by Kyoko Mori
I turn away from the building and begin running south toward the embankment, following the way we used to walk to the beach to collect seashells. My mother and I walked up and down the tide line trying to find the few pink oyster shells and scallops that had come through the breakwater without being shattered.
At the bottom of the embankment that separates the road from the sand beach, I stop and climb the stairs. What I find, when I get to the top, is not the sand or water but tall buildings rising out of what used to be the sea. As far as I can see, there is nothing but land.
I had heard that a mile-wide landfill had been added to the old shoreline. But when I looked at the city from Sylvia’s house, I couldn’t tell where the curve of the shore had changed. From the old embankment, the buildings look new, with white concrete facades. To my right, there is a park with red-clay tennis courts. For the last thirteen years, I have often dreamed of walking in the places of my childhood and finding the sea where the land used to be: right outside our old apartment complex, between the park and the bus stop, outside the second-story window of my elementary school. In the dreams, I am never surprised or afraid. “Oh, the sea has moved,” I think. “Maybe I’ll have to swim or row a boat to school.” I wake up feeling almost happy about all that blue salt water everywhere. What I’m looking at now, as I stand on this old embankment, is just like that, only the directions are reversed: rather than the sea moving toward the land to submerge my childhood landscape, the land has moved into the sea.
The buildings on the landfill must be condominiums and office spaces. They are too tall to be anything else. Cars are parked beside the tennis courts where people in white shirts are hitting balls on the red clay. They are playing tennis beyond the boundaries of my past, swinging their rackets on the old sea. Though the houses in which I have lived have been torn down, time has added to the larger landscape of possibilities. Slowly, I climb down the embankment to stand on the ground, on a new paved road, and begin to run. Fifty yards down, past the old sand beach and the cement breakwater, I am stepping on what used to be waves. The shapes of the land and the sea have changed since I last lived here. I continue to run south, deeper into the old water.
Happiness
On the telephone, my grandmother Fuku calls me by my childhood name. “Kyo-chan,” she says. “It’s been such a long time.”
I am upstairs in Sylvia’s house, using the phone by the porch. The sky has cleared since this morning when I went running.
“Grandmother, how is your health?”
“So-so,” she replies.
“I’m in Kobe now.”
“At your father’s house?”
“No. At a friend’s house near Mikage, up on the hill.”
She doesn’t say anything. Beyond our blue roof, the neighbor’s orange trees look glossy from the humidity.
“I’d like to come and see you,” I say. “When would be a good time for a visit?”
“It doesn’t matter when. I have nowhere to go. I’m always home.”
“How about next weekend then? I can come on Friday or Saturday.”
“I’m not able to do much for guests now. But if you don’t mind that, please stay overnight.”
“Of course.” I always assumed that I would stay. It’s a half day’s trip just to get out there. “I’ll come on Saturday, a week from now.”
“Did you call your uncles and aunts?”
“No, not yet.”
“Your uncle Yasuo and aunt Sayo will want to see you here while you are visiting me.”
“I’ll call them. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone.”
She doesn’t say anything more. She was never much for phone conversations. My mother used to write to her every week rather than call her.
“It’ll be good to see you,” I tell her. “Good-bye till then.”
Hanging up the phone, I look toward the sea and trace the shoreline toward Ashiya. Now that I have been on the landfill, I can see exactly where it is: a thin strip of land beyond the green line of pines planted along the old shoreline. The late afternoon sun reflects off the tall white buildings with glass windows. Standing by the porch, I proceed to call my uncles and aunts so I can see them in the two weeks left of my stay.
* * *
It’s early evening when I reach Kenichi, my youngest uncle.
“Ken Nichan,” I say, “it’s Kyoko.”
“Kyo-chan. Your grandmother said you were coming to Japan. She was so happy to get your letter.”
“I called her this afternoon. I’m going to see her next weekend.”
“That’s good. She’s very anxious to see you.”
“How is her health?”
“Very good.”
“Really? She said her health was only so-so and she was too old to do much for guests. I was worried she might be sick.”
“No,” he laughs. “That’s just the way she talks. Don’t you remember? She always sounds pessimistic.”
“Maybe that’s true. How about you? And your family?”
“Everyone’s well here. Asako was just a little kid when you left. She is in high school now. Then there’s Jiro. He’s in ninth grade.”
“I don’t remember him all that much. He was just a baby.”
“So you’ve been in Kobe for a while now?”
“Yes. I’m staying at a friend’s house. I traveled around for four weeks first. When I got back to town, I went to see our old house.”
“You did?”
“Sure. But it was torn down, of course.”
“You must have been surprised.”
“I was. I walked up to the reservoir, though. That looked the same. The corner store is still there, and the ichiba and Dr. Doi’s hospital.”
“You remember a lot about the old neighborhood.”
“Of course I remember.” I pause, happy that Kenichi seems pleased by my remembering. “I want to come and see you soon. I only have two weeks left.”
