“You will have to see a Noh play while you’re here.”
“I want to.” She’s raving about something she’s never seen—of course she knows about Noh, the oldest surviving form of Japanese theater from the fourteenth century. It continues in much the same form, with many of the same plays performed today, plays filled with uncanny things, gods, ghosts, demons—but it’s painfully slow and hours long. She’s never wanted to make the time.
“I am honored to say that Moto comes to my restaurant for dinner,” says the proprietor, smiling broadly, turning his face into a fan of wrinkles. His older brother eats here, too. “Moto comes here because we serve the freshest fish.”
Hanne smiles and orders sashimi. The owner is right; the fish is wonderful. She tells him she’ll be back for dinner.
It’s not Moto who shows up, but his older brother, who must be in his mid-sixties.
The proprietor makes the introductions, telling this man, whose name is Renzo, that Hanne is a well-known translator who is a big fan of Noh, and particularly his brother.
“You’ve traveled so far to meet my brother,” says Renzo, whose voice is reedy thin, like his body. He smiles, showing off his tea-stained teeth. He’s a dapper dresser, decked out in a warm gray suit and crisp white shirt. “He will be quite honored. He loves Americans.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she says. “I’m not American. I come from Europe first, Germany, to be precise. Only lately has it been America.”
“Oh, he loves all foreigners.”
The proprietor shows them to a table by the window.
“You speak Japanese so well,” he says. “You must be a very great translator.”
She spares him the story of her fall down the stairs, and the lecture that knowing a language is only a fraction of what makes a good translator. “Thank you.”
Over dinner, Renzo turns out to be a chatty fellow, telling her Moto is considered a master of Noh. He began training when he was just a boy, around age three. That’s not unusual, mind you, but he showed talent even then. It’s clear from Renzo’s bright eyes that he loves his brother.
“So young,” she says, thinking of Jiro, who began playing the violin when he was five years old. Jiro demanded an adult-size violin, and once he began to play, it became his passion. Except, of course, during that difficult year with his wife. What’s happened to Moto that caused him to no longer act? Did his wife fall ill too? She supposes she’ll find out soon enough.
The Okuro family has produced six generations of superb Noh actors, Renzo tells her. Hanne probably knows about Bon, the annual ceremony, which is one of Japan’s most important rituals to honor one’s ancestors. Loyalty to one’s family has deep roots in Japan, going way back to the samurai. “That’s all changing now. But my generation was raised to honor our ancestors, to honor our family name and legacy.”
Hence the legacy of the family tradition of Noh, thinks Hanne. The similarities between Jiro and Moto are striking. Jiro also inherited a family tradition. At least seven generations of males played some instrument in a symphony or for the imperial court.
“I had a dose of that, too,” says Hanne. She remembers sitting with her mother at the kitchen table, conjugating German verbs. To speak, speaking, spoken, have spoken. A rigorous schedule instituted by her mother and never questioned by Hanne because she wanted to earn the praise of her mother. She lapped it up, her mother’s “Good, good,” which came rarely, but just enough to feel earned and urge her on. That Hanne would in some way specialize in languages was never questioned. Looking back, Hanne is glad her mother prodded and pushed; she approves of knowledge handed down through the generations. Though she has no idea what Brigitte would say about that. Does she even use her languages now? Renzo is still talking about his family legacy.
“I was supposed to become a Noh actor, but I was no good at any of it,” says Renzo. When Moto came along and could dance and sing and act, he was promoted to the role of eldest. Renzo’s name was changed from Ichiro, first son, to Renzo, or third son. He laughs. “I know what you’re wondering—but there’s only two of you, why third son?”
There’s Moto, then the character Moto plays in the Noh play. “I come after that,” says Renzo, smiling. “He had talent and it’s what our family has done. What the Okuro family has contributed to Japan.”
Hanne wants to ask what the Okuro family is contributing now that Moto is unemployed. Renzo tells her he used to own an antique shop, and he still dabbles in buying and selling antiques.
Hanne pays for the dinner. “My treat.”
“I can’t accept.”
“You must,” says Hanne handing the proprietor her credit card.
