Fragile Happiness

There was a photograph in my mother’s room of the three of us—me, Yūha, and Mom.

The photo of us when we were little, being held in her arms, had been taken by my father. Our whole family had gone to an amusement park together. Back then, happiness as a family of four had still been possible.

Even though Yūha had been born from my mother’s affair, I had only been three years old at the time, so I hadn’t understood what any of that meant. In my hazy memories, there was no trace of the face of my second father.

I think ignorance is a prerequisite for happiness.

There is no value in knowing things.

Ever since I was a kid, I’d vaguely felt that I wasn’t loved as much as Yūha. Around that same time, the other kids had also gone through a phase where they said things like, “My parents are fake. They found me under a bridge,” so I had vaguely wondered if the same might be true for me.

Of course, for the other kids it was nothing more than an extension of getting scolded or rebelling against their parents, and they were very much related by blood.

In my case, it was real.

Our family albums only existed from the year Yūha was born onward. Even though I was supposed to be older, there were no photographs of me from before I was three. I knew my father was the kind of person who liked keeping commemorative photos, so even then, I’d had a faintly bad feeling about it.

I’d already had sticky fingers back then, so I rummaged through my mother’s belongings, which she had always been skilled at hiding—and finally found it.

A photograph of her holding me when I was about a year old, posing affectionately beside a man I didn’t know.

A single sentence had been written on the photograph in permanent marker.

‘We’ll make this child happy. Welcome to the Kunioka family, Rokurō!’

An unfamiliar surname, and my own name.

My mother’s face, which I knew well, and the face of a man I’d never seen before.

The word “affair,” which the precocious girls in my class were always talking about, surfaced in my mind. Thanks to the influence of daytime dramas, “affair” had actually been a more familiar word to me than “divorce” at the time. That peculiar, lopsided knowledge unique to elementary school children had come back to bite me.

After that, everything had unraveled one thing after another.

Fortunately, I had still been a rather oblivious lower-grade elementary schooler, so it hadn’t wounded me too deeply. If I’d discovered it a few years later, I probably would have broken right then and there.

As I gradually came to understand that I was the fake one, the foreign object in the family, there was one thing I remembered thinking with absolute certainty.

—I don’t want Yūha to ever find out.

“Grab the other side. Yeah, spread it out, then put something on each corner to weigh it down.”

“Okay.”

There was no way anyone would be at a nature park this deep in the countryside in the middle of a weekday. We extravagantly claimed a spot beneath a tree in the very center of the grassy field and sat down where we could see the lake.

I took out the drinks we’d chilled in the cooler, and after taking a breather, it felt like paradise.

How long had it been since I’d let myself relax this completely?

I lay back on the tarp and looked at the sky through the gaps in the leaves.

“I never want to work again…”

“You’ve seemed pretty exhausted lately.”

“The neighborhood brats are way too ferocious. There are somehow more of them now too… I’m starting to miss farm work.”

“I heard farm work is really hard, though.”

“Vegetables don’t attack you.”

It wasn’t funny from my perspective, but Yūha giggled like she found it hilarious.

“You know, Rokurō, you might actually make a good preschool teacher.”

“Should I raise an entire generation of outrageous liars?”

I could create a den of corruption where any lie was acceptable as long as you didn’t get caught, then raise liars who surpassed even me. That might actually be entertaining.

“You say that, but you actually like little kids, don’t you?”

“That’s a really unfortunate way to phrase it…”

“What is?”

“Nothing.”

Because my mind was filthy, I’d interpreted that in a weird way. By “liking little kids,” she meant as a normal, well-adjusted adult. Right.

I hadn’t been having trashy conversations with Keiji lately, so toxins were starting to build up inside me. If I didn’t vent once in a while, I was going to become genuinely toxic.

Maybe I’d call him later. By now he was probably going, “Nako-chan turned down my stay-at-home date…”

Anyway, my answer to Yūha was no.

“I hate kids. They’re annoying.”

“But you still take care of them properly.”

“That’s exactly why I hate them.”

They looked dangerous if you merely watched them, and when they tried to do something, they were so unsteady that you couldn’t help worrying. Before long, they started thinking, “This adult is fun,” and came charging at you with their curiosity on full display.

Dealing with that was unbelievably exhausting.

“You’re really not honest with yourself.”

“Shut up.”

Yūha’s finger touched the space between my eyebrows as I lay there. It felt cool, probably because she’d been holding a plastic bottle.

Her touch was soft and didn’t feel unpleasant, but I frowned anyway for appearances’ sake. Looking down at me with amusement, Yūha continued her nonsense.

“I bet you’d make a good father, Rokurō.”

“Here we go with the nonsense again.”

“You’d probably spoil your kids like crazy. You might even cry when they hit their rebellious phase.”

“If I ever had kids, I’d throw them into a ravine like a lion. If they climbed back up, I’d throw them down again.”

“You’re not going to raise the one that makes it back up…?”

Thus was born the next revolutionary parenting technique: the “Riverbed of Sai Method.”

It would produce either an absurdly resilient human being or someone who had completely despaired of everything.

“No thanks. I don’t want to become a parent. I can barely manage myself, so how the hell am I supposed to raise a kid?”

“But having a family would make you happy.”

“…………”

I didn’t answer.

Even with my eyes closed, a smile naturally rose to my lips.

“Why are you smiling? You’re definitely making fun of me a little.”

“I’m not, I’m not.”

Would people call Yūha foolish for still seeing family as something beautiful after being born into such a warped household? Or would they call her purehearted and beautiful?

Neither.

She was ignorant.

She knew nothing.

To Yūha, the Sanjō family was a family going through a divorce, but still a precious family nonetheless. She still had beautiful memories of the past, and she hadn’t despaired of the very idea of family.

She didn’t know that I was unrelated to her, that our mother had cheated, or that our father had fallen apart mentally.

Me, Mom, and Dad—we had all maintained the lie for her sake.

We disliked one another and had long since come to hate one another, yet there was one person we all still cared about: her. Only on that one point had we ever been able to work together.

Like hiding the truth about Santa Claus—not that what we were doing was nearly so beautiful, but we had undeniably been looking toward the same thing.

And if her earlier words were the result of that,

then perhaps all the lies we’d piled up hadn’t been meaningless after all.

I used both hands to push myself upright.

“Let’s eat. After that, we can take a short walk and head home before the sun starts going down.”

“Okay. Ah, wait a second—my phone’s ringing.”

“A call?”

“Looks like it. I think it’s probably a friend… Ah.”

The moment Yūha looked at the screen, visible panic spread across her face.

A dull pain ran through the pit of my stomach. On some instinctive level, I immediately narrowed down who the caller was to one of two possibilities.

Either way, both options were terrible.

After thinking for three seconds, I narrowed it down to one.

Yūha confirmed the answer herself.

“It’s Mom. …It’s okay if I answer, right?”