Then, a few weeks into November, we had our first snowfall of that year. Overnight people in town began to wear quilted jackets made of indigo and stuffed with wata cotton or mawata silkworm fibers. Farmers wore straw snowshoes and snowboots into town. My mother put on a pair of heavy gloves and shoveled the snow off the entryway to her store.
“Satomi,” she called to me. “I need your help. Go to the market and buy an extra dozen eggs, three large daikon, and some fish cake. Hurry.”
I pulled on my boots and donned a thick jacket and strode out in the fading light to the nearest store.
That evening, a group of men, her old customers who’d been missing for so many weeks, burst into the shop demanding sake and oden to eat. “It’s so cold!” they exclaimed.
“I just couldn’t stand being cooped up with my wife for one more minute!” another declared.
My mother was all smiles. “What makes you think I’ll serve you anything after the way you’ve ignored me?”
“Aw, come on. We weren’t ignoring you. We thought of you every day! We missed you!”
She laughed and began to ladle boiled eggs and fish cake out of a pot of broth. The izakaya stayed open well past the hour I went to sleep, and I was only dimly aware of my mother slipping into the futon beside me, humming to herself. When I came home from school the following day, she greeted me with a girlish giggle. “I’ve been waiting for you! It’s so cold. Let’s go sit in the bath.”
In the warm water, the women gathered in groups of twos and threes, and all said the same thing. It was so cold already, and not even December yet! Thank goodness for the bathhouse where we could all warm up.
And so our public humiliation had ended on account of a change in the weather.
CHAPTER 2
The Moon People
I will never know the extent to which our treatment by the other women in the town affected my mother and prompted her to do what happened next. She must already have been thinking about my future. She knew that if I were really going to be able to compete against that Korean girl and others like her, I was going to have to have better lessons.
Toward the end of winter, I noticed that my mother was eating very little again. She’d also taken to checking and rechecking the mirror and patting her flushed cheeks.
“Do you have a fever? Are you sick?” I asked her, point blank. Up until then, that was my greatest fear. I was terrified that my mother might catch tuberculosis or some equally insidious disease.
“No,” she panted. “A little nauseous, maybe.”
She was thirty years old. I thought of her as an old woman, but I’ve come to understand now that she was still young enough to have plenty of dreams, to want to see herself as a romantic prize.
At dinner one evening, not too long after the first cherry blossoms had released a froth of pink against the green of the mountains, she told me that she was tired of working at the bar. She wanted me to live in a house where I could have my own room. She wanted us to have our own bath.
We were moving.
She was going to get married.
Certainly the possibility had always loomed. She was good with men and more than a few had wanted to marry her. In the past she had always demurred because, she told me, marriage would get in the way of our plans, by which I understood her to mean that a man would greatly interfere with her ambitions for me.
Looking back now, I think that she felt her plans had become more complicated than she’d anticipated. She must have realized that the shunning could happen again the moment the women felt compelled to enforce their judgments on us.
A Mr. Horie came to her rescue. She said they’d been friends for some time, though how this could be true and I not know about it seemed a mystery. Then again, there were hours of the day when I didn’t see her, when I was at school or at the piano teacher’s house, or, as I was still prone to do, exploring the woods for treasures. She might have been meeting with Mr. Horie then. He ran a fishing business near Hachinohe, a city so far north it was inhospitable to bamboo. Many boats bearing the Horie name braved the Pacific waters each morning to snatch purses of bonita tuna, squid, crab, sanma mackerel, and other seafood to send to the markets in Tokyo. My mother told me that the house in Hachinohe had a natural hot spring for a bath. “It will be like we’re in a ryokan every day,” she said enthusiastically.
Mr. Horie had two daughters a few years older than me; their mother had died two years ago after an illness. He was willing to buy me a proper piano and pay for my lessons, but in return, he wanted and needed a wife.
I knew from the moment I met the Horie girls that they would have joined in with the women in Kuma-ume to shun us in the bathhouse. They had that quality that sends married men running from their wives and into the shelter of a bar or an izakaya. It was an ability to look at you reproachfully, as though they just knew that you had done something terrible, even if they knew nothing at all.
Chieko was the older of the two. She was fifteen when I arrived, and very pale, with long straight hair and a face that could have been pretty, my mother liked to whisper to me, if only she tried. She was a hard worker, studying to an almost abstemious, Zen-like degree. I had good grades too, but I would never punish myself in the extreme way that Chieko did, and I found it amusing that I was able to be so much better a student with so much less effort.
“You roll your eyes and move your body too much when you play,” Chieko complained to me about two weeks after I had arrived at her house with my ragtag wardrobe of hand-me-downs carefully picked and coordinated by my mother.
“That’s because I play with feeling.”
“Have you lost your mother recently?” she asked me sharply. “Talk to me when that happens and then maybe you’ll know something about the sincerity of feeling.”
