by Kyoko Mori
My mother wanted to be surrounded by beauty and warmth. She filled our apartment with embroidery, planted the small garden plots with sweetpeas and poppies and petunias, and baked cakes and pies almost every night in the winter because it was cold outside. She must have been trying to fill the emptiness of her house, just as Keiko is clothing herself daily in the holy light of her religion now. Their longing is like hunger, the recurring theme of their stories about the wartime.
In the third summer of the war, they once told me, when food became scarce in the city, their family planted some pumpkin seeds they had saved from the year before. The plants grew well and bore huge pumpkins. My grandmother cooked all the pumpkins, then the leaves, the stems, even the roots cut up and mixed into rice. As I continue to kick my legs in the cold water, I imagine my mother and Keiko as young girls. I see them eating the tooth-edged leaves and hairy stems of the pumpkin vines, the small springs of tendrils, all that green like sharp points of light.
Getting to the wall, I kick and turn. I am in the last quarter mile now. The black line at the bottom keeps me going straight. I start wondering how much distance I have covered underwater or on the road running alone, how many hours of my life I have spent on other seemingly monotonous activities like weaving, spinning, knitting, needlework. I have inherited this restlessness from my mother; living isn’t enough. I run and swim so I can feel I am getting somewhere that is more than an actual place. Knitting or weaving, I like to feel my fingers making something that is more than useful. Everything I do is a passion—like my mother and Keiko, I don’t do things halfway. Choosing to be a writer, weaver, spinner, I want to take what could only be an afternoon’s entertainment for my mother and make a life out of it. I want to be immersed in what she could not have enough of.
Another lap done, I kick the wall and glide. Though the water is cold and I am dizzy from not having eaten all afternoon, I am finally swimming easily, as effortlessly as in my recurring dreams of water. There are very few people left in the pool now—just Vince and me and two others in the far lanes. The room seems very brightly lit. Every time I turn my head to breathe, my eyes catch the shine on the water from the overhead lamps. It spreads a white glimmer on the surface all around me like the fragile skin of loneliness we try and try to shed. My arm reaching up into the air as I breathe, I break through that surface momentarily and then glide back beneath it.
The Philosopher’s Path
I wake up the next morning with the sun coming through the large windows of the porch and immersing the telephone stand in a column of light. It’s seven o’clock. My father must be getting up just about now. Soon he will sit down to breakfast while my stepmother, who has gotten up earlier to cook, will go to dress and put on makeup so she can drive him to work.
I try to count how many days I have left in Kobe after today, Wednesday. I’ll be gone Saturday and Sunday to my grandmother’s house, Monday through Wednesday next week to my uncle Shiro’s in Hiroshima. That leaves only five full days before my departure, two Sundays from now. If I don’t call my father today, I may not have time to see him.
Right now, he must be at home, in the kitchen, shoving hot rice and miso soup into his mouth, the newspaper spread open on the business page. My stepmother, in another room, must be blackening her eyelids with the dark liner she has always worn. She will put on a dress, nylons, and high heels to drive my father to work, because that is how a proper woman dresses in public, at least in her own country where she knows people who “will talk.”
When I met them in New York last year, Hiroshi and Michiko were wearing baggy jeans and navy blue polo shirts. Almost everyone in their tour group was dressed in the same way: with the studied casualness of affluent Japanese people on vacation in a foreign city. Away from home, there was no pressure to dress up, nobody worth impressing.
Hiroshi and Michiko hated New York. The streets were dirty, they complained; the whole city was full of Mexicans, Koreans, Middle Easterners. Hiroshi kept telling me he had seven hundred dollars in his wallet. Michiko gawked at the porters at their hotel and called them kurombo, a derogatory term for African Americans. Both she and Hiroshi called the homeless kojiki, “beggars,” and warned each other that these kojiki were sure to be pickpockets and alcoholics.
