Written by Kaori Fujino and translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor, “The Key” opens with a husband’s irrational panic before an elderly woman in red who walks the couple’s street each night. What begins as a minor domestic disturbance soon leads to the wife’s slow recognition of the gendered mechanics of fear, of the future self waiting for her, and of how vigilance becomes a way of life for those who must survive by rehearsing violence long before it confronts them.

Originally published in MONKEY: New Writing from Japan, this story asks what women inherit in their bodies as forms of defence, and what it would mean, inside a marriage, to ask a man to recognize that knowledge instead of merely standing beside it.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Granny Red—that’s what my husband called her. On that first night that he saw her and fled home to our apartment, the name just came to him and flew from his mouth. It was the only thing he could imagine calling her. Not missus, not grandmother, not old lady—“granny.” I was a little surprised that he’d choose such a childish word, but I found it truly endearing when he blurted it out.

My husband always got home around midnight, the same time Granny Red usually appeared. I got home a little earlier. Most nights, by the time he walked through the door, I’d already eaten dinner, had my bath, and was ready for bed; I lounged on the sofa, makeup removed, contacts out, glasses on, idly scrolling on my phone. Granny Red would appear on the dark one-way street that runs in front of our building. She came and went along the seven hundred meters of pavement, which was usually deserted, even though it connected two major boulevards. Just as her nickname implied, she was an old lady who always wore a red T-shirt. I figured she lived in the neighborhood. Maybe even in our building. Maybe she’d always been here, or maybe she’d moved in around the time my husband first spotted her six months ago. We were both white-collar workers, childless, renters with no friends in the neighborhood. Granny Red didn’t appear every night. When I looked for her, she wasn’t there. When I forgot about her, there she was. Granny Red didn’t have a regular schedule. But if she was out, my husband would always complain the moment he walked in the door.

“Again . . . Granny Red was there again,” he’d say uneasily. He seemed jumpy, as if he suspected she was hiding somewhere in our living room.

Sometimes he’d message me: “Granny Red is here.” That was his emergency signal. Immediately my late-night brain fog would clear, and I’d leap from the couch. A cardigan over my pajamas, then as the season changed, a trench coat, and as it changed again, a wool coat, sandals over my bare feet (always barefoot, no matter the season), and out our door I went. Down the hallway I dashed, into the elevator and down to the first floor, where I passed through the building’s automatic door with its automatic lock and emerged onto the street.

No one was there. No—glancing down either side—Granny was always there, somewhere. Just as my husband said. She wore her red T-shirt, her loose culottes, and slip-on sandals almost exactly like mine, and she walked down the very center of the street. Sometimes I found her standing there, fists on her hips, feet set apart, chest puffed out. My husband was usually cowering behind the row of bike racks next to our building.

“Dai-chan,” I’d call, voice low, and out he’d spring to crouch behind me.

“She’s . . . she’s . . .”

“Yes, she’s here,” I’d whisper. “Let’s go home.” I’d take his hand and pull. His palm and fingers were meaty and thick. Like a well-made leather glove. While I absently checked our mailbox, as I did every time I walked into our building, he frantically punched the code into the autolock and chanted “Hurry up, hurry up, she’s coming!” He sounded like he was fighting back a scream. He could sense Granny Red’s inevitable return—sooner or later, she always came back toward us.

He’d ask me to save him whenever he misjudged the distance between him and Granny Red. She was a slow walker, so sometimes he accidentally caught up to her. He tried to keep a prudent distance, but if Granny sensed my husband behind her, she’d suddenly turn on her heel and start walking toward him, or so he claimed. She never left the middle of the road, though. Dai-chan could pass her without incident just by walking along the edge of the street. But the moment he did, she would turn and head toward him. After that first time, even if he was right in front of the apartment, if Dai-chan judged there wasn’t enough space between them, he’d hide behind the bike racks. He imagined she would sneak up behind him while he was punching in the code, and he was terrified that she’d follow him into the apartment, into the elevator, and then he’d be stuck with her—alone, his fear freezing him to the spot.

The first night Dai-chan complained about Granny Red, I didn’t doubt what he told me. I didn’t laugh at him either. That night, he was a changed man. The terror within him moved me. He stood there in his suit, ghastly white, stiff as a board, and I beckoned him to the sofa where I lounged in my pajamas. He approached me woodenly and slowly set himself down beside me.