Renzo insists on picking her up tomorrow around 6:00 p.m. for dinner at their house. “We would be honored.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
She’s never been to this part of Japan. The buildings dwindle, vanish, and then acres of open fields of greenery, with grazing brown cows, barns, stables, tractors, a few houses with dirt driveways dotting the horizon. She thought by now the whole island had been mastered, cultivated, roped in and scraped away for houses, buildings and shopping malls, hotels, golf courses, and driving ranges. But here large swatches of arable, fertile land, growing what—wheat? Corn? Alfalfa? Pastoral, she thinks. Or maybe bucolic. In the hills, a ring around the valley, there are real trees, an actual forest. They drive through a small village—only a grocery store, a pharmacy—and Renzo points to a lone house on a small hill in the distance. “You can see it from here.”
The glossy black roof tiles gleam like dark water. A traditional Japanese house, it looks huge. He parks the car by the iron gate. In the front yard, a large stone Buddha with a big belly greets them with a big smile. Someone has planted a bonsai garden of dwarf pine trees, but she’s drawn to the rock garden next to it, with five big gray boulders. The huge rocks are surrounded by a sea of gray, white, and black pebbles, neatly raked, the tongs making flawless lines that never cross, never touch. Such order, she thinks, and precision.
Inside they remove their shoes, setting them beside a jumble of men’s black dress shoes, brown, sneakers, boots, slippers, moccasins; it looks like five men live here, not two. A wooden bodhisattva stands by the shoes, as if guarding them. This one’s smile almost seems smug, as if it knows something you don’t. The house is still, only the occasional sound of a twig or pine cone pinging the roof. It’s freezing and it’s so quiet. Too quiet. Is the great Moto even here? She buttons her coat to her chin and pulls on her gloves again.
Renzo takes the stairs two at a time. She hears him above her, opening doors, closing them. A big drafty house. He calls out, “Make yourself at home!”
Wearing her socks, she pads into the first room, a long stretch of golden tatami mats, and two Buddhas, side by side. In front of both Buddhas are incense holders, a line of stubby white candles, and two mandarin oranges. Shrines to Renzo’s deceased parents, most likely. Another Buddha, this one larger than the others, sits like a sentry in the corner. It, too, has candles, incense, oranges, and also apples in front of it. Probably offerings to the beloved ancestors.
She slides open a shoji paper wall; nothing but a fish tank with goldfish and a dark wood table hovering over a square recessed area in the floor. The room could be called empty, but she doesn’t feel a lonely vacancy, only an essential elegant beauty, everything subtracted except that which appeals to the eye. She’s always felt comfortable in Japanese-style homes. When she lived with her mother in Tokyo, they decorated their apartment like this, with tatami mats made of stiff rice-straw, paper walls from the inner bark of mulberry trees.
She slips her legs underneath the table and, leaning under, finds the knob to the kerosene space heater. The coils glow orange with a hint of rose.
Renzo finally joins her. “He said he’d be here.” His face is creased with worry.
“Maybe he stepped out,” she offers.
He sighs deeply.
; “Or something came up,” she said, hoping her tone doesn’t sound too disappointed. Did she come all this way for nothing?
“I’m sorry to tell you this.” He hesitates. “Moto has not been himself lately.” He looks down at the table, as if embarrassed, then excuses himself and steps into the kitchen.
An actor. She can conjure up the handful of actors whom she’s met. Performers, entertainers, solitude makes them lonely, and private love is a pale version of what they really want—the unwavering love of an audience. With their expanded presence, they make you feel part of something larger, somehow exalted, more vast, playing a bigger role than you ever imagined—but not necessarily the role you would have chosen. He’s probably very charming. And now he’s out of work. Maybe Renzo invited her so he’d have a new member of his impromptu audience. But, out of practice, he didn’t feel ready, so he skips out on dinner.
By the time Renzo reappears, he’s fully recovered his cheerful self. “Here we are,” he says, bringing out bowls of miso and rice and a plate of homemade sushi and sukiyaki.
“This looks lovely.”
