I was confused. “I knew what, Mineko? Speak clearly.”
But she wouldn’t say anything more because at that moment the two little girls had begun to fight over the top and who was going to spin it next. My mother looked on in alarm, raising her voice just slightly and unable to prevent the wrestling match. Mineko, called to duty, jumped up from the sofa where we had been sitting and grabbed each girl roughly by the shoulder, separating them and reminding them that they were to play nicely with each other and to love each other as sisters.
I asked my mother about Masayoshi the next opportunity that we had to be alone, which was in the bath. My mother had relaxed into the water, her hair pinned up against her scalp. Her face was flushed and pink and she looked youthful.
“Okāsan.” Mother. “Did Masayoshi ask you if he could marry me?”
For a little while I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard me, or that we were going to pretend that she hadn’t heard me. She began to kick her legs in the water in a rapid bicycling motion, working out her joints, which, she had confided at breakfast, were beginning to stiffen. “You don’t really want to get married.”
“But did he ask you?”
“Satomi,” she sighed, “you are far too talented a girl to just go off and get married. We’ve discussed this.”
“But …”
She fixed her eyes on mine and said, “You have a tendency to react to the moment, without thinking of the future. Remember Mineko? Of course that was partly my fault. If you’d had a more secure childhood, you wouldn’t feel the need to fight everyone around you, like an alley cat afraid that each meal might be its last. But, honestly, what kind of happiness would you have in ten years if you married Masayoshi? He is a more conventional person than you realize. He’s fascinated by you for now, but that kind of attraction doesn’t make a really good match in the long run.”
“And you know so much about good matches.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I found us a good home, didn’t I?”
“You found yourself a good home.”
“Satomi,” she said. “Of course this is your home. You could have settled in here a lot more easily if you’d behaved differently.”
“You never asked me if I wanted you to marry Mr. Horie.”
She shook her head. “I made some mistakes when you were small. I spoiled you. I let you think you were an adult before you were one and let you throw tantrums for far too long.”
This wasn’t the response I had expected. “Ever since you got here, you’ve been so different, Mother. You act like Mineko and Chieko are much more your daughters than I am.”
“They are my daughters.”
I tried a different tactic. “You sent me away to school. You never sent them away.”
My mother sighed and her breath disturbed the steam on top of the bathwater so that it fluttered. And then in a voice that sounded tired, as though she had repeated this point many times, she said, “You are talented, Satomi. They are nice girls, but they are ordinary. You should know this by now.”
“But …”
“One day perhaps you will all be friends. That is my hope.” She began to ask me about my plans now that my final year of school had started. She had all but forgotten the original reason for our conversation, which was Masayoshi and his marriage proposal about which I had heard nothing, and she was carrying on instead about my other future, the one in which I finally fulfilled my promise as Japan’s next great contribution to the world of Western music. She wanted to know what path I had sketched out with my teachers. Try as I might to steer the conversation back in the direction of Masayoshi, she would have none of it. I realize now that in her persistent way she saw Masayoshi as a distraction, the main reason why I hadn’t already debuted with the NHK symphony, and that now that she had gotten rid of him, I could focus on my purpose again.
“Will you play in concert halls?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, sulking.
“What are the other girls doing?”
“Getting married. Teaching.”
“Well, I suppose it’s my fault too,” she said out loud, as though finishing up the tail end of another conversation, one that had taken place in her head. “Perhaps what you say is true. If I had paid more attention to you when you were a teenager, you’d be further along in your studies.”
“Maybe I never really had that much talent in the first place.”
“Nonsense. Remember the story about the moon princess …”
“That was just a story.”
She looked as though I had slapped her. “Of course it was just a story. It was the only way that you as a young child could understand what I saw in you.” She paused. “The only other option for you now is to marry someone whom Mr. Horie and I think is suitable for you. Or, for a time, you could come work in the business.”
“Fishing?”
“Hasn’t it paid for your schooling so far?”
The very thought of working down by the wharf where I would doubtless need to get up early in the morning and wear a pair of rubber boots and tromp around in cold saltwater and fish blood disgusted me. “There is one thing,” I said. “You remember Rie Sanada? She says that I would benefit from studying in Europe. She wants me to audition for school in Paris.”
“Oh?” My mother raised her eyebrows.
I chose my words carefully. “She says that I have a passionate nature and that I would do better in Europe. She lived there for several years before coming back to Japan. I remind her of the French musicians. She says that Japan isn’t going to be able to teach me everything I need to know and that if I am going to perform before an international audience, I have to, well, ‘lose my accent.’ ”
My mother settled back into the water again and I waited to see if my words would have an effect. “Of course,” she finally said. “Japan didn’t invent classical music. The Europeans did. It shouldn’t be expected that you would learn to play truly great music here in Japan.”
I thought of the jazz musicians that Masayoshi and I had gone to hear. “I wonder if we will ever play as well as they do.”
