by Kyoko Mori
I stoop down to touch the chrysanthemum buds. They are hard, luminous at the tip. I wish my visits had continued through my teens and twenties; then, coming back here now, I would not feel such a mixture of familiarity and strangeness, this fondness and regret.
My grandmother stops picking the lettuce and looks up.
“Last time I came,” I say to her, “Grandfather was still here.”
* * *
While Fuku goes back to the house to rest, I cut some garden pinks and walk over to see the Yamamotos next door. The couple come to the door and start bowing to me. I bow back. We are standing under the roof I fell from one year. Their daughter, Reiko, who was my age, showed me how to get up on the roof by climbing the maple tree first, but she forgot to warn me about the loose shingle above the front door. I lost my balance while running around on the roof and fell off. I wasn’t badly hurt because the part I fell from was lower than the rest of the roof. What I remember most is Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto scolding Reiko as if the whole thing were her fault, even though my grandparents and my mother told them to take it easy on her.
“Your grandmother said you were coming,” Mrs. Yamamoto says. “You’ve grown up.”
“I came to ask you a favor. I want to go up the hill to the family grave. Would you mind going with me? Grandmother doesn’t want me to go there alone, and she says she is too old to walk up that hill.”
Mr. Yamamoto takes some daisies from the garden because his family’s grave is also up on the same hill. It’s time to bring more flowers for his parents; they both passed away since I’ve been out of the country. Reiko is married now and lives in Himeji. He talks about her and her daughter as we climb the hill to the clearing where the two family graves are. Because Mr. Yamamoto’s family used to be our family’s sharecroppers, our stone is much larger than theirs and closer to the ledge that overlooks the river. Mr. Yamamoto and I get some water at the faucet in the middle of the clearing and start toward the stones.
“Watch out,” he shouts. “There’s a habu.”
I stop. He is standing completely still on the grassy path in front of his family’s stone and squinting at his feet.
“What is habu?” I ask. “Is that the same thing as mamushi?”
“Yes. Be careful. They always come in pairs.” He picks up a stick and beats the grass at his feet.
I peer into the grass around my path. There is no snake of any kind, so I proceed to the stone and put the flowers in the basin.
“It went back into its hole,” Mr. Yamamoto says after a while as I wash the stone. “I don’t see the other one anywhere. You’d better tell your grandmother.”
“She says she doesn’t come here anymore. But she’ll be glad you were with me. I wouldn’t know a mamushi from a garden snake.”
Mr. Yamamoto starts cleaning his family’s grave. I light the incense sticks Fuku gave me and put them in the bowl under the names. The Nagai stone has more names and dates carved on its side than the Mori stone: my grandfather Takeo, his parents, my mother, and her older sisters who died as young children. Each is identified by the name in this life and the spirit-name given at the time of death, and also by their relationship to the living: Takeo’s father, Takeo’s mother, Takeo’s first, second, and third daughters. Takeo is identified as my uncle Yasuo’s father. Blood ties are remembered beyond death here.
The Nagais before my great-grandfather Takehiko are memorialized in a mountain village a few miles north, where the family had lived for centuries, supervising their land from the mountaintop. Takehiko was the first to come down from that village and live among the family’s sharecroppers. He chose this site for the family cemetery. In the summers, my uncles, aunts, and cousins used to visit here together.
I still have a picture that was taken on one such occasion. It shows Fuku and Takeo, my mother, Yasuo and Sayo, my uncle Shiro and his wife, Michiyo, Kenichi, Keiko, Jumpei, and me all standing in front of this stone. Jumpei and I must have been four and seven; it was before most of our cousins were born. All the adults in the picture look solemn. Maybe it was irreverent or bad luck to smile at the grave site where you were getting a memorial picture taken with the ancestral spirits. But I’m putting my palms together in a mock gesture of reverence and grinning with all my teeth. Jumpei’s face is completely turned away from the camera toward me. His mouth is wide open with laughter.
The smoke is rising from the incense sticks. I close my eyes.
