The Dream of Water

by Kyoko Mori

  Every summer, my brother and I cried as soon as we sat down on the bus. We sat in the very back and waved as though we never expected to see our grandparents again. Grandmother always sent us home with some kind of food—tomatoes and eggplant from the garden or rice cakes she had made. Watching us cry, she would say something about how she was getting old, and that it would be so lonely without us. She was always more pessimistic than my grandfather, who waved to us with a big smile on his face. My mother and I used to laugh about it later. “Your grandmother,” she used to tell me, “she’s the biggest pessimist I know.”

  I keep waving until the bus has moved so far that we can no longer see each other. Then I turn to face forward.

  Keiko reaches across the aisle and lays her hand on my wrist.

  “Grandmother just talks like that, right?” I ask her. “She was always kind of pessimistic, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. Your grandmother’s even worse than before because she is older. Sometimes she speaks that way because she’s lonely. But she was glad to see you. It made her very happy. And she has Yasuo and Sayo to take care of her.”

  I watch the river to my left. Every summer during my childhood, the river looked the same but was in fact slightly different. The place where we were supposed to swim—because the current was slow and the depth just right—changed from summer to summer due to rainfall and erosion. It was the kind of thing you knew only if you lived here. I will never live in this village or even in the same country. In a week, I will be separated from this river, this village, by an ocean, another time zone, another language. My eyes hurt, and my throat feels tight. How do I know what has changed and what remains the same when I live so far away? How can I feel comforted by the past when loss is the most constant thing in it? Holding my aunt’s hand, I continue to look out the window at the green paddies that once belonged to my mother’s family. I am leaving behind a village where all my life, under different circumstances, could have taken place.

  A Thousand Cranes

  After our dinner together, my uncle Shiro brings out a bottle of wine while his wife, Michiyo, clears the table. Their fifth-floor condominium overlooks one of the many rivers of Hiroshima. On the busy street below, white headlights move like beads rolling down along the black water. When Michiyo returns from the kitchen, Shiro uncorks the wine and pours us each a glass.

  We have been talking about my grandfather’s letters and papers, which Shiro is keeping in his office. He has the diaries and will send them to me.

  “When I couldn’t find the diaries,” I tell Shiro and Michiyo, “Grandmother said, ‘Maybe they turned into rice.’ She was thinking about the kimonos she sold after the war. She forgot that Grandfather passed away years later.”

  Shiro and Michiyo both laugh.

  “That was the only thing she was confused about. Otherwise, she remembered everything.”

  “Her memory is remarkable.” Shiro frowns and smiles at the same time. “She gets confused sometimes because her mind is stuck on a detail she can’t forget, like selling those kimonos after the war. She’s not losing her memory in any way.”

  “You’re right. She kept reminding Keiko and me to do things. She was afraid we might be forgetful.”

  Shiro shakes his head. “She is as shitsukoi as ever.”

  Shitsukoi means, literally, “thick-willed” and therefore “maddeningly persistent.”

  “She was shitsukoi all right,” I admit. “She woke us up to have breakfast because she was worried about all the food she had bought. It was early, so we wanted to sleep some more, but Grandmother kept talking until we gave in.”

  Shiro and Michiyo look at each other.

  “She’s done that to us, too,” Michiyo says.

  “Your poor grandmother,” Shiro sighs. “She wants things to go exactly her way. She can be a terrible nag sometimes.”

  “But she doesn’t nag in a mean way,” Michiyo puts in. “She worries because she wants to make sure her guests have enough to eat and they’re comfortable and everything is all right. She worries because she’s kindhearted.”

  “Of course,” I agree. “She just doesn’t understand that people might be more comfortable if she could leave them alone now and then. I know she means well.”

  “It’s the Nagai curse,” Shiro laughs and sips his wine. “All of us are like that in some way. We don’t know how to leave well enough alone. We can’t help being shitsukoi.”

  I look at him wanting to say, Not me. I have no problem leaving people alone.

