Chorus of Mushrooms

by Hiromi Goto

  THE HERALD

  The Multicultural Voices of Alberta,

  Part 4: Japanese Canadians Today

  My name is Keiko, but please call me Kay. I’ve lived in Alberta for twenty years and like it very much.

  Nothing seems more fragile yet symbolic of resilient life as the wild crocus blooming every spring despite a covering of ice and snow. I would never move to Vancouver to retire. There are too many Japanese there who wish they were in Japan. I could never understand why those people ever left if they always pine for the past.

  When I decided to immigrate, I decided to be at home in my new country. You can’t be everything at once. It is too confusing for a child to juggle two cultures. Two sets of ideals. If you want a child to have a normal and accepted lifestyle, you have to live like everyone else. This has nothing to do with shame in one’s own culture, but about being sensible and realistic. If you live in Canada, you should live like a Canadian and that’s how I raised my own daughter. It’s very simple, really.

  That’s my advice to new immigrants. I’ve had a happy and easy life here, and I would never want to live anywhere else. This is my home. These are my neighbours.

  My name is Murasaki. My mother calls me Muriel, but I outgrew that name when I came to realize that I came from a specific cultural background that wasn’t Occidental. Whatever that means.

  I was born in High River, but I grew up in Nanton, a small rural town south of Calgary. Life is hard in Canada, once you come to an age when you find out that people think certain things of you just because your hair is black and they have watched Shōgun, the Mini Series. I had a grandmother who could only speak Japanese, but I never spoke with her because I never learned the language. I wasn’t given the chance to choose. I feel a lot of bitterness about how I was raised, how I was taught to behave. I had a lot of questions about my heritage, but they were never answered. The place where we lived didn’t foster cultural difference. It only had room for cultural integration. If you didn’t abide by the unwritten rules of conduct, you were alienated as an other, subject to suspicion and mistrust.

  It was easy when I was an innocent. I could swallow everything I was told. I’m not finished asking questions and I never will be. Home should be a safe place, but there are times when I don’t feel safe at all.

  And I have to wonder where I live.

  Kiyokawa Naoe wa iru. Mukāshi mo ita. Korekara nochi mo iru. Canada wa hiroi. Jitto mimi o sumashite kiite goran, ironna koe ga kikoeru kara. Kokoro no mimi o mottetara ne. Do you know your neighbour? Do you even want to? Will you ever? If you leave your home and start walking this road, I’ll meet you somewhere.

  MURASAKI

  Mom got better. She ate food and I brushed her hair and sometimes, when I felt lonely, I asked her to clean my ears. One day, she got out of bed and took off Obāchan’s nemaki. Folded it up and put it away in Obāchan’s dresser drawer. She put on her own slacks and blouse and curled her hair in fat rollers. She plucked her eyebrows and pencilled them in darker than the original colour. I just watched her, bustling around, feeling a little sad.

  “Do you feel better, Mom?”

  “Yes, I feel much better. Thank you, Muriel.” And that was that. We didn’t talk about Obāchan leaving, or why they wouldn’t talk together. Why they only talked apart. We didn’t talk about why Mom was sick for three months and why she left important things behind her when they left Japan. I never thought we would have a happy ending, Mom and I, but I was still sad when it was time for her to get well again. Funny how she had to be sick for us to be able to come to a place where we could have some contact. Maybe, I thought, maybe I can get sick next time.

  Mom got better and I went back to school. She still cooked her lasagna and roast chicken, her blocks of beef, but sometimes, on a holiday weekend, she would ask me to whip up something from “my little cook book,” as she called it. And I knew.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I hope I didn’t put you off. I guess I’m still a little old-fashioned.” We were lying side by side in the middle of the giant futon. He snuggled his arms around my waist from behind. Nestling his face in the fold of my neck.

  “Me too.”

  “You’re old-fashioned too?” he said, sounding hopeful.

  “No, I mean I’m sorry. Though I may be at that. I never really thought about it. I suppose I’m old-fashioned about some things, but not about the marriage thing. That doesn’t mean I’m messing around, but the institution of marriage isn’t my idea of what a commitment is about. I could be committed to you from ten thousand miles away, you know.”

  “Are you planning on going somewhere?”

  “The idea’s been on my mind lately.”

  “Oh.”

  He rolled on to his back and he looked up at the ceiling. Looked up at dusty thread of cobweb, weaving back and forth, back and forth, in the unseen movement of air. I slid my hands back through his lovely widow’s peak. Followed the bones of his face to cup his jaw in my palm. There were tears in his eyes. I leaned down to kiss his cheek, his brow, his eye, tasted his sadness on my tongue. I reached down and tucked him deep inside me. We rocked and rocked, slowly, gently, the strand of thread weaving in the air above us.

  You decide to leave, go on a journey, and people will say this and that. They want to tag you with something so that questions are neatly answered. A reason for everything around them. She’s troubled, she’s searching for something. Or she’s running away. Not taking it at face value. How to measure the cost?

  The journey begins inside my head. With thoughts and words like my Obāchan before me. And when I’m gone, after I’m gone, I’ll send post cards now and then, so people won’t have to worry.

