by Kyoko Mori
“I know.”
“So your father and I used to sit at the kitchen table drinking scotch for a couple of hours. Your father is a sentimental guy when he drinks. He always cried after a couple of shots.”
“No.”
“Yes. He shed big tears. He even said, ‘It’s all my fault. Poor Takako. If I had been a better husband, she would never have chosen to die.’”
I pick up the beer and put it down without drinking. “I can’t believe he said anything like that.”
“Oh, he said it every night we drank together. I began to feel sorry for him. It was the only time I almost felt close to your father. You know I never liked him before, even when we were younger and lived together.”
Kenichi doesn’t say anything more for a while. I take a drink. The beer is stronger, more bitter, than the American beer I’m used to drinking. I put the glass down wondering why Kenichi is telling me this story.
Kenichi clears his throat and continues. “Then one night during the last week, everything changed. We were drinking as usual, and he was crying about how your mother’s death was all his fault. It was past midnight. All of a sudden, he poured himself another shot, gulped it down, and said, ‘Ken-chan, I have a woman in Shimonoseki. I’ve been seeing her for a few years now. We’re in love. How long should I wait till I can have her move in with me?’” Kenichi pauses and looks into my face, maybe to make sure that I am not too shocked or hurt. I look back at him. I want him to know that I am all right. He continues. “I didn’t know what to say. I was drunk. For a second, I thought maybe I didn’t hear him right. Your father started crying about your mother again and then said, ‘But I’m in love with this other woman. What am I supposed to do?’”
“He had no right to ask you that.”
“I know,” he shakes his head. “In the end, I had to tell him, ‘It’s none of my business. I’m the wrong person to ask. Do whatever you think you should.’ That was the last time he asked me to drink with him. I only had four or five days left to stay at his house after that anyway. But the last couple of nights, I heard your father talking to someone on the phone late at night when he thought I was sleeping. You remember the phone was downstairs in the hallway and I slept upstairs in your brother’s room. So I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could hear his voice. He talked for a long time.”
“You think he was talking to Michiko.”
“That’s right.”
We drink our beer without speaking. Upstairs, everyone must be sleeping. The house is quiet.
“One evening, a few weeks after that,” Kenichi adds, “your father showed up at our house in Kobe with some boxes and suitcases. I was home alone because your aunt Keiko and her family were having dinner at her in-laws’ house. When I came downstairs to answer the door, your father was already putting the boxes and the suitcases in the foyer. His cab was waiting outside; I could hear the engine running. Your father said, ‘These are Takako’s things. I can’t keep them because my woman’s coming to live with me tomorrow. You and Keiko can do whatever you want with them.’ He was gone before I could say anything to him.” Kenichi sighs. “I sat down in the foyer looking at all that luggage. It was as if he packed your mother’s things to divorce her, to send her back to her parents’ house—except what happened was much worse than that; she was dead.”
I imagine Kenichi sitting alone in the dark with my mother’s things. He would have been only thirty at the time, younger than I am now.
“Your grandmother still has some of the things he brought that night. Keiko and I sent them to her to keep for you. We didn’t know how long it would be before you could get them. Soon after your father came to our house, he said that none of us should ever try to see you and Jumpei.” Kenichi pauses.
Looking at his face across the coffee table, I want to say, “I didn’t know how much my father hurt you back then. I’m so sorry,” but that seems too direct and intrusive in Japanese. I’m not sure what I can say instead to indicate that feeling without directly saying it.
“Did you ever wonder why your grandparents gave up so easily?” Kenichi asks me. “When your father told them that they couldn’t see you anymore, they didn’t come and visit you against his wishes. They didn’t even write to you until you were in the States because he told them they couldn’t write to you as long as you lived with him. Did you wonder why they didn’t tell him he was wrong?”
I think about it for a while. “No,” I reply. “I guess I understood that my grandparents had to do what my father said.”
“Well,” Kenichi says. “Your grandfather didn’t accept it right away. He went to see a lawyer.”
“He did?”
“He wanted to take your father to court so you could come and live with him and your grandmother out in the country. He didn’t think your father would give up your brother because he was the only son, but he thought maybe your father would let you go.”
My life would have been completely different if my grandfather had gone through with his plans. I would have grown up in the country with my mother’s family.
“But in the end, he gave up the idea,” Kenichi says.
“Why?”
“For one thing, the lawyer told him that his chances were very slim. Things could get ugly. You would be asked to testify in court and state whom you preferred to live with and why. Then, too, your grandfather started thinking that maybe you would prefer to live with your father in the city anyway. You had just gotten into Kobe Jogakuin. Your grandparents had no money to keep sending you to a private school, especially since you’d have to live in the dorm during the school year. If they had custody, you would have had to attend a public school in the country. They didn’t think your mother would have wanted that. She was so proud of how smart you were. She would have been sad to see you go to a country school. So in the end, your grandparents decided you would be better off with your father and stepmother. All the same, your grandfather was never sure if he had done the right thing. He talked about you and missed you all his life. He was talking about you right up till his death.”
