by Kyoko Mori
THE CIVIL CEREMONY CHUCK AND I had was the opposite of the Latvian wedding. We invited none of our families, relatives, neighbors, or friends our age. Aside from the two of us and the judge, the only people present were Ed and Vicki, a couple in their forties who served as our witnesses. They ran an alternative poetry press; I had met them through my writing, and Chuck scarcely knew them. They home-schooled their teen-age daughter, arguing that they were Zen Buddhists entitled to exercise their freedom of religion. Fifteen years earlier, their own wedding had consisted of driving three times around the water tower in Kenosha, Vicki’s hometown. They were supposed to go to the court house afterward but never made it, so their marriage was not recognized by law. We couldn’t have chosen two people with fewer ties to the community or to our past.
Chuck and I showed up in our jeans and T-shirts; Ed and Vicki didn’t own any other kinds of clothes. When the judge arrived, the ceremony in the living room took five minutes, made even shorter by our omission of wedding rings which we scorned as outdated symbols of oppression (“like a dog collar around the finger,” Chuck said). Our wedding day was March 17, 1984. The day before, March 16, had been the fifteenth anniversary of my mother’s death, but I said nothing to Chuck. That day was sacred between Takako and me: every year, I took a long walk to think about her and promise her that my life would be different from hers.
As I stood before the judge with Chuck, the only thing I wanted to be tied to was my mother’s memory. I kept the family name she had taken at her wedding. Takako had told her parents that she would rather die than live without Hiroshi, but the words Chuck and I repeated only said that we would always love, respect, and honor each other—which we could do even if we were no longer married to each other someday. Takako was my mother forever; Chuck would be my husband as long as he and I chose.
I believed my freedom depended on being able to live my mother’s life in reverse. I didn’t understand that rebelling against every tradition bound me tighter to my own history. While the Latvian bride opened her dowry box to give away the entire contents of her past, I held onto mine like a mismatched mitten.
Hats
WHILE THE FRENCH WERE knitting silk stockings for the royalty in the sixteenth century, English and Welsh artisans made skullcaps for their soldiers to wear under their helmets. The caps were knitted in coarse brown wool and washed in boiling water until they shrank and turned into felt. In Henry V, Shakespeare described the Welsh soldiers at Agincourt wearing leeks in their caps to express their national pride.
The English literature I studied in college was hardy like the soldiers’ caps. My favorite Shakespearean hero, Hamlet, pretended to be crazy while he pursued an elaborate plot to make sure that his uncle was guilty of his father’s murder. Like anyone who recoils from confrontation, he vacillated between being overcautious and rash. After he stabbed Ophelia’s father by mistake, she went mad and drowned, her brother joined the plot to kill him and died by his own sword, and his mother drank from the poisoned cup meant for him. If Hamlet had killed his uncle right away without thinking so much about it, no one else would have had to die, but the revenge he botched showed his humanity.
The classical Japanese literature I’d been taught was tame in comparison. In each chapter our high school class had read from The Tale of Genji, a new woman fell in love with our hero and waited all day for his visit, only to receive a seasonal token—a pressed flower, red maple leaves, grass blades tied with silk—and a poem he wrote to apologize for his absence. Though Genji had many lovers, he pined for his stepmother, the one woman he could never marry. No matter how callously he treated the others, he didn’t lose his reputation as “the shining prince.” Exiled from court, he stood on a deserted beach and shed a few tasteful tears while his followers praised his beauty.
The Tale of Genji was too pretty for me, delicate like the silk stockings reserved for the royalty. I preferred the literature of coarse wool caps, stories about people who said and did terrible things and regretted their mistakes.
THE FIRST HAT I MADE WAS a watchcap, with the same round shape as the soldiers’ skullcaps. It started with a band around the forehead. A series of gradual decreases shaped the crown; at the end, I pulled the yarn through the few stitches left on the needles and decorated the top with a pompon. Over the next few years, I knitted a watchcap to match every sweater I made. Depending on the yarn, the caps turned out so sturdy they stood on their own like tea cozies or so fine I could stuff them in my coat pocket.