She laughed. “Eventually we’ll play better than they do. And so you must be part of the new wave of artists who truly master Western classical music and come back to Japan to show us how to do it correctly. Sah.” She stood up out of the water and began to walk across the tiled floor of the tub to the steps. She gripped the railing with one hand and held a small white towel over her breasts with the other. Slowly she began to climb out and I looked at her figure, still so girlish. How could she have changed so much, but still look so young?
“Masayoshi …,” I began, but she waved her hand at me.
“You’ll see him from time to time because he is family. But he’s changed the path of his life. You must continue on the one that you started.”
Sanada-sensei and I continued my Thursday lessons, working and reworking the repertory I would use to audition for the École Normale in Paris. But one afternoon when she let me in, she surprised me by asking me to sit at a table by the window. As we made small talk, she served me a small meal of bread, soup, and sardines.
“You have to learn to eat soup with a spoon,” she said. “That’s what they do.”
“I’m not going to play today?” The sudden barrage of eating utensils and the formality of so many cups and plates intimidated me.
“I think we are all done with lessons,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“I still have my last exam. And I have to record my audition tape.”
“You’re ready for all that.”
“You’ll be there for the exam?”
“Of course. I suppose I’ll have to see if there is anyone else with any talent I can take on. Mostly, it’s been so disappointing listening to those children.” She sighed.
I watched her cut her sardines in half and followed suit.
“Do you have any questions?” she asked.
I spent a minute chewing and swallo
wing my food before I asked, “What if I get there and I’m not good enough?”
“Not even a question anymore.” She smiled kindly. “I know for a fact that all the teachers at Geidai think you are ready to go overseas and that your ability would be wasted here. They find you an overly emotional player, of course. Rather baroque. So while no one is going to help you with the NHK symphony, they do support your application to go overseas. Satomi, it’s really up to you now and up to your will. Many things can happen to a young woman to derail her. I should know.”
“War,” I said. “Bad health.”
“A broken heart,” she replied, darkly, and I wondered to whom she referred.
“But you still played.”
“Yes. Because the piano is my first love.” She watched me intently and set her fork down on a plate. “You are wondering if you will be happy.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a question with you, isn’t it? Will music be enough for passionate Satomi? Will it make you feel secure, even? I don’t know. It has been my focus. You will find out if it is yours.”
I passed my exams easily and was admitted to school in Paris just as Sanada-sensei had foreseen. Though I was elated to have accomplished something so few Japanese students had even dared try, I was also deeply uneasy.
“I’ll miss you,” I bawled to Shinobu. As I have said, I can be a terrible crier once I begin. That day I was a geyser of tears and she dutifully handed me Masayoshi’s handkerchiefs one after another while I sobbed. “Who will rescue me when I am in trouble?”
“Don’t get into trouble,” Shinobu said sensibly.
“Why don’t you come with me?”
She shook her head. “He says we’re going to have a baby, which means my children will be half Japanese. It’s an opportunity for me.”
“But you’re a better pianist than I am!”
“Maybe I was once, Satomi. But not since you’ve studied with Sanada-sensei. And also,” she sighed. “It’s just not as important to me as it is to you. I realize this now.”
About a week before I left to go to Paris, I saw Masayoshi once more. I was home packing when I heard the front door slide open and felt the walls tremble with pressure. We had visitors. I stiffened, waiting for the moment when my mother would call me to come out of my small room and to help prepare tea and sweets, but the call never came. I just sat there in my room, looking at the plastic-wrapped packages my mother had moved into my room. Clearly she was intent on turning my room into a storage area once I had permanently left the house.
I heard low murmurs through the wall and then laughter. The cadence was familiar and I decided that it must be Mineko here again for a visit with her two small brats. I lay down on my bed and began to read a magazine I’d picked up from the grocery store. Its pages were filled with glossy photos of ordinary Americans having fun at something called a diner and at the beach, and I wondered at the way their polished cheeks seemed to glow even through paper, how the men looked at the girls with such protective kindness in their eyes.
My musician’s ears heard the low rumble of a serious voice making a comment in the other room. It wasn’t the voice of Mineko’s husband, but someone else’s.
I slid out of my room, trying to be quiet so I could escape back to solitude if necessary. I walked across the floor, picking the beams that did not squeak and whose positions I’d memorized since childhood. Then I knelt and looked through a hole in the shoji door separating the main room from the hallway. It was Masayoshi sitting at a table with his back to me. He’d shaved his head, but I would have recognized him anywhere, what with the straight shoulders and the gentle swoop of his neck, a private place, like an inner room in a house that few people ever see.
“Satomi?” My mother’s gaze shifted to the far side of the room where I was hiding.
I tried to enter the room as noiselessly as possible to give the impression that I hadn’t been hiding all that time, but that I had been on my way in to see them. “Mother,” I purred. “Would you and your guests like a fresh change of tea leaves?” I made sure my eyes did not once brush his face.
My manners surprised my mother. “Thank you.”
