Shizuko's Daughter

by Kyoko Mori

  It was past midnight. She had waited until her father and stepmother were sleeping. Careful not to make any noise, she walked slowly toward the wooden boxes and knelt on the floor next to them.

  Yuki was to leave for Nagasaki in two days. Having paid her tuition and a month’s rent at the rooming house she found through the paper, she had barely enough money for the train ticket. She couldn’t afford to send any of her mother’s things, but she could pack a small bag to take with her on the train. She was sure that her stepmother would throw out whatever she didn’t take. It was a wonder she had not gotten to the attic already.

  Yuki opened the box closest to her and found clothes stacked to the top. The first one she took out was a dark purple kimono with hand-dyed patterns of maple leaves and cranes. Yuki put it on her lap and traced the patterns with her fingertips. Her mother had worn kimonos only on very formal occasions. The last time Yuki saw her wear this kimono was the afternoon she went to a neighbor’s wedding, when Yuki was eleven. If her mother had lived, she might have worn it to Yuki’s graduation from high school, a week ago. Yuki laid the kimono on top of the box lid, which she had set aside. The floor was dusty. She couldn’t put anything there.

  Next, she took out a teal-blue dress and laid it on top of the kimono. Reaching back into the box, she brought out more dresses, skirts, blouses. When the box lid was full, she opened the other two boxes and used their lids. The smell of mothballs rose from the layers of clothing, but even when she got to the bottom, there were no mothballs. They had evaporated, leaving only the essence of their pungency among the clothes. At the bottom, there were several small boxes, each containing a piece of jewelry: the abalone pin Yuki had given her on Mother’s Day, the pearl necklace her mother had bought when they went to see the pearl divers in a small village northeast of Kobe, the coral earrings her father had given her before they were married. Yuki placed the jewelry on top of the clothes.

  Each piece that she unpacked was familiar. She remembered her mother wearing it, and she remembered Aya putting it into the box. When she closed her eyes, she could see her mother smiling at her in her teal-blue dress or white linen suit, and at the same time, she could hear the rustle of cottons and silks as Aya folded the clothes and, downstairs, the undertaker’s men moving the furniture in the living room.

  Yuki opened her eyes and looked at the piles. In the other boxes, there would be sweaters and coats, more jewelry, shawls, scarves, books, photographs.

  Even before she knew exactly what she had decided to do, Yuki started putting the jewelry and the clothes back into the box. Now and then, she pressed a blouse to her cheek, ran her fingers along the lapels of jackets, looked long at the embroidery and the buttons on the dresses. When she was done, she closed all three boxes and sat thinking.

  She remembered the afternoon she got up to give a three-minute speech in her sophomore class on Monet’s Gladioli, a painting she loved. Standing at the podium, she smiled at her classmates and the teacher. She was never nervous about speaking in public. She glanced at the few notes she had jotted down. Camille’s parasol, the first note read. That was the detail she was going to mention first because she thought it was the most striking thing about the painting—a woman, Monet’s wife, holding a green parasol in the upper-left corner. But when she looked back at the class to start speaking, she was suddenly struck dumb. Why should I mention the parasol more than the flowers or the sky or the brushstrokes or the colors? she wondered. The next moment, she realized that she couldn’t talk about the painting in three minutes; if she had three hours or three days, she still couldn’t do it. Whatever was important about the painting simply could not be put into a speech. This thought made her heart beat faster, but not from nervousness or distress. She felt tremendously happy. She stood for her three minutes without saying anything, smiled, bowed, and sat down. The only true thing she could say on that occasion, she thought even now, was nothing. She had sat down after her silent speech feeling as though she was filled with the bright blue and green brushstrokes on Monet’s canvas.

  Yuki put her hand on the box she had unpacked and then packed again. Her mother couldn’t be summed up in a list any more than Monet’s painting could be described in a three-minute speech. It would be wrong to take any ten or twenty things as though her mother had been nothing but an assortment of dresses, necklaces, and a few photographs; as though one dress represented her more than the others, one piece of jewelry over another. Yuki was sure now. To save a few things and leave the others was to say that her mother could be reduced to one essence, like the mothballs that disappeared in every way except their smell. She would not do that.

