The Gossamer Fly

by Meira Chand

Natsuko pushed the memory away and returned her gaze to her mother. Even from that distance it was clear something was gone from her spirit. Leaning heavily upon Kazuo’s arm, her head drooped near his shoulder, but did not rest upon it. Natsuko watched them disappear down the steep flight of steps in front of the house until they vanished and the top step welled up, empty. A car door slammed, the engine whirred. For a brief moment sun glinted on the roof of the car as it slid down the hill. They were gone. But Natsuko continued to stand by the window, looking.

  Before the house an expanse of empty land slipped away sharply down the contour of the hill in a verge of yellow grass. Marking the descending road, telephone poles sank at a perpendicular angle. Diminished and far below, the heavy tiled roofs of a Zen monastery stood out, in its garden a pale clump of bamboos. Below that again spread the texture of the town, the chimneys of the steel works, and the sea of Osaka bay. The sombre reflections of clouds moved quickly over its surface.

  Raised highways cut through the town, and upon them a ribbon of traffic moved. Ships pushed slowly between the cranes and jetties of the harbour. Chimneys smoked. A train rushed forward towards Osaka, a dusty snake of indeterminate colour. Things happened there in the town, each moment something moved, bursting into sound or action. Mechanical cause produced mechanical effect. It was all quick, orderly and foreseeable.

  But here, up the steep mountainside above the town, it was as if a giant hand had torn away the land beneath them. Cut off by silence and space they alone seemed to hang here, precipitously. Shrouded by mists the movement of birds and the sloughing of wind through trees and grass was the only life. Natsuko did not trust it here, feeling from the beginning vulnerable.

  Before they had lived with her father’s parents, in an old Japanese house, in Japanese style. For how long they were there she did not know, for she had been very small. Then they moved here, to this house, and afterwards the grandparents died, one following the other rapidly. In their house her mother had found it impossible to live; she was always complaining and crying.

  Natsuko remembered little. Only hazy edged images slipped through her mind, the memories unconnected. Preceding her up slippery narrow stairs she saw the white tabi socked feet of her grandmother, shuffling pigeon-toed, below the hem of a grey kimono. Somewhere upstairs were decorated paper boxes, stacked one on top of another, and a tall red lacquer chest. In them were stored her grandmother’s kimono. Sometimes Natsuko had been allowed to look. Then, pressing her fingers into the soft cool silks she touched outlines of clouds and birds. The room was dim, the matted floor tight, but she remembered there only a gentle coloured sea of peonies, willows and wild ginger leaves.

  In that house she and Riichi slept on futon on the floor, although her parents had a bed. Lying on those quilts she remembered the low smooth eye levels, the feeling of space. From the matted tatami floor near her face came an astringent smell. The rush mats were padded, fitted one into another like a puzzle. The woven sheen of them, polished by morning light, was the first thing she saw when she woke. The bean-filled pillows had white frilled coverlets, and through the cloth she pressed the small lumps between her fingers. The beans inside made a sighing noise when she turned the pillow over. The kitchen had been brown wood with warm piquant smells, jars of fermenting pickles, sour and strong, roasted rice cakes that pulled like rubber on her teeth. She remembered a vase of first chrysanthemums, smelling of Autumn and the sadness of the hills. The shadow of bamboo leaves on a paper door, and the sound of rain, dripping through trees on to the moss-covered stones of the garden. In that rain her grandmother wore special pink plastic toecaps over her wedged sandals and white tabi socks. And Summer seemed to ride upon her beige linen parasol, bobbing above her like a jerky dragonfly when she walked in the sun.

  Clearest in Natsuko’s memory was the garden, and her grandfather’s love of it. When the wide sliding doors of the house were drawn back it came almost into the room. Natsuko had knelt with him on the polished platform of the veranda, while he pruned small potted plants and bonsai trees. The garden had gathered at the centre into a mossy green mound, studded with rocks and a small fir tree, the trunk bent and stubby. Above, the branches fanned out in a wide umbrella, supported from below by tall straddled logs, and wire that coiled along the branches. Behind a creeper-covered wall set off a whole bed of Chinese bellflowers.

