by Kyoko Mori
I stand up and look back into the dark room, waiting for some urge, some inspiration that would make me open the door and step in. If my mother were watching over me now, as Fuku believes, would she want me to forgive him? Would she be happy, as Kazumi said, that I had dinner with him tonight? Would she agree with Keiko that the grudge I hold against him would do her no good and that it will bring me endless unhappiness? No. My mother would not have chosen to die alone if she had known how Hiroshi would beat me and threaten my life. If my mother had foreseen me crawling across the roof in the dark to practice my escape, she would have gone on living to protect me. Or else she would have despaired for both of us and tried to include me in her death. But even that would have been the result of love gone wrong.
I have long forgiven my mother for having considered, at least for a short while, taking my life as well as hers. The anger I felt at her for that, and for leaving me, was an obstacle I could overcome because I knew she had loved me. It’s a different story with Hiroshi. With him, the obstacles stand alone, without any love. I cannot say that I will forgive him for what he did in the past; nor can I say that I will overlook his faults and offenses because there are other things I like about him. In the end, the things he did to hurt me are the only things I know about him. They hang between us like the smoke from his cigarettes—constant, ever growing. If I removed the smoke, there would be nothing behind it except his mouth blowing out more smoke.
I turn away from the dark room. The view floats toward me like a net of light. My back against the door, I sit down again. In three days, when I am back in Wisconsin, I will miss these mountains, the bay, my old school, the clustered lights. I might regret the way I left—with just as much resentment as before. Still, nothing can cancel out my anger. My father is sixty-four. Most likely, his health will never be the same after the surgery. He will never again play rugby or stay up drinking all night with his friends. But I cannot feel genuine pity or concern for him. I cannot feel the loss of a relationship, warmth, or love that we never had in the first place. I cannot make myself believe that I will regret my failure to make peace with him. What I regret instead is the loss of this city—how I had to leave it thirteen years ago because of him. That’s what I keep thinking about instead of peace, forgiveness, or even courtesy and fairness toward my father.
The breeze continues to stir the darkness around me. I remember Hiroshi saying, at the restaurant, that he was anxious to go to bed early. Perhaps he is already sleeping. It’s foolish of me to try to imagine him sitting in the kitchen, regretting the past. More likely, he is snoring in the room where he slept through my visit last week and got up only to criticize me for not knowing the way back to Sylvia’s house. No matter when I talk to him, and how, he will always disappoint me, always fill me with new resentment. If I were ever to make peace, it would be with that fact, in my own mind, not with him. I continue to scan the map of light below me. I don’t go back into the house. It is too late to call him, to say anything at all.
The Child of Wisdom
At eleven o’clock the next morning, Friday, I am sitting on the steps in front of Sylvia’s house waiting for my friend Miya. Heat vapors are rising from the ground under the orange trees. The rainy season is slowly coming to an end. In the neighbors’ yard, the pomegranate trees have bloomed. The red flowers are ruffled and almost artificial looking, like the paper roses we made to decorate the stage for school plays. Miya is late, as usual. She is probably just leaving her apartment right now.
During my last semester at Kobe Jogakuin, Miya gave me a ride to school every morning. Always ten or fifteen minutes late, she would speed up the hill, park in the lot reserved for visitors, and never get a ticket. We would run to our British drama class and get in, barely on time. Paul Bennett, who taught the class, locked the classroom door promptly at nine and did not let latecomers in.
During our middle and high school years at Kobe Jogakuin, Miya and I had been close friends with other girls who played on sports teams. There were about twenty of us who practiced after school, walked together to the train station, and sometimes stopped on the way for coffee. Though none of us played team sports in college, we still met for lunch or studied together in the library. When I left for the States, at the beginning of our junior year in college, all of those friends wrote to me every month. Within a year and a half, they were sending me news of their wedding plans.
In February of my senior year, Machiko, a friend I had been particularly close to, wrote, “I finally feel settled and at peace. I can’t believe that just a few years ago, I used to lie awake all night worrying about my future. How silly I was back then. Now that I am engaged, I don’t have those terrible ups and downs of emotions and I’m grateful for this change.” Reading her letter on a snow-covered path between the mail room and my dormitory at Rockford, I knew I could never write back to her. She had written as though the whole struggling part of her life were now ended, when mine was only beginning. I had decided, by then, to go to graduate school to study writing. I expected the next few years to be full of hard work. I had just had my first short story accepted for publication, and I could not forgive Machiko for thinking of her marriage as the crowning achievement of her life.
In the next few years, I lost touch with all the friends from our group except for Miya, who kept writing to me, whether I responded or not. She must have written three or four letters for every one I sent to her.
The door opens behind me, and Cadine steps out.
“Someone’s on the phone for you,” she says. “She only speaks Japanese. She kept saying your name.”
I follow her back into the house, thinking that Miya must have gotten lost or even decided to cancel our plans. Cadine hands me the phone in the hallway.
