Butterfly's Child

by Angela Davis-Gardner

  Rinn accepted his mother’s invitation to visit Unzen for a week in August—the best time of year, his mother said, to escape the heat and humidity of Nagasaki. “I can’t leave the shop that long,” Benji said. He would spend one night, two at the most; Rinn and Shoichi could do what they pleased.

  They traveled by jinricksha south of Nagasaki through green hilly countryside, past farms with thatched houses, a watermill, groves of mandarin oranges, fields of tea. Benji looked at the fields, cultivated even on the slopes; most American farmers wouldn’t know what to do with a hill, except leave it to pasture. He glanced at Rinn beneath her parasol, Shoichi asleep in her lap, a wide-brimmed hat protecting his delicate skin. When he was plowing in the brutal Illinois sun, he could not have begun to conceive of this moment.

  They stopped at a small village for tea in an outdoor garden, then at Mogi boarded a steamer for Obama, crossing the wide inlet toward Unzen. Benji leaned on the railing, looking out at the water, smoking one cigarette after another.

  Rinn came to stand beside him. “Even if you hate her, you can put it aside.”

  “That was easier when she was dead.”

  The ocean was calm, the boat cutting easily through it. Shoichi’s eyes were open now; he was sucking on two fingers and looking from beneath his hat in the direction of the water. Benji thought of himself on the ship with Frank and Kate, in shock from his mother’s death. He’d been sick and thrown up at dinner; someone yanked him out of his chair and down to the cabin, where he was sick again.

  They spent the night in a waterfront hotel in Obama before continuing to Unzen. Benji had felt queasy all day. “I’m ill,” he told Rinn.

  She put her hand over his. “It’s to be expected. You’ll feel better once we arrive.”

  In mid-morning they reached the inn, a Western-style building set partway up a hill overlooking the town of Unzen. Steam from the hot springs below billowed up in great sulfurous plumes; to divert himself from the odor, Benji concentrated on the vine of sweet-smelling white flowers that ran along the banister of the steps and the porch railings. A foreign couple sat on the porch, the man peering at a bird through opera glasses. Benji and Rinn started up the steps. He would give his mother a brief, formal bow, he decided, no apology for his behavior.

  But a maid received them at the door. “Your mother asked me to show you to your quarters.” Relieved and irritated, Benji followed her and Rinn along a path up the hill to a Japanese building set in a grove of bamboo.

  The maid showed them into a large tatami room with sliding doors that provided views of bamboo and, on the other side, a mossy courtyard garden. “Your mother asks that you make yourselves comfortable. Please refresh yourselves with a bath and a light meal. After you’ve had time to rest, your mother will come.” She bowed her way out of the room.

  Benji looked out into the garden, like a stage set with its trickling stream and careful placement of lanterns. “She couldn’t even bother to come greet us.”

  “She’s giving us time to adjust,” Rinn said. “This is very Japanese.”

  He didn’t answer but sat at a table and smoked while Rinn carried Shoichi around the room, exclaiming over the elegance of the rice paper doors, the scroll in the tokonoma, the flower arrangement there. He closed his eyes, exhausted. While Rinn took Shoichi for a bath, he pulled a futon from the closet and slept.

  He woke with a start. The maid was arranging their dishes of food on the table, where Rinn sat waiting, her skin radiant from the bath. There was sashimi, seaweed tied in flat bows, sea urchin, custard for Shoichi. Benji could eat nothing but rice.

  After the dishes had been cleared away, Rinn and Shoichi lay down for a nap and he went for a walk, up the hill away from the inn. He sat on a rock in the woods beside the stream, staring at the water, small insects darting above the surface. A raven flapped between the trees and settled nearby, cawing, a rusty, mocking noise. He shouldn’t have come; a fool’s errand, Grandmother Pinkerton would call it.

  A woman in a blue-and-white summer kimono came up the path toward him, her head bowed. She looked up, and smiled. Her face was luminous. Okasan. He looked away from her, into a blur of woods. His heart was racing.