  Yuki took her flashlight, stood up, and turned off the ceiling light. In the dark, her flashlight shone against the boxes along the wall. She went to one of them and touched the white label. Her mother’s neat handwriting was still clear: Yuki’s Watercolors, Fifth and Sixth Grades. Every box along the wall contained something from her childhood. She and her mother had packed them a long time ago. “We’ll look at these things together when we’re both old,” her mother had said. “We’ll remember your childhood and talk.” They would never be old together.

  It’s all right, Yuki told herself in spite of the terrible sadness she still felt. These things were not necessary for her to go on remembering. In her sketchbook, she had drawn pictures of the clothes her mother had made for her, and of the pottery they had bought and used together. Even more than that, she had the memory in her mind. Though she and her mother would never be old together, Yuki would still remember her and their time together when she was an old woman.

  Through the trapdoor, Yuki climbed down into the closet of the room that used to be her mother’s. As she stepped out of the closet, she pointed her flashlight across the floor. There was nothing except piles of magazines and newspapers her stepmother had put against one wall. The room had been unused for years. Soon, her own room would look the same. Her stepmother would throw out her desk and bed, even her quilted futon and the books she was leaving behind.

  Walking quietly across the stairway landing, Yuki went back to her room, changed into her pajamas in the dark, and lay down on the bed. She tried to imagine the countryside outside the train window on her way to Nagasaki. The rice paddies would already be flooded. They would be squares of warm muddy brown—blank spaces waiting to be filled with green seedlings in another month.

  My mother and I, Yuki thought, we are moving on. We leave behind nothing but empty spaces—empty spaces turning green as we move away from here.

  13

  SILENT SPRING

  (March 1975)

  A week after his daughter, Yuki, left for a college in Nagasaki, Hideki came home from work and found cardboard boxes stacked up outside his door. There were eight of them, arranged in neat double rows as if left ready for a delivery truck. He hurried into the house and went straight to the kitchen, where his wife, Hanae, would be preparing supper.

  “Why did you put those boxes outside the door?” he asked as he stood in the doorway.

  Hanae was chopping some vegetables at the sink. Hideki walked in and stood behind her. The sink was scattered with peelings of potatoes, chopped-off tops and tails of carrots, onion skins. Hanae stopped her hand for a minute and looked up; she did not turn around to face him.

  “Yuki didn’t take them, so I thought I was justified in throwing them out. The attic’s been so cluttered.” She went back to chopping the carrots.

  “But what are they?” Hideki asked. At any rate, he knew, they were not Hanae’s own things. “Yuki’s things that she didn’t take?”

  Hanae stopped chopping again. “They are the things that had been stored in the boxes in the attic before I came,” she said. “Clothes, mostly. Then there are boxes of Yuki’s old things that had been packed up and saved. There’s plenty more of that junk in the attic for another day.”

  Hideki remained silent. Hanae would never mention his first wife, Shizuko, by name, but every time she w
as mentioned indirectly, there was an awkwardness.

  “Yuki would have taken them if she wanted them,” Hanae said.

  “I’m not so sure.” Hideki looked around for a place to put down his briefcase but there was nowhere except for the tabletop, which would have to be cleared soon. He kept the briefcase. “Maybe she didn’t take those things because she has no space for them where she’s living. From the address, it sounded like a lodging, a one-room place. She probably doesn’t get to store anything there. Besides, she must not have had much money to send things by mail. I imagine she had just enough to pay the first installment of the tuition and get through the first month. She must have had to save everything she could. I don’t know, but she may very well want the things later.”

  Hanae abruptly turned away from the sink and glared at him. “You anger me,” she said, “the way you were with her. You had absolutely no authority over her. How could you let her go without knowing exactly where and how she was going to live? I don’t care about her. A selfish girl like that, she’ll manage all right for herself. But you know what the neighbors are thinking even this moment. They’re thinking that I drove her away from her own house because I was a bad stepmother. Anyone can tell she left all of a sudden, without telling us much. They’ll see how she never comes back even for short visits. They’ll say it was all my fault.”

  Hanae stood very rigid. Her angry breathing was audible. Hideki put the briefcase down on the floor and reached toward her, to put his hand on her shoulder, but she pulled back. He stared for a moment at his outstretched hand and then drew it back. Hanae forced a laugh.

