The flight was a good one, as far as I was concerned. No terrorists on board; for that matter, nobody in the two seats next to me. I was able to stretch out and sleep, a fitful slumber in which an old woman with dark eyes floated in and out. Her lips were moving; she was trying to say something that I couldn’t understand. I don’t know the language, I thought, and began a frantic search for Eric Gan. But he was nowhere.
I touched down in Tokyo late in the afternoon; technically, it was the next day, although I’d left San Francisco in the morning and reached Tokyo early in the evening. I gave my heavy suitcases to the airport delivery service to handle getting them to my apartment, and then rode the train an hour to make my way home.
I had just enough energy to slide the key into the lock and my body onto the futon. Then I was asleep.
As exhausted as I’d been, I still woke up early the next day. Very early: 5 A.M. The Family Mart convenience store wouldn’t be open at that hour, so I would either have to eat the dried bonito fish still in its box on the kitchen counter—the aged specimen I’d boasted about to my father—or break into the foil-wrapped packet of cookies I’d taken off the plane, and forgotten to declare at customs, the previous night.
I cranked up the Tokyo City Gas space heater and settled down a few inches away from it with the cookies and a cup of green tea. Lack of central heating notwithstanding, the apartment was as comfortable as a thick Japanese acrylic sock—the kind men wore in winter with thonged sandals, a habit I’d taken up myself, since my shoe size in Japan was more masculine than feminine.
I’d painted my living-dining-kitchen area in a warm persimmon, which dramatically set off the old lacquered chests and tables I’d refinished. Everything was unusually neat, as I’d taken pains to tidy up before leaving for America two months earlier, but there was a thick layer of dust on all the old wood. Dutifully, I dusted every surface, coughing at the clouds I whipped up. I was going to have to do a lot more cleaning with the New Year a few days away. At the end of each year, students cleaned their schools, salarymen washed their cars, and housewives turned over their houses top to bottom. It was all to welcome the toshigami—the god of the New Year—into their homes, for the promise of prosperity and happiness in the coming year. The changing of the calendar was a time to pay off debts and lay to rest all the old problems for a clean start.
The thought of starting over reminded me of Hugh’s class action. It seemed a bit absurd to be calling on a Japanese Shinto god for help with a lawsuit against Japanese big business, but I couldn’t escape my heritage—and the idea that with a bit of careful preparation, the class action might succeed after all.
I thought about the name Rosa had mentioned to us: Ramon Espinosa. He was her Filipino comrade who was supposed to be living in Japan.
I called information, spelling out the name Espinosa to the operator. No luck. I should have expected that. Mr. Espinosa was probably a retired laborer without many comforts. I pondered whether it would be preferable to be a broke foreigner in San Francisco or Tokyo. Both were terrifically expensive cities. But San Francisco embraced a myriad of cultures—Tokyo didn’t. Ramon Espinosa had chosen a hard lot in life, to stay in Japan instead of returning to the Philippines—that is, if he was still in the country.
If he were alive, there would be a police record of his presence. And if he’d died here, that record would exist as well. Japan was mad for keeping records. Searching the nation’s local ward offices for such records, though, would take months. To get it done quickly, I’d need to ask a professional for help.
I flipped open the telephone book for my district—in Tokyo, there are so many people, you can only get a phone book covering one’s own ward—and looked in the business section for detectives. Private detectives were plentiful, because families frequently used them to research their children’s prospective marital partners. I doubted PIs worked on Sundays—it was the only day of the week Japanese people rested—but at least they’d hear my message first thing Monday morning.
I spent the rest of the morning making telephone calls to business associates, leaving messages that I was back in town. There was another call I should have made, to my parents, to let them know I’d safely arrived. But I told myself it was too late—they’d be in bed already, asleep. Better to call them another day.
