Shizuko's Daughter

by Kyoko Mori

  Yuki said nothing.

  “You must understand how awkward it would be otherwise,” Aya said. “She has her own relatives, who will become your relatives. You’ll see me and Grandpa and Grandma on special occasions, of course.”

  “Like funerals,” Yuki said.

  “Don’t be that way,” Aya said. “Can’t you see it can’t be helped? You are your father’s only child. We have no claim on you. It was kind enough of your father to invite me to the wedding.”

  “You know it’s a lie,” Yuki said. “It’s all a lie, the whole thing. They know I want to stay in Tokyo with you, and they’d like it that way too. They don’t care about me. They only came to see me twice the whole time I was with you. They’d as soon be by themselves. Only they won’t do it because it would look bad. People would talk.”

  Yuki looked out the window. She could see the concert hall where she had performed in her first piano recital when she was six. After she played her two pieces, she went out to the stairway landing outside to get fresh air and look at the ships. Her mother slipped out the other door and went to buy her a bouquet of pink roses. Yuki could still see her mother running up the stairway in her white dress, the roses a blur of pink and green. She had stood up and hugged her mother, gingerly, with her back bent, so as not to crush the roses between them.

  “I’ll miss you, so much,” Yuki said.

  * * *

  Yuki was seated between her aunt and an old friend of her father’s, a man who had come to her mother’s funeral. The ceremony would start in a few minutes, when the bride came in. Yuki looked around. The room was dimly lit with the long white candles on the altar in the front. The guests were all seated at the three long tables arranged in a horseshoe around the altar. About twenty men and women: the bride’s relatives, Yuki’s father’s side of the family, a few business friends. The men were wearing dark-colored suits; most of the women wore formal black kimonos. The smell of old cloth and candles was suffocating. The room had no windows. Yuki longed for the hallway outside, the busy lobbies of the hotel, people with suitcases coming and going.

  Her father was standing on the side of the altar, away from the door. In his black kimono, he looked small and old. He was not looking at anyone in particular around the table but seemed to be staring into the air about two feet above everybody’s head. He reminded Yuki of an old man trying to remember something: the lines of a poem, a song he hadn’t sung in years. The priest stood on the other side of the altar in his red-and-white ceremonial robe. He was holding a wand of green branches tied up with red-and-white paper. Yuki looked away from the priest and his wand, at her own hands under the table. She pressed them harder against her purse and tried to picture her parents standing in front of the temple gate. Through the open gate, in the background, she could imagine the green leaves of the trees in the temple garden. The wedding had taken place in May. She could almost smell the wisteria blossoms on the other side of the temple buildings, in the arbors near the pond. The breezes of May would carry their scent all the way to the temple gate. She looked again at her father standing in the middle of the horseshoe and thought: Can’t you remember all that, the open air, the scent of the flowers and green leaves, and her hand pressing against your arm?

  The door opened and the bride entered. She walked slowly under her huge wig and layers of kimono. The people around the tables rose when the bride stopped between the priest and the groom.

  Yuki stood up with the rest and put down her purse on her seat. Her father’s friend’s jacket sleeve brushed against her hand. She leaned closer to her aunt. The priest began to shake the wand over the couple and to chant. Yuki could not understand the words that he intoned in a high, nasal voice. She thought of another priest who chanted at her mother’s funeral, how she didn’t understand him either. Let me sit down before the floor starts rocking again, she thought.

  After the chant, the priest handed Yuki’s father a large earthenware bowl of ceremonial sake. Yuki watched him drink the warm rice wine from the bowl three times and hand it to the bride. The bride drank from it. Then the priest passed the bowl to Yuki’s table. Each person drank from it three times and passed it to the right. Yuki stood watching the bowl come down the table to Aya. Aya took it and tipped it toward her face. The bowl was so large it looked as though her face would be swallowed inside it. Aya lifted it away from her mouth and passed it to Yuki.