And then I said something like this: When I walk alone at night down empty streets, I am always seized with dread. There might be a thug crouching somewhere. A thug blessed with stature and strength far greater than my own. That crook, he might hit me. That lowlife, he might sexually assault me. That brute, he might kill me.

“And when I get scared like that, I do this.”

I grabbed my purse from where I’d tossed it beside the couch and pulled out my little Lego keychain. I wrapped my fist around the whole thing—save for the sharp blade of the key, which I arranged so that it poked out between my pointer and middle fingers.

“You see? Like this. I’ve done this ever since high school, any time I walk down a street that makes me nervous. I still do it. If some thug ever does show up, I’ll stab him in the eye with this.

“Touch your eye,” I told him, and then I took his hand and pressed his fingers over his eyelid.

“It’s harder than you’d think, right? You can feel how it resists your finger? But it doesn’t matter. This key is more than enough to ruin an eyeball.

“But there’s one thing,” I added. No, not added—because this was the most important point.

“The key can do its job. It’s me that might fail. I don’t know if I have the courage to actually stab someone with this key. Maybe I’ll lose my nerve, and my hand will go limp. Or maybe I’ll put too much into my swing and miss him entirely.”

My confession was an honest one. Dai-chan had shared his fear with me, and to answer that vulnerability, that rawness, I laid my heart bare. I told him it wasn’t only thugs I worried about, the nights I walked alone through empty streets—I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to answer violence with violence when the time came.

“So, given my own hesitation, maybe I shouldn’t be giving you advice,” I said as I passed the key to my husband, “but something is better than nothing, and this is all I can offer.”

Dai-chan didn’t even try to grip the keychain. I plucked it from his palm and showed him again.

“See? Like this.”

But when I looked up at him, he was back to his old self. The man, the husband, he’d always been. He was twenty centimeters taller than me, almost one hundred eighty centimeters, and though I didn’t know his weight, he was neither too heavy nor too thin—an adult man of average build with enough confidence and strength to back up his height. That was my husband.

He was clearly perplexed. He told me he’d never been nervous to walk alone at night—he’d never once believed someone might attack him with violence. Which meant that he’d also never imagined having to seize the upper hand by attacking that someone.

“Even when it comes to Granny Red?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Even though you’re terrified of her?”

“That’s right,” he said. He began listing the reasons he had no need for violence. Firstly, Granny Red was empty-handed. And given her outfit, he couldn’t imagine she was hiding a weapon either. She was unarmed. Granny Red was even smaller and thinner than me. And she was old. Even if she was coming after him, he didn’t think she’d be able to hurt him.

That was true for him. But what about me? I didn’t think I could be as blasé as Dai-chan, but given her age and stature, I could probably beat Granny Red barehanded.

I said no more.

“But I am terrified. She’s so creepy, creepy just being there, I mean,” Dai-chan said.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

I usually spent lunch break on my phone. Whether I ate at a café or in the company cafeteria or at my desk, I would gaze absent-mindedly at lines of text, reading through blogs written by complete strangers. For days on end I’d read the blog posts in sequence. Because I often had to stop in the middle of an entry, when I wasn’t staring at the blog, I couldn’t remember a word of what I’d been reading. But when I sat down and opened the browser on my phone, the entry I’d been reading would appear, and as I started to follow the words again, the contents would come back to me.

Oh, that’s right, now I remember, I’d think. She had her baby. Pretty sure it was a little girl. But now the baby was gone. Or, no, it wasn’t that she was gone, it was that she didn’t yet exist. Because I was reading the blog backwards.

That’s what blogs are like.. You read them in reverse chronological order. All the blogs I read are more or less the same, always beginning with a baby or a toddler who grows smaller day by day until it disappears.

