The Dream of Water

by Kyoko Mori

  As the water washes the lather off my hair onto my back, I squeeze my eyes tighter and remember who I have grown up to be.

  Cadine is sitting in the living room when I come out of the shower. “The cleaning lady never came,” she says. “Maybe my mom was wrong about when she’s coming. My mom’s Japanese isn’t so good, either. She just keeps saying hai, hai, ‘yes, yes,’ even when she doesn’t really understand.”

  “I’ll call her later if your mother wants,” I offer. “I’ll ask her when she’s coming.”

  I get a book from upstairs and sit down in the living room with Cadine. Outside in the yard, the orange trees are blooming and their other cat, Nietzsche, is stalking sparrows. I am glad to be back where I can talk or not talk, by choice. Now that the trip is over, I realize what a burden my solitude and silence have been, what a relief it is to be back here. Perhaps I can feel at home, not only in this house but also in the city of Kobe, with its familiar neighborhoods, the downtown shops, the mountains, and the sea.

  Walking or running in various cities in the last month, I began to think that Kobe was indeed nothing like the other places in Japan. Nobody ever visits Kobe to see traditional Japanese culture. All the points of interest mentioned in guidebooks about my hometown are foreign: the Victorian houses built by the British and Americans at the turn of the century, the cable car that goes up the mountainside, the big Western-style hotels, herb and rose gardens, the Indian restaurants downtown. It’s no wonder, having grown up here, that I don’t think of woodblock prints and Yuzen tapestries as my heritage, that I don’t look for my “roots” in the traditional places and arts of Japan. Before my trip, I had assumed that my foreignness was a result of my years in the States and my particular family circumstance: I don’t come from a “normal” Japanese family. But I wonder now if growing up in Kobe didn’t have a lot to do with it—I might not have turned out traditionally Japanese even if my mother hadn’t chosen to die; my foreignness isn’t simply a result of tragedy or deprivation but a part of my Kobe upbringing.

  I want to spend a few days thinking about that possibility, getting to know the city again, feeling at home here. It will be easier to see my family, to face the particular and personal things that made me “different,” if I know that these were not the only important factors in making me who I am. So I decide to give myself some extra time before calling my father or my grandmother—even though, as soon as I come to that decision, I begin to suspect that I am simply giving myself an excuse, stalling and procrastinating.

  * * *

  The next morning, the rain stops as I get off the commuter train downtown and walk to the bus stop. When the bus for central Kobe pulls up to the curb, I climb on and give my token to the driver. “Could you let me know when we get to the Tsuyuno-cho stop?” I ask him. The bus goes through downtown and heads northwest, back toward the mountain ridge. Soon the driver is looking back and nodding at me. I stand up and get off at the next stop.

  The area is almost exactly as I remember it. Across the street from the bus stop, there still is an ichiba, a roofed-over arcade of small stores where people shop for groceries, going from the greengrocer’s to the fish store, the rice shop, the bakery, or the butcher’s. Even thirteen years ago, when I was leaving the country, these ichibas had been disappearing because they couldn’t compete with supermarkets. But this one is thriving. Women with baskets on their arms are coming in and out, some of them with small children tagging along. My mother and I used to shop here. This is the neighborhood where I was born.

  I walk east toward the river, past the small hospital with a sign that says “Doi Gynecological Hospital.” The small print under the name reads: “the doctor is a woman.” She has to be the same doctor who delivered my brother and me—she was about my mother’s age. If I knew how to introduce myself without awkwardness, I would stop in. But I continue on to the river, across the bridge, and then head north. This street, which borders the river, is the one our old house is on. Already I can see the steep hill in the back. Across from the low wall that separates the street from the river, I pass the corner store where my uncles used to buy me candy. The place looks unchanged, with a cloth hung in the doorway, instead of a wooden door, to make it look more inviting.

