Kawashima Masayuki’s abusive relationship with his mother

Kawashima Masayuki’s abusive relationship with his mother shapes both his childhood strategies for surviving pain and the way he understands fear, forgiveness, and help as an adult. Her violence and rejection become memories he can partly contain by distancing himself from pain, but they are not settled: during a later crisis, the voice that once helped him endure returns alongside an intense identification with her. The relationship’s legacy is presented as formative without making it a simple explanation or excuse for his later actions.

Childhood Abuse and Exclusion

Kawashima says the abuse began after his father died, when he was four. His mother beat him, while leaving his younger brother alone. She later explained that she had treated Kawashima that way because he reminded her of his father. As a child, he did not understand this as his mother’s responsibility; he assumed he must be a bad child and tried to endure the violence by mentally separating himself from the person being hurt. Because the beatings could come without warning, he also kept himself prepared for their return.

The difference between Kawashima’s treatment and his brother’s became especially painful in ordinary family life. When his mother took his brother to the children’s play area at a department store in Odawara, she began leaving Kawashima locked at home. Once, he climbed out a window and chased after them. His mother brought him back and tied him to the bathroom pipes. He later recalled falling asleep on the tiled floor and waking after dark, with the empty road outside the window as the scene’s remaining image. The memory joins physical restraint to exclusion: he was not merely afraid of being hurt, but left alone while his mother chose to take his brother with her.

Removal from Home and Lasting Memories

A middle-school teacher arranged for Kawashima to be placed in the Home for abused children. He stayed there for a little over two years before going to live with his paternal grandmother. He later connected the beginning of his drawing to his time in the Home, where he repeatedly drew narrow roads at night. The drawings and the remembered road outside the bathroom window give his childhood account a recurring image of isolation, though the narrative does not present drawing as erasing what happened.

Kawashima’s account also shows how survival rules could persist after the immediate danger passed. As an adult, he remembers a protective inner voice advising him not to apologize when being hurt, because doing so would invite further punishment. It also instructs him to wait until an attack is over and then meet the other person’s eyes so that he will not feel defeated. This voice is not another person speaking: Kawashima later recognizes it as one he created as a child, adopting the imagined sound of an adult because his own voice felt too vulnerable. The rules preserve a sense of endurance, but they are organized around anticipated violence rather than safety or trust.

The Attempted Reconciliation

At Kawashima’s high-school graduation, his mother apologized. He describes the apology as self-serving because she followed it by asking him to forgive her. He initially nodded, then struck her in the face. He recalls that this was the only time he ever hit her. The moment is not a reconciliation: her request does not undo his childhood, and his response marks how little space he has for an appeal that seems to demand forgiveness on her terms.

Years later, Kawashima still has not forgiven his mother or his younger brother. When he tells Yoko about his childhood, he explains that he has never shared this history with anyone before; Yoko takes his hand. Their marriage and her support offer a contrast to the earlier household. He supports her choices, including leaving her job and wanting a child, and for a time his old episodes of self-loathing and panic largely subside. His history with his mother remains part of his life, but closeness with Yoko is not simply a repetition of the childhood pattern.

Return of the Past During Crisis

During a later confrontation, the childhood voice returns as Kawashima is struck and his awareness comes back. Its instructions echo the rules he learned for enduring his mother’s violence. At first, this remembered voice helps him regain a sense of direction. He then recognizes it as his own creation and frames adulthood as a chance to speak and act for himself. But that realization turns toward intimidation: he focuses on making others fear him, rather than on escaping the pattern of violence that formed the voice.

His mother becomes more than a memory in the scene. As he approaches another person while under the effects of Halcion, the narrative brings back the image and presence associated with his childhood abuse. Kawashima experiences this as his mother entering and taking control of his body; the feeling overwhelms him, and he loses consciousness before carrying out the threatened act. The episode does not resolve their relationship or establish that his mother is literally present. Instead, it shows the past re-entering his present through memory and bodily identification, interrupting his attempt to act from a position of control.

Narrative Significance

The relationship is defined by a stark contradiction: the voice Kawashima created to protect himself also carries forward rules shaped by abuse. It teaches him to withstand pain and preserve a sense of dignity, yet its insistence that help does not exist can turn fear into hostility toward anyone who appears vulnerable or asks for rescue. His recollection of striking his mother when she seemed frightened makes that contradiction explicit. The narrative traces how a child’s strategy for surviving an unsafe relationship can return in adulthood, while distinguishing that history from inevitability: supportive ties with Yoko coincided with a long reprieve from his old panic, even though the past later resurfaced under pressure.