The Dream of Water

by Kyoko Mori

  “I’ll walk to the station with you.” Kazumi takes off her apron and gets up. “I’m going to Osaka to see my mother. We can take the same train part of the way.”

  “Wait,” Tatsuo says, blinking himself awake. From a porcelain box placed on the glass-top table, he takes out a newspaper clipping and pushes it toward me. “Here, this is for you. I wanted to give you something.”

  It’s a one-column article, a thought for the day with quotations from several Taoist philosophers on the meaning of wisdom and obligations. Most of the quotations are in the old literary language I never mastered. I fold up the article and put it in the pocket of my shorts.

  “Thank you. Take care of your health, Grandfather,” I say in my formal greeting voice.

  He nods and remains seated in his chair. I’m not sure if I will see him again, but I just get up and leave. I’m happy to be walking away from his house, the dog barking after us.

  “It looks like rain,” Kazumi says.

  The half mile from the house to the train station still has the stores and restaurants I recognize. In front of the flower shop where a dog once ran out and bit my leg, a black van passes us, its loudspeakers playing the national anthem.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Some political announcement.”

  “Is it the right-wing party?” I have read in the newspapers, in the States, about the resurgence of militant nationalists in Japan. They are partially funded by the yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. In several cities I traveled to earlier, I saw vans and trucks with big posters announcing the upcoming coronation ceremony for the new emperor. I have heard that the liberals who protest against the ceremony have been harassed by the yakuza. But Kazumi seems unconcerned.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “They always play the anthem, or else the song about unfurling the flag.”

  “That’s kind of right-wing, isn’t it? Do they broadcast nationalist slogans?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t listen. They’re a nuisance.”

  The music fades away in the distance. Halfway to the station, we pass several Chinese restaurants, some of them new.

  “My stepmother’s going to take us to dinner on Friday next week,” I tell Kazumi. “She wants to go to one of these Chinese restaurants around here. I hope you’re free then.”

  “I am.”

  “Good. I don’t want to go unless you can come. I don’t want to have dinner with her alone.”

  “You and she never got along,” Kazumi says matter-of-factly. “She’s not at all like Aunt Takako. I never warmed up to Michiko, either, even though she and your father visit us.”

  “My father says he might take us out, too, if he’s not too busy working. He’ll call you so you can call me.”

  Kazumi tilts her head slightly.

  “He has to call you because he didn’t take down my phone number. He didn’t seem at all happy to see me. He went to lie down while I was visiting, soon after I called you.”

  She doesn’t say anything. Maybe my father’s behavior is too bizarre for commentary, or maybe she’s being polite, just as I was being polite in not commenting on our grandfather’s selfish character. Kazumi doesn’t want to embarrass me or hurt my feelings by speaking ill of my father. The truth is, I would be relieved to hear her say that my father is a completely thoughtless and selfish person. But I know she would never say that. A statement like that is never a declaration of a simple fact. It’s too tinged with feelings, and her upbringing—our upbringing—doesn’t allow us to mention anything that might invoke feelings of anger and hurt. All our lives we have been taught to discuss only the facts in a polite, levelheaded tone, to leave the feelings unsaid so as to spare each other embarrassment and pain. So we walk on in silence. Of course she knows how poor my father’s behavior was, how hurt I must feel. She doesn’t have to say it.

  At the station, we buy our tickets and climb the stairs to the platform. The train is already waiting. We sit side by side.

  “I don’t know if my father will call you,” I say. “He told me not to count on it. He has a lot of work to do.”

  “He’ll call.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, he’s your father.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Besides, he seemed excited when he first told me that you were coming. He sounded like he would be happy to see you.”

  The train starts moving.

  “That’s impossible,” I tell Kazumi. “He scarcely talked to me the whole time I was visiting him.” I stop, afraid that I have allowed myself to sound too bitter, but Kazumi nods as though what I said were completely normal.

