by Kyoko Mori
He returns with the rail pass, which is a piece of embossed paper folded in two.
“When do you want this to be effective?” he asks me.
“When can I have it be effective?”
He shrugs. “Anytime,” he says. “Today, if you’d like.”
It’s already four o’clock. I need a day to decide where to go and to make hotel reservations. I want to get in touch with Miya Ueda, the friend I wrote to in early May.
“The day after tomorrow,” I say.
The man picks up the big silver stamp and readjusts the dates, rolling forward the days. I watch him as he stamps my pass: 5/25/90. The ink is dark and perfectly printed without a smear. He pushes the stamped pass toward me without speaking or even smiling. As I nod and turn to go, I realize how different this transaction has been from what I am used to: The man said nothing to me except what strictly pertained to the business at hand; he didn’t ask me where I was going, where I was from, what I was doing in Japan. He made no small talk. He didn’t even thank me for doing business with his company. For once, I miss what I am mildly irritated by in the American Midwest: people wishing me to have a nice day, perfect strangers engaging in small talk. Here a person could be isolated in polite silence for days.
Walking out of the station, I pass the golden statue of a dancer that has been here as far back as I can remember. Up ahead, across a busy street, I can see the Sony Building, the Mr. Donut store, the San-ai boutique, and other places I used to visit. On this side of the street, a crowd of people is waiting for the light to change: businessmen in dark suits, women office workers in their tailored dresses and medium-high heels, and young women shopping in what would be party outfits in Wisconsin—pink or white dresses with gathered skirts, silk flowers pinned to lapels. Here women wear clothes like these every day just to go to the store. I stop behind them. In my denim shorts and T-shirt, I’m out of place, but no more so than when I was thirteen or fourteen and wearing jeans and sweatshirts. I used to spend whole Saturdays walking up and down the same streets, window-shopping alone, because I did not want to go home to see my stepmother cleaning the house yet again. Every movement of her rag or broom announced that even the accumulation of dust was somehow my fault.
The light changes. Stepping into the intersection, I remember what Vince said about the singing traffic lights in other cities. Around me, everyone is taking firm, brisk steps, looking straight ahead. We could all be marching to silent music coming from our various childhoods. On the other side of the street, I break away from the crowd. Leaning against the window of a hat shop, I open the directory Vince gave me and start thinking of where I can spend the next four weeks.
Shapes of Land
“Kobe. Kobe-Sannomiya,” the conductor announces the downtown station in the singsong my brother and I used to mimic. “Thank you for using Japan Railways. Please be careful not to forget your umbrellas as you leave the train.” Reaching out for my suitcase, I am irritated by the announcement, by the impersonal courtesy I cannot get used to—store clerks bowing and welcoming us into their stores without making eye contact, conductors reminding us, over the loudspeaker, not to forget our belongings. Every greeting sounds exactly the same, as if recorded, addressed to a large generic audience. Face-to-face, nobody says anything.
As I step onto the platform and walk toward the commuter line, I can already feel the humidity. In the four weeks I have been gone, the rainy season must have arrived in Kobe. The sky is heavy with clouds, and people are carrying umbrellas. The umbrellas remind me of Kyushu, the southern island where I spent two of my four weeks: there, old women walked down the street with umbrellas under the midday sun while, across the narrow channel, a volcano erupted on a small island. The volcanic ashes rained down on the streets of Kagoshima for a week. Though the ashes were invisible as they came down, every morning the pavement was covered with a half inch of white silt. I could not run without coughing. Except for the old women, no one showed any anxiety about the ashes. The young people sat in rooftop cafés to watch the smoke spewing from the island across the water.