In place of a child, there are go bags for the eventual run to the hospital to give birth. Small suitcases or big totebags. And then, as though baring its innards, the bag’s contents appear. Pajamas, underwear, skin care products, makeup, a digital camera, a laptop so the woman can update her blog. Then an enumeration of all the ways her body is out of sorts. The heaviness of her belly, the terribleness of her swelling, the unsettling of her stomach, the pain in her back. The totebag she just bought for her trip to the hospital arrives. Then she’s considering whether to buy a huge new bag that she can use first to go to the hospital and after as a diaper bag. Then for the newborn, onesies, swaddling blankets, diapers, baby wipes—one by one they disappear. Pain in her thighs, whining about how at this rate she won’t even be able to walk anymore. The empty living room, the TV stand now slightly too far from the sofa, a floor mat for the baby in the middle of it all. Then the mat is gone and the TV and sofa are back in place, and a coffee table appears between them. Her living room looks a lot like ours. We’re getting rid of the coffee table, for the baby, she confesses. Complaints about morning sickness, it seems it will go on for eternity. The couple’s bedroom is unveiled. There, low to the floor, a wooden slat bed for mother and father and a baby-sized bed with a lip of cushioning, small enough that mother can co-sleep with her newborn. The two beds in turn disappear, and a normal full-size mattress and mattress frame take their place. This bedroom, too, resembles ours. We’re throwing it out, for the baby, the woman says again—no, says for the first time. So that when the baby’s a little bigger, we can all crash together, so that the chances of the baby rolling and falling off are zero, that’s why we’re throwing out our bed. Morning sickness begins.

When I’m reading these blogs, I sense the passing of time. Not just my lunch break, but my commute to the office and back home again, the time I spend waiting for my transfer at the train station, or waiting for my husband on the sofa after I’ve bathed. I waste all my free time reading someone else’s memories. Someone else’s joy, her hesitation, her experiences, her finances, her suffering, the things I don’t feel, can’t feel. I abandon the time I have to live my own life and instead validate the lives of others. I come to know that such things are out there.

And as I read, I grow distant, just as distant time passes. Just over a week has passed since our last bi-monthly work meeting, a little less than a week to the next; thirty-five years, several months, and a few days have passed since I was born; eight minutes to walk from our apartment to the nearest station; seventeen minutes from the moment I board the subway to the moment I arrive at the station nearest the office; six months since I started wondering if I should have a kid—no, that’s a lie, in truth two years have passed; it’s been just over six months since my husband first encountered Granny Red. It all shrinks to a single point, but in the next instant, it explodes above me, a universe I’m not entirely capable of sustaining, and it is because of this infinite smallness and infinite largeness and the coming and going between them that I grow so distant.

Or maybe I’m not actually that out of it, I think. Coffee table. Bed. I see, you throw them out. You have to throw them out. I learn that the option of throwing them out exists. I learn that sometimes your pelvis grows unstable, and you can be immobilized, your morning sickness can begin even before your belly has begun to swell, and it can last until the birth.

Yes, this is learning.

I am learning.

On weekdays, Dai-chan and I talk for only a few minutes before we go to sleep. We don’t have time for more. But on Granny Red nights, we offer up that precious time to have the same conversation again and again. We’ve already had it dozens of times—I know what he’ll say, and he knows what I’ll say.

“I think she’s just out for a walk.”

“Who takes a walk this late at night?”

“Maybe she’s a night person.”

“But she’s only wearing a T-shirt. In this weather! It’s been that same T-shirt since she first appeared last summer, and now it’s the middle of winter!”

“You’ve seen those foreign tourists, right? The ones who wear shorts and a T-shirt even in January? Seems like it’s the same for her.”

“But she’s Japanese! And she’s so tiny!”

“But she’s Japanese. And she’s so tiny. So why are you scared of her, Dai-chan?”

“And why is her T-shirt red anyway?”

“Maybe she wants to make sure drivers can see her on the road?”

“Why the hell is she walking in the middle of the road in the first place?”

“Maybe the middle of the road is actually safer, because she’s easier to see.”

“But why—”

“You could try talking to her. Say hi.”

“I don’t want to. Why should I?”

“Why shouldn’t you? It’s just hello.”

“I said I don’t want to.”

I know Dai-chan won’t actually burst into tears, but he sounds like he might. I love this conversation between us—I could have it over and over again.

There is another conversation we’ve had again and again, one where we both already know what the other will say. Recently, our talk about Granny Red has superseded it, but this other conversation came first.

“Dai-chan, do you want kids?”

“Do you?”

