Feeling So Bad about Writing This

My brother was very strict with me. Already in his adolescence, he seemed to be living according to his own principle, of which I have no idea. Principally, he was sometimes exceedingly critical of my childish behavior. I was a child after all. My mother would complain to him about me, and then he would come to me to leave terse and harsh comments. I do not remember what made him say this but I do remember him saying to me on the train platform of Shichijo station, “You have no right to talk back to mother as far as she cooks for you and do laundry for you.” It does not matter when this event took place but it was either when my brother and I were on our way home after attending the funeral of our aunt (if so, I was 15 or 16, still in high school) or when we were on our way home after meeting our father (if so, it was during 1983 when I was studying to get into an art school, a traumatic experience). If it was the latter, she only added me to my brother for the visit as I guess she thought I would violently complain when I knew I had been excluded again. She would send me out alone twice more to see father to ask him to pay for my university entrance fee and to get the money. When I went to see him alone “for the first time,” I made a call from a payphone I found at Namba station and hesitated very much to explain to him who I was. For my third time, she sent me out saying, “This is a promise a man made to another man.” Saying that he had just received some money from his client, he made a cheque of 200,000 yen on the spot. With the cheque with me, I went to a Sumitomo Bank branch in Kyobashi or Tenmabashi to get the cash.
One reason why I was so unhappy with mother is that she was treating me only as someone who did not deserve much consideration and who was incapable of reasoning. She might be right to think this way as I am the youngest member of the family. To me, it was always her inability of talking straight. She would allude to her marital problem, which of course irreparably affected my personality, at any time in any way she liked, but it was always an allusion as if she had already explained the matter fully and convincingly. She never did. But I knew what was happening, and it greatly irritated me when she mentioned anything that was associated with her own marital problem and she never allowed any criticism from me accepting only agreement.
Even while a very young child, I had terrible fear about the situation which my family was in and frightened by realizing the fact of having the fear. I already knew the situation because of my mother’s careless but probably intentional remarks and my own intuition. In her stories, father was always the worst man imaginable in the whole world and on other occasions she would say. “You are just like your father even in the way you walk,” the worst comment I could get from anybody. Her sisters (my aunts) were in agreement with her, forcing me to be ashamed of myself. My feeling toward her was so rocky and unstable that I wanted to resist a hug from her when I was still in kindergarten. She was giving me a hug because this child was intolerably rebellious and she thought a hug would cure me.  I wanted to resist it with all my might but I did not because I knew it was something I was not supposed to do. In those very young days of mine, she would send me to run after father when he was leaving home for his office, on the second floor of a building with a coffee shop named “Hawks” downstairs located behind the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium and near a big police station, to say to him, “Come back early tonight.” Already meters ahead of me walking along the canal, he would raise his hand and wave it without turning around. I think at least partly she was exploiting my innocence toward father for herself. I was not and am not for what father, an unrefined lowbrow, did to his family. But I, as a little boy, had sound affection toward him, and mother was consciously or not trying to destroy it.
So many years later in the spring of 1992, a ‘feeling of blood” came back to me when I received a call from a stranger who told me that father had got hospitalized. I was still staying with mother and she was asleep. The person was someone who was living in the same apartment complex as he and she found the phone number in a notebook or address book my father was keeping. I could not bring myself to tell mother about the call but I managed to call my brother, who was not living with us, to let him know about the call. I think he asked me who had got hospitalized because I could not be clear about “who.” I remember I was feeling very uncomfortable with great difficulty to utter the word “father.” I stayed awake and waited for the first train to visit the hospital. His condition was grim. After leaving the hospital, I was emotionally choked with a tight chest on the subway, thinking “This is the end of it.” Back home, I found my brother with mother. I reported what I saw at the hospital and said “I will take care of him because I feel close toward him.“ Mother said, “That’s what I thought,” disapproving me. Even after such an event, she continued the attitude she had been showing to me with allusions and suggestions about the past taking my tacit agreement for granted. More years later, this has been the same even after she created a Buddhist tablet for him. Deeply religious and still resentful. And about my brother, I do not know if he did what he did for mother out of his sense of obligation or firmly established moral principle. Or he may have been simply acting.