The Dream of Water

by Kyoko Mori

  I went back to my room, saw the cardigan covering up the altar, and was glad that my father hadn’t taken me up on my offer. He would have been angry at me for hanging my clothes in the wrong place. I was only being polite when I had said he could sleep in my room. As I closed the door behind me, I could hear Michiko bursting out in a high-pitched laugh.

  * * *

  A month later, in the locker room after our volleyball practice, a ninth-grade girl, Junko, told me why Hiroshi and Michiko were sleeping in the same room. We had just taken our showers and were drying off. We sat in front of the lockers with towels wrapped around us. When Junko went into the particular physical details, I didn’t even know what part of the body she was talking about.

  “It’s where you have your periods, you know,” she said.

  “But I don’t have anything like that,” I protested.

  “You’ve heard about them, haven’t you?”

  As Junko began to dry her hair, I recalled the afternoon back in fifth grade when all the girls had been excused from gym class to hear a lecture in the auditorium. Two of the women teachers had told us something about bleeding, and my friends were very squeamish about it afterward. But my brother was having frequent nosebleeds at that time so blood didn’t seem like such a dramatic thing to me. He could start the bleeding at will, sometimes, by scrunching his eyes and breathing through the nose. I had tried this myself with no success: I had wanted my nose to start bleeding while my mother was nagging me about practicing my piano or doing my math homework, so she would have to stop talking and tend to me instead. But she had thought I was making funny faces at her and had complained that I never took anything seriously. At any rate, I concluded that this menstruation business was like a once-a-month nosebleed I might get in some distant future. The lecture didn’t alarm me like the other health presentations, about leprosy, for instance, or Japanese encephalitis, which you could get from being bitten by a certain kind of mosquito.

  But now Junko was talking about people sleeping together and having babies. I leaned forward and covered my face with my hands because I was crying all of a sudden and could not stop.

  “Maybe my father does that with her,” I insisted after a while, my voice sounding high and weak. “But he never did anything like that with my mother.”

  “Don’t be silly. You wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t,” Junko laughed.

  “But my parents never slept in the same room.”

  In the end, Junko said, “Okay. Maybe your parents only did that twice. To have you and your brother.”

  We finished dressing and walked to the train station. She ran into the bakery in front of the station, came out with two buns filled with sweet bean paste, and handed one to me.

  “Look,” she said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I thought you knew more than you did.”

  Sitting on the bench on the platform next to her, I ate the bun even though I hated bean paste because it was overly sweet. The bread was too soft and fluffy while the paste was too sticky—purple, full of small lumps. I kept chewing carefully so I wouldn’t choke or start crying again. When the train pulled in, I got up too quickly from the bench. Suddenly I was dizzy and out of breath. Everything looked purple.

  * * *

  Our two-month summer vacation was going to begin in late June. Until that year, Jumpei and I had spent every July and August with our mother and her family in her parents’ village. Though most of our uncles and aunts lived away from the village, everyone came back—“came home,” as they said—for the summer. One evening in June, our uncle Shiro called and said that he and his family would meet my brother and me at the station so we could make the trip together.

  “I don’t know exactly when Father was planning for Jumpei and me to go,” I said. “I can’t ask him because he’s still at work.”

  “That’s all right,” Shiro assured me. “I’ll call him at his office tomorrow and make sure it’s okay with him. Tell your brother that Kenichi and I are going to teach him how to fish.”

  “You should tell Ken Nichan to call me,” I told Shiro. Kenichi hadn’t visited us since we had moved back to live with my father and Michiko, though we went to see him and our aunt Keiko a few times. “I’m going out for the volleyball team. I want him to show me the roundhouse serve.”

  “So you’re looking for a killer serve?” Shiro chuckled. “When will you start acting more like a girl?” Shiro had always been the uncle who teased me the most. He had a way of screwing up his face so you couldn’t tell if he was smiling or frowning. I could see him, even over the phone, making that face.

