by Kyoko Mori
“Remember Buko?” Miya points to one of the names. Next to it, the address says, “Hilton International: Kobe Office.”
“Buko is the regional director for Hilton,” Miya says. “She’s a very important businesswoman.”
“How did she get a job like that?”
“The year after you left, she transferred to a hotel management school in Switzerland. She came back fluent in English, French, and German. She has a good chance to be the next executive director for Hilton-Japan.”
I try to imagine Buko as an important executive in a business suit, but I keep remembering her bangs cut straight across her forehead.
“Do you see her often?” I ask Miya.
“I ran into her a few months ago downtown. She was coming out of a health club where she swims during her lunch hour. I was just standing across the street. We went and had some coffee, before she had to go back to her office. She seemed very happy.”
“Does she live in Kobe?”
“No, she stays with her parents in Ashiya when she’s in town, which isn’t often since she is always traveling on business. She’s the only one left at home. Her brother and sister got married.”
I look through the rest of the names, stopping once in a while to inquire about different classmates.
When I get to the end, I think of a friend who was a year older. “How about Chieko Seki?” I ask Miya. “I lost touch with her during my senior year at Rockford. Did she go on to graduate school?”
“Chieko? I didn’t know her except through you.”
“You don’t hear anything about her?”
“No.” Miya shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“I should look her up.” I turn the pages forward to the graduating class of ’74. Chieko graduated with them and then went to Kyoto National University to study psychology. In between, she took a year off to study for the entrance exams. That was my senior year in high school. I had gotten back from Arizona, where I had spent a whole year not having to worry about going home to Hiroshi and Michiko every night. It seemed almost unbearable to be back home again, hearing Michiko nagging him about me downstairs, late at night, until he came up to my room to hit me. At school, too, things were different. My friends had gone through some transformations while I was away.
During our sophomore year in high school, we had all worn jeans and T-shirts to school, and no one had dated boys. When I returned from Arizona, my friends were wearing dresses or silky blouses and long skirts to school; they got their hair permed and on weekends went to mixers with boys from the nearby boys’ schools. On the few occasions when I went with them, boys looked at us across the dark room while the music played on. Eventually, they would start to walk up and down in front of us, stopping to take a closer look. I could tell by the way they walked that some of them were a little drunk. When a boy asked me to dance, I could smell a sickly sweet combination of alcohol and hair oil or aftershave. The boys I danced with seldom talked to me—except to ask me if I wanted to dance more or if I was tired. When some of them called me a week later, I couldn’t match the names with their faces. I always turned down the dates.
All my friends, except Chieko Seki, thought I was silly and perhaps even conceited. Because Chieko had spent her junior year in Boston, she had come back, the year before, to the same thing. She understood when I said I missed the boys I had dated in Arizona—with whom I had watched movies, gone hiking, or helped on community projects like recycling cans. She knew the kind of boys I was talking about: they were serious and talkative boys from our classes and church groups. We had discussed and even argued about books or politics or our own rebelliousness toward our families and teachers. No Japanese boy ever asked us what we thought of these subjects. Chieko and I met once a week in Ashiya to talk, to complain, and it was a relief for me to know I was not alone in being puzzled and irritated by the whole situation.
I should have thought about her earlier, I think as I page through the directory. Maybe I can still call her and ask her to meet us for a drink tomorrow. When I find the right page and am looking down the column, Miya suddenly reaches out and takes the directory away from me.
“Let me see this a minute.” Her eyes scan the names. She turns forward a few pages, finds whatever she was looking for, and closes the book. She doesn’t say anything.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Actually,” she says, “I did hear something about her.”
“About Chieko?”
“Yes. I heard that she passed away.”
“She what?”
Miya shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says.
I reach toward her. “I want to see that for myself,” I tell her.
She hesitates.
“Please.”
When she hands over the directory, I find the page I was on before and go down the columns. Her name is not listed where it should be in the alphabetical order. I turn the pages and find what Miya has seen: a single entry at the end of the class. There Chieko’s name is printed without an address, a black dot to its left. The word above it, eiminsha, is a euphemism for the dead. Literally, it means, “a person who sleeps eternally.”
I close the book and put it back on the coffee table. “When did this happen?” I ask.
“I think it was the year after we graduated from college.”
“Was Chieko sick?”
“I’m not sure.” Miya frowns. “I didn’t hear the details. I don’t know anything for sure.”
The year we were meeting for coffee, Chieko had long hair parted in the middle, a big smile that softened the square outline of her jaws. I used to love the way she laughed, tipping her head backward a little. Her name meant “a child of wisdom.”
“She must have been only twenty-two,” I tell Miya. “That’s so young. She was just a year older than us, and now we’re in our thirties.”
“I’m sorry,” Miya says. “You liked her a lot.”
Miya gets up, goes to the kitchen, and brings us each a glass of iced tea. As we drink the tea in silence, I know that Miya took the directory from me to prevent me from coming upon Chieko’s death on my own, in print. She wanted to break the news herself, but because she wasn’t friends with Chieko, she doesn’t want to talk about her death. She doesn’t want to pass on information that might only be hearsay or unfounded rumor.
