The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  I will not ask for forgiveness, Yakumo, for these untruths. If I were given a second life with you, I would say and behave the same. There are fewer ways to save a life than you would think. There are even fewer ways to live a life, given the circumstances that we cannot change.

  You have told untruths about me, Yakumo. They sting us like nettles, I know.

  Kazuo at fifteen is reading your Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. He tells me that he is practicing his English, but I believe that he is reading your first book about the country outside because he is missing you. He recognizes the stories of ghosts and other wandering spirits as the ones that foster Grandmother had told to keep him tucked in for the night. He identifies others as the oft-repeated family stories of Papa and Mama’s travels in Izumo Province and the surrounds. Kazuo has finished the first volume and is now reaching the end of the second. He has asked me questions, Yakumo, and there is one that I cannot answer.

  “Papa wrote about you, Mama,” Kazuo began.

  “Did he?”

  “No,” he answered. “I misspoke. He only wrote about your true name. He explained to his readers that there are two kanji, both pronounced ‘setsu,’ one meaning the node of the bamboo and the other ‘virtue, fidelity, and constancy.’”

  “Which one did Papa say I was?”

  “He did not.”

  “I see.”

  “The passage was actually about the bamboo, and why the people of Matsue display it during the New Year Matsuri.”

  “I see.”

  Yakumo, as I grow older, this face reveals more of this heart. Kazuo must have caught a glimpse of both because he offered that “a lady of Matsue” in volume two was certainly a reference to Mama. The story that she told to Papa, Kazuo said, reminded him of one that I had often told him and his siblings about my youth:

  I was two—but, perhaps, that is far too young to have a memory, so the memory may be a story that was told to me—and I had been taken to the open fields near Matsue Castle to see the modern army marching and performing precision drills, dressed in their new trim uniforms, their rifles gleaming. Their commander was a Westerner who rode on a horse, chestnut brown. This man’s face was the color of a freshly caught tai fish. He wore a full beard, which made his ruddy face appear small and half the size of a Japanese man’s. I remember him descending from his horse and leading this animal over to where we children had gathered. Some immediately ran off, and the ones who stayed began to cry.

  I did not run nor did I cry. The Westerner knelt in front of me—“his beard a small furry animal on his face,” I often said at this point in the story, which always made the children laugh out loud and you too, Yakumo. The Westerner asked for my age. He unfurled his fingers, first one then two. I mimicked him. His beard moved, lifting slightly upward, and his eyes shone, and I took that to mean that he was pleased. He reached into a pocket of his uniform—I remember him wearing an overcoat with many polished buttons—and he took out a small object with a thin reed-like handle, which was no longer small once he had placed it in the recipient’s hands. He then led his horse away from the crying children whose distress had been greatly increased by the recognition that I alone had received a gift. What it was none of us knew, but the gift was gilded in parts and clear in others, and the whole of it caught the early afternoon Matsue light.

  I showed the object to foster Father, and he showed me how to hold the small oval of glass by its handle. He hovered the glass over an ant crawling toward a clump of flowering thistle, and I looked down to find that the ant had grown greatly in size. Foster Father warned me never to hold the glass over an insect for too long, especially when the sun was bright and high in the sky, as the small creature would die. I did not want the gift after hearing of its power to kill, and I gave it to foster Father. He said that the gift was mine alone to keep. You were brave to stand your ground, he declared.

  Years later, when I was in school, I learned that the man was named Frédéric Valette from the country of France, and he was one of the first Westerners to come to Matsue in 1870, the 3rd year of Meiji.

  Yakumo, remember how Kazuo would ask—and then Iwao and Kiyoshi would as well—to see the Frenchman’s glass? I instead would show them the one that you kept on your desk and tell them that Papa’s magnifier was many times stronger than that little old thing that Mama has kept with her all these years. I liked very much how the boys would look at your glass and then back up at you, Yakumo. Their Papa was, in their eyes, the stronger of the two.

