by Kyoko Mori
While Keiko and I wait to be seated, the young women at the nearest table glance up at us and then turn back to their conversation. They are wearing tailored suits in taupe, charcoal gray, light blue, mauve—the colors my friends wore in the last years of high school and in college, when they were moving away from the bright reds and yellows of childhood into the more sophisticated shades of young womanhood. In my blue jeans and tie-dyed shirts, I must have looked completely miscast among them.
“I wonder what’s taking them so long to seat us,” Keiko whispers a little too loudly behind me.
The young women look up at us again, one of them frowning slightly. Keiko and I make a strange pair: me in my shorts and red T-shirt, a gym bag slung over my shoulder for swimming later; Keiko in a dress much brighter than usual for her age. She shifts her purse from one shoulder to the other and stares back at the women. More than likely, her purse is stuffed with the religious tracts she passes out in front of train stations and at shopping centers. She wanted to meet me at Marco Polo because she would be at the station “teaching” about her religion.
A waiter in a black uniform comes up to us and bows. We follow him to one of the glass-top tables and sit down while he goes to get our menus and water.
“I’m glad you are free today,” Keiko says, setting her purse on the floor and leaning toward me. She has her hair cut like my mother’s: a few inches below the ears, parted in the middle, and permed. “I’ll be going with you to Grandmother’s this weekend,” she adds. “But I want to see you alone first. A lot of important things have happened to me since I last saw you. I want to tell you about them.”
The waiter comes back and hands us the menus. He sets the water glasses on the table and leaves.
“I’m walking the path of faith,” Keiko declares.
I pick up my glass and look at her in silence while I sip the water.
She tilts her head a little and smiles, her lips outlined in bright red. My mother didn’t wear much makeup. Other than that, they look a lot alike. Even their voices sound the same: clear and high. “Maybe Kenichi told you,” Keiko says. “He doesn’t understand. It’s my way of trying to help your mother’s soul.”
I have known about Keiko’s religion for some time. When my brother, Jumpei, visited me in Wisconsin two years ago, he told me that Keiko had invited him to a shrine and tried to convert him to a religion called hirameki-san. She had burned incense, prayed, and asked Jumpei to notice the divine spirits and ancestral souls floating in the air around them. The world is full of spiritual power, she had told him. “I don’t care what she believes,” my brother said. “But her religion is notorious for being like the Moonies. Keiko and her husband already gave up almost everything they own, and they still make contributions every month. Of course, I wanted to have nothing to do with that religion.” Mariko and Kenichi, too, warned me yesterday. They predicted Keiko would ask me to go to a shrine with her to pray. I’m supposed to decline as firmly as possible.
“I never forgot your mother,” Keiko says. “Not a day goes by without my thinking about her.”
The waiter has come back and is standing next to the table.
“Are you hungry?” Keiko asks me.
“No. I’m meeting a friend at six to swim at his health club. I can’t eat now.”
We both order iced coffee, which is brought to us in thick glass mugs with a thumb-sized pitcher of cream for each. I pour all my cream into the mug and watch it filter through the ice cubes before I take a sip through the straw. The coffee is cold, bitter, and sweet at once; it’s one of the tastes I associate with being in Japan because almost everybody here drinks a lot of it in the summer.
Keiko doesn’t immediately return to the subject of her religion. For about half an hour, we talk about family news: which of my cousins have graduated from college, gotten jobs, or married; how my grandmother manages alone, who helps her with various chores. I tell Keiko about my job in the States, about my sabbatical project.
Keiko says abruptly, “I’m so glad you have gotten married after all.” She stirs her coffee with the straw.
I pick up my mug, which is heavier than it looks because of the thick glass. I’m irritated by the way she keeps smiling. Like most women her age, Keiko must value my marriage above everything else I have done since we last saw each other; to her, my having married is my real accomplishment, the thing that made my life turn out all right.
But that isn’t what I think of my life or my marriage. I resent the idea that an unmarried woman is flawed, unfortunate, inferior. I’d like to think that my happiness does not have to depend on any one person. If I had not gotten married, my life would be different, not worse or better, certainly not incomplete. Why should I expect anyone—even my husband—to make my life all right, as though, alone, I would find myself lacking and inadequate? There are tasks in my life—this very trip, for instance—that I must accomplish alone. No friend, family, or husband can help me come to terms with the sorrow or pain contained in my past. Even my mother could not protect me from the unhappiness that destroyed her life. There is a limit to what other people can do for me, regardless of their relationship to me. I want to explain this to Keiko, but no words come to me.
“I was worried for you because I believe in karma,” she says. “My religion teaches about it. There’s personal karma, and then there’s family karma. Your mother was unhappy in her marriage. I don’t want you to repeat her unhappiness.”
Putting down my mug, I snap back, “My mother was unhappy because my father neglected her. She was lonely. My marriage would never be like that. My happiness doesn’t depend completely on my husband.”
At the next table, a man and a woman, about my age, are drinking tea and talking in low voices. The woman glances in my direction because I’ve raised my voice; she quickly looks away when our eyes meet.
