Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  “Are you going to go boxing later today?” he asked me.

  “Do I look like a boxer?” I asked.

  “From what I understand, looks can be deceiving.” He grinned at me. “You never know what kind of physical power even a little girl might have.”

  Who was he? Someone from Hachinohe who remembered how I had attacked Mineko? I scanned the car for other seats where I could move and be alone. But there were few. Most had little old ladies or drunk older men, and I wasn’t entirely certain that moving next to them would stop me from having to have these kinds of inane conversations.

  “These are gauntlets,” I said, pronouncing the foreign word very slowly. Gon-to-re-tto.

  “Are you expecting a sword fight with someone?” he persisted.

  I hadn’t anticipated that he would know how the gloves were originally used.

  “I read a lot of English literature. Mostly in translation, of course, though I try to read the original too.”

  “In Hitachi?” I snorted.

  “We have books in Hitachi,” he said soberly. “And if you learned to read by going to school in Tokyo …”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “… at Keio University, then you would be able to read just about anywhere. Even in Hitachi. Anyway. It’s not like you’re from Tokyo either.”

  I liked this directness, even though it was intended to humble me a little. “No,” I agreed. “I’m sorry. I play the piano. I’m trying to …”

  “Protect your hands?”

  “Yes,” I lowered my head. “And I guess I thought if I wore something this strange, people would leave me alone on the train. I have this fear that I’m going to run into people I know.”

  “Why would that be a problem? I’m always happy to run into friends. I don’t see them enough as it is.”

  I shrugged. “I’m supposed to be a genius. And I might not be.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  I stiffened. “What do you hear, exactly, and from whom?”

  He grinned. “My name is Masayoshi. I’m about to be your brother-in-law.”

  Chieko had married a year earlier, and now my mother was quite caught up in the preparations for Mineko’s nuptials, even going so far as to come down to Tokyo to look at silks and see what went on at a Tokyo wedding banquet. This man, Masayoshi, was an attorney and the brother of Mineko’s intended. He’d known in advance which train I’d be taking and had decided to try to catch the same one.

  “Everyone said I’d know you right away, and it’s true. You stand out.” He smiled.

  I squirmed a little. “I see.”

  “So, what’s this about not being a genius?”

  “I’m a good piano player. But sometimes I … people don’t always like me. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to go on the concert circuit.”

  “Why not?”

  I paused. “I don’t know if anyone will let me,” I said. “I’m a very expressive player. Isn’t that what music is supposed to be? Emotional? But people don’t always appreciate that.” And then, perhaps because he was a stranger, or because he was more engaging and more open than most people, I began to tell him about college. Now that I was there, I felt as though something wasn’t quite right. Masayoshi thought that perhaps it was all the distractions of Tokyo, the shops, the museums, the parties, but I told him I didn’t think this was the case. It was more that I’d counted on at last fitting in, but instead found myself a little bit bored and already hungry for life outside the university walls.

  “What do you do with your spare time?” he asked.

  What did I do with my spare time? I liked to doodle caricatures of people. I liked to take walks with Shinobu. I liked to look at people. I was always hoping I would find someone who was easy to talk to, but this rarely happened. “I think I waste a lot of time,” I admitted.

  “Me too!” He beamed. “Actually, I don’t think that you actually waste time. Some people do. But what you call wasting time, the nobility would have considered cultivation.”

  “Like studying the tea ceremony.”

  “Gazing at the moon and writing poems.”

  “Drawing.”

  “Speaking of which.” And he pulled a slim folder out of his bag and showed me a watercolor of a temple flanked by green leaves. “I did these.”

  I examined the picture. “That’s nice.”

  “My younger brother is the real artist,” he continued, trying to sound modest. “He goes to your school. He’s studying painting, not music.”

  “If he’s the real thing, then what are you?”

  “Just a hobbyist.” He grinned, clearly pleased that I liked his work.

  We were quiet for a few minutes, looking some more at the watercolor of the temple. I admitted that I liked to draw little pictures too, but demurred when he asked to see an example. “I’m not that kind of artist,” I said.

  “This is not my best, perhaps,” he continued cheerfully, “but I liked the fact that I could use purple in the eaves.”

  “That is purple, isn’t it?”

  “I like unusual things,” he said to me in a low voice. Something about the way he said this shook me and I felt half-afraid of him, even as I was also thrilled.

  “You’re a collector.” I managed to keep my voice steady.

  “Of unique experiences,” he agreed. “Which is one reason I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

  Though it infuriated me, I found myself blushing. “Curious about the odd one in the family?”

  “I said unique. Not odd.” He nodded at the landscape outside the window. “Chinese mystics believed that you could tell the essence of every living thing. Some trees have good living energy. Some don’t. You can tell by their shape.”

  “If I were a tree, then, what would I be?”

  “Well, that’s just it. Since you’re unusual, it’s hard to tell.” He grinned. “But I do intend to find out.”