My friends marveled at the tiny stitches on the finer hats and exclaimed, “You must be so patient.” But doing the same thing over and over didn’t require any patience; the worst I could be alone was bored. The real test of patience was putting up with other people.
On a family vacation he and Michiko planned the first summer they were married, my father screamed at a man who cut in front of us in the ticket line at the train station. Hiroshi was shorter than average, but he had thick eyebrows and big eyes that flashed out his anger. Even after the offender slouched toward him and mumbled an apology, Hiroshi didn’t let up. His face got redder and redder, and he was jumping up and down like an angry little dog. When people started staring at us, I walked away and stood behind a pillar.
I’ve never yelled at anyone in anger. Whether a repair person shows up in the mid-afternoon for our morning appointment or a friend calls the restaurant where I’m already seated to say she’s not coming, my response is always, “Don’t worry. I hope everything’s okay with you.” There is a huge difference between being late and being inconsiderate, between what I should accept from a repair person I will never see again and a friend who should know better. The closer I am to someone, the more important it is to tell the truth. I wish I could emulate the literature I love—the rough edges, the complex emotions, the honesty—but as my impatience flares into anger, I act calmer by the second. With a big false smile, I’ll insist there’s no problem. I’m worse than The Tale of Genji. The words I offer are as brittle as dried grasses tied in silk.
If I let my anger show, what’s to stop me from being as out of control as my father, who yelled at people and hit me at home? With Chuck, who didn’t like to fight, it was especially easy to remain patient. When he made sarcastic remarks about my friends or came home late while I waited for him to go somewhere with me, I seldom knew how upset I was until hours later when I was alone. By the time we were together again, it seemed petty and embarrassing to bring up an offense he might have forgotten about. Whatever I was upset about, I told myself, it couldn’t have been that important if I didn’t notice right away. Because my father had no patience, I became patient to a fault. If Hiroshi was fire, then I would be a glacier.
WHEN I FINALLY GOT TIRED of making watchcaps, I started knitting brimmed hats from variegated mohair yarn. The first, finished in two days, looked like a tie-dye-draped lamp shade from a 1960s dorm room. The crown was a purple and pink swirl that covered my face down to the chin, and the brim draped over my shoulders. I threw this enormous hat in the washer set on hot wash and cold rinse and ran the cycle twice. The hat came out shrunken and matted: the stitches had contracted till they were invisible, leaving a dense, fuzzy nap. Like the medieval soldiers’ caps, my hat had turned into felt. I reshaped it on a mixing bowl about the size of my head, and by the time it dried, it resembled a professionally made bowler. The lava-lamp swirls had settled into flecked tweed. I knitted a dozen more in different colors and decorated them with beads and embroidery. The felted bowler became a staple of my gift giving, something to knit every fall in anticipation of Christmas.
One November Saturday after I’d moved to Green Bay, I went to an antique mall in Northern Wisconsin with a couple who had fallen in love with an oak dresser. Every weekend for two months, Dan and Lucy had brought a different friend to look at the dresser, to ooh and aah over it, so they could work up the nerve to spend the money. The antique mall was a huge place out in the country crammed with furniture and knickknacks. Wh
en we finally got to the right section, I didn’t even notice the dresser because to the right of it, on a shabby card table, stood a wooden hat form. To an untrained eye, the hat form looked like a wooden head, but I knew what it was. Tired of reshaping hats over a bowl, I had been trying to order one, except the modern versions were made of Styrofoam, and I didn’t think I could stand the squeaky noise they would make. I grabbed the wooden head and walked around with it tightly clutched under my arm while Dan and Lucy showed me all the other oak dressers in the entire mall, everyone of them inferior to the one they wanted. When we were through, Dan said, “We should wait.” “Yeah, we want to be sure,” Lucy agreed, her lips pursed.