The old women with their umbrellas reminded me of my grandmother Fuku. Like her, they had borne and raised children before and during the Second World War, before the Western diet of high calcium and protein. Their backs were bent, their necks foreshortened. Watching them, I remembered my mother’s insistence that my brother and I drink milk every morning. “You have to have protein to grow tall and strong,” she had said. She had discouraged us from sitting Japanese-style on the floor with our legs folded under in the posture called seiza, “correct-sitting,” because she had feared that our young bones might get crooked or stunted. Every generation has its fears. My mother’s generation worried about not being tall and strong, while my grandmother’s distrusted anything that rained down, like bombs, from the sky.
It’s drizzling when I get off the commuter train. I stand in line for a cab, and when my turn comes, I shove my suitcase in and sit down. The driver cocks his head when I give him Sylvia’s address.
“That house belongs to a gaijin family, doesn’t it?” he asks, using the word that literally means an outside-person and, therefore, a foreigner.
“Yes. My friend is an American.”
“Are you a nikkei?” A nikkei is a foreigner of Japanese descent.
“I’m an American citizen,” I reply, “but I was born here.”
The driver puts his car in gear and pulls away from the curb in silence. I don’t ask why he thought I was a foreigner. All over Japan for the last four weeks, people have thought I was a foreigner. Even other foreigners thought I was one of them.
Lost in the old castle town of Kanazawa during my first week, I met an American man sitting outside a temple and turning his map around to get his bearings. “When you get that map figured out,” I said, “I’d like to see it. I’m lost, too.” We decided to set out together to look for the train station. When we got to an intersection where two workers were fixing a streetlamp, I asked them in Japanese, “Which way do we turn here to get to the train station?” They told me; we walked a block and stopped for the light to change. The man I was with said, “Hey, I didn’t know you could speak Japanese.” “Why?” I asked; “I was born in Kobe.” “But you’re not dressed like a Japanese woman,” he pointed out. “You don’t even have a purse.”
A few feet away from us, five young women, all in lacy pastel dresses, were waiting for the light to change. Each of them had a white leather purse with shoulder straps, medium-heeled shoes that matched her dress and pantyhose. Their hair was softly permed to frame their faces. In my T-shirt, denim shorts, and Reeboks, my long straight hair in a ponytail, I looked nothing like them. Instead of a purse, I carried a backpack especially designed for runners and walkers. “I guess I know what you mean,” I admitted, and the two of us started laughing. Though I had just met this man and would most likely never see him again, he seemed like someone I had known a long time. He opened his mouth and tipped his head back when he laughed. He looked me in the face and smiled as he made half-ironic comments about the way people looked. He was like my friends. He was American.
In Kanazawa and in the other cities, I stayed at minshuku, private houses where you can get a room and two meals a day. The minshuku I went to were run by older women, who stayed in small sitting rooms by the main entrance all day, making sure their guests had everything they needed. Except for me, the guests were businessmen on their sales trips. Perhaps they made regular visits to the same cities and always stayed at the same minshuku; they were very friendly toward the hostesses. As these men stood in the foyer putting on their shoes to go out, they would announce where they were going, when they would be back. “I am leaving for my meeting downtown now,” they would call toward the room where the hostess was sitting. “I expect to be back at seven.” They would wait for the hostess to come out to wish them a good day. Later, coming back into the house, the men would call loudly again, “Hi, I’m home. I got out of my meeting
early,” or “Hi, I’m home. My meeting was long, and I’m really tired.” The hostess would come running out with slippers for the men to change into. Then, together, they would go into her room to talk over tea. It was almost as though these men were staying at their mother’s or aunt’s house.
In Japan, either you are an insider or an outsider, never anything in between. When an insider stays at a minshuku, it isn’t at all like business; it’s a family visit. With an outsider, on the other hand, the hostess does not even make small talk, much less fetch slippers and offer tea in her own sitting room. I was an outsider. When I wanted to leave for the day, I put on my shoes and left. When I came back, I got my own slippers and went to my room. Though the hostesses knew that I could speak Japanese, they kept their conversations with me to bare essentials: what time I wanted to have dinner served, what time I wanted to check in or out. They used the most formal and polite level of language, addressing me not by name but as Okyaku-san, “Our Honorable Guest.” Most evenings, I could hear them talking to the other guests in the hallway, using the informal language people use with old friends or relatives. From the conversations I overheard, I knew that most of the hostesses were widows and had daughters who lived nearby raising children. Perhaps that was their idea of what a woman my age should be doing. They couldn’t figure out why I was traveling around the country alone, visiting museums and craft centers. Because I was nothing like their daughters, I might as well have been a gaijin. For my part, I was glad to be left alone. I did not expect to feel “at home” at what was essentially a bed-and-breakfast. My staying there was just business, nothing like staying at the houses of friends. Silence was a relief and a protection.
