How to Be an American Housewife

by Margaret Dilloway

  American males, like Japanese males, have lives outside of the home, at work, in hobbies, and in other arenas. They often wish to keep this part of their lives separate from their domestic lives. This is normal and natural and not to be taken as hurtful.

  The good Wife will not question where her husband has been or what he has been doing, or with whom. Such pryings will drive your husband away. It is important to mind your own business and stay within the arena of domesticity.

  —from the chapter “A Map to Husbands,”

  How to Be an American Housewife

  Six

  Ueki High School was a few miles down the bus route, a gray rectangle three stories high, with pine trees shading the lawn into oblivion.

  In the office, a woman about thirty with a flipped-up bob worked behind a computer. Her red lips smiled. “Ohayō gozaimasu.”

  “Ohayō. Sumimasen,” I began. “Yasuo Tanaka . . .”

  “Tanaka-sensei?” She bowed and we bowed back and she bowed again. I held my breath, afraid that this would continue like a Marx Brothers gag until Christmas came. She continued in English. “How do you call yourself?”

  Helena’s white teeth flashed. “We’re American cousins.” The lady smiled again and motioned to the bright orange plastic chairs.

  When I was in college, my work-study job one semester was being a teacher’s aide to a high school English class. I had taught adverbs versus adjectives to a mostly uncaring classroom; yet at its end, the students made me thank-you cards, and most passed the final. “Did you make them do this?” I asked the regular teacher. He had not. I had gripped my sheaf of handmade cards and decided to become a teacher.

  I thought about this as I sat down, feeling a pang as I watched a couple of students pass by. Around the office, photo portraits of serious men and a few women hung on the walls, obviously a gallery of the school’s principals over the years. One of these must be Taro. I studied them, looking for resemblances to Mom, but found no one.

  A few minutes later, the office door opened and a trim man in a pink-and-purple argyle sweater vest, purple button-down shirt, and dark slacks entered. His graying hair was cut close to his head and bald in front. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and carried an art portfolio. “Suiko?” He bowed. “This is most unexpected.” An understatement.

  “Yasuo?” He had Mom’s same broad forehead and pointed chin. And he knew my name. I smiled at him. “This is my daughter, Helena.”

  He stared at my face, too. “Ah!” Suddenly he leapt forward and hugged us both. I hugged him back, touched. “I thought I wouldn’t see you until I died. My dear, dear cousins.”

  We followed him into the teachers’ lounge, furnished with round tables. “Sit, sit.” He hustled to the counter. “Coffee? Tea? Or me?” He laughed. “Are you on a tour?”

  “Tea, please. I’m getting used to green tea, Mom. Even with no sugar.” Helena swung her feet.

  “Tea also, please.” I cleared my throat. “We came here to find Taro.”

  Yasuo stopped pouring for a second, his eyes raised to the black cabinets. Perhaps I had been too abrupt. What a strange, sad look came across his face. “He used to be principal here. Now he is retired, a priest. Konko religion. Like our grandfather. He lives in Uwajima now.” Yasuo brought over the tea. “You don’t need to see him.”

  “I do need to see him.” I told him about my mother’s heart and what she had asked me to do.

  “Same as happened to my mother. I am sorry to hear it.” He nodded slowly. “Such is the cycle of life. One dies, one is born.”

  My mouth went dry. “She’s having surgery. She’ll be fine.”

  His eyes were doubtful. “The radiation weakened the heart, I’m afraid.”

  “Radiation?” Helena took a teacup. “From what?”

  “Nagasaki,” Yasuo replied.

  I leaned forward. “Her doctors always say the cause could have been any number of things.”

  “You never told me that.” Helena’s eyes became huge. “She never told me that. She told me about other stuff from Japan—happier stuff.” She stared into her cup of tea. “Poor Obāchan.”

  “She doesn’t think of herself that way, Helena. You know her.” My mother, persisting with her garden and her backbreaking laundry chores. “She never gives up.”

  My mother and her iron will, forged during World War II. The most I had ever had to contend with was minuscule in comparison. “You have easy life,” Mom would tell me often.