  “From the way she left,” she said, “you know she’ll never write to us or ask us for anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if you never heard from her, except to say in four years that she’s graduating and moving somewhere else, or that she’s getting married, if she ever does.”

  Hideki thought again about the morning Yuki had left. She came down to the kitchen while they were having their breakfast. Standing in the doorway with a suitcase in her hand, she said, “I’ll leave the address of my lodging by the telephone, just in case you need to get in touch with me someday. But you don’t have to write unless there’s something important. I don’t think I will, either.” Hideki had been unable to say anything. Hanae had put down her chopsticks and stared at Yuki, her jaw set so hard he could almost feel the tension in her teeth. Yuki’s face looked pale. “I’m calling a cab to the train station now,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever come back here.” Then she turned around and walked out. From the hallway, Hideki could hear her dialing the cab and giving the address. Soon, there was the sound of the door closing. That was all. She was gone.

  Hanae had gone back to her chopping. Over its staccato noise, she said, “I was going to ask you to burn those boxes. The garbage pickup isn’t until early next week. If we leave them outside, the neighbors’ children might pull things out, and then their parents might talk. You know how it is.” Her voice was no longer angry, but casual, almost conciliatory.

  Hideki rolled his head back and stared at the white ceiling. Then, to loosen the tight knot in the back of his neck, he slowly rolled his head from right to left and listened to his neck cracking. All week, he had been trying to remember exactly how he had felt at Yuki’s leaving. He could hardly deny it. He had felt a surge of relief and, immediately thereafter, a sense of annoyance and guilt—guilt, he thought now as he listened to the cracking of his neck, about being glad to have her gone. Beyond that, he had felt very little. With Yuki gone, there would be no more arguments with Hanae unless he himself were to anger her.

  “When do you want me to burn the boxes?” he asked her. “Right now?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to rush around like that.” Hanae stopped chopping and took the empty kettle off the stove. She turned the faucet and filled the kettle. “Supper’s going to be ready in an hour or so. I’ll put the kettle on right now so you can have some tea while you wait. Why don’t you sit down? You should relax after a hard day’s work. You can burn the boxes after supper if you feel up to it.” She turned sideways toward him, smiling, as she placed the kettle on the stove. “Yes, that would be very helpful,” she said, “if you could burn them after supper.”

  * * *

  The fire was just beginning to catch. Hideki squatted in the backyard after sundown beside the boxes, watching the small flames around the crumpled balls of newspaper he used as kindling. It was slow going. The ground was still damp from the rain of the night before. It had been another wet March, but even the evening air was warmer now, almost balmy. One more week, Hideki thought, and it would be April. Schools—Yuki’s college too—would start a new year then. Hideki continued to watch the fire, keeping count of the time in his mind. High school graduation had been in mid-March. Yuki had not asked him or his wife, and they had not gone. Hanae was annoyed: people would talk, she said, about how Yuki’s parents didn’t even care to attend her graduation; they would say that it was because Yuki had only a stepmother, not a real mother. She had expected him to intervene, to make Yuki invite them, but he didn’t try because he knew Yuki would simply refuse. “No,” she might say, “I don’t invite people I don’t like.” That was the kind of thing she said on the few occasions when she talked to them. She was blunt and stubborn. She talked as though he was a stranger, not her father at all but a stranger she didn’t like. Perhaps that was how she thought of him. There was no denying, Hideki thought now, that the situation at home had been as intolerable to Yuki as it was to Hanae. She had left as soon as she possibly could—giving herself just a week after graduation to quit her part-time job at the city library, pack up, send some of the things, perhaps. Hideki did not know exactly what she had done or thought in that week. He wondered if she had wanted the things he was about to burn. She might have left them on purpose because she wanted to forget all of her past. Or perhaps it had been too painful for her to go through her mother’s things even now. That was most likely. It had been six years since Shizuko’s death, but he had to admit that Yuki had never gotten over it.

