Chapter 7 Section 6

Takumi and Chizuru walked out of the apartment together.Qianhe said, let Shisheng be alone for a while.Tuoshi didn't know the meaning of doing this, but he also felt that, with his current state, he really couldn't say anything casually to him. "I don't know what's wrong with that guy, but he started crying right after he said that." Tuoshi pointed to the apartment behind him with his thumb as he walked. "Everyone has troubles, just like you, Brother Takumi." "It seems that this is the case, but if you don't say anything, how can others know!"

"My parents are not in this world", Shi Sheng said just now, presumably he meant that his parents had passed away a long time ago, and he was alone.Takumi thought, Chizuru said he was the same as himself, but it was actually different. Strange to say, Shisheng once said that his relationship with Takumi was a bit like relatives.Since both of them are lonely guests in the world, how can they be relatives? After breaking up with Chizuru, who was going to the station, Takumi walked into a noodle shop he frequented.The shop only has a row of seats at the counter and only noodles and dumplings are on the menu.The food is not very tasty, the only advantage is that it is cheap.Tuoshi ordered noodles, dumplings and rice, and went to the self-service drinking water station to pour a glass of water.

His adoptive father loves dumplings the most, saying that as long as there are dumplings and beer, there is nothing else he can ask for, and he often asks for many plates by himself.When the adoptive mother saw him like this, she always frowned and said something: Eating so much will leave a smell, don't the guests suffer?The adoptive father, who was blushing from drinking, would always shake his hands and say, it's okay, just drink more milk before going to bed. Takumi also tried this a few times, but felt that drinking milk didn't work.In fact, after eating dumplings, my adoptive father always went to work with a taste of garlic in his mouth.

Thinking about it now, Takumi felt that his adoptive father's guest was really unlucky.At the time, the adoptive father was driving a private taxi. The Miyamotos have no children.The results of the examination showed that it seemed that the man had a problem.This reality was a great disappointment to the couple, who both loved their children very much.When they got married, they rented a house with a single family. They didn't want to live in an apartment building because they thought they would have children after marriage and they could play in the yard. The couple did not lose heart.They decided to live a loving life together, and comforted each other, saying, aren't there many couples who have no children but live happily?

However, they didn't give up completely, and they always felt a kind of regret. My own flesh and blood can no longer stay in this world, but I hope to have the opportunity to complete the great cause of raising a person. On their tenth wedding anniversary, a relative made a fateful call asking if they wanted to adopt a child.An unmarried girl living in Osaka was pregnant and did not know who the father of the child was.Of course, she should know, but she didn't want to say anything, she just answered when she was forced, she wouldn't come back anyway, so why did she say him?The girl's mother speculated that her daughter must have been tricked by some villain and asked her to have an abortion, but her daughter refused.In this way, the child grew up little by little in the stomach, and gradually the word "abortion" could no longer be used, because it would be too cruel to kill a fully formed child, and the life of the pregnant woman would be in danger.The matter has come to this point, and the child has to be born.

The girl's mother thought about it, and finally wanted to show it to a couple without children, but she couldn't find such a family at once.So she discussed with her acquaintances, and after many twists and turns, she found the person who called the Miyamotos. Faced with this sudden incident, the couple were a little overwhelmed for a while, but they still discussed repeatedly.It's not that I haven't thought about adopting an adopted son before, but it's just that we discuss it without a specific object, which always lacks a sense of reality.It was only then that they began to seriously discuss the matter.

The idea of ​​wanting to have a baby hasn't changed.Although it is raising someone else's child, the joy of raising it is exactly the same, but I am worried that I will always worry about it in the future.What is the child's lineage? So, the couple proposed a plan to the middleman: Can they wait to see the child before making a decision?They wondered if they felt the urge to nurture when they saw their newborn baby.It seems to be the wife who came up with this plan. After being conveyed by the middleman girl's mother, the other party agreed. About two months later, the child was born.Hearing that it was a boy, Miyamoto and his wife were very happy.They had always preferred a boy.