  “Never,” I said.

  After we hung up, I woke up my brother to tell him that we were going to our grandparents’ house with Shiro’s family. We talked about how Shiro and Kenichi would teach him to fish. Our other uncle, Yasuo, would be fishing alone, we imagined—he was such a good fisherman he liked to go by himself and not be bothered by people who were less serious about the sport. I could already see all of us eating watermelon in the backyard in the afternoons, everyone laughing and spitting out the black seeds. Though our father said nothing in the next few days about our visit, we assumed that everything was settled. The prospect made us even more eager for the end of the school term.

  * * *

  About a week later, Hiroshi told Jumpei and me to meet him at his father Tatsuo’s house after school because he had something important to say. When he came in, around five o’clock, he ordered us into the drawing room, where Tatsuo, already seated in one of the armchairs, pointed at the couch for my brother and me to sit down. Hiroshi took the other armchair. Then, without any pause or preamble, he said, “It’s about your grandparents. You’re not to see them again.” “That’s right,” Tatsuo continued. “Your mother is gone, and you have a new mother. It’s time for some changes.” Jumpei started crying right away. He kept wiping his face with his shirtsleeve and sobbing out loud.

  “Be quiet,” Tatsuo scolded.

  “You mean we won’t ever see them?” I asked.

  “I’ll make exceptions if somebody dies and you have to go to the funeral,” Hiroshi replied. “Or if your uncle Kenichi ever gets married, you may attend the wedding.”

  “Other than that, I won’t see any of them at all?”

  “When the priest comes to read the sutras for your mother, I’ll invite your aunt Keiko. She can come hear them.”

  “I’m supposed to go and see her soon. She wants to buy my summer clothes. She and Ken Nichan called the other day,” I pointed out. “They want me to come over soon.”

  “You have a new mother to go shopping with. You don’t need your aunt.”

  “I’ll be at school when the priest comes to read the sutras. He always comes in the morning. May I stay home then so I can see Keiko?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “My mother let me stay home from school when I asked. She said I should just ask her. It was better than pretending to be sick. Just be honest, she said.”

  Hiroshi hit the table with his fist. “Your mother indulged you too much. She spoiled you and left you to me. You are not to talk about her.”

  I turned my face aside and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, I noticed Tatsuo’s purple vase, which was always empty. Tatsuo never put flowers in it because he never entertained guests. He sat in the drawing room alone or else scolded us there and locked us up afterward to reflect on our faults in the dark.

  “May I write to my grandparents?” I asked. I had written them every Sunday since I had learned to write in the first grade. Before that, I had sent them pictures.

  Tatsuo and Hiroshi looked at each other. Tatsuo said, “You may write so long as you show the letters to your father first.”

  Hiroshi nodded. Jumpei was wailing and hiccuping. Neither Hiroshi nor Tatsuo tried to comfort us; neither said they were sorry to cause us pain. I started thinking how much I hated them, how I would outwit them. I could not visit my relatives without Hiroshi finding out—my
absence would be noticed. But I could write my letters without showing them to him first.

  Every afternoon on my way home from school, I walked past a post office. I could write to my grandparents during my lunch hour and mail the letter from there. I could buy stamps with my monthly allowance and lunch money. To ward off suspicion, I would write letters now and then to show Hiroshi, but I would never mail the ones I showed him. No one had ever inspected my private letters before in my life. No one had forbidden me to see my own relatives.

  Soon Hiroshi and Tatsuo told us we were dismissed. “Go see your aunt in the kitchen,” Tatsuo said. “She’ll give you supper before you go home.”

