She moved closer and put her arms around him. They rocked back and forth together.
“Very long story,” he said, pulling away from her. “I am afraid you may be tired.”
“No,” she said, “never.” She touched his face. He took her hand and kissed it.
“How did you—go on, after that?” she asked.
“Eventually my mother and I moved to aunt's house in Fukuyama, a small town on inland sea north of Hiroshima, where air was fresher.
“During this time I was away from Hiroshima I dreamed of it every night. I had little appetite even for the better food we had in Fukuyama. I became feverish and began to develop some boil on my skin. The family's doctor said I had atom bomb disease and my bones were melting. I might not live to see twenty years. Only hope for cure was rest in bed and cauterization with moxa—also drink what he called miracle green juice. This was from leaf of kale which aunt began to grow and ground up into juice for me. I spent five years as invalid.”
“Five years—until you were eighteen.” An entire adolescence spent in bed. “But you got well.”
“The doctor was wrong. I was not so ill. Nakamoto sensei persuaded aunt to take me to Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima. There it was told by radiation doctor that my bones were not melting. Boils on skin had been only passing trouble. I was going to live.”
“You must have been so happy—you and your family—and Nakamoto sensei.”
He shook his head. “I was ashamed. After years of lying in bed, I was ashamed. Also angry. I hate my thin body, now pale and weak. Such a weak man,” he said, raising his voice, “alive only because of toothache. I did not explain my aunt and mother why I insist to walk home from Hiroshima, a distance of forty kilometers. At first I must sit down every hour, my legs feel like tofu. But I grow stronger.
It takes me some weeks but I accomplish the walk home. My feet are so blistered I have to cut shoes away from them. After that time I walk each day, for months I walked until I was strong. I walked to chase away my anger too but it was to no effect.”
They got back into the futon beneath the covers. “I am very selfish person as you now see. I could think of nothing but how angry I am. I had little education and no training for a job. I had a body of a man and yet was no man. I wished to be older and killed in war. One day I had dispute with aunt and I left Fukuyama. I walked north. I refused to take any transport. I determined to go to Tokyo to live, there I would find some job and not depend on aunt and mother and charity of neighbors.”
“I think you were strong,” she said. “Not selfish.”
He did not seem to have heard. “On my way I tried to work wherever I can, but there are few jobs at that time, soon after war. I happened to stop in small village near base of Fuji-san where there was a potter at work. He let me try to throw pot.” He gestured with his hands, as though holding a bowl. “I liked this and he said I had fine hand. This man had studied here at Mashiko. He suggest I may try this too. So when I walked north I went around edge of Tokyo and on to this place.
“It was spring when I arrived here, like now, green and peaceful place as you can see. It did not seem to ever heard of war. I walked through streets of Mashiko with tears on my face. Eventually I became apprentice to Hamada sensei and remained three years working with him.”
He looked at her. “So now you hear my life. I am surprised how much I say. No scar on outside. Some hibakusha has scar only on inside. I have not told this to anyone outside Hiroshima.”
“I have no words to say how honored I am—” She fell silent. “Do all hibakusha . . . find love impossible?” she asked.
He was quiet a moment. “Maybe you cannot understand.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “But I'm trying ...”
He took her hand. “Hai,” he said. “You try very hard, I think.”
The next afternoon Barbara helped Seiji package clay haniwa for shipping. They worked in a small studio, a windowless space with a dirt floor and the front side open to the road. There was a companionable silence between them as they lined boxes with stiff shredded papers and laid the haniwa figures inside. There were images of feudal soldiers, horses, and one Barbara remembered seeing at Seiji's studio, a woman carrying a baby on her back. Her mouth was open—for singing, Seiji said, though it looked to her as if the woman was wailing. She kept thinking of Michi in Hiroshima, holding her hands over her belly to protect Ume, and of Seiji, running through the black smoke.
It began to rain, large drops at first, pocking the dirt road in front of the studio. Seiji made tea and they sat down to drink it, looking out at the rain. Small birds were flitting about in the thicket of trees across the road.
“I wish to understand your life as well,” he said.
“What has happened in my life is very ordinary in comparison to yours.”
“My life would be ordinary if not for meeting with atom bomb.” He looked at her. “Please tell me of your home.”
She told him about growing up in Raleigh, the house on Stone Street, her mother's Japanese garden. “The real reason I came to Japan was to search for my mother—though I wasn't aware of that at first. And then I found Michi-san instead.”
“I see.” He studied her thoughtfully.
They fell silent, gazing out at the rain. She thought of Michi in California. Maybe looking for Ko had been a welcome distraction for her, after Hiroshima. She wished she'd brought the next paper about California for Seiji to translate. It was odd that he'd chosen the 1961 paper to read; at Hakone, they'd been working on Chie's papers. He could have translated the next one in sequence. “By the way,” she said, “I didn't bring any more papers.”
