53 pages • 1 hour read
A Gesture Life
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Chapters 13-14
Chapter 13 Summary
Around the time Thomas is born, Hata had begun entertaining a certain waking nightmare. He was sad, angry, and hurt that Sunny was living with Lincoln, even after he offered her all that he possessed. In his daydream, Hata is a respected physician and an adolescent girl arrives to his clinic in labor. He rushes the girl to the back room and finds it to be a breech delivery, which he has experience in. Hata immediately forgets the delicate procedures as the girl writhes in pain. When the nurse hands him a blade, he realizes he is not a surgeon and has never cut into living flesh. He calls himself a coward, and he admits he should not have “coveted and accepted as I had done the confidence of people, their singular regard and trust” (273). Hata knows he feels guilty about Sunny and feels “gravely ill” out of concern, as a father would be.
Sunny finally allows Thomas to visit Bedley Run so Hata can teach him how to swim at the town pool as promised. Thomas calls him Franklin and is satisfied that Hata is a “family friend.” During a visit to the natural history museum, Thomas expresses his desire to be a fish that could breathe air so he could jump out of water day and night. Hata thinks instead of the dream of longtime swimmers to open one’s mouth underwater and magically be able to breathe. He admits he did so when he was thinking of Sunny’s pregnancy, wondering now if he had wished to die or hoped for transmogrification and an unfettered, fresh new life. Hata arrives at Sunny’s rental condominium located in the better section of Ebbington. Sunny is getting ready for an interview for a management job at a clothing store out west. She takes a bite of a cookie in the way she did as a small orphan girl, fearing that he would think her greedy and selfish for taking more.
When Sunny shares that Tommy may have to repeat the first grade because of his difficulty reading, Hata offers to teach him to read. Sunny, however, doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Hata says he understands and accepts that he is on tenuous ground, but Sunny doesn’t believe him. She doesn’t want to fight anymore. Though she is grateful, she doesn’t want him to forget what he once did. If she had her first baby, she wouldn’t have had Thomas. Sunny asks Hata if he is the one who arranged for her abortion. Sunny had wanted the baby just to be against Hata and feels terrible that even Thomas came out of spiting Hata. She doesn’t know where she would have been without Thomas, and he is saving her despite having him for the wrong reasons. Hata realizes he never really understood how deeply he affected Sunny in pressuring her to go through with the abortion, which he did as a masked performance in an attempt to harmonize life.
Chapter 14 Summary
When Hata returns home, he imagines a naked K enrobed in a black flag more clearly than ever before. K asks Hata if they will be going away soon—she hoped they would travel to the places they planned. Hata wonders why being in this house is so abhorrent to everyone—the impressive house is in the best town, where they are happily known and respected. K is not dissatisfied, but anxious to move from this place. She knows she will not die here, though she wishes to. Hata wants her to live with him forever. He falls asleep believing K will stay the night, but by morning she is gone. After following what he believes to be K outside the house, Hata returns to the house and takes a hot bath in Sunny’s old bathroom. The intense heat feels pure and truthful to him, and he wishes he could trade all his years to return to an earlier moment and stay there forever.
Hata recalls K tending to his wounds after Captain Ono beat him unconscious. The captain tells K he won’t kill Hata if she agrees to give her life for his. K agrees, admitting the doctor already has her life. When Hata tells K he will protect her, she sarcastically asks if Hata really believes she will be allowed to walk free unharmed when the war ends. Hata asks K if she is pregnant, which K denies. He then asks to see her and is unable to stop himself from having sex with her when she strips her clothing without protest. Hata remembers that his pure, wholehearted desire to have K to himself is what allowed the following events to occur, even if it meant losing her forever.
Hata finds himself entering the infirmary when he hears Captain Ono talking sweetly to K. The doctor embraces her as she motions for Hata to go to the cabinet of surgical tools. When Hata reaches for a blade, Captain Ono aims his pistol at Hata’s chest. Suddenly, K stabs the doctor’s neck with a scalpel, killing him. Hata realizes that K wanted the same thing he would yearn in all his days—her own place in the accepted order of things. All Hata wishes for is “to be a part (if but a millionth) of the massing, and that I pass through with something more than a life of gestures” (299).
