Yakumo, I could travel with you to Kumamoto City, Kōbe, and soon to Tokyo, but I could not accompany you when you were in misery. It was not language that separated us there, but I did believe that language—the English one—could bring you back when you had been away for too long.
Before Kazuo came to us, I had pleaded with you to teach me. “English is ugly,” you said, “coming from the mouth of a Japanese.” You meant the mouth of a Japanese woman, Husband.
Silence was available to us both, Yakumo. At first, you also did not recognize mine as anger. When you did not hear “Pardon me for being the first to sleep” for the first time since the cohabitation, you must have known something was awry. You dismissed it though, as an oversight, an uncharacteristic moment of carelessness that had kept this back turned to yours. Four nights of that back broke yours, Husband. You woke me on the fifth and said, “Sweet Wife, we begin tomorrow.”
“Begin what?” I asked, rubbing the eyelids open.
“Begin English,” you answered. “Sweet Wife cannot be ugly,” you apologized.
I kissed the tops of your hands that night, which made you laugh low, a wiser man of forty-two.
In the months that followed, we sat across from each other for an hour every evening as you said English words aloud to me, repeating them, as I slowly wrote them in my notebook, choosing the katakana and hiragana characters that most closely mimicked their sounds. It was a list of nonsense words to any other Japanese eyes but mine. Setsu’s language, you called it. After each entry, I added its meaning in Japanese to remind me what these sounds meant. Before the lesson ended, I would read these “English words” back to you.
We began with the foodstuffs found on the table: “onion, potato, mushroom, bread, salt, sugar.”
Then came the objects within the other rooms of the house: “book, paper, hat, dish, saucer, soap, shoe.”
Next were the phrases of day-to-day life: “Are you hungry? I have your hat. Have you the paper? I have your sugar. No, I have not. Yes, I have it.”
These phrases became less and less useful as the weeks went by: “Have you my old iron gun? No, I have not your old dog. Have you your bad cap? I have the ugly leather shoes.”
I repeated them dutifully because I did not want these lessons to stop, which they did once the new moon that would become Kazuo began to wax within me.
When I asked you why you had not taught me the letters of the English alphabet, you explained that first I must learn how to form the sounds of the language with the tongue and mouth before I could learn how to read and write the language, and grammar would come last of all.
When Kazuo was ready to begin his English-language lessons, your teaching practices had thankfully changed. The house of Koizumi was in Tokyo for about a year by then. You, his proud Papa, were the Chair of English Language and Literature at Tokyo Imperial University. “I am a man with no university degree of my own,” you had said to me, smiling broadly, before the jinrikisha man took you to the campus for your first lecture, when you were reborn yet again, Yakumo.
Kazuo at four was already speaking like a poet, to borrow the words of foster Grandfather, the three languages of this house of Koizumi: English, Japanese, and Herun-san’s. You thought it best that he learn how to read and write English and Japanese at exactly the same time so that one language would not overtake the other or cause undue bias, as he would need both in the years to come. “Kazuo does not look like a Japanese boy,” you reminded me, as if I could ever forget his face. “He will be a tall man, the doctor predicts,” you said, looking at Kazuo’s chubby limbs, imagining them towering over his countrymen one day. “Japanese is his practical language,” you declared, “and English is the language of his soul.” You would waver on this point in the years to come, assigning to Kazuo’s soul a national allegiance that would shift with your own. By the end, you had decided that his soul, like yours, was entirely Japanese.
Either way, you are wrong, Yakumo.
A soul is not limited by language. Language, same as the body, is shed upon our passing. No longer dependent on the vagaries of words—the misplaced, the ill chosen, and the false friends—you are fluent now, Yakumo. I will be as well one day.
No, Yakumo, I did not come to this thought in a book or in an old tale. It is my own, Husband.
Kazuo’s daily English-language lessons were in the early mornings before your university classes, which meant that your first pupil of the day was often groggy with sleep and whimpered whenever you lost patience with him. “Lucky boy,” I would remind him after you had left. “Papa is a Tokyo Imperial University professor. Only the brightest young men in the country can study with Papa,” I told Kazuo.
I needed those lessons to continue, Yakumo, for Kazuo and for me.
Listening at the edge of the room divider, I was teaching myself the alphabet and its sounds. Studying their oversized letters that you wrote on the sheets of old newspapers for Kazuo’s benefit, I would teach myself to identify their shapes—“A,” the gable roof of a Shintō shrine; “B,” a double-lobed gourd; “C,” a comb ornament for the hair—but these letters to my great regret would never join hands and dance for me the way that they would for Kazuo.
Iwao had already joined the house of Koizumi by then but with less fanfare than his elder brother, as the month following Iwao’s arrival, the household had been deep in mourning.
Nishida-san at thirty-four had left this world. You were forty-seven, and I was twenty-nine. You wept and berated the gods for being so cruel. You tried to reverse Nishida-san’s fate and yours. You pledged aloud to the gods that they could take everything from you, if Nishida-san could live again.
Everything, Yakumo? Even Kazuo and Iwao? I wanted to scream into the Tokyo night.
So this is love, I thought.