  She stopped beside him. “Welcome to Unzen,” she said, bowing. “I am grateful that you have come.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice too thin. He stood, slightly off balance, and gave an awkward bow.

  “Your wife and son are charming. I am very glad to meet them.”

  “I’ve been fortunate,” he said, “in recent years.” Her eyes were not black, but brown flecked with black. He had not remembered that.

  She wet her lips and looked at the ground. She was nervous too, he realized.

  “It’s nice here,” he offered.

  “Shall we take a walk? We’re halfway to a place I want to show you.”

  They climbed farther up the hill in silence. He looked at a squirrel scuttling across the thick pine-needle floor of the forest, mushrooms at the base of a tree. Here, with his mother.

  “You’re taller than I imagined,” she said.

  “In America I was short.”

  “Did your hair remain light?”

  “Yes.” He tugged at his forelock. “Dye,” he said.

  She nodded. “I thought as much.”

  They turned from the main path to a smaller one, which led to a shrine—a rustic wooden torii, two stone foxes wearing red bibs.

  “This is where I came to pray for you all these years.”

  He stared at the foxes’ blank eyes. “What did you pray?”

  “That your parents would be kind, that you were healthy.”

  “He beat me with a whip, a switch … whatever was at hand.” He was glad to see her wince with pain. “My father’s mother was kind. A friend gave me a horse—I used to pretend I was riding to Japan.”

  She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. He wasn’t what she had expected.

  He looked at the empty white dishes at the base of the fox statues. “I suppose the squirrels ate the tofu.”

  “Some creatures ate it since this morning, when I came to pray for your arrival.”

  A breeze moved through the pines, the sound of one branch sliding against another.

  “You might have been beaten in Maruyama too,” she said, “and found your food in garbage piles. I had hoped …” She pressed a handkerchief to her face. A geisha learns to perform, she had said. But he felt a catch in his chest at the sight of her arm, so thin.

  She tucked the handkerchief in her sleeve. “Perhaps we should be going.”

  They started down the hill.

  “It’s nice here,” he said again.

  “Yes, quite tranquil.”

  “Have you lived here all this time?”

  “Almost fourteen years. First we lived in Nagasaki, but my husband did not care to work for his father’s business, so he bought this hotel. It suits his temperament.”

  “I’ve been wondering …” He cleared his throat. “Did you know your husband before the … before I left for America?”

  “No, I returned to the geisha life. About two years later I met Ichihara-san at a party in Maruyama. His wife had lately died, and he was melancholy. My company gave him comfort, he said, but I was very surprised when he asked not long after our first meeting not just to be my patron but to marry.”

  “If I had stayed in Japan would he have adopted me?”

  “To tell the truth, this might have not have been possible. Perhaps—I am sorry to say—although he is very kind, he might not have cared for another man’s son, especially with the mark of a foreigner. This might have been the case with any man, especially a pure Japanese.” She paused, knocked a small stone out of the path, then was silent, looking down. “I am deeply grieved to hear of your trouble in America.”

  He felt a flush of satisfaction.

  “Thank you.” They walked on in silence. “Do you and Ichihara-san have children?”

  “A boy, Natsume,
who is artistic like his father. At present he lives with his grandmother in Hagi to study ceramics. The woman you met in Nagasaki—Yoshiko-chan—is Ichihara’s daughter by his previous marriage. She lives in Tokyo and is very modern.”

  They had reached the inn. He looked at the open door, the long, gleaming hall beyond it.

  “Does Natsume have black hair?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Not a mongrel, then.”

  She looked at him steadily. “I have always loved you,” she murmured, then walked quickly away from him, down the hill.

  Shoichi was asleep when Benji returned to their room. Rinn was at the table with her embroidery. She tucked the needle into the cloth and laid it down. “Did she find you?”

  He sat down, poured sake from a ceramic bottle into a small cup. “She claims to love me,” he said.

  “I believe her. Imagine if I had to give up Shoichi.”

  Benji looked at the baby, lying on his side. He was still bald as a turnip; would he look like a mongrel too?