I don’t speak for a long time. I don’t know what I would have chosen back then, living with my grandparents in the country or staying in the city to attend the school my mother and I had decided on. In my grandparents’ village, I would have missed not only the school but the museums, theaters, bookstores—the places and things my mother had taught me to appreciate. Even though I had enjoyed my summer visits in the country, I would have been afraid of being stuck there year round, going to school with rough farm kids who didn’t speak like my friends in the city. It is possible that, in the end, I would have thought the same thing my grandfather did and chosen to stay in the city. Perhaps I was lucky not to have had to make such a difficult choice at twelve or thirteen.
“You aren’t mad at Grandfather and Grandmother, are you?” Kenichi asks. “You don’t think they let you go because they didn’t care for you, do you?”
“Of course not,” I assure him. “Grandfather and Grandmother had no idea how bad things were at my father’s house. I’m not surprised they thought I’d be better off there. My father had more money and lived in the city. I understand.” My grandparents had given me up because they believed I would be better off in the city, even though they could no longer see me then—just as my mother had given me up so she could die alone and I could go on living. They gave me up, I know, because they loved me and it was the only thing they could do for me. In many ways, they were right. The choices they made, in the end, allowed me to escape the small world in which my mother had been so unhappy.
But Kenichi doesn’t seem all that convinced. He’s still looking at me with a wrinkle between his eyebrows.
“I wrote to my grandparents every week,” I add. “I never told them how bad things were at home. I only wrote about school or friends because I didn’t want to write anything that would worry them. To them, I must have sounded like a typical teenager. They must have thought I was happy
. They could see I enjoyed going to Kobe Jogakuin. And it was important for me to go there.”
Kenichi suddenly leans forward and looks me in the eye. “But I should have known better,” he says. “I knew more than anyone because of that time I had spent with your father. He wasn’t the kind of person a young girl should have to grow up with. How could I leave you with him and a woman he was seeing behind your mother’s back? I must have been out of my mind. I should have done everything I could to get you out of there and still make him pay for your education. I’m so sorry I didn’t. You have to forgive me.”
I want to get up, walk over to Kenichi, and give him a hug. But in Japan, only women hug each other; if I tried to hug Kenichi, he would be embarrassed. He would think that I have become a foreigner in spite of our mutual past. I try to smile instead. “Ken Nichan,” I say as calmly as possible, “it isn’t your fault. There’s nothing to forgive.” That April when my father started beating me, I never told Kenichi, though I saw him every day for a while. Even he didn’t know everything.
Kenichi tilts his head, smiles back, and says, “It turned out all right in the end, didn’t it? You’re kofuku now.”
Kofuku means both “happiness” and “good fortune.” The Japanese concept of happiness is both unspecific and absolute. It doesn’t allow for the gap between the way things turn out (good fortune) and the way one feels about them (happiness), or the way some things turn out well and others do not. You are either kofuku or not; there is no room for small dissatisfactions. This is not how I think of happiness or good fortune. They are not the same in my mind. I am often happy about one thing and unhappy about another. Sometimes things turn out all right, but I am in no way happy about them because I feel embittered by the process. How can I make a blanket statement about being kofuku? Worst of all, I don’t even know how to explain my thoughts in Japanese. In a tired, late-night sort of way, I am sad about having thoughts I cannot explain to Kenichi. I want to reassure him, to say something positive without being insincere.
“Of course I’m happy,” I tell him. “I’m talking to you right now. That gives me happiness.”
Kenichi nods and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “Natsukashii.” It’s been a long time.
By now, it’s one o’clock in the morning, time to go to bed. While I am taking out my contact lenses at the downstairs sink, Kenichi brings a big colander and puts it over the drain.
“I’m not going to drop my lenses.” I laugh because the colander is big enough to serve spaghetti to a dozen people. “I’m not that clumsy.”
“Well, just in case,” he says, and shrugs.
It’s the kind of thing my mother might have done. On windy days, she braided and pinned up my hair so the loose strands would not get caught in any machinery and cause me injury. It made no difference that there were no machines at school or at home where my hair might get caught. Even cars never passed very close by. She had instructed me to walk on the crown on the sidewalk facing the traffic so that I would not be run over, kidnapped, or splashed with mud. “Just in case,” she would have said, too.
“Thanks,” I say to Kenichi. “I’ll be careful.”
He goes upstairs to his bedroom.
Washing my face at the sink downstairs, I remember how he taught me to use soap when he, Shiro, and Keiko lived with my family in Kobe. My mother bought soap that came in small paper-thin sheets of pink, blue, and green, all of them almost transparent. Kenichi used to stand behind me at the sink while I poured water over my hands. Then, after he gave me a sheet of soap, I would close my palms and stick my hands under the water again.
“Keep rubbing your hands together until all the slippery stuff comes off the soap onto your palms,” he would say.
I rubbed my hands until I could open them and show him that the soap was gone.
“Look at that,” he would exclaim. “Where did the soap go?”
“I don’t know,” I would reply. The almost-transparent pink or green had turned into nothing, leaving a faint scent of flowers and leaves.
