Parasite Eve (14 page)

5

    Kiyomi’s friends were always
impressed that her parents were both doctors. Whenever they came over to her
house, they could not help but notice its spaciousness and well-decorated interior.
A grand piano stood in the living room, as well as a wooden book case that
housed a charming assortment of music boxes and French dolls. Kiyomi’s mother
enjoyed baking and usually made cake or cookies for her and her friends.

    “We’ve only got an apartment.
My father’s always complaining he doesn’t have enough money ‘cuz he’s a high
school teacher,” said Chika in a bright voice, despite the mouthful of freshly
baked cookie. Denying any possession of such riches, Kiyomi replied modestly
that Chika had plenty going for her, all the games she had, not to mention an
older brother to keep her company at home.

    “Oh, he’s a pain. He’s so
uncool,” Chika retorted, shaking her head dramatically. Then she laughed and
said Kiyomi’s house was the best.

    Kiyomi had many friends and
enjoyed her time with everyone. She had been close to most of them since grade
school. But because she and Chika were in the same homeroom class for their
first two years of middle school, they had become especially good friends and
spent much of their free time together. They differed in character and taste,
yet this only served to augment their friendship. Chika often described Kiyomi’s
lavish household, to use a vocab word she had learned in history class, as
“bourgeois.” Kiyomi understood Chika’s praise to be genuine at bottom, so she
didn’t mind at all.

    Kiyomi inherited her mother’s
hobbies and had recently begun to pursue an interest in baking, occasionally
making cakes together with her mother. She was also fond of doll-making. For
her birthday the year before, she’d received an
Anne of Green Gables
book from her father and had fallen in love with it. She now owned the entire
series and had reread them from cover to cover a number of times.

    “Kiyomi, you’re such a lady, everything
you do. ‘Course, if I grew up like you, I’d be baking fancy cookies too,” Chika
said heartily.

    After finishing their
cookies, they sipped orange juice from straws.

    “I would love to be more like
you, Chika.” Kiyomi was thinking of Chika’s fifty-meter dash in gym class that
day. Though Chika was short, she had the right reflexes and excelled in short
distance running, for which she held the top honor in her class. She’d
participated in city meets, and she was always the star on Sports Day. For the
relay run, she easily beat out boys from the other classes. Her figure stood
out quite noticeably on the track.

    “Nah, I suck. Look at my
legs, they’re getting fat. None of the cute guys’ll even get near me!” said
Chika sarcastically and smiled.

    “Don’t be silly. You’re
adorable, Chika...I’m sure you’ll find someone who appreciates you.”

    “You’re just saying that. ‘Sides,
if you looked up ‘adorable’ in the dictionary, your picture’d be right there
next to it.” Chika laughed as she said this, but then her expression grew
serious. She leaned in closer.

    “What’s wrong?” asked Kiyomi,
somewhat unnerved.

    “A question for the witness.
This’ll go on record, so you must answer honestly. You do have the right to
remain silent.”

    “What is it, Chika?”

    “What’s your type?”

    “Huh?”

    It was such a sudden question
that Kiyomi did not know how to answer. She looked around bashfully, then gazed
directly at Chika’s face. Chika’s eyes took on a mischievous look; the straight
line of her lips twisted and broke into laughter.

    “You’re too much, Kiyomi.”
Chika held her belly and continued laughing. “Is it that hard to answer?”

    “Hey...”

    “I could see you ending up
with someone like your dad,” she said, at last suppressing her snickering.

    “You think?”

    “Definitely. He seems like
someone you can really count on. They say if you have a father like that, you
end up with pretty high standards.”

    “I never thought about it...”

    “Your family’s like a TV
show, anyway. You’ve got your quiet father, gentle mother, and the little
princess. Everything you need for the perfect drama.”

    “Don’t say things like
that...it’s embarrassing.” Kiyomi’s face turned red and she hid it behind both
hands. She tried to change the subject.

    “Well, enough about me. What
about you? You haven’t told me what your type is.”

    “Me? Hm...”

    She grew serious again,
folded her arms, and tilted her head. Her emotions always changed so quickly.
Kiyomi was more reserved in character and was envious of Chika’s outgoing
nature.

    Chika thought about it for a
good thirty seconds. Then, a smile rose to her lips.

    “Someone who will think of me
forever.”

    “Yeah.”

    Kiyomi nodded, a smile upon
her face as well.

    Kiyomi’s grades were in good
standing and she was an active member of the brass band. She was accepted into
a prep school without even attending cram-school classes. The high school was
considered one of the best in her prefecture, with a lot of the graduates going
on to college. Meanwhile, Chika’s diligent study in her final year of middle
school paid off and she was accepted into the same high school as Kiyomi. Chika
always wore a cheerful smile in the company of others, showing no signs of
stress, but Kiyomi suspected that she was secretly a very hard worker.

    The high school placed as
much emphasis on extracurricular activities as on academics, and most students
picked up something. Chika did what she was best at and joined the track and
field club, while Kiyomi joined a chamber ensemble.

    High school life was as
enjoyable as they could have imagined. Kiyomi liked to read in the time between
classes and after-school activities. After finishing
The Tale of Genji
,
she started on
Anne of Green Gables
in the English original.

    The seasons passed by
quickly. Nevertheless, somewhere in her heart, Kiyomi felt like high school
life was all she would ever know; hence her exclamation of surprise one day
during the summer of her second year when the teacher handed out a college
selection form to the class.

    Later that day after
practice, Kiyomi was putting her things away when Chika dropped by the practice
room. She was carrying her backpack and duffel bag in one hand. As she stood in
front of the doorway, peeping into the room, she gently waved her free hand.
Her hair was a bit wet from the shower she had taken after track. Kiyomi smiled
and waved back, signaling with a finger to wait a moment. When most of the band
members had left, Chika stepped into the quiet practice room and sat next to
Kiyomi, who was cleaning her instrument.