I too had felt the loss, Husband. Nishida-san’s hand had written the only letter that I had ever received from you. It was a letter of love. Should distance separate the two of us, we were on our own now, no bridge to connect the shores.
I have given thanks and offerings to the gods that they did not hear you, Yakumo, or if they did, they rejected outright your foolish, selfish, sentimental plea.
You resolved to honor Nishida-san by becoming a letter writer yourself. “I want to write a letter to you, Sweet Wife,” you told me.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked in jest.
Your reply was a half smile that said “yes” and “no.”
You began to sit beside Kazuo when I tutored him in Japanese, determined to learn the fundamentals of hiragana and katakana, which Papa and son both acquired in admirable time. But when Kazuo learned kanji—the first of the thousands of characters with their multiple strokes, each stroke with their prescribed, exact order upon the page—you found them a thick, impenetrable tangle of vines. I assured you that what you had learned was enough, that we would not hunger.
In the remaining years allotted to us, Yakumo, I was grateful for every one of your letters. They did not come from afar or from over the seas, for which I was also grateful. They were only a night train away in Yaizu, the small fishing village that brought you to the shores of the North Pacific Ocean during the month of August when Tokyo steamed, smelled of rotting refuse, and was renamed “Horrid Tokyo” by you. The “summer house of Koizumi,” as you often called it, was a set of simple rooms in the house of the fisherman Otokichi. There, Papa, half fish, and Kazuo, one-quarter fish, stayed for a month’s worth of daily swims. The summer household grew to include Iwao and even foster Father, before he left for the unseen world. At the tail end of your stay, I arrived with Kiyoshi, once he too joined the house of Koizumi—“We are rich in boys!” you said to me—and, the last August there, I brought Suzuko not even a year old in my arms.
The maids and the student houseboys of the house of Koizumi would come and go with us, in varying combinations, a band of travelers attracting
second glances, as the other train passengers attempted to guess our relationships to one another.
In Yaizu, there were no sand-throwing villagers, but there were many who had never seen a cut of beef, a loaf of bread, or a bottle of whiskey. You brought along your own, but you rarely emptied the bottle. “The ocean air, Sweet Wife!” you enthused by way of explanation.
Before your morning meal was when you wrote to me, Yakumo. Your letters were not the multipage affairs that you penned for America and England, the ones that I, and not Yao or any of the other maids, had delivered to the post offices of Matsue, Kumamoto City, Kōbe, and Tokyo in order to assure you that they would begin their long journey with due care. When this task first became a part of my daily routine, I wondered what had happened that week in Herun-san’s life. I looked at those thick envelopes and imagined who had passed away or married or given birth. I could not believe that the matters of your everyday life would require so many pages to document and to relay.
Yakumo, the letters that you wrote to me were less than a page, sometimes as brief as two or three sentences: “Weather is good. Kazuo studies well. No other news.”
In Yaizu, your pen found other ways to express itself that made this reader laugh out loud. A sleepy-eyed snail drawn at one corner, a scrawny duck at another, a Tani-no-oto toad, a coiled snake, and a straggly blackbird lived on these pages too. Once, there was even a Jizō statue, weeping pebble tears. These little bodies, offering themselves as comical asides, interrupted your wobbly rows of hiragana and katakana. These letters—their Herun-san’s language, their childlike drawings, their keen desires to see this plain face again—could not have been written by any other man, Yakumo.
Your August letters were delivered to the Tomihisachō quarter at the western fringe of Tokyo, where the house of Koizumi, upon its arrival in this city, had been growing in numbers, under the eaves of yet another rented dwelling. How I rejoiced when your letters arrived at this house instead, Yakumo.
“According to the maps, the house is in Ōkubo village, just west of Tokyo’s city lines,” I had told you when I first found this property. “It is small and will need more rooms added, but the gardens are old and established. They have seen life, as you say, Husband. There is a bamboo grove at the back, and, Husband, I heard a bush warbler singing there.”
Do you remember your response, Yakumo?
“Do you have money?” you asked, not looking up from the page that you were writing.
“Yes,” I replied, hard and sharp, not echoing the playful tone of your question.
You looked up and saw a plain woman’s face staring back at you, and you saw in those straight lines a warning that you should put down your pen and listen.
“Good!” you said, “Tell me more, Sweet Wife.”
“Husband, all the houses in the village are in the old style. There are no Western buildings there yet,” I said.
You nodded your head, and soon the decision to purchase this house was made.
But once the work on this Ōkubo house began, you did not want to hear anything more about it. You claimed that you only knew “a little about writing,” and everything else was my domain. Your only two requests were for a writing room where your high desk and chair could face toward the west, your favored direction, and for a heating stove to be installed therein. I made certain that the writing room, to be constructed as part of the new wing, would be situated far from the front door and away from the boys’ rooms. I asked the builders to fit your writing room with clear glass, in addition to the shōji, so that the colder months would never again cause you discomfort, Yakumo. The room, I knew, also had to be “cozy.” I suggested that a Western rug, which you said was called an “Oriental” rug, could be placed atop the tatami to achieve the desired effect, but you rejected the idea outright. The rug is here now, Yakumo, and it is cozy as I thought it would be. I inquired about the cost of building more bookshelves, which I told the builders should be confined to the writing room, as the rest of the house would remain in the Japanese style. At first, the builders wanted to hear these instructions from the master of the house. These men were afraid that I had no mind of my own or, if I did, I would change it. You refused to visit this house until the work was completed, Yakumo. “A waste of time,” you dismissed, with a wave of your hand and a kiss on both of these cheeks. So, these men, all of them, had to adapt and to obey this woman’s every word or not be paid.
