Express Store Women

“Chirin-chirin”, rang the suzu. The last customer left with a chicken sausage, two onigiris and one can of soda pop.

I was reading “Heaven”, by Mieko Kawakami. It’s a really good book, I will probably complete it by tonight 3 AM. I am really loving how fast Mieko Kawakami has made the plot go.

“Ehhhhh, Mieko, not every day is the same”, I exclaimed at Miko, my helper in Express Store. She recently got rejected by a boy who she fell in love with. The boy was apparently 5 years older to her. Poor Mieko. She struggles at expressing her feelings a lot of times.

“Let me tell you a story of a bullying session I had gone through when I was very young”, I said.

I did not clearly remember what “bullying session” meant here. I just made up some words probably but I just have some image of that in my mind which I used to daydream about.

I started, “It goes back to around 10 years ago now? Yes. I was always afraid of what my body used to look like. It was the miserable COVID-19 times and even before that I had grown very afraid and insecure about how my upper body was. I used to search on internet about why my male melons looked like and were growing like female ones”.

“There was this condition called ‘Gynecomastia’ which I stumbled upon while watching youtube on how to reduce Chest Fat and get away from it without Medical Drugs or a surgery”, I said.

Mieko looked very interested in the story, since I was expressing about one of my bullying sessions. This is how we are as humans. All of us have around 40% of this mental condition called SPD, Sadistic Personality Disorder. It’s nothing serious, all of us have it.

In fact, I’d say to what I know of Mieko she probably has 80% of SPD and she really gets interested into destructive, self sabotage and all these kind of negative energies.

I could see all the glistening eye candies, so I continued.

“Gynecomastia is this condition in males when the female molecules inside your body are increasing and overpowering the male ones. To be more precise, testosterone and estrogen levels. I was quite young back then, I guess a very tender 14 year old. It was bound to happen. Things were happening early on to me”.

Now, I kind of feel insecure sharing all these next things with her, because it is traumatic, but I think it’s fine.

All of us, in this marginalia, are very self-centered and why shouldn’t we be? We breathe for ourselves, eat for ourselves. So, I am completely fine being a self centered person even if some woman comes in front of my shop and shouts, “You daughter of a self centered fucking bitch!”.

I stopped talking to myself and continued, “I was moreover precocious for the most part. Credit to my mother mostly. Growing up, my mother shared a lot of her trauma and insecurities from her childhood. She even shared about how scared she was when she was bleeding for the first time. It was indeed traumatizing for her as a girl and on the other hand her parents were happy”.

Her parents said, “Tamago, you’ve grown up. We’ll be hosting a dinner next week on Sunday for you. Let’s also go and get a new Kimono for you”.

She told us that after her mother got to know that she was bleeding, 2 hours later her mother stepped into her room coldly and said, “Welcome to Womanhood, Tamago”.

“She was very self aware. But, let me tell you Mieko, being self aware and realizing everything you feel is also a curse. I’ve had people ask me if I can cry, and on the contrary they just can’t cry. That is an example of not realizing what’s happening to you, your mind or even your body.”

“I was a little kid and for some time I had started eating a lot of rice and chicken curry. I was loving it and that made me fat. It wasn’t exactly gynecomastic, but the tissues around my chest and nipples were growing larger making me feel very very insecure of them. That is also why, I have always been shy of even changing my shirt in front of my own mother. I always do it in the bathroom.”

Mieko said, “Ehhhh, that doesn’t sound like a very good thing. Did you not consult the doctors?”

I thought for a while and said, “I did not really know what to do. All I used to do was find remedies. For the most part my mother did not even know that I was afraid and looking at all these kind of things. I wish I had shared this with her. But I think I did after getting very badly bullied”.

“The incident happened pre-covid, when I was in 9th. I had changed my school just 2 years before that. I hated the new school of mine because of how rough every other kid around me was. I was coming from a covenant and all the kids around me were from village areas. They were very strong, but I was not so strong.”

I wanted to express it very strongly to Mieko, making sure she feels some of the uncertainty and trouble I experienced when I was young. For troublemakers, it is often very easy. The one who goes through the trouble always knows how the red roses will go sad. They lose all their charm and the colors of angst become very, very vibrant.

“I always sat alone in the classroom on the last bench, lost in my own unnerving demise. The kids in the school were very wild and violent. They often made fun of the weak and each other. They left no one, not even close friends of theirs”.

“They were very physical and we boys often had to change clothes in the classroom before leaving for sports. That was when I noticed one of the boys named Ryuji. He was the most silent troublemaker”.

“The next day after our math lecture, Ryuji walked towards me and said, ‘You’ve got nice, cute little baggage over there’ and flicked his finger on that region of my chest. I was angry while being scared”.

“I said, ‘Don’t do that’ and looked down”.

He said, ‘Ahhaa, is it?’

I smirked and told Mieko, “I had pulled trouble towards me by even asking him to stay away from me because Ryuji gathered 3 other guys.”

“Ryuji called out, ‘Takaro, Kazuma, come over here mates, we gonna have little fun with this girly over here’. All of them came running from their benches.”

“Ryuji said, ‘Hold his hands tight you both’”.

“I was super scared by then and I had tears in my eyes already. I shouldn’t have, but I covered my chest with both my hands because I knew they were going to do something brutal.”

Mieko was fully focused by now.

“I held my hands tight around my chest, in fear. That is when Shinji got violent and hit me on my head from behind. He said, ‘If you don’t remove your hands, then we’ll confirm to the whole world that you’re not a boy and just a girl because those hangies might grow bigger.’”

“I started crying and I couldn’t say anything. He hit me so hard that my head banged on the front of my desk and it really hurt. I had my hands covering my chest region even then.”

“Ryuji said, ‘Ahhhhhh, fucker, stop acting, we will just play a bit’ and he held me by my long hair and pulled my head away from the desk. He asked Kazuma and Takaro to hold my hands”.

“Takaro and Kazuma caught hold of both my hands tightly in their arms and went behind me. My chest was all open and I started crying loudly. The whole class kept on watching and I couldn’t help myself at all. I felt the weakest in the whole world then. Ryuji came ahead and landed a punch on my face.”

My neck started feeling tight, even after so many years of that incident, I still can’t help feeling emotional. Maybe it is just those images and frames in my mind which are so clear.

“Ryuji came ahead and started pinching my nipples and started pressing both my left and right chest very badly. He had a very bad smile on his face. That is all I could see from the gaps of my eyes. The 2 other guys came and they joined Ryuji in that too.”

“I can’t explain that feeling enough, it felt like I was hung on a noose on a cliff and getting beaten with metal rods on my legs. Like they won’t let me hang to freedom, neither stop the beating nor push me down the cliff.”

“I was crying and shouting very badly by now and I couldn’t help myself. I was completely alone and I had tears in my eyes this whole time. Their pinches were hurting me a lot.”

“I tried to push them away, and I was moving so horrendously, trying to escape through the gap between them. But I couldn’t, they had grabbed the fish very strongly.”

“After a while, Ryuji and his friends stopped. I was sweating and now all my white uniform had these massive patches of brown dirt on them which came from their hands. Ryuji said, ‘You’re really good missus’. He kicked me on my chest and I fell down. I was on the floor, sobbing with both my legs close to my stomach like a prawn. I had my chest covered once again”.

I stopped.

“You know what Mieko, now 15 years after when I think about this I always feel like whether I am overthinking and making a big fuss out of it in my mind. I don’t know, I’ve always wondered about what it is like to be on the stronger end. After that nothing like that happened to me ever, because I just hated people around me.”

Mieko did not say anything and she returned back to cleaning.

I kept on thinking about this for a while.