“Maybe. I don’t really want them, but I don’t not want them either.”

“I feel the same. I guess I wouldn’t mind having kids.”

“So what should we do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“We can’t wait around forever. It might already be too late.”

“What do you want to do, Saya-chan?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re the one who has to give birth, so I’ll stand by your decision. I want to put your feelings on this first.”

“Thank you for that.”

Whenever he tells me this, I think again what a good man my husband is. He must be. He’s probably a really good person.

If he pressed me, told me he wanted me to have our kids, I think I’d completely reject the idea. Because with pregnancy and childbirth, I’d be the one losing something—losing my health, or maybe my job, my time, my freedom. I’d probably say to him, How dare you! How could you say that to me?

My husband can’t force me, and I decide. If I’m the one making the decision, no matter how much I lose, he isn’t the one responsible, it was my call. All he has to do is obey and ejaculate. He waits, powerless, for my decision and my permission. His free time is not spent learning what is necessary for pregnancy and childbirth. All he can do is wait.

In the night, while I was floating in the space between the lives of others and my own life, a call for aid came from my husband, the first in a while.

“Granny Red is here.”

His message pulled me well and truly back into my own life. The season for wool coats had ended, and we were back to trench coat weather. I practically leapt into my coat, pajamas and all, pocketed my phone and keychain, slipped sandals onto my bare feet, and headed out. The key was not for self-defense, not this time. It was just to lock the door behind me, even though I’d be gone only a moment. Of course, it would be naive to assume that a thug lurking in the hallway or the elevator was out of the question. But I knew that my husband was on the street just below, and my mind was racing, so the key stayed in my pocket.

I got out of the elevator and passed through the automatic glass door—it locked again behind me. I took one step out onto the street and looked right and left, assessing the situation.

There she was. Granny Red was about halfway between the corner of our building and the end of the street, facing the point where our road spills onto the main boulevard. She stood in the darkness in the middle of the street, hands on hips, legs braced, back straight. I drew back and called to my husband.

“Dai-chan!”

He emerged from behind the bike racks.

“She’s there, right?”

“She is.”

“Let’s go. Quick.”

“It’s all right, she’s facing the other way,” I said, smiling to calm him. I thought that if I ever had a child, this was the way I would smile at them. I looked up into his eyes and took his hand, feeling his faint resistance, and slowly began to walk backward toward our apartment building. “Why don’t you take a look?”

“It’s not all right, it’s not all right!” In an instant, his resistance became stronger, more befitting an adult man, and I couldn’t go any farther. He looked past me and his voice went from a whisper to nearly a scream.

I looked over my shoulder and there, right behind me, was Granny Red. I had been holding my husband’s hand, but now he reversed us and grabbed hold of me instead. Granny Red stood in the middle of the street, same as always, but now she faced us head-on. Normally I only saw her in profile.

This was the first time I’d seen her this close. To have come from where she had been standing to where she stood now, she had to have moved fast. Maybe I’d underestimated her, thinking I could take her on in a fistfight. I took her in, her face, her body, all of her. But Granny Red wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were raised above me. She was looking at my husband. Dare I say she was glaring at him. I looked back up at Dai-chan. He was holding his breath, trying to offer a smile with the last shred of the civility ingrained in him, but his face was frozen halfway.

I inhaled.

“Hello!” I said, clearly, loudly. “Hello. Out for a walk?”

In that instant, Granny Red’s expression changed, like she’d been called back from elsewhere. Her eyes broke away from my husband and her face relaxed—she looked like she’d just woken up and was a bit surprised about it. She blinked twice, three times, and as she did, her eyes moved slightly, back and forth, back and forth, and then at last, nervously, she looked directly at me.

“Hello!” I said again, smiling.

Granny Red said nothing. Slowly she turned until she was again facing down the street, and she began to walk, her sandal-clad feet dragging across the asphalt.

When we got back to the apartment, my husband removed his suit, hung it up, and spritzed the fabric with a bottle of water to help remove the wrinkles. This routine was not the norm on Granny Red nights. On nights when he encountered Granny Red, my husband was meant to come in and, without even removing his coat, curl up next to me on the sofa, despondent.

“Why the hell did you have to go and talk to her?”

“Well, why didn’t you, Dai-chan?”