  The fire began to smolder. He would have to feed it slowly, taking the things out of the boxes and casting them in a little at a time. Inside the first box he opened, he found large envelopes and manilla folders of paper and photographs. These must be the things Shizuko had saved from Yuki’s childhood. They would burn easily. After he tossed them into the fire by large handfuls, he pulled open the other boxes and emptied the two that contained more folders. The flames rose higher.

  Long ago when he was a child, the people in his town celebrated the last day of each year by building a bonfire in the field behind the town hall. Each family brought a year’s worth of newspapers, letters, bills, old clothes, anything they wanted to get rid of. The fire burned all night. Monks from nearby temples came to beat drums and chant. The bonfire was a ritual of cleansing, of putting things behind and moving on into the new year. Of all the old-fashioned rituals, Hideki thought now, that fire was the best. It taught people to put things behind, forget, embrace the new.

  By the time he got to the clothes, his fire was burning steadily. He reached inside the first box of clothes and pulled things out without looking. As he dropped them in, they felt cool and slippery. A few of them caught fire immediately and kindled while the others burned slowly.

  Someone should have taught Yuki to forget the past, Hideki thought as he squatted to watch the fire. Each time Hanae had threatened to leave him, it was Yuki’s fault. Yuki should have tried harder to forget her mother and love Hanae. Instead, she had stayed away from home as much as possible and spent all her time in her room when she had to be home. She came down only at mealtimes, and then spoke not a word at the table. Sometimes, she didn’t even eat. She sat drinking her glass of water and got up to leave as soon as it was polite to do so. “Your daughter acts like we don’t even exist,” Hanae had complained. “She has nothing but contempt for us, and she won’t even hide it.” Hanae was angry wi
th him because he could not make Yuki behave differently. She said it was all his fault. He had allowed her to be brought up as a spoiled, selfish girl.

  Hideki distinctly remembered the first time Hanae had threatened to leave, about a year after their marriage. In the middle of supper one evening, without much of a warning, Hanae got up from the table saying, “You make me sick, the two of you, sick. You’re close and sly, Yuki. All the time, you’re silent, not a word, but who knows what you’re plotting in your head, and you”—she glared at Hideki—“you are totally useless. If she were my daughter, she’d be taught to behave differently.” Hanae left the kitchen, and for a while, Hideki remained seated, thinking that she had gone to wash her face, to compose herself, until he heard the front door slam. Then he had to find his shoes, his jacket, and run after her. When he caught up with her about three blocks away from the house, she was standing on the street trying to hail a cab, clutching her purse tight against her chest. She did not resist being brought back. They walked slowly home, without speaking. Yuki had already gone up to her room. Hanae went into the living room and sat on the couch for two hours in silence, while Hideki apologized and pleaded with her not to leave him. Just before they went to bed that night, he saw her take a pair of underwear out of her purse and put it back in her drawer. He realized then that was all she had packed in her purse before running away.

  Hideki stood up to throw more things into the fire. In the unsteady light, he could not clearly make out the clothes he must have seen once. He tried to picture the way Shizuko used to dress. I must still remember at least one dress, one coat, one piece of jewelry, he thought. But nothing came to his mind. She had, it seemed to him, preferred blues and greens, colors of the water. But he was not completely sure. After the first few years, he had spent little time at home. Even now, he wondered if they should have been divorced, if that might have saved her. But divorce would have been disgraceful and impractical. Yuki had been born by then. She would have been left with him since she was his only child. Then there would have been the same problems between Yuki and his second wife, Yuki and himself. Hideki could not remember a time when he had felt a strong bond with Yuki. Even before her mother’s death, she was a strange, quiet child to him, though other people said she was cheerful and likable. Most of the time, he wanted to have nothing to do with her. The thought of Yuki, as far as he could remember, brought him nothing but a useless sense of guilt—guilt for her mother’s unhappiness, guilt for her eventual suicide, for which, Hideki knew, Yuki held him responsible. After that, there was guilt for his remarriage, for keeping her away from her mother’s family according to Hanae’s wishes because Hanae thought people would talk—they would see the continued contact between Yuki and his former in-laws as an admission of blame on his part for his first wife’s death. Guilt was a useless emotion, Hideki reminded himself. Still, the list of his wrongs seemed endless. Now he was burning what was Yuki’s legacy—her mother’s clothes, the things her mother had saved for her.