You picked up a book from atop one of the stacks. You opened it and ran a finger down its Japanese title. On the facing page was its title in the English language, I presumed. You wanted me to read the former aloud to you, to test Tsune’s veracity and mine.
“A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, fourth edition,” I complied. “By Ja Se . . . He . . . bun,” I continued, hesitating over the author’s foreign name, transcribed there in katakana characters.
“J. C. Hepburn,” you corrected, as you raised the glass up to your right eye again.
I noted a change. Flecks of gold were now floating inside a ring of moss, at its center a chestnut freed from its burr.
We stood this way for what must have been a long while, as the bush warbler sang in his cage.
Tsune became impatient and began to point at you and pull at a sleeve of the formal kimono.
When foster Mother offered to lend it to me, I had hesitated.
“He is expecting a samurai’s daughter,” foster Mother insisted.
“He will notice the shorter sleeves,” I objected, pulling at their fabric, wanting them to stretch to a maiden kimono’s more generous length.
“He is not looking for a bride,” foster Mother said.
“He will know.”
“That woman from the inn already knows,” foster Mother said.
“Tsune knows?”
“Yes, she knows. Oman must have told her,” foster Mother replied. “That woman summoned me to the inn to inquire about the circumstances. I told her the truth.”
“What is the truth?”
“Foster Father regrets his decision,” foster Mother answered. “Foster Grandfather did not approve from the start. We should have listened. Inaba Province people are untrustworthy, he had warned us about Maeda Tameji.”
“Please do not say his name.”
“The second son of the former samurai house of Maeda, from Inaba Province, the letter from the go-between had stated; is willing to be adopted into the house of Inagaki, upon marriage.”
“I remember the letter, foster Mother.”
“We thought that our prayers had been answered,” she said. “A male heir, the continuity of the house of Inagaki, and you as our daughter in name as well as in heart. Also, you were already nineteen then,” she added, making a case for the bridegroom all over again.
“I remember the prayers, foster Mother.”
“The go-between’s letter confirmed the hopeful outcome of your visit to the Yaegaki Shrine,” she continued.
“I remember the prophecy, foster Mother.”
“Your paper and coin had floated to the farthest end of the shrine’s Mirror Pond. A newt had touched it, nudging it along. Marriage, we rejoiced, though it would be to someone from afar, we knew.”
“The prophecy came true,” I said.
“The Mirror Pond never lies,” foster Mother agreed.
“It omits though.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged.
“Less than a year.”
“Less than a year,” foster Mother repeated.
“Tsune knows about the dissolution?” I asked.
“I informed her that your name was removed from the Inagaki family registry and returned to the house of Koizumi, once your husband had disappeared,” she replied.
“He did not disappear, foster Mother. He went to Ōsaka.”
“May he die in Ōsaka then.”
“Koizumi Setsu?” you asked, ignoring Tsune’s flailing gestures and sleeve tugging.
“Koizumi Setsu,” I confirmed.
You lowered the handheld glass.
Tsune continued to point and jab, but you turned your attention to the Dictionary again. You sat down on the zabuton and leafed through its pages. Then you pointed to an entry, reading the English word aloud to me, “agree.”
I kneeled beside you on the tatami, and I read the Japanese that followed aloud to you, “agree.”
You located two more entries, “begin” and “today.” I echoed their counterparts to you, first as a question and then as a statement.
By now, even Tsune understood that an arrangement was being reached between Lafcadio Hearn and Koizumi Setsu.
Wanting to ensure her finder’s fee, Tsune intervened. She again pointed at you and then at me. She moved her legs up and down, as if she were walking. She turned her back to you, as if she were departing. She turned toward you again and showed you the cupped palms of her hands, two empty bowls. “The bill,” she said, first in Japanese and then what must have been its English twin.
Yakumo, you placed in her hands two banknotes.
Tsune closed her fingers around them, the claws of a crab snapping.
You shook your head.
She shook her head, feigning forgetfulness, and then handed one of the banknotes to me.
The weight of a month of rice was in those hands, Yakumo.
“Already know what to do, I see,” Tsune spat out, before she departed.
You returned to the kotatsu and lost your legs underneath its quilt covering. You returned to the pages of the Dictionary, compiling a list of words. The task absorbed your attention.
The bush warbler was no longer singing. The warmth of the pavilion had lulled him to sleep. His bamboo perch swung slowly back and forth.
I searched the room again for a zabuton, where I could kneel until your attention turned my way again.
You are not a guest here, Setsu, I reminded myself.
I begged your pardon.
You did not look up from your writing.
I climbed the polished wooden steps that led to the second floor of the pavilion, and I found there a room stale with sleep and unwashed clothing. I slid open a shōji window and the wooden shutters, and I looked out at Lake Shinji and the Ōhashi River, as if for the first time. Snowflakes were descending in large unfamiliar shapes, the feathers of some lost bird. The hills and the mountains bordering the lake had receded into the clouds. The Ōhashi Bridge was barely visible in the mid-distance. The winds of Matsue were the only familiar presence, as they picked up and rushed into the room, shaking the wood and rattling the paper.