  The bowl felt heavy in her hands. As she lifted it slowly toward her mouth, the pungent smell of sake made her want to cough. She closed her eyes tight against the smell. In a blur, she saw her mother standing in front of the temple gate in her white wedding dress among wisteria blossoms and the spring breeze, her body a soft weight against the black sleeve. Mama, I can’t do it, she thought, I can’t let him forget. She stood on her tiptoes and tilted the bowl toward her face. The sake trickled into her mouth, warm and bitter. She drank it down in one long draft. Then, while her father’s friend reached out his black sleeves for the bowl, Yuki brought her heels down with all her weight, dropping the bowl and shattering it against the tabletop—just as, on the morning of the funeral, her father had shattered her mother’s rice bowl against the doorsteps so her ghost would not haunt his household or anyone in it.

  4

  IRISES

  (April 1970)

  Her father and stepmother were in their room watching an afternoon movie on television. Yuki could see them through the open door as she passed by. They sat side by side on their futon bedding, the TV flickering in front of them. Though it was sunny, they had closed the heavy, rust-colored curtains her stepmother had put up. Her father’s room looked small and crowded with her stepmother’s things: the TV, her clothes, her makeup stand and dresser, the new futon with a shiny pink cover. The upstairs room that used to be Yuki’s mother’s was stripped of its furniture and the curtains.

  Neither her father nor stepmother looked up from the movie to notice her. Yuki went to the kitchen and opened the right-hand door of the cupboard. Her mother’s heavy, blue-tinted glasses and white ceramic goblets were gone. Instead, there were stacks of white porcelain plates and saucers with tiny pink flowers on the rim. Matching cups hung from the hooks her father must have just screwed in. Yuki tried the left-hand door and found a few dozen glasses lined up in rows, upside down. They were clear, tall tumblers and small juice glasses, all of them new and fragile looking. On this shelf, her mother had stacked up ceramic plates with blue and purple glaze dipped down the middle, each pattern slightly different, like the phases of the moon.

  Yuki opened the new yellow refrigerator, took out the orange juice, and poured it into one of the new tumblers. She stared at the persimmon-colored tea set inside the glass cabinet. It was the only thing that hadn’t been changed in the kitchen. On the day she and her mother had bought the tea set at a craft fair, the potter who made it was working at his wheel. The clay rose up into a perfect cylinder as he treadled. He pinched the side and made it flare out like a large petal; then he took the finished vase off the wheel and examined its shape, frowning. Finally, he held it between the heels of his hands and pressed slowly, carefully, till the cylinder was slightly askew. “Why does he do that?” Yuki asked. “He doesn’t want a perfect shape,” her mother answered. “He wants it just a touch bent and imperfect.” No two things should be exactly the same, her mother had taught her.

  Carrying her orange juice, Yuki walked back past her father’s room and up the stairs to hers. She closed the door. At least her room had remained the same: the pale blue curtains she and her mother had chosen, the desk her grandfather had made, the dresser, the bed with the red quilted cover from her grandmother. Yuki took a sip of her juice and sat down on the floor among the four boxes sent from Tokyo by her aunt Aya. Just that morning Yuki had opened them up and read the note packed on top of her summer clothes. Yuki, I hope you are well, Aya had written. My house seems empty without you. You know that I miss you and think of you often. I understand how difficult this move is for
you. Please be brave. Try to be happy where you are.

  Yuki put the note in her desk drawer and began to unpack her clothes. As she hung up her dresses and skirts in the closet, folded the sweaters and put them in the drawers, she thought of another move. Just two years ago she and her mother had packed their things to move to this house.

  * * *

  That day, too, was a Saturday in early April. But it was raining rather than sunny. The cherry blossoms in the nearby park had opened the week before. Yuki was sorry about the rain. It was coming down with enough force to shatter the fragile cups of flowers. The bruised petals would scatter over the asphalt walkways, the blue swing set, the silver bowl of the drinking fountain.

