by Sally Quinn
One day in autumn we were playing outside in piles of vibrant red, yellow, and orange leaves. I suggested to her that we dig a hole, fill it up with leaves, and cover ourselves with them. She looked like an autumn leaf anyway. We dug and dug and filled up the hole and then I told her to get in and I covered her with leaves. I told her not to move, that I had a surprise for her. I ran back to the house and got a pack of matches. I came back to the hole where she was wriggling and giggling and telling me to hurry up. I looked at the pile and saw some of her gorgeous curls escaping from underneath the matching leaves. I saw myself lighting a match and tossing it into the pile. I imagined the flames leaping up around her, flames the same color as her hair. I visualized her screaming and writhing in pain. In my mind’s eye, I saw her go up in a puff of smoke.
The next thing I knew I was breathing heavily, barely able to inhale, perspiration dripping down my forehead. I yelled at her to wait one more minute, raced back to the house, put the matches away, and rushed back with a bottle of water and poured it over her head. She squealed with laughter as she pushed the leaves away, then grabbed me and tossed me into the pile, pulling wet leaves over me, and together we laughed and laughed.
I suppose if I were Japanese, I might have cut my stomach open. As it was, I fought off the emotion of jealousy, as I have tried to do all my life. When I do feel it, my throat gets dry, my stomach clenches in knots, and I get nauseated. At the time of this awful incident I knew perfectly well that what I had done was wrong, very wrong. The knowledge came not from any religious teaching, but from a moral compass that was beginning to develop from what I was learning from my parents.
Getting caught playing doctor at a friend’s house by her mother was nothing compared to that, but it was bad enough that I went home and hid in the armoire all night. My parents were frantic and had the MPs searching for me up and down Dragon Heights and Dragon Gulch. Finally I couldn’t bear my mother’s sobs and crept out, so ashamed I couldn’t look at them. My mother, who had heard about our game from my friend’s mother, consoled me, telling me that it was normal and that most kids experiment when they are little. She was so different from my friend’s mother, who made me feel evil and dirty. I never played with that friend again.
* * *
My favorite doll was named Polly. She was very pretty with dark blond pigtails, a sweetheart mouth, blue eyes, and long black lashes. She wore a yellow cotton pinafore with blue-and-white trim and a ruffled white collar and skirt. I adored Polly. She was really my best friend. We were inseparable. One afternoon we were having a tea party in the playhouse, a small enclosed templelike structure in the backyard, when my mother called to me. She sounded urgent, so, thinking something was wrong, I dashed in to see what the matter was.
A typhoon was approaching, she said, and we had to batten down the hatches. The whole household was busy covering the sliding doors and propping up bags and pillows against them to prevent leaking. My mother and I were helping stock a safe room with food when the typhoon hit suddenly. We had very little warning. In my haste to get back to the house, I had forgotten Polly. I was frantic. I started to run out to get her when my mother stopped me. A fierce wind was already whipping branches against the house, and the rain was coming down in thick, dark sheets.
We all herded into the tiny safe room and sat together in terror as the storm lashed around us. Polly would die. I just knew it. Then Emiko began to chant and soon the others picked up her prayers. They were praying for us, said Emiko, but also praying for Polly.
After many hours, the howling and crashing and moaning subsided. I couldn’t get to the playhouse fast enough. There was Polly lying on the floor looking disheveled, her dress half torn off, her hair a mess. The right side of her upper lip was missing as was one hand. It looked as if it had been gnawed off. But the little temple was intact. How could that have happened? Then I heard a crashing noise. Polly’s tea set had fallen off the table. I looked closely in the gloom and saw a group of large black rats sitting on the table, and the floor, eating the last of the cookie crumbs and staring at me malevolently.
I shrieked and grabbed Polly, running as fast as I could toward the house, which had, happily, sustained very little damage. When I showed Polly to Emiko, she held her tightly and cried. Finally she said, “The gods saved her. If we had not prayed for her, she would have died.” I wondered who these gods were and if they had really saved Polly. Still it didn’t shake my “faith” that there was no God. I always loved Polly more because of her imperfections.