  She remembered a pond, not large, but enough for some red and white carp. Beside it she lay on her stomach, looking down through the green water to the soft muddy bottom of rotted leaves. Around the sides ferny weeds waved gently, stirred by the motion of the fish, gauzy tails fanning out behind their meandering bodies. Undisturbed she could lie for hours, staring into the water, wishing she too had been born a fish, sealed into the still green world.

  Then they had moved here. She hated the cold and upright house, narrow on the outside, and on the inside filled with gloomy depth, brown wood and watching passages. It was August. Within three days there had been a typhoon. She had known others, but they were different. Tucked between close neighbours in the town, the grandparents’ house had only a small patch of sky above the garden, hemmed in by dark trees and much bamboo. But from this very window in her parents’ room, she had watched the vast sky, uncontained before her on that typhoon day. Far away across the bay the horizon was lost in thick haze, as it had been since the day they arrived. It looked like open sea before them. To the left it stretched as far as she could see, to the smoking factories and gasometers of Osaka, and to the right over Kobe port, to the indistinct outline of Awaji Island. Between these two points the clouds rushed bruised and bulbous, mad chariots racing through the sky. As the typhoon neared, ships left port to anchor in the safety of the bay, hundreds of them dotting the water, rocking on its choppy surface. In the garden wind cut through the heat, rustling leaves with the sound of taffeta, hissing through the tall pampas grass on the slope beyond the gate. Then, slapping the windows in sheets, the rain came suddenly, washing down the stone path and trees until colours deepened and dripped. She had been terrified seeing it all, blowing off the horizon in a bar, like an army advancing towards them. And they, exposed and without defence. In the house they laughed at her. The eye is far away. It is nothing. We will only have side winds, they told her. They played music and made hot drinks, her father had a holiday from the university. But Natsuko sat here, at this window, and watched all that anger blowing at her. Once they persuaded her away, to watch the typhoon news on the television. A yellow map of Japan in a blue sea filled the screen. Upon it the typhoon was an orderly design of circles and lines. A man tapped it briskly with a cane. But returning to the window she wondered where they fitted, all those thin black lines and circles, into the wild sea and the rain. She thought then of a film she had seen, about a girl who visited strange faraway places, flying there upon a magic brass-railed bed. Wind blew out her hair in streamers, filled the puffed sleeves of her nightgown. Clouds rolled by near enough to touch, enveloping her sometimes in mist. It was terrifying. For nights Natsuko slept badly, praying her own bed would not act so strangely. Now, facing the open sky at the window, she felt that fear again.

  Gradually it went, hours later. The bay came into focus, exhausted, but clear again. Bordering it the colours of the town were deeper than she had ever seen, each small block standing out exact and separate. Suddenly then, the other side of the bay, the whole peninsula of Wakayama loomed up to face her, dark and alarmingly near. Mountains were purple and ridged, a distant town small white clustered dots along the foreshore. She drew a sharp breath, for it shocked her more than any moment of the typhoon. It was the sheer deception. Hidden behind a curtain of haze she had not imagined all the time, solid land was there. She had thought they faced open sea.

  Afterwards, this room was always filled for her with the uneasy residue of that day. It frightened her to be here alone, the window filled by the emptiness of the sky. Looking up, she saw that its hollowness never ended, each thin strata of cloud gave w
ay to more nothingness. She wondered where it ever ended, and knew herself small, smaller than an ant. Useless and disposable.

  4

  She could see no reason for Hiroko to come to the hospital. Worse still, Hiroko made an occasion of it, changing from her green skirt into a kimono. Natsuko sat on the matted floor of Hiroko’s room and watched her winding the stiff sash of obi, round and round her midriff. Through her mind passed a picture of the other obi and the lewd performance on New Year’s Eve, its crumpled trail lying on the rough boards of the stage. Hiroko finished it neatly, the folds at the back tucked into a small flap. Natsuko wondered where all the cloth had gone. From a band securing the obi a toggle hung down, a pitted stone of blue and purple. The greys and mauve of the winter kimono blended into the rain-filled sky of the window. The room was warm and stuffy, and the scent of cosmetics mixed with fumes from the oil stove as Hiroko patted powder on to her cheeks, kneeling before a low, mirrored vanity box. She looked neater than in Western clothes, like a parcel, wrapped and tied. But all the fussing and changing only confirmed to Natsuko the fear inside her: that her mother was in a hospital room, shuttered away, attended by doctors and mystery.