I was the worst person to bring to the antique mall. Chuck and I found furniture shopping so overwhelming we just waited for people to give us their hand-me-downs. Our friends and his relatives made our decorating decisions for us by giving us a red velvet couch or a green dining table or a set of white chairs. Nothing matched, and it was impossible to buy a new item to add to the existing mishmash. The only piece of furniture we got on our own—an end table from a rummage sale—didn’t fit. “I don’t know what more we could have done,” Chuck said. He’d gone home to measure the space while I waited at the sale; he’d scribbled the numbers on a piece of paper and brought it back. Later, we couldn’t find the paper to see if he’d mis-measured the space or the table or both. Watching Dan and Lucy at the antique mall, I understood that our problem wasn’t with the measuring tape.
Lucy sewed, sold, and rented out vintage costumes. Dan ran a dog-grooming business. Each had furnished their work space and made important business decisions and yet—together—they couldn’t buy the dresser they both liked. They kept coming back week after week, hoping that whoever they’d brought along would say, “Just buy the dresser and get it over with,” or “The dresser’s too expensive. You should forget about it.”
Being a couple was debilitating. Every time you were faced with a major decision, you mumbled one vague remark after another and waited for your partner to take charge: if something went wrong, then, it would be his fault, not yours. But he had thought of this, too, so the two of you were forever stuck saying, “Really, I don’t care. You decide,” “No, no, I’m sure you know more about it than I do.” “One is the loneliest number,” a popular song of our youth declared, but one was the only number that forced us to be decisive.
After we retraced our steps and got back to the counter, I paid twelve dollars for my hat form. It was heavy and compact: a single, powerful head.
THE WATCHCAP and the felted bowler would have made an ideal two-part project for my home-ec. class. They were the perfect size: small enough not to be intimidating, large enough to hold comfortably in our hands. Mrs. Amasaki must have chosen the mittens because they made us practice the basic techniques at least twice. Repetition is key to learning a new skill, but unlike magic spells, knitting repetition doesn’t have to be exact. If a beginner made a watchcap and a felted bowler, she would get plenty of practice with the yarn, the needles, and—as a bonus—the washing machine. Whether you use a modern-day washer or a tub of boiling water and a stirring stick, wool turns into felt when the microscopic scales on its surface are loosened and softened by moisture and heat, then locked together under friction and pressure. To felt a knitted fabric, you do everything you ordinarily shouldn’t with wool: wash in extremely hot water with strong soap; spin, rub, roll, and agitate; rinse in cold water; repeat. Shrinking our hats on purpose would have been an unforgettable demonstration. No budding homemaker would have tossed her angora cardigan in hot water afterward.
Mrs. Amasaki must not have known about the wedding mittens of Latvia. If she had, she would have made them an important part of our lesson and examined us on the particulars (“How many pairs of mittens did an average bride knit? A: five; B: fifty; C: two hundred; D: none of the above”) since the purpose of our class was to prepare us for marriage. In addition to needlework and cooking, we learned how to plan monthly budgets for a family of four with two children, how to wash, fold, and store various seldom-worn clothes like the husband’s tuxedo and the children’s New Year’s kimonos, how to prepare nutritious and attractive lunches for them to take to work and to school. The books Mrs. Amasaki assigned didn’t mention single women making a home for themselves or married women having a job outside the home.
Our home-ec. class could have included information about women who’d chosen not to become wives or mothers. Even in the 1970s, there were Japanese women in public life—politicians and educators—almost all of whom were single or married-butchildless. We could have found out if the married career women shared household duties with their husbands, how many of the single women had their own homes and how many lived with their parents, and if these women wished they had husbands and children. We might have read profiles of politicians like Takako Doi, who had gone to high school with my mother. She had been elected to the House of Representatives from Kobe and would go on to become the head of the Social Democratic Party. Many of our own teachers were single. They could have told us what home-making meant to them.
