The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

At the end of that June, an article appeared in the San’in Shimbun that detailed how the goodhearted and generous Lafcadio Hearn had rescued the birth mother of his rashamen from imminent eviction. The paper claimed that Mother received a monthly allowance from Herun-san when, in fact, it was more. It noted her hunger but not Third Brother’s and Youngest Brother’s, which also had to be fed. Ensconced with her sons in a newly rented house, modest but furnished once again with all the household items that Third Brother had sold off over the years, Mother refused my visits.

  Upon seeing the house of Koizumi identified in the newspaper as the birth family of a rashamen, Setsu at twenty-three left her body in a long curl of smoke, pulled up and into the sky. The Setsu who remained was unrooted and thus light on her feet. She had the sudden urge to travel. Like many travelers before her, she had lost a home and was in search of another.

  I followed you, Yakumo.

  First, I ventured only as far as Kitzuki. To escape the mid-July heat in Matsue, you and Nishida-san had secured rooms at Inaba-ya, a seaside inn facing the Inasa bay. You longed to see the Izumo Shrine again and looked forward to beginning and ending your days with a swim in the Sea of Japan.

  “I am half fish,” you declared, as I packed your traveling bag.

  “Your people were fishermen?” I asked.

  “No, military and medical.”

  “Your Mother was a healer?”

  “No, my Father was in the army and a doctor. My Mother was a ‘Shiomi Chie.’”

  You would later shorten this entry into Herun-san’s language to “Chie” to mean a woman of noble birth, beautiful, and brave. Her tragic end was implied.

  That was the course of the conversations back then. As with the paths in the merchant Orihara’s formal gardens, they were rarely in a straight line. You went in one direction, and I went in the other. Somewhere in between, we met.

  Mother survived you, Yakumo, by two years.

  She died in Ōsaka, the city of those who disappear. In her last month of life, she sent a letter in which she declared that she would leave this world with regrets and that I was one of them.

  Her regret, more precisely, was the life that I had with you, which began not in the birdcage in Matsue but in Kitzuki by the sea.

  A day after your arrival there, you had asked Nishida-san to write a letter to me. It requested that I travel to the inn as soon as possible. I recognized the head teacher’s handwriting, and for a brief moment I thought the letter was from him. His hand must have trembled, when you began, “One day without you and already it is too long.”

  I left for Kitzuki, catching the small steamship that had taken you and Nishida-san along the length of Lake Shinji. Disembarking at the village of Shōbara, I hired a jinrikisha, and I traced your steps. For hours, the long narrow path took me through rice paddies and frog songs. As the sun was poised to set, a torii appeared in the distance, and the jinrikisha man announced that we had reached Kitzuki. At the inn, the maid who answered the front door informed me that the foreigner was still in the sea. The maid was expecting me and without hesitation showed me upstairs to your room, informing me that the adjoining one was also for my use. I wondered what Nishida-san had said to prepare her. I had not asked about his whereabouts, as I had no expectation that he would want to greet me.

  Your clothes were in a wrinkled heap, Yakumo. Your money had spilled from its carrying pouch. There were handfuls of seashells gathered on the tenugui that I had given to you as a going-away gift. You had tucked that cotton cloth into your traveling bag without a word about how fitting its seigaiha pattern was for a seaside holiday. I had chosen those blue-and-white waves with some care, Yakumo. A sigh welled up inside of me. He is elsewhere already, I thought.

  From the windows of your room, I saw you walking toward the inn, lit by the lanterns lining its front path. I hurried downstairs to greet you. By the front door, the maid was already waiting with a yukata neatly folded in her hands. A routine is in place, I noted. Her skin is pale for someone living so near to the sea. Her body is no more than fifteen. She could be Oman’s twin, I thought, as this heart became a moth beating its drab, futile wings.

  When you caught sight of me, Yakumo, there was not a breath between your recognition and your elation. You sprinted toward me with the legs of a youth, not a man of forty-one. Your black hair was damp, and the cloth of your gray yukata stuck to the seawater on your body. You wrapped your arms around me and lifted me off the ground, as if offering me to the sky.

