by Hiromi Goto
Or
A longing, a desire for.
Forgetting or remembering something that never happened. Wondering when does one thing end and another begin? And if you can separate the two.
Part three.
The missing part.
PART FOUR
(Murasaki: Obāchan. Obāchan, help. Help me.
Naoe: Ara, what is it child?
Murasaki: Sometimes I’m so lonely I almost can’t stand it. I get this ache here, and here, and I get this wobbly tremor in my throat and it makes me feel like I’ll start crying and never stop again.
Naoe: Murasaki, it’s the pain of growing up.
Murasaki: How can I be growing up still? I’m almost thirty.
Naoe: What then, you think some day you stop growing up?
That’s the day you die. The pain is hard, but it is important. You’ll see.
Murasaki: I don’t want to hear that now. All I can see is this awful pain inside.
Naoe: And you will be strong.
Murasaki: I can’t.
Naoe: Yes, Murasaki.
Murasaki: I can’t.
Naoe: Don’t be wagamama! Do you think you are the only person who bears the ache of loneliness? Foolish child! You are a child still, if you think so.
Murasaki: Easy to be tough when you’re ninety-seven. Two hundred and seven for all I know.
Naoe: Murasaki, it only gets harder and harder.
Murasaki: Then I might as well die.
Naoe: Yes, you might as well.
Murasaki: Obāchan!
Naoe: Do you want me to hold your hand forever? I wouldn’t be doing you a favour. You stand on your own. Warui koto yuwanai kara.
Murasaki: How can I go on? Putting words in peoples’ mouths. In yours, mine, distorting.
Naoe: Che! What, a sudden attack of conscience? I could be putting words in your mouth for all you know.
Murasaki: Really?
Naoe: Of course.
Murasaki: But I can’t even come up with a new idea. A new story. It just turns over on itself, over and over again.
Naoe: Don’t be vain. No one has a new idea. An infinite number of monkeys. And all that shit.
Murasaki: Obāchan! Where have you been picking up language like that?
Naoe: Murasaki, it has always been around. Why do you amaeru to me all the time? I don’t want to coddle you forever.
Murasaki: Who else can I amaeru to?
Naoe: Your Mom, maybe?
Murasaki: You’ve got to be kidding!
Naoe: There are stranger things done beneath the midnight sun.
Murasaki: What! Are you in the Yukon?
Naoe: Mattaku, don’t be so literal, Murasaki. I think we’ve exhausted this conversation!
Murasaki: All right, all right already.)
MURASAKI
It was a strange winter of snow like fish scales. There wasn’t a chinook the whole three months I stayed at home to care for Mom and I never ventured outside except to buy groceries. Once every two weeks, I sent Dad to Calgary with a list of items to buy at the Oriental Food Store. Sushi always sent back a box of strawberry-flavoured Pocky for me. On the house. I would eat the whole box of biscuit sticks dipped in strawberry chocolate while I watched Ripley’s Believe It Or Not on TV.
Just me and Mom in the winter house of creaking walls and cobweb corners. I read books I found in the attic from the last people who lived in it. Actually, the house wasn’t always here. It was originally built in High River and someone had had the whole creaking mess hauled on a flatbed truck in the middle of the night. The belly of the house getting so much stress that they couldn’t squeeze it back together again. Fractures and wrinkles all over the house so the wind never stopped blowing through. There were books in the attic, and sometimes strange photos would fall out of the walls when the wind shook them too hard.
It wasn’t like we were suddenly best friends. It wasn’t that we forgot everything unsaid. Those three months were a neutral zone and we could talk of quiet things out loud.
“Mom,” I was sitting on her bed, leaning against the headboard. She sat in front of me and I was brushing her hair.
“Yes?” she said dreamily. Her body weaving with every stroke of the brush.
“What does Murasaki mean?”
Mom stopped weaving and opened her eyes.
“Purple.” She started swaying again.
Purple, I thought. Purple as thought as mood as amethyst, yuck! As blood as eggplant as grapes so swollen round puurrrrrple. Hmmmmm.
“Why do you suppose Obāchan called me purple?”