  He downed one cup of sake, then another. Rinn came to kneel beside him and massaged his neck. Her wavy hair spilled down her back, a black river of silk.

  He put his hand inside her loose yukata and buried his face in her hair. She untied her sash, then his, and they lay down on the tatami that smelled of fresh straw, quiet, to keep from waking the baby.

  Dinner was served in his mother and Ichihara’s apartment, at the other end of the building. Benji and Rinn wore the new kimonos Rinn insisted they have made for this occasion—black silk with the Matsumoto family crest on the shoulders and sleeves.

  His mother and Ichihara, a white-haired man with an animated face, greeted them at the door. His mother made the introductions; she looked radiant in a pale yellow kimono.

  Ichihara insisted on shaking Benji’s hand. “Please addresse me as Hiroshi,” he said, “American style.”

  “Thank you,” Benji said with a deep bow, “although I now consider myself Japanese.”

  “You have made yourself at home in Nagasaki, ne? You and your family. Your mother was overjoyed to hear it.”

  There were toasts and exchanges of gifts. Benji received a gold pen and pencil for his desk; Rinn, a kimono, pale blue with stylized clouds and birds. “I never expected to have such a fine kimono, like a geisha’s.”

  Shoichi helped Rinn tear the paper from his gift.

  A multicolored string ball. Benji stared at it.

  “Like mine,” he said.

  “I’m glad you remember,” his mother said. “I was hoping you might.” She rolled the ball across the tatami, and Shoichi went scrambling after it.

  “My ball was lost in a river,” he said. “My only souvenir of you. For years I grieved for it.”

  “Ah.” She bowed her head, and for a moment there was silence.

  “Please tell us about your life in America,” Hiroshi said.

  “I was a farm boy, milking cows, plowing. I’ll never forget the smell of that black dirt. We lived in the middle of the country—no mountains or trees.”

  “I thought your father was a wealthy man,” his mother said. Benji laughed.

  “Did you have proper schooling?”

  “Only in a country schoolhouse.” His mother’s face fell. “I didn’t care so much about education—I only wanted to get to Japan. I left to come here when I was fifteen.” Driven away by my father, he almost added, but she was already distressed. He would tell her some other time.

  “A long journey for you,” Hiroshi said.

  “His life hasn’t been easy,” Rinn said. “But he always persevered.”

  The meal was elaborate, Shippoku cuisine with many courses: fin soup, pickled Chinese greens, tilefish tempura, beans in sugar syrup. Rinn suggested that Benji tell his mother and Hiroshi about Mr. Matsumoto; his mother leaned forward as he recounted their meeting on the train, the timing of the earthquake, his stays in Denver and California, the curious circumstances of his adoption. “Now he and Matsumoto-san are partners,” Rinn said. “Benji-san has a gift for business, and his collection of art is known all over Kyushu.”

  Benji asked his mother about her samurai family. She laughed. “I may have described such a history to your father, but it is far from true.”

  “But—all those years …” He shook his head. “Was Midori your geisha name?”

  “The name my mother gave me.” She looked down at her hands. “As a geisha, I was known as Ichiume.”

  As the dishes were cleared away, she asked Benji to come into the next room, where they knelt beside a small red lacquer chest. “First let me tell you,” she said in a low voice, “that I am a mongrel myself. My mother, the child of a Frenchman and a courtesan, had light hair and eyes. She became a courtesan as well, and led a very difficult life. So, you see, I know the difficulties of impure blood. I could not leave you to a similar fate. Ichihara-san does not know the full truth of this,” she added. “I was relieved when our son looked pure Japanese.”

  “This is why I have blond hair,” he said. “A history of foreign blood.”

  “There are many such histories in Nagasaki.”

  She opened the bottom drawer, took out a package wrapped in rice paper, laid it on the tatami, and carefully unfolded the paper. “Your first blanket,” she said, lifting out a dingy white cloth. He held it up; its edges were ragged and there was a hole in one side.

  “You liked to chew on it,” she said.

  “I don’t remember.” But an image came to him, riding along on her back, the world going up and down. A man in a strange hat asked if he was a big boy.