I closed the shōji window and looked behind me.
A hibachi, its maw filled with ash, sat cold in the center of the room. I could see my breath when I exhaled, same as within the house of Inagaki all winter long. In a corner alcove, the bedding quilts were folded up for the day, along with three zabuton stacked one on top of the other.
I could place those zabuton together and sleep on them tonight, I told myself. I could bring the bush warbler’s cage here to keep me company. Herun-san should not be sleeping up here. No wonder he has been ill for so long. How could Oman and Onobu have been so careless? I will need assistance bringing his bedding quilts downstairs tonight. I will find “carry” in that Dictionary. “Help” will be needed as well.
I too was making a list, Yakumo. My words were utilitarian. Yours had other aims.
At the noon hour, Onobu and Yao, another of the inn’s young maids who from this day forward came in lieu of Oman, arrived at the garden pavilion with the lacquered boxes containing your midday meal along with a parcel of clothing and foodstuff that foster Mother had gathered for me. Yakumo, as you had already paid Tsune until the end of the month, she saw no need to change the maids’ routine or to reimburse you, which confirmed for me that she profited handsomely from the New Foreign Teacher.
While Onobu set up the trays and brewed the tea, I returned to the second floor, and with Yao’s help I took off foster Mother’s formal kimono, exchanging it for an everyday one, tying up its sleeves in preparation for the day’s chores.
Foster Mother included in the parcel a mirror and an ivory comb, which Father and Mother had given to me long ago. On the seventh day after my birth, these items had accompanie
d me to the house of Inagaki along with a wet nurse, whose feet did not touch the snowy ground because she and I were carried there in a covered palanquin. In the lean years that would follow, I had offered to sell the comb and the mirror, but foster Mother had refused. I knew, eventually, that she and I would have to sell whatever was of worth that remained.
I sent the formal kimono back to foster Mother along with the banknote tucked inside one of the sleeves. More I hoped would soon follow.
That was the beginning of the story, Yakumo.
It was not the one that I had sent to your Elizabeth for her book.
You and I both know that the beginning is not the pearl. It is the grain of sand.
I would have never presumed, Yakumo, to tell your story to her or to any other stranger, but for Mr. McDonald.
Within days of your departure, he had cablegrammed your publishers asking for a full accounting of your royalties and copyrights. He reviewed your bank accounts here in Tokyo on my behalf. He made the train trip between Yokohama and Tokyo several times in the course of the following month, bringing with him toys and imported sweets for the children every time. His assessment at the end was clear. New sources of income have to be found for the house of Koizumi.
Mr. McDonald was firm in his resolve and urgency. He said that I was “only” thirty-six years old. “Not an old woman,” he insisted, in his decorous Japanese. The Koizumi children will require financial support for years to come, he said.
Mr. McDonald devised a plan, and a biography would be one of these new income sources. He said that interest in your life and your books was high, as your obituary had appeared in newspapers throughout America and England. A “Mrs. Wetmore” would write the biography, but she would need my recollections of your years in Japan. “Mrs. Wetmore is a woman of means now and does not need or want the royalties,” Mr. McDonald said. “They will be assigned to you, Mrs. Koizumi.” The proceeds, he assured me, would allow the family to remain in this house.
When Mrs. Wetmore was first named, I did not know that she was a woman of means now. I did not know anything about her, until I remembered that three years before your passing, Yakumo, you had dedicated a book to a “Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore.” When I learned that she would publish your biography under her maiden name, “Elizabeth Bisland,” I understood that I had known of her all along.
Elizabeth is hungry.
Elizabeth is angry.
Elizabeth has my hat.
Kazuo’s notebooks were full of Elizabeths. You used her name in the daily English-language lessons that you gave to your eldest son. How I envied him for these lessons with Papa. You had stopped teaching me the English language before he came into the world. Herun-san’s language, as you called it, served us well enough, you thought.
The Japanese words that you acquired never found their rightful order. They were, as you had been on that winter morning in Matsue, addled seeming. Often, they were unrecognizable because you had disguised them with your own meanings, obscure and strange.
“Herun-san speaks Japanese like a poet,” foster Grandfather used to say to me. “A drunk one,” he would add. If foster Grandfather had too much sake, he would be even more descriptive. “A drunk lady poet,” he would say, mimicking your words in a high voice, as they, admittedly, were echoes of my own.
There are Japanese words that only women say, Yakumo. Your fellow teachers must have informed you of this when you were in the company of the geisha and maiko who entertained after the monthly poetry gatherings at the Tomitaya. Nishida-san must have shared with you the origin and function of this women’s speech, but, perhaps, the nuances of vocabulary became lost in the affairs of men and forgotten in the acts that followed.
Foster Mother knew that foster Grandfather was fond of you, but her lips pulled into a taut line whenever she heard him joking at your expense. “Herun-san can speak Japanese any way he pleases,” she would say to me in private. “A man who feeds both of your families can speak any way he pleases,” she reminded me, as though I could forget.
When we were no longer in Matsue, I understood that this poet whom you had become had yet another distinguishing trait. “A drunk lady poet from Izumo Province,” foster Grandfather could have said, though he never did because he was very proud of his Izumo dialect. I was not proud or partial to the speech of my region, but it was all that I knew, Yakumo.
