THE LOVING MOTHER

A Story from the Island of Hokkaido, Japan.

The Loving Mother is a story that reveals the everlasting love of a mother to her baby even after her death. It particularly gives central focus around the mysterious arrival of a woman at the pharmacist’s usually at midnight. Mr Shoji Sakota was a pharmacist in the city of Sappora on Hokkaido Island in northern Japan. He runs his own drug store in the same building where he used to live. He used to live alone in the rear part of the building because his wife had died several years ago. Shoji Sakota, the protagonist of this story undergoes an unseen fear when he received the frequent visit of a young woman at the same time almost every night. 

One stormy winter night in 1964, Mr. Sakota was working in his drug store at about mid night. As it was the end of the fiscal / financial year, he was very busy with the profit, loss and the management of accounts of the whole year. At that time, there was a knock on the door. At first he avoided it thinking that whoever came there will return back after seeing the pharmacy closed. Second time also he heard some noise at the door, and this time he thought that the storm was making the sound. When frequency of knock grew again for the third time, it compelled him to think of some emergency call. So, he moved towards the door thinking that somebody might have come to get some important medicine. He looked outside from the window of the door quietly, and saw there a young woman standing and speaking in a trembling voice. He suspected her and thought whether it might be her trick to rob him. But her continuous pleads assured him, and made him open the door. It was a woman who wanted an ame (Japanese candy used for pacifying young children) on a stick for her baby. Mr Sakota was quite surprised at this because he was expecting that woman to ask some sort of medicine for her sick perhaps dying baby. Furthermore, he got very much surprised with the appearance of the lady. The woman looked like not a normal woman. She was so strange that her hair was disheveled / messy / uncombed / untidy and her eyes looked alien. She looked like a lady from another world. After the lady went from there, somehow or other Mr Sakota could not forget her appearance and at last he left working and went to the bed.

The same woman came to the store in the following nights regularly with same request at the same time. With a desire to have detail study about the woman, he called one of his friend who was a photographer by profession. They managed to take some photos of that woman secretly on the fourth night. But, when the film was developed, there was no sign of the woman except the things in the drugstore. The mystery remained so intense that ultimately forced them to follow her up to her bedroom on the fifth night when she came back again to the store for the same request. They followed her all the way back to her home and were able to find the same woman lying beside her eight or nine months old child who was enjoying the ame on a stick which the lady brought from the drug store of Mr. Sakota. When Mr. Sakota saw her sleeping, he thought it was merely a kind of pretension. The moment he touched her with his fingers on her bare neck, he became sure that she had been dead for few days.

The conclusion is that after her death, the lady’s soul was worried about the child. She not only wanted to arrange for food for her child but she also wanted someone to come and know that she had been dead and her child was in a helpless situation. She had selected Mr Sakota for this. Her death was quite unknown to others. Moreover, there was nobody to look after her.