1970: Year of the Dog

Norie Suzuki

315th Day
It was around the time we were ten and eleven, when me and my brother and all the neighborhood kids played on the mountain behind our rickety two-story apartment. Rain or shine. We gamboled up and down the narrow trail lined with maple trees and konara oaks, picked up gooey clumps of tadpole eggs, and skipped stones in a creek.

355th Day
It was around the time of our first motherless Mother’s Day when a bully in my class bugged me to get a white carnation, and my brother, Masashi, the biggest boy in sixth grade, punched him in the nose. The principal took us to her office and asked for an explanation, but we all clammed up, standing still like bamboos until our silence outran her patience.

390th Day
It was around that time when Aunt Kazuko, Pa’s older sister who lived on the other side of the mountain, often visited our apartment on Sundays, bringing photograph after photograph of women to show Pa.
          “It’s about time to consider your future. You’re still forty. Look. What do you think?” she asked, though, at best, she only got a grunt from Pa. Lying on the tatami mat, Masashi and I pretended to read comic books while we became all ears. Because Auntie never showed us the pictures she laid on our Formica dining table, and Pa later tossed them away in his drawer, where he kept his bills and receipts and broken pencils, what we heard was everything.
          Piece by piece, I stitched together Auntie’s words: a chubby woman, not an eye-catcher, but as strong as a horse; a petite, perky beauty who could pass for Satoshi and Masashi’s older sister; quite plain-looking, but a fantastic cook. I rolled my eyes or made funny faces as the figures I imagined appeared in my mind like speech bubbles. Masashi didn’t play along, but shot me a pain-in-the-neck glare.
          Even after Pa left to walk Aunt Kazuko home, my brother and I never exchanged notes on the possible mothers-to-be. Except for once.
          It was a clear day, marking the end of a rainy season, exactly fourteen months after the gas leak, after the explosion that blew up the welding shop. A ray of sunlight streaming into our tatami room beamed on our paulownia chest of drawers, which were labeled in Ma’s handwriting: the top two as Pa’s, underneath them were Ma’s, followed by Masashi’s, then mine.
          “Do you think Pa will meet the woman?” I asked. “Auntie said she looks like Ma.”
          “You believe her? She’ll say anything to get Pa’s attention.”
          I picked up Ma’s picture frame from the chest. Wearing a blue polka-dot dress, she leans against an oak tree, smiling shyly. A honeymoon photo. “Do you remember how Ma looked, I mean exactly?”
          “Are you nuts? Of course.”
          “Don’t stare at me like that. I was just asking.” I placed Ma’s picture back next to a pedestal vase filled with artificial purple and white delphiniums.
          “You don’t believe me, do you?” Masashi said, shoving me away. He put his hand in the finger-pull groove of Pa’s drawer.
          “We’re not supposed to go through his stuff.”
          “Chill out!” Masashi took out the photo Auntie brought and studied it before handing it to me with a scoff. Without looking at Ma’s picture, my brother described Ma: her eyes were round like acorns, not drooping; her nose was slightly upturned, not snub; and most of all, her hair was fluffy and smelled of soap, not a slicked-back bun like hers.
          My brother was right. Not even a hint of Ma. “She can’t be our mother,” I said.
          “No. And we don’t need a mother.” My brother placed the photo on top of the pile of bills and slammed Pa’s drawer, knocking down Ma’s picture frame.

464th Day
It happened around the end of August, when the Osaka Expo was nearing its grand finale, and our monochrome TV screens showed the wonder and excitement of a faraway place. For us, the Tower of the Sun, the moon rock, or the Daidarasaurus coaster were things from another world, irrelevant. We were busy building our secret base with tires, wooden boards, and torn mattresses dumped near the creek.
          We befriended a stray mongrel that followed us. The ugliest mutt: the left side of her face was black, while the rest was white and brown, and her left eye looked like a saury’s that never blinked. Fuckface. That’s what we boys called her, and we made her into a lion, a bear, and a dinosaur, depending on the game we played. Behind Pa’s back, my brother and I saved some day-old rice and miso soup in a plastic bag and fed Fuckface the thick porridge in a chipped bowl we hid in our secret base.
          One afternoon, while we were playing hide-and-seek, Fuckface tagged along with me to the creek and wouldn’t stop barking.
          “Shut up.” I raised my hands to show her I didn’t have any munchies. “If you’re good, I’ll bring you something tomorrow, so get lost.”
          Fuckface was not only ugly but downright stupid. Her woofing grew louder, her marble eye fixed on me. Beyond the oak tree, a figure moved. The it. Trying not to make any noise, I hid behind the fridge, which we hadn’t figured out how to drag to our secret base. Fuckface nuzzled my ankle, her sticky tongue licking the frayed strap of my hand-me-down sandal. Before she had a chance to yap, I muzzled Fuckface with my hand, praying for the it to move on. I held my breath. And waited. Listened to the oak leaves rustle.
          “Found you!” The it ran up the path, calling, “Masashi, I found you. You’re out.”
          Fuckface wriggled loose from my arm and barked.
          “Damn it!” I opened the fridge door. Pretending to grab something from my pocket, I fake-placed it inside. When Fuckface stepped in, I flung shut the door and ran to the bushes.

