by Kyoko Mori
Soon the waiter is back with four large platters of food and a bowl of rice. We start to help ourselves.
“I keep thinking of those East Indians,” Hiroshi says as he dishes the sesame beef onto his plate.
“I beg your pardon?”
“They’re vegetarians, like you. Look at them past forty. Their faces are wrinkled and dried up. It’s because they don’t eat enough protein and fat. You don’t want to look like that, do you?” He sticks his chopsticks into the pockmarked tofu on his plate. The surface glistens with grease from the ground pork as he stirs the sauce toward the sesame beef, the two dishes overlapping on top of the rice.
“Maybe they get more sun,” I say without thinking. “But who says they have more wrinkles than other people? Each person is different. It’s racist to say that all East Indians have wrinkles.”
“Take my word for it. They have more wrinkles than anyone else. I see enough of them in Kobe.” He waves his chopsticks at Kazumi. “Don’t be shy. Eat more.” He opens the menu again. “How about lotus-leaf-wrapped rice? That’s good. I’ve had it before.”
“I’m getting full,” Kazumi says.
I reach over and take one of the menus he hasn’t handed us. “The rice is prepared with ground pork and sauteed in oil with special spices,” I read. “I can’t eat that.”
Hiroshi sighs. “We’ll order two and ask them to prepare one without pork.” He raises his hand. The waiter walks toward us at a fast clip and writes down the order. After he leaves, we eat in silence.
“Do you walk Ran-chan twice a day?” Hiroshi asks Kazumi when the waiter returns with the rice.
“Yes,” she says, unwrapping the rice and spreading it on the plate for us. She folds up the lotus leaves and puts them in the center, to divide my meatless rice from theirs. She has always acted like my older sister, though I’m six months older and was a year ahead in school. Our mothers were the same way. Mine was seven months older than hers. Mine was quick and funny; hers was steady, reliable. Kazumi and I are playing the same parts, each of us like her mother.
“Ran-chan is anxious for his walk,” Hiroshi says as he spoons some rice onto his plate. “Let’s get you home before dark.”
“It’s nowhere near dark yet,” Kazumi protests. “Besides, we only go a short way the second time. It doesn’t matter whether it’s dark or light.”
Still, he calls for the bill as soon as we are done with the last course—fried sweet potatoes in a tangle of sticky sugar threads. He examines the bill quickly and shuffles over to the counter to pay while Kazumi and I are still drinking our tea.
“Tell me one thing,” I say to Kazumi as we get up and begin to walk toward the door, where Hiroshi is waiting, another cigarette between his fingers. Kazumi is a few steps ahead of me. I raise my hand and touch her back. “Does he seem weird to you?” I ask. “It’s not just my imagination, is it? He really is weird.”
We both stop a moment among the empty tables and chairs. She cranes her neck and turns back to me, her lips pursed into a half-smile. “He certainly is strange. My mother says he has turned into a strange character. Wait till you see her.”
I squeeze her shoulder lightly and then let go as we begin walking. I want to tell her how relieved I am that she sees him the way I do—I’m not imagining his behavior or being unreasonably critical. But we are almost at the door, so I shrug and smile.
“All the same, Aunt Takako would have been happy you had dinner with him,” she whispers.
“Maybe,” I say.
Outside, Hiroshi drops his cigarette and grinds it out with his shoe. He takes off his jacket, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead. We walk back to Tatsuo’s house and stop in front of the door. The house is dark. Tatsuo is not home. Kazumi puts her key in the lock. “Would you like to come in?” she asks.
“No, we’d better go,” Hiroshi says.
Kazumi opens the door all the same. The dog dashes out, dragging his chain, and jumps up on Hiroshi.
“Ran-chan.” He stoops over and lays his hand on the dog’s head. “It’s good to see you again. We came home early so you can take your walk.” The dog’s ears go back and he sticks out his tongue. “Michiko will call you about dinner tomorrow,” Hiroshi says to Kazumi.
“Thank you for taking us out tonight,” she says. “Good night, and good luck on your operation.”
“Time for me to go home,” Hiroshi says to the dog. He nudges him away. “Be a good dog.”