After a bottle of sake, Renzo begins to tell her more. She remembers this about Hiro’s Japanese friends. So shy and reserved at first, but with a little alcohol they became red-cheeked and loquacious. Moto had a dishonorable thing happen. He lost his job.
“What happened?”
Renzo swallows. “He says he can’t act anymore.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Renzo tells her Moto’s wife left him. “But they were unhappy for a long while. Or so it seemed to me.”
Kobayashi must have met Moto when the marriage was on its last legs, she thinks. And he changed it, so in the novel the wife was dying, which put immense strain on the marriage, versus the slow dying of a marriage from more mundane trivialities. If that was truly what happened to Moto and his wife, Hanne knows that terrain very well.
“What was your brother’s wife like?” Hanne is thinking of Aiko and her gloomy moods, the days spent sprawled on the couch in the dark living room.
Renzo hoots. A powerful advertising exec, he says, she had the Viagra account. Did Hanne ever see the Japanese ads on television? The old man sitting at the bar counter, fawned over by beautiful young women. The old man turns to the camera and says “I’m sixty, but I feel like I’m sixteen.” Seven million impotent men in Japan, and she hands them a way to shrug off old age and throw themselves into sexual ecstasy.
Renzo opens a second bottle of sake and tips back a glass. “And now Moto wastes his time doing silly voice-overs for commercials.” That admission seems to take something out of Renzo, because he abruptly falls silent. The room fills with the gurgling from the fish tank.
She stares at him in this strange, suspended moment. With his thin, dry lips and forced cheerfulness, he’s as interesting to her as a head of cabbage. When he begins talking again, it is a long rant about how Moto is ruining the family name, ruining his life. Though Renzo was demoted to younger brother in their youth, he is Moto’s only remaining relation, and it was to him Moto turned for help, and Renzo has been paying his bills. He let Moto move in with him, but it isn’t ideal, not at all.
It does not seem Renzo enjoys the reversal of roles, thinks Hanne.
Renzo runs out of steam. The food is cold, the second bottle of sake almost empty. And Hanne is tired. Renzo pushes himself up from the table. “I apologize again for Moto.” His face quickly brightens. “You must come tomorrow night. I will make sure he is here.”
How he plans to do that, she doesn’t ask. “All right. I’d love to.” She offers to call a taxi.
He laughs. “You think I had too much? No, I’m fine.”
As he drives her back to her hotel in Kurashiki, he talks about what he’ll make for supper, and she half listens, looking out the window at the pitch black night, the occasional glow of a house light. She’s aware of a weight lifting; she wouldn’t call it euphoria or even happiness. It is something more subtle, quieter. She feels a forward trajectory again.
Chapter Nine
The next evening, she takes a taxi back to their house. This time Renzo is missing. There’s a note taped on the door: Hanne-san, Please come in! I’ve run to the grocery store. Say hello to Moto!
As she walks down the hallway, she’s surprised by the adrenaline rushing through her. What does she think will happen? It’s just a first meeting. Yet she also knows that first impression, her sense of him, matters. But it’s more than that. She’s about to meet the man who gave rise to Jiro. Jiro, for whom she had such deep affection, and who was, frustratingly, the root of the confrontation with Kobayashi.
In the eating room, a muscular man sits hunched in front of the fish tank, watching the goldfish swim aimlessly in circles. He has a formidable head of hair, wavy black with coarse strands of silver, shoulder-length and disheveled. There’s a stillness to his being, as if he has been in that position for hours and might stay that way for days. Most striking, on his right cheek, a fiery red birthmark blazes in what looks like the shape of Montana.
“You must be Moto. Komban wa. Hanne desu.” Good evening. I’m Hanne.
He doesn’t acknowledge her, not even a turn of his head. She’s about to speak again, louder, when he sits up and shudders, like a mangy dog freeing itself of water.
What to make of it? Dressed in faded blue jeans with a rip in the knee and a white T-shirt, he’s barely made an effort to spruce himself up. Did he forget she was coming? Or maybe he plans on skipping out on dinner again. There’s also the rebellion of his hair. From his appearance, he looks like an adolescent revolting against conventions, except he’s no teenager. In his fifties, at least. She has never approved of men who circle back on themselves, attempting to relive a perceived glorious youth. Don’t they grow bored traveling known, predictable territory—as bored as people are with them?
