Sansei and Sensibility
Also by Karen Tei Yamashita
Anime Wong
Brazil-Maru
Circle K Cycles
I Hotel
Letters to Memory
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
Tropic of Orange
Sansei and Sensibility
KAREN TEI YAMASHITA
Copyright © 2020 by Karen Tei Yamashita
Book design by Sarah Miner
Author photograph © Howard Boltz
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Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Yamashita, Karen Tei, 1951– author.
Title: Sansei and sensibility / Karen Tei Yamashita.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028589 (print) | LCCN 2019028590 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895781 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781566895866 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3575.A44 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS3575.A44 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028589
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028590
Images in “A Gentlemen’s Agreement” are from the Yamashita Family Archives, courtesy of the author.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
For Jane Tomi
Contents
(Note to Janeite readers in search of Jane Austen: kindly skip to part II)
I. Sansei
The Bath
The Dentist and the Dental Hygienist
A Gentlemen’s Agreement
Bombay Gin
Borges & I
Kiss of Kitty
Indian Summer
Colono:Scopy
KonMarimasu
Sansei Recipes
A Selected L.A./Gardena J.A. Timeline
II. Sensibility
Shikataganai & Mottainai
Giri & Gaman
Monterey Park
Emi
Japanese American Gothic
The PersuAsians
Omaki-san
J.A. Cheat Sheet
Afterword: Sansei Janeite
Stories/Essays Previously Published
Acknowledgments
Sansei and Sensibility
I. Sansei
The Bath
I
In their house, they often say that Mother has a special fascination for the bath. Father pointed this out many years ago. Perhaps it was only in answer to Mother’s suggestion that Father might bathe more frequently than once a week on Saturday nights. Father bragged of his weekly bath but only in relation to Mother’s nightly affair. Over the years, it seems Mother has taken to early morning baths as well, so Father’s comments on Mother and the bath continue with an added flourish. He seems to believe certain habits of Mother’s have come together to conspire against him by beginning all at once in the morning.
Mother isn’t one to deny such things. She laughs at herself in an embarrassed manner, pressing her lips together and looking at the floor. Father’s banter is an old and recurring one, and Mother is not without her usual reply. She defends herself on two accounts, saying that a hot bath is the most relaxing thing. Her other retort is a more defensive stance on the necessity of cleanliness. “You perspire, and isn’t it nice to have a clean body? You feel so much better.” “After all,” she’ll finally say, “the bath is my only luxury.”
These are statements typical of Mother. They suggest perhaps a certain simplicity. This isn’t to say Mother is simpleminded. Not at all. Rather, it is to suggest a sensibility that respects necessities for what they are, a practical sense that finds contentment, sometimes even luxury, in the simple duties of necessity. Mother is simple in that she doesn’t carry around anything in excess, be it pretension, desire, or fashionable decoration. As Father says, “She is what she is.” Mother’s simplicity is, finally, honest. It is clean and naked in a hot bathtub.
It has been suggested that the bath is a return to the womb, to a fetal state. Mother freely admits this must be a part of its pleasure. Nakedness is not something Mother is shy about. Birth and bodies, it’s all very natural and beautiful. However, they’ve had some difficulty extracting from Mother explanations as to processes, actions, and causes in the matter of birth and naked bodies. It’s all very much a mystery. Mother’s standard answer in these cases is, “What do you have that others haven’t got?” That has somehow had to suffice for everything, that which is natural and that, mysterious.
* * *
Speaking of the bath, one has in mind the bathroom in the old house where they first lived as a family. It seemed this bathroom was painted all over in pink enamel. The built-in wood drawers and the large wood medicine cabinet behind the mirror: these too were painted in pink enamel. But the amazing thing was the tub itself, an old curving tub standing on four legs like a huge white iron pig in the middle of the peeling linoleum.
In those days, the three of them, Mother and the twins, took baths in this tub together. Mother would squat at the front of the tub, adjusting cold and hot water while her two naked daughters stood leaning into her shoulders, splashing and floating rubber toys and bars of Ivory soap. Mother would take a washcloth and soap and scrub herself and the two children, rinse, and send them out before the aka or tub scum could gather much. Mother did this generally and quickly, in a way they called īkagen. Īkagen is “just so” or “to suit your taste” or “just enough.” Īkagen is a word Mother used to describe what her mother had said about how much salt or shōyu to use in this or that recipe. If it was īkagen, it was an amount of common sense or taste. Īkagen is descriptive of a general approach Mother maintains toward household duties, secretarial filing, letter writing, reading, and washing children.
But if Mother washed īkagen, shampooing was sometimes a different matter. Not that the general style—a quick scrubbing on four sides of the scalp—wasn’t īkagen. It was that every once in a while, she would bring three eggs to the bath. The eggs were cold out of the refrigerator. The twins leaned against the white curve of the old tub as she cracked the cold shells gently on the tops of wet heads. She let the yellow lump fall and the cool slime ooze, dribbling down the backs of ears and over the forehead and around eyebrows, tongue reaching for a taste. Then, īkagen, Mother massaged the scalp, scrambling yellow eggs and black hair. She said, “When I was little, my mother always washed my hair with an egg. It gets it clean and shiny.”