“How are you getting home?” he asks me when Kazumi closes the door.
“I thought I’d take the train.”
“Well, I was going to take a taxi home,” Hiroshi says after a few steps. “I can give the driver enough money to drop me off first and then drive on to your friend’s house from there. It won’t add much to the fare.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“It won’t be any trouble.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thank you.”
“The taxi stand is a few blocks away.”
“I know where it is.”
We begin to walk in silence. Hiroshi is a few steps ahead of me when we come to an intersection. He continues straight ahead through a red light while I stop to look. A car comes from the left. Then another from the right. Then the light changes. Just as I step into the intersection, a car comes from the side and turns in front of me. By the time it’s gone, Hiroshi is far ahead, on the other side. He doesn’t even look back. I begin to run after him. I’m just catching up when we get to the taxi stand. There is no one in line, with three cars waiting.
“Good,” he says. “We don’t have to wait.” He marches up to the first car and taps on the window for the driver to open the automatic door.
“Take me to Asahigaoka-dai first and then drive her to Mikage,” he says, climbing in. “I’ll pay the whole fare.”
The cab pulls away from the stand. We ride several blocks in silence. Hiroshi is staring straight ahead, at the back of the vinyl seat.
“Are you nervous about your surgery?” I ask him because I can’t think of anything else to say.
Trying to light a cigarette, he looks down his nose at the tip of the lighter. “No,” he shakes his head.
“Grandfather said you were going in for nine weeks. I didn’t realize it was so serious.”
“It’s not serious.” He takes the first drag and exhales, spreading smoke in the interior of the cab.
“You’re not in pain now?” I don’t even know why I am asking, except to be polite. Whether he feels pain or not is of no concern to me.
“Of course not,” he answers. “The hospital wants to keep me for nine weeks because they can get my insurance to pay. That’s all. The doctors want to make money. Besides, this isn’t America. They don’t just cut you open, sew you up, and expect you to leave in a week.” He grimaces as if to criticize me for what he considers to be the inferior medical practices of the country where I have chosen to live.
What is the use of talking to him? I turn away and watch the houses along the hill while he gives the driver his exact address. Soon we are in front of his condominium.
Hiroshi says, ja, “well.” Genki-de, “Stay well.” He shoves some bills toward the driver and gets out. He doesn’t look back or wave. I don’t roll down the window to thank him for dinner.
That was my father, I want to say as we start back down the hill. You’d never know it by the way we acted.
Now we are halfway down the hill. The grade school I attended is behind us, its cream-colored buildings blurring against the mountainside at dusk. On the first day of first grade, my mother had walked up this hill with me and stood waving at the gate. She waited while I joined the other children in the school yard, and we followed the teacher into the building. She was still waving when I looked back just before entering the building. Inside, the corridors were made of dark wood. We were supposed to walk and never run. On rainy days, the whole building smelled of old wood, oil, and varnish. In my memory, those corridors are a tu
nnel of time—long, narrow, and dark. On one side, I was in first grade going to school with my mother; on the other, I was leaving, alone.
My graduation ceremony from sixth grade was a week after my mother’s death. Though it was held on a Sunday so both parents could attend, my father went to play rugby, leaving my aunts Akiko, Keiko, and my uncle Kenichi to accompany me. Because I was one of the three students chosen to recite our poems after the principal’s speech, I sat up on the stage with the teachers. My mother had sewn me a black velvet dress for the occasion; she and I had chosen the black patent leather shoes I was wearing. When I walked up to the microphone, I was nervous because I had missed the rehearsals. It was quiet in the auditorium except for my breath scratching against the microphone. I said the first word, trying to concentrate. When I was finished, there was a moment of silence and then applause, louder than I had anticipated.
After the ceremony, almost everyone I talked to said, “Your mother would have been so proud of you.” It was as though my mother, dead, still cared more about me than my father could if he were to live to be a hundred years old.
When I turn away from my old school, the sky is dark blue. The lights are beginning to come on near the bay. The cab proceeds south toward the highway, past the east-west street that would be a shortcut. I don’t say anything. Going from one hilltop neighborhood to the next, cabdrivers always take the longest way possible if you don’t complain. But it isn’t my money. I could care less.
