ought to be avoided. Perhaps the high frequency of stories involving the death of children is due to the emotive subject, and possibly authors feel this is likely to elicit a strong response in the reader. This could cynically be seen as cashing in on infant mortality. However, I stand by this story as a legitimate attempt to question this event in the light of human experience. This story is based on real events, but the focus is really about how the horror of another’s experience can become haunting to an individual due to some form of empathic connection, albeit one created by garish media reporting. This story also deals with the way one person might adopt another’s grief as a form of ‘excuse’ for their own feelings of depression. A final justification is that I felt Riku Saito’s story was so tragic and so sad, and yet having occurred in Japan it was not picked up by western media and therefore this poor boy’s fate is not well-known. In writing about it, I felt I may be able to bring some of the issues that his death raises to a wider readership.