K requests Hata not touch her anymore. Hata tells her she will come with him when the war is over, to which she responds angrily that she will not, and she doesn’t want his help. She believes Hata just wants sex—if he truly loved her, he could not bear to let her live like this. When he professes his love, K asks him to show her by telling the guards what she did—though he dreams of escape, none exists for her. Hata instead shoots the Captain and tells the lieutenant that the Captain shot himself. To Hata’s horror, the lieutenant takes K, claiming the other girls are useless skeletons now. K stabs the lieutenant.
After administering medicine to the commander, Hata quickly heads to the comfort house. Mrs. Matsui tells him they are in the clearing. As he heads to the same place Endo killed K’s sister, Hata sees 30 half-dressed, bloody men returning one by one. Once they leave, he gathers K’s remains, miraculously discovering a small fetus. He doesn’t know what he is doing and doesn’t feel the weight of the remains.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
At the beginning of Chapter 13, Hata remembers having a heavily symbolic “waking nightmare,” where he is to deliver the baby of an adolescent girl. Though the nurse in the scenario reveres Hata and believes him to be a capable doctor, once he has the blade in his hand, Hata realizes he is not a real surgeon and has never once cut flesh. This imaginary situation symbolizes Hata’s internal struggle with his life of gestures, where he is finally coming face to face with the way he has taken advantage of the confidence and trust people have in him. Hata realizes that the name he has built for himself, and that he has desired for so long to build as the “Hata’s of Bedley Run” is nothing but a façade. When visiting Sunny’s house, her visible discomfort and lack of desire to argue about her abortion makes Hata realize he never truly understood how much it affected her. The dream also symbolizes the abortion procedure and Hata’s internal dread that it was indeed all his fault.
Hata’s grim imagination of K enrobed in the black flag whilst spending the night with him further explores the symbol of the black flag. The embodiment of K lives on with Hata only as long as he remains in Bedley Run, as the imaginary K asks Hata to leave this place. She wishes to die, or be forgotten, which she cannot there. Hata is visibly frustrated, as he claims he has built them a reputable life in the best of towns. His frustration speaks to an underlying restlessness and dissatisfaction and is a testament that the perfect life and reputation he has built, which is repeatedly referenced from the perspective of Renny and Liv, is all a façade. K leaving him instead of staying with him through the night foreshadows her actual fate and the both the climax of the story and the defining moment of Hata’s life.
Hata revisits the moments leading to K’s murder on a regular basis, hoping to unveil the truth he so desperately desires to face. Hata’s inability to take action when it most mattered forms his identity and character for the rest of his days. Even in the moments leading to her brutal gang rape and murder in the woods, Hata knows that the right thing is to save K with a quick and easy death. Just as he keeps up appearances and reputations his entire life through a life of gestures, Hata relies solely on the dreams and hopes of a life together with K after the war. K dismisses these dreams as impossible, telling Hata that his love is not more than a young man’s sexual infatuation and fantasy. If Hata truly loved her, he would not bear to see her in such a state and would save her from such a life by killing her.
As he is never able to pay this debt of love to K, the way he raises Sunny is a lifelong atonement and attempt to make peace with his failure. At the time, Hata seems unable to process handling K’s remains and the presence of the fetus. However, an underlying morbidity remains in the form of his waking nightmare of being unable to deliver a baby and as a possible explanation for forcing Sunny to have an abortion. His life of gestures and reputation as “good Doc Hata” proves to be empty, just as his vows of love to K proved empty in the one moment that mattered. Hata’s every deed is a masked performance in attempting to synthesize life to perfection, from the roles that each person must play to his belief in the way that things should be. He doesn’t realize until it is too late that things are never the way one expects, and life’s real experiences are more often grimmer and harder to face than one would like.
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