  I heard the maid sucking in the salt air, astonished by the open show of your affection.

  The moth flew away.

  The following week we became man and wife at the Izumo Shrine. Ōkuninushi, the Shintō god of marriage, was a witness. Nishida-san was the other.

  We had been together as man and woman, months before. A cloth had covered the bush warbler’s cage.

  The commitment to each other came later, its rites completed by the Kitzuki letter.

  The marriage ceremony came last.

  For your Elizabeth’s book, I had to reverse the order of those three acts. I did it for the dead and for the living, Yakumo. What good is the truth to your legacy, the children’s future, and for the present that I must now live without you?

  When the one-year anniversary of your passing had neared, the cablegrams began arriving again, breathless as before: “Mrs. Hearn, your contribution completed, I trust. Translation under way, I presume. Manuscript sent to my summer address posthaste.” Kazuo translated the words for me, his eleven-year-old’s voice reminding me that your biographer was impatient and waiting.

  Elizabeth is hungry!

  Elizabeth is angry!

  Elizabeth has my hat!

  I was determined to hold on to what was mine. I had no intention of sending anything to your Elizabeth. Foster Mother must have known, as she took me aside that night and showed me the household accounts, which she had been managing on her own. Almost a full year without your university professor salary, Yakumo, and there was not much left that this house could trim, except for the house itself.

  I resolved not to be a Chie, wasting away, taking the sons of Koizumi with me. And little Suzuko, how could I ever allow her to become me?

  But I still could not breathe for the two of us, Yakumo. Thus, when I began that first telling of your story, the ghost of you was here by my side, holding me by the hand.

  Minari Shigeyuki was the scribe. My handwriting has always been poor, and the thought of showing it to the translator would have added to my discomfort. Also, storytelling was what I knew; story writing was your domain. It soothed me to have a listener as attentive as you had been, Yakumo. Do you remember what you had said about this distant relative of mine when you first met him? You declared in feigned exasperation that I was related to everyone in Japan. Then you noted with admiration that Shigeyuki had the face of a Tokugawa samurai. That stern elongated face hid a nimble, refined intellect that surprised even you, Yakumo. You were pleased to offer the young scholar a room within this house, and he repaid you in kind with the research that he would conduct on your behalf. Fireflies in the poems of yore, you first requested of him. He found them everywhere in the ancient texts, yet he had never seen them before you. “Herun-sensei is a conjurer,” he had confided in me.

  Shigeyuki is still employed by the Institute for the Compilation of Historical Materials, Yakumo. He remains unmarried. He and I both know that he will remain so. A remnant of the old way, deviant and degenerate are what some of the Tokyo newspapers write about the practice of nanshoku these days. So many of the modern men of this city seem to agree. No wonder Shigeyuki prefers the archives.

  A man who must hide his heart can be trusted with your own, I told myself.

  Ochiai Teizaburō, your former student from Tokyo Imperial University, was the translator. He asked nothing by way of compensation. He vowed, Yakumo, that h
e too would do anything for Herun-sensei. He repeatedly apologized to me for any mistakes that he might have made, as he had completed the translation in such haste. I repeatedly apologized to him, as I was the sole cause of that haste. I had given him the pages of your story with only a month remaining before their English counterpart had to be in your Elizabeth’s hands.

  I had wanted to begin that first telling with the day of your final departure, but then I heard your advice, Yakumo—Leave the end for the end, Sweet Wife!—and I began with the introduction in Matsue instead. But soon I became lost in its timeline, revealing and indiscreet.

  Shigeyuki, who had been transcribing silently up until then, asked if he could interrupt the recitation of events. “Facts are akin to fish bones,” he said. “If what you want is to serve the flesh, then the bones can be discarded,” he suggested.

  A man who must hide his heart is also a skilled storyteller, Yakumo.