“We are not bored, I think.” He took her hand.
She looked at him, his fine profile, the line of his jaw. The morning he lay in bed with his toothache he never could have predicted that in an instant his childhood would be shattered, his world gone. We are all so vulnerable, she thought, everyone; not just to bombs, but to all kinds of calamity and change. Tears gathered beneath her eyelids. It was a terrible waste, to live in fear of love.
That night as they lay on the futon with their arms around each other, she asked why his feeling for her was unspeakable.
“I do not know how to explain.”
“Even in Japanese?”
“Even in Japanese.”
“I feel unspeakable about you too,” she said. “Very unspeakable.”
He laughed, kissing her.
“Will you give me more lessons in pottery when we return to Tokyo?”
“Of course—now you are my apprentice, desho?”
“I hope you won't be so bossy,” she said, keeping her voice light, “deciding which papers to read.”
“Kirēkitsu-san will decide,” he said, pulling her towards him. “But I think we should continue as we were, with story of olden time.”
Part Two
19
Chie's journal, 1934
Michi is almost twelve years of age, but remains willful girl. She has blood of wild fox in her veins, from her grandmother Ko.
This New Year I have told Michi-chan the story of my long-ago surprise meeting with Ko. As a child, I enjoyed to jump off the bridge into the river in the hot summertime. One day I hit my head on a rock and was unconscious. A pretty lady pulled me out, a geisha, who took me to my house. That was when servant Roku told me about my mother Ko who was a fox and had taken up guise of geisha. Roku said when geisha left house that day she could see a white tip of fox tail beneath her kimono.
After the holiday was over and classes resumed in April, Barbara went to Seiji's house every weekend. In the early afternoon of Saturday or Sunday—and sometimes, both days—Barbara walked through the woods from the campus to Takanodai. During the first few weeks he would meet her at the front gate of his house and they walked through the courtyard to the teahouse. Often he had a new piece of pottery to show her, and she brought him examples of calligraphy she was learning from Junko—fire, water, tree
—each character practiced over and over with her brush until she was ready to execute it on a large piece of rice paper. Bakeru—for possession—required only four strokes, but they were difficult ones, with angles and thicknesses of line that had to be exactly rendered. Junko told her that calligraphy when performed as an art may be interpreted by the individual—the important thing was to make each brush stroke using all her concentration of feeling. Barbara thought of Seiji, his breath against her ear, as she practiced bakeru; Junko had the final result mounted on a fine scroll bordered with handmade papers. Barbara gave it to Seiji with an awkward bow. “I don't know if you can read it, but it means bakeru—because you are possessing me too.”
“This is very excellent,” he said, looking suddenly shy; he hung the scroll in the tokonoma of the teahouse.
Chie's journal, 1935
One day when Fumio supposed us going out to do New Year's errands, Michi and I made our way to the geisha quarters in Kamiya-cho. We went from house to house to find if anyone knows Ko, a beautiful woman from Izumo who may have become geisha. At each place I described her and told of the years-ago visit to my childhood home by a geisha who may have been a fox woman. Some laughed at my questions, I thought with some uneasiness. But at one house we met a geisha mother who invited us for refreshment. We looked to be weary, she said. We sat by the open shoji door looking out at the river. She seemed to draw me like magnet. Her face was that of an antique beauty, with a high brow and aristocratic nose. I asked if she was from Izumo or some other distant province. She replied that all geisha are from some other place than Hiroshima. As she was showing Michi to play the shamisen, an eerie mournful tune, I slipped out and left Michi to return on her own. When she returned crying some hours after, she said to me that she had become lost and very frightened. I instructed her that she must recover her fox instinct for finding the way. She is almost thirteen, too big to rely on me always.
During each visit Seiji prepared tea and Barbara took from her bag the paper she had brought. In April and early May these were all from Chie's journal. After arguing in favor of going back to Michi's papers—she was impatient to read the next California entry—she gave in to his wish to follow them in sequence. And then she was glad she had lost the debate; she was beginning to understand Michi's history, and why she'd left her the papers. Both she and Michi had a fox mother in their lineage, an inheritance of absence.
She and Seiji spent leisurely afternoons translating and drinking tea. When the light began to fade from the room, Seiji pulled their futon from the cupboard. “What if your mother or aunt should come out?” she asked one evening, as they lay twined together after making love. “My aunt gives tea ceremony lessons in the mornings only, and lately she is not well. Don't be troubled,” he murmured into her hair, “We can be private here.”
One afternoon when they had just begun translating, they looked at each other and without speaking began to undress. She closed her eyes as he touched her. “Kirēkitsu-san,” he whispered into her mouth.
He lay on the tatami, she astride him. She kissed his eyelids, mouth, his underarm, inhaling the musky scent.
There was a voice outside, high-pitched. “Shigeko-san!”