Around eleven, I decided to venture out to the Family Mart convenience store a few blocks away. I stepped out into typical January weather—mid-forties, sunny, and dry. Everything on my tiny street looked the same as always. Two bicycles leaned against the wall of the apartment house, unchained because nobody would ever steal them; the fan shop’s exterior was decorated with a line of potted plants struggling to stay alive in the forty-degree weather; and the ever-present wet spot on the sidewalk outside the tofu shop had not dried. As I walked, I passed my neighbors; the Tanakas carrying their young baby toward the subway, old Mrs. Yuto cleaning the outside of her windows, Mr. Haneda polishing the chrome on his car. Yes, the New Year’s cleaning was on, full force. I resolved to buy extra cleaning supplies at Family Mart.
I’d wanted to see my dear old friend Mr. Waka, who was usually behind the counter at this Family Mart franchise, which he owned. Mr. Waka always had a ready hand to give me candy or advice on my life. But his son was there, saying that he was filling in while Mr. Waka was home with the flu.
“It’s been a difficult winter for illnesses, neh?” Kenji said, while wiping his nose with a tissue.
“I didn’t know that your father had a flu! Please give him my best regards and tell him that I finally returned from America. I’ve been away over two months—too long entirely.” I felt strangely desperate to have someone recognize that I’d been gone.
“Oh. Well, please take care,” Kenji said, using the hand that had wiped his nose to load my little plastic shopping bag with the food and the cleaning supplies.
“Right. And please say hello to your father for me,” I said, thinking the younger generation just wasn’t as fastidious about hygiene as their elders.
As I entered my apartment I heard a voice talking into my answering machine. It was Hugh, telling me he was having trouble getting a flight booked. Without bothering to take off my shoes—a big no-no, if anyone Japanese had been watching me—I dashed into the living room to lift the receiver.
“Hello,” I said breathlessly, just as Hugh hung up.
Damn it. I played the whole message, during which Hugh said that Rosa’s autopsy results had come back, revealing a cardiac event—in other words, a heart attack; a typical elderly person’s death. Hugh went on to say that since nobody had claimed a relationship with Rosa, the law firm was being asked to clean up her effects. If it went quickly, he could fly to Japan within the next day or two.
So Rosa had died of natural causes. I should have felt reassured. Now I didn’t have to worry about the New Year bringing a police investigation. The matter was cleaned up, dealt with. But it was too bad I couldn’t have caught Hugh on the phone and pressed him for details; I felt quite unsatisfied.
I was distracted for a while by the delivery of my suitcases from the airport. I got right to unpacking, and as I was finishing up, the phone rang again.
On the other end was my aunt Norie.
“Oh, welcome home, Rei-chan. When you come tonight, don’t forget to stop by the senbeiya-san in your neighborhood. Can you bring your uncle’s favorite crackers?”
“What? I don’t remember making plans.” I had no idea what Hiroshi’s favorite style of senbei cracker was, either.
“It is Sunday evening. You always come on Sunday evening for supper.”
“But—how did you know I was back?”
“Your father telephoned to remind us. Actually, we would have been happy to meet you at the airport, but he told us he thought you could manage.”
“Did he sound angry with me?” I asked.
“Angry? Of course he’s not angry. Why, did you do some—misbehavior?”
“No, just the usua
l.” I pressed my lips together. “I’ll see you tonight.”
At my aunt and uncle’s place, a welcoming light shone over the door, and there was a large urn holding pine, bamboo, and plum—nature’s trinity to celebrate the New Year. I was transported back to all the other New Year’s times when I would go to see my aunt and uncle and cousin, when the kind of problems I had were with my job, not with my status as a free woman.
Of course, the door was unlocked. I slid it to the side and sang out, “Tadaima,” the traditional greeting that means “I’m home.” Technically, I shouldn’t have said it, because I wasn’t an actual household member, but I called it out because I was feeling hopeful. A quick patter of light footsteps, and my cousin Tsutomu, whom I thought of as Tom, was there. He liked me to call him Tom because it made him feel exotic. Japanese people all called him Tsutomu, or, more typically, Shimura-sensei—the honorific at the end marking his status as a doctor at St. Luke’s International Hospital.
