Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  The announcer had to call out the Korean girl’s name several times before any of us could hear it, for the applause continued well after I had been seated. After that, people began to whisper to each other, filling the room with a rattling sound like the noise of pigeons in an abandoned building.

  “Shinobu Kaneshiro.” The Korean girl was using her Japanese name. She took to the stage, but, unlike me, she stood to the side of the piano and rested her hand on its body. She smiled and very slowly scanned the room, tilting her head from side to side as though each and every one of us were adorable. I groaned inwardly. What a calculated way to engage the audience! But it worked. People stopped talking and stared at her pearly smile instead. Our attention won, she sat down and began to play.

  In her hands, the piano didn’t sound like the same instrument the rest of us had touched. The music raced along, moonbeams fluttering on the surface of the water, daylight fading while Venus appeared, stars gaining confidence in the darkness till they shone.

  When the Korean girl bowed, she was poised at first, then abruptly gave an endearing girlish smile so the gap in her teeth showed. The applause burst spontaneously from the audience and I thought of the hot spring bath back at the ryokan, and how the water simply burbled so naturally from out of the oni’s nose. The girl ran to the right of the stage and bowed, then nimbly skipped over to the other side of the stage and bowed again.

  “Why don’t they stop clapping?” my mother groaned.

  Still the applause continued, until finally one of the competition workers came to get the little Korean girl off the stage so the next age group in the contest could begin.

  We waited for a full two hours to learn the results. By then my carefully braided hair had come undone because I’d taken a nap. When I woke, I was hungry and my mother handed me some onigiri rice balls to eat, and then we went outside for a walk.

  “You’re going to win.” Her voice was high and a little breathless. “I can feel it.”

  “Everyone wants the Korean girl to win,” I replied.

  My mother pursed her lips. “It was so annoying the way she just stayed on stage like that. Egotistical.”

  “She stayed because everyone kept clapping.”

  The judges announced the winners of the youngest category first. Some of the losers could not help but cry. When it was time for my age group, my mother held my hand, as she had at every contest we’d ever attended together. The third and second place winners were announced first: a boy and a girl. When my name was not called, I knew that I had really and truly lost for the first time in my life. The Korean girl, Shinobu, seemed to know that she would win. She was sitting on her father’s lap, bouncing up and down and smiling excitedly and speaking with her parents in Korean and flirting with the judges, her enormous eyes fluttering like the bows in her hair, which flapped every time she turned her head.

  “Our first place winner,” said the man at the microphone, “in the children’s fifth and sixth grade category is …”—he consulted a sheet of paper—“Satomi Inoue!”

  I heard a crash like the ocean. People were clapping. My mother pushed me. “Go!” she exclaimed. “Go onto the stage!”

  I was handed a recognition certificate and the basket of sundries, which were quite heavy when I held them all together. Later, my mother would keep the certificate in her izakaya behind the bar and up alongside the sake cups of our regular customers. Beside this would hang a photograph taken that afternoon. My eyes are focused on something just past the camera. To the casual observer I look dazed, a truly humble girl grateful that her talents had been recognized. I might be looking with awe at my mother, wondering how she knew to enter me into this contest, or gazing at the deciding judge who cast his vote in my favor. But each time I look at this picture, I remember what I was really seeing: the Korean girl, mouth erased of the playful smile, distaste on her face, politely clapping along with everyone else.

  My mother told the ryokan proprietor of my triumph, and that night we feasted on an even more ostentatious meal than the previous evening as my mother recounted the story of my playing and declared me the most talented eleven-year-old in the north of Japan. The cook sent up two special dishes of shrimp and mushrooms, and the hunchback proprietor brought us a small bottle of sake to share, and then gave one to the other guests.

