The Cherry Blossom Rarely Smiles

by Ioana Lee

  After my graduation, I moved to his place in the Herastrau Park area of Bucharest. That summer I had a wonderful vacation, which I spent mostly in Greece and at Mamaia, a luxurious region on Romania’s Black Sea. That fall I turned 23 and started teaching Japanese, becoming a professor at the same University where I was once a student. It felt a little awkward having students who not too long ago were my peers. By then I had a large (and growing) Japanese library. The Japanese Embassy and the Japanese Foundation in Bucharest helped me enormously in this endeavor. This made my students’ life much easier because they had plenty of dictionaries, books and videotapes for their studies—materials that my former colleagues and I had missed. I taught there for two years and was very committed to doing lots of research. I wanted to be fully prepared for my classes, as I didn’t have an experienced professor to guide me along the way. I was the only one specialized in this field and at that time there was a huge need for professors to teach Japanese. Living with a Japanese man brought me to a very advanced level of Japanese, especially speaking and grammar. My aim was to speak the language much better, nicer, more correct and more civilized than most of the native speakers. It was one of my most ambitious missions and nothing could have kept me from achieving it.

  I remember that the weekend was coming up and something rather surprising happened. I don’t recall why Ken and I fought. He was very agitated and I found myself wondering how to best fill up my time without standing in his way, or him standing in mine.

  “I want to go to Valeni this weekend” he told me. His decision smiled upon me. I’d get to spend time by myself in my room and walk around while he’d talk endlessly with my parents. Spending weekends in Valeni was the most beautiful and leisured thing in my life, especially when all of us, the three sisters, along with our husbands and our parents came together and talked about everything under the sun. We tended to talk way too much about law and philosophy. Eventually, we’d all get to a saturation point. Usually, Ken and I would draw back into our Nipponese world.

  That visit things were different: I chose to go to Valeni to get rid of him, somehow, or to get though my anger at him.

  We arrived there on a chilly Saturday afternoon in November. Many important events in my life seem to have happened in November. Perhaps the most important is my sister’s birthday, Sorana. I have two older sisters, Iulia and Sorana. When we got there, they were both in the house along with their husbands and my parents. The table was already set for lunch. We all ate delicacies prepared by my mother and father, who were, as always, in a culinary competition whenever their daughters were coming home. I had very little to eat, as I usually do. Unlike other times together, I sensed something unusual in their behavior and look. I was suspecting them of being on Ken’s side, now that we weren’t on good terms. It felt like I was witnessing a secret plot organized against me.

  Supposedly when you are the youngest and most spoiled one in the family, you can never feel like you have too much attention. They were all smiling at each other in secret. My mother was more beautiful and cheerful than usual. My father was very serious… my sisters exchanging smiles. Hmm! Darn it! And Ken was speaking fervently too much while I was upset. I didn’t feel at all like listening to him. I couldn’t stand up to leave the table, as it would have been disrespectful. I remember taking 5 minutes to swallow twice, after which my stomach would be full. That time though, lunch ended rapidly. I stood up trying to avoid being asked to wash the dishes, when all of them, almost in the same voice, warned me:

  “Ken said that he wants to make an announcement.”

  I was concerned that something bad has happened with his family back in Japan. We all sat down at the table, besides my mom, who was visibly very agitated and sat down on an armchair. A sinister quietness took over the room. I was impatiently waiting for the situation to get clarified.

  Ken started talking on a solemn tone, with an uncontrollable nervousness in his voice. All of a sudden he was making lots of mistakes in Romanian. It was very distracting for me, perhaps, because of my profession as a language teacher. I felt the need to correct and punish him for his flagrant mistakes, and as a result I couldn’t focus on the meaning of his message. With this being said, I admit that making mistakes often happened to me as I was trying to learn a new language.

  (I preserved Ken’s following mistakes on purpose):

  “Me spoke with grandmother, who me explained need Ioana my life, for after death. And grandmother (Shin’s daughter and head of family, age, presence and authority)… told me I speak more what situation is. I explained I don’t live at all, if I don’t have Ioana for living together forever…… conclsion, all my famiry love Ioana and agree marriage special, if famiry Matei (my last name at that time) thinks alike. So… Ioana’s Father how do you think?”

  My dad, who was now called by everyone Ioana’s Father, (my mom—Ioana’s Mother) was a criminal judge, well-known for his authority in the field, and even more so for his authority as a parent. He would have liked his daughters to step onto his path and become judges like him, yet my mom considered it too much. She allowed us to choose our own desired paths. My dad has a lot of wisdom, he’s reasonable, cultivated, balanced, loves his family deeply and is very dedicated to his three daughters. He speaks very little and to the point, only when it’s truly necessary. He’s a Pisces as I am, and I think I’m his “lucky golden fish”, although secretly—just between you and I—I believe that he loves my sister Iulia more, because she was his first daughter and she became a judge as well. Never mind, these are my deep-down buried thoughts as the youngest and most spoiled one. I use this as an excuse…

  My dad was the head of the table. I was sitting next to him disoriented, as everyone waited for my verdict. No one asked me anything. I don’t recall dad’s words or what exactly he said, yet I remember how much I loved him when I heard: “Ken, you’ll have to ask Ioana first and if she agrees, we would all be very happy for both of you.” In an instant all my family approved. Ken nodded and they all started smiling contently. And the champagne started pouring. Ken and my mother started crying… and I am almost certain that I didn’t say YES. They were all too rambunctious to even notice my reaction. Especially since I didn’t say NO either.