  “Your brother, Jumpei, is not like that,” Shiro says. “And my son, Takeshi. But they’re exceptions.”

  “How about me? I’m not a nag. I don’t worry when people come to my house.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Shiro says. “I mean the way we can’t do things halfway. Whatever we do, we go all out. We don’t know when to let up.”

  I want to protest again, but Shiro keeps on talking.

  “Look at your uncle Yasuo. When he goes fishing, he doesn’t just catch a few fish and come home. He spends the whole afternoon and brings back more fish than his family can eat. It’s the same thing with his business. He works from dawn to midnight and goes in on Sundays to do his accounts.”

  “He used to trap birds, too,” I add. “My mother told me.”

  “Birds, crickets, beetles. When we were growing up, Yasuo had jars and cages all over our house. He used to hide behind bushes in the winter with a net to catch nightingales. Even if it was snowing and cold, he could sit there all day. He didn’t know when to give up.”

  “He almost flunked out of high school because he was too busy catching birds and crickets.”

  “That’s right. Now, with Keiko, it’s her religion. Why can’t she be moderately religious like other people? Instead she gives all her money to this hirameki shrine and stands in front of train stations handing out tracts. It’s all or nothing with her, too.”

  While Shiro refills his glass, I take a sip from mine. The wine is fruity and sweeter than the German wines I am used to. It reminds me of the cooking liquers, fruit rinds, and spices my mother kept in her cupboards. They were arranged in orderly rows of glass jars, each labeled in her meticulous handwriting.

  “I suppose my mother was like that, too.”

  “You bet.”

  My mother used to get up at five to weed her vegetable garden. She built trellises and arches for her morning glories and roses, the bamboo sticks cut, bent, and tied neatly with white twine. In her desk drawer, her embroidery floss was sorted and arranged by color, boxes of pencils were sharpened to perfection, and she had several notebooks in which she kept records of her gardening, her embroidery projects, her plans for outdoor excursions.

  “You’re right,” I say to Shiro. “My mother did everything all out, too. She was more cheerful and energetic than anybody’s mother I knew. But when she became unhappy, she didn’t feel just a little depressed. She thought her life was completely worthless. So it was all or nothing with her, too.”

  Shiro nods. “People in your mother’s generation were prone to depression when they got to be thirty-five or forty. Your mother had one of the worst cases.”

  “You mean people in her generation suffered because of the war?” I ask. Every time age or generation is mentioned in Japan, the Second World War is the dividing line: people belong to different generations according to how old they were back then.

  “Your mother was in middle school when the war broke out,” Shiro says. “She spent her most impressionable years being told to sacrifice everything for her country. She had to eat watered-down rice and go hungry, walk through neighborhoods full of dead bodies after air raids. She was prepared to die for her country, and then it came to nothing. The war turned out to be nothing worth dying for.” Shiro pauses to sip his wine and continues. “When the war ended and we lost our land, she had to work hard to support us. Then she met your father, nursed him through TB, and married him. She worked hard to make a good home, but her m
arriage wasn’t happy. By the time she was nearing forty, she felt as if she had spent her whole life sacrificing for one meaningless cause after another. A lot of people her age went through that. I was lucky to be a few years younger. I don’t remember the war quite as vividly.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Remember Takeshi Ogata, your mother’s and my cousin?”

  I nod.

  “He was your mother’s age and very similar in temperament; both of them were very intelligent. They tended to think a lot and take things to heart. Once they started thinking depressing thoughts, they couldn’t stop. That’s what I mean by the Nagai curse. Other people went through the same things and were able to shrug them off. Your mother and Takeshi couldn’t.”

  I don’t say anything for a while.

  Michiyo gets up from the table. “Let’s have some tea,” she suggests in her bright, cheerful voice. “Bancha or oolong tea?” she asks me.

  “Either sounds very good.”

