I think I've finally figured out where my poor parenting skills come from, my profound inability to communicate effectively with my family, skills I had to learn by spitting blood and swallowing rivers of poison.
My mother. Inari Miyuma.
A woman who married at thirty and at thirty-two gave birth to me, her only child, the fruit of a very little desired marriage.
Inari looks like her daughter-in-law, she is a victim of the social system, of conveniences, of pressures.
Her old-fashioned parents wouldn't have wanted an unmarried daughter without descendants, having no siblings, so she took on the shy cook who worked in a restaurant not far from home in Shizuoka.
Inari has held a grudge against her parents, but she is dutiful and so she has yielded.
In less than a year of dating she organized the wedding as if it were a building to be erected, a company to be started.
As cold as her blue eyes, measured, with dark brown hair mortified in a bun that made her look older than she was, Inari has settled into her new role as a wife while absolutely not giving up her job as a professor of mathematics in a high school.
Mathematics suits her: it has no emotions, feelings, it leaves no room for imagination. Inari is like that.
She has always taken care of me impeccably, she has never made me want for anything, whether it was medical care, visits for the Quirk development, clothes always tidy and clean, the most targeted advice.
But she was and is still physically unable to let go.
Once, I was probably seven, I ran up to her, I hugged and kissed her. She didn't reciprocate, maybe because I had just come back from the pool with dad and I was sweaty and sticky, maybe because she was correcting some tests and I made her lose her concentration, the fact is that she looked at me and said something I've never forgotten:
"Leave the mushy stuff in storybooks, Enji."
How bad can a sentence like that hurt a child? To me a lot, because over the years I have understood its true meaning.
My mom didn't say it out of tiredness or irritation at the time, that was the result of YEARS of tiredness, irritation and frustration.
Her storybook would have seen a free woman, without children or husband, a woman who didn't know what to do with friends, who was bored listening to useless frivolities, who considered the Quirk society "a bunch of deluded people convinced of being deities".
Inari would always live alone, alone with her math, her logic, her precise calculations, without emotional distractions.
Sadly, Inari was consumed by her own devotion to her aging parents.
Inari has silenced her wishes, it's no coincidence that her Quirk is called "Silencer" and allows her to remove any sound at a variable range, up to two hundred meters. A Quirk useful at school, very useful for not having to listen to nonsense in public.
And so, the woman I call mother took on a man who she welcomed into her house with the same enthusiasm with which she would allow a muddy stray to splash her sofa, and she had me as a payoff for her parents, at least they would have had the coveted continuation of the lineage.
She was never mean to me and my father, she never raised her voice, I don't think I ever heard her yell. Maybe that's why I yelled, yelled so much, with my wife and the children. I yelled for my mother, for that woman who half-loved me, who treated me with the respectful courtesy one would give to guests for no more than two hours a day. Too bad I've been in her house for eighteen years.
I learned early to be an obedient child, not to disturb her, or she would have looked at me with those cold and distant eyes of hers, the worst punishment, worse than any slap she could ever give me, and yet she is still a portly woman today, with a height of one meter and seventy-five.
As for my father, Kori Todoroki… he was a big, heavy man, a gentle giant two meters tall, with a thick reddish beard and eyes as green as the grass.
The complete opposite of my mother: he had a warm heart, caring manners, many friends, he was loved. Shy and friendly.
His Quirk, Warm Body, was very useful for cooking in his restaurant. The shy Kori didn't need much to be happy, he just wanted a woman who loved him, and he found himself being courted by a maiden who had been forced not to remain a spinster. Poor dad, too shy to come forward with who could give him the love he deserved.
He moved slowly in our house, with slippers and a grace almost impossible for a man of his size. He didn't want to disturb my mother either, too much noise and she would use Silencer, cutting off our free communication.
I was very close to my father, with him I had no limits in expressing my wishes and he gave me some cuddles that would otherwise be denied: an affectionate pat on the cheek, a stroke disheveling my hair, a hug. He too suffered because of his wife's coldness, but I never once heard him complain about it.
Here… If only he had survived…
If only he were still alive now…
If that bloody October day he hadn't tried to stop that kidnapper…
The police have tried to reconstruct that terrible event that led to the death of three people: him, the kidnapper and the same little girl he had tried to protect.
From the kitchen window of his restaurant he had glimpsed suspicious movements around noon, and had gone out to see using the back door, the one that opened onto an isolated alley.
There was a bad guy in a balaclava and he was trying to take away a well-dressed little girl, probably for a ransom from her parents.
Dad was good and his shyness vanished in the face of injustice. He threw himself on the criminal trying to burn him with Warm Body, but the latter, unfortunately, had the time to use his hammering hands on the wall of the building next door, causing a small balcony on the second floor to collapse on top of my father and the little girl .
Dad was good and shielded the little girl with his body, but the rubble still hit her on the head.
The three protagonists of that tragedy were already dead when help arrived: my father and the little girl from their injuries, the kidnapper from Warm Body burns.
I was twelve.
That day, everything changed for me.
I felt a chill breeze on the back of my neck, never again feeling my father's comforting touch.
I felt, more ferocious than ever, the distance from my mother.
After the funeral, my mother withdrew even more into herself, she became a ghost.
She didn't cry, but once with me she loosened her wax mask.
It was when I told her that after middle school I wanted to enroll in UA and become a Pro Hero.
She, usually impassive, stopped sipping her tea and looked at me.
"Do you want to end up like your father? This society has no future, Enji, and do you know why? Because nowadays everyone wants to play heroes, more often than not without having the aptitude and ability. Your father wanted to save a little girl and you know the result."
I remember getting angry.
"Are you saying that dad should've ignored her? He should have left that little girl to her fate?"
"He should have called the police. The police, Enji, not the Heroes. I have seen them and they use the rescued victims as advertising propaganda."
I was just a fourteen-year-old boy at the time, so my mother's words seemed like an insult to Dad and the Heroes.
"You won't be able to convince me, Mom."
"I know, but you'll have to take your responsibilities. Go your own way and don't try to complain about what you have chosen."
At fourteen, my mother seemed absurd to me, a heartless woman. Instead, looking back on it, hers was pain.
Pain at losing a man she loved, albeit in her own way.
Wrath, to have a stubborn son who could have met the same fate as her husband.
She never said a word to me about it again. The atmosphere at home has been heavy for years, so as soon as UA was over I went off to live on my own. I was already a listed Hero and I had no financial problems.
Inari has always kept away from me and my family. She doesn't want anything to do with the world of heroism, we see each other very little, my children practically don't know her.
But I know my sins.
Their root.
What I have to do to remedy them.
And I will.