In fact, the Miyamotos spent the past two months waiting anxiously.Although they claim to wait until they see the child to make a decision, in fact, the couple have already painted a new picture of family life in their minds.In fact, they have made a decision before seeing the child. But God ignored the couple's eagerness to see their children, and did not easily give them a chance to meet.Soon, the middleman brought the news that surprised them: after the girl gave birth, she refused to give her son to others as an adopted child. This is treachery!Miyamoto and his wife were furious, and Mrs. Miyamoto was even more out of control.It is no wonder that the child who has been thinking for so long is about to come, but in the end it has come to nothing, which is really unbearable.However, they are not stupid enough to lose their temper with the middleman.After gradually calming down, they felt that they could not blame anyone.It is only natural that a biological child is not willing to give it to others, and it is naturally best for the mother to raise the child herself.

Therefore, the Miyamotos and the child did not see each other. However, about a year later, that relative called again, asking if they still wanted the baby. It is probably not an exaggeration to describe the feelings of the couple as encountering a bolt from the blue, but they still understood the whole story rationally.According to the intermediary, the girl wanted to raise the child on her own, but she was already weak and sick, and she couldn't support herself while taking care of the child and working. In the end, she had to rely on her mother to do some labor at home to eke out a living.The family cannot live a normal life, and in the long run, the child may become malnourished.In desperation, the girl had agreed to give her son to someone else.

On a certain day when the cherry blossoms began to bloom from Kyushu to the north, Miyamoto and his wife went to Osaka.They were taken to a place with a row of small houses that were too poor to be a residence.In one of the huts lived the mother, daughter, and little boy.The girl was eighteen years old at the time, thin and skinny, with an ugly complexion. She said that she had been working in a textile factory since she graduated from junior high school, and was later fired because of her frail health.Mother is thin and small, she should be only forty-five or six years old, but she has wrinkles and looks like an old woman.