  She goes to the kitchen, part of which is visible from the dining room over the countertop. I watch her fill a kettle and put it on the stove, open a tin, and measure the tea leaves into a glossy brown pot. When she comes back to the dining room, she sits with her face partially turned toward the kitchen to watch the kettle. “I think some hot tea would be wonderful,” she announces, smiling at me.

  “I didn’t mean to have a depressing discussion,” Shiro says. He drains his glass. “The Nagai persistence can be a good thing. It doesn’t have to be a curse.”

  I wait for him to go on.

  “I’ve always been able to get more research done than my colleagues at the university because I know how to work hard even under stress. I can really concentrate. In that way, I’m lucky to have our family’s persistent nature. You must know how that is.”

  For a moment, it seems strange that Shiro and I can now talk about work. When we last saw each other, I was in high school. Now I have a doctorate and an academic position just as he does, though our fields are different.

  “I’m pretty disciplined about my work,” I say, “but I’m not a perfectionist the way my mother was. Maybe I don’t have the Nagai temperament. I’m not all that persistent.”

  Shiro shakes his head and almost guffaws. “You are more persistent than all your cousins combined. You inherited more of the Nagai temperament than anyone else.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Remember when you used to make origami cranes?”

  I nod.

  “Once you learned how to make them, you wanted to make them smaller and smaller. You had to use your mother’s sewing needles and tweezers to fold them because they were too small for your fingers. You had a cookie tin full of origami cranes smaller than your thumbnail.”

  “But that’s just one thing.”

  “You also filled at least one notebook a week with your stories and pictures during summer vacation. You collected seashells with holes in just the right places so you could string them into necklaces. When we walked on the beach, you were always picking up shells and looking at them. You were just like Yasuo. Both of you could do the same thing for hours.”

  “All right,” I concede. “But I’m not like that about everything. I do most things less than halfway. If I have a class that’s not going well, I don’t lie awake worrying about it. When I knit sweaters, if I find a minor mistake several rows later, I don’t rip out the stitches to correct it. I’m not a perfectionist.”

  “Good,” Shiro says, grinning. “That means you’ve learned your lesson.”

  “What lesson?”

  “The lesson about living with the Nagai curse. Choose one or two things you can’t leave alone and make sure they are good things. Then back off from everything else so you don’t have to be shitsukoi all around. That’s what I try to do with my research. I obsess on that, but I try to let up about everything else.”

  “Does that work?”

  “Sure. It works for me. I wish Keiko had done the same. Keiko would have made a great scholar because she’s smart and hard-working. She would have done a lot of good for other people and been happier herself if she’d found something other than this crazy religion to obsess about. It’s too bad she couldn’t go to college and find something to study.”

  For a long time, I have had similar thoughts about my mother: she might have been happier if she had found a vocation, an art, a cause to pursue professionally. Then she wouldn’t have been so quick to think that her life was worthless.

  Michiyo goes to the kitchen, where the water is boiling. She lets the tea steep and then brings it to the dining room.

  “Try and see if you like it,” she says, pushing a brown ceramic cup toward me.

  I lift it and drink. It’s bancha, the roasted Japanese tea that, unlike green tea, is sweet.

  “It’s delicious.”

  Smiling, she pours a cup each for herself and Shiro, goes back to the kitchen, and returns with a plate of manju. Each manju is shaped like a maple leaf.

  “These are specialties of Hiroshima. You’ll like them because they don’t have bean paste inside. The outside part is like pancakes. Inside they have chocolate or jam. Try one.” She holds the plate toward me.

  I take one of the manju and bite into semisweet chocolate. “This is great.”

  Michiyo and Shiro are looking at each other and nodding. See, she likes the manju, they must be thinking to each other. I can imagine what it’s like for my cousin Takeshi to come home on his vacation from his job in Okayama, two hours away by train. Though he hasn’t lived at home for a few years now, Shiro and Michiyo would remember exactly what food he liked and disliked; they would tell him things he had forgotten about his childhood. If my mother had lived on, my homecoming would have been the same way. I smile at Michiyo as she pours more tea into my cup and puts another manju in front of me.