  Akiko and Kazumi came through the kitchen door into the hallway when they heard my brother and me. “Your father’s too harsh,” Akiko whispered with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry I can’t help more.” She put her arms around my shoulders and hugged me so that her hair touched my neck. The moment I hugged her back, leaning into her shoulder, tears started coming out of my eyes. No matter how I tried to stop, my whole body kept shaking with the small jagged breaths I was taking. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kazumi holding Jumpei’s hand and patting him on the back, trying to comfort him, but soon she was beginning to sniffle, too. Nobody said, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right.” I imagined my grandparents standing in the road in front of their house and waving at us, the way they did at the end of every summer when we were leaving on the bus. Now maybe they, too, would be crying. And Aunt Keiko would have to come to our house alone to hear the sutras and never see us. My brother was beyond whimpering or sobbing; he was making a loud wailing noise. Hiroshi and Tatsuo did not come out of the drawing room to see what was going on, if we were all right. Letting go of my aunt and wiping my face on my sleeve, I thought how wrong my mother had been to think that we would be better off without her.

  * * *

  Someone is playing an organ or a horn in the street. It’s the same tune over and over, played loud and harsh. I sit up in bed, automatically repeating the words in my mind.

  medaka no gakko wa

  kawa no naka

  sotto nozoite metegoran

  minna de oyugi shiteiruyo

  the minnow children

  go to school in the river

  look

  they’re playing together

  The tune begins to fade away in the distance just as I run downstairs.

  “What was that?” I ask Sylvia, who is drinking coffee at the kitchen table in her pink jogging suit, her long red hair in a ponytail.

  She looks at me as if she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  “Who was playing that song? It’s crazy.”

  “Oh, that,” Sylvia laughs. “That’s the tofu truck.”

  “The tofu truck?”

  “A guy selling tofu from his truck. He always plays that same song so we can tell when he’s driving by—in case we need tofu.”

  “They should write him a tofu song,” I tell her. “Not the minnow children. It’s a song we all learn in kindergarten. It has nothing to do with tofu.”

  “Poor guy,” Sylvia says, sipping her coffee. “Can you imagine hearing that over and over all day?”

  “No.”

  “I know all the street vendors by their songs. There’s a guy who goes around sharpening knives. And a guy who sells fish cake. They each have their own song.”

  I imagine my school friends now grown up and married, listening to our silly childhood songs blaring out of trucks to get them to run out and buy tofu. When we were young and talked about our future, we debated whether we would ever get married or pursue some artistic career, whether we would fall in love or find the right partner by allowing our parents to go through matchmakers. We were so serious about being happy.

  “I was woken up by the tofu truck,” I tell Vince on the phone while Sylvia gets ready for work. “He was playing the song about the minnow children.”

  “That’s what they’ve done with electronic music here,” he says. “In some cities, when the traffic light turns green, a tune comes on so you know which way to walk. I was crossing a street in Nagasaki once, when I realized I was listening to ‘Coming Through the Rye.’”

  We talk some more and agree to meet downtown for lunch. After we hang up, I continue to sit at the table, drinking the coffee Sylvia poured for me and thinking of last night’s cab ride. With the raised highways intersecting at sharp angles in front of me, I felt as though I had been dropped into the middle of a high-speed chase from a science-fiction film. The bright glow of neon made the city look more like a Hollywood set than any real place. Now when I think of singing lights and musical vendors, this whole country reminds me of an amusement park, a big Disneyland with computerized lights and electronic wonders. The place I came back to seems absurd, comical, even silly.

  But how can I possibly feel that way after last night, when, lying in the dark a few miles from the house where my mother had chosen to die, I realized it was fear that had kept me away for so long—fear of this city, this country, of being plunged back into my mother’s unhappiness? I slept poorly all night because I kept remembering the past. Then, woken up by a silly tofu song, I find myself staying with people I have never met before in my life. I feel perfectly at home, safe, in their house. Accepting hospitality is my gift: I can make myself comfortable anywhere; I am good at being a guest. As I get up and pour more coffee, open the fridge to find some bread because I don’t want to walk down the hill and ride the train on an empty stomach, everything, even my own concerns, seems so calm and banal, completely harmless. How can I feel this way after not being able to sleep last night? My memories are painful enough to keep me awake a long time, and yet some part of my mind is thinking about what to wear to lunch.