  As I approach our old block—the last block before the mountains—something looks wrong. The green of the mountains looks too vivid, too close. Crossing the last street onto the block, I realize why. There is nothing obstructing the view; there are no houses. The gray concrete of a parking lot covers the space where the houses used to be: ours and two others, all of them wooden two-story buildings. Only a few cars are parked in the lot. The middle part, where our house was located, is empty. I go to stand where the small pond used to be in our yard. My uncles Shiro and Kenichi, who were living in this house with my parents back then, planted a mountain ash tree beside the pond when I was born. There is no trace of the pond, the tree, or the downstairs room where my mother and my aunt Keiko used to sew.

  The house had been occupied by people in my mother’s family from the Second World War until a few years ago, when one of my younger cousins graduated from college and moved to Kyushu for a job. My grandmother had told me in a letter about the house being sold, but no one had said anything about it being torn down.

  Another car is pulling into the lot. I walk out into the street. The low wall along the river is marked with children’s drawings in red and yellow chalk: flowers, trees, stick-figure people. My uncles and I used to draw here. They were always teaching me to try complicated things like airplanes, ships, cars. Heading north, I climb the steep hill toward the reservoir we hiked to back then. Shiro and Kenichi took me walking every day because a doctor had told my mother it was important for me to get exercise and strengthen my legs. I was born with dislocated hips and spent my first sixteen months with my legs in a cast. After the cast came off and I learned to walk, the doctor warned my mother that if I didn’t strengthen my legs, I might limp for the rest of my life. Climbing the last steep stretch now, I’m not sure if I remember walking up here with Shiro and Kenichi back then, or if I just remember being here at some later time with them.

  Where the path levels off at the top, the reservoir comes into view quite suddenly, larger than I remember. The blue water looks deep and calm, divided from the path by a wire fence. There is nobody in sight. I linger by the water for a while and then walk along the fence to the ledge overlooking the western part of downtown, about two miles away. Tall white buildings cluster along the coast, and beyond them, the sea stretches dark blue. Right after World War II, my mother used to climb this same hill to look out at the sea because it was blue and calm just as it had been before the war, before miles of rubble stretched between this hill and downtown. My grandparents and their younger children had moved back to the countryside, leaving my mother and Shiro in town because they were still in high school. The year she climbed this hill to look at the sea beyond the rubble of downtown, she would have been seventeen, half the age I am now. She and Shiro had escaped the firebombs that destroyed most of Kobe because the house was too close to the mountains for the bombers to fly over. Neighborhoods only a mile to the south had burned down. Years later, my mother still had dreams about her house burning while she and Shiro ran up the hill to this reservoir to escape. Standing here almost fifty years later, I am inside her dreams of fire and water, dreams of destruction and narrow escape. Still, I cannot quite imagine what the downtown had looked like, reduced to rubble, any more than my mother as a young woman could have predicted this very moment: her daughter standing on this ledge after her death, after the destruction of her house in peacetime, and missing her with all the force of history.

  * * *

  As I get off the train near Sylvia’s house, something begins to bother me. The trip to the old neighborhood has taken only an hour and a half each way. The two places where I lived with my father after my mother’s death were both within five miles of Sylvia’s house and therefore not sig
nificantly farther from the old house where Keiko and Kenichi were living. I could easily have gone to see them on my own. If my father had ever asked, my friends would have lied for me and said I had been with them. Why didn’t I think of that back then? Was I so afraid of my father that I couldn’t think of this simple way to disobey him?

  I saw my mother’s family only a few times between her death and my departure from the country. My brother and I were allowed to visit our grandparents twice together—for the third anniversary of our mother’s death and for the fiftieth anniversary of our grandparents’ wedding. Then, in the last week before I left Japan in 1977, I went alone to visit my grandparents in their village, and also Kenichi, who had gotten married a few years earlier and was living in our old house with his family. My father never knew. I pretended that I had gone with my friends to a cabin that belonged to one of their parents. By then, I knew better than to tell him.