* * *
Lying down in the guest room upstairs, I think of my grandmother Fuku, who had two older sisters named Masu and Ko. When you said all three names together, you came up with masu kofuku, which means “increasing happiness and good fortune.” My mother told me once that my grandmother’s name had not come true, that Fuku was not kofuku since her family had been reduced to poverty after the Second World War through the Land Reform. At that time, Fuku and Takeo were forced to give up almost all the land they had inherited from Takeo’s father, so that the government could redistribute it among their sharecroppers. They were allowed to keep only a few paddies for their own use, though they knew nothing about farming.
Fuku and Takeo had spent their adult lives in Kobe: Fuku, who was a pharmacist, cared for their children and ran a small drugstore out of their home; Takeo became a schoolteacher because teaching was considered a good genteel occupation for a landowner’s son who would eventually live off his land, on the rent he collected from his sharecroppers. Until my great-grandfather’s death in the last year of the war, Fuku and Takeo had only visited the countryside in the summers to vacation, not to work. Now, left with a few paddies, my grandparents didn’t know how to make a profit. Takeo applied for a teaching job at the village school so he would have a steady source of modest income. Fuku worked outside from morning to night, while he taught during the day and came home to help her. They made barely enough money to raise the three children still living with them. By the time I was born, my grandparents always looked tired, even though my mother and her siblings sent them money to help out so they were better off than right after the war. Stooped and sunburned, they didn’t look like people who were kofuku.
My grandfather Takeo has been dead for twelve years now. My grandmother, the only one left of the three good-fortune sisters, lives alone in the house in the country, surrounded by the land she and my grandfather lost. She must feel lonely. She must wish that my mother were alive to comfort her in her old age, to take care of her garden and sew her clothes and tell stories to make her laugh.
“Poor Takako,” my father had said to Kenichi. “If I had been a better husband she would never have chosen to die.”
How could he have said that and then invited Michiko to live with him only a few weeks later? If he had felt that way once, even drunk, why did he sit there and say nothing in the hotel room in New York last year, when Michiko went on about how my mother hadn’t raised me right? Instead of showing remorse after my mother’s death, he had added to my grandmother’s unhappiness by forbidding her to see my brother and me. He had gone to Kenichi’s house with my mother’s things, without an apology or an explanation, and left him alone to sit in the dark and feel terrible.
I cannot believe that my father could have acted with such insensitivity if he had really felt guilty about my mother’s death. But at the same time, nothing Kenichi told me surprises me: for years, decades, I have expected only the worst from my father. The thing is, I can never reconcile these two ways I feel about him. Seeing him in New York last year or hearing about him from Kenichi tonight, I am amazed at his insensitivity and yet not even slightly surprised. That’s what bothers me about him. Even though no one can make me as angry as he can, he always seems slightly unreal to me. He is like somebody I have imagined, somebody I don’t want to think about if I want to get to sleep. I can never be completely happy or even at peace so long as I have to think of him, much less plan to see him in the near future.
So, trying to sleep, I remember the early summer mornings at my grandparents’ house when I was a child. Every morning when I got up, I went to collect the eggs from the hen house and brought them to the kitchen where my grandparents were having tea. Inside the basket I carried, the eggs were white and still warm. The three of us would hold them up to the bulb one by one and watch them flood with light and become clear spheres. “Yes, that’s a good one,” we would nod to one another as we put the eggs back into
the basket, as though each good egg were a special accomplishment, a small perfection that might add up, in spite of everything, to a larger happiness.
Hunger
The coffee shop, called Marco Polo, is a block from the commuter train station in Nishinomiya, the suburb my school was in. My aunt Keiko is waiting in front of the door in a green dress with large yellow flowers printed all over. She starts waving as soon as she spots me walking across the street toward her.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she says, reaching out to hold both my hands in hers. Her black leather purse slides off her shoulder and bumps against my arm. “You’ve grown taller.” She smiles and lets go of my hands.
“It’s good to see you, too, Neine.” We haven’t seen each other since my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, seventeen years ago.
“So I’m still your Neine at fifty-two.” She laughs.
I started calling her Neine when she and my uncles lived with my family and I was too young to be able to say Neisan, “Big Sister.”
We are standing next to a glass case that displays wax models of the food served inside. Dust covers the stiff white spirals of the ice cream. The noodles in the spaghetti dish are too yellow, as if uncooked. The toast placed on the edge of a saucer is brown, and thick as a book.
“Let’s go in.” Keiko puts her hand on my back and nudges me toward the door. I walk in ahead.
With gold-and-red damask curtains in the windows, the interior is dark, though it’s three in the afternoon. The only light comes from the dim overhead lamps. The four large tables are occupied by young men and women, students at nearby colleges. A few couples and pairs of older women are sitting at the small glass-top tables. Because this place was only one stop away from our school on the train, my friends and I used to come here on our way home and spend afternoons drinking coffee and talking. We smoked Dunhill cigarettes and listened to jazz records. The decor looks about the same now, but there is no music coming from the speakers.