  * * *

  An hour later, lying in bed in Takeshi’s old room, I remember saying good-bye to Keiko at the train station in Himeji.

  “I won’t have a chance to see you again,” she said as we stood near the ticket gate. “You’ll be in Kobe only a short while after this.”

  “I’ll be back again. Maybe next year.”

  “I’m glad we got to see each other. Your mother would be happy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m praying for her every day.” Keiko smiled and tilted her head, as if to say, Is that all right?

  “I’m glad to hear that. Thank you,” I said. “See you next year.”

  I began to walk toward the tracks. Before turning the corner, I looked back one last time and saw Keiko waving. Her other arm was wrapped tight around the tray of Chinese food, more an inconvenience than a welcome gift since she wasn’t going straight back to Kobe. She had to stop at the Himeji branch of her shrine. Still, Keiko had accepted the food so my grandmother would stop worrying and feel at peace. In the same way, I thought, it was all right for me to thank her for praying for my mother. Prayer is Keiko’s way of honoring and mourning my mother. It doesn’t matter that I don’t believe in her religion. Just as Keiko had wanted to give Fuku some peace of mind, I wanted Keiko to feel that she was doing me some good.

  Keiko believes that the souls of dead people are caught in limbo between this life and the next world, waiting for the prayers of surviving relatives to help them move on. She wants to get a genealogy chart done so she can pray all our ancestors into the next world. Shiro is right about one thing, Keiko is going all out: she wants to bring our entire family, living and dead, into peace, into enlightenment. But Shiro may be wrong to say that her pursuit is crazy, that she would have been better off as a scholar. All weekend, Keiko was considerate toward my grandmother, toward me. She smiled and laughed a lot. She must be happy. Who can say that she would have been happier some other way or done more good for other people?

  To Keiko, hirameki must be a flash of light just as its name suggests, something that brightens up her life. As she sits at the altar every morni
ng to pray, she might notice a stream of light coming through the window. Dust in its path would glitter and be transformed into specks of light, into souls. The world is full of lost souls waiting for her to claim them as kin, to help them move on. She is so eager to do good. I fall asleep imagining her at a train station. “Look behind you and around you,” she is calling to tired people coming home from work or school. “Don’t you see that flash of light? It’s all around you. Don’t you see it?”

  * * *

  The following afternoon, Michiyo and I make our way through the Peace Memorial Park, the site of another kind of hirameki forty-five years earlier. It’s been gray and windy all morning and afternoon. The rain starts when we are halfway through the park. Shiro is at the university attending a meeting. He wouldn’t have come here even if he had been free.

  “You two should go alone,” he said at breakfast. “I don’t feel up to it. It’s too depressing, especially in this weather.”

  He has a point. This is a place for grieving. The statues and memorial stones along the path are covered with flowers, one thousand cranes of peace, letters and banners addressed to the souls of people who perished here. Wet paper and petals glisten against gray stone. At the end of the path, we come to the largest commemorative stone, which is surrounded by flower arrangements sent by the current mayor of Hiroshima, the U.S. ambassador, someone from the prefectural office. Michiyo and I stop to read the words carved on the stone: “Please rest in peace. The mistake will not be repeated.”

  In silence, we cross the plaza and enter the museum building. Inside, the exhibit is spread out into a series of small rooms. The first room has fact sheets and charts about the power of the atomic bomb; the second is lined with glass cases. Metal and glass fragments pulled from the skin of the dying, burned shirts peeled off their backs, curled fingernails and singed hair they had shed are all preserved under lock and key.

  Walking a few steps ahead of me, Michiyo doesn’t pause long to read the tags under each item. She and Shiro have lived in Hiroshima for the last five years. She must have seen these displays over and over with guests, but they are not things she would remember from her childhood. She was born in Kobe during the war and was only two or three at its end. Unlike my mother, she doesn’t remember the long lines at the ration stands, sitting in the dark all night while the air raids went on, the constant talk of dying for her country.