  ‘Is she better? Shall we bring her home today?’ She expected no assurance from Hiroko, wished she did not find it necessary to ask the question. Nobody would explain what was wrong. In cold, black pockets of the night she feared her mother had died.

  Hiroko ran a lipstick over her mouth, rubbing her lips wetly together. Natsuko watched the contortion of her face in the small oval mirror. It reflected the wall behind them, and Hiroko’s green skirt, hanging from a hook. Below was a pile of folded quilts, and on top of them the box of biscuits they would take to the hospital. It was done up in a purple carrying cloth, the ends knotted, sticking up above the box like a winged insect.

  ‘She’ll never be better, as long as she lives in Japan. That’s what they say. None of the foreigners can live here. Sooner or later they all have to go home,’ Hiroko said with satisfaction, scrutinizing herself in the mirror, rubbing her lips together again. She never wasted words.

  Behind her Natsuko stared down at the upturned soles of Hiroko’s feet protruding, neatly socked, from under the tight curve of her buttocks as she knelt before the mirror. She glimpsed a portion of leg between the white tabi sock and the kimono hem, as uncompromising as Hiroko’s face.

  ‘They’ll send her home to England. That’s what your father said.’ From a little red pot Hiroko rouged her cheeks.

  All the way, from the moment they entered the hospital, along the many corridors, she was conscious of Hiroko. Why must she come, Natsuko thought. She disliked Hiroko carrying her mother’s favourite biscuits. She or Riichi should have carried them. Instead they swung from Hiroko’s fingers as her wedged slippers squeaked over the rubbery floor in small tripping steps, slightly pigeon-toed. Walking quickly Natsuko hoped to outpace Hiroko but they kept rigidly in procession; Natsuko just behind her father, then Riichi and some way back Hiroko. It was a mission hospital run by an order of Franciscan nuns.

  Frances Akazawa was not in bed. She sat in a chair by the window. The room was warm, but colourless. Even the metal rim of the bed and the cabinet beside it were painted white. All the darkness was outside the window, upon the wet roofs of the town, and grey banks of swollen cloud.

  She turned her face towards them, trying to smile, but only the corners of her mouth twitched slightly. The whiteness of her frightened Natsuko. Her face slipped sometimes into the beige dressing-gown, sometimes into the putty-coloured curtains behind her, stiff and closed. She reached out to hug Natsuko and her arms were loose and heavy, the kiss dry. Crowding into the small room they seemed immediately too many, filling the room with smells of damp cloth and robust colour. Standing awkwardly, sitting upon the high bed and visitors’ chairs, they were too much for Frances Akazawa. She began to cry, quietly. Silent tears squeezed from her, running thinly down her cheeks, dripping onto the box of biscuits on her lap, patterning the purple carrying cloth with small, deep spots. Not knowing what to do they stood about uneasily, patting her shoulders. With the tears there was no sound but the odd, harsh intake of breath. That noiselessness was more terrible to Natsuko than any amount of sobbing.

  Hiroko had not come into the room. Natsuko saw her standing against the wall outside as the American nun, who was also a doctor, came in. The door closed again, shutting Hiroko out. The nun in her white habit blended into the room, the black spectacles on her nose standing out against her veil and gown.

  ‘Now what is this, Mrs Akazawa? They have all come to see you and you cry. That will not do.’ She looked meaningly at Kazuo. He turned to the children.

  ‘Go out now, both of you. Wait with Hiroko while I speak with the doctor.’

  Like the room the corridor was pale and warm. The polished floor stretched away either sideofNatsuko, reflecting ceiling lights. After the thin, white face of her mother Hiroko appeared indestructible. Her red mouth stood out in her face, a bright glossy spot. Natsuko could not look. She turned and gazed from the window. It had stopped raining. Outside a grassy slope faced her, a sodden dirty yellow. High up, well behind the hospital she could see the corner of a Buddhist cemetery. In the monochrome of path, stone and leafless tree, a polished granite block stood out, wet and shiny as black ice. Natsuko turned to face the corridor again.