“I don’t know. Could be a number of reasons.”
“So what would your guess be?” I asked softly, so she wouldn’t end the conversation.
“Please don’t stop brushing.”
“Oh, sorry. So can you tell me what she might have meant?”
“Well, it might be her favourite colour.”
“Oh.” Disappointed. “That’s all, huh.”
“Or. . . .”
“Or what?”
“Well, there was a woman named Murasaki Shikibu born in the late tenth century Japan.”
“This sounds more promising.”
“She is the first person to write a novel. As far as we know,” Mom amended. “Well, not a novel in the Western sense, because it was written on scrolls but she was the first person to write a long piece of prose that was in fact a story and not just a diary thing or some sort of lesson.”
“Wow, that’s cool.”
“And not only that,” Mom continued, warming to the subject, “she is considered to be the first person ever to create the antihero.”
“Wow. Have you read the book?”
“A long time ago.”
“What’s it called?”
“Genji Monogatari.”
“What does that mean?”
“Roughly, The Tale of Genji.”
“What’s it about?”
“You’re full of questions, aren’t you.”
“Well, I want to get as many in as I can, in case you stop answering,” I say, brushing her hair with long even strokes.
“That’s practical. Genji Monogatari is about a nobleman named Genji and his life at court and his various adventures with ladies.”
“Oh.” Disappointed again. “Kinda like an anchored royal Love Boat with a Hirohito Tom Jones?”
“The things you come up with! Don’t make judgements until you’ve read it, Muriel. Actually, if you can read beneath the surface, it gives an aching account of what life was like for women of court in the eleventh century.”
“Sorry. I wonder if they’ll have it in the Nanton library?”
“Maybe try the university.”
“I think I will. Thanks. Is there anything special you want for supper?”
“Mmmmm. Anything you make is fine, Muriel.”
She thumped down the stairs, the rug flat and hard where everyone placed their feet. Her grandmother’s chair still in the hall. More than a wooden presence. It wasn’t contoured with carved swirling arms, or curved for the body. It had a flat back with no ornamentation and no armrests to offer meager comfort. A simple chair with only a hint of a concave the old woman’s buttocks had worn away over two decades of perseverance. The chair was in an awkward position so it was even a greater disturbance to walk around because there was no one sitting in it. The young woman reached out to touch the seat of the chair, but pulled back her hand before contact. Shivered. Stepped carefully around it and into the kitchen. The wind slid through the space between floor and wall, minute cracks around the window frames. She checked the clock above the sink, five thirty-six. It was already dark outside. She crossed her bare arms and vigorously rubbed her icy skin with her hands, briskly, up and down, but it only made the surface warmer for an instant, then was snatched away with a sudden gust that made the windows rattle. Too early to start supper, too late to start a book, she decided to watch the news for half an hour.
From the living room, she could see three of the four walls of the house, and the windows and the view they offered. She bent down to switch on the television, when something swirled on the edge of her sight, just outside the living room window. She whirled around, but the movement stayed beyond her focus. The girl felt something whisk by again, and she twisted to just miss something swirl past the dining room. She spun from window, to window, to catch the movement with her eyes, but it whirled on and on, circling the house in dizzy spirals, the girl spinning and spinning, always one turn too slow to ever see. The ground tipping and sliding beneath her feet, her eyes watered with nausea. She stumbled to the hall, was drawn to her Obāchan’s chair. The only steady object in the heaving of the house. The floorboards lurched beneath her feet, the walls stretched then waned, a kettle, a toaster, the vacuum cleaner spinning in the air. Dead bodies of moths spiralled off the floor to mimic a patterned flight. She reached for the back of the chair with a shaking hand. With a single touch, everything was still. The toaster, back on the kitchen counter, the kettle on the stove. The vacuum cleaner nestled in the bottom of the closet. Dead moths heaped in the corners of the hallway. The girl turned jerkily, the backs of her knees bumping the seat of the chair, her heart beating so loudly it scattered her breath in her chest. She took a long shuddering gasp of air and held it in her lungs. Sat down with dread and longing.