  I discarded the bones and served forth the following to your Elizabeth:

  In early January, 1891, the 24th year of Meiji, Lafcadio Hearn and Koizumi Setsu married in Matsue. Tsune had no role to play in the introduction and was made to disappear. Nishida Sentarō gallantly stepped in. I raised the house of Nishida from foot-soldier class to samurai, and I bestowed upon the head teacher a familial connection to the house of Shiomi, which facilitated the plausibility of his performance as a trusted go-between. The early days of silence within the birdcage and the Dictionary, our unsteady bridge, I mentioned only in passing. Instead, there was always Nishida-san, a friend to us both, to serve as interpreter. He was present for you, Yakumo, so this characterization was only half untrue.

  Elizabeth Bisland was no San’in Shimbun, and for this I was grateful. She had asked for my age at the time of the marriage, but she sought no explanation as to why I had been without a husband at the age of twenty-two. Thus, the first marriage was allowed to disappear entirely—it went to Ōsaka, as it were—from that first telling and then from the pages of your Elizabeth’s book. The San’in Shimbun would have asked more questions, Yakumo. They would have been wary of a fish with no bones.

  Elizabeth is American, I reminded myself, as I wrapped those pages—your story, translated, was already unrecognizable to me, Yakumo—for their journey overseas, backed by a thin piece of wood to keep them neat and crisp upon their arrival, as you had so often done.

  Yakumo, I know you are smiling. Sweet Wife! is what you are thinking. Is “sweet” the same as “simple” in Herun-san’s language, Yakumo?

  I know more about your Elizabeth now. The San’in Shimbun would have been honored to have her, a journalist of renown in the city of New York before she became Mrs. Wetmore. Like you, Elizabeth was a well-documented traveler.

  Kazuo, curious in recent years about his Father’s biographer, has read the book that Elizabeth Bisland wrote about her famed race around the world. He told me that she was twenty-eight years old at the time. Unmarried, I presumed. Though she lost the race—Is travel often a competition for Americans, Yakumo?—to another reporter named Nellie Bly, your Elizabeth beat you to these shores. Upon arriving in Yokohama in December of 1889, the 22nd year of Meiji, Elizabeth Bisland met there Paymaster Mitchell McDonald, U.S.N., who became her American friend in Yokohama before he was yours, Yakumo.

  How small this world is. How like a grain of sand you can become when the stories of that small world are kept from you. When they are eventually told, they are waves, Yakumo, sweeping your legs from under you.

  Mr. McDonald gifts the house of Koizumi a considerable sum of money every Christmas, Yakumo.

  Last year, it meant the difference between taking in boarders and not. The thought of dividing up this house keeps these eyes from closing at night. Mr. McDonald has a family of his own to care for, and I ask myself—and now I ask it of you—whether these gifts are, in truth, from Mrs. Wetmore, a woman of means now?

  The royalties from her biography had ebbed, and Mr. McDonald had suggested that it was my turn now. He said that a book published under my name would attract great interest with readers abroad and here. He proposed that I expand upon what I had already recounted for Mrs. Wetmore. Mr. McDonald already had a title in mind, Yakumo. He suggested the English word “reminiscences,” which Kazuo said was akin to “memories.”

  “What is the difference?” I asked Kazuo, and his reply showed him at fifteen to be very much your son.

  “Poets have reminiscences. Mothers have memories,” Kazuo declared.

  So, I began again, Yakumo, but this time without you.

  If your Elizabeth at twenty-eight could travel the world on her own, then Setsu at forty-one could tell a story without you, Husband. To equate the two acts may not be entirely sound, but so be it. That is what happens when you are the first to sleep. Those who remain awake are free to act and to act singly.

  Setsu is hungry.

  Setsu is angry.

  Setsu has your hat.

  With Shigeyuki again as my scribe, I returned to Matsue for the last days in the house in the shadows of the Castle:

  As the winds whipped through those rooms of wood and paper, rattling them like dried seedpods, you looked around you, shivered, and declared that you were happy to be departing for southern climes. I had never imagined a life on the island of Kyūshū and in the city of Kumamoto, as I had never imagined a husband named Lafcadio Hearn, but your destinations were now also mine.

  “Double the salary, Sweet Wife,” you had said. “Teaching hours will be longer but not by much.”

  “I see,” I replied.

  “You see? You mean ‘Good news!’” you corrected me.

  “Good news!” I echoed.