A high and clipped voice says a chotto, “well, anyway.”
It’s my stepmother. She gets right to the point. “I can’t go to dinner with you and Kazumi. I already called her. She gave me your number at your gaijin friend’s house.”
“Fine,” I say. I cover the receiver and turn to Cadine, who is still standing next to me. “Could you do me a favor? Can you watch out for my friend Miya so she knows she’s come to the right house? She should be here any minute.”
“Okay.” Cadine puts on her shoes and runs out the door.
On the phone, my stepmother is saying, “I came back from Hokkaido just a while ago. We’re leaving for the hospital as soon as your father’s ready. He’s packing a few things now.” She clears her throat. “I’m going to stay with him instead of going out to dinner. He says it’s not necessary because all they’ll do is prepare him for surgery. But I’m his wife. What would the doctors think if I weren’t there?”
“I understand.”
“I got you something from Hokkaido.” She sighs as though I had made an imposition, even though I never asked her for a gift. “I hear you and Kazumi are going to Akiko’s hospital tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m glad Akiko changed her mind about seeing you after all. It would have been a shame for you to come all this way and not see her. She must have postponed the visit as long as possible to avoid the intrusion, but at least she’s decided to see you. That’s something. Just be careful not to overstay your welcome. Be sure to leave early.”
I have an urge to simply put down the receiver, but I don’t.
“Anyway, I’ll drop off your gift with Kazumi on the way to the hospital. She can give it to you tomorrow. Their house is a little out of our way, of course, but it’s all right. We’ll just have to leave twenty minutes earlier. Anyway, your father and I don’t expect you to be at the hospital for him. If you’d rather visit Akiko, we understand. Why should we ask you to sit and wait while he’s in surgery? Hospital chairs are always uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t have to get me anything from Hokkaido,” I tell her.
“You probably won’t even like it. It’s a set of jewelry. Earrings and a necklace made of milkstone. That’s
the special product of Hokkaido; you know, they make it by boiling milk and cooling it so the milk fat turns into a gem. I thought the jewelry was quite stylish.”
“So milkstone is boiled milk fat?”
“You can give them away if you don’t like them. I never know what to get you. Our tastes are so different. We have nothing in common. But you can always stay at our house if you need a place.”
“I’d better go,” I interrupt. “I’m going out with a friend in a minute. She might be outside right now.” I pause and add, saying each word slowly and clearly, “Please tell Father that I wish him the best on his surgery.” I let a moment pass, to make sure she heard, but hang up before she can respond.
Outside, Miya and Cadine are standing on the steps. Cadine sees me first and says, “There you are.” She runs back into the house before I can introduce them.
“I must have scared her. I was trying to think of something to say, but nothing came to my mind.” Miya laughs a little, a dimple on each of her cheeks. She is wearing pale green eyeshadow, light pink lipstick outlining her small mouth. Her hair is shoulder length, curled slightly to frame her face. “I haven’t spoken any English since college,” she says.
“I’m sorry. I was talking to my stepmother on the phone.”
We begin to walk toward her blue Mazda parked across the street. Miya’s long green linen dress swishes around her legs. She is wearing green high heels to match.
We get into the car and sit down.
“You haven’t changed at all,” we say simultaneously as we close the doors and then burst out laughing. With her fingers, she smoothes the wide ruffles around the square neckline of her dress, the same kind of dress she used to wear in college.
I have not been expecting her to look like this. When she got married, during my first semester in graduate school, she sent me pictures of herself in the traditional bridal kimono, her head bent under a huge wig of upswept hair and white cloth. Her face, painted white with rice powder, looked like a doll’s face with the eyes and the mouth penciled in. She had looked more like herself, I thought, when she had played boys’ roles in our high school plays. Even her going-away outfit, a mauve two-piece suit and a pillbox hat, seemed staged. She was like someone from a different period of history, Jackie Kennedy in the early sixties. The few pictures she sent me shortly after, of herself and her husband playing golf, didn’t take away this impression. They were too perfectly dressed for their parts: white shirts and pants, cotton sweaters with varsity stripes. Now, ten years later, she looks more like before. This is such a relief that I almost want to thank her.
“Your hair’s longer,” Miya says as she starts the car. “It suits you.”
When I first went to Kobe Jogakuin in seventh grade, I still wore my hair the way my mother had liked: straight down to my waist. After my stepmother came and I cut my hair, my friends were always trying to talk me into growing it back. But every time my hair got past the tips of my earlobes, my stepmother began to complain about finding shed hair around the house. No matter how often I swept or vacuumed the floor, she found the one or two strands I had missed and said, “I don’t know anyone whose hair sheds so much.” She grimaced to show her distaste—as far as she was concerned, the excessive hair shedding was another of my shortcomings. After two or three weeks of her constant complaining, I would go to the corner barbershop and say, “Cut my hair as short as you can.” The old man there would chop it off so what was left stood straight up from my head like bristles on a kitchen scrub brush.