I threw out the old leaves into a strainer that rested on top of a bucket by the back door. I boiled water on the stove, then set about carefully measuring fresh tea leaves into the teapot. The tea was from Uji, famous for its manicured hedges, rich soil, and the ladies dressed in indigo-colored clothing and straw hats, who had picked the young leaves to make this sen-cha, the first crop of the year. It was my mother’s favorite kind of tea.
I heard a noise. Masayoshi had excused himself from the front room and was carrying in several plates. I knew he was doing this just as an excuse to see me; we’d need plates again when my mother decided to serve her guests something else to eat. But by bringing the dishes into the kitchen he was giving the impression of being a helpful guest while coming up with an excuse to see me alone. No one followed him and I knew that they knew exactly what he intended.
“Well.” I tried to sound lighthearted. “I leave you alone for a couple of years and you lose your hair.”
He blushed and ran his hand over his scalp. “Actually, this is considered kind of long. I have to get it shaved again soon.”
The teakettle was whistling and I turned off the gas and let the water sit for a few seconds to make sure it was the perfect temperature for tea. Then I began to pour the steaming water over the leaves. They unfurled at the touch of the hot liquid, like little fists relaxing at last. In a few minutes, the tea would be ready. If I waited too long, my mother would complain that I had made the tea too strong. So, quickly, I said, “If you wanted to get married you could have just asked me.”
He didn’t seem to know quite how to respond, which infuriated me.
“Ah. Is that so?” he said.
I frowned. “You can’t come in here looking for an excuse to talk to me, and when I finally bring up what you want to talk about, just stutter like that.”
“Excuse me.”
I waited.
“You always were very blunt. I used to wonder if maybe you didn’t grow up in Japan. If maybe your father was a foreigner,” he said.
“Could have been. No one knows who my father was. I’m not even sure anymore that my mother does.”
“Well, either way. I’ll bet you will do very well overseas. I hear that the foreigners are much more direct than we are.”
“Let’s hope so,” I muttered.
“Satomi …,” he began.
I waited a few seconds then turned to take the tea back into the front room. It wouldn’t have made much difference if I’d continued standing there. I know how men’s minds work. Masayoshi probably told himself that if I’d been able to give him just a few more seconds, he would have come up with the words to ask me to forgive him. He took my quickness as evidence that he had been right after all to just let our friendship go. But this is silly. It is very easy to convince yourself that you have done something correctly if you never really pay attention to what else you might have done in the first place. What kind of person, I asked myself as I slid open the shoji door to the front room with one hand while carrying the tea carefully into the tatami-lined room with the other, doesn’t speak up for himself? I saw my mother give me a probing look, the pressure of her gaze feeling a little bit like the weight of her hand stroking my forehead when I had been a child and had a fever. But I didn’t look at her. I simply knelt down and held the teapot over the table, giving it a few swirls before I offered our guests an additional cupful to drink.
Then I excused myself and went out to the entrance of the house. I put on my shoes and went for a long walk, all the way down to the water. When I came back, several hours later, the guests had gone. And if I half hoped that there would be a letter for me, some little scribbled note asking for my forgiveness, I was disappointed. No such missive was waiting for me. There was only my mother sewing a button on one of her golf shirts and listening
to the broadcast of a live symphony orchestra coming from Tokyo and dreaming, no doubt, that I would be piped to her in similar fashion one day.
I sat by myself in my room and looked at all the objects I had collected over the years. There were scale books and étude books and photos and old certificates from music contests. In the closet were my old recital dresses and skirts whose hems my mother had let out numerous times as I had grown. I looked over my record collection and chose an old album, Rubinstein playing études by Chopin, and I listened to the delicate, impressionistic notes stream into my room. I thought how wonderful it was for Chopin to have created such lovely music that we were still listening to and of the many girls who had gone through Geidai University struggling to play these same notes. It was a cool evening and I opened my window. Leaves stirred just beyond the glass and I smelled the ocean air riding up the street and past my window. I thought of how fine it would be to do something grand, to create something that others would listen to and care for long after I had gone. The thought made me sad and determined all at once. I was certain at that moment that I could do something important in the world if only I were to focus and if only I were given the chance.
There is one more thing. That same day I went for a walk, venturing down to an old noodle shop by the fish market. Masayoshi and I had gone there on our first evening out together when we had met so many years ago on the train. I ordered some noodles and slurped them up, listening to old fishermen talking. I’d finished eating and was just thinking about leaving when I saw a gaijin, a stranger, wander in.
He looked just like someone I would see inside the pages of a magazine. In fact, he could have been one of the models selling chocolates or have been James Dean himself. My eye wasn’t yet trained to see the difference between various Caucasian faces.
The man ordered a beer and fumbled through a few phrases of Japanese. “Udon kudasai?”
The counter staff explained that there was no udon available, and when the gaijin didn’t understand what was happening, the waiter spoke at an even louder decibel. Finally, the foreigner pointed to my nearly empty bowl. “Udon,” he insisted.
Picking Bones from Ash Page 8