After a time, the twins took baths together without Mother. And without Mother’s īkagen technique, they were free to develop an entire and gradually complicated ritual surrounding bath time. It probably began with two tiny bodies at opposite ends of that steaming pink enamel bathroom scudding about with protruding stomachs and ramming into each other, laughing.
“My pompom’s bigger!”
“Lookit your belly button. It’s all itchy.”
“Don’ touchit!”
Later, Mother would find them performing the entire sequence of “The Hokey-Pokey” from “you put your left foot in” to the final “whole self.” In those days, baths were apt to be rather lukewarm. But after Mother had them draw their o
wn bathwater, their ritual accommodated by the creation of a system of fore and aft, as in “two men in a tub.” That is, one sat up front weathering the hot water and adding the cold and yelling at appropriate intervals, “Row! Row left!” while the other twin in the aft paddled, stirring up the incoming hot or cold. Sometimes they were able to coordinate several rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” changing directions at new verses. By the end of these songs, they were in a virtual whirlpool, water spilling over the sides of the tub, warping the linoleum.
The bubble bath was a new challenge to bath time, calling for an exceptionally delicate rowing technique to get the water stirred with the greatest and deepest amount of bubbles. They sat fore and aft in a tub of white bubbles, hardly daring to move or breathe. These were almost silent baths. They moved slowly, whispering like cloud people, listening to the soft snapping fizzle of dying bubbles. These were often lengthy bath times spent waiting silently for the bubbles to pass before getting to the business of washing the body, which was by now quite a minor portion of bath-time fantasy.
Emerging finally, skinny bodies flushed and wrinkled, the twins watched the gray aka accumulate in a wide scummy ring, and the water finally disappear in a tiny rushing whirl, the old tub sending up a long sucking noise beyond the dark rusting drain, its navel.
Now they came often to watch Mother at her bath alone. They would usually find her lying deep in the tub, her head and shoulders propped up in a curve against the slope of the tub, a square washcloth floating over her soft mound of stomach and hair. She would say, “Come in and close the door. It’s cold air.”
They leaned over the edge of the tub, talking. “Mommy, you have a scar on your tummy? Isn’t that where I came out of you when I was a baby?”
“No, that’s when I had my appendix taken out.”
“See, I told you.”
Watching Mother was never much entertainment. She never used much soap but scrubbed her skin generally. It was in the usual manner of īkagen, the horizontal soaking being the thing.
It was quite a different thing to watch Father’s weekly productions, which were extravagant in soap and water and flourish. He sat at the edge of the tub with a bar of soap, rubbing it into a thick white lather all over his body. He seemed to be very hairy. And there was his bad leg and the wound in his right hip; a scarred hole, it seemed as big as one’s small hand.
“Daddy, you hurt your leg in the war?”
“No, I was a bad boy and fell off a fence.”
“Oh.”
The best part of his bath was to watch him, a hairy lathered man, plunge into deep white water, all the gray foam rising in waves, splashing water up to his chin. And when he rose, the water surged beneath him, and the tub echoed the din and squeak of his body and flat feet beating and rubbing against iron, and there was that wonderful and unbeatable amount of gray aka. It never occurred to them then, but the reason Father washed with the soap bar, always melting it to half its size, was probably that the washcloth somehow remained draped between his legs throughout the bath.
It was perhaps Grandmother who had the ultimate flair for bath-time ritual, and when she came to visit, they followed her around the house, watching to see what she would do next. It wasn’t simply the bath, it was everything that led up to and continued after. Grandmother was a proud and somewhat stern woman, but they were able to talk with her through her broken English. She said so herself, “I bery broken Engurish.”
She was a plump woman, fat at the middle, and she had long gray hair braided up in a longish bun at the back. They came to her like two young pages, volunteering for buttons and zippers, but mostly they were fascinated with her heavy under-armor: a stiff, thick, pink corset with metal catches and a crisscross of lacing up the middle. The twins, each taking an end of lace, tugged and unhooked step by step, attached to Grandmother by corset strings that slowly stretched across the room.
Grandmother always went to bathe with a long strip of cotton cloth, a tenugui for washing decorated with Japanese writing and designs. In the tub, the thin cloth adhered to the fat folds of her old body, Japanese characters and woven ends trailing off in the clear hot water. Around her stomach, they saw the tight crisscross and wrinkles embedded by the confining corset swell and disappear.