I hope you remember how I made you laugh, I say to Takeo and Takako.
* * *
When I get back to the house, Keiko is in the kitchen cooking. She is making a salad, a pot of rice, and some potato stew with little pieces of meat I can easily pick out and not eat. Fuku is in her bedroom resting.
Around five o’clock, Yasuo and Sayo come over with a tray of Chinese food from a restaurant. “Time for dinner,” he says, laughing and shaking my hand. Soon we are sitting on the tatami floor of the family room around the big black table. Keiko gives Fuku small portions of everything.
“Whenever I eat Chinese food,” Fuku says to me, “I think of your other grandmother, Okiku-san.”
“How is that?” I ask.
“A week before your mother’s wedding, your grandfather and I came to town. Okiku-san and I had lunch together. She took me to the best Chinese restaurant in Kobe and treated me. She kept saying how happy she was about the marriage. She loved your mother. Okiku-san was a gentle and considerate person, not at all like her husband. She went through a lot of hardships because of him.”
“Because he was selfish?”
Fuku gives a discreet small nod. “Anyway, at the Chinese restaurant, she kept ordering more and more food and urging me to eat. We had such a good time together.”
If I could go back in time, this is what I want to see: my two grandmothers talking and laughing together over egg rolls or shark-fin soup. They would have worn their going-out kimonos and had their hair done to visit a fancy restaurant. They must have confided in each other about their hardships. I imagine them lifting white cups of chrysanthemum tea to their lips and smiling at each other.
I know little about my paternal grandmother except that her name was Kiku and she was called Okiku-san, like the woman from the Mansion of the Plates. Kiku died before I was a year old. When I go to doctors’ offices and they ask what my grandparents died of, I say I’m not sure about my grandmother even though she died young, in her midfifties.
“Okiku-san had liver cancer,” Keiko tells me as she puts more rice into my bowl. “She was in Hiroshima when they dropped the bomb. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Everyone was there except my father.”
Yasuo sees me pick out the pieces of meat and set them aside on an empty plate. He shakes his head. “I see you are still a picky eater. Eating like that, you’ll never live a long life like your grandmother.” He peels a summer orange and sets the sweet sections on Fuku’s plate. “These are her favorites ever since I made her eat them when she stayed at my house with a bad cold. They cured her.”
“But remember,” Sayo breaks in, “she didn’t want to try them at first when I recommended them. She said they were bitter. How could she know when she had never tasted them? She said she could tell by their look. She was wrong, of course. Sometimes she has her mind set against things, so it doesn’t matter what you tell her.” Sayo glances sideways at Fuku.
Fuku continues chewing the orange sections in silence, perhaps pretending not to hear. Her sisters, Masu and Ko, both lived to be over ninety-five, though Fuku is the only one left now. She has lived more than twice as long as my mother. Fuku’s family is known for longevity; her mother lived to almost a hundred.
Yasuo takes another orange into his hands. His thumb circles over its rough skin to find the soft spot near the stem end.
“Here, Mother,” he says. “Eat more.”
Until the last two years of her life, my mother thought that she would live to be a very old woman because of her family hi
story. I wonder if she ever imagined my brother and me taking care of her in her old age, spooning Chinese food on her plate, peeling oranges for her. Look how attentive Uncle Yasuo is, I want to say to her; Jumpei and I would have done anything for you, too.
At nine o’clock, I see Yasuo and Sayo to the door.
“Maybe we’ll have a big family reunion next year,” Yasuo says. “It’ll be the thirteenth anniversary of your grandfather’s death. We’ll have the priest over to read the sutras and remember him together. It’ll be a good occasion for your grandmother to see everyone.”
“That sounds very good.”
“If I can send you a ticket, will you come back for the reunion?”
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll come anyway.”
“Let me get your ticket,” Yasuo insists.
I hesitate.
“Don’t be polite. I’m your uncle. Your mother took care of me when I was little. Your grandmother would want to see you again next summer. I want to help you come back.”