For a few weeks after the visit, I thought more about their general pettiness and racism than about their repeated personal criticism of me. “I finally see my father and stepmother for what they are,” I told friends. “They are narrow-minded and petty people. I shouldn’t have taken everything so personally before. I shouldn’t have expected them to be nice and decent toward me when they have never been nice or decent toward anyone.”
Our meeting had been in early May. It was June or even July before I fully realized that what I was saying made no sense. People shouldn’t be excused for one kind of meanness because they are also guilty of another. Why should I forgive Hiroshi and Michiko for insulting me constantly because they also made derogatory comments about people they didn’t know? What kind of logic was that—the meaner and more narrow-minded someone is, the more I should accept it?
Even now, I’m angry at the way the two of them judged me: no matter what I did, I didn’t make enough money, I didn’t know the right people or the right things, my mother hadn’t raised me right. At the same time, my father had been eager to introduce me to their friends from the tour group. He told them I was a college professor. He had me escort his friend to a pharmacy to get aspirin so the man could hear me speak English. This is what I cannot forgive: my father wants it both ways. He wants my achievements to reflect well on him in front of other people while he himself never acknowledges these same achievements.
My father always wanted things both ways. When I lived with him, he wanted to influence every aspect of my life—even the time I came home from my part-time jobs—so that our neighbors would not gossip about us; and at the same time, he showed no interest in anything I did at school or the books I was reading at home or the friends I made. He wanted to know nothing out of affection or interest. If he had wanted to control me, to interfere in my life because he loved me and was being overprotective in the way my mother might have been, I would have come to understand, to tolerate and forgive. But he was only worried about what people would say. Until I was able to go abroad on a scholarship, he would not let me move out of the house on my own. My moving out, he said, would make him and his wife look bad: a young woman from a good family simply did not live on her own; people would think that something was wrong with our family if I didn’t live at home. While he would not give me permission to move out, he kept reminding me that I was “living in his house” as if it were a privilege I had asked for. Contradiction is a basic element in his character. He has not changed. Right after my mother’s death, he shed big tears in front of my uncle Kenichi and said that her death was all his fault; at the same time, he was planning to have Michiko move in as soon as possible. He has never stopped to question his contradictions and double standards. If I go to see him today, he will behave in exactly the same way.
I don’t want to spend the few days I have left being angry at him. I didn’t come all the way here to feel bitter and hurt. I get up and dress to go running.
Returning an hour later, I go to the phone and dial my friend Miya’s number. I have been calling her almost every day in the last week and have never gotten an answer. This time, somebody picks up the phone and says moshi moshi, “hello.”
“This is Kyoko,” I say. “I’m trying to reach Miya Ueda.”
“Kyoko. It’s me. Miya.”
“Oh. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”
“No.” Miya coughs. “But I have tonsilitis. I was lying down.”
“Are you all right?”
“I will be, in a few days. I’m glad you called. I was worried we’d never get in touch.”
“Me, too. You must have been out of town.”
“Back in May, my father-in-law got sick, so my husband and I had
to move into their house to help my mother-in-law. My husband is an only child.”
“So he had to take care of his father?”
Miya laughs and coughs at the same time. “No. He didn’t do anything. He went to work as usual. I took over the housework so my mother-in-law could concentrate on taking care of her husband. They live in Osaka, so I drove back here some nights to clean the apartment and to see my students. I told you in my letter last year, didn’t I? I tutor high school kids.”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, by the time we had to move, it was too late to write to you. I was hoping you would happen to call on the nights I was here. But my father-in-law’s better now, so we came back here last night, and then I started running a fever in the middle of the night.”
“I should have given you my number at Sylvia’s house. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’d like to see you as soon as I get better.”
We agree to get together next week, after I come back from Hiroshima. I hang up the phone and continue to sit there, wondering if I should call my father’s house after all. I don’t have any plans for today or tonight. But the sun is shining outside. It’s a perfect day to go to Kyoto, which is only a ninety-minute train ride. If I leave now, I can be there before noon.