  Voluntarily and of my own free will…

  The wedding preparations started on both sides of the world, Romania and Japan. A few months later my mom said, “Ioana but you haven’t said yet if you want to marry Ken or not.” After her question, my dad and sisters were each asking me the same question. I didn’t have an answer. Everyone knew that we’re getting married. What else there was to be said about it? One month prior to the wedding, which was supposed to be held in August in Bucharest and for which my parents in law were intensely preparing, Otoosan asked me over the phone: “Ioana I’ve never heard you say… Yes I want to marry Ken. Everyone is happy for you two; everyone knows about the wedding and is congratulating you. All my family and friends are waiting for you to move to Japan, but… do you want marry him?” I never fully understood these questions about marriage, at which you have to answer monosyllabically: YES or NO. Hence, I hid behind the ambiguity of the Japanese language, saying that people’s destiny is not fully under their control; that their coming to Romania will make me very glad, that my wedding dress from Italy is absolutely wonderful and that happiness can be created and destroyed by a person, with the consequence of affecting many, many others… I don’t know, not even to this day, if I ever wanted to marry Ken, or I wanted to marry Japan, Shin, or their spirituality… or if I got married because I wasn’t able to live without Ken anymore…

  We were together 24/7. We even started thinking and looking alike. We seemed to be on the same life path that carried us through good and bad. In the end I said YES. There was no way around it. I was in front of the registrar and everyone was there. Ken looked like a porcelain doll handsome, innocent and delicate. And that was the end of it: I became Ioana Kurosawa.

  The religious ceremony
and the wedding were held three days later, on August 15th, 1998. I was 25 and Ken was 31. Everything was magical, just like a story with princes and princesses, only that in my case a real prince, a Japanese one. I have lots of wonderful memories, yet many of them are nebulous because all the events happened at maximum speed. We left for our honeymoon to Budapest (a city that we both loved), followed shortly thereafter by London and then the north of England, after which we moved to Japan. Forever.

  How lightly people use these words and how often one is asked: “You’re leaving forever? You’ll never come back?” Life taught me that only death is synonymous with forever or never.

  My other home

  There I was again in Japan, with a more advanced Nipponese language, more knowledge, and most of all a different status—a member of the distinguished Kurosawa family. I was outrageously happy. Ken too. As a couple we identified with a description found in Kenelm Chillingly by Lord Lytton: We were experiencing a “serene happiness, that sort of happiness which seems as if it had never been interrupted by a sorrow, had never been troubled by a sin – that holy kind of happiness which belongs to innocence, the light reflected from a heart and conscience alike at peace.”

  This feeling of gracefulness got ingrained in my emotional memory, thus it’s the first one that comes to mind when I look back. I don’t remember almost anything about the first two weeks in Japan, as the trip was exhausting and my settling in was challenging. We took Kiku with us, our small puppy from Romania. We spent 5 hours at the airport in Paris, during which she barked at people, peed on the floor and cried when she was taken away from me to be checked. The French police announced that they had to go through the boarding process all over again because of a bomb threat (at the time this was extremely rare and less credible). This delayed our departure for a while. Finally we found ourselves on the plane departing for Tokyo. Late at night, when most passengers were sleeping and I was able to snooze with Kiku in my arms, she burst out. She started barking unrelentingly, waking up everyone around us. People were looking at us—not in a nice manner. Kiku was tired and agitated because of the injections that she got at the airport in Bucharest right before our departure. Their effect was fading away because of all the delays in Paris. I had some sleeping pills with me, and I tried to give her one but it had no effect. It was exasperating.

  After one night spent in Tokyo, we finally arrived in Aomori district in Sendai, located just north on the main island of Japan. This was where the Kurosawa Museum was and Ken’s parents and grandmother lived. Otoosan was the director of the museum. The family owned almost the whole town.

  Otoosan, Okaasan and Obaachama happily welcomed us, with their traditional Japanese warmth.

  “These are the keys to your house” they told us, offering us two sets of keys, one for each. “You can settle in right now.”