“All right. Thanks a lot.”
Yasuo pats my shoulder with his big hand. I remember the crickets, grasshoppers, and butterflies he used to catch, the wild nightingales he tamed so that they sang inside bamboo cages or flew around his house.
“You look like your mother now,” Yasuo says. “You have her eyes.”
We say good night, and I watch them walk to their car. Then I go back in the house, where Keiko and Fuku are drinking tea.
“Sayo left the Chinese food,” Fuku says. “The leftovers won’t fit into my refrigerator. They’ll spoil.”
“Don’t worry, Mother,” Keiko assures her. “They won’t spoil overnight. It’s very cool tonight.”
“Will you eat the leftovers before you go home, then?”
“If not, I’ll take them home for my husband.”
Keiko has covered the tray with a cloth. Fuku lifts it and looks at the food. “Sayo should have taken back the whole tray. There’s too much food.”
I don’t want her to stay up fretting about the food. “Grandmother, you should go take a bath and relax,” I suggest. “Then we’ll all go to bed.”
“You two should take a bath, too, but the hot water comes out too sudden. I don’t want you to come to my house and get burned.”
Fuku puts the cloth back over the food and starts to smooth the cushion she is sitting on.
“We’ll be careful about the hot water,” I try to assure her.
“I can’t eat all this food. Why did Sayo bring so much anyway?”
“But it won’t go to waste because Keiko’s taking it back.”
“The food will spoil while she’s carrying it on the train. It won’t be any good by the time she gets home.”
“Stop worrying,” Keiko says. “The train takes much less time now. Besides, it’s air-conditioned.”
“You two take a bath and go to bed,” Fuku says. “Which of you will go first?”
Keiko and I look at each other. She shrugs. We are the guests. Fuku won’t take a bath or go to bed until the two of us are in bed. Though I am irritated by her nagging, I remind myself that she wants everything to be perfect on this visit, just as I do.
“You go first, Neine,” I say to Keiko.
After we have bathed, we lay our futons in the middle room between the family room and the butsuma. This is where my mother, brother, and I slept during our summer visits. In July and August, we had to sleep inside a green mosquito netting to avoid being bitten. My brother and I crawled around pretending to be lions in a cage. I fall asleep while Fuku is walking around the house after her bath, making sure everything is in order.
* * *
At six the next morning, Fuku calls from the next room.
“I bought extra milk when the grocery truck came last. I don’t want it to spoil. It’s in the refrigerator. You go and drink it.”
“She’s worried about the food,” Keiko whispers from her futon.
“There’s some bread in the refrigerator, too,” Fuku continues. “We left last night’s rice on the table.” Now she’s moving around. Cloth rustles against cloth. She must be folding her futon and getting dressed.
“I want to sleep some more,” I call out to Fuku, too sleepy to hide the crankiness in my voice.
“Go ahead and make yourself a little breakfast,” Keiko adds. “We’ll get up soon, and you can eat with us again.”
“Do you know how to toast the bread on the burner?” Fuku asks, completely ignoring what we said. We can hear her steps. She must be walking toward the kitchen.
Keiko pushes her covers aside, gets up, and puts on a cardigan over her nightgown.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s not going to stop till we get up and eat with her.” Keiko buttons up her cardigan. “She’s worried about the food.”
“I’m going back to sleep all the same.” I pull the sheets over my head. “I never eat right after I get up.”
Keiko is already walking away toward the kitchen.
By now, Fuku has checked the kitchen and come back to the dining room. She is saying something about the tray of Chinese food left on the table. I kick the covers aside and pull a long-sleeved T-shirt over my nightshirt. Keiko is right. My grandmother is not going to be satisfied until we are all eating breakfast. I sit on the futon for awhile, listening to her shuffling around. Leave me alone, I want to say. Why won’t you let me sleep? But that is childish. I have to give in.
