The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  When the sounds of the jinrikisha’s wheels and its runner’s sandaled feet return in the late afternoon, I greet you at the front door, and the maid out of habit begins to heat the water for your bath. You smile, kiss me on both cheeks, and ask whether any letters or packages have arrived that day from America.

  Yakumo, is this your way of asking for your Elizabeth?

  Her correspondence, wearing their “Mrs. Wetmore” disguise, waits for you in your writing room, where you sit at your high desk, the right side of your face bent toward its surface, your eye nearly touching the paper and ink, until the light of the day begins to fade. I light the oil lamp. The tabletop hibachi for your pipe I leave cold because I long to hear the Pa-wo! Pa-wo! of the shell.

  When the family gathers at the table for the evening meal, I see you walking into the room last. I still wait for you to begin. There are nights, though, when you forget about your hunger and your family’s, and I do not catch sight of you again until the moment before I turn down the light.

  Pardon me for being the first to sleep, your drowsy voice tickles the ear.

  I hear you, Yakumo.

  Every night.

  “Pardon me for being the first to sleep” were my words. I had spoken them to you since the birdcage in Matsue, since before you understood their meaning, since before I meant them.

  You never were the first, Yakumo.

  Until now.

  I close these eyes and I join you in the dream world where grief slips below the horizon, replaced by the rising moon of memory, and we are in Matsue again with the bush warbler and his song.

  That little fellow and Yao were such a source of comfort to me during those early days. We three took to one another immediately, but the bush warbler had fallen truly for the maid Yao. He sang to her and only her whenever she was in his line of sight. Despite your distaste for Tsune, you were tempted to keep the arrangement with the inn so that Yao could keep the bush warbler and me company.

  I showed you in one hand the amount that you paid to Tsune and in the other what you could pay directly to Yao. It was easy to see who was overpaid and who did the bulk of the work.

  When you agreed with my judgment, I knew that you intended it as a gesture of affection, Yakumo. With Yao as your new live-in maid, there would be, between us, a different arrangement in place. I took your decision, however, as the beginning of trust. Trust and affection were of unequal weight, and I preferred trust, as it had to be earned. Affection could be pity or a purchaser’s remorse in disguise.

  Within the close quarters of your birdcage, I could not hide these hands, coarsened by their years at the loom. Were you sparing them household work because you were sparing yourself? Did you think that the hands of a common laborer would disappear and those of a highborn woman would take their place again? Affection would have only compounded such doubts. Trust did not have to ask such questions of shame.

  I knew that Tsune would attempt to make a fuss or pretend that she did not understand, if one of your students was tasked with letting her know. As for Nishida-san’s assistance with a household matter, I was not yet trustworthy in the eyes of the head teacher, and therefore he was not yet trustworthy in mine. The New Foreign Teacher’s change of heart, coming from this mouth, left Tsune with little recourse except to gossip about it to the innkeepers, shop owners, jinrikisha men, and maids of Matsue, who together did a better job disseminating information than the city’s newspapers.

  That rashamen is already making changes!

  That rashamen swooped in like a bird of prey, and the rest of us lost our shares!

  That rashamen is Matsue’s shame!

  “Rashamen” soon followed me like a hungry dog whenever I left the birdcage to visit with foster Mother, leaving banknotes for her and for Mother tucked inside her sleeve each time.

  At least I am not a hungry dog! declared the straight back.

  Foster Mother is not a hungry dog! added the silk of another new kimono.

  Nor is Mother! affirmed the freshly dressed oval of hair.