  “I understand. My father and I are the same way. I see him only once a year, if that. When I call him on the phone, he sounds happy to hear from me, but when I go to see him, he has nothing to say. I don’t even feel related to him. He hasn’t lived with my mother for the last seven years, you know.” She tilts her head slightly with no expression at all except for a slight downturn of her lips.

  Now it’s my turn not to comment on how appalling the situation is. “I heard that,” I say in my most level voice, “from my stepmother. Of course, she told me not to let on.”

  Kazumi grimaces. “That’s just like her. She always talks behind people’s backs.”

  “I know.”

  We are in Osaka already. The train is slowing down. I give Kazumi my phone number at Sylvia’s.

  “I’ll meet you at the main gate of this station tomorrow,” Kazumi says, standing up. “You still want to go to the temple, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  After she gets out, the train moves on past downtown Osaka, the residential areas, and then into the countryside. I take out my notebook and look over the directions I got over the phone from Peter. He told me to get off at the main Kyoto station and take the number 21 bus. “Getting off the bus is the tricky part,” he said. “Our actual stop has no landmarks, so the easiest thing to do is to look for the next stop, which has a big Kentucky Fried Chicken on the left side and a gas station on the right with a Bridgestone sign. Then you have to walk back a stop.” “Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t want to walk if it’s pouring rain. Tell me the name of your stop. I’ll look for it on the map or else ask the driver to let me off there.” “Do you speak Japanese?” he asked. “I was born here,” I replied. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t know. You sound American.”

  So it wasn’t just my clothes or shoes or long straight hair. It’s the way I sound on the phone, the way I talk and think. Going from my cousin’s house to the house of people I have never met, I know that I can tell these people about my job or my writing in a way I could never tell Kazumi. My life in the States is something she can’t begin to imagine—the mundane everyday texture of it such as my running and swimming and eating my sandwich in the parking lot on the way to my class because I don’t like to drive and eat, much less my being a writer, or my being a woman teaching at a college in a small mid-western town. But how can this be when all of my present life actually stems from the one she and I once shared? How can I not tell her about my writing when she remembers the very things that motivate it—my mother’s love of beauty, her cold noodles with thread-thin cucumbers? I want to find a way to tell her what is important to me now, but I don’t know how.

  Getting off the train in Kyoto, I stick my hand in my pocket for the ticket. Along with it, I find the folded newspaper clipping from Tatsuo. I crumple it up into a ball and toss it into the trashcan. Taoists, wisdom, and obligations have nothing to do with my past or present. I can’t believe that Tatsuo really handed me a newspaper clipping as a gift after not seeing me for thirteen years.

  * * *

  When I get to the main entrance of the Osaka station on Friday afternoon, Kazumi is waiting in a black skirt and a black top with tiny red dots. We always wore dark colors to go to the family cemetery. Today I am wearing a navy blue T-shirt over my black shorts.

 
“Grandfather gave me money for the tickets and the flowers.” Kazumi hands me the train ticket she already bought for me.

  We walk toward the tracks, past the regular lines and into the subway area. I wouldn’t have found the right line on my own. The subways in Osaka run in intersecting loops.

  “How’s Aunt Akiko?” I ask as we sit down in an air-conditioned train.

  “She’s recovering faster than the doctors thought. She is very eager to see you.”

  “My stepmother made it seem like Aunt Akiko scarcely wanted to see me. She said you might be too busy, too.”

  Kazumi frowns.

  “She even tried to stop me from calling you from their house. She said Grandfather might be sleeping, but my father dialed the number anyway.”

  “Actually,” Kazumi says, “your stepmother told me that you might be too busy to see my mother and me this summer. She said you had a lot of things planned.”

  “When did she say that?”

  “About a month ago, when your father got your letter. She and your father came over one night to visit Grandfather. She took me aside and told me that she wanted to apologize for you ahead of time because you wouldn’t have much time to spend with me or my mother.”