  Our home, a superb villa built specially for our arrival, awed us into silence with its imposing appearance. It was built on one of the estates of the Kurosawa family, close to our parent’s house and also close to the Kurosawa Museum. From the outside it looked like a big, bright and very modern house. On the inside it was like a labyrinth. The entrance was traditional Japanese, with a very large genkan[vii] where we would mandatorily take our shoes off and arrange them, making sure that the toes were always pointing towards the exit and never towards the house. It’s fascinating how easy it was for the Japanese to do this automatically… It took me a very long time to get used to it. Okaasan often came to cook for us and arrange the shoes at the door, which were scattered on the hallway by Kiku. She was always bringing the shoes into the house, which was utterly unacceptable to the Japanese. From the hallway, we would pass a set of stairs where there were several pairs of neatly aligned house slippers, only this time the toes were pointing towards the house. Just like in all the other Japanese homes there were multiple pairs of slippers by the door; some for the people living in the house and some for the guests. I was shocked to notice that all of the colorful slippers were branded Valentino—“What a waste!” I said to myself. Ken was happy though, because he couldn’t stand things that weren’t made with quality. Over time I had come to observe and learn a lot about the Japanese snobbism regarding their brand and quality mindset, which supposedly could be found only in well-known fashion houses. I realized how speculative the fashion industry was and how much money the French and Italian brands were making in this country. Everything was manufactured exclusively for Japan, from slippers to glasses, toothbrushes, saltshakers, aprons, etc. A country obsessed with anything imported from abroad, yet at the same time so closed down in itself.

  I’m now thinking that I started writing these pages for myself, but I have the feeling that sooner or later this project will take the shape of a book. Besides all the questions: What will the Kurosawa family think of it? What will my parents say? What will Kiku bark? One of the questions that come to mind is: Will the reader say to himself something similar to Lytton: “I can’t even get through this book; it is as dull as England in November?”

  How to live in a Japanese home

  It took me a month to get used to the interior of the house. That’s how sophisticated and complicated it was. “It has a first and second floor. That’s pretty much it” I kept on saying to myself to get things clearer in my head. The first floor had a very large living room with one glass wall overlooking our parent’s house and the garden, where all the ancestors were buried. As to the mystery of the Japanese ancestors so present in our everyday lives, I came to understand it only later. The first floor is a small house in itself, with several rooms designed in a Japanese yet western style. On the same first floor there was also a bathroom, a place that caused me tremendous unhappiness and also undiplomatic discussions and confrontations with Otoosan and to an extent with the whole country of Japan. Their customs were so foreign to me that I couldn’t assimilate them, regardless of how much I tried.

  On the second floor of the house was my little piece of heaven. A very large room with two beds one next to the other, both making a large king size bed. Maybe when they did the interior design they thought that because of the culture shock I’d get overweight, or that Kiku, who used to sleep with us in the same bed, was the same size as a polar bear. Otherwise I can’t explain why we had such a huge bed. It could fit two queens and 3 kings all together. I often used to joke with Ken, saying that it matched the distance between Bucharest and Valeni of approximately 100 miles, and that many times I had to make a phone call to find out who was on the other side of our bed. On the same floor, there were also small Japanese rooms and storage space, as well as a small, feminine bathroom supplied already with face creams, lotions and other unidentified products. All these rooms were designed to surround my gravitational center, formed by a small table and a chair, from where I wrote my correspondence and my journal. These were my two mandatory occupations as a “shogun-ese” wife. My nervous system, now fractious at the idea of obligation, demanded that I write a journal only for the first 2 weeks. I couldn’t do it any longer. My correspondence was limited to a polite, non-formal language for my family in Romania. Next to my little desk I had my library, mostly made of my XIX century English collection, plus some essential books in Romanian, including the Bible.

  Unfortunately, not long after moving to Japan I was brainwashed out of my orthodox religion, in which I was baptized and raised. Initially, there were two Christian orthodox people in the Kurosawa family that was normally split between the Buddhist and Shinto religion. The two orthodox were me and Brother Toma, (Ken’s Christian name), who after my parents’ approval of our marriage understood that he needed to change his religion to mine. I had never asked him to do this, but the Orthodox Church did not accept inter-religious marriages, a fact that made me determined to question its intolerance of the diversity of the world that we live in. Brother Toma (Ken) started by becoming obsessed with being a true orthodox, especially when he was kissing the icon of Saint Toma that was offered to hi
m, at an exorbitant price, by the priest that baptized him. I started to realize that we weren’t only handicapped in the linguistic sense—we were also handicapped in a religious way. For me, the church was inside, deep in my heart. This was how I was raised and educated to feel and to think by the one person who represents for me more than I’d ever be capable of expressing in words or deeds—my mother. Anyhow, given our new and different life circumstances, in a very short time, at least for the sake of appearances, Brother Toma returned to his Shinto religion, and Sister Ioana became half Buddhist, half Shinto. This was not so much out of my own will or desire, but rather for the lack of it. And all this was unfolding under the ambiguity of my new Japanese lifestyle.

  The first thing that we had to do when we arrived in Japan was to visit our Ancestor’s graves, to pray in front of them, tell them that we returned home and ask them to watch over us. Every morning before breakfast we were bowing towards the garden, where the Ancestors lived. This was a sacred ritual in Japanese religion. Over time, I learned to feed the Ancestors, talk to them, salute and worship them. I also told them what I had done lately and what I was going through emotionally. Until I became aware of what I was doing, I noticed that whenever I found myself in an existential dead-end, instead of praying to my God, in my own language, instead of framing “Our Father”, I chose to go to my Japanese Ancestors. This happened in an automatic way that came from frequent practice. I often went to Shin to ask him to help me, in light of the fact that my sufferance was coming from his country and his people… Slowly but surely, God ceased to exist in my prayers and in my soul. The alienation was rapid and somehow frightening.