We wake in a pile of butter-yellow blankets beside a dying fire: me and three dark heads of hair. The world outside is a snowglobe – a beautiful rarity in 逗子 / Zushi / the half-mile beach where the sun was born.
In the morning light, there’s a smudge of blue on the inside glass of the woodstove.
“Yuri,” Manami had asked as she stoked the fire the night before, “did you have a chicken in here?”
“Ehh?”
“There’s a feather.”
It took a moment for us to realise what had happened. The heat of the flame had melted a hole in the sleeve of Manami’s blue down coat, just as Yuri had warned. A trail of fluff was leaking into the fireplace.
We laughed hysterically, then Manami – ever pragmatic – retrieved her wheel of masking tape.
Manami is four months pregnant. It’s given us all an extra layer of caution, her pregnancy: women banding together in an unspoken agreement to protect a mother and her unborn child.
We’d ummed and ahhed about which route to take to Zushi – whether to drive at all in the first Tokyo snowfall in several winters.
After a late start (mostly because the taxi I’d triumphantly hailed made me get out and walk when we were wedged, unmoving, in a thick slug of traffic), the four of us clambered into Manami’s campveran: two in the front and two under heavy floral blankets in the back.
We’ll take the slow roads. Skip the highways.
It was close to midnight when we arrived, but only now that dawn has broken does the house feel fully warm.
“Coffee?” Megumi offers.
“Alright,” I concede. “I’ll get up.”
“Yes girl – I have the seminar!”
Ah.
In a bid to address Japan’s declining population, Tokyo’s metropolitan government has introduced an egg-freezing subsidy for 2024. The amount promised will cover maybe half the cost of extraction and a portion of five years of storage.
They expected 300 applicants. My friend is one of more than 7000. This seminar is the first of many hoops she’ll need to jump through to qualify.
Megumi is not the only woman in my network to explore egg freezing: a service a relative first suggested when I was 24 and that I’ve been receiving targeted advertising about for the past five years.
“Did you guys know,” Megumi calls out after half an hour of video roll call, “that a baby girl is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have?”
It’s something I think about a lot. How part of me was inside my mother for the first 27 years of her life. How part of me was also once inside her mother: a woman who died when I was small, who sang to her children and kept bantams and sewed her own clothes before being institutionalised by her husband when she was younger than I am now.
Megumi relays more facts from the seminar. “90% of eggs frozen in Japan are never used.”
I think about how those same statistics exist in Australia; how three friends who were told they would struggle to conceive naturally had become pregnant accidentally in the past six months; how I once went home with a man several years my senior who’d set his dating app age-range well below mine because he “doesn’t want a woman looking for a baby daddy”.
I think about the lack of research into women’s health, the male fertility crisis I’ve never received a targeted ad for, and the children and babies who’ve been murdered, maimed and orphaned in Gaza these past months.
I think about how when I was last home in Australia, my best friend had said dryly, “If I’m still dragging this body to the club, she’s coming with me,” – referring to the egg that might form the base of her future daughter.
She was joking, of course, but I understood the sentiment. We’re the first women in our lineage to have this much freedom.
We’re the first women in our lineage to have this much freedom.
Cover by the author, inset 1 and 2 by Megumi Koiwai, inset 3 by Kaia Clarke.