* * *
One day a wizened old Buddhist monk came riding up to our house in a donkey cart. Completely filthy, he was dressed in a tattered robe and disintegrating sandals. He had wisps of graying hair on his chin and his head. When he got out of the cart, it was clear he was starving. He came to the entrance in the back. He said he had been traveling a long way from Nagasaki and had not eaten for days. He asked if the staff would give him a bowl of rice. They did. He was so weak he could barely stand, and they offered to let him stay with them in their quarters and feed him. They told Mother and Daddy, who said he could stay as long as he liked. He stayed for three weeks.
Then one day he decided to leave. It was time for him to go, he said, although he did not know where he was headed. They tried to persuade him to stay, but he was insistent. He asked to speak to my parents as he was departing. He came into our living room carrying what looked like a giant clamshell with hinges on the side where the other half had been. Four feet wide and nearly three feet high, it had been painted white but much of it was worn. Obviously handmade, the inside had a raised design with a gold background and a painting of a blue lake with a large leafless tree covered in snow. A background of snowy hills completed the still, serene, peaceful winter scene.
The shell had been in his temple in Nagasaki, he told us. There was another half to the shell. When Nagasaki was bombed by the Americans during the war, he grabbed the shell and hid in the underground storage room of the temple. Because it was so heavy, he was only able to carry one half of the shell. The temple and everything else in it had been destroyed. Somehow he had found a donkey cart and had made his way to Sasebo. The shell was his only possession.
He bowed and presented it to my parents. He said he wanted to thank us for taking him in and saving his life. He would leave us the shell because he had no use for it now and it would be too difficult to carry with him. He was happy it had found the proper home. He said a prayer for us, bowed again, and left. My parents took the shell with them for their next twenty moves. When I got my first apartment in Washington, I persuaded them to give it to me. It is hanging in the living room of my house today. It is one of my most sacred possessions.
Again, only in retrospect do I see that my encounter with the Buddhist monk was a positive experience even though he was part of a formal religion. From the moment I met him I was drawn to the aura that surrounded him. Maybe his very foreignness and the light he seemed to give off drew me to him because in my mind he seemed more in the realm of magic than religion.
* * *
Shizuko was our nurse. She took care of Butchie and Donna and me. Emiko was number one, but we adored Shizuko-san. She was young, in her twenties but very wise for her age. She was kind and gentle and loving. She spoke Japanese to us. She also taught us all the customs. She taught Donna and me how to dress up like geishas. She got us little kimonos, pinks and reds with cherry blossoms, and obis and zoris (traditional Japanese sandals made of cloth and straw) and getas (flip-flops attached to an elevated wooden base). She made us up with white faces and little bow mouths. She showed us how to do tea ceremonies and flower arranging and how to bow. She taught us Japanese nursery rhymes and songs that I remember transliterally as: “Den den mushi mushi” and “Ame ame fude fude.” The translation of the latter had to do with a rainy day and a little girl knowing her mother would come with an umbrella. I can still sing the “Rainy Day” song, but I’m not sure anyone would recognize it.
&n
bsp; One day Emiko-san came to us with a very sad face. She was sorry to tell us but Shizuko had become very sick and had to go to the hospital. She didn’t tell us what was wrong with her. Nothing was the same again. It was as if a light had gone out of our lives. Donna and I begged our parents to let us visit her. One day they took us with Emiko to the hospital, where Shizuko was in the cancer ward, with only weeks to live. The place was horrible. It looked like a primitive barracks with one long dark room, concrete floors, and a bare lightbulb or two in the ceiling. There were rows of metal beds with patients in various stages of dying, many of them moaning or even crying out in pain.
Shizuko was at the end of the room, so we had to walk past everyone to get to her. She looked emaciated, and her eyes were sunken into the hollows of her cheeks. Her skin was ashen. However, the most horrifying thing was that she had small burn scars all over her body, including her face. When we tried to hug her, she flinched in pain. She could barely talk.
“Shizuko-san,” I asked her, “what are those burns all over your body?” Emiko was translating.
“They are brands,” she said.