We would have discovered that being single was hard. The majority of the successful single women had parents who were rich, powerful, and unconventional enough to support them. Still, few had their own houses or apartments because—as my father said—women from “good families” did not live alone. Most remained in their childhood homes into their fifties and sixties, cared for their parents, and lived alone only when they themselves were old enough to have been widowed, had they been married. Knowing these things, my friends would have appreciated their marriages more in the future, like the homemaker who—having seen what hot water did to wool—treated her sweaters with extra care.
I would not have married in Japan. After my mother’s suicide and the lies my father told about it, I knew that marrying into a Japanese family meant keeping a lifelong secret about Takako’s death. My friends’ path and mine would have remained separate. Only, I wouldn’t have felt so excluded, as though the choices I planned to make were not worth mentioning.
A MISMATCHED PAIR OF HATS—a watchcap and a bowler—was how Chuck and I wanted to be as a couple. We hated being considered a match, as though one of us, alone, was incomplete. We emphasized our differences even though we only disagreed about one serious topic.
Aside from running, Zen meditation was the only thing Chuck was disciplined about. He meditated every afternoon when he came home from teaching. He had read Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki and listened to meditation tapes and Zen lecture tapes since he was in high school. None of my Japanese friends had ever studied Zen. The only Buddhism I knew as a child was the “remembering the family dead” variety practiced by most Japanese families, and even that was perfunctory. After my mother’s death, my father got an altar for her spirit and stuck it in the room that used to be hers. In the first year after her death, he hired a priest to come to our house to perform the monthly incense burning and sutra reading and invited our neighbors and his coworkers to see what a devoted husband he had been. Because the priest intoned the sutras in the traditional chanting style, his voice alternating between the nasal and the guttural, I had no idea what he was saying. If my mother’s spirit was still around, I was sure she wouldn’t appreciate being addressed with such an ugly voice.
Hiroshi didn’t marry Michiko until the one-year Buddhist mourning period was over, but she had arrived at our house with her red bridal futon two months after Takako’s death and moved into his room. When the priest came, Hiroshi didn’t invite my mother’s parents even though they were the only devout Buddhists we knew. Our neighbors and his coworkers didn’t really believe that Takako’s spirit was traveling in the land of the dead, in search of our ancestors. When the year was over and the priest came to mark the end of her journey, only my grandparents would have been consoled by the ceremony.
Chuck’s parents had signed him up for Confirmation classes in their Lutheran church when he turne
d fifteen. Every week, his mother dropped him off in the parking lot but Chuck walked through the church, slipped out the back, and ran to the nearby pinball arcade where his friends hung out. One afternoon, a boy with a juvenile record stopped at the arcade in a stolen car, and Chuck went for a ride with him. On the highway, shortly after Chuck tossed a box of fish tackles out the window to make room for his legs, they were pulled over by a police officer. “I skipped out of Confirmation to ride around in a stolen car,” was how Chuck summed up his religious education.
Around the same time, I was singing hymns and memorizing Bible verses at our all-girls school, which had been founded in 1871 by a missionary from Illinois. To leave her home to teach young Japanese girls in the first few years the country became open to foreigners after Commodore Perry’s arrival, our founder must have believed as strongly in women’s education as in Christianity. Mrs. Amasaki was an exception. Most of our teachers were single women from Christian families. Their fathers had protested World War II and gone to jail; their mothers taught Sunday School and led women’s volunteer circles to help the poor.
Most Christian families in Japan belonged to the educated upper-middle class. Our parents had sent us to the school because it was an expensive private academy that specialized in bilingual education; if they’d known our teachers’ political views, they might have reconsidered. The Christian women reminded us that Jesus had befriended the outcasts of his society. They criticized our government’s treatment of Korean immigrants, its tolerance of businesses that poisoned our waterways. I went to church every Sunday until I was nineteen, hoping to believe in the God who inspired my teachers to be so outspoken. In the end, I couldn’t accept that a man who was crucified two thousand years ago could come back to life and be among us as our “personal savior.” Still, it was a story I wished had been true.
