Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  Finally, she gathered the nerve to call her. She said she was a reporter for Time magazine and was writing a book on women in the Japanese entertainment industry. She asked to interview Tomiko, saying she wanted to hear about her career as an enka singer, how she got her start, the barriers she had faced, what sort of fulfillment she derived from her work. Once assured that her identity would be disguised and that nothing from the book would ever be published in Japan, Tomiko agreed to be interviewed.

  Now Lisa was standing in front of Tomiko Higa’s house in Gotanda, and she rang the bell, and suddenly she was face to face with the woman who was supposed to be her birth mother.

  “Come in, come in,” Tomiko said.

  She thought she would be taller. From the photographs and videos, she had looked to be around Lisa’s height, five-six, but in person she was much shorter, and somewhat plump. She was dressed extravagantly in a tight pink brocade dress with a pattern of rosebuds and poofy sleeves, the neck, wrists, and hems sprouted with lace. Her hair was pulled back and to the side, held together by an elaborate clip festooned with glass shoots and petals, and she wore several large gaudy rings on her fingers.

  Lisa wasn’t prepared for this. She had thought she would be, but now all she wanted to do was flee. She was afraid she might vomit.

  “Don’t be shy,” Tomiko said cheerily. “Come in!”

  Lisa took off her shoes and reluctantly followed Tomiko into the living room. Her house was tiny, made even more claustrophobic by the profusion of plants and flowers inside: begonias, spider plants, philodendrons, palms, African violets, dracaenas, geraniums. It was overwhelming, a veritable greenhouse, the air hot and humid in the living room as they sat in a pair of chairs covered in jonquil-patterned chintz. A jungle mutated with Laura Ashley DNA.

  “Your plants are beautiful,” Lisa said tensely.

  “Oh, they’re very ugly.” Tomiko beamed with great pride. “Would you like coffee?”

  She brought out a tray with a small pot of coffee and two gorgeous Spode cup-and-saucer sets. “I have milk instead of cream, if you like,” Tomiko said.

  “Cream is fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got some cakes from Anderson’s Bakery for when we take a break. Strawberry cakes.”

  “I’m on a diet,” Lisa said, lying for no reason.

  “Diet!” Tomiko said. “Why are you on a diet? You have a lovely figure.”

  “No,” Lisa said, pleased.

  “Yes. You’re a beautiful girl.”

  Lisa blinked and looked at Tomiko, who smiled at her.

  “Do you require anything special for the interview?” Tomiko asked.

  “No,” Lisa said. She pulled out her tape recorder and a notebook from her purse. “I have everything I need.”

  With little preamble, Tomiko began telling her about her childhood in Kawasaki and her big break in Yokohama, winning a local song contest that had led to an appearance on a once-popular enka show on TV, which had then led to a recording contract.

  “Didn’t you work on the Navy base in Yokohama for a while?” Lisa asked.

  Tomiko faltered for a second. “Yes, for a year, as a clerk. How in the world did you know that?”

  “I read it in an article somewhere.” She asked Tomiko about the first time she had been selected to sing on Kohaku uta gassen, soon after the release of her one and only minor hit, “Fall Like the Petals of a Flower.”

  “I was so honored,” Tomiko said. “It was the proudest day of my life.”

  “It’s very competitive to get on the show, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. They really look at everything to judge your standing and popularity. Even the suggestion of a scandal can affect the decision of the selection committee. Like what happened to poor Hibari Misora.” Hibari Misora was the queen of enka, with an enormous following and staggering record sales. Yet she had been banned from Kohaku uta gassen because of her rumored association with the yakuza. “Now that enka is not so popular, I am not invited to appear on every show, but that only makes it even more marvelous when I am invited,” Tomiko said. “Yet nothing, of course, can ever match my first time.”

  She brought out a photo album. “I didn’t know what I’d wear,” she said, “but then I found a fantastic seamstress who made me this.” She pointed to a photograph of herself in a dreadful fuchsia kimono with a huge, lurid pink rose splashed across her breast.