After a long silence, he grunts something, maybe a word, his voice a laconic rumble, as if used up long ago. Whatever he said, it wasn’t a long enough utterance to be an apology for not appearing last night. He has yet to look over; the fish seem to be the most fascinating thing in the room.
He may be an actor, but he’s not the least bit charming. He seems to have no need for an audience. Jiro had these moods: withdrawn, even prickly around people, preferring solitude above all else and feeling resentful when disturbed. He could spend hours in his study alone, playing his violin or composing music. He wasn’t beyond barking at someone to leave him alone.
She’ll let Moto have his privacy. She steps into the kitchen and suddenly the room is tilting, sloping downward. Her hip smacks into the counter. A delayed aftershock from her fall down the stairs? A clot in her brain? She hears a high-pitched ringing in her ears. Not exhaustion, she can’t remember when she slept as deeply as she did last night.
She looks out the window to steady herself. Water from last night’s rain has pooled in the leaves. In the back yard, a large, twisted apple tree reaches its spindly, leafless branches in every direction. Large lumps line its trunk, as if something lives inside it and is trying to punch its way out. It probably hasn’t ever been sprayed for bugs or pruned. Each year the old tree must meet spring with a flourish of flowers, only to have the birds and a frenzy of bugs devour its fruit. What a waste.
A chill jerks her shoulders. The house is cold, and the sole source of warmth is where Moto is sitting, the heater beneath the table. When she turns, she’s startled to find Moto standing in the kitchen. She didn’t even hear him cross the cold floorboards. He’s a handsome man, compact, not an ounce of extra fat. When he walks to the sink, he moves without bobbing his head, as if he’s wafting on a breeze.
She tries again. “Your brother Renzo invited me—”
He fills a glass of water from the faucet. She watches his Adam’s apple dance as he drinks until the glass is empty. A water droplet glimmers on his cheek. She can see his birthmark more clearly now. It’s changed to a softer red, or is it the lighting, she c
an’t tell. Stretching from the outside corner of his right eye down to the tip of his nose, it distracts from his deepset eyes, unusual for a Japanese face, a face that is unreadable, an expressionless mask, like the Noh masks he wears on stage—or used to wear.
“Hello,” he says.
His first clearly articulated word, and it’s almost civil. But it’s not just the word her attention veers to, it’s the sound, a deep timbre emanating not from his chest, but lower, his belly. And from that one sound a whole series of sounds runs through her, as if he’s not just one man but many—shouts of anger and joy, cries of ecstasy, moans and laughter. How did he do that?
“It’s a lovely house,” she stammers. “Post and beam, with paper walls that move. A constantly changing house,” why doesn’t she stop rambling, “you can have a wall or not.”
He wipes his lips.
“You’re a Noh actor?”
“Was.”
“Yes, I heard. I’m sorry. It must be difficult.”
He looks at her. “Shikata ga nai,” he says. It can’t be helped.
It’s a fairly common Japanese expression. When she was shopping in Tokyo for her granddaughters, Hanne heard a woman in the check-out line utter this phrase as she relented and bought her crying child a bag of candy. The woman said it whimsically, a meaningless bit of verbiage. Moto’s tone, on the other hand, held more gravity. It reminds her how Jiro must have sounded after he called the doctor and turned over the care for his wife. An acceptance of a bad situation and the need to move on.
It’s this attitude that she found so appealing and admirable about Jiro: faced with the demise of his marriage, he exuded from his constitution a steady fortitude and resilience to march onward. In her opinion, his response was not heartless at all. In fact, she’d argue that it’s one of the more admirable traits a human can have. Not selfishly mired in a haze of self-absorption or pity, a person with this quality is responsible, full of integrity, available to others. To carry on. It’s a courageous act to move on from an unexpected, unfortunate event. And look at Moto: except for his hair, Moto hasn’t let himself go. He is a physically fit man, and he holds down a job, though it may not be the kind of work that Renzo approves of. At least he’s carrying on. Bravo. Bravo for him.
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