  After Yao, the next to join the birdcage was Hinoko, the first of the felines to belong to the house of Koizumi. With spring still days away, the pavilion’s veranda was a chilly place to take in the sunset, but the panels of persimmon- and wisteria-colored silks that draped the river and the lake at that brief moment of the day soothed and solaced me. As the sun began its descent, the winds carried with them the sounds of whimpering and crying. A baby, I thought. Then the winds brought shouts of “Throw it in! Throw it in!” that grew into a determined chant. I ran toward those voices and down to the nearby shores of the river, where I saw one of the gardener’s sons holding a kitten, squirming and drenched, by its long tail. The boy was dipping the little creature into the Ōhashi and pulling it out again. I had seen this boy, no more than eight years of age, working alongside his Father in the merchant Orihara’s gardens. The boy’s face—his lips now pulled back to show his teeth and his brows pushed together into one—made him unrecognizable as a human child. I shouted at him to give me the animal. The others ran off, and the gardener’s son did as he was told.

  When you returned to the pavilion that evening, you found a ball of black fluff, sleeping near the bush warbler’s cage. The story of Hinoko—I had named her for the gold sparks in her eyes—then began. I was the storyteller and you the listener, as were our roles in the years to come.

  Our cohabitation, three months by then, had resulted in a short list of words that could be exchanged without having to consult the pages of the Dictionary. These words suggested an air of having grown old together, a vocabulary winnowed by the passage of years. They also lent a sense of amity. I was loath to disturb that fiction with the introduction of words such as “anger” and “fear” or “helpless” and “weak,” but those were precisely the ones that I would need in order to tell you the story of Hinoko.

  Your eye opened wide, your face went pale, and you paced back and forth, uttering exhortations that I had not heard from you before. Your anger at the gardener’s son and his cohorts was clear. So was the pity that you felt for the defenseless Hinoko. I would see that outrage and injury emerge from you again. The plight of weaker beings, animal or human, always wounded you so, Yakumo.

  Once the story was finished, you went to Hinoko and cradled her in the crook of your arm, and you wept.

  Yakumo, I had never seen a man cry.

  Hinoko began to wake, and she licked your hands with her sleepy tongue. Her long tail, the reason for her torment as it was thought to bring with it misfortune, caressed your shirtfront and sleeves.

  Yao had asked in the merchant Orihara’s kitchen for an abalone shell to use as a feeding bowl for Hinoko. When you placed her onto the tatami again, she headed toward the shell and its slick of rice porridge. Hinoko was a smudge of ink as she lapped up the remainder of her meal. You returned to the storyteller’s side, and you reached for her hands and held them.

  We stood that way until Hinoko was sated.

  Yakumo, I was beginning to understand that the hands—with kisses as if they were lips, with caresses as if they were cheeks, with intertwined fingers, as if they were limbs—were where you displayed the intentions of your body and then your heart. I did not pull the storyteller’s hands away from yours. That night was the beginning of trust but not the beginning of affection, as you would have preferred.

  I took care of your needs then, Yakumo, but I could not in truth claim to care. I do not mean to wound you, but we must see the past for what it was, a clear cold night.

  Once the matter of the sleeping arrangements was agreed to, I ordered new bedding quilts and four padded kimonos for you. It was much too cold to wash and properly dry the ones that I had found moldering on the second floor of the birdcage. Foster Mother oversaw the work with the assistance of five other seamstresses. The new items were finished in a week’s time, allowing me to
leave more banknotes inside of her sleeve.

  Soon I made another change to the household. Herun-san was hungry. The Japanese meals that Tsune sent from the inn did not seem to fill you. You drank many cups of tea-colored liquid from a glass bottle, which I later learned was whiskey, in order to make up for the lack. I had heard about Kamata Saiji’s Occidental restaurant and that his kitchen was one of the few in Matsue that boasted an “oven.” The prefectural Governor’s kitchen was said to have one as well. “Required for the baking of breads and for the roasting of beef and other meats,” Kamata would tell me.

  The first time I went to Kamata’s restaurant, it was not yet opened for the day, but after I told him my employer’s name he allowed me inside and directed me into the kitchen, where he was chopping onions.

  “Herun-san’s stomach sent you?” Kamata asked me, acknowledging his odd turn of phrase with a low laugh.