  Two years before that, I had been in Tokyo overnight for a school forensics competition. I called my uncle Shiro from the hotel when we checked in before the competition. He and his family came to hear my speech; afterward, they took me out to dinner. The next day, when my train was about to leave, Shiro and his wife came running onto the platform to see me off. They had been so happy to see me, they said, and they were proud of me for being in a national competition. As soon as I got home, I told my father about seeing Shiro. I made a point of being “honest,” I suppose, because I was feeling self-righteous and angry in the way I often felt back then and still do sometimes, when I feel compelled to tell offensive or unpopular “truths,” no matter what the consequences. My father hit me in the face and said he would never again allow me to go on overnight trips for school activities. He said it was no use allowing me to represent my school anyway, since I didn’t win the competition.

  I took no chances after that. Especially when I had only a week left before my escape to the States, I wasn’t going to tell my father anything that might send him into a rage. Every night, I slept in my clothes and tennis shoes, with a big chair pushed against my door, ready in case he came in the middle of the night to kill me with my stepmother’s butcher knife, something he had threatened several times to do. Maybe he would think this was his last chance and finally carry out his threat. I didn’t want anything to happen so close to my freedom.

  Walking up the long hill to Sylvia’s house, I remember the urgency I felt back then about escaping his house with my life. This is why I haven’t wanted to visit Kobe for so long: I didn’t want to see him; I didn’t even want to be in the same city with him. My reluctance to see him has kept me from seeing anyone else, and it continues to do so.

  I know that I cannot contact anyone in my family without first fulfilling my duty toward my father and stepmother. My maternal grandmother, uncles, aunts; my father’s sister, Akiko, and her daughter, Kazumi—all of them would feel awkward if I called them up and asked to visit them without first seeing my father, my stepmother, and my paternal grandfather, Tatsuo. Blood relationships are a webwork of obligations I cannot understand. Whether I like it or not, I have to honor their intricate restrictions so no one else will be forced into a bad position.

  Coming into Sylvia’s house, I am almost ready to pick up the phone and call my father’s house, to get the thing over with. My stepmother is probably home, though my father must be working. Maybe Michiko still cleans the house every day—taking whole mornings to sweep, mop, polish every piece of furniture. Last year, when I saw the two of them in New York where they spent a weekend as part of their group tour, she asked me if I washed my socks and underwear every night rather than letting my laundry pile up for a week the way she had heard American women did. I told her I did my laundry every other week. She said she was happy that I hadn’t gotten married and settled down in Japan, because she would have been embarrassed in front of her in-laws about what a terrible housekeeper I was. Though I was in New York that whole weekend staying with my friend Henri, I saw my parents just for one afternoon. That was the only time I saw them in the last thirteen years. I would be happy not to see them again for another thirteen years, or more.

  All the same, I get my address book and go to the phone. I can’t keep stalling forever, waiting to feel comfortable or ready, because I am never going to feel comfortable or ready. I have to call my father, so I can call everyone else. I remember what he looked like in New York: he had lost weight and his hair had turned gray. He is an old man now. I will never again have to fear for my life, not from him. Though I tell myself all these things, I cannot dial the number. Not today.

  I dial my friend Miya’s number instead. I have been calling her off and on since my first week in Japan and have never gotten an answer. The phone keeps ringing without an answer. Maybe she never got my letter. We might never be able to see each other. Still, I have enough things I want to do.

  * * *

  Three days later, Saturday, I get off the commuter train in Ashiya. The drizzle has stopped. The sky looks more blue than gray. People are staring at me because I am wearing my running shorts, tank top, and the heavily cushioned Brooks shoes I use for long-distance running. It’s midmorning. Women are shopping in the boutiques around the station.