  I saw Masayoshi nearly every day. We explored Hachinohe together, me brazenly riding on the back of his bicycle as he struggled through the streets to take me to a hot spring. Once we took the bus all the way to the Misawa Air Base because I said I wanted to see some gaijin, or foreigners. We couldn’t actually go onto the base itself, but settled for tea in a small coffee shop in town where the bus driver had told us we might see a few gaijin faces out and about running errands.

  “There’s one,” I murmured.

  “Where?” Masayoshi craned his neck.

  “Don’t be so obvious! But there. By the mailbox.”

  “I thought they were taller.”

  “This is like bird-watching.”

  Masayoshi turned to grin at me. “That’s what I like about you, Satomi,” he said. “You dive right into the world, and things just happen around you as a result. Time with you is always interesting.”

  I brushed the compliment aside. “What is someone as sophisticated as you doing in Hitachi anyway?”

  “You make it sound like sophistication is a crime.”

  “In some periods of history it has been,” I said.

  “In the spirit of honesty, then, I’m as conflicted about sophistication as you are.”

  “I’m not conflicted.” I laughed.

  “Sure you are. I’ll bet you tell all those fancy Tokyo girls just how much you love Hachinohe for the good seafood and the honest nature of the peasants. And when you meet someone from Tōhoku who looks lost in Tokyo, you’re nice to them and give them directions. But then you come home to Hachinohe and you are bored and you like to wear your gauntlets and provoke gossip by hanging out with a junior attorney who lives in Hitachi.”

  “You just don’t seem like an attorney. You seem better than that.”

  He blushed a little. “I wanted to study philosophy. But of course there is no money in scholarship.”

  “Well, you’ll be rich some day. You’ll make some girl happy.”

  “I don’t want just any girl,” he said to me, with great sincerity.


  He had the ability, even though we were in Hachinohe, to ferret out the most Tokyo-like spots. So it was that we visited a little club on the water that played jazz. Every now and then, there was even a gaijin musician in the mix. There was always an energy to the way those foreigners played that we in Japan simply couldn’t emulate.

  Actually, by 1965, we were very aware of just how much we weren’t like America at all. That country had come into our consciousness first with the bombs and then with benevolence, and then television. In those days I was as taken by the idea of Americans as everyone else. How confident they seemed. I was old enough now to know that there was no kingdom on the moon, though the powerful image of America made it feel to me as though there was something just about as potent as the moon, even if it was overseas and not in the sky.

  Masayoshi told me that he wanted to travel as soon as possible. He was working as a low-level attorney in the Hitachi corporation, which he thought would one day lead to the opportunity to go overseas. He couldn’t talk too openly about everything that the company was doing, but it partly involved the high-speed rail that had made its debut in time for the 1964 Olympics, which he promised would one day make it easy to travel from Tokyo to Hachinohe.

  “Easy?” I laughed. “It’ll always be the country up here.”

  “No,” he said seriously, “I imagine that the world will become quite small one day. Already with airplanes it is so much easier to travel.”

  Our closeness wasn’t lost on the rest of the family. Mineko, in her typical fashion, was jealous of my friendship with her fiancé’s brother. She thought I was spending time with Masayoshi just to embarrass her. But she wouldn’t talk to me about it directly. During family meals, she would look my mother in the eye and say things like, “People are going to wonder what kind of a girl I am, marrying into a family where the boy behaves this way.”

  “We’re just friends,” I grumbled.

  Late one night, my mother intercepted me in the hallway and asked me to come and sit with her in the kitchen.

  When we’d first moved here to Hachinohe, I’d been astounded by the size of the house. The orange-and-yellow linoleum had looked so modern to me. But now the house seemed a bit old. The floor had grown gray, despite repeated attempts to scrub it clean. The walls and the eaves seemed to have lost their crisp edges, the way a freshly pressed sheet becomes crumpled from use and exposure to too much mist. The atmosphere made me feel a little sad, and so I was already in a melancholy mood when she asked me to join her in a late-night snack of tangerines.

  “You like this Masayoshi boy,” she said.

  “He’s entertaining.”

  “Did you know,” she said, “that he is engaged to someone else? A young woman from Nagoya.”

  I hadn’t known. But I said, “So? It doesn’t matter to me.”

  This seemed to relieve her a little bit. “I thought perhaps you were developing some serious feelings for him.”

  “Well. No,” I said. “It’s just that once I’m here, I’m always so bored. You know, it’s tough being here after all the excitement in Tokyo.”

  “I always hoped you’d do something important with your life. Other than get married.”

  “You got married.”

  “It was too late for me to do anything else.” She smiled thinly.

  I asked Masayoshi about the Nagoya girl the first chance I got. “Oh, that’s nothing,” he said to me.

  “Does she think it’s nothing?”

  “She’s a friend.”

  “The same way I’m a friend?”

  He considered this. “She and I have less to talk about.”

  I was flattered in spite of myself.

  “I was always under the impression that you’d never want to get married.” He said this very quietly.

  “Do you want to get married?” I asked, my heart beating quite fiercely.

  “Come on!” he grinned. “You know me better than that!”

