TAKAHASHI
My knees were shaking. It has been more than four hours when I had heard my parents arguing in Japanese. Tears streaked my face upon hearing something I shouldn't have. The wooden latticed walls with fusuma paper did not muffle the sound of my parents shouting at each other. My father called me a bastard.
My mother used to be a singer. That was how my parents met. My father immediately married my mother after two weeks of them continuously seeing each other. He did not know that she had previously broken off with a long-time boyfriend because he ran away after learning that she was pregnant with me. To save herself from shame, she did not hesitate when Hiroshi Ryuji had asked for her hand in marriage even though they only knew each other for a period of two weeks.