  Yuki and her mother had been packing all morning, each in her own room. By eleven, Yuki was almost done with her things. The movers were coming at three. All over the house, there were half-filled boxes, piles of jackets, books, magazines, bedsheets, and towels. They hadn’t even started on the kitchen or the living room. Only her father’s bedroom was already cleaned out. Before he left on his business trip a week earlier, he had packed his things and piled the boxes against the wall in the hallway. The boxes were marked, taped, neatly stacked up. He said he would come back to the new house on Sunday morning and unpack his things into his bedroom and his new study. Yuki knew he would be done in half a day, everything arranged perfect and orderly, just in time for him to take off on another business trip. She scarcely ever saw him.

  Yuki taped shut the last box in her room and went to the kitchen. She took the glasses and plates out of the cupboard and lined them up on the tiled floor. Then she sat down in her red T-shirt and blue jeans, a pile of old newspapers on her right side and the glasses on her left. She didn’t mind this job. She was proud of how careful she could be. She crumpled the papers inside the glasses, wrapped each glass twice. The newspapers had pictures of politicians, movie stars, criminals and accident victims, newly married couples. Their faces got crumpled against the blue of the glasses. Yuki filled the box, taped it shut, and pushed it away. She reached out for the next box, ready to start on the plates.

  “You’re working very hard.”

  Yuki turned around toward the doorway. Her mother was standing there in her mint-green housedress, her hair pinned up into a bun. Yuki and her mother both had long hair. Yuki’s came down to her waist, and her mother’s to her shoulders. Yuki had pulled back hers into a ponytail to keep it out of her eyes.

  “I’m almost done with the breakable things,” she told her mother. “I’ll throw the pots and pans into a few big boxes. We’re not going far. We don’t have to pack them that carefully, do we?”

  “No,” Shizuko said. “How ever you can pack them is fine.”

  The new house was two miles to the north. They would still be in Kobe, but living near the mountains rather than the sea. When the first term started in mid-April, Yuki would be going to a different school. Her mother had been worried all week about the school. She started talking about it again.

  “You really don’t mind going to the new school?” she asked Yuki. “Maybe I should see about keeping you at the old school for sixth grade. Next April might be a better time to change, when everyone has to start at the junior high school. You won’t be the only one who’s new. I can get permission from the school board for you to stay. But then you’d have to take the city bus every morning. I don’t know.”

  Yuki sighed and shook her head so her mother would see how fed up she was. “I wish you wouldn’t keep asking me the same thing. I already told you I don’t mind. I’m not worried, so you should stop.”

  “But kids will pick on you at first, just because you’re new.”

  “I don’t care. I can take care of myself. I’m not afraid of anyone.”

  “When other kids tease you,” her mother said, “you should ignore them. They’ll give up sooner or later. You make things worse by getting upset. That’s exactly what they’re hoping you will do. You should pretend you didn’t even hear them.”

  “Mama, you don’t understand. I’m not going to let anyone make fun of me or say mean things to me and get away with it. But I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I have a lot to do here. You’re bothering me.” She turned back to her packing and crumpled another newspaper.

  Her mother sighed and went away. Yuki continued to pack the plates and then the large ceramic goblets, green soup bowls, and blue cups. She could remember where and when she and her mother had bought each ceramic piece: at craft fairs in Kyoto, in the old pottery villages north of Kobe. The best pottery, her mother said, was pottery you could use every day. Cups should feel solid in your hands and smooth against your lips. The glaze should be subtle rather than overbright. Bottoms of pieces were always plain. Potters scraped off any glaze that dripped there because in the kiln, glaze on the bottom would make the piece stick to the floor and crack. Her mother knew so much, Yuki thought. There wasn’t much Yuki knew that she hadn’t been taught by her mother. By the time she was done packing the breakable things, she felt bad about the way she had spoken.