“How about Monday? I’ll be back from school at three. You can take the commuter train to Itami. I’ll come and pick you up in my car. We’ll have dinner, and you can stay overnight.”
“That sounds very good.”
“Did you see your father yet?” he asks me.
“No. Not on this visit. I saw him in New York last year.”
“I ran into him the other day. I had dinner downtown with some other teachers from our school. We were just leaving when your father walked in with his friends. He looked right at me but said nothing, so I didn’t say anything either. I noticed he looked kind of old.” Kenichi laughs as though satisfied. “Your father. He’s an old man now. Imagine that.”
“I haven’t called him yet. Our visit in New York was terrible. I don’t want to see him, at least not yet.”
“You’re grown up now,” Kenichi says. “You can do what you want.”
After we hang up, I wish I had told Kenichi about running in Ashiya this morning, how I felt the old obligations fall away as my feet pounded what used to be the sea. Even the land and the sea had changed their shapes. I knew then that the old roles were no longer relevant; I was free to call my mother’s family first, without contacting my father. I wanted to explain these thoughts to Kenichi, but I couldn’t say what I meant in Japanese. Because my thoughts involve too much feeling or intuition, not step-by-step logic, it’s almost impossible to express them in Japanese, a language that encourages, even prizes, vagueness in referring to feelings. In Japanese, one discusses only what is logical and leaves the feelings unsaid, subtly, ambiguously implied. To do otherwise—to launch into discussions of one’s own feelings—is considered rude, intrusive, selfish. But even when I lived in Japan and was speaking Japanese every day, I could never think without referring back to feelings and intuitions. The perceptions and observations I wanted to express were not based on rigid logic, even back then. It’s no surprise that after thirteen years away, most of my immediate thoughts come to me only in English, without proper translation.
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nbsp; * * *
At Kenichi’s house on Monday, my cousins, Asako and Jiro, excuse themselves soon after dinner and go up to their rooms to study for upcoming tests in their classes. Because they attend public schools, their school year is a series of examinations meant to prepare them for more examinations next year. Each year of schooling is designed to train them for the university entrance examinations they will take at the end of their high school senior year. Juken jigoku, “examination hell,” is the phrase often used to describe this system.
One of the last decisions my mother and I made together was for me to avoid spending my teenage years in that examination hell. In January of what was to be our final year together, I applied to Kobe Jogakuin. If I got into its junior high school, by taking a series of examinations in February, I would be guaranteed a place in its college. “This way,” my mother said, “you only have to take exams once, for two days. When you go to school afterward, you will really be learning something rather than cramming for more exams.” Kobe Jogakuin, founded by two American women in the 1870s, had a reputation for emphasizing the arts and languages and also giving students a lot of freedom; while other schools, public or private, had military-looking uniforms, Jogakuin had no uniforms and not much of a dress code. My mother and I both thought that I would be happier there. Her death came two weeks after we had found out the results of the exams: I was one of the 150 girls who had been admitted out of 500.
As we sit in the living room talking after dinner, Kenichi’s wife, Mariko, says that I was lucky to go to Jogakuin and avoid the examination hell.
“Poor Asako,” she sighs. “She’s a senior this year. She has to take the exams in March. I should have sent her to a private school.”
Sitting in the chairs across the coffee table from me, Kenichi and Mariko tell me about the problems Asako has had at school. Her teachers are disappointed in her because she studies only what interests her. She might spend days writing an essay on a subject she likes and then almost fail an examination in another subject because she spent all her time writing the essay. That was how I was as a student, but my teachers at Kobe Jogakuin never treated me with the kind of harsh disapproval Asako has received from hers. “An intelligent person like you could do better than that,” my geometry teacher said every semester, sounding a lot like my mother, who used to say, “You think everything is funny.” They both wished that I would improve my conduct somehow, but, basically, they were resigned to the way I was. Most of my teachers were like that. When I kept failing multiple-choice examinations in a history class because I always marked “none of the above” or else wrote in my own answers, my history teacher allowed me to write papers instead. The algebra teacher let me make up my failing grade by constructing a diamond-shaped die, devising a board game, and writing a paper about probability studies based on my game. I would never have been given the same flexibility at a public school. Having me apply to Kobe Jogakuin was another thing my mother had done for me. She had left me a legacy of tolerance rather than the oppression of the examination hell whose essence is that everybody must do the exact same thing in the exact same way.
“Maybe Asako will go to college in the States,” Mariko says. “She says she doesn’t care if she can’t get into any of the Japanese colleges next April. She doesn’t want to be part of the system, she says.”
“Asako can come and stay with me in Wisconsin if she wants to,” I suggest.
At ten, Mariko decides to go to bed so she can get up early to do some woodworking. She made the coffee table, the bookcase, and the chairs in the living room, all of them with ornate flower-and-leaf patterns. We say good night, promising to go for a walk after breakfast to a park where the trees are covered with white egrets.
* * *
“Mariko Neisan is very nice,” I say to Kenichi. Because he and Mariko got married a few years after my mother’s death, I have met her only once before, when I came to their house to say good-bye before leaving for the States.