  By the end of the break I’d relayed the story of my first exam to Masayoshi, who had laughed heartily at my audacity, then begun a gentle campaign to convince me to return to school and to go see Rie Sanada while I was at it. I told my mother too—not about the exam, but about meeting the strange woman and her apparent offer to teach me.

  “Rie Sanada. I’ve heard of her,” my mother said. “Why don’t you call her and see what happens?”

  So I did. The day I returned to Tokyo, I called the mysterious woman from the dormitory pay phone, trying not to speak too loudly and keeping my phrases general enough that no one listening to me would know what I was trying to do.

  “Thursday at four o’clock,” I said into the mouthpiece. “Yes. I believe I can manage that.”

  I learned even more about Sanada-sensei, as I would soon call her, from Shinobu, who had found two of the older woman’s vinyl recordings in her parents’ library. We played them on the phonograph player that Shinobu had also brought with her, explaining away our habit to Taki and the other girls by saying that we wanted to listen to past masters for inspiration. The records had been made in the thirties, and from what Shinobu gathered, Sanada-sensei had once been poised for a major international career. In 1939 she had returned home to Japan, suffered through the war years, and nearly been felled by an illness. By the time she had recovered somewhat, she had been unable to recapture her earlier youthful success. Still, she was famous in Tokyo circles, and up until ten years ago had regularly performed with the NHK, or Japan Broadcasting Corporation, symphony.

  I went to see her one fall day, with an envelope of money Mr. Horie had given me to use for “clothes” and “more sheet music.” She lived in an ugly postwar building not too far from Ueno Park. It was difficult to reconcile this smog-stained concrete structure with the elegant woman I had met some weeks earlier, but when I tapped on her door and she let me into her apartment, it was as though I’d been transported into another world. The apartment was small: three rooms at the most, with a kitchen unabashedly blending into the living space. Despite the size, the apartment had an aura of romantic grandeur, as though I’d stepped into a painting by Renoir. She lived mostly western style, with fleshy rugs, pertly stuffed chairs, a small velvet sofa, and oil paintings framed in gilded wood. In the center of the room, shining like a pool of oil, was a baby grand piano. She watched me with quiet amusement as I took in the photos hanging in the hallway: there she was with various prime ministers, the emperor, and American actors whose faces I recognized, but whose names I did not know.

  “It has been an interesting life,” she said as if reading my thoughts.

  “I listened to your recordings,” I said. “They were very good.”

  “Do you know what they used to call me? Chop Suey. The English thought I sounded like an Asian person in a Western country. But to the Asians who knew better, I did not sound authentically Asian at all. I play much better now. Come sit down.”

  She gave me a pair of slippers to wear—one of the few Japanese concessions in her home—and sat beside me at the piano. Our afternoon was made up of neither Bach nor Mozart. Instead, she dazzled me with Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Rachmaninoff. By the time she had moved on to her third piece, I could have sworn we were sitting in a thick forest, with a canopy of moss and mist and large exotic birds with suspicious eyes peering down at us from the branches.

  And then, abruptly, she stopped. “I can’t play for as long as I used to.” She rubbed her hands.

  “It was beautiful.”

  “I prefer the Eastern Europeans. I have a theory that because they are closer to us geographically, we Japanese can understand them better. I can never focus myself as well when I play Bach, for example. Now you try. How about that prelude you performed for your exams?”

  I had made it through a few bars when she stopped me. “Do you see how you are playing? Like this?” She played the same bars, keeping her wrists unnaturally stiff. “No movement. Until now,” she continued, confidently, “you have been taught to play pieces.
You don’t know anything about the piano, and until you understand that, you won’t really be able to tell all those stories you have locked away in your heart. Now watch.”

  She taught me her secret. I was to play the Bach prelude very slowly. As each finger hit a note, I was to adjust my wrist to center with that one note. I was to do this every day, a few hours at a time, and to return the following week. “I will have a cup of tea for you when you come. And some sweets. Students are always hungry. Now you’d better go before poor Uchihara-sensei tries to find you.”

  I reached into my purse to pull out my wallet.

  “Not this week,” Sanada-sensei said. “After all, you hardly played.”

  I was not in the habit of listening to people very much at that stage of my life, but Sanada-sensei’s playing had captured my attention. I found her exercise a strange way to practice and yet I listened to what she said, spending hours in the practice room on my own, preparing for lessons for both sets of teachers. Day after day I continued to practice, and soon it was time for my first official lesson.

  This time Sanada-sensei did not play at all. She asked me to begin the Bach prelude, watching to see that as I struck each note, I carefully recentered my wrists as she had asked me to do. When I finished she smiled and said, “You actually practiced.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now try again. Faster. Like this.” She set her metronome. I obliged. “Faster,” she commanded. “Again.” So I played the prelude over and over, at faster tempos, until we reached a speed that was entirely impractical. To my surprise, I saw that my arms and hands flowed easily through the piece, as though the music were suddenly free to wash through me, as though it were originating from somewhere in my body other than my hands.