  “That’s crazy. I didn’t say anything in my letter about how busy I was going to be or what other plans I had. I certainly didn’t say anything about being too busy to see you.”

  “I thought it was strange, what she said.”

  “What else did she say?”

  Kazumi hesitates a moment. “She said I shouldn’t take it personally if you didn’t spend time with me. You were always too independent-minded. You never understood your obligations toward your relatives. It couldn’t be helped, she said. You live in a foreign country. It was natural for you and me to lose touch.”

  For a moment, I am too astonished and angry to speak. Outside the window, the high-rise apartments and office buildings of downtown are gone. We are passing old neighborhoods with black-slated roofs. The streets are narrower.

  “My stepmother said the same things to me.” I try to speak calmly, but my voice sounds shaky. “She said you would be too busy to see me, I shouldn’t take it personally, and it couldn’t be helped that I’m not close to you anymore.”

  Kazumi touches my hand for a moment and then looks at me, trying to smile. It’s the same look she used to give me when she found me sitting in the dark in our room after my father’s visits. She is worried about me because I’m upset, she wants to make sure I’m all right, but she doesn’t know what to say. As we look at each other in silence, I realize what I have always known: there is nothing she can say, now or back then, to change or even explain the bad things that happened to me; she can only offer me something different—a gesture of consolation, a silent reassurance that she cares about me.

  I try to calm down. “I’m sorry you had to hear lies about me from my stepmother. None of them is true.”

  “Of course I know that.”

  Looking at the narrow, curvy streets outside, I remember the anecdote my stepmother finds so amusing—how my grandmother had been too sick one year to see my brother so she asked him not to visit. “Imagine being rejected by your own grandmother,” she told me, laughing and gasping for breath. She takes pleasure in telling these anecdotes; she is always repeating how my brother and I are not close to our father, how Jumpei didn’t even identify himself on the phone when Hiroshi answered, how I told Jumpei—I was in junior high school at the time—that I was embarrassed to be seen with him. Divide and conquer is her strategy. She kept sending Jumpei money when he and Hiroshi weren’t speaking to each other. She did nothing to bring about peace. In fact, by sending the money in secret, she took away any incentive the two men had to contact each other. I realize that there is something I need to ask Kazumi.

  “Remember when we were in junior high school?” I ask her. “I used to come over to see you and Aunt Akiko every Sunday. Did Aunt Akiko ever say that I was bothering her, that I should spend more time at my own house rather than hanging out at yours all day?”

  Kazumi narrows her eyes in surprise. “No. Why would my mother say a thing like that?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course. She used to cry every Sunday after you went home. She felt so sorry about your mother’s death. She said she wished you could have gone on living with us. She wanted you back.”

  I take a deep breath and say, “I stopped coming to your house because my stepmother suggested I was bothering Aunt Akiko. She said Aunt Akiko wanted to spend her Sundays alone with you, since you were her daughter and I was only a niece. I was intruding on the two of you, she claimed.”

  Kazumi covers her mouth with her hand and says nothing. It’s as if she’s holding back ugly, angry words. Finally, she calms down enough to say, “My mother had no idea. She was lonely for you every Sunday after you stopped coming.”

  The train is lurching to a stop. Kazumi and I silently look at each other. I am relieved and angry both: relieved to finally come to this truth—my aunt never wanted to avoid my company—and angry at my stepmother for her lies. She is a truly evil person, I think, but don’t say. The reason for not stating embarrassing or painful truths, we were taught, is that these things need not be said, everyone already understands. In a way, that is true. Kazumi knows. We all know.

  “One more stop,” she says, patting my hand. “We can get off then.”

  Where we get off is an old section of town. We walk through a roofed-over arcade, ichiba, like the one I saw in my old neighborhood in Kobe where my family used to live with my uncles and Aunt Keiko. The small stores here look as though they haven’t changed in fifty years: groceries, fruit stands, bakeries, fish stores, cloth and notion stores.