  Windows lined most of one wall, opposite them a row of identical white doors. Beside each the black printed name of their inmate was slotted. On some notices were pinned: ‘No Visitors. No Meals. Operation Schedule.’ On her mother’s door ‘No Visitors’ dangled on a blue ribbon. Before these marked doors vases of flowers stood on the floor, ominously rejected from inside. There was a smell everywhere of calm bustle, warmth and disinfectant. Natsuko had been born here, and Riichi too. The nuns always greeted them kindly, remarking on the growth of their former babies.

  The door opened, Kazuo and the nun emerged. They turned to the right and walked silently a short distance down the corridor, then stopped. They stood closely together, their concern apparent. The nun placed a hand briefly on Kazuo’s arm. Natsuko strained to hear what was being said, but lacking beginnings or ends, only the remnants of sentences floated to her. Reaching out she snapped off a leaf from a cyclamen plant, pressing it over the ball of her thumb. A thin green juice smeared her fingers.

  ‘… but a difficult age … all these years … isolation … consider … alienated … and chronic depression … oh yes … no doubt … eventually even a loss of reality … then …’

  Natsuko did not understand the words, but she knew the meanings. And a day at the beginning of Autumn came back to her then. She had gone with her mother to the club in town, to a meeting there of a social group, for the foreign wives of the Japanese. They met in the library, a small sunny room at the back of the club. Natsuko sat beside her mother in a round armchair. From a window behind sun streamed directly on to her neck, there was a smell off the curtains of long hung dust. The women relaxed in a wide circle, their faces bright, their clothes casual but special. First one or two women addressed the group, introducing a newcomer, giving information of products and services. They spoke little of themselves individually, saying more often ‘we’, with reference to our special problems.

  Then a grey-haired, large-busted woman called Janet Okuda stood up and talked about the changes she had seen in forty-eight years. When she first arrived in Japan as a new bride, she had been forced to use the back door of the communal family house, with other women and servants. Her husband, the eldest son, used the front door with the men. Loudly and gaily Janet Okuda asked the younger women to look at her, to see how well she had survived this and much more. She begged the women to realize what an easy time a young bride now had of it, how cottage cheese, large size tights and ovenproof dishes were now available. How fashions no longer took three years to come but were flown red hot from Paris to Tokyo. Christian Dior handbags and Cardin shirts were now the ambition if not the p
roperty of every little office girl. And she herself now taught these young women of marriageable age Western etiquette so that, if ever they accompanied a prospective husband abroad a foreign menu or more might not floor them. They, the foreign wives of the Japanese, were now at a clear advantage, said Janet Okuda. It was no more like it used to be. Japan was becoming part of the world. Within the group they must continue to help one another, adapting to and learning all they could of their husband’s country. The old timers must help the newcomers. Their comfort, knowledge and sense of humour would reduce the phenomena of culture shock. She sat down and everyone clapped.

  Later, against a yawning, sun-filled window Janet Okuda poured tea from a large chrome pot. The women queued in an orderly line, beneath conversation cups clattered delicately. Janet Okuda lowered her head, smiled at Natsuko and tweaked her chin. Picking up a spatula, she presented Natsuko with a slice of crumbly cake, sprinkled with sesame seeds. Frances and Natsuko walked back to the groups of chatting women. From a distance their heads moved gently, like heavy flowers on long stems. They steered into them and settled. But, although they were greeted and talked to, Natsuko saw her mother did not melt among the teacups and chat, as did the other women. She sat tense and straight, teacup knocking thinly on the saucer, her expression expectant but wooden, her thoughts folded up inside her. Slowly the other women released her, carefully, so that she would not feel it, and projected their concern the other way. Frances was left alone.

  But soon Janet Okuda came over with a cup of tea. She looked at Natsuko critically.

  ‘She’s growing so pretty, Frances. Her eyes are so round, and her hair almost as blonde as yours. That’s unusual. Really, you would hardly know there was a Japanese half to her, she looks so much like you. If I had ever had children, I should have wished them to look like Natsuko.’ Her eyes speared into Natsuko, she spoke loudly and everyone turned their heads. Frances seemed pleased and ruffled her daughter’s hair. But Natsuko bit sesame seeds between her front teeth, filled with sudden shame, sure of an unpleasant depth to Janet Okuda’s words. She noticed now there were a number of bristly grey hairs on her chin, and fine cracks through her lips. Janet Okuda leaned towards them.