“What do you mean?” She explained that because they had no anesthetics at the hospital, they would take a small branding iron and brand the patients with the red-hot metal to take their minds away from the unbearable pain of the cancer. Shizuko nodded to the branding iron sitting on her bedside table. I wasn’t sure if she was welcoming it or dreading it. She was clearly in pain and exhausted.
Emiko said we should go. We had only visited for a few minutes, but I couldn’t wait to leave. I knew there was nothing I could do for her. I couldn’t even hug her good-bye. We all cried on the way home. Mercifully, Shizuko died a few weeks later. When I found out she had died, I thought again about Polly and wondered why Emiko’s gods had saved my doll and not her.
* * *
Kyoto is one of the most sacred cities in Japan. It is a destination not just for Japanese, but for seekers from around the world. With its many temples and Shinto shrines dotting the landscape, the city’s serenity beckons those in need. Kyoto looks like a storybook, particularly in the spring with clouds of cherry trees bursting with blooms, petals raining down in the breeze, shaved-head monks in dark robes with saffron shawls, and beautiful women in face paint and pastel kimonos strolling the temple grounds, their faces somewhat hidden by twirling parasols. The fall is breathtaking as well, the flaming maple leaves as ubiquitous as the pale-pink blossoms in spring. Arching temple bridges reach from one side of a pond to another, ducks calmly gliding underneath them. Every scene is a vision of a Japanese screen or scroll, inked out by the artists or gilded with a fine hand.
We lived in Kyoto for a year after Sasebo. Emiko-san, her daughter, Mariko-chan, and Teichi-san, our houseboy, came with us. We were very happy in Kyoto. I was totally culturally in sync in a way my friends were not. This was my place. I belonged. I felt Japanese. There’s a phrase I learned much later—genius loci, or the spirit of a place—that comes to mind now as I think about my ease in Kyoto and my love for the city. I was overcome by its peacefulness, intoxicated by its fragrances, its colors, its essence.
On Sundays my parents took us to the Imperial Palace Hotel for lunch, our greatest treat of the week. The dining room was extremely elegant with crisp white tablecloths and other guests whispering to each other over champagne cocktails. After lunch we would take our dinner rolls, carefully hidden in our napkins, and go outside to the koi pond in the immaculate Japanese garden to feed the bright orange tubular fish, puckering their lips in and out, waiting for their turn as though they were about to kiss you. For some reason, our little ritual of tearing off tiny bits of bread and throwing them to our favorites seemed like making wishes. “Hi, precious fishie. I wish my front teeth would grow in.” It wasn’t just wishes that I was making. It was prayers I was praying, even if I didn’t realize it. The fish were magic. They had special powers, I just knew it. We didn’t go to church in Kyoto; we went to the Imperial Hotel pond. That was our religious experience on those special Sundays.
My front teeth did grow in soon afterward. Gorgeous new pearly white, if a little big for my face, front teeth. I no longer looked like a baby or a toothless old lady. It was a short time before we were to leave Kyoto that I was riding my bike down the steep hill in front of my house when Donna, not looking, ran out in front of me. I swerved to avoid hitting her and went headfirst over the handlebars and landed right on my face.
It wasn’t until I had regained consciousness, with my mother holding my blood-soaked head, that I realized I had knocked out both of my beautiful new teeth plus a third one next to them. I was rushed to the dentist, cleaned off, and told I had to wait until the swelling went down and my gums had healed. It was then that the most rudimentary plastic caps were placed on what remained of three of my front teeth. They were so ill-fitting that I looked like a freak and lisped when I talked. Even worse, they were a hideous luminescent green and glowed in the dark. My humiliation was complete. I didn’t smile at night for years.
The weekend before we left for Tokyo—where we were going to live for another year—we went back to the Imperial Palace Hotel for lunch. I was still having trouble eating properly, trying to adjust to this new atrocity in my mouth. After lunch we took our rolls and ran out to the pond to feed the fish. But as I stepped up to the edge and spied what I used to think of as lovely creatures swirling around in seaweed, all I could see were huge orange monsters. They weren’t my friends at all. I had wished/prayed for new teeth and I got them, but then they were taken away. It was the first time I had known betrayal. I hated those fish, and I knew I would never believe in them again.