  “It’s beautiful,” Lisa said.

  She expected Tomiko to reply with typical Japanese modesty, “Oh, it’s very ugly,” but Tomiko squealed gleefully, “Isn’t it? The kimonos, the flowers, became my trademark. The same seamstress has been making them for me all these years.”

  “Your handkerchiefs, too?” Lisa asked. In every performance, Tomiko clutched a pink lace handkerchief in her left hand.

  “Those are custom-made in London.”

  She flipped to the next page in the photo album, and the next, and the next, and then she retrieved more albums. For more than an hour, she recounted various concerts and awards and records and shows, welling up with delight and wonder. She talked about her surprising popularity in Taiwan and Singapore, the gratifying ardor of her many fans, some of whom wrote letters begging to be her driver or maid for free, just to be close to her. “They love me,” she said, choking up.

  Pinned in the stuffed chair, Lisa listened to her, unable to relax, constantly shifting the hard, heart-shaped pillows at the small of her back, brushing away tendrils of ivy that tickled her shoulder. It was too hot in the house. It was all too much—the closeness of the room, the flora, Tomiko’s perfume, her makeup, her rouge and eye shadow comically applied in feline streaks, her stories and giggles, her cloying sincerity and oppressive cheerfulness. Everything was overstuffed, on the verge of bursting. Lisa had not planned to stay this long. She had wanted their first meeting to be quick—an abbreviated flyby. She hadn’t thought she could handle anything more. She had envisioned a series of interviews, during which they could get progressively more comfortable, become friends, even. But Tomiko continued to babble blithely about herself, not allowing Lisa the opportunity for a graceful exit.

  Irrationally, Lisa had assumed her mother would be soft-spoken, humble, kind, but Tomiko Higa was a silly woman, a pitiable figure, mawkish and self-absorbed and deluded. Could this woman really be her mother? Lisa didn’t recognize herself in her at all. There was no family resemblance. She didn’t want there to be a resemblance. She didn’t want Tomiko Higa to be her mother.

  Lisa let her prattle on for another half hour—an interminable time—but eventually she couldn’t take it anymore. “You’re famous for something else,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Your emotion.”

  “Ah, my emotion.” Tomiko smiled.

  “I saw the tape of that first time.”

  “You did? You should have said. Oh, I was just overcome. I had no idea it would happen.”

  During her first performance of “Fall Like the Petals of a Flower” on Kohaku uta gassen, at the climatic moment of the song when she was quivering about her lover leaving her in the city, alone, homesick, and heartbroken, tears had streamed down Tomiko’s face—a moving, spontaneous display of emotion that she was thereafter able to recreate at will.

  “Were you thinking of someone in particular?” Lisa asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “A lover?”

  Tomiko covered her mouth and tittered. “No, no lover.”

  “You’ve never been married.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you ever have any children?”

  Tomiko smiled tightly. “I just told you I never married.”

  “You never got pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “You never had a child?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t work in the Military Intelligence office in Yokohama and hang out at a sailor bar called Club Zoo Fly?”

  “I’m s
orry, what is this about?”

  “You’re not zainichi Korean?”

  “I most certainly am not.”

  “You didn’t give birth to an ainoko baby at Fujigaoka Hospital on September 14, 1955, and then abandon her four days later at Nonohama-no-ie Children’s Home?”

  “What is this? Who are you?”

  “I think I’m your daughter,” Lisa said.

  “What?”

  “I’m your daughter.”

  Tomiko stared at her. “But you’re not half-kurombo.”

  And this was when Lisa knew that Tomiko was her mother. “I’m part black. I just look white.”

  Tomiko stared at her, finally speechless.