“Rei-chan.” He drew me into a swift, tight hug, then stepped back to look at me. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just tired. I would have liked to rest from four o’clock on today, but I couldn’t resist coming to Sunday night supper. Where’s Chika-chan? Isn’t she home for the holidays?”
“She’s out with her friends,” Aunt Norie said, coming out of the kitchen to give me a hug. “She’s been with us a week. Since she’s so grown up now, she says this neighborhood is too boring—she wants to play in Tokyo every evening, and it’s with a fast crowd from the Kansai area. Sending her to Kyoto was stupid—now she’s trying to turn into a Kansai girl, obsessed with clothes and so loud, ara, you wouldn’t believe the way she talks!”
Norie was referring to the classic divide between Eastern and Western Japan—the Kanto and Kansai regions. Kanto, the section that encompassed Tokyo and Yokohama, was regarded as stable and tasteful. Kansai, which was the seat of Japan’s original capital, Kyoto, and its true business mecca, Osaka, was different. People in Kansai talked more loudly, and had their own slang; they spent more money on clothing, and women felt free to wear sexy shoes and more vibrant colors than their sisters in Tokyo. The Japanese said it was the combined forces of Kyoto’s past royal image and the big money merchant culture of Osaka. I didn’t know if this was true, but I couldn’t fault a Yokohama girl for wanting to pick up some Kansai style. I hadn’t seen Chika since she’d gone off to college three years earlier, so the change, I knew, might very well be dramatic.
“Chika will be here New Year’s Eve, Rei, but don’t worry about her right now,” Tom said. “You look so tense. Did something happen in America?”
“Let her come in out of the cold and relax before you interrogate her,” Aunt Norie chided, securing the bag of sesame crackers she had requested I bring. “Rei-chan, thank you so much for remembering.”
“A lot happened in California,” I said, stepping up onto the living room floor and giving my aunt a long, hard embrace. I’d missed her so much.
“Well, please inform us, Rei-chan. Your father only said that you were coming home at last.” My uncle Hiroshi came forward to greet me with a slight bow, rather than an embrace. It was awkward for him to embrace me—even if I was his brother’s daughter. Hiroshi had thick salt-and-pepper hair just like my father’s, but it didn’t hang too low. It was cut neatly, the way most salarymen wore their hair. Hiroshi had worked for the same bank since college, then been made redundant after thirty-five years. Since then he’d found new work in the business office of an electronics company, but he was not a section head, as he’d once been. This wasn’t the way they’d expected Japan to treat them. Still, the prospect of Norie working to make up for the economic shortfall was unthinkable. My aunt had once tried to find a part-time job, but the only businesses interested in her skills were supermarkets. She preferred to teach ikebana classes, taking a token cash payment from each student. Besides, she was so busy cooking for her family, I thought, as I sat down with everyone at the cozy round dining table dominated by Norie’s propane-powered tabletop cooker. After the cooker’s flame glowed blue, she topped it with a large clay pot called a nabe. She had made donabe—a light, seafood-based broth into which we all dipped shrimp, clams, mushrooms, and scallions.
Eating the nourishing donabe gave me the rush of confidence I needed to begin to tell them I was engaged to be married. I was nervous because it had taken them well over a year to get used to Hugh the first time around, and then when we’d split, they’d blamed it all on him. But they were quietly positive, and Norie even volunteered to help me shop for the right hotel in which to hold the wedding.
“We’re interested in a smaller gathering at a shrine,” I said. “I thought of the one in my neighborhood, if they’ll have me, or another one that’s important in Shimura family history.”
“Your aunt and I married at the Yasukuni Shrine,” Uncle Hiroshi said.
“Isn’t that the right-wing shrine where people go to honor those who died in World War II?” I made my comment a question, for politeness’s sake. I knew for a fact that the current prime minister had made a visit there, which had set off a firestorm of criticism from liberals, and praise from conservatives.
“It’s the place where all who gave their lives to Japan over the course of our wars lie,” Hiroshi explained. “And since our old family household was nearby, it became the shrine where our family made donations and prayed.”