“So who would know more?” I ask after a while.
“Maybe Kanko.” She names a girl Toshiko and I used to walk home with. “Kanko was studying psychology at the national university at the same time, you remember. She’s in Kyoto. Here, let me copy her number.” She opens the directory again, copies the number, and hands it to me. I fold it and stick it into my pocket.
“Are you okay?” Miya asks me. “I wish I didn’t have to tell you.”
“I’m okay, but it’s a big surprise.”
“I remember she was very smart and considerate,” Miya says. “I wish I’d have known her better.”
Drinking my iced tea in silence, I keep looking at the blue directory on the coffee table and thinking of the way it lists the dead with black dots next to their names, no addresses given. It’s as if they were floating in the air forever like lost balloons or kites, unable to come back down to the earth.
* * *
At eight o’clock, when Miya drops me off at Sylvia’s house, Vince is waiting for me in the kitchen with Sylvia and Cadine. He has to leave town tomorrow on business and won’t be back until after I’m gone. I don’t want to say good-bye right away, so the four of us sit in the kitchen talking. Cadine and I check on the caterpillars, which have completed their chrysallis. Brown and mottled, they look like dry leaves. It’s hard to imagine that anything could come out of those shells.
After Vince leaves, I go to the upstairs phone to call Kanko. She answers on the first ring.
“Hi, Kanko. This is Kyoko. I’m in Kobe. Miya gave me your number.”
She is speechless, no doubt with surprise.
“I�
�m sorry to call so suddenly,” I apologize.
“No. It’s good to hear from you. Are you staying long?”
“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. I should have called sooner. I’m meeting Miya, Yoshiko, Hiroko, and Toshiko tomorrow night for drinks. You’re invited, too.”
“I don’t think I can make it. My husband and I live on the other side of Kyoto. I seldom get into Kobe. But we can at least talk on the phone. I’ve been wondering about you. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
For a while, we exchange news about ourselves. Since she got her master’s degree, Kanko has been teaching at a women’s college in Kyoto. Last year, she got married to another psychologist, who is working on his Ph.D.
“We’ll look for jobs when he finishes next year,” she says. “It’s hard for both of us to get jobs. But I want to work at least part-time, after all the time I put into getting my degree.”
“That can be hard, too. Some of my friends in the States have part-time jobs where their husbands have full-time jobs. They often feel that they are treated more as someone’s wife than as a colleague.”
“I have already thought about that. I want to go back for my Ph.D. after my husband finishes his.”
“Good for you.”
“At least,” she says, “I’m lucky to be teaching in my area. I talk to Toshiko on the phone every couple of weeks. She doesn’t even get to teach her specialty.”
We talk some more about our work. Then I finally say, “There’s something I want to ask you.”
“What is that?”
“It’s about Chieko Seki. You and she were in the same master’s program.”
“Yes. She did some research for a professor I had classes with.”
“Did you see her much—you know, the year she died?”
“I saw her some, but not all the time. We had mutual friends, though we weren’t in any of the same classes.”
“You know she and I were friends my senior year in high school, the year she took off to study. She was very kind to me. She took time off from her studying to meet me for coffee.”
“She was a very generous person,” Kanko says.
“I need to know what happened to her, if you know.”
She doesn’t say anything.
So I ask her what I already know from her silence, from Miya’s silence.
“Did Chieko kill herself?”
Kanko still hesitates.
“Was it suicide?” I ask again.
“Yes,” she answers, her voice lowered.
“Do you know why?”
“I think it had something to do with love.” She pauses. “I don’t know the particulars because she didn’t tell me anything herself. But the friends we both had said she was in love with someone and it didn’t work out. That’s all I know.”
It could have been another graduate student, I think, or even her professor, the one she was doing research for. I imagine Chieko in a white lab coat, in a large desolate-looking room. I will never know what her life was like that last year.
“I ran into her on the train,” Kanko says, “about two weeks before her death. She looked run-down, like she hadn’t been sleeping well. We talked about how tough graduate school was. My stop was before hers. As I was getting off, she patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘We’ll both be all right. We’ll hang in there.’ I said I would call her and we would have coffee. After I heard the news of her death, I kept remembering that train ride. I didn’t realize how unhappy she must have been. I thought she was just tired.”
“That’s how it is,” I tell her. “We never know until it’s too late. I know what that’s like.”
We talk about other things for a while and then hang up, promising to see each other on my next visit.
