Kyoko's Mother

Kyoko's mother is a fair-skinned woman of middle age with straight black hair reaching the nape and M-shaped bangs tucked behind her ears. Like her husband, she is always drawn with her eyes lost in shadow. She dresses simply, in plain blouses and long skirts.

Kyoko paints her mother as someone wholly preoccupied with her husband and with keeping up the family's outward image. That fixation left her distant and unfeeling toward her daughter, whom she never spent time with. Though gentler than her husband in how she treated Kyoko, her shame and sorrow over how the girl turned out sprang not from any concern for Kyoko but from a fear of angering her husband and of the neighbors' gossip.

She married and gave birth to Kyoko, and the household she shared was frigid; there were no family outings, no shared meals, and no memory for Kyoko of ever being held. The resulting loneliness pushed Kyoko into delinquency by middle school. While her father berated and struck the girl, the mother looked on from the background, weeping and asking why her daughter had become this way.

Kyoko once shouted that she had never asked to be born and that her mother should not have had her, words that clearly shook the woman. When Kyoko was hospitalized after quitting her gang, it was the mother who told Katsuya her discharge date. She stood by as her husband disowned Kyoko, growing uneasy when Katsuya announced his wish to marry her and doing what little she could to hold her husband back. Years later Kyoko, newly pregnant, would look back on her own harsh words and wonder how deeply they had wounded her mother.