As the cab climbs uphill now, I am protected inside the same silence. Though cabdrivers are probably the only people in Japan who chat with their customers, this driver isn’t going to talk to me. He is staring straight ahead. In spite of what I said, he thinks that I am a gaijin, that my Japanese might be limited. He doesn’t want to start a conversation we might not be able to finish.
I am glad, in a way, for his silence: I don’t want to have to explain who I am, why I’m here. Still, it’s odd to be driving up this familiar hill, passing the park, the hospital, the condominiums, the houses I used to see as a teenager, while being treated as a foreigner. Visiting the other cities was different. In most of them, people spoke slightly different dialects from the one I had grown up with. Often, over the phone, I had to ask them to repeat themselves. I got lost in every city, especially when I went running, which made me feel all the more that I was in a foreign place. But I had expected to feel that way from the start.
Using my four-week rail pass, I had first gone to Kanazawa, which is north of Kobe, and then all the way down to Kagoshima, the southernmost city on the southern island of Kyushu. I spent the last two weeks retracing my way back north toward Kobe: through the middle and northern parts of Kyushu and then the southwestern part of the main island, Honshu. In each city, I visited museums and craft centers to look at tapestries, ceramics, woodblock prints, gold-leaf painted screens. Nothing I saw made me feel “at home.”
Just as I was lost in the unfamiliar cities, I was lost in the landscapes, the floral paintings, the color juxtapositions of tapestries. I did not understand the shape and scale of things: yellow cranes flying among pale purple maple leaves much larger than their wingspan, perfectly groomed pine trees painted in nature scenes, rain falling as unbroken diagonal lines across a river scene. These details, I thought, were deliberately artificial, ornate. At the same time, in floral paintings, there were often a few insect-eaten leaves or buds, supposedly to enhance the beauty of the perfect blooms. I did not understand this mixture of what I considered to be fantasy and superrealism. I knew that the words I used in my head—fantasy, realism, scale, perspective—were all useless terms for looking at this art, but they were the only concepts I had. I had grown up looking at Western art. I could only be lost in what I was seeing now.
My feeling of being lost was strongest in the last city I visited, Kurashiki, at a large museum known for its Asian collection. The collection was housed in a restored kura, a Japanese-style wooden storage building in which rich samurai families used to keep their treasures. As soon as I entered the building, before my eyes adjusted to the semidark, I could hear a clinking sound coming at twenty- or thirty-second intervals inside the crowded kura. I began to make my way among a group of older tourists to view the huge wooden statues of bodhisattvas. When I got close to the first statue, I realized what the sound had been: all around the pedestal of the statue, hundred-yen coins were scattered about. I looked around. The men and the women moved through the room in hushed reverence; dressed mostly in black, they must have been in their fifties or sixties. Some women were wearing their best black kimonos with family crests on them. At the head of this procession was the tour guide, a young woman carrying a yellow flag with the name of the tour group printed on it. Now and then, someone bowed to the statue in front of her or him and tossed another coin. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to think or feel about the whole thing—whether to be amused or irritated or moved. I wanted to be back at the Art Institute in Chicago where, in the Asian collection, my footsteps had triggered the lights as I moved through the deserted room of bodhisattvas. It was hot and close inside the kura. I felt terribly tired of moving among men and women who traveled in large groups and never did anything alone. Even the bodhisattvas made me feel like an outsider. There was something generic about them to what must be my Western sensibility. One bodhisattva looked pretty much like another, in a way that Van Gogh’s poppies and irises never looked like Georgia O’Keeffe’s. I know nothing, I thought, about art that is an expression of universal enlightenment instead of personal vision. Its beauty will always remain foreign to me.