  “We will send for the house of Inagaki. You will not be lonely in Kumamoto City for long, Sweet Wife.”

  Yakumo, you did not offer to bring with us the three members of the house of Koizumi. Perhaps Nishida-san had spoken to you about the San’in Shimbun article and the disgrace that it had brought to my birth family’s name. Nishida-san might have advised you that while marriage between a British national and a Japanese national was not binding under the laws of either country, a wife in name would be better than a rashamen in public, given your position as a teacher and your reputation as a scholar and writer. That conversation might have prompted you both to depart for Kitzuki to consider your next steps, Yakumo. That conversation might have prompted you then to send for me.

  Do you remember, Yakumo, how Nishida-san had reddened when you asked him to interpret the word “honeymoon” for me? I thought he would run out of the inn and into the sea, when you insisted on explaining to me—which meant Nishida-san explaining to me—what the Western ritual of “honeymooning” entailed. By the end of that night, when even I drank sake, I laughed out loud when you raised your cup “To our honeymoon!” and we three said, “Kampai!”

  In Kitzuki at the shores of Inasa bay, Setsu at twenty-three heard, for the first time, the language of her birth offering the words of a man in love with her. When Nishida-san interpreted for you, it was his voice that I heard and his language that I understood.

  Maeda Tameji had spoken to Setsu at nineteen of hunger and other bodily needs. He forgot those words along with “family” and “honor” when he abandoned her and his other burdens for the city of Ōsaka. At night when sleep was absent, Setsu then counted the years still before her. White hair and silence were what she thought they would bring by way of companionship. In the dark, she resolved to accept that this body would never carry within it a second beating heart. Without husband and without children, a woman’s life was as quiet as a snowfall, she had been told. In the dark, she knew that the snow had begun. She lay there and knew that the snow would cover her in the end.

  When Setsu at twenty-two found herself in your birdcage and she understood there only the bush warbler’s song, she thought of it as the opposite of silence. She did not think of it as the
start of a new life though. She thought of it as what came after the end of one.

  Yakumo, with Nishida-san by your side, you were no longer a drunken poet, though sake had flowed freely into cup after cup. In Kitzuki, you were a poet whose recited words made the evening sky a swirl of starlight and the moon a flutter of wings.

  That night you and Nishida-san had argued briefly about a writer, a Frenchman whose books you admired and he did not. I asked what he had written, and you gave me a long explanation that Nishida-san then condensed into “a novel about a French naval officer and a Japanese woman named Chrysanthemum.”

  You were taken aback, Yakumo. You took your friend’s refusal to interpret every word of what you had said as a betrayal. I could see it on your face, first as a small collapse of your brow and then as a twitch at the corner of your right eye. In later years, the person seated before you would have been shown to the door, followed by instructions to me to never allow them back inside of the garden gate.

  You and Nishida-san stared at each other, daring the other to speak first, while the waves crashing outside took over the conversation. You both wore your hair longer during those summer days, the ends grazing the shoulders, the thick locks swept to one side and tucked behind an ear so they would not curtain the forehead and the lashes. In that moment when you were both bound in place by pride, Nishida-san’s hair fell over his eyes and then yours followed. Out of habit, I reached over and tucked back your hair. Then I did the same for Nishida-san. When the hand returned to the lap, I realized what it had done. A sharp intake of air replaced the sounds of the sea.

  Yakumo, you began to laugh and slap your knees. Nishida-san caught my eyes briefly, as if he were seeking my permission, and then he joined you.

  Setsu dropped her head into her hands. Into her palms, she vowed to keep a stronger hold on her limbs, her heart, her body as a whole.

  The conversation between you and Nishida-san resumed, while the sea breezes kept the mosquitoes at bay.

  I awoke at dawn to seabirds squawking for their first meal of the day. As I finished dressing, I heard footsteps in the inn’s passageway. I slid open the door, hoping to see a maid, as I wanted my morning tea served earlier than usual. Instead, I saw Nishida-san’s back. He turned around and nodded. I followed him down the stairs, where he bid me good morning, formal as if I were his own Mother. Then he offered his apologies.