  “It did not send me,” I replied, “nor did Herun-san.”

  “Apologies. I heard that he had been ill. I thought he would want some Occidental fare to get him well again.”

  “Do you think it will help?” I asked, relieved to hear my own thoughts coming from the cook’s mouth.

  “Of course, of course!” Kamata replied. “Herun-san is always happiest dining here.”

  “He dines here often?”

  “Even you are surprised? I would have thought . . .”

  “I have only started to work for him,” I said.

  “Right, yes,” he said. “Well, we all have secret things that we like to eat, yes?”

  “Is your food a secret?”

  “You did not know. The landlady at the Tomitaya does not know. If I were a betting man, I would say that even that head teacher friend of his does not know that Herun-san eats here regularly.”

  “But he prefers Japanese fare,” I insisted.

  “Yes, yes, but that is all research and study to him,” Kamata explained, “and after the newspapers made such a fuss over his ‘commendable preference’ for Japanese food, he had to maintain the appearance of eating it.”

  When I heard that Kamata was a man from Ōsaka, I was not inclined to trust him, but in that open port city he said that he had learned how to cook in the British style. “From men who were not born in Britain but in a country called India,” Kamata said. “Those men,” he assured me, “were the very best cooks of British fare.”

  “You cook only in the British style?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Herun-san is from America. The newspapers wrote that his rail journey to the Abyssinia began there,” I said, certain that I had caught Kamata in a lie.

  “Herun-san is a British national. His Father is from Ireland, you know.”

  “No, I do not know.”

  “Ah, well, you can tell by the way that he speaks the English language. It sounds like he is singing, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Then you will have to take my word for it.”

  “I will,” I replied.

  “Roast fowls, roast beefs, beefsteaks, meat pies, Lincolnshire or Manchester sausages, breads—Herun-san almost wept when he saw the cottage loaves that I bake—and, of course, those ‘puddings’ that the British end their meals with, not to be confused with the savory ‘puddings’ made with blood that begin their mornings,” Kamata said, listing his menu for me.

  “Could you send a selection over to the Orihara’s garden pavilion this evening?” I asked, as I had no knowledge of which items to choose.

  “Of course, of course. Let me save you a walk over here tomorrow. The order will continue for the rest of the week, unless I hear from you otherwise,” Kamata said, as he showed me out of his kitchen.

  “I have not paid you,” I said.

  “I will get it from Herun-san the next time I see him,” Kamata replied. “I know he will back here soon.”

  When you saw the lacquer boxes from Kamata, along with the three glass bottles of “Bass ales,” suggested by the cook as the usual accompaniment of the British table, you behaved as if they did not appeal. You ate with your usual briskness the evening meal from the Tomitaya, and then you looked up at me and smiled, like a child asking for more. You nodded toward the offerings from Kamata, which I then served to you. He had the foresight to include Western utensils for your use and a set for me as well, which was unnecessary, as you finished everything on your own, except for a thick slice of bread that you set aside for your morning tea, which told me that Kamata should supplement that meal as well.

  Months later when we, along with Yao, the bush warbler, and Hinoko, moved into the house in the shadows of Matsue Castle, which had a proper kitchen, separate and away from the main house, I sent Yao to Kamata to learn some of the basic preparations, which she in turn shared with foster Mother. He taught Yao how to brew your morning coffee and the British way of tea, how to prepare soft eggs and toasts, and how to pan-fry beefsteaks. Everything else, Kamata’s oven would continue to provide. He was right about your fondness for those cottage loaves, Yakumo. You would close your eye when you bit into a thick slice of that bread, as if otherwise tears would fall.

  “Herun-san has put on weight?” Kamata asked me, about a month into his arrangement with the household. He then laughed low as if he already knew.

  “How would I know?” I asked.

  “I mean on his face. You can see weight gain on a man’s face, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Yes, he has,” I replied. “A lot of weight,” I admitted, turning my back to him.