  I stretch my legs against the wall and then start running east back into Kobe. After a mile, I head north up a hill. The last block before the house, which used to be gravel, is now paved. The brown dog that used to bark at me is of course gone. I speed up and sprint the last fifty yards. But when I stop and look up, the house my mother died in is no longer there. It has been torn down and the lot divided. Two new houses have been built, one of them with a shiny blue roof. The other house, with traditional ink-black kawara tiles, is situated where my mother’s garden used to be, where her lettuce grew faster that last summer than we could eat it. But the same oaks and cherries in the back of the lot are casting shadows on the blue house. It was always cold and dark in the kitchen where my mother sat thinking about what a failure her life had become. I imagine someone else, a woman my age, sitting in the kitchen there. I want to go in and warn her. “My mother died here. Be careful. Get out while you can.”

  Retracing my steps back toward Ashiya, I pass the houses of my grade-school friends. From the names on the mailboxes, I know that the same families live here now: the Hondas, Yamanakas, Tanabes. Their fathers or brothers must still own the houses. I wish I could stop to ask after my friends, but most likely they have married and moved away; even their last names would be different. Whoever is in the house, their mothers or their sisters-in-law, would be puzzled to see a strange woman in a jogging outfit, sweaty and urgent with nostalgia. They would only feel awkward or embarrassed. So I don’t stop, except once in front of a roadside shrine that was always here on my way to school. Inside what looks like a wooden cage the size of a refrigerator, several stone buddhas, called jizos, are seated on pillows. Their faces worn down almost to nothing, the statues look more like piles of simple stones. Still, people have been bringing flowers and incense sticks. My grandmother used to pray to a roadside buddha like these on the road between her house and the river. For all I know, she still does—wishing her children and grandchildren success and prosperity.

  In less than thirty minutes, I am approaching the seaside neighborhood in Ashiya where my family lived for five years, between when I was in kindergarten and in fourth grade. We were one of the twenty-four families living in a four-story apartment complex that belonged to Kawasaki Steel, the company my father worked for. My mother was happy there, surrounded by women her age who came over every day to drink tea and knit or sew together. When we moved to the house on the hill, she used to cry every night, saying that she missed her friends, she was so lonely. I want to stand in front of the apartment complex where she was happy and remember our time together.

  In just a few minutes, I’m running in front of the post office where my mother and I mailed our letters to my grandparents every week. I turn the corner onto our street and stop.

/>   In front of me stretches a thick barbed wire fence. Our building, twenty yards away inside the fence, is marked with yellow signs posted every ten yards or so: DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, CONSTRUCTION AREA: HARD HATS REQUIRED. There are no curtains in the windows; the building has not been painted in a long time.

  I walk slowly along the fence until I am directly in front of the ground-floor unit where we lived. Inside the north-facing bedroom where my mother and I used to sleep, the air seems tinted yellow as in old photographs. I know this is actually because the window is dirty; still, everything looks as if I were already remembering it rather than seeing it right now. Somehow the whole building looks smaller, reduced. The only thing that looks real is the loquat tree in front of the apartment that used to belong to the Kuzuha family. Gone wild, it’s still bearing fruit the color of sulfur-pink sunsets. Everywhere else, grass is growing long in the large yard where I used to play with the neighborhood children every afternoon.

  I jog around the building to the south side and stand before the balcony from which my mother used to call me when it was time to come in. Especially in the summer, I stayed out past dusk, until I was one of the last kids left playing. When I heard my name, I would sprint across the yard, push open the front door, kick off my shoes, and run into the kitchen where she was making supper. Sometimes, coming so suddenly into the bright light of the house, I would feel dizzy. I might even knock into the bookcase or the door before my eyes adjusted. Or else I would start talking very fast as soon as I entered the kitchen, even before my mother had turned her full attention toward me. “Slow down,” she would say, laughing. “You’re always in such a hurry. There’s no reason to rush. We’ll be here all night.” But even as she told me to slow down, I knew that she was amused by my rushing, that my quickness was something I inherited from her. Standing in front of this fenced-off building now, I still hope that I made her happy back then, even though it wasn’t enough to keep her alive till old age.