As I stand by the window after the phone call, the neighborhood Kanko, Toshiko, and I used to live in is to my left, lit up—like the other hillside neighborhoods—in white residential lights. In ninth grade, Kanko and Toshiko played on the basketball team while I went out for volleyball. Every afternoon around five-thirty, we took the same train to our station and walked home, first stopping at a bakery for a large bag of cinnamon rolls. During the twenty-minute walk up the hill, we ate the rolls, their sticky spirals unraveling in our fingers. Sometimes Kanko and Toshiko were mad at each other because of something that had happened at practice. They gave each other the silent treatment, each of them keeping a separate conversation with me as I walked in the middle with the bag of rolls and handed them out one by one. Toshiko left first because her house was the closest to the station. After Kanko and I walked another block and she went into her house, I had to turn the corner and walk the last few blocks alone. When my house came into view, I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. School was a day-long break from the house I had to return to every night. Now it seems strange for all three of us to have become teachers when I remember them—and myself, too—as young girls too hungry to walk home without those sticky rolls. If she hadn’t killed herself, Chieko, too, might have been a teacher or a researcher, trying to find a position she could be happy in. She and I might have talked over the phone or met for coffee and complained about our jobs.
As I step away from the window, I catch a weak reflection of the room, my own face, blurred over the light of the city below. Turning away and getting ready for bed, I imagine Chieko riding a train. She is on one of those expresses that used to pass by the platform where we waited for an all-stop. The express trains always slowed down a little on their approach so that, for a second, we could catch the faces of the passengers in their lit interior. Her long hair falling over the shoulders of her gray tweed coat, Chieko stands against the glass doors, waving. She is smiling and telling me, telling Kanko and Toshiko, telling everyone to hang in there, carry on.
Milkstone
When Kazumi and I enter her hospital room on Saturday afternoon, my aunt Akiko is sitting up in her pink pajamas, her hair brushed back into a neat bun.
“I’m glad you came to see me,” she says to me. “Let’s go to the lobby.” She points to the other patient, who is sleeping.
Kazumi and I help her out of the bed, and together we walk to the lobby and sit down on the yellow couch, Akiko in the middle.
“You look well,” I say.
She reaches for my hand, lets go, and reaches for it again. “I wanted to get well fast so I could see you.”
“My father never told me about your illness.”
She lets go of my hand and shakes her head. My father is undergoing surgery at another hospital right now, doctors in blue or white surgical garments bending over him.
“He made it sound like his own surgery was nothing serious,” I add. “He said the doctors wanted to keep him for nine weeks so they could make money.”
“Your father has turned out to be a strange character,” Akiko says. “I can’t believe he is actually my brother.”
Kazumi pats her shoulder.
“I don’t wish him ill,” Akiko explains. “But I don’t feel related to him in the least.”
“Did Kazumi tell you about our dinner with him on Thursday?”
“She did.”
“He was in a hurry the whole time,” I tell her anyway. “As soon as we sat down, he wanted to leave early to get some sleep. I wasn’t surprised, of course. Last week, when I visited him and Michiko at their place, he got up from the table in the middle of our conversation and went to take a nap.”
“I don’t know how I ended up with a brother like that,” Akiko sighs.
“Maybe I shouldn’t complain because I wasn’t very nice to him, either,” I admit. “Both he and Michiko could tell that I wasn’t eager to see them. I did nothing to hide my reluctance.”
“What do they expect?” Akiko’s voice rises a pitch in indignation. “After the way they treated you, why should you be eager to see them? If they want to improve things, it’s up to them to start.”
“You really think so?”
“Of course
. He is your father.”
“That doesn’t mean much in our family,” Kazumi says.
Akiko wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know how I ended up with these men. Father, brother, husband, all three of them such insensitive people. I’m glad I didn’t have a son.”
“There’s something I want to ask you about my father.”
Akiko turns to me and waits.
“I don’t want to upset you,” I hesitate. “Maybe I’ll ask another time.”
“I’m all right now. Ask me anything.”
“Okay. It’s about when you were in Hiroshima—you, Grandfather, Grandmother, and your brother Tsuyoshi.” I pause.
She nods for me to go on.
“My father was in Kyoto then, right? Did he come back to Hiroshima to find out what happened to you all? My aunt Michiyo said that most people who had families went back to find out. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have known for weeks. How about my father? Did he come back?”
Akiko leans forward and takes a deep breath. She glances at Kazumi and then at me. “No. He didn’t.”
“Why not?” I ask, not at all surprised, really.
Akiko frowns slightly. “He never gave any reasons. He was living in a rooming house. The landlady, who was a friend of our family’s, later said that she had offered him money to make the trip. But he didn’t come.”
“So, how did he find out what had happened, then?”
“He got my father’s letter after a man showed up at our house carrying Tsuyoshi’s school cap with his name and address sewn on the inside. This man had seen Tsuyoshi fall down and die by one of the rivers downtown. He could do nothing but bring the cap and tell us.”
“When did Tsuyoshi die?” I ask. “The day of the bomb?”
“No, the next morning.”
So Tsuyoshi hadn’t died instantaneously, as I wished when I saw the displays at the memorial museum.
“This man came about a week after the bomb. He took one look at my mother and knew that he had come to the right house. Tsuyoshi looked a lot like my mother.” Akiko sighs. “Anyway, my father wrote to your father and said Tsuyoshi was dead and we were coming back to Kyoto as soon as we could.”