  Kazuo told me how your “lady of Matsue” recounted my story on the pages of your book, and how her details were not the same as mine: a daimyō, not an Imperial edict, had brought the Frenchman to Matsue; Mother, not foster Father, was with her that day; the insect magnified was a fly, not an ant. Kazuo, like his Papa, reveled in the minute. He was thorough in his assessment and cataloging of the discrepancies between her story and mine.

  He doubted me, Yakumo.

  Kazuo then wanted to know why I was nowhere else in your book. He asked this of me as if it were proof that I did not exist, that this body was not of bones, of flesh, and of his same blood. He pointed to the pages where you wrote about the sea caves, a locale that he and his siblings knew well from the stories that I also had told them, particularly when they had misbehaved or been ungrateful for the blessings of their lives. When Kazuo was very young, he had wept inconsolably over the tiny straw sandals, as you had done when you saw them with your own eye, Yakumo. Kazuo at fifteen now demanded to know why Papa wrote that a jinrikisha man, not Mama, had been Papa’s traveling companion on that boat.

  “I am the jinrikisha man.”

  The correction came from these lips before I could stop it, Yakumo.

  Kazuo laughed out loud. Then he apologized to Mama for the disrespect.

  He took a moment to consider the claim and asked if Mama was Papa’s “companion” at the Yaegaki Shrine.

  “I am the companion.”

  “Were you the ‘charming Japanese girl’ who told Papa about how a doll can acquire a soul?” he asked. “She is in the chapter about Kitzuki, the one that Papa dated the twentieth of July, 1891.”

  “I am the charming Japanese girl.”

  Yakumo, you had misremembered. You and Nishida-san arrived in Kitzuki on the twenty-sixth of July. I arrived two days later. “Our honeymoon” was what followed.

  Kazuo was not satisfied. He went through the pages of your book again, reading them anew.

  “You were Papa’s ‘attendant’ and ‘interpreter’ at Hamamura?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You were Papa’s ‘companion’ and ‘friend’ in Uragō?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘Akira’ who traveled to Matsue with Papa?”

  “No.”

  Yakumo, you included Manabe Akira, the Imperial University man, who had traveled with you to Matsue in the pages of your book? I am certain that he was pleased to be remembered for the companionship that he had provided you. Such courtesy would have pleased me too, Husband.

  “‘Kinjuro, the ancient gardener’ in Matsue?” Kazuo asked.

  I smiled upon hearing that long-ago name. “I was not, but I was the interpreter for Papa and him,” I answered. “Kinjuro,” I said, “was the gardener at the house in the shadows of Matsue Castle, but he was not ancient. He was in the prime of his life, and probably why the maid Yao did not want to leave Matsue behind.”

  “Why did Papa write that Kinjuro was bald and his head looked like ‘a ball of ivory’?”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was Papa writing about, Kazuo?”

  “Papa asked Kinjuro about souls and how many of them the gardener believed that he had.”

  I did not remember that exchange, Yakumo, but I did not want Kazuo to doubt you. A sting worse than nettles, I know.

  “
Kazuo, on the subject of souls, whom do you believe, an old man at the end of his life or a young man, hale and handsome?”

  “A body is a body,” Kazuo, an old soul, replied. “It depends more on the man’s words.”

  “Perhaps Papa knew that his readers were not so wise and tended to prefer the ancient over the young.”

  “Perhaps,” Kazuo agreed.

  I tried my best, Yakumo.

  I thought that Kazuo was done with his questions, but he had saved the impossible one for last.

  “Am I a half-caste?” your son asked.

  If Kiyoshi at seven had asked this of me, I would have answered, “You are half of Papa and half of Mama,” and he would have smiled. Kazuo at fifteen has no taste for such sweet words.

  “Yes,” I answered, looking him in the eyes to show him that there was no shame in mine.

  “Am I better off dead then?”

  “Did someone say this to you? One of your classmates?”

  “Papa did.”

  “Kazuo!”

  “Mama, he did. He wrote it in his book for all to read.”

  “Kazuo—”

  “Papa wrote that he was in a cemetery in search of the faces of Jizō, and he saw in that city of the dead a half-caste girl with pretty blue eyes. He wrote that she was better off among the dead than the living. He wrote that she was ‘the ghost of another race.’”