“Because you’re not supposed to talk to suspicious people.”

“But she’s not suspicious, right? She lives in this neighborhood.”

“What are you talking about, you can’t trust her, and besides, you don’t know where she lives. What is her family thinking, letting an old lady wander the streets at night.”

Old lady. My shock made me slow to respond. He plowed ahead in the silence.

“But maybe she lives alone. Maybe she’s going senile. You know that old tenement down the way, looks straight out of the 1960s? I’m always surprised it’s even there, nobody makes places like that anymore, and it’s so run-down. Maybe the old lady lives there, maybe she hasn’t got any family left. Makes me a little sad for her, I guess. But even so—”

My mouth was open, trembling a little. Words were coming out, I knew. But not the words I had prepared, the ones I’d wanted to say. These words were conveying information I wasn’t supposed to know. In the same way my husband had instinctively and immediately dubbed her Granny Red, the words whole and complete, a mass of words now flew from my mouth with the same degree of perfection and weight.

“You must be blind! She’s not senile, you’ve got to go to the salon to maintain a short haircut like that, and I think she must’ve been there just this afternoon, she had that fresh-cut look, and sure, her clothes are a bit odd, but that red T-shirt has definitely been washed, and the collar isn’t stretched at all, that outfit’s perfect for a bit of power walking, and maybe she thinks she should wear a T-shirt for power walking even if it’s cold, maybe she’s just stuck in her ways. And besides, the elderly aren’t as able to feel hot and cold anymore, and I remember one time in winter, I passed her and she was wearing long underwear, she’d rolled up the sleeves to hide them under the T-shirt, but I could still tell. And the reason she’s always in red is because she has a bunch of T-shirts that same color, there was a really good T-shirt sale, but nobody wanted the red ones, so they slapped on an even bigger discount and she bought a bunch of them, I mean, don’t you think it’s a little too red? Nobody would wear that color if they could help it. And she walks at night because she’s worried about sunburn, but you don’t have to wear sunscreen at night, right, and if you don’t have to wear sunscreen, you don’t have to go through your whole face-washing routine when you get back, so what I mean is that she’s finished her entire day, washed her face and everything, and once she’s done with her power walk—she’s got to keep her legs and back strong—all she has to do is go to bed. I don’t know where she lives, though you’re right about her not having family, she lives alone, but what’s wrong with that, don’t you go feeling sorry for her, maybe she likes it that way, and you know what else, Dai-chan, I don’t know how you haven’t realized this, but the reason that woman notices you, the reason she turns around, the reason she looks at you, Dai-chan, is because that woman is me. Me decades from now! Me, living alone, in the future! So just talk to her already!”

My husband stood there, shirt half unbuttoned, hands frozen, staring dumbfounded at me—he heard me out, but when I closed my mouth, he rushed over to me.

“Saya-chan, what are you saying, Saya-chan, you’re not going to wind up all alone, you’ll have a family. . . .” I looked down at where he’d gently put his hand over my lower stomach. “You’ll have me, Saya-chan, and this child, too.”

That’s right. I was pregnant. I’d had an exam the other day and they’d found both the amniotic sac and the heartbeat, which meant I was five weeks pregnant. There was apparently a living creature in my stomach.

“But, but you’re going to die before me, Dai-chan.” My words were decisive, and this time, this time I’d spoken of my own accord. “And children, once they grow up, they run off.”

“And why do you get to decide how long I’ll live?”

I’d thought that my tirade before was unprompted, unbidden, but now I began to believe that I had chosen to say those things. All I’d done was observe Granny Red, compile my thoughts, and speak them, all at once. But why in the world did I say that she was me?

“I mean, the average lifespan for a woman is longer than the average lifespan for a man, so there is a high chance you’ll outlive me, Saya-chan, that’s true. But still . . .”

And then it came to me: Ah, I see, I thought, as the penny dropped.

I decided to go on a stakeout. Before my husband came home, I went down to our apartment’s mailboxes and loitered, waiting for Granny Red. I held out until Dai-chan appeared at the end of the street and then hurried back to the apartment so he wouldn’t see me waiting. I whipped off my trench coat and assumed a seat on the sofa, toying with my phone as though nothing was happening.

