course I did.
“Do you think it was Monono Aware?”
One tap.
“Bwarp! No. That’s zero points to you. Her name was Yoshiko Yukawa. Or Yukawa Yoshiko, if you want to say it baasan-style. Yoshiko was a terrible name, by the way. It’s what you call your kitten, not what you call your first-born daughter. It shortens to Yo-Yo. Can you imagine people calling you Yo-Yo? Don’t try.
“But here’s the sad, sad thing of it. Masako Yukawa – Yoshiko’s mother – was fifteen years old when she got pregnant, and just turned sixteen when she had Yoshiko. She probably would have been a lot happier with a kitten. Her parents certainly would. They hated that she was pregnant. They wanted to sneak up inside her uterus with some scissors, cut that baby out of her when she wasn’t looking and pretend it had never been there.
“Masako wouldn’t let them. She dug in her heels and said no. Her little kitten was going to get to be born, no matter what. But when it finally came, they made her put it into a yogo-shisetsu. That’s a big, huge bucket full of little tiny kids. An orphanage, run by the state so people who have inconvenient babies have got someplace to dump them and never, ever, ever have to think about them again.
“So that’s where little Yo-Yo grew up. Feeling way, way sorry for herself because there was nobody to wipe her nose when it got runny or to tell the bigger kids to leave her alone when they were in a shit-kicking mood.”
I give three taps. I was sorry they done that to Yoshiko, whoever she was.
“Thank you, Koli. You’re sweet. But Yo-Yo didn’t have it so bad really. The food in the orphanage tasted like it was made out of old people’s underwear, you had as much privacy as the average goldfish and half the staff were perverts of one flavour or another. But hey, times were tough for everybody.
“They really were, Koli. Very, very tough. Bad things were happening all over. The population of planet Earth around this time was fifty quintillion and three, or thereabouts, and that’s not counting dogs, pigs or politicians. There were fewer babies being born, but there was also less space to put them in and less food to fill their faces. The seas were rising, the deserts were growing, yada yada yada. The dogs, the pigs and the politicians were to blame – especially the politicians. They saw all this coming from a long way off. Long enough to give it a name, which was climate breakdown, but not long enough to do anything about it. They just kept warning each other what would happen. People will be fighting wars over rice and clean water, oh my god! Then they got tired of talking about it and just started fighting the wars.
“Aaaaaanyway, Yo-Yo didn’t give a fuck or a fart about most of this. Orphans don’t have stars in their eyes. Razor blades maybe, but not stars. Throw them in the air as much as you like, they come down on their feet like cats. Claws out like cats too, a lot of the time.
“But there was one thing Yo-Yo hated, which was that all the animals and the birds and the flowers were dying. The last African elephant died the year she was born. The white rhino turned up its ungulate toes when she was two. The yellow-breasted bunting, which was a bird that sang like an angel having an orgasm, was eaten into extinction because it had the bad luck to taste nice with egg-yolk batter.
“The dawn redwood. The snow leopard. The pangolin. The red-headed vulture. The Sumatran tiger. The blue whale. The vaquita, which was a dolphin you could fit in your pocket. The orangutan. The hawksbill turtle. Yo-Yo looked around her, Koli, and what she saw, everywhere, was the beauty of the world pouring away and vanishing, like hot breath on a cold day. Last blossom falls… you know.
“She survived the orphanage. Grew up and got out and joined the seven-mile exodus to Tokyo. You couldn’t get away from the dying by that time. Everything was falling down quicker than they could build it up again. But Tokyo was a nicer place than most to watch it from.
“Yo-Yo got a job in a market, gutting fish. They fired her because she wasn’t quick enough. She worked in a bar for a while, and then in a casino, where she mostly just stood