“I don’t believe anyone can make me happy,” I say in a quieter voice. “Marriage didn’t make my life better—just different.”
“Is that good?” Keiko asks.
“Of course it is. But none of this has to do with karma, unless you mean my mother should have married someone else. I’ve always thought that myself.”
Keiko shakes her head. “Don’t say that. You wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t married your father. It’s bad luck to talk against your own life.”
“Regardless, I wish my mother had married someone else and been happier. I would be glad not to have been born, just for that.”
Keiko looks into my face, her hands curled around the glass mug. I try to laugh because what I have said is absurd, but it isn’t funny, either.
“Your parents were very happy together once,” she says.
“When was that? I don’t remember anything like that.”
She sighs. “It was a few years before you were born, when they were first married and lived with Shiro, Kenichi, and me.”
I cannot contradict her about a time before I was born. All the same, I ask, “What makes you think they were happy? Maybe they were pretending because you were around. My father was always good at that. He could really put up a front.”
“No. This wasn’t like that. Back then, your father was different. He was very considerate. He spent a lot of time at home with your mother. He didn’t stay out late with his work friends or go out with them on weekends. He even made us breakfast. You remember how your mother was always tired in the mornings. She was such a heavy sleeper.”
I nod.
“Your father wanted her to sleep in and take it easy, so he got up early enough to make everyone bag lunches. After that, he ironed his own shirt and then my blouse for work, which he would hang up on my door so it wouldn’t get wrinkled. When everyone was up except your mother, he started cooking breakfast. He was a good cook; he could make beautiful omelettes. He went to wake up your mother just in time for her to eat with us before we all left for work.”
The couple at the next table get up to leave. The man puts money on the table a
nd waits for the woman to pick up her purse and put on her lacy white cardigan. As they open the door, I can see the sunlight outside.
Keiko says, “Your parents seemed like an ideal couple. You know I wasn’t married then. I used to think, ‘I hope my marriage turns out to be just like theirs.’”
“I can’t believe that. They were never like that when I was around.”
“I know. But it isn’t so strange after all. Your parents married for love. There had to be a time when they were happy together.”
My parents had met on the job at Kawasaki Steel, where my mother worked as a secretary to support herself and Shiro, and my father was employed as an engineer. She turned down an arranged marriage offer and got engaged to my father instead. Soon after, he came down with tuberculosis. For the next three years, while he was in a sanatorium, my mother quit her job and took in piecework. She sat at his bedside sewing neckties and knitting socks every day. Even his parents advised her to break off the engagement and marry someone else. The doctors didn’t think he had much chance of recovering.
“I always knew how much my mother once wanted to marry him,” I tell Keiko. “She told me about nursing him when he had tuberculosis. I could never put it together, though, with how they were when I knew them.”
Keiko draws her lips into a resigned half smile. “It’s the way your mother’s karma worked out. Her happiness wasn’t meant to last.”
“I don’t think it’s karma.”
“It is. When your parents had been married three years, everything changed suddenly. Your father got promoted at the office and became very ambitious about his work. He scarcely came home anymore. He was either working late or drinking with work friends, which he insisted was part of his work. The same year, your mother had her first miscarriage, and then another one the year after. Suddenly, there was a big gap between them. Your father felt that his life was going very well since good things were happening to him at work, while your mother felt that her life was full of misfortune. See, something came between them and divided them.”
“What came between them wasn’t karma,” I insist. “They shouldn’t have felt divided like that. Why didn’t they think that everything that happened happened to them both?” When I pick up the mug again, there is a ring of water on the table. I put a paper napkin over it. “I can see how my mother wasn’t very happy about his promotion because it took him away just when she needed him most. No wonder she felt like the good things at work were happening only to him rather than to both of them. But what about him? How could he feel as if the miscarriages were happening only to her and not to them? That’s weird, isn’t it? They were—or would have been—his children, too.”
Keiko shakes her head. “You know your father. He doesn’t know how to comfort people. He always walks away if someone’s unhappy or sick. He doesn’t have much patience. That part of him was the same.”
I don’t say anything, though I wonder how my mother could ever have loved someone like that.
“You shouldn’t blame your father,” Keiko says. “He can’t help being who he is. Besides, he was under a lot of pressure at work. He had to put in long hours to get ahead.”
“Come on, Neine. That’s just an excuse.”
“Maybe it is. Still, your mother was suddenly burdened with misfortune from then on. She had been healthy all her life, but now she had the miscarriages and then you were born with dislocated hips and your brother’s neck was twisted. There had to be some bad karma. Don’t you see?”
“No.” I put down my mug and shake my head. “I don’t think people’s health problems are caused by karma. Besides, Jumpei and I got well. There’s nothing wrong with us now.”
“Her bad luck didn’t stop there, though. Just when both you and Jumpei were beginning to be healthy, your father decided to move your family to Ashiya to live with his father. She was so unhappy there.”
“That’s because my grandfather was mean to her and my father didn’t help her out.”
