Chocolate Bar
「板チョコ」の英訳版。
I received word of my mother’s death from my aunt, but I hadn’t seen her for over ten years.
My mother had me when she was already quite old.
When I was in kindergarten, I loved my mother dearly. I never wanted to be apart from her even for a moment, and “Mom, I love you!” was my constant refrain.
When I started elementary school, I began to notice that my classmates’ mothers were different from mine.
It all started when one of the boys in class called my mother “grandma,” and from that moment on, I found myself avoiding her.
My father was about a decade younger than my mother. When he was a university student, he fell in love at first sight with my mother, who was already working full-time. He pursued her insistently, and they decided to marry as soon as he graduated.
My mother gave birth to me when she was forty.
One of the reasons I began to avoid my mother was my father’s attitude toward her. From the moment I was born, all I had ever seen was him treating her as if she were something filthy. Yet, my mother always treated both of us with a smile.
One day, when I was in third grade, my father got a new girlfriend who was about a decade younger than him, and he pressured my mother to divorce him.
When my father asked me, “Which side are you on?” I chose him without hesitation.
I will never forget the sad look on my mother’s face at that moment...
She didn’t ask for any compensation and left the house immediately.
She spoke words of parting to me, but I dismissed them with indifference.
As if paying the price for the way my father and I had treated my mother, the woman who became my new mother treated me as if I didn’t exist.
Though I was just a child and confused by her behavior, I gradually grew accustomed to it and stopped speaking to anyone.
Before I knew it, I could feel my own presence fading away inside the house.
A few years later, my sister was born.
She was loved by my father, and I became an even more neglected presence, treated as if I were filthy.
Having lost my place in the world, I left home as soon as I graduated from middle school.
For a brief moment, I even tried to contact my mother, thinking it might be possible to live with her. It wasn’t that I wanted to see her. I wasn’t lonely or nostalgic. I was only trying to contact her because it seemed like the most practical way to get by.
In the end, I was nothing more than one of the bullies who had hurt my mother alongside my father.
When I turned twenty, I moved out of the company housing and began living on my own.
As I entered the unfamiliar territory of my twenties, the word “adult” was constantly on my mind.
Even when my aunt told me that my mother had passed away, all I could recall was treating her coldly, so I didn’t know how to respond.
“Could you take in your late mother’s cat?” she asked.
The cat had the same name as me. For a moment, a cold part of me thought, “That’s disgusting.”
I refused to take the cat and told my aunt not to contact me again.
“You basically killed her! Do you even know how she felt when she took her own life?”
Her parting words pierced my back, but I ignored them.
After a while, a kitten appeared in the park near my workplace. Weak and on the verge of death, it reminded me of my mother.
Even during work, I couldn’t help but think about the kitten for some reason.
—It was the first time I had ever felt such emotions.
By now, I couldn’t possibly tell my aunt that I wanted to take in my mother’s cat.
Still, if I were to take in that kitten... I felt a selfish, almost hypocritical hope that I might, in some small way, be able to do something for my mother.
—Suddenly, it felt as if something human had begun to stir within me.
On my way from work, I hurried to the park and saw a boy petting the kitten that was seeking attention.
I recognized him—he was the child who lived near the local general store.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, it’s you, big sister. This kitten belongs to me.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll take it home later with my mom.”
I couldn’t insist on taking the kitten from a child, so I quietly stepped back.
Yet I was worried...
I went to the general store and checked with the boy’s mother.
“Are you taking the kitten?” I asked.
“Yes, we are. We’re going to adopt it this evening,” she replied.
The moment I saw her smile, I gave up on taking in the kitten. At the same time, a weight I had been carrying—the burden of forcing myself to protect the kitten to somehow justify my actions after my mother’s death—lifted from my shoulders, leaving me with a light, freeing sense of relief.
That night, I tried to look for memories of my mother, but I couldn’t find a single photograph. Instead, all I found were a few pictures of my father and me together. Without thinking, I tore them up.
A few days later, I ran into the boy who lived near the general store and his mother at the supermarket.
We exchanged greetings.
The boy was holding a long, rectangular chocolate bar carefully in both hands. Seeing him like that, I couldn’t help but worry that his body heat might melt the chocolate.
“My boy loves this chocolate bar. He won’t even share a single bite with me,” his mother explained, noticing my gaze with a smile.
“Big sister, do you want to see pictures of the kitten?”
“Yeah, I do!”
Curious, I answered without hesitation.
His mother took out her smartphone and showed me photos of the kitten they had welcomed into their home.
“—Huh?”
The kitten wasn’t the one from the park...
“Not the kitten from the park?” I asked the boy, my face twisting in disbelief.
“Park?”
His mother looked at me, puzzled.
“It’s not from the park,” the boy said with a smile.
My mind went completely blank.
“What do you mean, a kitten from the park?”
“No, I just assumed it was the kitten from the park...”
“Our kitten was brought home through an adoption site,” she explained.
Stunned, I watched as the boy, holding the chocolate bar aloft like a trophy, puffed out his chest and said proudly, “But I gave the kitten in the park my whole chocolate bar!”
The boy seemed to think he had done the right thing.
I gave them both a slight nod, abandoned the items in my shopping basket, and ran out of the store without buying anything.
As I hurried toward the park to check on the kitten, I felt my heart leap into my throat.
Gasping for breath, I reached the park and searched every corner for the kitten—only to find it lying there, small eyes wide open, cold and stiff.
For a moment, I was frozen in place.
Once again, I had ignored a life I could have saved...
The kitten lay on top of the chocolate bar. The chocolate had softened just enough to sink gently around the kitten’s tiny body, hugging it closely, yet it still held its shape.
On top of it, a line of ants had formed, their small, hurried bodies crawling over and around the kitten’s lifeless form.
As I stared at the kitten encircled by the ants, a strange sensation washed over me.
The boy had been able to give his chocolate bar, which he never shared with anyone, to this tiny life.
But when it came to my mother, and now this kitten, I had done nothing in the end.
For a moment, the kitten’s lifeless body seemed to merge with the image of my mother—but no tears came.
All that remained in the depths of my chest was a sense of emptiness that I could not put into words.
インデントはまだ勉強中。
名詞、代名詞、冠詞とかも悩んだ。子猫を it にするのは嫌やったけど、意味を伝える方法としてそうした。
日本語も難しいけど、英語も難しい。
文法とか間違えてると思うけど、仕上げた事に満足。
ここまで読んでくださった皆さま、ありがとうございました。
2026/05/04 執筆
2026/05/05 英語版の執筆