Mineko was thirteen, but determined to remain eight years old for as long as possible. She had a little lisp, which apparently people had made the mistake of telling her over the years was charming, and she liked to twist her body from side to side as she talked, as if she believed this made her girlishly appealing. She was constantly scribbling secret observations on little pieces of paper that she stuffed in crevices around the house. Then she spied on us to see who would find her notes.
My mother would uncover scraps of paper that read: “Today you looked at my mother’s funeral portrait for an hour” or “I do not like satoimo sticky potatoes for dinner” or “Satomi should learn to line up the toilet slippers when she is done going to the bathroom.” My mother would gather up the notes for Mr. Horie to read at dinner. He thought they were very funny.
To my surprise, my mother took to writing back on the notes and putting them where she had found them. In her lovely handwriting she would pen: “Your mother was very beautiful” or “I will try to give you extra fish cake instead” or “I will speak to Satomi about this.” I wondered why my mother had fallen so naturally into this game. One night, looking up at the sky, I remembered. My mother had once lived in a house full of sisters.
Although Mineko was different from her sister, they were very close to each other. One of their favorite activities was to follow the daily manga that appeared in the newspapers. They would sit side by side and look at the drawings and make little comments about the stories and sigh and speculate on what might happen next.
Mineko herself was a fairly good artist. The first month that I was in that large house with its glossy black wood hallways and the kitchen with the bright-orange linoleum floor, Chieko quietly celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Mineko gave her sister a large hand-drawn portrait of their favorite manga character, a hero named Antares. That night, and for many nights after, both Mineko and Chieko refused to sleep until they’d kissed the portrait of Antares on the mouth and said good night to him. Over time, the lips on his penciled-in face grew darker and grayer, and I hated to think what kinds of germs were congregating on just that one part of the paper. But such, I suppose, is the power of a romantic idea. It goes w
ithout saying that I was never allowed to kiss Antares.
After that Mineko began to draw a lot. Instead of notes, she started leaving sketches around the house. I found one of her sketches in a glass cabinet. My mother had sent me to bring four glasses to the kitchen so we could refresh ourselves with mugi-cha. There in between the two yellow glasses was a piece of paper, hastily folded, the corners not lining up. I opened it.
The picture, while done in the hand of a child, was still quite good. There were two animals. A cat was admiring one particularly long eyelash in the mirror. The other animal, a badger, stood on its hind legs, eating a bunch of candies till its belly had become distended so it looked like a balloon. The drawing was a caricature of my mother and me.
I said nothing, just sat in the kitchen while my mother patiently poured the tea and tried to engage the girls in conversation. Cavorting with the enemy, I thought. I didn’t have the chance to tell her about the note in private, for we no longer slept together. I’d been given my own room, a somewhat hastily converted storage chamber that had formerly held canned goods and an old wooden tansu chest and was now just large enough for a desk, a closet, and enough tatami space for a futon for one girl. I lay there at night and wondered what other secrets the house might hold.
As it happened, the secret observations were everywhere. The cracks in the floor whispered comments, windows yawned with insults, drawers squeaked with complaints. Always I was an awkward animal pounding away at the piano while the other girls in the pictures laughed at me or mimicked my sad, clumsy ways. My mother was sketched in exaggerated ballerina poses, or shown wearing a tengu mask with its red face and long nose while she was making powdered tea. She wore outrageous kimonos with the obi backward, or tottered around on high-heeled shoes like a flashy oiran prostitute. More than once I considered running away to our old apartment. My mother would come and find me and I would convince her that we could go on living there as we had before, with the bar downstairs to pay for my lessons and me hunting for vegetables during the day to supplement our diet. But I never did run away. I wasn’t even really sure which way our old house lay.
Matters came to a head one day when I sat down to practice the piano and lifted the cover. For a moment, I froze. Then I screamed. There, wiggling its way across the black and white keys was a brown snake, very much alive and, to my mind, very hungry. I heard Mineko laughing as she raced past me on the wooden hallway in her mini pink socks, her long hair braided by Chieko just that morning into two elaborate plaits.
I ran after her.
Twin braids stuck out, like antlers, and I grasped them as you might take hold of the steering wheel on a bike, and turned them to the right. Her body obediently flipped over. We tussled just on the step by the entryway to the house. Our shoes and umbrellas and bikes were kept on the lower level, and I imagine that Mineko had been attempting to put on her shoes to run away from the house, knowing that I would make an effort to catch her. Had she made it out onto the street, the cars and pedestrians whizzing past would have stopped me in my tracks and I would have let her escape.
But she didn’t make it that far. Instead, her body whipped to the right and she landed on her right hand—her drawing hand. I heard the sound of chalk crunching up against a chalkboard.
Her wrist never healed correctly, and she could never draw particularly well again, so in a way I suppose I accomplished my goal.
After a sullen period during which Mineko recuperated, she emerged from her cocoon to become a strangely older, more serious person who fluttered like a butterfly when she moved, smoothing the pleats of her skirt when she sat down and patting vainly at her hair. She was watchful and shadowy, and had taken to having intense conversations with her sister, who greeted her after the convalescence as though she’d just been waiting for Mineko to turn out like this, so adult and serious.