  The next morning, I was wrestling again with an uncomfortable feeling, something bordering on recklessness combined with a strong need to be kind to someone. I begged my mother to buy us a box of Akita omanju to give to Tomoko as a present. My mother, usually so thrifty, allowed me to buy a box. She also let me buy a stuffed Akita dog toy. I was surprised to see her linger over a makeup stand in the department store by the train station. Eventually she talked herself into purchasing a cherry bark compact from Kakunodate.

  “You did well,” she said as we began the long journey home. “Several people came to talk to me about your playing. Important teachers.”

  “From Akita?”

  “From Nagoya, Tokyo, and Osaka. Satomi, people recognize your talent and want to help you. They say you should enter a special school, just for music.”

  “Hmm,” I said, and gazed out of the window at the sparse landscape of the north. Before us rose the mountains we’d have to cross to go home. I clutched my stuffed Akita dog and pretended to go to sleep. My mother carefully brushed my forehead with her cool hand, and, hypnotized by this soothing feeling, I soon fell asleep for real.

  It was late in the afternoon when we arrived home and I had that horrible feeling that comes from having spent a day in naps, of resenting the sun as it slips down over the horizon. I dragged my feet, wanting to remain a traveler for just a few more seconds.

  “Tadaima! We’re home!” my mother called out to the dark doorway. This was what I always said when I arrived home from school, and it struck me as odd that she would announce herself this way to an empty house.

  “Ara.” My mother was frowning.

  The hechima plant that had been growing outside the entrance to the building was gone. Two days ago when we had left, swollen hechima gourds had dangled from vines clinging to a trellis my mother had woven from string she’d collected from various store packages. Every year my mother grew hechima like this. She used the vines to make special beauty water for her face and dried pulp from the gourds to scrub her dishes.

  We knelt down by the rectangular pot and looked at the roots. They were snipped. Someone had come by and cut the vine back. I knew that my mother could make do with rags to wash her dishes. The beauty water was another matter. Someone had struck a deliberate blow to her vanity.

  “But the hechima didn’t do anything,” she protested as she fingered the roots. “The poor gourds.”

  Dinner was a quiet, uncomfortable affair. My mother tried to cook something special, a whole fish she ran out and bought from the market to celebrate my success, but I knew she was distracted.

  She said she wasn’t hungry and insisted that I consume most of the fish, even though I was already full.

  “We have to eat the whole fish tonight to celebrate your entire success. You see? Eating the whole fish means that you will become a whole person. That you will continue to succeed.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “I’m full. But you have to eat until it’s all gone.”

  For a time, we were allowed to forget about the mysterious fate of the hechima plant. When I went back to school, I was greeted as a hero. The teachers all knew that I had won the Tōhoku piano competition and that I had been scouted by teachers from the glamorous southern cities. No one knew about the Korean girl and I decided that it was best to pretend that I had deserved to win, that I was as good a piano player as everyone said. The local news station even came to interview me at school, and that evening I went to Tomoko’s house and watched my grainy black-and-white portrait on the screen as I confidently told the reporter that I loved the piano and hoped to play in Paris one day. I did not yet understand that my acco
mplishment was not large enough to protect us forever, and I was somewhat surprised when, walking home from school a few weeks later, Tomoko came running behind me, her hair flying and skirt jumping up and down as she ran.

  “Chotto! Matte!” she called out. Wait wait!

  I stopped walking. “Hello,” I said when she caught up with me. “Are you going home?”

  She ignored the question. “I need to talk to you,” she panted. “It’s about your mother.”

  She had overheard her own mother speaking to some of the other ladies in town. All had complained that since my mother had no husband, it was only natural that she should try to find one. But was it necessary, the women asked, for my mother to behave as though all the men in town together could collectively function as her spouse? No fewer than seven men were known to have contributed money to the trip we had taken to Akita for my contest. And then there was the mysterious man who had paid for our elaborate dinner.

  My mother had promised to pay back all the men, but still the women were unhappy. What did it suggest that my mother thought it appropriate even to have asked for such a favor?