  “I shouldn’t call you Tengu. You should tell me what you want me to call you. It was presumptuous of me,” she said, her arm across his chest. She ran her bath-wrinkled fingers over the smoothness of his belly. He reached over to the night stand and tapped a Mild Seven out of a crumpled pack. Turned to her and raised his eyebrows. She took it and tucked it above her ear. He tapped out another and lit it with the hotel matches. Hotel Regis.

  “When I was little, my dad was a ranch hand, a foreman, and we lived out west, in the foothills. He’d wake up before dawn and bloody cold out, so early in the morning and fresh out of bed, and haul feed to the bulls and drive a few of those huge round bales of hay out to the far pasture and milk the cows and check the coop for some fresh warm eggs, blue ones, we had guinea hens, and kick the old turkey for hissing too closely and be back inside after a good three hours of solid work, the sun wouldn’t even be peeping over the low scrub of the foothills. He’d come back inside, his flesh all chilled and press his cold nose in my neck and I’d squeal and run into his girlfriend’s and his bedroom and snuggle beside her and she’d stick her head out over the covers, she liked to sleep with her head beneath them, and say, You done the chores? Yup, he’d say, and toss me up in the air and let me fall to the bed and I’d laugh and laugh. Come on, he’d say. Go wash your face and get dressed, son. It’s pretty near afternoon. And I went to wash up and I could smell coffee perking on the gas stove all hot and brown-smelling and the blue eggs cracked and the yolks so yellow all stirred up and scrambled and the floor of the bathroom icy beneath my bare feet, the smell of Janet burning toast, Dad stirring the eggs. I wet my hair and parted it down the middle, but I couldn’t get the one cowlick flat and I put on my new jeans and old cowboy boots and my going-out shirt and tried to wet down my hair again but no, it just wouldn’t stick. Janet, in her blue housecoat with one pocket ripped off so there is a square patch of darker blue where it used to be and Dad still smelling hay sweet of cow shit and and the sound of cream separating from milk downstairs. I ate two pieces of toast and eggs with ketchup and a cup of coffee because Dad was never one for making a fuss about age and what I could and couldn’t do so as long as it was legal. Are you excited about your first day of school, son? he asked. Janet looked up from her toast dipped in sweet coffee, Sure glad it�
��s you and not me. I only had to go ‘til grade six in my time. Who knows, though. You might like it. Her hair was still mussy but a pretty brown colour with red shining. I dunno, I said, I guess so. But I must have been something because I had another cup of coffee. The bus came while it was still dark outside and I was the only one in it because we lived farthest out from anyone else who was going to school and we had to drive, me and the bus driver, for half an hour before anyone else got on, the driver, Ed, yawning five times, I counted. Finally getting light outside and stopped at the Lazy S Ranch to pick up the Samson sisters, but they were older kids and didn’t even look at me, sitting in the very front, just slouched past to sit in the back. And we stopped more often, other ranches and farm houses and all the kids sitting in the back half of the bus and I learned that no one sits in the front through choice and there are a couple kids I knew from the odd wedding and 4-H cattle sales, but we were shy and too nervous to talk on the bus, getting closer to school and what kind of teacher would I get? Getting more nervous, the coffee in my gut all squishy sloshy and making me burp and I’d never gone to kindergarten because we lived too far out for me to come in, especially driven, for half a day of crayon and counting, and wishing I was at home sleeping between Dad and Janet on their lumpy bed smelling like homemade butter and sweet cow shit. We got to school and I waited until everyone got off first, then I just sorta followed everyone inside, only everyone dispersed to different rooms and I didn’t know where I was supposed to be but I didn’t want to ask a grown-up. The bell rang and I knew that meant I was supposed to be somewhere, so I just sidled into this room and it was full of bigger kids, sitting in desks, and a teacher with yellow hair and blue eyes bent down so his face was right above mine and smiled with yellow teeth. A few kids snickered and I heard someone said, I bet you he pees his pants. My face felt all hot and fat and my new jeans tight on my coffee tummy. The yellow man asked me in a too loud voice, What grade are you in? What’s your name? I gulped, and said, Grade one. My name is Sun. The whole class room burst out laughing, and I heard one of the Samson sisters. That’s funny, the yellow hair teacher said, that sounds like a Chinese name, but you don’t look Chinese. Are you sure that’s your name? Yes, I said firmly. Dad always calls me Sun. I see, said the teacher. And what’s your father’s name? Dad! of course, I said. Everyone was shrieking with laughter and my eyes felt all melty and my throat felt all hot and throbby. Even the teacher was laughing. Finally, he said, Son is not your name. It means a boy child. Your dad calls you son because he is your father. Dad means the same thing as father. Do you understand? And everything swung around and words and names all swirling and bang, they smacked into place so that something I had known and trusted was really a solid wall that I could run into and I puked my two cups of coffee and breakfast all over the teacher’s shoes and Janet came to pick me up in the crew cab and I lay on the seat with my head in her lap and she patted my back.”

  He snubbed out his third cigarette and looked over at her. She was lying on her back, palms of her hands facing upward, her fingers slightly curled and relaxed. He thought she was asleep.