465th Day
It happened around the time Pa left for work, when his pickup truck, loaded with trowels, mixing buckets, and a step ladder, rumbled down the gravel road, when my brother scraped some leftover rice from the cooker and dumped it into a plastic bag, shaking it in my face like bait so I would hurry up and slip on my sandals so we could get to our secret base before the other boys.
          “Fuckface!” I yelled, dropping my toothbrush on Masashi’s foot.
          “Yuck.” My brother wiped his foot and tried to rub his icky hand against my cheek when he realized I was crying.
          Between hiccups, I told him what I did. He didn’t call me an idiot. He didn’t blame me. He only said, “Let’s go.”
          When Masashi opened the fridge, Fuckface tumbled out the door, her eyes, even her saury eye, tightly shut. We stood there motionless, waiting for Fuckface’s dried nose to twitch, her matted ears to perk up.
          “Is she…?” I bit my lower lip.
          “Why would I know?” Masashi said, clenching his fist like when I asked him about Ma in whispers, huddled on a hard hospital bench where Pa told us to wait while he went to the basement with a policeman.
          The sun bit into our necks, and I felt sweat run down my spine as ants crawled on her paw. Masashi knelt and touched Fuckface’s head with his fingertips, then slowly slid his hand down her neck, spine, and belly. I did the same, feeling her stiffened muscles, her body that was no longer warm.
          “Do you think Ma’s body would have been like Fuckface’s?” I asked Masashi without looking at him.
          He stopped tracing the dog’s face and stood up. “No,” he snapped.
          “How can you be so sure?”
          “Because we were never allowed to see her, open that casket to touch her.” He stomped on the ants gathering around his sandals. “Who knows what parts of Ma were in that casket?”
          “Shut up!” I tackled my brother, and we rolled on the ground. The sharp gravel stung my back as I frantically swung my arm to punch him. But he pinned me down like I was no match. I closed my eyes and braced myself for a blow, counting down from ten the way Ma told me to whenever I panicked. My breathing slowed, and I felt my body soften like the cotton candy Ma bought for me at the summer carnival. Maybe I might have smiled. Maybe that was why Masashi didn’t punch me, but helped me get on my feet.
          We didn’t talk while walking home, but we knew exactly what was on our minds. For the first time after the funeral, we opened the drawer labeled “Ma.” Her sweaters and blouses were neatly folded, organized by color. When we pulled out her white, bow-tie blouse, which she always wore to our school on Parents’ Day, Ma’s whiff tingled my nostrils.
          “We’d better hurry,” Masashi said, rummaging through her jewelry box. “You go get Pa’s old shovel. Must be lying somewhere behind the landlord’s shed.”
          When we returned to the creek, blow flies were circling over Fuckface. We swatted them away and covered her with Ma’s blouse while we took turns digging a hole as far as possible from the creek and the garbage dump, but not too close to the mountain trail.
          “Looks good enough,” Masashi said, taking the shovel from me. He examined the hole, which was about thirty centimeters deep, and flattened the bottom with the back of the blade. We carried Fuckface together like pallbearers, my brother holding her neck and me her butt. Her once fluffy fur felt coarse and dry, her body firm against my clammy arms.
          We brushed the flies and ants off her face and gently wrapped her in Ma’s blouse. Then, the bow. It wasn’t easy. No matter how many times we tried, the bow never sat right but looked crooked. Next, the clip-on earrings Masashi found in her jewelry box—the shiny white, oval faux pearls Ma wore with the blouse. He handed me one, and I clipped it onto Fuckface’s hardened ear.
          We lowered her into the trench. Before letting her go, I cried out—sorry for locking you up, for not bringing you more food, for not being a good boy, for not saying I love you—and stroked Ma’s blouse one last time.
          Masashi placed his hand on my shoulder. I wouldn’t have known then that this would be the moment I would recall at Ma’s thirty-second anniversary memorial service. Not the pungent smell of antiseptic that floated over the hospital bench, not the red-eyed Pa emerging from the basement like a soul-sucked sleepwalker, not the coffin tightly wrapped in the white pall. My hand holding the prayer beads would remember the touch of Fuckface’s solid body, her cold ear, the heaviness of gravel and sand I heaped on her. Over the sutra chant, I would hear the scraping and rustling, the thud that echoed with finality as the sand piled over Fuckface.
          But this would happen much later.
          So, there we stood by the freshly covered grave, me and my brother. We looked at each other and pointed at our messy faces, streaked with dirt and sweat and who knows what else. Under the vast, cloudless sky, we doubled over in bittersweet laughter, feeling as light as the wind.

Norie Suzuki (she/her) was born and educated bilingually in Tokyo, Japan, where she writes and works as a simultaneous interpreter. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Cutleaf Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received third prize in the T. Paulo Urcanse Prize for Literary Excellence in 2024, and her work will be included in Best Microfiction 2026.

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