  She knew that her mother couldn’t help being worried. Yuki had often gotten into trouble at school for fighting with the boys. Sometimes she came home with bruises or cuts. Last fall, she gave one boy a hairline fracture when she pushed him and he fell back against a stone wall, shoulder first. Her mother was called to school for that. “It could have been you with the broken shoulder,” her mother said on the way home. “Promise me you’ll stay out of trouble from now on.” Yuki had tried to laugh it off. “I can’t make a promise that I can’t keep,” she said. “Besides, his shoulder wasn’t exactly broken. It was more like a small crack. And he started the fight by throwing my books into the puddle.”

  Yuki packed the utensils, pots, and pans into a few large boxes and went to her mother’s room. Her mother was kneeling on the floor among piles of dresses, scarves, handkerchiefs, jewelry. She had only two boxes finished. Yuki went in and stood opposite her.

  “I keep thinking I should look through these clothes first,” her mother said. “Some of them are too bright for me now.” She pointed at a white dress with teal-blue roses printed down the front. “That dress, for one.”

  “No,” Yuki protested. “I like you in it.”

  Her mother shook her head. “It’s time for me to start wearing more subdued colors. By the time my mother was forty, she only wore ivory, light gray, and the darker blues.”

  “But Grandma’s different,” Yuki said, “and you’re not forty yet.”

  “I will be this winter, and Grandma’s not different. When I’m sixty, I’ll be wearing grays and browns too, just like she does. All old women dress like that.”

  Yuki frowned. She couldn’t imagine her mother being old like her grandmother, who had always been old as long as Yuki could remember.

  “I wonder what it’s like to be sixty,” her mother said. “That’s a long time to live.”

  Yuki sat down next to her on the floor. “I think you should wear everything you have,” she said. “Besides, this isn’t a good time to throw things out. You can always do that later. You know you’ll have more time then.”

  Her mother laughed. “Yuki, you’re so full of common sense.”

  Yuki leaned forward and cleared her throat. “I came to apologize,” she said. “I spoke impertinently just a while ago. I’m sorry. I hope you’re not mad at me.”

  “No, I’m not mad.” Her mother rubbed Yuki’s forehead with her fingertips. “There’s a smudge on your forehead. It must be from the newspapers. I can’t get it off.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll wash my face later.”

  Her mother said, “Remember when you ate the tube of my watercolor paint? It was yellow. Your mouth and chin were covered with it. I had to take you to the hospital. I was so worried.”

  Yuki recalled the bright yellow her mother had been using to paint lemon lilies. It was five or six years ago. “I must have been five or six already, wasn’t I? That was such
a pretty color. I thought it would taste good. It tasted terrible. But I kept eating because I thought it would taste better once I got used to it. I was a dumb kid in a way.”

  Outside, the rain was turning into a drizzle. The sky was a lighter gray than it had been all morning. Yuki pulled her knees up to her chest and sat leaning forward, her arms draped around her legs.

  “What will we do with our flowers?” she asked. “Are we going to dig them out and take them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we should leave them. Some of the perennials are ready to bud. This isn’t a good time to move them. You’re supposed to do that in the fall, when they’re finished flowering.”

  “They might die if we don’t take them. What if the new people don’t know how to take care of them?”

  “Do you want me to take them?”

  “I think so. I’ll miss them otherwise. They’re our flowers.

  “It isn’t hard to get more. Your grandma can give us lots more.”

  “They won’t be the same. I want these flowers.” Yuki reached over for an empty box and began to put her mother’s dresses inside it. “I’ll take care of this if you want to go dig them out. I’d do it for you, but you’re better at it. I don’t want to hurt their roots.”

  “All right. We’ll take them.”

  Her mother stood up to go. Yuki filled one box with the dresses and put the silk scarves on top. They were in shades of green and blue, some purple and dark pink.

  “Your scarves are so pretty,” she said.

  Her mother stopped and looked back. “Someday when I can’t wear them anymore,” she said, “maybe you’ll be old enough to wear them for me.”

  “No,” Yuki said. “I like them on you. I didn’t mean that I wanted them.”

  “I know,” her mother said, going out. Yuki hesitated a minute, looking up into the empty doorway. Then she went back to packing.