  “So you think she won’t survive.” Helena looked at Yasuo. Her voice was flat.

  Yasuo’s chest moved up and down. He glanced at me instead and said nothing.

  I reached out and gripped his hand. “I need to do this for her.”

  Yasuo smiled briefly. “I do not want to give you false hope.” He gazed pensively over his teacup. What was he leaving out? “I have Taro’s address at home. If you have time, I will take you.”

  YASUO LIVED in downtown Kumamoto City. His apartment was two rooms, separated by a sliding rice-paper wall. We took off our shoes and padded across the light-colored hardwood to a low table. “I like traditional Japanese design,” Yasuo said, inviting us to sit on cushions, then going into the kitchen. “Clean, simple, nothing to dust.”

  I agreed. I had always liked what I knew of Japanese design. Westerners put the colors all over the room; the Japanese were more monochromatic, with colors concentrated in one spot. The Japanese way seemed so much simpler: a framing of views, using what you had, not creating clutter to tire your eyes.

  We heard water running. A door opened and a man appeared. He was Yasuo’s age, his dark hair clipped in a buzz cut, wearing a white button-down, untucked over trousers. “Ah, sumimasen.” He bowed, backing up. “Yasuo, you didn’t tell me we had company,” he said in Japanese, then switched to English. “I am Hiroshi.”

  “Sorry. I am Suiko and this is Helena, my daughter.” I shook his hand. “We’re Yasuo’s cousins.” He had to be Yasuo’s roommate.

  Yasuo returned with a tea tray and set it on the low table. “They want to know about Taro. They are on a mission from Shoko.” Hiroshi looked doubtful. “Tomorrow, I can take you to the boat to Uwajima, on Shikoku, where Taro lives. It is only an hour from Kyushu. I do not believe the boats run late in the day.” Yasuo poured tea and offered little cakes resembling green Twinkies.

  “Are you Yasuo’s boyfriend?” Helena asked.

  “That’s not any of our business,” I whispered. Helena clamped her mouth shut and blushed.

  Yasuo froze. Hiroshi inclined his head. “You are observant, little girl.”

  I gave Helena a cake. She put it in her mouth, still blushing.

  Hiroshi changed the subject. “Have you kept in touch with Taro?”

  “Not at all.” I sipped some tea.

  Tomorrow we would see Taro. My stomach fluttered. I was not used to meeting relatives. I had only met my Maryland relatives once in my whole life, during a trip to see my dying grandmother when I was four. It had been a long time since Dad went home, too.

  All we had was our immediate family. No one visited at the holidays. No one even bothered to send Christmas cards anymore. Not even me.

  Hiroshi leaned over. “Yasuo, you did warn them about the terrible ogre, no?”

  Yasuo looked at us. “I did, but they still want to chance being eaten.” He smiled. “Today, I thought you might like to see where our grandfather was priest, and where your mother grew up.”

  THE KONKO CHURCH WAS IMPOSING. Stone steps, guarded by two creatures that looked like lions crossed with dogs, led up to a traditional Japanese building with a red tile roof curving toward the sky. I touched a statue that I remembered from a photo of my grandparents, taken on these steps. Had my grandparents touched it, too, or my mother, when she was a child?

  I imagined what my mother looked like as a child. The only photos of my mother from grade school were of her entire school group, and even in a crowd of a hundred identically clad Japanese girls, I had
easily picked out her face. It was oddly mature, a smaller version of her adult face, with the same solemn look and sculpted cheekbones.

  We walked around the back to an open-air pavilion. Yasuo extended his arm toward it. “Many rites take place here. It is open to nature, to kami. Kami is everything sacred.” He gestured to the landscaped grounds of pine trees, grass, and flowers. “In the back is the cemetery. I thought you would like to see where our grandparents are.” We followed him down a path that veered sharply left.

  Hundreds of headstones and short stone lanterns were built into a hillside and on a small, flat piece of land below it. Yasuo tapped a lantern. “These are torı̄. They are the gateway between sacred and profane. Between our world and the next, I should say.”