  “Kazuo—”

  “Mama,” Kazuo again interrupted, this time with the finality of a closing gate.

  I could not leave him there, Yakumo. In the hopes of bringing him back to us, back to the country inside, I told him the story of his birth:

  You came to us, Kazuo, when Papa and Mama were living in Kumamoto City. The household had grown to ten—the house of Inagaki, the maids, a jinrikisha man, a student houseboy—and we were all waiting for you, the eleventh member of the household, to join us. Papa knelt by my side, holding on to Mama’s hands for most of that night. Foster Mother objected to his presence in the room but could not shoo him away.

  “Go write, go write,” I told him, and reluctantly he listened.

  Before he left, he bent down and said to you, a full moon still within me, in Herun-san’s language, “Come into this world with good eyes!”

  In the first hour of the seventeenth day of November, 1893, the 26th year of Meiji, Lafcadio Hearn—as that was still his name back then—became a new man. Your first cries called him from his writing room, and he came running.

  “Papa,” I greeted him, as foster Mother lifted the cloth from your old man’s face.

  “A boy!” she announced.

  “A boy,” I repeated.

  Papa cried.

  You cried.

  I cried.

  Foster Mother laughed at the three of us.

  Papa could not stop looking into your eyes, Kazuo, which were a startling blue—seas, Papa called them—which later deepened into your curious grays. Papa thought it fitting that you should have two true names.

  Leopoldo, he named you.

  Kazuo, I named you.

  When the sun rose that morning, Papa was still by your side. “A new day!” he regaled you, kissing you on both cheeks.

  Lafcadio Hearn became Koizumi Yakumo for you, Kazuo.

  Papa did not know that Iwao, Kiyoshi, and Suzuko would join us in the years to come. He knew only that he had a son now, a continuation of his line, an heir to carry on his name. But if you, Kazuo, became a “Hearn” and a British citizen and Mama along with you, we would no longer be subjects of the country of our births. We would become foreigners within our own land, unable to purchase even the smallest parcel of it or to choose within it where we could call home. We would live only within the open port cities, which Kumamoto City was not. This house of Koizumi, which was then the house of Hearn, was in Kumamoto City because of Papa’s position as a teacher within a prefectural-government-run school. Should his services no longer be required, he—and his British son and wife—would no longer have the right to remain there. What would become of that household of eleven, I know, was the question that kept Papa at his desk writing late into the Kumamoto night.

  Mama at twenty-five did not know that there was another fear that can take hold of us in the later years of our lives. Papa at forty-three knew that the man he called “Father” had passed from this world at the age of forty-eight. Papa knew that if he, Lafcadio Hearn, were to die without settling this matter of citizenship, his marriage would remain outside the bounds of British and Japanese laws, and thus his estate would pass to his family overseas. The house of Koizumi—the house of his Japanese son and wife—would receive nothing but grief and loss.

  It was your arrival, Kazuo, that prompted Papa to become a legal subject of Japan. This act spared you, your siblings to come, and Mama of the indignities of renouncing our own citizenships. The process of becoming a citizen, rarely pursued and questioned at every turn, was not completed until the fourteenth day of February, 1896, the 29th year of Meiji, when you were two years old, and Lafcadio Hearn at forty-five was reborn as “Koizumi Yakumo.” His new name, a required change, was added to the Koizumi family registry. Papa had followed the only legal path opened to him. He had become an adopted son of a Japanese family in order to become an adopted son of Japan.

  This house of Koizumi was in Kōbe by then. We had moved to that open port city when you were almost one year old, so that Papa could write for an English-language newspaper. I had been sending weekly letters to foster Grandfather, who had chosen to return to Matsue to live out his final years, to keep him informed of household matters—though, in truth, it was because he missed Papa, whom he called “the Poet”—and it was foster Grandfather who settled the question of Papa’s true name.