* * *
When I get off the train in Kyoto, the weather has changed. The sky is overcast and the streets are wet. Taking Cadine’s red fold-out umbrella out of my backpack and holding it over my head, I begin to walk along the Philosopher’s Path, a riverside route that winds around small temples and shrines. In the drizzle that starts and stops, the cedars along the path are wet and dense as water grass. I notice again how various and textured the trees are in Japan: cedars, bamboo, pines, spruces, persimmons, cherries. On the mountains that surround Kyoto, they make a collage of blunt and sharp edges like pins scattered on a patchwork quilt. Because the mountains are in every direction in Kyoto—unlike in Kobe, where yamate, “mountain-direction,” is synonymous with kita, “north”—I am always slightly lost here.
Coming up a hill, I stop in front of the wooden gate of a small temple. Its name is written on a plaque above the gate, but the characters are the old forms no longer taught in school. The temple isn’t marked on the map I got at the tourist information booth, unless I’m mistaken about where I am. It doesn’t matter since the path will eventually wind back to some major road. I decide to go in through the gate.
The grounds are deserted. After crossing a footbridge over a lotus pond, I follow a flagstone path to the main building and stand before a small altar. The bodhisattva on a wooden pedestal is taller than I am. Circles of heartwood mark his forehead and cheeks. Like every bodhisattva, he looks gaunt and sad. At his feet on a small wooden table, yellow summer oranges are stacked up into a perfect pyramid on a silver platter, and a notebook lies open with a pen next to it, for visitors to write their names and remarks. On the left-hand page, there are a few signatures and dates followed by brief comments. The entry at the bottom, dated today, two hours ago, was signed by two women with the same family name: “A beautiful quiet temple. My daughter is twenty. This is our first trip together, just the two of us.” Below this line is an empty space the width of my palm. The whole right-hand page is still blank.
Instead of writing my name, I turn away and walk back toward the lotus pond. As I step on the white stone bridge, the sun comes out momentarily through the drizzle, throwing a dappled shadow of a ginkgo tree at my feet like a sudden sentence I am too slow to catch before it fades away. My mother and I will never be able to take trips together; we will never write a remark and sign it together. On the other side of the pond, to my left, white pebbles have been raked to form two mandalas, the lines shimmering like water. I walk out the gate into the shade of cedars.
Somehow, it isn’t the gate through which I first entered the temple. I’m in another—adjoining—temple with its own building and altar. In the far corner beyond a moss garden, there is a pond where an old woman stands on a stepping stone. As I approach, I can see she is feeding the red and black carp, the big fish called koi, whose name puns with the word for romantic love. Koi also means “Come here,” an informal command of the word kuru. “Koi, koi, koi,” my mother and I used to call at temple gardens as the fish rose to the water’s surface in a sinewy tangle of hunger, mouthing hard at the bread crumbs falling from our fingers.
The woman doesn’t seem to mind the drizzle. Without an umbrella, she stands feeding the carp. Across the pond, beyond the low fence, a tall white kannon, “bodhisattva of mercy,” is placed on a pedestal overlooking a small family cemetery. She is a yakuji kannon, “medicine-bearing bodhisattva.” One of her hands is curled in a gesture of meditation; the other holds out a small jar of salve toward the grave markers—as if the dead still need consolation.
Walking back to the gate, I think of my cousin Kazumi, who used to play hide-and-seek with my brother, Jumpei, and me in our family cemetery. On his visit to Wisconsin, Jumpei said he would rather die than be stuck living with our grandfather Tatsuo, the way Kazumi was. Kazumi had no way out: she was too old to marry unless a match could be arranged with a widower, and because she was a woman from a good family, she could not move out on her own to find work. For a few years after college, Kazumi worked as a secretary at our grandfather’s paint company, but he never considered training her as his successor because she wasn’t a man. Instead, he tried to arrange a match for her with a man who could be his heir. But none of the prospects worked out, even when Kazumi was still in her twenties. She struck the men as being too intelligent and self-assured. She had an economics degree from one of the better universities in our area. Our grandfather was mad at her, Jumpei said, for not having gone to a junior college instead and gotten a two-year degree in something “more feminine” like home economics or child development. “It’s so sad,” Jumpei shook his head. “What a terrible life.”