  He stopped at a headstone marked with a plain gray torı̄. “Here are our grandparents.”

  “Are those their names?” I pointed to the symbols.

  “Yes.”

  I put my hand on the stone, feeling the coarseness of the unpolished granite scratch my palm. “Our grandmother died well before I was born, but I knew Grandfather. He was a fine man,” Yasuo said. “He always had time for me, to take me fishing, tell stories, play ball. He taught me to observe, and how to draw.”

  I had never known a grandfather. Yasuo’s gentle smile reminded me of what I would never have. What would he have done with me, his granddaughter? I thought of what Helena’s grandfathers did with her. Bounced me on his knee, told me stories? “Did he give you candy?” I asked, my voice low.

  Yasuo’s grin broadened. “Always. Foil-wrapped chocolates. Why do you ask?”

  My father liked to have butterscotch candies for Helena, producing them from his pocket to hear her delighted yelps. “I’m trying to get a picture of him, know what he was like.” Know what he would have been like with me.

  Helena smiled at me and put her hand on my arm. “You okay, Mom?”

  I nodded. Swallowing hard, I asked, “Did he ever talk about our mother?”

  Yasuo nodded, dusting off the top of the headstone with a handkerchief. “He was always sorry that Taro and Shoko didn’t get along. Grandfather would have been glad to see her again. We all would have. But America was too far and expensive for us to visit.”

  Our mother had never seen her parents’ graves. On the anniversaries of their deaths, Mom always said a prayer for them and put their favorite fruit—tangerines—in her shrine. She said they spoke to her in her dreams. No one spoke to me.

  “You have a camera? I’ll take your picture.” Yasuo motioned for us to stand by the headstone. “In Japan, we take pictures at funerals. You know that?”

  “Yes, sometimes relatives send them to my mother.” Until recently, it had been Aunt Suki’s duty. Now I supposed it belonged to no one, unless I asked Yasuo to do it.

  He snapped the photo, then checked his watch. “Time to go. Hiroshisan’s famous sukiyaki will be ready soon.”

  Returning home for visits is not a business for the faint of heart. The culture shock you will feel upon returning to Japan is as bad as when you left it. We do not, therefore, recommend returning unless absolutely necessary. Visits may lead to symptoms such as melancholy and longing for things which can no longer be.

  —from the chapter “Turning American,”

  How to Be an American Housewife

  Seven

  Over Hiroshi’s delicious sukiyaki—a pot of thinly sliced beef, vegetables, and broth simmering in the middle of the table over a gas flame—I told Yasuo more about how we got to Japan and how we went to his old house.

  Yasuo shook his head. “The man you saw at my old house is named Kobe. He and I broke up. He was very angry about it and told Taro. Luckily, Taro was no longer the principal, or he would have fired me.” Yasuo sighed. “I had kept this secret from the family until then. Now Taro has disowned me.”

  I had thought my mother would disown me for getting a divorce. She had told me from a young age that marriage was forever. At the very least, I expected an “I told you so.” When she found out—in a crying phone call late at night—she was calm.

  “He gone?” she asked. “I come over.”

  Then Mom surprised me by listening to all I had to say. “If he leave, not nothing for you do, huh?” she said philosophically. “Tokidoki.” Then she sighed. Nonetheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mom viewed me with disappointment, as though she were measuring up her old hopes for me against the reality and finding it short. I would feel her eyes on me in quiet moments. “What, Mom?” I would say, and she always said, “Nothing,” and went back to whatever she was doing.

  We finished all the sukiyaki. “It’s fine with me if we never see that old badger again,” Hiroshi said while carrying in graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows. “You know what these are?”

  “S’mores! What happened to traditional Japanese food?” Helena popped a marshmallow into her mouth. “Better than nattō any day.”

  “Good for you for trying nattō. I never have.” Yasuo offered us bamboo skewers, then put his own marshmallow over the gas flame. “I fear Taro won’t be any more forgiving of your mother than he has been of me. When he has hard feelings, they last forever.”