  His mother placed a book before him; on its worn green cover was written, in gold lettering, America Beautiful. “From this I tried to picture your life,” she said.

  He turned through the pages of photographs: the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon. There was a stretch of beach with a lighthouse—Cape Cod, perhaps—and a street in a city, two women in bustles looking in a shop window. He paused to study a picture of Japanese men standing in a strawberry field.

  “My fortune-teller and I argued about where you could be,” she said. “I guessed a city or university, but she believed it was the strawberry farm.”

  “Your fortune-teller came closest,” he said. He closed the book and ran his fingers over the raised lettering. She had thought of him.

  He watched as she returned the blanket and the book to the chest.

  “I’m sorry for my rude behavior when you came to Nagasaki,” he said.

  She bowed, her expression grave. “Daijobu,” she said in a low voice. “I can understand you. Now please come.” Her face brightened. “I have a surprise.… I believe I heard her enter.”

  A white-haired woman with hooded eyes was kneeling beside the table. She stood and bowed when Benji and his mother entered the room.

  “Suzuki-chan!” he cried.

  “Benji-san.” She gave him a shy smile and another bow.

  He hugged her, then backed away. “I’m sorry—my American side broke through.”

  “I see you have grown up,” she said.

  “I warned her about the hair,” his mother put in. She had reseated herself at the table. “Please join us at the table and we’ll have more champagne.”

  Suzuki exclaimed over Shoichi and thanked Rinn for her persistent inquiries about Benji’s mother. “Word of your diligence traveled throughout Maruyama.” She turned to Benji. “Your mother is sincere in her joy that you have met again. Indeed, I have not seen her in such a state except on the day of your birth … and,” she added, with a bow toward Hiroshi, “on the occasion of her marriage.”

  Benji looked at his mother. She was smiling and her head was tilted slightly to one side, just as in the photograph.

  “As a fortunate by-product of your search,” his mother said, “Suzuki and I have found each other too. She is now our valued assistant at the inn.”

  For the next few days, his mother and Hiroshi left the management of
the hotel to Suzuki and took Benji and Rinn sightseeing. They went to the village of Unzen, where they looked at the shops and summer cottages—the houses were well priced, Hiroshi whispered to Benji—and took a ropeway up to the highest mountain, for a view of the countryside.

  One afternoon they went to the source of the hot springs, an area outside the village of Unzen, and walked beside the volcanic mud and bubbling water that stank of sulfur. Rinn covered Shoichi’s face with her handkerchief.

  “The core of the earth breaks through here,” Hiroshi said. “Some Christians were boiled alive in this place, hundreds of years ago,” he added in a cheerful tour-guide voice.

  “My stepmother is a Christian,” Benji said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been rescued from Maruyama. She was good to me,” he added, “much of the time.” He felt a sting of guilt; he’d never written to her.

  “How did you manage,” he asked his mother, “during the years after my father left you with me?”

  “I had a friend, Sharpless-san, from the American consulate. Each month he brought an envelope of money, from your father, he said. I learned the truth only in recent years—that the money had been from him. Then I understood that he was rather fond of me.” She tried to hide her smile. “He was a loyal Christian, however, with a wife and children.”

  “Where is Sharpless-san now?”

  “In Tokyo, I believe. I’ve lost touch with him lately.”

  “Cio-Cio-san, my father called you. Did you love him?”

  She shrugged. “I was rather fond of him.”

  “But I thought … and you waited for him …”

  “That you might have a home.” She grasped his hands. “The charade of the suicide was a futile sacrifice. I thought you would succeed in America, but of course I wasn’t aware of the harsh circumstances. We have both suffered for my action.”

  He looked at her, the wide-set eyes he knew so well, her face blazing with life.

  “What we imagine never happens, does it?” he said. “But some things are far superior. I could never have imagined Rinn or Shoichi. Or you,” he added.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She stepped closer to him and he put his arm around her, his hand lightly touching her shoulder, and they stood looking into the distance, at the cool green sweep of mountains dotted here and there with houses and the orange torii of shrines, until Rinn called that it was time to go.