From Wildcat Dome, which will be published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.

She gets off the bus and walks for about twenty meters along the sidewalk, which is protected by a single guardrail. Only then does she see the building on the corner—a beige, ten-story structure that looks like it was built only recently. There is a produce shop on the ground floor, while the rest of the building is residential.

The building enters her field of vision, though she has no desire to see it. She begins to tremble, to feel dizzy. Tears well up in her eyes. If she turns that corner, proceeds along the alleyway, and makes a left, her son will be waiting for her, the one who has become a cold stone. She wants to keep walking instead of taking that turn. Why does she have to go home, anyway? If only she could abandon her son. She wishes she could forget all about that cold stone.

When the mother came back to her apartment three days ago, he had already reverted to his stonelike state. Not this again, she thought. This was the third time. He was huddled on his futon, rarely getting up except to drink water. His wailing was the only sound that escaped from the covers. After this continued for about a week, the son, emaciated, finally crawled out of bed to sip the miso soup his mother brought him, tears splashing onto the tatami. He didn’t speak. The mother didn’t speak either. This is how it had gone the first time, and the second.

My son is ill, the mother kept trying to convince herself. All they had to do was cure him. But if she took him to a hospital, would they actually treat him, or turn him over to the police? It wasn’t as though the outbreaks occurred that often. Very seldom, in fact—around once every ten years. Eventually they might stop altogether. The son did his best to prevent them, too. So much so that sometimes the mother would wonder if they were gone for good. How happy she would be if God, or Buddha, or whoever, told her that the outbreaks would never occur again, that all they had to do was live the rest of their lives in atonement for what he’d already done.

But that’s not how things went. Just three days ago, he’d had another outbreak, and when she came home, he had turned into a cold stone again.

For some reason, he would always come back home after an outbreak, though she wished he wouldn’t. She would always be there waiting for him. She was sure the only reason he came back was to make her suffer even more. Three nights ago, she cursed her son in the darkness, wailed, swore she would kill him, thinking surely this would save them both. But a knife was useless against a cold stone, and if she slammed her head against him like a hammer, the most it would do was create a few cracks in the surface. She wondered how in the world she was supposed to get rid of him.

There is another version of the mother who does not turn the corner where that brand-new building stands, who does not go home to her son. It is this other mother, dragging the exhaustion of the day’s work behind her, who thinks: I don’t need to go back to that terrifying room ever again. And in that moment, she feels the sky above her grow taller, her spine a little longer, her feet lighter. The other mother smiles to herself, continues walking along the bus route. Perhaps when she reaches the next stop she gets on the bus. The other mother thinks nothing, gives her body over to the swaying of the bus, almost as though her son never existed at all. Does she eventually fall into a deep sleep as drowsiness overtakes her, riding all the way to the end of the line? If she abandons her son, she can go anywhere she wants—it doesn’t matter where.

Or perhaps the other mother keeps walking along the bus route, following it to the left and right, wherever it goes, only to find herself eventually near a small pond in a park.

When the news arrived that her previous apartment was going to be demolished, she’d moved into her current one without complaint. She should have moved farther away when she’d had the chance, but in the end she’d settled on a cheap apartment, similar to her last one and not far away either, located at the end of a road. She had so many horrible memories of the old place. Everyone in town had criticized her and her son. The town became frightening, full of ghosts. Still, the thought of leaving this place, which they knew so well that they could practically walk the streets in their sleep, felt too overwhelming. She didn’t want to move to a completely unfamiliar town.

She walks through the alleyway, exhausted, finished with the day’s work. She is worried about what might happen if she becomes ill, or injures herself. She is approaching her sixties, which means that soon she won’t be able to work anymore. And when that time comes, how will she and her son survive? She will eventually die, which she doesn’t mind, but what will her son do? He is only thirty-five but already looks aged. Her only son. Why had the two of them been forced to keep living? What value did their lives have anyway?

As the mother approaches the apartment, she begins to feel heavier and heavier. With every step she takes, a cloud of white breath escapes from her mouth. It is night now, chilly. Her chest hurts as she regards her own breath.

She is careful not to keep anything orange in their apartment. But when he steps outside, it’s as though the color is everywhere. There is orange at the fruit stand. On the restaurant signs, in the pharmacies, in the clothing stores. There are women wearing orange scarves, children wearing orange jackets, men with orange backpacks. Of course, there are subtle differences in shade. Most of the time, her son simply averts his eyes and nothing happens. Even if he sees a woman wearing an orange skirt. But that doesn’t mean the mother lets her guard down. No matter how carefully she monitors him, she can never predict what will set him off.

Why had the seven-year-old girl been wearing that orange skirt when she fell into the pond?

The mother pauses, closes her eyes. Tears spill out. What was it that her son had seen that day near the pond?

The mother approaches the apartment building. I don’t want to go back in there, she thinks. Why can’t she just abandon him? She wants so much to do it, and yet.