  I put the coffee cup in the sink and walk up the winding stairway toward my room. To the left of the stairway, the wall is solid with wood panels that are stained a dark brown. To my right, from between the lighter-colored cypress pillars, I can look down at the front entrance. The door is open to let in the air. A light breeze is moving the glossy leaves of the orange trees planted near the gate. Ascending the stairway, I am suspended in midair between these two views, between two separate pictures I cannot bring together.

  * * *

  I walk down the steep hill from Sylvia’s house to the commuter train station, a few miles to the south. Gradually, as I walk on, the view of the city and the sea gets blocked out; finally, I can’t see them at all beyond the station building. When I look back to the north, the dark mountain ridge stands against the sky. The northern subdivisions crowd up against the green.

  A train is gliding into the station just as I punch in my ticket and walk up the stairs. It’s the same color as it used to be—a shade between dark brown and purple. The electric doors slide open. Inside, the seats are the same green, and posters hang from the ceiling advertising movies and gossip magazines. I sit down facing the mountains. Several young women get on at the next stop and stand together by the windows. Once in a while, all of them burst out laughing at the same time; their hands fly up to cover their mouths, which are carefully outlined in lipstick. They are wearing blue and gray tailored suits and carrying briefcases. They must be office workers on their lunch break. I close my eyes and feel the train rocking slightly as the wheels hit the crack between the rails. Everything about the ride is exactly as I remember from when I was a teenager taking this same commuter line to school.

  When the train pulls into the downtown station, I immediately recognize the big department stores, the newspaper building, the hotels to the west. There must be some new buildings that I have never seen, but the old ones stand out. If the city has changed, I don’t notice it.

  * * *

  “Maybe it was a mistake to come back here,” I tell Vince at a health food restaurant, only a block away from the bookstore where I worked one spring break, typing order forms in English and German. “It’s too much the same, but it also se
ems so weird.” At the bookstore, old women were hired expressly to bring cups of tea to the male workers at their desks. All employees had to put on dark blue smocks over their street clothes. Sometimes I didn’t button mine all the way up to my throat and had to be reminded. “It looks sloppy,” said the man who was my supervisor. Maybe there still are old women pouring tea all afternoon in that building.

  The waitress brings our plates of vegetable sandwiches and goes away. The restaurant is attached to a health food supermarket, both of them quite new. Most of the people shopping or eating here are Americans.

  “Are you still going to travel around for a while?” Vince asks me as we begin to eat.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “I almost feel too tired to think of what to do next. But I suppose I should travel.”

  “I brought you something that might help.” He pulls a thick red book out of his bag and pushes it across the table, his big hands maneuvering it around our plates. “This is a directory I use when I travel. It has all the business hotels and youth hostels listed in major cities. Here, you can borrow it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Maybe it would be good to travel,” he suggests. “You said you wanted to see parts of Japan you didn’t see when you lived here. It’ll inspire you to write. You’ll feel better afterward.”

  We eat in silence. I know Vince is right. I have managed to come here only because of the sabbatical, which allowed me to say to myself, “I am here as a writer. What I am doing is part of my job. Seeing my family is just an extra thing.” I can’t keep saying that unless I leave Kobe and travel, as planned.

  “You’re right,” I admit. “I didn’t see that much of Japan when I lived here.”

  Vince smiles as he says, “This is a foreign country you are getting to know.”

  * * *

  After Vince leaves to teach his night class, I walk to the tourism office of the Japan Railway Company, which is inside the downtown station. At the counter, I present my passport and my rail pass voucher to an old man who is wearing a uniform all rail workers wear: a starched white shirt, creased black pants, and a wide-brimmed black hat. He looks through my papers for a long time and finally asks me if I speak Japanese. Though I nod, he doesn’t start up a conversation. All he says is, “Please wait,” before he disappears into another part of the office.