Leaving that last city and boarding the train to Kobe, I wondered if my remaining three weeks might still offer some kind of homecoming, a double homecoming since I would be returning from my four-week trip as well as from my years in the States. Now, as the cab climbs the last leg of the uphill route, I cannot decide how I feel, lost or at home.
* * *
The front door of Sylvia’s house is locked. The key chain I pull out of my backpack still has my keys from Green Bay: the house key, the car key, the keys to my office and the building in which I teach.
The foyer is dark as I unlock the door and step in. Putting down my suitcase, I kneel to take off my scuffed-up white Reeboks and reach toward the low wooden shelves. Next to the empty space where I put mine, there are two more pairs of Reeboks. The white pair looks almost identical to mine, only a little newer and perhaps a size smaller; the black hightops could be my own pair, which I have left in my closet in Green Bay. Half crouched in the entryway, I glance through the shelves and find other shoes that could be my own: Nike running shoes, Keds, oxfords, a few pairs of flat pumps. My white Reeboks look completely normal here.
When I look up, Cadine is coming around the corner from the kitchen. She stops, her face flushed, and puts her palm flat against her chest.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize, standing up. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She lets her hand drop to her side. “I thought you were Hashimoto-san, the cleaning lady. I was alone. I was hoping it wasn’t her.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t talk to her. She only speaks Japanese.”
We stand in the hallway for a while.
“My school’s out now,” Cadine adds. “But Mom’s still working.” The Japanese colleges, where Sylvia teaches English, are in session for another week, though the International School Cadine goes to is out because it runs on an American schedule. “So how was your trip?”
“All right, but it’s good to be back.” As soon as I say it, I realize how true that is. “Hey, it’s nice to see you.” I smile, and I’m pleased to see Cadine smile back.
We go upstairs, where I put down my suitcase and open up the shades. The rain has sto
pped for now, but the view looks hazy beyond the porch, white mist hanging heavy over the city.
* * *
After unpacking my suitcase, I go into the shower, which consists of two rooms separated by a door: a wood-paneled changing room with a sink and a linen closet, a tiled room with a Japanese-style deep tub and a shower rigged in the corner. When I enter the changing room, one of the cats, Ophelia, jumps out of the closet where she has been sleeping on top of the towels. I undress, go into the other room, and turn on the shower. The water pressure is good and strong. I step under the steady hot stream. Then, squinting my eyes from the spray, I reach out for the shampoo bottle. My wet fingers close on a familiar bottle of Mills Farms Swedish Formula Jojoba shampoo. It’s the same sixteen-ounce bottle I buy at the health food store in Green Bay. But this one is from the health food store downtown where Vince and I had lunch a month ago. Pasted over the bottle, there’s a small tag that spells out the name, Jojoba shampoo, in the phonetic katakana script used for foreign words. I squeeze a half inch of the pink shampoo onto my palm and close my eyes. The familiar scent brings me back, momentarily, to the locker room at the YMCA where I swam twice a week all last year.
On Mondays and Wednesdays, I had my office hours from eleven to half past twelve and then drove to the Y to swim two-thirds of a mile after the lunch-hour crowd was gone. Sometimes there was no one else in the pool. I would get out just in time to shower and drive back to teach my two-o’clock class, eating my egg salad or tempeh sandwich as I walked from my car to the building. My hair would be wet or frozen as I sat down at the long seminar table and looked around at my students. “Let’s see who’s here today,” I would say as I quickly checked off the absences in my grade book. It was a small class. I didn’t have to call their names. Though I took attendance, everyone knew that I wasn’t a big disciplinarian, that they didn’t have to lie to me about why they had missed class.