  “So you don’t have a name,” she said, without opening her eyes.

  “Something like that. I’m not even sure.”

  “You must be lonely.”

  “Only when I’m with other people.”

  “Are you lonely now?” she sat up and leaned against the headboard. Reached up for the cigarette tucked above her ear. He struck a match for her and shook it out instead of blowing.

  “Not so bad with you. Your stories, they’re something more than hollow shape and I can almost catch that feeling I had before my first day at school.”

  “You told a good story now,” she thoughtfully tapped the ashes.

  He smiled slowly.

  “You keep changing, you know,” she said. “Or how I translate you. I don’t know who you are from one moment to the next. Are you still the same person who can sukōshi speak Japanese or was that something I made up on my own?”

  He looked at her in amazement, his eyebrows raised, and eyes wide open.

  “What do you mean? Eigo hitotsu mo hanashitenai to omou kedo. Haven’t we been talking Japanese all along?”

  Oh.

  MURASAKI

  People always want to hear a happy story. Something with a warm-hearted ending with maybe a touch of a lesson that makes you think, yes, that was meaningful but very positive. Let’s be more careful. People say this and that. Why can’t you tell a story with a happy ending? Why do you have to be so sarcastic and depressing? It just depends on how you hear it. This is a happy story. Can’t you tell? I’ve been smiling all along. I went to Nanton by myself, and the first thing Mom asked me was if we had fought.

  “No, Mom, we didn’t fight. I wanted to come alone.” I was sitting at the kitchen table, watching her bustle. “Mom, can you clean my ears?”

  “Go get the mimikaki from your Obāchan’s room,” she said, setting the timer on the oven. Chicken cordon bleu, the freezer kind. I padded upstairs to Obāchan’s room, still the same as the day she left. Kept clean by Mom for who knows why.

  When I came down, Mom was already in the living room, sitting on the sunny side of the couch. She patted the cushion beside her and smiled with her eyes. When I came to stand beside her, she tugged my hand until I sat and gently pushed my shoulder until my head was snuggled in her warm soft lap. The scent of her clothes. The sun all roasty toasty on my face, my curled body.

  “Mom?” I whispered.

  “Yes, don’t move.”

  “I’m going away soon,” I said softly, so she might hear things unsaid.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “I’ve known it all along.”

  “Oh,” I was slightly disappointed. Wanted a tearful mother, begging me to stay.

  “You won’t find her, you know. I couldn’t even find her when we were in the same room,” Mom said sensibly.

  “I’m not looking. I’m just going, you know?”

  “Not really, but I’ll worry,” Mom said. Softly, carefully, scratching the inside of my ear.

  “I’ll write,” I said reassuringly.

  “Is he going with you? I would feel better if he was,” Mom sighed, knowing my answer before I even stated it.

  “No. He just got here, but he has to arrive. You can’t move on until you’ve arrived. I’ve finally arrived and now I can go.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I arrived over thirty years ago.”

  “No, Mom. You’re arriving still.”

  “According to you,” she said sharply. “Using your own measure of standards.

  “Yeah, you have a point.”

  “Stop nodding. I don’t want to poke you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Your father will miss you very much.”

  “He won’t even notice I’m gone!”

  “No. You just never noticed him noticing you. That’s something of a flaw in your character, you know.”

  “Not like some people with no flaws at all,” I muttered.

  “And that’s another,” she added.

  “What?”

  “Your sarcasm. You’ll never see anything if you’re always busy being sarcastic.”

  “Words of wisdom from enlightened mother to impetuous young daughter.”

  “Not so young, either.”

  “Ouch!” I faked. Not my ear, but at Mom’s words.

  “Never mind. You go. Your father and I will stay here. Who knows, Obāchan might decide to drop by some time and I want to be here for that day. One postcard! All those words she had to say for so many years and she can only write one postcard! Well, those MasterCard receipts keep coming in, I suppose she must be well.

  “You know, we could have traced her. All those receipts, we could have tracked her down. Why don’t you?” I had my own reasons, but I didn’t know what my Mom’s were.

  “Because her leav
ing meant she was strong enough to be happy. Strong enough to choose a direction. Because if she wanted to come back, she could. And I was happy for her. At least she’s eating well. Mattaku! But I still hope you can do better than one postcard!”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I hoped you’d be better about writing us.”

  “No, before that. Didn’t you say ‘Mattaku!’?”

  “I did no such thing!”

  “Oh.” Hmmmmm.

  Two women take up two different roads, two different journeys at different times. They are not travelling with a specific destination in mind but the women are walking toward the same place.

  Whether they meet or not is not relevant.

  This is not a mathematical equation.

  I suppose there was a time when a body could travel with only a light backpack and a sturdy pair of shoes. Trade a bowl of soup and a slice of bread for a tale or two. If anybody could live that way, it would be Obāchan. Who knows, she may be doing exactly that and, even now, be putting words inside my mouth. Maybe it’s time to start that practice again. I always have a pair of strong shoulders to work for my meals. But there must be a lot of people out there just starving for a filling story. Something that would leave a rich flavour on their tongue, on their lips. Lick, then suck their fingertips. Let me feed you.