by Hiromi Goto
“Hi, Grandma. How was your day?” he says in English. Every day.
“Māmā no toko da ne.”
“Glad to hear it,” he says, no matter what I say. Once, I said I spent the day masturbating with my toes. Another time I said Keiko scrubbed the walls with shit and wiped the floor with piss. But all he says is, “Glad to hear it.” I suppose if a body can learn a new language in twenty years, you could unlearn one as well. No, Shinji has truly forgotten the language he left behind. I can accept this, but Keiko is another matter. A child from my heart, a child from my body, but not from my mouth. The language she forms on her tongue is there for the wrong reasons. You cannot move to a foreign land and call that place home because you parrot the words around you. Find your home inside yourself first, I say. Let your home words grow out from the inside, not the outside in. Che! But I shouldn’t point my finger. Shouldn’t behave like I’ve never let anybody down. Especially Keiko. Another stupid circle and no end in sight, I suppose. I’ll never forgive Keiko in words and she will never utter to me the words I wish to hear. We love each other in noisy silence.
Shinji is not a man like my father or my husband. Keiko certainly didn’t err in her choice of a partner. Shinji is a simple man, so hard to be simple in this cluttered world filled with dust and howling. To choose a simple life over an easily cluttered one, something pure must remain. One cocoon wrapped in silk. A pocket of eggs. Soup.
A different soup in Shina, and a new boy. What was his name, how could I forget his name? I slept with a pistol beside my pillow for people hungrier than I were on the other side of the wall. Keiko always with the boy, always clinging to the hem of his shirt or a sleeve or pocket and he didn’t scold her. Keiko never coming to me because I did not answer. My thoughts sour as dust. Makoto away, making his paper bridges, “For my inland cousins,” he said. I did not go to the market. I did not tend the garden. I did not change my kimono. I did not wash my hair. I wandered around the house with a brush in one hand and a pot of black sumi in the other. Went from paper screen to papered walls to skin-thin windows and wrote my name in tiny characters.
清川 直恵 清川 直恵 清川 直恵 …
The boy… His name is Sui Mintan! Yes. Yes. The name begins the story.
Keiko is at Lucky Dollar. Buying pork chops and steaks and macaroni and cheese. What I wouldn’t do for a nice chawanmushi! Steaming delicate egg custard, but without the sugar. More like a delicate egg souffle. Steamed egg in a cup, if you will. A tender-firm shrimp on top and all sorts of surprises inside. Why, you can find shiitake, or scallops or takenoko or spinach. Anything at all, or all at once. But it’s the gingko nut I crave. Always one, in the bottom of my bowl, Okāsan never forgets. The squeak of the plump nut between my back teeth and the mealy green taste. Okāsan used to fry them in salt and oil, with the nuts still unshelled. And Shige and I peeled them when they were still too hot, cracking the thin shell between our teeth and burning our tongues and fingertips. Grains of salt in the creases of our lips. We drank water until our bellies were as tight as drums and then lay on the sweet tatami. Rolling a little from side to side, to hear the water slosh.
During war, there are no thoughts forever. Three things only: Is there water? Is there food? Who is still alive? Gisei… and Sui Mintan says leave, you must leave and I know that that is what he says, the words, the sounds that spill from his mouth say leave because there is danger for you and Keiko, and Makoto conscripted, walking over the very bridges he designed, that he built for his inland cousins, only now he has a gun in his hands and a belt filled with bullets and Keiko and I we leave, we leave and join Shige and Fumiko and Otōsan in Pekin and Otōsan too weak to travel, too ill to travel from Pekin to Kinken to Manshū to Chosen to Hong Kong to Japan, so very very far away, and Otōsan says you must leave while there is time, no need to wait for the old to die when there is time for the young to live, take Keiko home, home to Japan and Shige and Fumi can watch over me and you and Keiko will be fine and remember and grow, and we leave again, again, always leaving and the train and the dust and the wind howling with war and the gas masks we clutch in our hands, the ship, the life jackets, the nauseous fear of mines unseen beneath the choppy waves or submarines or bombs falling from the sky and thinking of Otōsan and Shige and Fumiko still in Pekin, kinchyono katamari, daijobukana, demo shinuka ikirukato harao kimete yatto Nihonni tsuite, Nobeokani kaette Makoto no Otōsanga mukaeni kitekurete, 事で帰ってこれたねぇ。みんなで配心し ちょったよ。And he hugs us, hugs us close and my bitter dry eyes grow wet. We send a telegram to Pekin, to Otōsan, we are fine and back home, in Japan, we are fine and Otōsan reads the message, his hand shaking, smiles, and closes his eyes for the last time.