  Kamata must have known many rashamen in Ōsaka. His manners toward me were informal from the beginning, speaking to me as if I were a younger sister or a longtime friend. This immediate familiarity only deepened my disgrace, Yakumo.

  Mother had heard about my changed circumstances, and when she saw them for herself, she had no words for me. Her silence told me what I needed to know. Upon the dissolution of the marriage, my name had been returned to the Koizumi family registry. She regretted that now.

  The story of Mother took many nights to tell you, Yakumo.

  June had just begun, and the hydrangeas in the gardens of the house in the shadows of Matsue Castle were weeks away from their full-clustered blooms. The house’s owner had been among the last of the former samurai in the city to occupy his own estate. I had been inquiring about its availability through foster Mother for months. My watch over the house was, perhaps, indecent. When would the animal, weakened by hunger, abandon its lair? Eventually, they all did, and then other animals found their way in. The fourteen ample rooms, the three gardens, and the adjacent wooded hills full of birdsongs, I knew, would please you.

  I was planning ahead, Yakumo, knowing that you could not endure another winter by the river and the lake. I did not know that we would not have another winter in Matsue.

  Seated on the veranda, deep underneath the eaves of that house, the gardens before us lit by fireflies and the full moon, I began.

  Say it plain, you requested. The Dictionary did not allow for subtlety was what you meant.

  After the story of Hinoko, there had been a string of others. At first, repetition was a necessity because the Dictionary, its entries each requiring pause and consideration, impeded and halted the telling. By the time I reached the end of a story, you had forgotten the beginning. Then repetition became a desired unfolding, as you slowed and directed the telling to suit your needs: “Tell me again what the samurai said to the blind musician. Tell me again what the grandmother said when she saw the blood.” The key, I had learned, was to tell you the same story upon each repetition but to use fewer and fewer words. Implied, redundant, irrelevant—whatever the reason may be— there was always a word that could be thrown back into the sea. To say it plain was to find a pearl within that sea.

  The pearl, that night, was Mother. I needed yo
u to see her, Yakumo.

  You had heard from your fellow teachers of the brave deeds of the men of the house of Shiomi, but none of them had told you about Shiomi Chie. A woman’s story, they dismissed. Gossip not worth their breath, they thought.

  Mother survived two husbands, I began.

  On the cusp of thirteen, she was betrothed to the first son of a samurai house whose family name was no longer said aloud now. When her husband failed to appear in their sleeping chamber on their first night of matrimony, she fell asleep waiting for him. She awoke to the muffled sounds of her new husband and a young maid, who had only hours before swept clean the very courtyard where they now both lay, publicly declaring their love. The blood was fresh and bright red, pouring from her neck and his stomach. Shiomi Chie looked down at her husband’s face and then at the maid’s. So this is love, she thought. She then alerted the guards at the front gate that they had slept through a murder-suicide, and she returned to the sleeping chamber to await her widow’s fate.

  Soon the samurai house was a river of tears, mostly shed by the maids who had long known of the love affair between the young Master and Yuki. Shiomi Chie shed no tears. She showed humility and deference toward her deceased husband’s family, careful never to utter his name or his deeds in the days to come. The maid’s own name was erased from the story even before her body grew cold. By morning, the news of the lovers’ deaths had swept through Matsue, and Shiomi Chie was being praised in the houses in the shadows of Matsue Castle as a female worthy of the Shiomi name. Among the maids in these same houses, Shiomi Chie became known as the “Ice Bride.” Among the maids in the house of her deceased husband, she was known as the “Blood Bride.”

  You gasped when you heard these words, Yakumo.

  You asked me to say them again. Then you asked if they were all true.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Ah, even better!” you declared, slapping your knees.

  The story of Hinoko had brought you to tears, Yakumo, but the story of Mother made your eye shine, brighter than the moon that night.