“She used to work at your father’s company,” Kenichi says. “She was a secretary there for five years.”
“Did she know him?”
“Not personally. They weren’t in the same department. All she ever heard about him was that he was shigoto no oni.” Shigoto no oni means, literally, “a monster of work” and therefore a person aggressively dedicated to his or her job. Sometimes the expression is meant as a compliment, other times not. It’s hard to say how my father’s coworkers might have meant it.
“I haven’t called my father,” I tell Kenichi. “I have to do it eventually, though, because I want to get in touch with Aunt Akiko and Kazumi at my grandfather’s house.”
Kenichi shakes his head. With his square face and small, round eyes, he looks remarkably like my maternal grandfather, Takeo. He has gained some weight and no longer looks skinny in his white polo shirt and blue twill pants.
“When we saw each other in New York last year,” I add, “my father criticized me for not making enough money and not having gotten a degree from a Japanese university. My stepmother said that my mother didn’t raise me right. He didn’t seem offended by that. It was as if he completely agreed.”
“I never thought much of your stepmother,” Kenichi says. “She was a very abrasive person. You could see she wasn’t very educated or cultured.”
“My father had the same complaint about her once. The first time I left home to go to Arizona for a year in high school, he wrote to me and said he wasn’t very satisfied with Michiko. He wanted to marry someone more genteel and feminine, more refined. He said I could write back to him and tell him what I thought. Only, he wanted me to write to him at his office, not at home.”
Kenichi leans forward and raises his eyebrows. “So did you write to him?”
“Yes. I said I didn’t have any opinions about who he was married to. That was his business, not mine. But if he and Michiko got a divorce and he couldn’t remarry, he shouldn’t expect me to keep house for him. I was planning to come back to the States to go to college or graduate school, so I wouldn’t be there for him.”
“I didn’t realize you were so grown up at sixteen. That was a very mature thing to say.”
“He didn’t think so. He wrote back and said that he was appalled by my selfishness. Here he was thinking of a big change for our family, he said, and I could only think of how it was going to affect me. He had decided to stay with Michiko after all and warned me never to mention his previous letter to anyone.”
Kenichi frowns, his shoulders hunched. “Your father had no right to say you were selfish. He is the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”
“I know that now. But at the time, I didn’t understand what was going on. Maybe he was seeing another woman while being married to Michiko. When he said he wanted to marry someone more genteel and cultured, maybe he had someone specific in mind. I never found out.”
“I’m sure he had someone in mind,” Kenichi says. “He was up to his old tricks. That’s all.”
We look at each other. I know what Kenichi is thinking about, but I ask him anyway. “Do you mean the way he married Michiko so soon after my mother’s death?”
He nods.
I look down at the rose-leaf pattern Mariko carved into the coffee table and trace the leaves and the flowers with my eyes. “I stayed at some minshuku when I was traveling around the country earlier this month. I imagined what it might have been like for my father visiting the minshuku Michiko’s mother was running. I know what was going on.”
Kenichi nods but doesn’t comment. Michiko’s mother’s minshuku was in Shimonoseki, a city my father visited often on business. Like the men I saw this summer, he must have come back from his meetings, taken off his shoes in the foyer, and called to the room where Michiko and her mother were sitting. Maybe both of them came running out with a pair of slippers for his feet; or more likely, the older woman brought the slippers and chatted with him in the hallway. Then later, Michiko served him dinner and sake in his room a
nd stayed on talking and flirting. Soon he was going to Shimonoseki to stay with Michiko whether he had business or not. To my brother and me, my father pretended that he had only known her slightly, that someone else had recommended her as a possible second wife for him. “My friend from work suggested this woman in Shimonoseki whose mother runs a minshuku,” he said. “I knew the woman and her mother because I myself have stayed there a few times. They seemed like suitable people.”
Kenichi suddenly gets up and goes to the kitchen. He returns with a big amber bottle of beer and two glasses, pours the beer into the glasses, hands me one; then he sits back down in his chair. After taking a drink, he says, “I know something about your father I should tell you about.”
I put down my glass on the coffee table, careful to place it on the coaster so it will not leave a stain.
“I told your grandparents some of it, but not everything.”
I nod so he will keep talking.
“Remember when I was staying at your father’s house to burn incense for your mother’s soul?” he asks.
“Yes. I remember.”
“Those couple of weeks after you and your brother moved to your grandfather’s house, your father came home late, drunk, almost every night. He made a lot of noise stumbling around, so I usually got up and went downstairs to see if he was all right.” Kenichi takes another drink of his beer and grimaces. “He was my brother-in-law after all. I didn’t want him to get hurt. Every night when he saw me, he said, ‘Sit down. Let’s have some scotch.’”
“Really? He wanted to drink with you?”
“I guess he was lonely. What was I supposed to do? I accepted since it was his house and he was trying to be hospitable. Besides, I felt like drinking anyway. Your mother’s death was hard on me.” He sighs.