She would begin by washing her face, working over the entire surface of her body to her toes and using the cloth tenugui in a variety of ways, expressing a versatility remarkable in a thing so simple. The tenugui, grasped at both ends across her back, scoured every inch of skin in a seesaw fashion. The tenugui could bunch up in a soft round sponge with a smooth woven surface. She rubbed in circular motions over and under the loose layers of freckled flesh and sagging breasts. Finally, the tenugui, squeezed within a breath of being dry, served to soak up and even dry her entire body. Now she stood outside the tub, steamy and damp, mopping the perspiration on her forehead. Grandmother and her tenugui in the tub seemed simply self-sufficient.
After came creaming the face and brushing and braiding her long gray hair. Then they would join her in pajamas on the large double bed for a group exercise session. These motions ranged from rolling the head in circles and hunching the shoulders to bicycling upside down while lying in bed. These things the three did simultaneously while Grandmother expounded on their obvious virtues. “This berry good for regs. Now you do. Old be much bettah.”
It wasn’t until many years later, in Japan, that they saw another tenugui like Grandmother’s. In fact, it would be many years before they saw another aging body naked at bath. It wasn’t that one missed seeing Grandmother in her bathing, but that in rediscovering the bath in Japan, there was a vibrant sense of an old intimacy that seemed to radiate through the steam and crouching jostle at the public bath. It was Great Aunt Yae on Mother’s side who first introduced one of the twins to the public bath, the sentō.
II
She came in February to Kyoto, cold with a barren sense of an old winter. She had just turned twenty-one and had been studying Japanese in Tokyo since the fall. She had never been so far from home.
Great Aunt Yae and her husband, Chihiro, lived retired in an old, small house of polished wood and deteriorating paper and mats, a house perhaps over one or two hundred years old, with the wear and darkness of time passing—passing through the war, when Chihiro had been an officer in the Imperial Army; passing with the birth of children, now married and gone; passing through the bitterness of war and the poverty after.
But of this past, the twin knew little, and it seemed she had passed into an old folktale beginning, “Mukashi, mukashi”: “Long, long ago there lived an old man and old woman in a little house at the bottom of a hill. They were poor. They lived alone. They had no children. Every day the old man went out to chop wood to sell, carrying his heavy bundle on his back, trudging through the snow.” This is the simple beginning of a recurring story; it seemed to convey the sad, gracious charm of an old couple whose lives are simple and resigned.
Her old uncle was hard of hearing, and Yae was continually yelling into his ear, repeating words her niece had said or reminding him of various details he had forgotten. Yae, on the other hand, was rather blind; squinting behind thick wire spectacles, she read newspapers and letters two or three inches from her nose. Sometimes her niece found her washing dishes, inspecting bowls and cups a few inches from her face, shifting her spectacles and poking at cracks and spots.
Yae said she and ojisan couldn’t live without each other. She said, laughing, that they were sometimes like cartoon characters. One day she had heard rain on the roof above and announced to her husband that it was raining. Chihiro looked up from his newspapers and said, “That can’t be. I don’t hear anything … Look, no rain today. Omae, you’re wrong.”
Yae went to the door and slid it aside. Looking out, she saw nothing, and she came back to confirm that it wasn’t raining after all.
Yae disappeared into the kitchen, but the old man’s curiosity drew him to the door. Looking out, he saw t
he falling rain and called his wife to the door, tugging at her hand and pushing it into the rain. They stood there at the door, looking out to the garden and the pouring rain, laughing.
* * *
At the door, Yae puts her niece in a pair of her old wooden geta. They are so worn down at the outer toe that she is forced to walk awkwardly, imitating Yae’s pigeon-toed trot. Yae hands her a small plastic basin in which she’s placed a folded tenugui along with soap, shampoo, and combs. They step out. A light snow is falling, disappearing into the gravel about their geta. Nodding over her basin to curious neighbors, Yae leads her to the sentō.
There she sees the layers of kimono fall away and Yae’s thin, aged body, plump and wrinkled at the stomach. Yae stands naked, slightly stooped in those thick wire spectacles, scrutinizing her belongings and folding everything into a small pile.
They enter the bathroom gripping their plastic basins, swimming through the warm steam that billows as the glass door slides aside. Rows of squatting women and children wash before running faucets. Yae leads her between the rows and echoing commotion of spilling water. Women, flushed and dripping, emerge from the deep pools. Others meditate silently, squatting low in the great tubs, hot water caressing their hunching shoulders; black wisps of fallen hair cling to cheek and neck. Finding two free places, Yae goes off to steep herself in the hot tub.
Women of every age and shape scrub their bodies with the tenugui, busy at wash, vigorous and skillful in their movements. Women kneel and squat, never sitting on the tile, filling their basins and sending cascades of water over an area almost confined to their bodies. All stretching and standing returns to a compact crouch before the faucet or in the tub.
Under the bright shiny lights of the bath, their skin is a beautiful clear white, smooth rich flesh, full at the thighs and hips and small and round at the breasts. She watches a woman with her back turned, following the curving back to the nape of the neck and the fullness of the shoulders sloping forward over breasts and skin, shaking. Turning to draw the tenugui over her back, she blushes to see her own shoulder.
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