* * *
Daddy went to work for General MacArthur in Tokyo, and we had a big house in the Yoyogi district. Again we had our household staff, now family, with us. Donna and I were enrolled in the Yoyogi school for the fall when Daddy got his orders to go to Korea. He was to be the commanding officer of the Seventeenth Infantry Regiment, which was on the front lines between North and South Korea. It was 1950. I had just had my ninth birthday. The war had heated up, and Tokyo was a battle town. Soldiers in uniform and fatigues were everywhere. U.S. Army trucks rumbled down streets, and helicopters whirred overhead. There was a sense of urgency, anticipation, and, as always with war, a sense of excitement in the air.
General MacArthur had not wanted my father to go and had tried to persuade him that it would be better for his career to stay at command headquarters in Tokyo. But my father was a warrior through and through. There was nothing that could keep him away from the field or the front. He couldn’t wait. I had never seen him so energized. My mother was nervous, but there was an air of resignation about her. She had been through the drill before.
I was a voracious reader by then. The first thing I grabbed each morning at the breakfast table was the Stars and Stripes newspaper. It was nothing but a litany of killing and wounding and overtaking towns, as well as artillery and troop movements; and it seemed that the Seventeenth Infantry Regiment was always in the news, pressing the enemy at every turn. I was traumatized. I worshipped my father. He had managed to survive one war. I was worried that he would never survive another. I knew there was no use praying for him.
I began to get terrible stomachaches, severe enough that I would double over with pain. I had a burning sensation in my gut that wouldn’t go away. I fought back nausea constantly. I couldn’t swallow. I didn’t eat. I became weak. My mother was frantic.
The day my father was to leave I couldn’t get out of bed. He came into my bedroom. The curtains were drawn; it was exceptionally hot at the end of August. I was sweating through my nightgown. He put on an encouraging face and urged me to try to eat something, just for him. He hugged me. I clung to him and started to cry.
“Please, Daddy, please don’t go.” He pulled away.
“It’s my duty, Sal,” he said.
He turned and walked to the door where my mother was waiting. They whispered somet
hing urgently. I could hear her muffled sobs. Then he was gone.
A week later I was in the pediatric ward at the U.S. Army’s General Hospital in Tokyo. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything other than water in over two weeks. I was so weak I couldn’t stand, and I was exhausted from the stomach pain. The nurses put me on an IV. My mother spoke with the officer in charge of the ward. He examined me. They did x-rays and blood tests and found nothing wrong. He said he thought it would only be a few days and then I’d be fine. Mother didn’t want to leave me, but there was no place for her to stay. It was an open ward with beds, little cots and cribs, crying babies, and moaning children. I was scared but too sick to do anything but lie there. She stroked my forehead with her beautiful hands, looked lovingly at me, kissed my cheek, and gave me a huge hug. “I love you, darlin’,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I didn’t see her again for months. The major in charge of the pediatric ward had instituted a rule that no parents would be allowed to visit their children unless they were dying. The hospital was swamped with wounded soldiers coming in from Korea and they were very short-staffed. The reasoning was that when the parents came to see their children and then left after visiting hours, the place would erupt in chaos. Children screamed and cried, and it was too much for the few nurses to handle.
The major reasoned that if the parents never came, the children would remain calm and manageable. Naturally, the parents obeyed. This was, after all, the military.
The parents obeyed except for my mother. She joined the Gray Ladies, a volunteer auxiliary nursing group. They were there to help the overwhelmed staff. She put on her uniform and came to the hospital every day. The first day she made a beeline for the children’s ward. I was lying in bed and I could hear her heels clicking on the linoleum floor as she approached the ward. I recognized her step. Tap, tap, tap. I thought I would expire with joy. I managed to sit up and stare at the door with anticipation. I thought I could smell her perfume, Sortilège, always my favorite. (Years later, I learned that the name also means “sorcery.” Somehow that came as no surprise.) But the major was one step ahead. He saw her and barred the door. I could hear her pleading, begging to be let in. He was telling her it wouldn’t be fair to the other children and that he couldn’t break the rules. A rule was a rule.