“The news is poor, Masao-san. I am sorry to tell you.” He closed his eyes for an instant, bracing himself. Their moment of joy had turned into a nightmare. He had lost them both. He just knew it.
“Hidemi is well.” He opened his eyes and stared at her, unable to believe his good fortune, as his throat tightened and his eyes filled with tears that many men would have been ashamed of.
“But the baby?” This time he had to ask her. Hidemi was alive. All was not lost. And how he loved her.
“Is a girl.” His mother-in-law lowered her eyes in grief that her daughter had so badly failed him.
“It's a girl?” he asked excitedly. “She's well? She's alive?”
“Of course.” Hidemi's mother looked startled by the question. “But I am very sorry….” She began to apologize, and Masao stood up and bowed to her in elated excitement.
“I am not sorry at all. I am very happy. Please tell Hidemi …” he began, and then thought better of it. He hurried across the garden as the sky turned from peach to flame, and the sun exploded into the sky like a bonfire.
“Where are you going, Masao-san? You cannot …” But there was nothing he could not do. It was his home, and his wife, and his baby. He was law here. Although seeing his wife at this point would have been highly improper, Masao had no thought of that at all, as he bounded up the two steps to their second bedroom, and knocked softly on the shoji screens that shielded her from him. Her sister opened them instantly, and Masao smiled at her, as she looked at him with eyes full of questions.
“I'd like to see my wife.”
“She cannot …She is …I …Yes, Masao-san,” she said, bowing low to him, and stepping aside after only a moment's hesitation. He was certainly unusual, but she knew her place here, and she disappeared, and went to the kitchen for a moment to prepare tea for him, and join her mother.
“Hidemi?” he asked softly as he entered the room, and then he saw them. She was lying peacefully, wrapped in quilts, and shivering slightly. She was pale, and her hair was pulled back off her face, and she looked incredibly lovely. And in her arms, tightly wrapped so only the tiny face showed, was the most perfect child he had ever seen. She looked as though she had been carved out of ivory, like the tiniest of statues. She looked just like her mother, although, if possible, she was even more beautiful, and he gazed down at her in wonder as he saw her. ‘Oh … she is so beautiful, Hidemi-san…. She is so perfect….” And then he looked at his wife, and saw easily how much she'd been through. “Are you all right?” He was still worried about her.
“I am fine,” she said, suddenly looking very wise, and a great deal older. She had crossed the mountains from girlhood into womanhood that night, and the journey had been far more arduous than she'd expected.
“You should have let me take you to the hospital,” he said anxiously, but she only shook her head in answer. She was happy here at home, with her mother and her sister, and her husband waiting in the garden.
“I'm sorry she is only a girl, Masao-san,” Hidemi said with genuine emotion, and her eyes filled with tears as she looked at him. Her mother was right. She had failed him.
“I am not sorry at all. I told you. I wanted a daughter.”
“You are very foolish,” she said, daring for once to be disrespectful.
“So are you, if you do not think a daughter a great prize …perhaps even far greater than a son. She will make us proud one day. You will see, Hidemi-san. She will do great things, speak many languages, go to other countries. She can be anything she wants to be, go anywhere she chooses.” Hidemi giggled at him. He was so silly sometimes, and it had been so much harder than she'd thought, but she loved him so dearly. He reached out and took her hand in his, and bent low to kiss her forehead. And then he sat for a long moment, looking with pride at their daughter. He meant everything he had said to her. He didn't mind at all that they had had a daughter. “She is beautiful, like you…. What shall we call her?”
“Hiroko.” Hidemi smiled. She had always liked the name, and it was the name of her dead sister.
“Hiroko-san,” he said happily, looking from his wife to his child, and engulfing them in the love he felt. “She will be a thoroughly modern woman.”
Hidemi laughed at him then, beginning to forget the pain, and then she smiled, looking suddenly a great deal older. “She will have a brother soon,” she promised him. She wanted to try again, to do it right for him the next time. No matter what he said, or how wild his ideas were, she knew she owed him more than this girl, and that there was nothing more important in life than bearing sons for her husband. And one day, he would have one.