“Don't stop,” he said. “It's only my mother. She will not come.” Her hair fell across his chest. He took a strand of it into his mouth.
A sound. Scritch-scritch.
“What's that?”
“She is raking gravel.” He pulled her closer. “Never mind,” he whispered, “never mind.”
That night as they left the teahouse he showed her a back entrance from the side street, a narrow grassy strip that ran behind the pottery. From then on Barbara took the narrow back path to and from the teahouse; by the end of April the long grass had been flattened, as though by a fox moving along the edge of a field.
Chie's journal, 1936
Baby is to arrive in two months. Roku has brought small Inari shrine for my sitting room. She shows me how to rub belly of fox figure and then my own belly. The child will be a boy, Fumio is certain, but I think will be another girl. Roku says I must be correct, as child of foxwoman and human union, as she believes me to be, has ability to foretell the future.
Between visits to the teahouse, Barbara thought constantly of Seiji, holding in her mind each detail of their lovemaking, letting the moments unfold slowly like the fragrant dried flowers he sometimes put into her tea. As she walked about the campus, the spring air, like silk against her skin, became his touch. She began to imagine a life with him, perhaps part of the year in Mashiko, part in the U.S. He would be sought after as a teacher of ceramics; they could teach at the same college.
In conversation class she let the students choose their own topics for discussion. Arranged marriage was the favorite topic until U.S. planes began shelling communist targets in Cambodia. All the students who spoke up were opposed to the bombing and to America's intervention into what one girl called “a family dispute among the Vietnamese.” Barbara withdrew from the debate, day after day listening to the conversation as through a filter.
In composition class as the students worked on their short stories, she stared out the window and thought of Seiji. She had memorized every part of his body, the contours of his back and buttocks, his narrow chest, the soft hair around his navel. Their lovemaking had grown more passionate; she imagined sparks in the air around them, like the sparks around Hiroshi and Ko.
Chie's journal, 1937
Little daughter Haru is eight months old. When I am holding her to my breast my thoughts drift to mother Ko. One day I went to geisha district with Haru so she also can meet grandmother, but cannot find the house where she has been. No doubt it has vanished, a common fox trick. Michi had petulantly refused to come. She says she does not believe in fox grandmother. I tell her she is a foolish girl, and someday she will be grateful I have introduced her.
Fumio has been much melancholy. His friend Murayama the painter was stoned to death in a field after a rumor he has spoken against war. Fumio refuses to give up all metal objects for war effort and has buried his bronze image of god Ebisu behind the teahouse. In a dream mother Ko spoke to me; she warns we must be circumspect.
The other inhabitants of Sango-kan began to comment indirectly on Barbara's absence during the weekends. Miss Yamaguchi stopped by to ask questions about American slang, but found she was “fleeting the coop.” Mrs. Ueda gave her curious glances when they met in the hall.
It was in early May that Barbara first met Rie on the path to Takanodai. The hardwood trees, now in full leaf, and the thick evergreens made a twilight in the woods. She saw someone coming toward her on a bicycle. At first she thought it was a boy; the biker had short hair and was wearing long pants. She stepped to one side of the path.
“Jefferson sensei.”
“Rie!” The girl's stout legs were planted on both sides of the bike. Her face was ruddier than usual and sweat had dampened her bangs.
“Are you going to Takanodai or Tachikawa?” Rie asked.
“I'm just walking—for exercise. There's a restaurant in Takanodai—sometimes I like to eat there.”
“I know this place,” Rie said. “Owned by Okada, the potter.”
“You know him?” Barbara could feel her voice giving her away.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “Sayonara, Sensei—have a fine lunch.”
The next couple of times Barbara and Rie met on the path Rie said, with that same smile, “Going to Okada place, Sensei?”
One day Barbara said, “What about you? I always see you here at about the same time.”
“I have some work in Tachikawa.”
“You have a job?” She didn't know any of the students had jobs. It was her impression they were almost always on campus, studying in the library or in their dorms, except for occasional excursions into the city with groups of friends. “What do you do?”
“This is my secret—you may say my shadow life. Sensei, I have been thinking more closely about origina
l sin. I would like to make my senior thesis on this topic. Can you help me?”
“Yes,” Barbara said; before she could ask more questions, Rie nodded goodbye and rode away.
Chie's journal, 1938
Fumio will not say so but he is dispirited not to have son. Roku predicts I will give birth again before long. She confessed that she has been putting a drop of fox saliva in Fumio's sake each evening. This will make child come soon, strong baby boy.
One evening Miss Ota came to visit. “I do hope I'm not troubling you, my dear,” she said when Barbara came to the door. “It's been quite some while since we have had one of our little chats.”
They walked down the hall to the large tatami room. Miss Ota peered into the smaller, three-mat room.
Plum Wine: A Novel (Library of American Fiction) Page 17