Keiko stirs her coffee with her straw several times, though it’s more than half gone. The two women who got seated at the next table are smoking. The smoke drifts slowly toward us.
“I’m not denying that she was unhappy,” I admit. “I just think it was more my father’s fault than karma. I know my grandfather was always overcritical of my mother and they couldn’t get along. Instead of trying to smooth things out between them, my father started taking long trips to avoid being home. How could he do that? He should have helped her out.”
Keiko doesn’t answer.
“Even if she was unhappy at my grandfather’s house, that lasted only for a year. We moved to the seaside apartment. I think she was happy there, for five years. That’s a long time, isn’t it? So you can’t say that my mother’s life was nothing but a series of misfortune and bad karma. I think she was happy sometimes.”
Keiko lightly touches my hand. “Of course. I didn’t mean to imply she was unhappy all the time. How could she be? She had you and Jumpei. She loved you.”
“She also had a lot of friends,” I add.
“I know,” Keiko smiles. “One of them told me something. She said, ‘Whenever your sister walks into any gathering, she brings extra cheerfulness. The room seems brighter and warmer with her in it.’ I always wanted to tell you that.”
I remember my mother sitting in our small living room with a dozen other women to whom she was teaching embroidery. Making up her own designs from pictures in art books, she embroidered landscapes on wall hangings, butterflies and violets on my blouses. She had stitched roses and ferns on a cloth draped over the top of my upright piano so that, during my daily practice, I could look at pink and red petals in satin stitches. On weekends, she invited her friends and their children to go on picnics and hikes. We walked all over the mountains that bordered Kobe to the north. Though my mother had maps, we often got lost and ended up going longer than planned. She had a terrible sense of direction and the rest of us knew it, but we always expected her to lead the way because she was so cheerful and confident. Though we didn’t trust her not to get lost, we completely trusted her to find our way again, to have everything turn out for the better. “If we hadn’t gotten lost,” she would point out later, “we would never have seen that patch of hydrangea.”
My father never came along on any outing my mother planned. I can’t picture the two of them together laughing or talking or even just sitting side by side at home, watching television.
“I guess she was happy because she had us and good friends,” I tell Keiko. “But my father wasn’t around even then.”
“I know. Your mother used to say that she and your father just went their separate ways. She said it was hard to remember how the two of them had such a big romance before they were married. She had friends who were in arranged marriages. They and their husbands did more things together and seemed warmer toward each other. She tried to laugh it off, though. She kept saying it was all right the way things worked out.”
“Do you think she really meant it?”
“I don’t know, but later on, the same thing bothered her, after you moved to that house on the hill.”
“I ran by that house the other day, but it was torn down and two new houses were there instead. The place looked the same anyway—it was shady and gloomy.”
“Your mother had a bad feeling about that house from the start,” Keiko remembers. “The day after she went to see it, she called me. She said she wasn’t sure about the house, even though there was nothing wrong with it. She just felt depressed as soon as she stepped inside. She should never have moved there.” Keiko pauses. “You, too. It’s important to trust your feelings. Don’t ever move to a place if you don’t feel good about it. It doesn’t matter how good the location is or how reasonable the rent is. Don’t repeat your mother’s mistake in this.” She looks me right in the eye as if to emphasize this point.
“The house didn’t ruin my mother’s life,” I point out. “Her marriage was bad even w
hen she thought she was happy at that apartment house. It’s just that moving to a new place and having no friends forced her to see that.”
“The problems in their marriage weren’t your father’s fault only,” Keiko says. “By the time they moved, your mother must have known about his affair. Instead of confronting him about it, she stopped sleeping with him herself. Your grandfather was worried that last year. He’d stayed at your house and found out that your parents didn’t even sleep in the same room.”
“They never did. My parents always slept separately at the apartment house, too. Grandfather didn’t know because he had only visited us there when Hiroshi was gone.”
“So you think your father had affairs all along?”
“I don’t know. But he was seeing Michiko for a few years before my mother’s death. I know that.”
Keiko picks up and puts down her iced coffee, which is completely watered down. The two women next to us are getting ready to leave, gathering up their purses and summer jackets. “I used to wonder how much you knew,” Keiko says. “I wasn’t sure if you were old enough back then.”
“I didn’t figure everything out at the time, but soon afterward. Ken Nichan told me some things, too, yesterday.”
“Men are often unfaithful,” Keiko grimaces and then forces a smile. “You must understand that for yourself. You can’t expect them not to fall in love and flirt with someone else. You shouldn’t think it is a crisis every time they have an affair. Affairs aren’t always serious.” She shrugs. “There’s not much you can do about some flaws in human nature. You shouldn’t judge your father too harshly. He’s not the first man to be unfaithful to his wife.” She nods as if to say, We all understand this.
Wait a minute, I want to say. His being a man has nothing to do with it. But I am stuck. I have never learned this kind of adult talk in Japanese. I don’t know how to be indirect about sensitive subjects and still get my points across—by being politely vague but not too vague, clear but not too embarrassingly clear, insinuating and talking around the issues a lot. I notice how other people do it, but I don’t know where or how to begin.