“My hair looked terrible when it was short,” I tell Miya now as we drive down the hill.
“But you still looked all right because you had such natural good looks. I used to envy that. If I had gotten my hair cut so short, I would have looked ridiculous. You still looked pretty in a dramatic way.”
“I never thought about it like that.”
“But everybody thought so. Remember the red wide-brimmed hat you used to wear? Yoshiko and I were walking home one day in eighth grade, and we could see you ahead of us. Yoshiko stopped in the middle of our conversation and said, ‘You know, if any one of us wore that hat, people would just laugh at us. How can Kyoko look so good in that?’”
I laugh, surprised that Miya would remember my hat.
At the bottom of the hill, Miya turns west to get on the highway toward downtown. “I drive here often,” she says. “I give my husband a ride to work when he oversleeps.”
Cars and trucks are zipping by. Trying to merge, we seem to be driving right into their path. One of the cars slows down to let us in. Miya smiles, waves to the driver, a man in a blue business suit.
“I don’t think I can drive here,” I say. “I’m used to driving on the other side of the road.”
I didn’t learn to drive until I was in America, though most of our friends took driving lessons at eighteen as part of what is called Bride Training—acquiring skills to marry well and be a good housewife. The other lessons, all of them expensive, were in flower arrangement, tea ceremony, European and Japanese sewing, various types of gourmet cooking. Though I had no desire for that kind of training, I was envious of my friends, whose parents were so eager to spend money on them while, at least once every month, my father threatened to stop paying my tuition. He said that going to college was making me even more selfish than before. “It’s too bad you’re not the kind of person who wants to learn tea ceremony,” my stepmother said from time to time, though she never offered me the opportunity. “Too bad you’re so different.” I wanted to have parents who would offer me Bride Training so I could decline it and be irritated by their misguided expression of love.
In ten minutes, Miya and I are downtown. We drive into the parking garage below the Daimaru department store, where my mother and I used to shop. The exit of the parking garage leads us into the basement level of the store, the gourmet food section: bottles of wine, blocks of cheese, chocolate, and pastry are displayed behind glass. The smell of coffee reminds me of how my mother and I used to visit coffee shops in the middle of our shopping. Our favorite place was on the roof of another department store overlooking the bay, where we had tea and cake and counted the ships in port.
“So where do you want to go?” Miya asks after we come up a set of stairs to the street level.
“I don’t know. How about you?”
“No, you choose. I can come back here any time.”
“Okay. How about Gaylord?” I mention one of the Indian restaurants. “Is that still there?”
“Yes. I went there in the spring with my husband and his friends from the Jaycees.”
“Jaycees? The Junior Chamber of Commerce?”
She nods.
“I didn’t know they had Jaycees in Japan.”
“Sure they do. My husband was elected vice president of the local chapter. He has a meeting tonight.”
We cross the street to Kokusai Kankan, the International Hall, and go down the stairs to the basement. Gaylord is to our right with its bright red door, a tapestry of Indian elephants hanging above the entrance. In the dark interior, everything looks exactly as I remember, candles flickering on the black tables against wine-red walls. A woman in a sari seats us in plush red chairs. Only a few of the tables are occupied. The waiter, an East Indian man, takes our order in Japanese and bows to us.
While we wait for our food, Miya updates me on what our friends have been doing. She has kept in touch with all of our close friends and a lot of people who had simply been classmates. Listening to her, I begin to miss everyone—even those classmates I hadn’t particularly liked. Our graduating class from high school had only one hundred and fifty girls, all of whom had attended Kobe Jogakuin since seventh grade. There wasn’t anyone I didn’t know well.
Unlike the girls who attended public schools, we never used keigo—the polite and honorific language. We talked as though we were sisters or cousins, calling one another by our first names or nicknames, while the public school girls used the polite combination
of the family name and the suffix san, the equivalent of “Miss.” Their polite talk—which we overheard on the train or at athletic meets—reduced us to fits of giggling. My mother, who had attended a girls’ school before the war, had addressed her friends informally also. Even at forty she and her best friend called each other Oshi-chan and Taka-chan, as though they were still kids.
“Yoshimi and I get together once every month,” Miya says, mentioning a girl who used to take my photographs because she liked my eyes. “We usually invite several other people so it’s like a class reunion. A lot of people got married and moved to Tokyo. The rest of us are really happy to see one another.”
The waiter brings out large platters of food and goes away.
“I went to Shima-chan’s wedding in April,” Miya says. “I told you that she’d been divorced, right?”
“No.”
“Well, she was. Her second husband seems like a nice man. He just graduated from college, but he’s not like other really young guys.” Cutting her chicken with her knife, Miya meets my eyes and then looks down. I know what she wants me to understand without saying it: Shima-chan’s husband is much younger than she, but it’s okay.