But we are not fine. There are rumours that Americans will soon invade Japan by boat, and the people, the villagers, the old people, the children, the wives, we chop bamboo from the groves and slice them at an angle, sharp as bayonets, to spear the enemy when they land, only they come, they come, not from the sea, but thunder in the sky above us, B-29s, huge, swollen with their cargo, in deadly formation, dropping destruction. Fire bombs, pitching sheets of incredible heat, melting everything, even metal, even stone. The fire roaring and swelling, cresting like a tidal wave to engulf us all and I run, I run, I run with Keiko clutched under one arm and a thin blanket to cover our heads, to the bomb shelter, the shelter, I run, the heat crackling the air around us snapping whipping the roar, the roaring winds of fire.
And when the fire dies
We creep from the shelter
We stand in the embers of our homes and only ask,
“Is there water? Is there food?” and “Who is still alive?”
Gisei. That is what we called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those people. The children, the infants, the elderly, the women.
Sacrifice.
MURASAKI
The daughter of a daughter of a daughter of a daughter of a daughter of a daughter of a daughter of … the list is endless.
But I am here.
I turned my head slowly in Obāchan’s lap, the fabric scratch and stiff. Inhaled dust and poetry. She stroked my forehead with her palm, and her words, they flowed fluid. I snuggled close and curled my legs and stopped pretending to understand. Only listened. And listened. And then my mouth opened on its own accord and words fell from my tongue like treasure. I couldn’t stop, didn’t try to stop, they swirled, swelled, and eddied. The words swept outside to be tugged, tossed by the prairie-shaping wind. Like a chain of seeds they lifted. Scattered. Obāchan and I, our voices lingered, reverberated off hollow walls and stretched across the land with streamers of silken thread.
I stand in the wind. I face the wind. It blows my hair. I like it. I am six.
I can talk. I can talk anything I want. Try and stop me.
“Me Chinese, me play joke, me go pee pee in your Coke! Hahahaha!”
“But I’m not Chinese,” I protested.
“Yes you are! You are! You are! You’re a slanty-eye Chinaman. Hweee chong chop ching Ahhh so! There, what did I say just now. Tell me what I said in Chinaman.”
I was confused.
“What are you, stupid or something?”
“No, you’re stupid!” I yelled.
“Am not!”
“Are so!”
“Am not!”
“Are so!”
“Am not!”
“Are so!”
“Fuck off Chink. Who needs you?”
“BUT I’M NOT CHINESE!”
These are hysterical stories.
God! Did I just make that up or is it true? I don’t even know anymore. Saying it out loud can make it so. I never kept a diary. I’ll make it up now and put in the dates later. I’ll write with my left hand and call myself Hank.
Look, here’s another airport story.
I met this guy at the airport in the departures area. Where are you going, he said. Japan, I said. Back to the ‘ole homeland, huh, he said. I just shrugged and smiled a bit. You know
, he said, you’re pretty cute for a Nip. He said. Most Nips are pretty damn ugly. All that inbreeding. Even now. He said. Well, have a good one. He said. And boarded his plane. And I felt really funny inside, him saying Nip and everything. Because he was one too.
Obāchan, what? You are ninety-one years old? One hundred and five? If anyone could live that long and still wander over this earth it would be only you. Old woman of moth and dust. Is it ever too late to learn? Obāchan, I learned to speak Japanese after you left. Because I wanted to. It’s a good reason. And you know what I learned, Obāchan? I learned that there’s no way to say I love you in Japanese except to a spouse or lover. Not to your sister or brother or daughter or son or aunt or uncle or cousin or mother or father. Or grand-mother. All you can say is Daisuki yo. A tepid, I like you very much. But I’m glad I learned Japanese because now I can juggle two languages and when there isn’t one word in English, it will be there in Japanese and if there’s something lacking in your tongue, I’ll reach for it in English. So I say to you in English. I love you, Obāchan.