* * *
At Sylvia’s house, the porch light is on, but no one’s home. The note on the fridge says, “We went out for dinner downtown. We’ll be back around ten. Hope your dinner with your father was OK. Love, Sylvia and Cadine.”
Upstairs, my room is in the same state of disorder as before. Switching on the light, I startle the cat, Ophelia, who has been napping on my pile of clothes. She runs down the stairs and clonks out the cat door. It’s too early to go to bed. I turn off the light and walk over to the window by the porch.
Down the hill, my hometown sinks into the dark and then floats back out of it, transformed into the language of light. The outlines of buildings disappear and are replaced by the white squares of office windows and the neon signs on rooftops. The two highways that cut across the city become two strings of white lights with orange beads moving under them. To the left, the bay curves toward Osaka, where clusters of red and yellow lights illuminate the factories. Halfway between these factories and the port of Kobe, the new landfill in Ashiya is mostly lit in white and orange lights. North of there but south of the highways is the old seaside neighborhood where my mother had been happy. It, too, is a blur of orange and white.
Leaning against the window ledge, I continue to look at the city. When I first came back, I didn’t know where the landfill was, but now I couldn’t miss it—I can read the view as though it were a map of light. Though I ordinarily have a poor sense of direction, I don’t even need a compass here. This is the one place in the world that is completely familiar to me. I know the names of the streets and neighborhoods, the famous landmark buildings now lit in neon. I knew their names even before I learned to read. No city I lived in or visited since then could give me the same unchanging sense of familiarity.
I open the screen door and step out on the porch. Up here on the hill, a cool breeze stirs the air at night. All the “good” neighborhoods in Kobe are on hilltops, away from summer heat, overlooking the “million-dollar night view.” The house in which my mother ended her life and the house to which my father moved us after his second wedding were both on hilltops—a sign of the status he had achieved by then. Both are within five miles of here. Though I went to see the house of my mother’s death, I have no desire to see the other.
My bedroom in that house was on the second floor; because the second floor was smaller than the first, part of the roof jutted out under my windows. Once a week, late at night, I climbed out onto that part of the roof and walked around to where the house connected to the garage. Then, crawling down to the top of the garage, I would sit on the edge with my feet dangling. I imagined what it would be like to jump to the street from there. First, I would lower myself carefully, my hands grabbing the slates; then I would have to let go.
“If you cause Michiko to leave me because you can’t get along with her, I’ll stab you with the meat knife and kill myself before the police get me.”
That’s what my father said about once a month when my stepmother threatened to leave him because of me. Without much warning, she would start yelling and screaming in the middle of dinner about something I had said or done. It was all Hiroshi’s fault, she said, for having allowed my mother to raise me wrong. Then, with her suitcase packed, she sat in the living room while my father beat me so I would cry and apologize. If the beating didn’t work, he talked about my mother—she hadn’t loved me, he said; if she had, she would still be alive. Sometimes I apologized right away. Then he said I was just saying I was sorry, that I didn’t really mean it. He threw me against the wall, he picked up a heavy dictionary and hurled it against the side of my head, or he slapped my face so hard his fingers made red blotches on my cheeks.
When he finally allowed me to go up to my room, I closed the door, locked it with its metal latch, and put both of my chairs between the doorway and my bed. I didn’t lie down until I had scattered books and tennis balls on the floor and put masking tape over the light switch so he would not be able to turn on the light. I slept with my clothes and shoes on. It would take him a few minutes, I thought, to break the latch and force the door open. He would then stumble around and lose more time. By the time he was at my bedside, I would be halfway across the house on the roof. If I broke my legs jumping from the roof of the garage, I would still call for help so that the neighbors would come running out of their houses. My father, I was sure, would not kill me with people looking on. He never even hit me in front of anyone except Michiko.
