by Kyoko Mori
I straighten the shoulder strap of my overnight bag and walk out of the store. There is no need to spend all my money here. Why should I buy something I will never use or need?
Back in the crowded gate area, I sit down on the floor next to the windows, leaning against the cool glass. It’s sunny outside. Green rice paddies stretch in every direction around the airport. A plane begins to lift off to my left, gaining altitude. My eyes hurt from trying to follow its course in the hazy white distance where the rice paddies border the sky or perhaps the glittering water I cannot see.
Blinking from that brightness and then looking back at the crowded gate area, I suddenly know that I will never come back to this country to spend more than a few weeks at a time. My impending departure seems as final as the one before, thirteen years ago. In the last few days, I have told my friends, my aunt Akiko, and Kazumi that I plan to come back next year to see my mother’s family, that I might even try to spend the whole summer then. I was even beginning to think that someday in the future, if I could get a leave of absence from my school, I would like to spend a semester or a year in Kobe.
Now, from this airport in the middle of flooded paddies, Kobe seems such a long way off, already a foreign country. No matter how much I love its mountains and the sea, the downtown, the familiar neighborhoods and the streets, it is a place I left thirteen years ago to save my life. I will never spend a whole summer, a semester, or a year there. I can’t believe that I could even consider it. How can I possibly spend more than a few weeks in the same city as my father? Even if I never saw him, even if he were dead, his presence would continue on in the place where he has spent all his adult life. Kobe will always be a lost land to me, a place to think of with nostalgia, from far away. That is the price of my anger. Aunt Keiko was partially right: anger can bring a curse or unhappiness. I am losing the city I love, the place of my childhood, because I won’t forgive my father. But I must accept that loss because there is no other way. After this visit, I know that I can never forgive Hiroshi no matter how much time passes.
Outside, another plane lifts off and disappears in the distance. More must have landed on the other side of the building. New passengers are arriving, squinting at the electronic displays of flight schedules. On the wall behind some of the benches, there is a map of the five continents advertising an airline. Somehow, the map looks slightly skewed or wrong, until I realize that it doesn’t have the United States at its center, like the maps I have been looking at in the last thirteen years. This is the map of my childhood, with Tokyo at its center. From that center, lines, indicating regularly scheduled flights, run all over the world, thin as webwork, blue and red like bloodlines diagrammed in schoolbooks.
“The world is a large place,” my Japanese friends might say, offering me a platitude meant to comfort by its ambiguity, shifting the focus from a particular hurt to a general wisdom.
I take a deep breath, trying to take consolation, however small, in the inevitability of my situation. My leaving is the logical conclusion of everything that has happened to my mother and her family: the loss of our land, the choices she made because of that loss, her letting go of me in the end to die alone. Sitting here and waiting for my plane, I am continuing our legacy of loss, which might, in the end, turn out to be a legacy of freedom as well. I am the daughter my mother had meant to set free into the larger world through her losses. That is the most essential thing about my past here. Having lost the city of my birth and childhood, I can go anywhere in the world and not feel the same loss again. My mother wanted me to move on, not to be afraid of uncertainty, not to be bound to old obligations.
I open my carry-on bag and pull out the package of milk fat jewelry from my stepmother. Walking up to the trashcan against the wall, I pitch the package into it and return to my seat. I have reached the end of my trip. My face pressed against the window, I wait for the plane that will propel me out of this center of the world into the blue light past its pull.
ALSO BY KYOKO MORI
Shizuko’s Daughter
Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
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New York, New York 10011
Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
Copyright © 1995 by Kyoko Mori
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Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd.,
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ISBN 0-8050-3260-6
First Edition—1995
eISBN 9781466876729
First eBook edition: June 2014