She can’t stop trembling. As she approaches the apartment, she feels a scream rising in the back of her throat.

Once an outbreak happened, her son would shut himself away in the apartment for at least two months. At six months, he’d be able to go outside again. After a year, he could maybe even work a part-time job. But then three years would go by, then five, and another outbreak would happen. Just three days ago, it had happened for the first time in eight years. Where? How? She didn’t want to know or even hear about the unknown woman wearing orange who had been sacrificed to her son’s rage. He had turned into a cold stone again. That was enough for her to guess what had happened.

Slowly, she walks up and down the hallway of the apartment building. The fifth door on the left is theirs. Inside her bag are minced chicken and scallions and eggs. When she goes inside, she’ll probably get started on cooking a late dinner. She wonders whether her son will refuse to eat again.

This son the mother had birthed. His small ears, which had looked like faintly red, translucent seashells. The tiny fingernails growing on each and every finger. The whites of his eyes had an almost bluish tint to them, and when tears would gather, the dark blue of his eyes would grow darker and begin to glitter.

The young mother had been fascinated, astonished, even, by this infant that had come out of her own stomach, and was glad she hadn’t given in to the voice in her head that told her to get rid of it. No matter how much she was cursed at, made fun of, she knew, at least, it hadn’t been a mistake to have this child.

She had been a young woman then. She hoped to eventually meet a man whom she and her son would be able to live with. She believed in that wish wholeheartedly. She was convinced this special man would appear someday.

But the mother is no longer young. She furrows her brow, clicks her tongue. Sometimes she’d spot those orphans that the American GIs left behind in the neighborhood and feel disgusted. They were technically alive, yes, but compared with them, her son, loved and protected by his mother, lived like a king, and she would feel good about herself, even if she knew it was foolish.

One day, when he was nine years old, her son had dashed indoors, frothing at the mouth, his face pale, then buried himself in the futon.

Since that day, while maintaining his outward appearance, the boy had transformed into a different being altogether, becoming enclosed in an endless darkness. The mother, too, became trapped in it. But she had to keep working. To maintain the apartment that was his hiding place.

It was right around the son’s eleventh birthday that the mother constructed the butsudan out of a tin box. It struck her that they would have to atone for the death of the young girl, which her son had undeniably been involved in. He was alive, the girl was dead. For the mother and son to go on living, they had no choice but to pray for the girl’s soul.

Every morning, every night, the mother would drag her son, kicking and screaming, and force him to bow his head in front of the butsudan. The son would tremble as he pressed his head against the floor, wailing. Of course it was painful for him. It was painful for her, too. But the greater the pain, the more it would serve as atonement for the girl’s life.

That girl. One of those orphans.

Had she been among those children that the mother had seen in the neighborhood? The mother had no way of knowing. She didn’t remember their faces. All she remembered was the satisfaction of knowing her son was better off than them. Some of the children had dark skin and curly hair. They ran around the streets looking like they owned the place. Surely they had spotted her son a few times, too. Did he want to be friends with them? They were almost the same age, and the orphans were probably shunned by other kids the way her son was. Had he wanted to approach that seven-year-old girl?

She had been standing at the edge of the pond, alone. Did her son call out to her? Did she respond? What did she say?

Go away. Don’t come any closer.

And then? What happened after that? Her son’s memory was shrouded in darkness, like a lid that has been slammed shut. What if the girl hadn’t been standing by that pond alone? What if she hadn’t been abandoned by her mother? What if the American GI had never met her Japanese mother? What if the American GIs had never set foot in Japan? What if Japan had never gone to war? The mother had asked herself these questions hundreds, no, thousands of times.

She stands in front of her apartment. The door is unlocked. She looks behind her, then to her right and left. She feels like someone is watching her. Is somebody standing in the hallway entrance? She tenses, staring into the darkness. There is no trace of that woman. The one who was always hanging around the orphans, who looked to be close in age to her. The first time she’d seen her, the mother immediately knew who she was. She didn’t know what relationship the woman had to those children, but she always saw the woman’s young daughter, with her little bowl cut, playing with the other orphans. The daughter had been nearby that day as well, when the mother’s son and the other little girl had been by the pond with the other orphans. And the woman’s daughter.

Perhaps that was why, ever since that day, the woman would sometimes come by the apartment where the mother and her son lived and stand there absentmindedly for a while before going home. The mother ignored her. But her presence irritated her. After the second and the third time she came, the mother began to feel uneasy, and she struggled to concentrate.

She wanted to ask the woman: Why did you come here? What do you want? But inside, she already knew the answer. They hadn’t seen her since they’d moved out about six months ago. Perhaps she simply didn’t know their new address yet. But eventually she’d find them and come around again—the mother was sure of that. Her prediction was also a kind of hope. She wanted the woman to find them.

The mother sighs and opens the door. The floorboards squeak like a cat’s helpless meow, drawing her inside.