Sitting down on the concrete floor of Sylvia’s porch, I think of my father this afternoon. To say that he was insensitive and rude today doesn’t even begin to describe how he was. He rushed through the Chinese dinner, smoked a pack of cigarettes, and made everyone nervous with his impatience. The waiter must have thought of him as a rude customer, one of the worst he had ever served. Still, something is wrong with my recollection; something important seems to be lacking from my mental picture of him from this afternoon. It doesn’t match what I remember from thirteen years ago.
Maybe that’s what gave me a strange feeling as we were walking to the restaurant or even while the three of us were eating. The whole time we were together, I was trying to observe and memorize every detail of his poor conduct. Even though there was plenty of that for me to notice, I felt, now and then, that I wasn’t seeing the whole picture. I couldn’t get over how thin and old he looked. Hiroshi poses no threat to my life now. He will never hit me again. I will never again have to sleep with my clothes and shoes on, tennis balls scattered on the floor to trip him. That’s what I can’t get over.
Of course, it isn’t as though I were simply imagining how bad Hiroshi’s actions were this evening—even my cousin said that he was a strange character. Maybe it’s fair to say he is just as despicable as before, only in a different way: he makes up for the lack of violence in pettiness and insensitivity. If I were trying to be completely fair, though, I would have to say I was petty, too. In all my interactions with Hiroshi, I did nothing to promote goodwill, I did nothing to think better of him in his old age. Even in such small matters as food, I wasn’t prepared to give him the same break I gave everyone else. When Keiko made the meat and potato stew at Fuku’s house, I picked out the meat and ate the rest of the stew. The Chinese food Sayo and Yasuo brought had some meat in it. I carefully dished out only the vegetables and ate them. When Fuku wanted me to drink milk the next morning, I drank a big glass of it in front of her, even though I always hated milk, and the way Fuku remembered everything, she might have remembered that. Irritated as I
was by her nagging, I still wanted to please her. I would never see her nagging as a moral failure or criticize her for forgetting that I hated milk. Her obsession about food was just a bad way of showing love.
But if Hiroshi forgot that I didn’t eat meat, I passed the harshest judgment: he was insensitive; he had no respect for my beliefs. If he took me out to dinner, I was offended because he was just doing his duty. But if he hadn’t, I would have been equally offended, taking the omission as an insult. Every time I saw Hiroshi, I was determined to find fault with him. I even felt a sort of vindication, really, when he acted the way he did.
Instead of feeling sorry, though, I keep picturing him as he sat at the table in his father’s house, smoking one cigarette after another while he talked about his visit to my mother’s grave. He would have told me nothing if I hadn’t asked. The smoke hung between us like the choking silence in which we interpreted each other’s words and actions in the worst light possible. Each white puff from his cigarettes was a trace of some word that should have been said between us long ago. By now, all the right words are gone, vaporized into smoke. Perhaps I have contributed just as much as he has to that pollution between us.
In the dark room behind me, I can make out the wooden telephone stand by the door. Though it’s too late for love or peace between my father and me, there could perhaps be some minimal but genuine courtesy, something more than the icy politeness I have resorted to. Maybe even my father recognizes that possibility. Maybe that was why he took me out to dinner and paid for my cab. Maybe he wasn’t doing it only because of his sense of obligation. I didn’t give him the benefit of that doubt. As the cab moved away from the curb, I didn’t thank him for dinner or wish him luck on his surgery, as Kazumi had done. Perhaps in this round of events between us, I have been downright rude; I have not even lived up to simple politeness. If I wanted to call him now to change that, it would take just five or six steps to enter the house and dial the number, to say something, to be fair.
He is alone in his condominium now, perhaps sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, looking at this same view. With a major operation coming up in two days, even he might take stock of his life. Maybe he is remembering the last time he was hospitalized—how my mother sat at his bedside every day to care for him. Everybody who has known both my mother and stepmother comments on how cheerful, humorous, and sweet-tempered my mother was, how abrasive and rude my stepmother is by contrast. It’s possible that my father has noticed that, too, and felt some regrets, though he has confided in no one about such feelings. If he ever felt lonely, remorseful, or worried, it would be tonight when he thinks about the surgery. My stepmother isn’t home to ridicule him and remind him that he and I never got along. If I called him, it is possible that we would part on some note of courtesy and good intentions.