  I had never considered, Kazuo, how daunting it could be to name oneself until Papa was faced with it. We were all born to a name, our first gift and not our last if we were lucky. Though you did not ask—as Papa never did—I will share with you, Kazuo, that if I were faced with the choice, I would give to myself the “Setsu” of a node of bamboo. The other meanings are heavier stones to carry.

  Papa was hesitant to come to a decision, which was a trait that I did not know that he had. Foster Grandfather’s “Yakumo,” sent from the very province that it honors, was so fitting that Papa could not stop saying it aloud. “Yakumo is a poem in and of itself,” Papa marveled. He took you from Mama’s arms and paraded you in his own, going through the rooms of the Kōbe house, singing in Herun-san’s language and then in English, “Koizumi Kazuo Leopoldo meet Koizumi Yakumo! Koizumi Kazuo Leopoldo meet Koizumi Yakumo!”

  Yakumo, your eldest son listened to my story, but I cannot say with certainty that he has forgiven the writer who saw a little girl in a cemetery—Was there even such a being, Yakumo?—and saw for her a fate worse than death. I have done what I can to assure Kazuo that the writer and Papa were no longer the same man.

  What I could not tell Kazuo about the story of his birth was that, before his arrival, you had been in misery. When you traveled there, you stayed for days in the nest that your beddings had become. In misery, you refused to allow in sunlight or even a breeze. In misery, you complained of pains in your eye and wore on it, day and night, a cloth soaked in cool water. In misery, you existed on a diet of whiskey, which made you sing to yourself late into the night. What these songs mourned or regretted, I could not tell, because they were in the language of your birth.

  Yes, Yakumo, I know. English is not the language of your birth. It is the language of your Father’s.

  “Mother did not know English,” you had told me.

  “How did Father and Mother speak?” I asked.

  “Father knew some of her languages,” you replied, “but it was not enough.”

  In Herun-san’s language, “not enough” and the word “hunger” were one and the same.

 
; As with the lanterns at Matsue Castle and the storm cloud in your left eye, “hunger” made me see them, Yakumo. Your Father and Mother sitting across from each other, their plates half empty, wanting for more.

  Perhaps in misery, your songs were in English and other languages as well. They were all foreign to me, Yakumo. When I waited for your return, I slept on the other side of the closed dividers to your room, and there I heard you. “A-e-TE-A” came from your lips most often. When “A-e-TE-A” began your forlorn songs, you could not finish them. Whiskey slurred your words, but “A-e-TE-A” silenced them, Husband.

  I have thought about A-e-TE-A in the years since your passing, and I believe it to be a name. I assume that the name belongs to a woman. Alcohol rarely loosens in men the name of an aunt or a grandmother, Yakumo. Was she another Elizabeth? I have looked through Kazuo’s English-language notebooks to find an A-e-TE-A. I believe “A” begins the name, but I cannot be sure. I have not found a trace, Yakumo. I have even thought of asking Kazuo to write to your Elizabeth to inquire, but it shames me not to know the letters that form the sounds that form the name that forms the woman whom I believe A-e-TE-A must be. It shames me more that Kazuo would be the first to know, should your Elizabeth send a reply.

  I would ask you, Yakumo, but I have no whiskey in this house of Koizumi tonight.

  No, Husband, the whiskey would be for me.

  Yakumo, during the first and the second tellings of your story, I have found that Kumamoto City and Kōbe have no distinct borders in my memory. Both cities you despised. You accused them of losing themselves to the West. You saw their redbrick buildings as affronts. You disliked the telegraph poles that marred their views. Even the steamboats and the trains that sped us from city to city you found fault in. Too loud, you complained. Too fast, you decried. Your students were dull and sullen. Your fellow teachers preferred beer and cigars to sake and pipes or, worse, were Japanese Christians. You were insulted by the Japanese women in their Western-style dresses and hats. Those horrid heeled boots are ruining their feet, you railed. You cringed when you heard them speaking the English language. You abhorred the modern Japanese, Yakumo, though you were there to educate their sons. You retreated to your Father’s language, writing until you fell asleep atop the pages that became your articles and your books.