She felt her body mold into the shape, the contour of the chair. Her legs shrinking to swing above the floor, her fingers curling into bulging bone. Her buttocks curved into the hollow carved out of the seat. “This chair feels just right,” she whispered, in a Goldilock’s voice. She sat in the cold hallway and wasn’t troubled with any thoughts. Just sat and watched the seeping wind pattern dust on the icy floorboards. Sat for moments or decades without knowing or even caring.
Looked up with a start. Her silent mother, looming in the darkness. She stood at the top of the stairway, so dark the girl couldn’t make out her eyes, her lips. Only the cotton pale gleam of her grandmother’s nemaki.
“Obāchan, you’ll ruin your eyes, sitting in the dark like this. If you’re going to insist on sitting in the hall, at least turn on the lights. Really, I wish you’d have more sense!”
“Denki nanka iranai yo. Yokei na osewa,” the young woman said, and shuddered. The hair standing on her arms and neck, shuddered so hard that she could feel pee trickling down her thigh. Her mother just sighed noisily and thumped back to her bedroom. The girl sat in the chair without moving.
“You mean your Obāchan took over your body?” you ask.
“No, that’s not it at all. It wasn’t a thing of taking over—more of a coming together. Or a returning. I don’t know. I might even be making this all up as I go along.” I impatiently scrounge through the deep freeze for my emergency package of cigarettes.
“What are you looking for?”
“A package of smokes. I know I had a pack of smokes in here.”
“Anoneeee,” you say, scratching the back of your head in embarrassment, “I might have smoked them last Sunday when you were out.”
I spin around. “What do you mean, ‘I might have.’? You did or you didn’t. Unless you’ve put some in yourself and smoked your own.”
You shake your head.
“Jesus,” I sigh, roll my eyes. “It’s too bloody cold out to get in the car let alone drive to the store.”
“You want me to go get you some?”
“Nah, I’m not that bad. Maybe I’ll bake some cookies or something. I feel a bit restless.”
“Because of your ghost story?” you ask, opening eyes wide in fear or skepticism.
“It’s doesn’t have to be a ghost story. Unless you think it is. It’s a question of belief.”
NAOE
Ahhh, nothing like a nice tub full of steaming water. You can’t take a proper bath unless the water is so hot you have to tease yourself into it, one toe at a time. So hot, the water, your skin feels like pins and needles, all prickly and itchy. If you scratch the surface of your skin, big fat red welts plump up in the heat.
Funny how one language has words for some things and not words for others. Water, I can say, and who is to know if I mean hot or cold. Funny limits to what I say and what is understood. Mizu, I’ll say, and I’ll get a cold glass of water, maybe pulled up from a well in a bucket on the end of a long wet rope. Oyu, I’ll say, and someone will surely fill the tub with steaming hot water. Yes, limits to sounds and utterances, always something misconstrued. Water, I’ll say, and I never know what I’ll get.
Funny how you can live so long and not have a new idea for years at a time. Finding yourself measuring the time past by how old your child begins to look. And still so much to do. Surely, time can be spent wondering what will be eaten for supper, but after that meal is in the belly, where will people turn their thoughts to? So smug in the order of animals. We are the top of the animal kingdom, no! We are superior to the animal kingdom because we are capable of thinking. Che! Who can know when the last human being had a thought, superior or otherwise?
No one thinks they aren’t thinking. Such foolish vain selfish creatures we are. And I’m not one to fool myself. I can be lulled by a plate full of creamy lobster, a tub full of hot oyu. Redundant usage.
(Naoe: Murasaki-chan?
Murasaki: Hai?
Naoe: My, such a quick henji!
Murasaki: I’ve decided it wouldn’t do me any harm to be polite sometimes.
Naoe: So you have been talking with your mother?
Murasaki: Hai.
Naoe: And you had your ears cleaned?
Murasaki: Hai.
Naoe: I’m glad. A daughter should be close enough to have her ears cleaned by her mother.
Murasaki: That would gross out a lot of people, you know.
Naoe: I suppose it’s culturally specific.
Murasaki: Not to mention appall a few doctors.