“You were outside. What were you doing? You shouldn’t be out in the cold,” he scolded. I flushed all over and even felt a bit nauseous. The nausea reminded me of when I was a child, the way I felt when I was overexcited.

Day four of my stakeout, and I at last spot the red-clad figure I’d been waiting for. Granny Red has come. And luckily, my husband won’t be back for a good while yet.

I casually stroll onto the street and begin walking toward her as she approaches me—at first, I walk at the edge of the road, but slowly, casually, I angle myself into the center. Granny Red comes straight toward me, unflinching, eyes blank and fixed forward, like she doesn’t see me at all. But I have no intention of giving way.

At last, we both come to a stop, so close that another step would have had us colliding. I’m taller, but if she could fix her stooped back and bowed legs, I have a feeling we’d be the same height. I square my shoulders, puff out my chest, and look down at Granny Red. She is looking slightly down, toward my chest.

“Hello.” Unlike last time, there’s no need to smile. I greet her calmly. Granny Red does not reply.

But I don’t care.

“I don’t think my husband realized.” I carefully pull my right hand from where it’s been thrust in my coat pocket. It’s clenched in a fist, and between the pointer and middle fingers, the blade of the key juts out. I level the tip at Granny Red’s jaw. “You too, right?”

For a time, Granny Red doesn’t move. She had stopped looking at my chest, gazing instead at my fist. And then, at last, she pulls her clenched right hand from where she’d hidden it behind her thigh, raising it until it’s level with my jaw.

From between her pointer and middle finger, the sharp tip of a key juts.

I nod.

This, this is why I’d thought she was me. I had seen her, had taken in the fact that she faced her late-night power walks with a key clenched in her fist. My husband described Granny Red as unarmed, but he was a fool. He couldn’t see it. The hand she kept at her side was too low for him to notice. But I had seen. It had taken me a while, but I know now what it meant.

I line myself up side by side with Granny Red. And then I jab upward toward the dark.

“Like this,” I say with each jab. “How does this feel?”

Granny Red nods. And then she follows suit, punching her fist out at the dark.

I realize I’ve never actually practiced attacking like this. How stupid of me. I’d been so worried about whether I’d have the guts to strike, but that kind of nerve only comes from practicing. “Like this.” Determined not to be shown up by Granny Red, I punch into the dark, stab it, carve out its eyeballs. The thug’s blood sprays over my glasses.

“Like this.” Somewhere along the line, she starts saying it too. She has turned the tables on her imagined opponent.

We are both out of breath, and even as the ghastly corpses of our foes pile up in the corners of our vision, we strike out with our fists at the new assailants that appear, one after another. I will likely teach this to the child in my belly. Their sex doesn’t matter. Whether boy or girl, any small child needs this skill. I take up their small hand, sticky with sweat, and curl it around a hard key. I teach them how to hold the blade between their chubby pointer and middle fingers. And then, side by side, we train.

I teach them where to aim.

Just as I twist again, I glimpse my husband approaching from behind. In the rhythmic interval between jabs, I raise the left hand I’ve been using to keep my balance and signal him.

“Saya-chan, what are you . . .” My husband stops in his tracks. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Hi, Dai-chan.” Granny Red and I fill the street with the sounds of our ragged breath, our fists cutting through air, the quiet shuffling of our sandals as we step in and out of the attack. “Dai-chan, you should do this, I know, someone like you, probably, isn’t the biggest target, but Dai-chan, you can’t, you just can’t, say that you’ll never become a victim, anyone can be a victim, anytime.” Let’s show these brutes who’s boss, I invite him.

There’s plenty of room next to me and Granny Red. He could come over here any time. Granny Red pays him no mind, she is viciously murdering each and every one of her imagined attackers. I take on my own thugs, but I am still half turned back, left hand extended to my husband.

“Come on,” I say. “Hurry up.” I’m growing frenzied. “Get over here.” If he doesn’t, if half my attention has to be on him, the imagined assailants will cut me down.

He stands frozen in place.

“Come on,” I call again, determined. “Come here.”

“The Key” by Kaori Fujino (trans. Laurel Taylor), and originally published in MONKEY: New Writing from Japan, which describes itself as showcasing “the best of contemporary Japanese literature.”