Norie put down her chopsticks. “It was fine for a wedding thirty years ago, when the political issues were quiet. But who knows what the conditions are like now? When the prime minister visited, the whole world watched. It could be quite difficult for Hugh-san and Rei-chan, because I’m sure they will have hundreds of guests, some of whom wouldn’t be comfortable.”
“I wouldn’t marry there,” Tom said. “I would have a simple ceremony in Guam or Hawaii, followed directly by the honeymoon!”
“You’re one to talk,” Hiroshi said. “No girl in sight, and you refuse to talk to the matchmaker your mother found for you.”
“Ah, I’ll check with Hugh first,” I said, trying to deflect attention from my poor cousin, who at age thirty-two was getting old for marriage. “There’s a slight chance he’ll be flying in tomorrow.”
“Oh, then he must come for New Year’s Eve,” Norie said, and then a general discussion of menu ensued. She would serve the traditional toshi-koshi soba, long buckwheat noodles meant to guarantee long life and happiness—my favorite—as well as the tiny sardinelike fish that you were supposed to eat whole—not my favorite. There would be fresh mochi cakes made from rice she’d pounded herself. Afterward, everyone would walk to pray at the neighborhood temple.
“You know, it sounds great, but he might be very, very tired upon arrival,” I said. I hadn’t liked the way he’d pushed himself so hard when he arrived in San Francisco. “Can we let you know that day if we’re coming? And before I forget, Uncle, I must ask you some family history questions. I recently learned there was a scroll signed by the late emperor that belonged to our family. Do you know anything about it?”
“Oh, yes. That letter actually came to my father. He was so proud when he received it that he would take it and hang it in the most important alcove of the house on the anniversary of his father’s death.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I wonder why that day.”
“Well, the scroll was actually a condolence letter about the death of his father—your great-grandfather, Shimura Kazuo.”
“How amazing!” I said. “What was the connection between Great-Grandfather and the emperor? They couldn’t have been friends…”
“No, of course not.” Uncle Hiroshi smiled at me as he used his chopsticks to deftly dip a shrimp into the donabe. “Your great-grandfather was a renowned man of letters. He had met with Emperor Hirohito when he was young and had not yet ascended the throne. But the emperor remembered your great-grandfather many years later when he passed away. He wrote a beautiful letter of
condolence that my father considered his most important possession. After his death, that scroll was passed on to your father, who was the eldest son.”
“I see.” I paused, knowing that what I’d say next might shock Hiroshi. “Actually, my father held on to the scroll until the mid-seventies, but at that point he decided to sell it to raise money to buy our house.”
“Oh! He never said anything to us about it.” Hiroshi stared at me.
“Well, the end result is it was bought by Showa College, and they have it safely stored in their archives. It’s good, don’t you think, that it’s available to the public?” I was desperately trying for something to mitigate the act committed by my father.
“But it is our family heritage,” Hiroshi murmured. “Does he still have the family sword? Or did he sell that, too?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “He treasures that very much. It hangs in a place of honor on his bedroom wall.”
“Bedroom wall?” Hiroshi said, with a little laugh that didn’t conceal his pain. “When my father owned the sword, it was specially displayed at our household altar at special times only. Every year my mother placed mochi cakes and an orange on a special plate in front of it.”
“I’ll record that in the family history. Thank you, Uncle.” As I spoke, I noticed that Hiroshi had completely forgotten about the shrimp he’d dipped into the broth. Its floating body had curled up into a ball—which is what I wanted to do, too.
13
Monday morning, I was at the post office right as it opened, desperate for two months’ worth of mail. Once I had it, my life could properly restart. The clerk was gone for a while, finally staggering back with two large crates. I dragged both boxes outside and flagged down a taxi to take me the quarter-mile home. The ride was short, but expensive. With a base price of close to $6 for merely entering a taxi, I was $10 poorer when I got out at home. The only mercy was that Japanese cabbies didn’t expect tips.
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