    Watching Kiyomi’s fingers
detachedly, Chika asked, “So what do you think you’ll do, Kiyomi?”

    “I don’t know.”

    Kiyomi shook her head. The
still warm sunlight poured in through the window, illuminating her hands as she
wiped fingerprints from her trumpet with a small cloth. The heat had been quite
intense throughout the day, but remained now only in scattered places as a
languid afterglow. It was already 6:30 and, before they knew it, the voices
echoing from the basketball team in the rear gymnasium had faded away.

    They hopped on their bikes
and took the road home together, riding side by side. The streets were
unusually inactive, not a single soul in sight. The girls, too, were silent.
Kiyomi began to feel uncomfortable, pedaling her bicycle faster to keep up with
Chika.

    Kiyomi broke the silence at
last.

    “So, we were just starting to
get used to high school and now we have to decide what to do with our lives. It’s
too much to handle right now. I can’t even think beyond band practice, you
know?”

    But Chika simply pedaled,
staring off wordlessly into the distance before them. Kiyomi studied her
profile. Before long, they had passed the street and reached a paved road which
ran straight through a rice paddy. The failing heat of the rays was pursued by
twilight and their surroundings became steeped in deep blue. The brightness of
a single star twinkled from a gap in the clouds. Chika replied at last.

    “I want to become a doctor,”
she mumbled.

    Surprised, Kiyomi looked at
Chika, whose eyes remained fixed on the sky spread out above them.

    Chika’s mother had passed
away that spring. Kiyomi did not understand the details very well, but knew
that there had been something wrong with her heart. The days of nursing and the
funeral itself must have been hard on Chika, but she’d never once shown a
depressed face to Kiyomi. She continued to smile and joke around in her usual
manner and remained the person Kiyomi could always talk to. Yet, Kiyomi had been
unable to read what had been transpiring in her best friend’s mind.

    Kiyomi had trouble falling
asleep that night.

    What did she want to be? She
could not picture herself finding a job and earning a salary. She would
probably attend college but had no clear ideas as to what she would major in.
She had plenty of time and she could decide once she was in college; that had
been the extent of her thinking.

    Chika’s comment that day
struck her heart. Chika seemed to know what she wanted to be, at least. Kiyomi
didn’t. Chika had taken a step ahead and was pulling away from her.

    Kiyomi fantasized about what
shape her life would take. Who would she marry? What would her children be
like? How would she die? She lay in bed with her eyes open, staring at the dark
ceiling with a contemplation that was fragmentary at best. The fluorescent
light dangling from above began to spin around slowly. She had no idea if she
was awake or dreaming. Countless doubts arose, overflowing and spilling over
one another inside her head.

6

    “How are you feeling?”
Yoshizumi said to Mariko and flashed a smile.

    Five days had passed since
the operation, and everything was going smoothly. Two days ago they had removed
the upper drainage tube from her kidney and today the urinary catheter. The
bladder [lube was still in place, but would be removed tomorrow.

    Barely glancing at Yoshizumi’s
face, Mariko looked away.

   
Didn’t think so...
Trying not to betray his disappointment, Yoshizumi said, “It seems your fever’s
gone down, and so has your CRP value. Don’t you feel better? You’re still
slightly anemic, so let’s adjust your transfusion level.”

    He then explained the test
results in a way Mariko would understand. If she knew about her condition
fully, he thought, she would have a much more positive attitude towards the
treatment this time around. She should also be relieved to learn that there
were no symptoms of organ rejection or serious infections.

    The real transplantation
treatment didn’t begin until after the operation. In the case of kidney
transplants, the surgery itself was relatively simple, something any trained
surgeon could perform. The problem was what happened afterwards.

    A transplanted organ was a
foreign body and inevitably elicited resistance from the recipient’s immune
system. It was to minimize this that HLA compatibility checks were made. Yet,
immuno-suppressants were always necessary, and the dual use of prednine, an
adrenal steroid, and azathioprine used to be common. The success rate for
transplants shot up, however, with the development of more effective
suppressants like cyclosporin and FK506. Because these drugs are reno-toxic,
today they are used only in conjunction with other drugs. Based on clinical
data, Yoshizumi’s group favored a three-drug combo consisting of a minimum of
cyclosporin, some adrenal steroid, and mizoribrine, an antiobiotic. Since this
wasn’t Mariko’s first transplant, she’d been prescribed a relatively small
volume. Suppressing the immune system helped the new kidney survive but made
the patient vulnerable to infections, a potentially lethal outcome given the
lowered barriers. This was the crux of a transplant procedure, which was often
compared to tightrope walking. The patient had to be kept under close watch for
signs of organ rejection on the one hand and infections on the other. Yoshizumi
was painfully aware that transplants were the work not of the surgeon alone but
of the nurses, clinical technicians, and pharmacists who had to stay in close
touch during the post-op period.

    Mariko was still turned away.
Yoshizumi cast a backwards glance at her father, but he, too, looked away.

    Yoshizumi sighed in his
heart.

    Mariko was clearly not in the
mood for small talk. She had been acting this way with her father and the
nurses as well. It seemed she wanted to forget, even deny, that the transplant
had ever occurred.

    In the eyes of a young
patient, parents and doctors were dignified, powerful figures and therefore
understandably intimidating. Yoshizumi remembered having similar instances with
other transplant patients under his care. However, in Mariko’s case, he
suspected there were other issues. He had no idea why she was so adamantly
opposed to the transplant, even after the fact.