  “You remember the way to the temple?” Kazumi asks.

  “No. I’m afraid not.” When we went to the temple for the annual reading of the sutras for our grandmother, Kiku, I never paid much attention to the way. Those were the only times I ever went to the temple or practiced any Buddhist ritual with my father’s family. Hiroshi didn’t hold ceremonies for Takako at the temple after her death. We never visited the family grave after her name was carved on it.

  Kazumi stops in front of a store at the end of the arcade.

  “Here’s the flower shop,” she says.

  The store we go into is nothing like the flower shops in downtown Kobe that have big glass windows and bright white lights. This place is dark. An old man in a gray apron is seated behind a plain wooden counter. There are buckets of cut flowers on the floor. The flowers have no tags explaining their names, the suggested occasions; no ribbons, tinsel, or greeting cards. The cut flowers are tall. The sharp scent of cedars and chrysanthemum leaves hangs in the air. I know what this place is. It’s where one gets flowers for visiting the dead.

  “I ordered some flowers for the temple visit,” Kazumi says to the man. “Do you have them ready?”

  He goes to the back room and returns with two bunches of flowers completely covered with newspaper. Kazumi gives him Tatsuo’s money and hands me one of the bunches. It’s heavier than any bouquet I have ever carried.

  A block past the end of the arcade, we stand at the temple gate. Kazumi opens the sliding wooden door. Carefully, we step over the stone slab at the bottom of the gate. It’s a bad omen if your foot touches this slab as you enter temples and shrines. Anyone who grew up in Japan would almost unconsciously lift his or her foot a few inches higher to make sure. It’s like seeing a hearse. Your hands automatically go into loose fists with thumbs tucked inside, because otherwise, your parents will die young. A few years ago, when I saw a hearse in Chinatown in Chicago and my hands did that, I wondered how many Japanese men and women make the same gesture, long into adulthood, well past the death of their parents.

  “I seldom stop to see the priest.” Kazumi points to the small house to our right where the priest lives. The path to the cemetery is to the left, behind the main temple building. “If it’s
the anniversary of someone’s death, he comes to visit the grave with us and talks a little. But we can stop if you want to see him.”

  I shake my head. I wouldn’t recognize the priest if I saw him. I only remember his shaved head, black robe, and the sing-songy way he read the sutras. I used to think that the sutras were written in some foreign language, like Sanskrit or Chinese, or a made-up language only the dead could understand.

  Kazumi and I follow the path to the back of the building, around the mountain of jizos—dwarf stone gods that protect the souls of children. There must be at least thirty of them here, stacked on top of one another like children in a school photograph. As we pass them and enter the cemetery, everything looks vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t have found our memorial stone by myself. At least fifty other families have their graves here.

  “It’s getting so crowded,” Kazumi says, leading the way on the narrow path between the stones. “My mother often loses her balance and almost bumps into another family’s gravestone. Then she says, ‘Excuse me,’ as if she has stepped on someone’s foot at a train station. I used to laugh at her, but now I’m beginning to do it, too.”

  The path is covered with moss. My mother did not want to be memorialized here. She did not like this temple because it was damp and gloomy. In the letter she left for my father, she asked that her ashes be buried with those of her own family, her name carved on their stone. My father did not allow that arrangement because it would have made him look bad. People would wonder why she did not want to be remembered as his wife. Still, my mother’s family wanted her wishes honored. As a compromise, her ashes were divided, and her name carved on both stones.

  “My mother cries for Aunt Takako every time we come here,” Kazumi says as we approach our family’s stone.

  She stops at the faucet against the wall and fills up the bucket kept there. Taking the ladle that hangs on the wall, she goes to our stone and pours water over it. The basins at the foot have two withered bouquets. Kazumi pulls them out and takes them to the wastebasket by the faucet. There isn’t much more cleaning to do. The rain washes the stone almost every night. It was raining just this morning.