Even Jumpei—who was a man, after all, and was allowed to move out of the house to go to college as soon as he was eighteen—seemed to sense the terrible restrictions of being a woman from a “good” Japanese family. If I hadn’t left, I would be living at home just like my cousin. I might have had a slightly easier time finding a job because of my English. But that would have been the only difference. No one would have wanted to marry me. If Kazumi—who was always much more mild mannered than I—had struck the men as too self-assured, I would have come across as plain arrogant. I might have tried to marry all the same, because that would have been my only way out of my father’s house. But in a culture that doesn’t value intelligence in women, how would I have found a husband who wasn’t, in the end, just like my father and my paternal grandfather? So I would have had only two bad choices: to live with my father or to live with someone like him. “You’re right,” I said to my brother. “I would rather be dead, too.”
I stop at the gate of the temple and look back. The woman is still feeding the carp; she has not even noticed me. Stepping outside the gate, I am back on the path. The gray wall I am walking away from reminds me of the walls that surround our family cemetery in Osaka, where I imagine some ghostly versions of us playing hide-and-seek. In our thirties, Kazumi, Jumpei, and I are still the only three children of our family. None of us is likely to change that. Whatever family legacy we have stops with us. My brother and I, having escaped that small world of stones, can say that we would rather die than be stuck there. We have left Kazumi alone to care for a grandfather whose cold eyes reminded us of fish eyes, who locked us in his dark drawing room for hours as punishment for talking too loudly or running down the hallway of his house, instead of walking quietly.
Long ago, Kazumi and her mother, Akiko, went hiking in the mountains with my mother, brother, and me to see the red maples in the fall, the cherries and azaleas in the spring. I cannot come this close and not see them. I have to call them, even if that means calling Hiroshi and Michiko first—and of course, it would mean that; otherwise, I would embarrass K
azumi and Akiko. So, walking in what I hope is the correct direction on the Philosopher’s Path, I know the time has come, or almost. It’s only one o’clock. I have the whole afternoon and half of this path left before I must head back to Kobe to make the phone call.
* * *
Back in Kobe, Sylvia is in the kitchen cooking supper.
“How was Kyoto?” she asks, stirring a pot of soup.
“I went to the Philosopher’s Path. It was nice.” I sit down at the table. “I decided to call my father.”
She puts down her spoon and looks back at me. “It’s hot. Can I make you a drink?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
She mixes a gin and tonic, squeezing a slice of lime over the glass.
“Are you going to call him now, or would you like to have supper with us first?” she asks, handing me the drink. “We can eat in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll eat first. I don’t want to call him on an empty stomach.”
“Okay.” She goes back to the sink to peel some cucumbers.
In the dining room, where I go to set the table, Cadine is reading a magazine. “Look,” she points to the glass jar on the windowsill. “The caterpillars turned green.”
Last night, when Cadine and I found them on the orange tree, the caterpillars were gray. Sylvia said they looked like bird droppings. Now both of them are bright green, their backs marked with black spots.
“I know what they are,” I tell Cadine, remembering. “They’re swallowtail larvae. My mother and I used to find them on our Japanese pepper tree. I didn’t recognize them last night because they were gray.”
“So they’re not moths?”
“No. Butterflies. We used to keep them in jars, too.”
Cadine gets up and brushes her long hair away from her face. “There are some messages on the machine. One of them is for you. Let’s go hear them.”
I follow her into the study, where she pushes the button on the answering machine by the doorway. Immediately, a woman’s voice comes on, loud and high, enunciating every word.