As I stand up and begin to fold my futon, though, I can’t help wishing that I had been allowed to visit her when I was a teenager. Perhaps then Fuku and I would already have had our fights about eating in the morning, about how her constant reminders bothered me. Our relationship is missing an important middle part: we were together when I was too young for serious rebellion, and suddenly I am here as a grown-up granddaughter, someone who should be attentive to her needs. I could not spend my teenage years challenging her authority and coming slowly to peace; instead I was always trying not to make her worry about me, writing only the good things in letters she was not even allowed to answer. It is too late to make amends for that missing middle. I cannot tell her about the anger I feel toward my father for his part in our loss. I need to do the best I can to make this visit a good one, an experience she can remember with pleasure.
I finish folding the futons and go to dress. Walking toward the big sink by the kitchen, where we always washed our faces, I remember my uncles and grandfather getting me up before dawn to go walking in the mountains, to see the sun rise.
* * *
In midafternoon, Keiko and I walk to the bus stop, down the street in front of the elementary school. Fuku follows us in her gray blouse and black skirt, an old pair of brown leather shoes too big for her feet. Keiko is carrying the tray of Chinese food with pink Saran Wrap on top.
The bus isn’t here yet. Behind us, a narrow path cuts between the paddies to the river. Ahead, across the street, is the school and then more paddies going up to the foot of the mountains.
“I’m glad you could come,” Fuku says to me. “I wanted to see you once before I died.”
“Don’t say such a thing,” Keiko protests.
“I’ll be here again,” I say. “Uncle Yasuo will send me a ticket to come and visit next summer. He’s planning a family reunion to remember Grandfather. I’m sure he told you that.”
Fuku tilts her head a little and sighs. “You can remember me then, too. Most likely, I’ll be gone by then.”
“Grandmother.”
“I have lived too long.” She looks down at the gray pavement. “Some nights, I think Sayo should put me in her car and take me to some cliff I can jump off from. Or when I’m crossing this road, I think about stopping in front of a car so it’ll hit me. But then I think of what an ugly death that would be. The person who hit me would be so inconvenienced. People would gossip, too. They would say, ‘That old woman, something must have been wrong with her head.’ What a big nuisance that would be to your uncl
es and aunts. And maybe your cousins wouldn’t be able to marry or find work after such a scandal. So I think I have no choice. I just have to live till my time comes.”
Keiko and I look at each other. She turns back toward Fuku and tries to laugh.
“Mother, what a morbid way to talk.”
“It’s the truth,” Fuku insists. “I can’t wait to die and meet Takako and Takeo. And my sisters.”
I look up at the sky. It’s a clear day. The sun feels too bright on the road. I am standing between my grandmother in her too-large clothes and my aunt wielding an awkward tray of food covered with Saran Wrap. What can I possibly say to make things right?
“Grandmother,” I say, “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. I didn’t come all this way to hear you talk about how you want to die.”
She looks at me in silence. Immediately, I regret what I’ve said. It must have sounded petty and resentful, as if I cared more about my feelings than about hers. But before I can say anything else, the orange-and-cream–colored bus comes down the road. I put down my backpack and touch Fuku’s thin shoulder.
“I’m so glad we could see each other,” I offer, wishing there were a way I could put all my love and regret and apologies into my voice. “I missed you so much. Please don’t think about dying. I want to see you again.” What I really want to say is, I am sorry about all the years I couldn’t be a good granddaughter to you because my father kept me from you, because I had to go and live in a foreign country. Forgive me. But I cannot tell her that, now or ever.
The bus is waiting, its doors wide open.
“Thank you for coming,” Fuku says, her cheeks wet with tears. She hesitates a second and adds, “Come and see me again. I’ll be waiting.”
“Yes,” I nod. “Next year.”
I squeeze her shoulder, pick up my backpack, and head up the steps while Keiko says’ her good-bye. The bus is empty. I give the driver my change and walk all the way to the back. As soon as I sit down, I turn back. Fuku is waving. Keiko comes to sit across the aisle and carefully lays out the tray of food next to her. The bus lurches forward. I continue waving.