Love is a strange thing. Stranger the older I grow. When I was an adolescent, I could never picture myself getting married to a gorgeous blond man and living with him forever and ever amen. So what happened? I fell for a fresh-off-the-boat; actually, he flew in on a Boeing 747, Japanese man fifteen years older than me. He liked to arrange flowers. This is not a stereotype. And he did it amazingly well. Snip, snip. Snip. The lower leaves of a peony stem. The flowers were still tight and beads of nectar pearled on the buds. Ants were everywhere. Not that they particularly bothered me.
“Hey!” you interrupt, “are you talking about me?”
We are driving southbound on Highway 2, driving from Calgary to Nanton to visit with my Mom and Dad. My Mom loves you so much, she would eat you up if she could.
“This is a story. One of many.” I look both ways down the railway tracks that cut across the road without even slowing down. Whip past High River in the wake of a semitrailer.
“I know,” you say, “but you said they were true stories.”
“Listen, they’re true if you believe them.”
“Is that logical?” you ask, reaching for a cassette tape of Japanese enka music.
“I don’t know. In fact, I don’t really care if it is or not. Does it bother you that you’re in the story?” I glance over to you, eyes leaving the highway. I know every curve, every dip, every speed trap on this eighty-five kilometre stretch.
“No,” you pop out Talking Heads to put in Misora Hibari. “Well, I don’t mind as long as you don’t make me look stupid.”
“I’ll make you look great,” I promise. “Anyway, it can’t really be you once I make it a story. It becomes someone else, you know?”
“Not really,” you say, “but keep on going.”
“Are you sure they’ll blossom?” I asked, my bare feet on the chair beside me.
“Yes, they’ll blossom. And smell very sweet.”
“I’m not convinced,” I said, watching him. Snip, snip. Snip.
“Wait. They will flower in a few days.”
“Where’d you learn to arrange flowers?”
“A Buddhist monk taught me.”
“No shit?”
“No, no shit. He lived in an old temple and the wood is always damp and mildewed. Very dark too, inside, and thick with mold and incense. He lived by himself, it was a small country temple, and slept on the tatami with only a thin futon to lie on. One night, after he had chanted all his okyā, he lay sleeping in the damp. In the dark. Just when he was almost falling into sleep, he felt this tickling tickling crawling up his leg. He almost twitched but suddenly awake and thought, ‘Centipede!’ Ha! Don’t laugh. You only have tiny infant centipedes in Canada. Especially Alberta. Too cold. But centipedes can grow huge in Japan and a big one’s bite can kill even a baby!”
“No shit?!” I was getting excited. Not sexually, but by the story.
“No, no shit. So my sensei lay very very still and he felt sweat trickling from his shiny bald head and his testes shrivelled up with fear because this centipede is crawling crawling up his body. But he is a very strong man so he doesn’t move, doesn’t move and up and up over his belly and chest and a c r o o o s s s s his neck and slowly slowly crawled off his body, one leg at a time. It took a very long time.” He picked up the last peony stem. “And when the last leg stepped off his neck, my sensei leapt to his feet, very quick he is for his age, sixty-eight, and turned on the lamp and saw! A centipede one metre long! Hurtling across the tatami!”
“Oooooh, god! No way!”
“Yes way! He looked for something to catch it with, but the floor was bare and when he looked up, the centipede was gone.” He was finished. The tight buds of the peonies looking hopeful, a cluster, a triad, a sweeping stem nodding. A balance that almost collapses. It was beautiful.
“Do you want to fuck?” I asked.
He just took my hand.
The ants go marching one by one. . . .