Naoe: Well, you can’t please everyone.
Murasaki: So I’m finding.
Naoe: Murasaki-chan?
Murasaki: Hai?
Naoe: I want to hear you tell a story.
Murasaki: What? I can’t tell a story. Out loud. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. You’re supposed to be the one telling stories to me. You know, the grandmother telling stories of the past to the avidly listening grandchild and all that.
Naoe: Have you listened to me? Have you heard my stories?
Murasaki: Hai.
Naoe: And you enjoyed them?
Murasaki: Hai.
Naoe: And don’t you think stories are shared. That there is a partnership in the telling and listening, that it is of equal importance?
Murasaki: Well, if you put it that way, I suppose you’re right.
Naoe: Murasaki-chan, we have only come part way in the telling and the listening. We must both be able to tell. We must both be able to listen. If the positions become static, there can never be stories. Stories grow out of stories grow out of stories. Listening becomes telling, telling listening.
Murasaki: Ehhhhhh.
Naoe: So come, tell me a wonderful story. I am sitting in a hot bath, up to my neck in silky heat. A story now will rush to my head and make it spin like no sake, no shōchū.
Murasaki: What’s shōchū?
Naoe: Always asking questions. That’s a good way of learning things, but I’m still waiting.
Murasaki: Okay, already. Here goes, but promise not to laugh.
Naoe: I promise.)
Mukāshi, mukāshi, ōmukashi . . .
(Murasaki: Obāchan?
Naoe: Hai?
Murasaki: I don’t think I’m ready.
Naoe: Oh. When will you be ready, child?
Murasaki: Soon. Very soon. But promise you’ll be with me when I start. It’s very frightening and what if I get stuck or something?
Naoe: Trust me. I’ll be there. And if you falter, I will fill in the words for you until you are ready again.
Murasaki: Can we do that?
&
nbsp; Naoe: Murasaki-chan, we can do almost anything.)
“Funny thing, that. You call your mago, Murasaki, and tell me to call you Purple. Why do you suppose?” Tengu asks, cupping lukewarm water in his palms and letting it slide down the bones of my spine.
“Ara! When did you come in? I didn’t even notice you getting in the tub!”
“I heard you talking and I wanted to listen,” he says, glances at my eyes. “I hope I haven’t offended you or anything.”
“Ehhh, well I guess it’s all right. You listened so quietly, I didn’t even hear you.”
“So, who is Murasaki and who is Purple?”
“The words are different, but in translation, they come together.”
“So you’re a translation of Murasaki and Murasaki is a translation of you?” Tengu touches my back with a fingertip, his palm, stroking down-ward. I lean slowly back.
“That’s one reading of it,” I say. My eyes are sleepy, but my skin is warming inside the cooling water.
“Is there more than one?” he whispers.
“Always.”
“Do you want to fuck?”
“Let me translate the answer with my body.”
MURASAKI
It’s an easy thing to hate your mother when you are eleven and living in what you can only see as agricultural hell. It was a time when I came to realize that the shape of my face, my eyes, the colour of my hair affected how people treated me. I never felt different until I saw the look crossing peoples’ faces. I don’t know if it’s better to come to realize, or not realize at all. When I didn’t know, I was happily innocent. When I finally noticed, the measure of my discontent knew no boundaries. Old Richard Third wasn’t the only one in the winter of his life.
Mom knew from the start. She knew from the start but all she chose to do was hide beneath a fluffy woolly skin of a white sheep. This was her only safety. She chose the great Canadian melting pot and I had to live with what she ladled.
I thumped up the porch, two steps at a time, and slammed the screen door open, tumbling inside.
“Ara!” Obāchan said. “Dōshitano?”
She was sitting in her chair, like always. Our sentinel. Our protectress. Such an uncomfortable wooden chair, and she never used a cushion. Her feet dangling above the floor. No windows to see outside, just the small pane of peel-and-stick plastic “stained glass” in the diamond-shaped frame in the door. Too high up to see out of. I sat carefully in her lap and put my arms around her thin neck. She smiled up at me and stroked my long straight hair.