  “I was given the name Mayu Kaneda,” Lisa said. “I stayed at the orphanage until I was four, when a black couple from the Navy base adopted me and took me to America with them. They were nice to me. They had a daughter who wasn’t so nice to me, but I suppose we can’t have everything.” This last comment had been written in for a little comic relief, but Lisa didn’t smile wryly with its delivery, as she had rehearsed, and Tomiko didn’t react to it. Lisa had gone through a dozen drafts of the monologue before translating it into Japanese and committing it to memory. “We lived all over the world—the Philippines, Italy, then Hawaii, California. I graduated as the salutatorian of my high school in Norfolk, Virginia, and I went to the University of Virginia on a scholarship. I’m now a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at Berkeley. Last September, my adoptive parents were killed in a car accident. Ever since, I’ve felt I have no one, that I’m alone. That’s why I decided to come to Tokyo to try to find you. I think I always intended to find you, although I never said so to anyone, even to myself. I’ve been studying the Japanese culture and language for years. I guess I should have been studying Korean as well. I don’t know why I’ve waited so long. Maybe I was afraid of hurting my adoptive parents, but maybe I just needed the courage to face the question—the question of whether you would be glad to see me. Or not.”

  Tomiko glared down at the coffee table, shaking her head rigidly as if afflicted with palsy. Then she said, “Who sent you?”

  “No one sent me.”

  “What do you want? Money?”

  “No, I don’t want your money,” Lisa said.

  “What are you going to threaten me with? The scandal magazines? Fancy or Frank? How much do you want?”

  “I’m not here to blackmail you.”

  “I never had a baby. I never had an affair with a colored sailor.”

  “Tell me about him,” Lisa said. “Tell me about my father.”

  “Someone’s trying to set me up.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Who are you working for? Who’s trying to ruin me?”

  “He was married, wasn’t he? You were having an affair. Was that why you couldn’t be together?”

  “Why is this happening?” Tomiko said, grasping her head in her hands. “What did I ever do to anybody?”

  “Why didn’t you get an abortion? Did you want to keep me? Or did he? Did someone convince you that you shouldn’t?”

  “I don’t have much money.”

  “Did you do it out of love?” Lisa asked, crying. “Did you give me up so I could have a better life?”

  “Get out,” Tomiko said.

  “I don’t blame you. You had no choice. It must have been so hard for you, having to conceal your identity, trying to pass for Japanese. I understand. I forgive you.”

  “I want you to leave.”

  “Please tell me about the affair,” Lisa said. “Tell me who I am.” She had imagined they would weep and embrace, that Tomiko would say she had been in agony all these years, tortured she had given Lisa up, and every day she had wondered what had happened to her, had worried about her, maybe even had searched for her, hired a private detective, hoping for a reunion.

  Lisa had been a fool. Tomiko had abandoned her for her pathetic singing career. Now Lisa simply wanted to know about her father. Tomiko was her only link to him. “Do you know where my father is?” she asked. “Where was he from? What did he look like? What was he? Do you have any photographs of him?”

  “Get out,” Tomiko said. “I never want to see you again.” She grabbed Lisa’s arm and pulled her up and shoved her toward the door. “I won’t give you any money. I don’t care what happens to me. I never had a baby.”

  “Just tell me his name,” Lisa said. “Please. That’s all I ask. Just tell me my father’s name,” she said, as Tomiko pushed her out the door.

  THERE WAS no logic to it, going to the ISA. She had not planned it. But after leaving Gotanda on the Yamanote Line, Lisa had not gotten off at Meguro to catch the subway home, too numb to disembark, and she had continued on the train, past Yoyogi, clap, clap, past Shinjuku, clap, clap, perhaps thinking she would ride the entire loop of twenty-nine stops around to Meguro again, or perhaps not thinking at all. She found herself shuffling off the train at Takadanobaba and wandering to the ISA campus, where she waited until she saw her coming out of the building and walking down the sidewalk. Lisa ran across the street and called out to her just as she reached a green convertible with the top down.