A drunkard, a poet, a female, a rustic.
I was aware of what you became in Herun-san’s language. You never spoke it in front of your fellow teachers and students—Why forfeit the English language when you were the one who wielded it best?—but you freely bandied it in front of shopkeepers, jinrikisha men, steamship passengers, fishermen, farmers, and anyone else whose path crossed yours. You were as proud of Herun-san’s language as foster Grandfather was of his Izumo speech.
I would stand aside while you attempted to converse. Then, when all had failed, I would ask the question that you had intended but as if I were asking it of you. The listener would overhear, understand then the nature of your inquiry, and a conversation would begin anew with me as the interpreter.
Women’s speech, Yakumo, coming from this mouth was expected and could be understood. An Izumo dialect also could be understood and easily dismissed, especially once we were among the learned men in Tokyo, as a woman’s lack of education or, if the listener were feeling generous, as a regional charm.
The children, one by one, learned Herun-san’s language. I worried that they would speak it outside of the house, but the children understood, without being told, that it was a family language with no currency beyond the garden gate.
Yakumo, you will be pleased to know that the boys have taught Suzuko the meaning of “Tani-no-oto,” the earliest of entries in Herun-san’s language. She says it now whenever she sees the neighbor’s rotund cat squeezing through the bamboo grove.
I had accompanied you to a sumo tournament in Matsue, and the grand champion that season was named Tani-no-oto. You delighted in him and in the sound of his name. Days later, when you said his name to me, I corrected you, thinking that you were reaching for the Japanese word for azaleas, lotus flower, toad, or whatever else you were finding noteworthy in the gardens of the merchant Orihara that morning. You shook your head and repeated “Tani-no-oto!” as you gestured toward the edge of the koi pond. Then you mimicked a sumo’s wide-legged stance.
“Ah, that toad is Tani-no-oto! Yes, so are you,” I teased, which made you laugh out loud like a boy, not a man of forty years.
I could not deny that Herun-san’s language has its usefulness and its appeal, but later on, whenever I would look through Kazuo’s English-language notebooks—his handwriting more steady with each passing year—I wanted that language as well. Over time, I would learn to identify the individual letters but not their meanings once they were grouped. Within Kazuo’s notebooks—these letters joined as if they were formed by one length of thread—the “E,” a curving corseted thing raising itself high above the rest, was an oft-repeated sight.
Elizabeth is hungry?
Elizabeth is angry?
Elizabeth has your hat?
I know the answers now, Yakumo. There is no need to claim otherwise. “Elizabeth Bisland” was the name that was always on the tip of your tongue.
I remind myself that we are all capable of having two hearts. Even me, Yakumo. Perhaps you had even more. Late at night when the world is hushed, these hearts murmur in languages foreign and familiar. In the light of day, it is the heart nearest to yours that prevails. This is not a wife’s solace speaking. It is what keeps her upright and unbroken. Proximity, she knows, is her advantage.
A month after your departure, your Elizabeth in the guise of “Mrs. Wetmore” requested, via a cablegram from America, that I send her “Lafcadio’s Japanese years as soon as possible. By mid 1905 at latest. Biography must publish 1906. To ensure continued i
nterest.”
Mr. McDonald, seeing my distress as he translated her words, assured me that Mrs. Wetmore would only include brief excerpts by me, which she would choose with the utmost care and discretion, in her account of your life. “The weight of this project would be on her shoulders,” he said.
Americans mourn differently, I told myself. They send disjointed missives, the speed of their arrival taking precedence over their content. They plan for a future without the deceased. They bustle with the deeds of the living.
I am Japanese.
I held on to your story, Yakumo, until I could take a breath again for the both of us. To tell another’s story is to bring him to life, and you, Husband, are still here. Every day, you and grief rise in me with the sun:
I see you in the garden of this house, greeting the vein-blue morning glories. When the autumn without you arrives, these stalwarts are still clinging to the garden fence, their leaves yellowing, their flowers growing smaller with each cool day. You prefer them best at this time of the year. Strong, you call them. Brave, you name the last of their blooms.
When the toasts and eggs are set out for the boys, I see you at the table, half in a dream, adding salt to your coffee, laughing aloud at yourself when the children laugh.
The household’s jinrikisha man, older than you but not by many years, departed the same day you did, as if fulfilling a feudal pact between retainer and master, and yet the two of you still leave from the garden gate on your teaching days, you in a Western suit and your mushroom hat, your books and papers wrapped by these hands in a blue-and-white furoshiki, your midday meal wrapped by the maid’s. You despise the formal costume of your country and your discomfort when wearing it shows. The university faculty and students have expectations, I remind you, as I button the white shirt’s stiff, binding collar. They want a Western professor, not a Tani-no-oto Japanese, I tease, as I tie the laces of the leather shoes that, you complain, confine and pinch your feet.
Lafcadio Hearn, reporting for duty! is your usual rejoinder, as you salute me as if I were an admiral issuing commands.
The Sweetest Fruits Page 18