On moving day, you left for Tokyo Imperial University from the Tomihisachō house, and the household’s jinrikisha man had been instructed by me to take you at the end of your teaching day to this Ōkubo house, where everything was already in its place.
You met for the first time the gardener who had remained with the property, and you gave him two young musa basjoo plants to add to the grounds. They were the only indications that you had been aware that a change of residence was taking place that day. “Wherever there is the most sunlight,” you wanted the gardener to know and I told him. “Their glossy leaves bring to mind the plantain trees of the West Indies,” you explained and I conveyed. The gardener nodded his head, but did not ask where the West Indies was in the world. His thoughts, as they should have been, were focused on where these plants would grow best in this corner of Ōkubo, Yakumo. The next morning, I asked the gardener whether these plants, once they matured, would bear fruit. “Yes, but they cannot be eaten,” he replied. “Bitter and full of tiny seeds.”
“Impractical,” I said and gave him the permission to find a place for them anyway. In a sunburned corner of the garden, which you would name “the West Indies,” the gardener planted the musa basjoo, which have yet to bear their fruits, Yakumo.
Within months, I would find you in the West Indies, weeping.
“All gone,” you said. Your words did not seem to believe their own claim.
“What is gone?” I asked, worried that the gardener had taken away one of your beloved plants.
“Saint-Pierre, Sweet Wife. A city of twenty-eight thousand souls.”
“An earthquake? A fire?” I asked.
“A volcano,” you replied, your legs giving way. You knelt on the pebbled path and continued to weep.
“Husband, the boys will hear. They will be frightened, if Papa cries,” I whispered.
The West Indies, you had told me early in the cohabitation, was a grouping of islands on the other side of the world, where you had lived on the island of Martinique, in the city of Saint-Pierre, during the years prior to Japan. You showed me two books that you had written there. You turned their pages slowly, reluctant to leave their words behind. With hand gestures and Dictionary words, you told me that the garden snakes in Matsue were not the same as those in the West Indies, where these creatures, convivial and less aloof, would crawl onto your arm and bathe there with you in the heat of the tropical sun. When you saw the sun, setting ablaze the waters of Lake Shinji and the Ōhashi River, you bemoaned that a sunset in Matsue was not the same as those in the West Indies.
I did not believe you, Yakumo.
I, in truth, stopped listening to you when you engaged in these comparisons, so I do not remember now what had separated the two suns. Why does the New Foreign Teacher travel, if what he longs for is a place where he has already been, I asked myself. Sameness is not possible, I remember thinking. So why seek it? I wondered.
Yet for this Ōkubo house, I had instructed the builders that the new and old wings needed to look exactly the same. The halves needed to appear as if they were part of a whole, I told them. The builders questioned why the rashamen did not want an entirely new Western-style house for her foreigner. They never dared to ask this in front of me because I, as far as their wages were concerned, was the master of this Ōkubo house. They nodded their heads and complied when I specified that the eaves of both wings, should be wide and generous. As deep as the eaves of the houses in the shadows of Matsue Castle, I could have said but d
id not because none of these men had been to isolated Izumo Province. Many of the details that I wanted for this Ōkubo house were taken from those rented in Matsue, Kumamoto City, and Kōbe or from the long list of inns where we had once stayed. This desire—not for sameness but for a reminder of where we had been—was triggered by travel or, rather, from having traveled. I regretted that Setsu at twenty-two had no understanding and little compassion for the New Foreign Teacher, who at forty had already circumnavigated the globe, his heart an atlas of such longings.
To your West Indies, the gardener later added at your behest a grouping of rare agave plants that you brought back from Yaizu, their long silver-gray leaves—the boys called them “swords”—looking as if they were covered in a fine layer of dust. The agaves, I knew, were your memorial to the lost city, Yakumo. The destruction of Saint-Pierre—I could not have known—was a harbinger of the losses that were to come.
In the months that followed, you were often elsewhere but not in the usual manner. You awoke early and wrote letters, more than you had in recent years. At the morning meal, you regaled Kazuo, eight years of age, about your years at boarding schools, years that you despised, you had told me. Young boys are animals, you had said, pointing at your storm-cloud eye. If Kazuo failed to show interest, you scolded him for his “mosquito” voice. If he listened intently, you slapped him on the back and encouraged him to have seconds of his toasts and soft eggs so that he would grow even taller. If you noticed that Iwao, Kiyoshi, and I were listening to your every word, you switched from Herun-san’s language to English. At midday, you whistled in the West Indies. In the late afternoon, you skipped with the boys along the eaves of this Ōkubo house. The hours of sleep you found unnecessary and wrote even longer into the Tokyo night.
The Sweetest Fruits Page 23