  “You’re Julia Tinsley, aren’t you?” she said.

  She turned around. “You’re . . . ?”

  “Lisa Countryman.” She was much prettier in person than in the photographs that Ako Abe had taken of her.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m in love with your husband.”

  Julia stepped back from her. “Excuse me?”

  “David doesn’t love you. David’s never loved you.”

  “Who the hell is David?”

  “I mean Vincent—Vincent.”

  Julia dumped her bag in the car and got in the driver’s seat.

  “He loves me,” Lisa said. “We’ve been having an affair. He’s going to leave you for me.”

  “You’re insane,” Julia said, and started the car and began pulling out into the street.

  “He loves me, not you,” Lisa screamed, running alongside the car.

  “Get the hell away from me,” Julia said.

  Lisa tried to hang on to the car. “He doesn’t care about you!” she yelled. “He’s never cared. He’s never given you a second thought. You were as good as dead to him.” But Julia had driven into traffic and was already gone, and Lisa sat down on the street and wept.

  MIDORI NOTICED Lisa moving gingerly at the club. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t hunch like that. Stand up straight.”

  Lisa thought she might have broken a rib. As she had run after Julia’s convertible, she had hit her ribs against the sideview mirror of a parked car. She was in pain all evening, and she barely talked to her customers. Singing, she sounded awful, not able to breathe fully from her diaphragm. At the end of the night, Midori summoned her to her office, and Lisa expected to be reprimanded for doing such a poor job.

  The office was a closet, with space only for a narrow counter, two chairs, and a safe, in which Midori meticulously stored the club’s receipts, her client list, and her customers’ expense accounts.

  “Something occurred to me today,” Midori said.

  “Yes?”

  “Your visa has expired.”

  She was right. Lisa hadn’t realized it herself. It was June 16. Her ninety-day tourist visa had expired the previous week.

  “What are your plans now?” Midori asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going back to the States?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. There’s not much reason for me to stay anymore.” She didn’t think Tomiko Higa would change her mind anytime soon, although Lisa planned to write to her in a few weeks, asking again for information about her father.

  “You’re welcome to continue here if you can be careful,” Midori said. “The last thing I need is trouble from Immigration.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “I’ve enjoyed having you here. Despite my initial reservatio
ns, it’s worked out well.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve become very fond of you. I usually don’t have any maternal urges toward my girls, but you’ve been an exception.”

  Overwhelmed, Lisa felt her eyes tear. “Really?” she asked, and she embraced Midori.

  “Hey, hey,” she said. She patted Lisa’s back, then disentangled herself from her. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you so emotional? Are you having your period?” She handed her a tissue, and after Lisa blew her nose, the two women looked at each other and laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” Lisa said.

  “It’s okay. I just wanted to say that if you decide to return home, I’ll be sad to see you go.”

  “That’s nice to hear.”

  “How are you doing for money? I can’t imagine you’ve saved much, living in that place in Nishi-Azabu.”

  “No, I guess I haven’t,” Lisa said. She was indeed broke.

  “How much are you paying a month?”

  Lisa told her, and Midori shook her head.

  “I’m afraid your landlord has been taking advantage of you.”

  Not just Takagi, Lisa thought. Ako Abe’s services had been very expensive. In addition to her hourly fees, she had repeatedly asked Lisa for cash to bribe clerks and bureaucrats and security guards, and Lisa wondered if Ako had been swindling her.

  Midori pinched an envelope out from underneath a ledger and slid it across the counter. “This is a little something as a token of appreciation.”

  “This isn’t necessary.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Well, thank you,” Lisa said.

  “I think Mojo would also like to give you a gift.”

  “Mojo?”

  “For treating him so well these past few months.”

  Lisa watched Midori tap on a calculator and write numbers on an invoice form. “You want me to go out with Mojo?”

  “It’s entirely up to you. I think he would be very grateful if you did.”

  “I thought you don’t allow dohan.”