We stayed in bed for a fortnight. I’ve no idea how many days that is, but that’s how long we stayed. We ordered pizza and Chinese food and threw a rope out the bedroom window so we wouldn’t have to get out of bed. We tossed crumpled fifty dollar bills and yelled, “Keep the change!” Everyone called back, “Enjoy! Enjoy!” And we did.
The sweet scent of peony blossoms. He was stroking infinity on my nipples when I heard a thud.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?” he asked, infinity turning to stars.
“That,” I said. Thud. Para para para. Thud. Para para para. I looked over his shoulder to the flower arrangement on the teak display table. The heavy blossoms were falling off the stems and the breeze from the open window was scattering the petals.
“Your flowers are toast,” I said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “If I’d wanted to keep them forever, I would have drawn them.”
“What? You draw too?”
“I also paint,” showing me. And again.
We could have met anywhere. We could have met, say, in an airport.
“Are you a tourist?” he asked.
“Why?” asking back, “why do you ask me?” I looked down on myself, my sneakers, my jeans, my Mickey Mouse T-shirt. The cigarette I had tucked above my ear fell to the floor and I picked it up and brushed the filter off with my knuckles. I slipped it between my lips and patted my back pocket for the lighter. He produced his without fuss or flourish and lit my cigarette.
“Am I dressed like one or what?”
“No,” he answered, “it’s not the clothes you’re wearing. It’s the way you smell.”
“Jesus!” I raised my right elbow ear level and sniffed my pit suspiciously. Nothing too bad. I’d smelled plenty worse. “Jesus,” I repeated, “you some kind of weirdo or what?”
“You smell different,” he continued, “I can’t tell whether or not you’ve just arrived or if you’re about to leave.”
“Jesus!” I repeated. “What country am I in anyway?”
(Murasaki: Obāchan, are you listening?
Naoe: Yes, child, always.)
When I was little, so very little, my Mom made me go to Sunday school where I learned
Red and Yellow, Black and White
They are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world!
There were pictures drawn on the song boards too. Indians with feathers and black boys with curly hair wearing only shorts and yellow people with skinny eyes. And a blonde girl with long eyelashes with a normal dress on.
“Everybody is the same,” the teacher said, “Jesus doesn’t see any difference at all. He loves you all the same.”
I thought that Jesus must be pretty blind if he thought everybody was the same. Because they weren’t. They weren’t at all. Sometimes, there would be a Guess Speaker, a missionary from deepest darkest Africa or from a head-shrinker tribe in the Amazon. There would be a slide show of before and after
natives and a display table of primitive tools and graven images. Everyone would get to touch these things as a reminder that godless places still exist.
At Christmas time, there was always a brown paper bag for each child. Mostly peanuts very cheap, but a scattering of coloured mints. And a Jap orange.
“We thank you Lord, for this wonderful Jap orange. A marvel of agricultural technology. Aren’t the people truly clever.”
When I was little.
What is there to say about a voiceless man? All that is unsaid. My father’s space inside my thoughts is dim and unformed. He could coax mushrooms to grow in the dust-strewn prairie and convince badgers to eat from his hands, but he never sat beside me to fill my ears with nonsense. He lived on his skin surface and I can’t even remember what he smelled like.
Dad was a living mystery, one I couldn’t decipher. How could he employ over twenty people and hardly say a word? He spent so much time in his office, I was convinced he was completely lazy or working magic spells. How else could a man who barely spoke convince moist mushrooms to grow in a desert? He left almost everything up to Joe and signed cheques once a month after Mom had done the bookkeeping. Sure, he wandered around the damp hallways, whistling a melody of something I couldn’t recognize. Looked into a few growing rooms and turned up a thermostat or two. Sure, he delivered the odd truckload of mushrooms to Calgary. Sure, he came into the coffee room at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon and sometimes at six for a bought-for-take-out supper from Ginger Jim’s when the picking would continue on past ten at night. It wasn’t like he sat around at home all day watching soaps. But he spent a lot of time in his office and I never asked to go inside.
(Murasaki: Obāchan, are you safe, are you well? Not sleeping on pebbles or eating nettles or sucking on snow for moisture. Where are you now, tonight?
Naoe: Child, I linger here.)
“What’s that funny smell?” Patricia asked.