  One of the women—Tomoko’s mother—suggested that perhaps my mother hadn’t asked for the favor at all and that the men had simply volunteered, but this had been met with derision. Even if that were true, they said, my mother shouldn’t have accepted the money and should have found a way to provide for me on her own. She would have known what scandals borrowing the money would bring, and she should have known better than to proceed.

  “But look,” Tomoko’s mother had protested. “Satomi is clearly a talented girl. She deserves this kind of help, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes,” the others had agreed at first. “But then it is only right that Satomi’s mother turn to the community for help. It says something that she only turned to the men, doesn’t it?”

  Even though my mother had been making public rounds to return the money, damage had already been done. The women, long jealous of our unorthodox life and the unconcerned manner in which my mother had raised me, let out their many years of repressed anger. They spoke of things they could do: refuse to sell my mother vegetables, suddenly “run out” of fish in the markets, or, worse, order their husbands not to visit the izakaya.

  Tomoko chattered on and on, waving her thin wrists as she spoke, clearly delighted to have procured this information and clearly proud of herself for sharing it with me. I could practically see the twin internal thoughts she had in a bubble over her head, like the captions that appear above cartoon characters. “Tomoko the good runs to the rescue of town outcast, Satomi. See how she hurried to share the news! Tomoko is such a good girl!”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I screamed at Tomoko. “Those women are awful! It’s not my fault I don’t have a father, and anyway, we’ll pay everyone back. So what’s the point?” I was pretending to have known that we had borrowed money from all those men.

  Tomoko was genuinely startled by my outburst. “I just thought you should know.”

  “Why?” I shouted. “So you can laugh at me?”

  “I’m not laughing at you! I ran all the way here to tell you so you’d be prepared!”

  “And then what? You’ll go back and tell Matsumi and all your fancy friends how I cried about the news and you’ll all talk about me like I’m some kind of charity case? Well, guess what. I don’t care what you and everyone else says about my mother behind my back!”

  “But … everyone admires you,” she sputtered. “That’s part of the problem.”

  I grabbed her wrist and pulled her little perfect face up close to my nose. “Do you really think I care what any of you think about me?” I let go and Tomoko lost her balance and crumpled onto the dirt.

  She was stunned and spent a moment examining her skirt, now soiled and in disarray. Then she saw that the fall had cut her knee. Emotion gathered in her face, like a gust of wind. “You are horrible!” she screamed. “Everyone’s right! You need to learn some manners or you will never, ever have a happy life!”

  I chased her as far as the edge of Mr. Nobata’s rice paddy. I didn’t really intend to catch her; I just wanted to scare her a little bit more. Then I stopped and screamed at her back, reminding her that children of wealthy parents, such as herself, were spoiled and would never know what it was like to develop magical powers as I had done.

  An island of trees hovered in the middle of one of Mr. Nobata’s rice paddies. Inside was a Shinto shrine so old and powerful that, it was said, no one would cut down the trees even to make way for more grain. When Tomoko had disappeared, I ran along the path to the island and climbed up the worn stone steps to the fox shrine, guarded by a torii, or gate, painted a fading red.

  Here the air smelled green and wet. I huddled up against the shrine itself, just a small wooden box, and began to cry. I have always been a generous crier, unable to stop once I start, and I learned early to hide myself whenever I felt tears coming. I clung to the old wooden shrine, staining it dark gray with my tears, for a good hour, and when I was finished it was as though an infection had been drained from my blood and my body was now sapped of energy and resistance to anything more nature might send my way.

  Like so many others in those days, my mother and I didn’t have our own private bath. Instead, we relied on the local bathhouse. We usually went in the afternoon after school, washing and rinsing in the cleaning area before soaking in the large wooden tub inside the steamy building. We couldn’t go in the evening since by then my mother was already serving drinks to the men in the bar.