I was punished, of course. The worst thing my mother could think of was to take away the piano, but she wasn’t about to ban the one thing that she said had prompted her to get married in the first place.
She couldn’t forbid me to see friends because I didn’t really have any. Instead she told me, with a pained, pale face, that for the next three months I was to take all my meals alone in my room. I was not to eat with her or with the girls. Worst of all, she would no longer bathe with me. She said this severely, while I cried, because already I was starting to feel that she didn’t care for me as she once had. She told me that she thought we needed to do something to get the girls to like us. We had to be nicer, she said. Pay compliments. Act as a family. All these years I’d gone without a father and they’d gone without a mother, and now we had a chance to rectify these injustices. Wouldn’t I like to have sisters? I should think about these things while I was waiting for the three-month sentence to pass.
The punishment confused me. This wasn’t the mother who’d told me I was special, just biding my time, waiting for the moon people to appear and rescue me from an ordinary life. What a torture it was to sit alone in my room and to hear the muffled giggles that streamed out from the kitchen, where my mother and the others talked about school, about boys, about parties and college plans. Once I peeked into the front room and saw my mother, who loved to take old kimonos and turn them into handbags and blouses long before it became so trendy to do so, sitting next to Chieko, both of them sewing. They were whispering in quiet and confiding voices, pausing to examine each other’s seams and stitches. The image stung. I’d thought my mother would grieve not to have me with her. Instead, she had replaced me.
In my room, I took to listening to a shortwave radio I’d found abandoned in a closet. It was capable of picking up a radio station from somewhere in Russia. In the evenings while my mother and her new family sat in the dining room, I turned on the radio and listened to choral music and orchestral music pouring out of the speaker. One day, I promised myself, I’d be far away in some exotic location Mineko and Chieko would envy, and I’d be responsible for making music just like this. My life would be richer and purer than theirs could ever be.
I started doing something else too. My mother had been so convinced I was to be a musician that it had never really occurred to me to try my hand at any of the other arts. But Mineko’s sketching made me curious. One evening, listening to the chorus from Khovanshchina, I picked up a pencil and tried to draw a caricature of Mineko. First I made her a snail, but then I decided that even this animal was too sweet a creature for that horrible stepsister of mine. She was nothing more than a pile of dung. So I tried again. I drew a cat, prancing off from having just gone to the bathroom in a low bush, then drew a pile of waste. There was Mineko, her little precious mouth wailing how she was now nothing more than a pile of brown goo. I rather liked my sketch and did several versions of it. Sometimes Mineko languished at the bottom of a toilet, her eyes trained to look up at a sky that she would never see. Sometimes, when I was feeling especially cruel, I simply drew an additional picture in which she and the rest of her dung-friends were silenced under a blanket of earth.
In my angriest days I liked to tell anyone who would listen that my mother had sacrificed my happiness for hers. This isn’t entirely true, of course. When I won a scholarship at age fifteen to attend a high school in Sendai, a good five hours away by train, my mother urged me to go, insisting that this was the chance we had been waiting for. “You’ll finally be around other artists,” she said. Mr. Horie, who had become tolerant of me after I’d gone for a good year without maiming any more members of his family, agreed to pay for my schooling, and for the train rides home on holidays and long weekends. Occasionally he sent me some money himself with a note that said things like “Buy yourself a blouse” or “Go get some sheet music.” I suppose he was kind in his way.
I did well in high school, and by my senior year, everyone knew I’d be going to the Tokyo University of the Arts, or Geidai, as it is commonly known. This is the most prestigious arts university in Japan, akin to Juilliard in America. My mother was ecstat
ic.
“You see?” she said to me one evening in the kitchen when the two of us were alone and peeling freshly picked tsukushi horsetail shoots. “You are finally becoming the person I knew you would.”
She accompanied me on the overnight train trip from Hachinohe to Tokyo, a journey that invoked our voyage to Akita so many years ago.
“Do you remember,” I said to her, “when you made me enter that competition? And afterward, the neighbors wouldn’t let you take a bath.”
“It was worth it,” she said. “That competition gave you the confidence to be here today.”
“Mother, did you ask the men to give you money? Or did they offer?”
She smiled. “Why, they offered, of course. I never had to ask.” She set her hands primly in her lap. “It’s a skill we women have. We know how to talk to people so an idea seems to have occurred to them, even if we are the ones who really suggested it. That’s why we can do witchcraft and men cannot. But you, Satomi, I don’t want you to ever have to rely on such tricks to survive. I want your life to be more secure. Whatever happens to me now, I know you will survive on your own talents. You won’t need to be like me, turning to men for help.”
It was a strange speech and I did not fully understand it at the time. “Do you ever wish you hadn’t married Mr. Horie? That we could return to life the way it was before?”
“Ha!” she laughed. “I know you do. Look, Satomi, you’ll be able to decide who or if you want to marry. But really, what choice did I have? Anyway, I like those two girls. It’s wonderful to be part of a family. I know you don’t understand.”
Picking Bones from Ash Page 4