The child was lying on the damp tatami mats. He was so small that he didn't look like a one-year-old child at all, and his movements were very slow.Looking at his body with protruding ribs and his slender limbs swaying slowly, Mrs. Miyamoto couldn't help thinking of weak insects. The girl's mother knelt down respectfully, bowed her head, and said "please", and the girl also fell on the ground beside her, motionless.Both were covered in moth-holed sweaters. Mrs. Miyamoto picked up the child, feeling surprisingly light.She put the child on her lap and looked into his face.Perhaps because of being too thin, the child's eyes looked very big, and he was looking at her.The child's complexion was not good, but his eyes were crystal clear, as if he wanted to tell her something. The wife looked at her husband who was watching quietly.The two looked at each other and nodded slightly.This is the final decision of the couple. They want to take the baby back.The girl had already given up her mind and did not stop her.The couple also sighed a lot with the girl's mother, but they sighed something, and then they all forgot, and only remembered the appearance of the girl when they left with the child in their arms.She sat upright with her hands clasped together, biting her fingertips.This attitude did not change until the end. There was no Shinkansen at that time, and it took more than ten hours for Miyamoto and his wife to return to Tokyo by night train, but Mrs. Miyamoto, holding the child, even forgot the passage of time.Seeing that other passengers had children, they took special care of them, which made the couple very happy. In this way, Takumi became a child of the Miyamoto family. After drinking the noodle soup, Takumi was about to get up when a piece of paper stuck on the wall attracted him.It read: "Take the dumplings home." He counted the money he had spent for the meal and what was left in his pocket.He had already bought a pack of Aigu before he came here. "Boss, pack two dumplings." The shopkeeper, who was below for other customers, nodded silently.Tuoshi took out the cigarette case, tore off the tin foil, took out one, reached for the large box of matches on the counter and lit it.He looked up at the smoke rising to the oily ceiling and took a sip of water. One night a few days before the high school entrance exam, Tuoshi listened to his parents talk about his life experience, perhaps at his request.After reading the copy of household registration, he has been worrying about when to ask.In the end, he went all out and opened his mouth, not because he had made up his mind, but because he couldn't bear it anymore. The adoptive mother saw that her son was a little abnormal, so she guessed that he might have read the copy of the household registration.So when he asked, the couple didn't look embarrassed.They already knew that day would come. Most of the things are told by the adoptive father.The adoptive mother Dazi just inserted a few words to supplement the adoptive father's memory.She kept her head down all the time, not meeting Tuoshi's eyes. This matter was not very pleasant to say, and Takushi just thought, ah, it seems that the whole person is really not his biological mother. After listening to the long narration, Takumi didn't feel much personally, as if he was just an outsider, listening to the storyline of a serial drama, and felt neither exciting nor sad.The adoptive parents were silent, as if they were waiting for him to vent his grief and anger, but he didn't know what to say on this occasion. "That's how it is." Kunio said, "Mom and Dad are not related by blood, but that's all. We have never treated you as someone else's child, not once, and it will not change in the future. So, you don't have to Take this to heart." "That's right, Takumi, it's fine as before. Mom sometimes even feels as if she really fed you." The two people who are kind to themselves have already talked about this, so what can I say to my husband?Even if they didn't say so, Takumi couldn't think of another way to go. "The real mother... is that person?" He lowered his head and asked, "That...the person who came here several times in the past few years and spoke an Osaka accent?" The adoptive father paused for a while, then replied, "Yes. She is married now, and her name is Sumiko Tojo. Her real name is Asaoka." Tuoshi asked how to write, and his adoptive father wrote these words on the back of the newspaper advertisement with a ballpoint pen. So my real name is Takumi Asaoka, he thought. Three years after sending her son away, Asaoka Sumiko married a pastry shop owner named Tojo in Aichi Prefecture, the adoptive father said.This is what she wrote to Miyamoto and his wife later.As for how she got married and what kind of person the other party was, the letter didn't say anything, it just said that she missed Takushi very much and wanted to see her.It can be felt from the letter that her desire is very strong. Miyamoto and his wife, who had never been in touch with her before, wrote back and expressed their blessings to her, saying that Takumi was in good health and asked her not to worry. Soon after, she wrote again, this time explicitly asking if she could see Takumi, as if that was what she was writing for.The Miyamotos began to discuss.Kunio was reluctant, and so was Dazi.The family of three is already very close, and if he suddenly asks his son to meet a woman he has never met, he will be at a loss.Tatsuko Miyamoto still has another worry - will the biological mother, who is married and living a stable life, propose to take the child back? Even so, they don't want to keep people away.After thinking about it, Kunio finally used the vague expression "If there happens to be a chance..." in his reply, trying to fool the past. Sumiko really took it literally.Or, she understood the meaning of this sentence, but pretended not to know it.So, shortly after Takumi's fifth birthday, Tojo Sumiko paid a surprise visit to Miyamoto's house. The former poor girl has become a stable and generous young woman.She was still very thin, but her figure was already feminine and round, her makeup was tasteful, and the scarlet suit she wore didn't look cheap. On this day, Miyamoto and his wife happened to be at home.Sumiko bowed her head in front of them and begged, "Please let me meet Takumi." As she said that, tears fell down, not looking like she was acting. At that time, traveling from Aichi Prefecture to Tokyo was quite exhausting both mentally and physically, not to mention that she did not know whether she could achieve her goal when she came to Tokyo. Miyamoto and his wife decided to let her meet Takumi, but put forward two conditions: one is that she must not reveal that she is Takumi's biological mother, and the other is that she must not cry in front of Takumi.Sumiko agreed without hesitation, saying that she would never break her promise. Despite some uneasiness in their hearts, the Miyamotos still let her and Takumi meet alone.This is not so much taking care of her mood as it is for himself.They worried that seeing the mother and son who had been separated for several years meet, their hearts would be shaken. After seeing the healthy and growing Takumi with her own eyes, Sumiko bowed her head deeply to the Miyamoto couple again.Her eyes were bloodshot, and it seemed that she was about to burst into tears, but she didn't cry until the end.She strictly kept her promise, because after she went back, Tuoshi asked, "Who is that auntie?" From then on, as Takumi remembered, Sumiko would visit Miyamoto's house every one to two years.After growing up, Takumi began to wonder, why did that woman come?Why did you let the two of them meet alone?At the same time, the Miyamotos also noticed that Sumiko began to show a persistent look in her eyes. Dazi said, tell her not to come, but Kunfu persuaded her, how can she not come now? The problem was soon resolved—Sumiko stopped coming. At that time, Takumi, who learned the truth from her adoptive parents, did not have any special feelings for Sumiko.There is such a memory of the special love that comes from time to time, but I still feel that she is irrelevant in spirit, at least I don't want to meet her.Enough of that hassle, that's all he got the impression. Despite the shocking news, Takumi passed the entrance exam with flying colors.Before high school, he joined the baseball club.Nor did his parents seem to change after telling him the truth.The adoptive father still drives a taxi for a living and works late every day.The adoptive mother cooks nutritious meals for him in order to grow up. Yet change did come.The hearts of a family that are linked together like an iron chain gradually began to unlink.