  That afternoon, when I went home after my fight with Tomoko, my mother seemed irritated and so I didn’t tell her what had really happened. I lied and told her that I’d been kept after class by teachers who wanted to hear the story of my triumph in Akita just one more time. But nothing I said seemed to please her. She looked at my schoolwork and said that my handwriting was sloppy on my notes and that I should have scored higher on my geography quiz. In fact, she seemed increasingly agitated and finally I declared that I wanted to go to the bathhouse.

  Now she wilted a little, as though suddenly aware of the bad mood she had been in, and its effect on me. “I might stay here,” she said.

  “Why? Do you have a cold?”

  “No. I just … Oh, never mind. I’ll go,” she huffed, as though I were forcing her.

  It didn’t take long for me to find out then why she had wanted to avoid the bath. The minute we entered the changing area, the conversation between the other women preparing to bathe completely stopped.

  Meanwhile, my mother peeled off her clothes with unusually brisk movements. I did the same.

  “Excuse me,” one of the women finally said, “this bath is not for mura-hachibu.”

  My mother looked her straight in the eye. “Satomi and I are members of this town. You know that.”

  “Well, but you do live near the train station. By those bars. Technically, you aren’t part of central Kuma-ume.”

  “Yes,” agreed another woman. “Perhaps the next town over will not mind if you bathe there.”

  Just then, a woman opened the sliding door separating the changing area from the actual bath. I caught a glimpse of women relaxing in the hot pools. I yearned to be in there with them, completely warm and nearly weightless. And clean. Then the door shut and the woman stood in front of it, arms crossed meaningfully.

  “Did you see that?” I asked my mother once we had dressed again and gone outside.

  She had tears in her eyes. “I didn’t think they would do that while you were here too.”

  “This morning … ?”

  “The same thing.”

  The following day she went to the bath with me again as usual, and the women—a different group this time—once again prevented us from bathing. After that, my mother refused to go to the bath with me. “It’s not that I care,” she said. “I don’t. But I can see that you care so it’s better if you go alone.”

  Tomoko’s mother invited us
to come bathe at their home, and we did go once. But it was awkward. Tomoko and I weren’t really close anymore, and there was Tomoko’s mother speaking to us both with overeager enthusiasm, as though we were still best friends. We limped through the meeting halfheartedly, like bad actors in an even worse play. My mother resorted to other means after that. She sent me to the bathhouse by myself while she took a bus to the nearby temple, run by a famously compassionate priest and his mother. Every other day my mother assembled a small package of goods—sake or pickles she had made—and ventured to Empukuji for her bath.

  But our problems didn’t end with the bathhouse. When my mother went to the vegetable shops to buy food for dinner, doors closed before she could enter. It fell to me to go shopping after school. Then business slowed in the izakaya. Only the most loyal customers, the men without wives, came in to drink. I noticed that my mother cut her weekly orders of beer for the store and that our meals became even leaner.

  “Are we going to have to close?” I asked timidly one night.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother huffed. “Things won’t stay bad like this forever.”

  But I wondered.

  Of these things, though, the worst was the humiliation at the bath. For the very fact that others in the town thought we were unclean made me feel as though I was in fact dirty. During that period of my life, I began to inspect myself, my hair, the backs of my ears, and the bottom of my feet before I climbed into the water. I was doubtless cleaner than ever during this time, but you cannot endure such an active shunning without wondering if perhaps you have done something offensive after all.

  “How long is this going to last?” I asked my mother one day.

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “Satomi,” she snapped. “I don’t ever want you to ask that question again. If you ignore this treatment, it will go away like a bad dream. I expect you to be tougher than this.”

  She made fun of the townspeople behind their backs, calling them ignorant, like “ants who methodically dissect the same rice ball, when a nice omanju is sitting in plain view.” At night, she told me she wasn’t hungry and gave me the majority of the food. But as much as she insisted she didn’t care about our treatment, I know that she did. Her playful mood all but disappeared, and no matter how well I did in school or in my lessons, she couldn’t muster even the slightest words of praise.