  This was not unlike my mother. She had a mental list of who had wronged her: the kid up the street who stole a rose from her garden; the neighbor who put his bags of grass clippings on our side of the property line; me for any number of things. I always chalked it up to her life spent trapped, peering out onto the street from behind the living room curtains. Perhaps it was cultural. Dad always said, “It’s in the past. Move on!”

  “Taro wrote a nationalist curriculum for the schools.” Hiroshi retrieved a Japanese textbook from a shelf. “He is rewriting history. Saying the Rape of Nanking never happened.”

  The book was as big and heavy as a college textbook. “They actually use this in schools?”

  “Not all. Some.” Yasuo wiped chocolate off his fingers. “We have not used it since Taro retired.”

  I looked at my daughter to see how much of this she was taking in. All of it, of course. She said, “So Taro is like one of those Holocaust deniers? My teacher talked about that. Why can’t he just admit that it happened and move on?”

  Yasuo nodded. “It is not so easy. Japan suffered a lot during the war and after. Where once we were proud, we had to bow. Some, like Taro, had a very difficult time doing this. It was hard enough to admit defeat to Americans. To admit all these other atrocities as well—I’m afraid Taro may not be capable.”

  “But my grandmother forgave.” Helena violently squished a marshmallow between two crackers. “She married an American. And if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Hiroshi put his hand on Helena’s arm. “There are some who cannot live in the present, Helena, and we should feel sorry for them rather than angry.”

  “Maybe he’s softened since you’ve seen him.” I thought of my mother’s father, by Mom’s account, a gentle man and a priest for the same church. Surely he raised his son to be the same. I reserved judgment. I had no other choice. Otherwise I would have to give up and go home.

  Hiroshi bowed his head. “We hope so.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, a Sunday, fog made the mountains disappear. I checked us out of the inn, and Yasuo and Hiroshi picked us up to go to the dock. “We will make a stop. Where our mothers grew up,” Yasuo said. He took us to a little plot of land that stood between two large, modern homes. “Their house was torn down long ago, and the land divided between these two owners. But our house stood here.” He walked several hundred feet into the land and turned to look at us.

  I stared at the terrain, picturing the house. This was where all of Mom’s stories took place. I imagined my mother as a youngster, laughing, putting up laundry on a line. Maybe that field to the west was where she and Taro had to take cover from the B-24s. Here was where Dad returned with her as a bride, where her fate was decided on the basis of a blurry photograph. Melancholy, pure and liquid, flooded me. I
wanted to sit, but instead crossed my arms.

  Helena took a picture of the countryside. “I didn’t know it would be so . . . different.”

  “Obāchan never told you stories?” I thought she had, during one of the many times Helena spent with her. Helena seemed to be much closer to my mother than I could ever be. But perhaps she was no closer than I was.

  “Not many. She said they were too boring for me.” Helena considered the land. She walked away from us, staring through her viewfinder at something I couldn’t see.

  “Is it hard, being a single parent?” Yasuo stared at the horizon.

  “Only every day.” I flashed a smile, picking up a round black stone from the tall grass. It was cold. I closed my fist around it.

  “You were in love?” he prompted.

  I glanced at him, startled by the question. No one had ever asked me this. I stuttered. “Too young, I suppose.”

  “I was married once, too.” Yasuo gave me a kind look. “Right after college. It was a marriage of convenience. She knew what I was like.” He shook his head. “In the end, she wanted more than I could give.”

  “Sometimes things don’t work out.”

  “It hurts, even if it wasn’t meant to be.”

  For a moment I stood and committed the scene to memory. Dark dirt and stones and knee-high grasses. The occasional glint of broken glass. Aunt Suki, Mom, and Taro running through the fields, before the war. My own heavy heart. I put the stone in my pocket and walked to the car. “Helena, time to go, love.”

  She followed.

  WE DROVE to the east side of Kyushu. “The jet foil takes one hour.” Yasuo hugged each of us. “Catch the bus to Uwajima—it’s four miles south. I do not know his exact address, but it is not hard to find. There’s not much on Shikoku.”