by Kyoko Mori
“That was a long time ago,” her mother said. “Now, Mr. Kimura has become a professor. He teaches literature at the Kobe National University.”
“But I never forgot your mother. I would have looked her up sooner if I had not been living in Tokyo all this time. I only came back to Kobe this April.”
Yuki and her mother had been to Tokyo a few times to visit her aunt Aya. What Yuki remembered most about the city was the way people talked. Her ears hurt from listening to them. They talked fast and loud; they sounded like they enjoyed spitting out their words.
“You don’t sound like someone from Tokyo,” she said to Mr. Kimura.
“Of course not. I grew up here in Kobe. I never picked up the Tokyo dialect, though I lived there for fifteen years and was married to a woman who spoke the dialect. Even my children speak like Tokyoites.”
In Yuki’s class, there were a few kids who had moved to Kobe from other parts of the country. They always got teased about their speech. “Do your children get into fights at school because people tease them about how they talk?” she asked Mr. Kimura.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Anyway, it’s just my son, and he’s already in middle school. My daughter lives in Tokyo with her mother.”
“Oh.”
“We are divorced.”
Yuki considered this for a while. She knew only one girl at school whose parents had been divorced. The girl’s name was Mariko; she lived with her father and his parents. Mariko said she scarcely remembered her mother, who had gone to live with her parents in the country. All the same, in May, when their teacher, Mr. Yamasaki, told the class to write essays about their mothers for Mother’s Day, Mariko ran out of the room without writing anything. Mr. Yamasaki brought her back and made her sit down. “I don’t have a mother,” Mariko said. “Write about your grandmother, then,” Mr. Yamasaki told her. Mariko sat at her desk all that hour staring at her blank paper and sniffling but did not write a word. When school was over that afternoon, Mr. Yamasaki told Mariko to stay behind while everyone else went home.
Walking home to her mother, Yuki could not stop feeling sorry for Mariko. “Mama,” she said as soon as she came into the house, “you wouldn’t believe what happened at school today to Mariko. I think Mr. Yamasaki was wrong.” Shizuko listened to the story and agreed. “Your teacher shouldn’t have been so strict with a poor motherless girl,” she said. “Why couldn’t Mariko stay with her mother anyway?” Yuki asked then. “Having no father wouldn’t be as bad as having no mother.” “When a couple gets divorced,” Shizuko answered, “the children usually remain with the father while the mother goes back to live with her parents. If there are two or three children, some of them might stay with their mother. But if there’s only one child, the mother almost always winds up alone.” The way her mother looked at Yuki, her face completely without a smile, Yuki knew what she meant. Like me, she thought but didn’t say.
Yuki stared at Mr. Kimura’s long, thin face and tried to imagine his daughter. She wondered if his daughter missed him. She couldn’t imagine seeing her mother only once a month.
Her mother and Mr. Kimura were talking about a temple they had once visited on a school trip. The temple had a pond with hundreds of carp in it. They were all the colors you could imagine: red, black, white, orange, yellow, peach.
“While we were walking by the pond,” Mr. Kimura said to Yuki, “one small carp jumped out of the water and landed on the stone path at our feet. It was the size of our hands and bright yellow, almost golden. It kept flopping around and gasping for breath. Nobody wanted to go near it. We were just watching it die. But your mother stepped up, grabbed the carp by the tail, and threw it back into the water. It swam away. She saved it.”
“It was a small thing,” her mother said, blushing. Yuki wasn’t sure if she meant the carp or her saving it. If what Mr. Kimura had said had been a story, the golden carp would have come back to pay its debt to her mother. In the folktales her mother read to her at night, animals often came back to the people who had rescued them. They brought treasures or granted wishes. Yuki wondered what her mother would have wished for if she had been the heroine of a story like that. Not money or treasure, she was sure. She watched her mother and Mr. Kimura talking and drinking their tea. They were laughing. Her mother had a clear, ringing voice when she laughed.
At nine, Yuki had to go to bed. She said good night and went to get ready while her mother was seeing Mr. Kimura to the door. She could still hear them talking at the gate. She had been lying down a few minutes when she finally heard the sound of his car starting up and pulling away.
That was the night before she had to go to an athletic competition. Every year, the city awarded a prize to the best athlete in each grade. Yuki had been chosen to represent the fourth grade at her school. She was worried about the swimming event. Her breaststroke was all right, and her freestyle had improved since last year. In backstroke, though, she kept weaving all over the lane. She couldn’t go straight no matter how hard she tried. Now, the thought of swimming kept her awake. Every time she closed her eyes, she imagined herself drowning or hitting her head on the side. Just when she began to fall asleep, she would wake up flailing her arms and gasping for breath. She kept tossing and turning, almost falling asleep and then being wide awake again. She kicked off the covers and then got cold. But the covers pressed down on her chest so she couldn’t breathe. At eleven, she finally gave up and went out of her room in her pajamas.
The kitchen light was on. Her mother usually waited up for her father, to give him his tea. Yuki walked down the hallway toward the light. In the kitchen, her mother was just hanging up the phone. Her face looked pale.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Yuki said, pulling out a chair and sitting at the table. “Was that Father?” she asked. He often called at the last minute to say that he wasn’t coming home.
Her mother didn’t answer until she sat down opposite Yuki.
“No, it was Mr. Kimura,” she said.
“Oh. Did he forget something?”
Her mother shook her head. “I called him because he had given me his number and said I should call if I needed a friend, someone to talk to.”
Yuki noticed the white card in her mother’s hand.
“Here,” Shizuko said, holding it out to Yuki. “I don’t need this anymore.”
Yuki took the card. It had Mr. Kimura’s name with his business and home addresses and phone numbers printed below it.
Her mother reached across the table and held Yuki’s hands. “I’m not going to call Mr. Kimura again,” she said.
“Why not? He’s your friend.”
Her mother shook her head. “I already have a friend if I need someone to talk to.” She tilted her head and smiled. “You are my friend, Yuki. I don’t have to call anyone else.” Though she was smiling, her eyes looked sad.
“But wouldn’t Mr. Kimura be waiting for you to call?” Yuki thought of how she hated it when her friends promised to do something and failed to follow through.
“No,” her mother said. “I explained everything to him just now. He understands.”
They sat in silence for a while. Then her mother said, “You need to sleep for tomorrow. Go back to your room. I’ll put the kettle on in case your father comes home soon, and then I’ll come and tell you a story so you can sleep.”
Yuki went back to her room. She wasn’t sure what to do with Mr. Kimura’s card. She thought about it for a while and finally put it in her drawer underneath her handkerchiefs. Her mother came and told her a story about a girl who was born from a huge peach and grew up to fight the bad goblins on a far-away island. It was a story everyone knew, but in the original version, the hero was a boy and his followers were a pheasant, a dog, and a monkey. In her mother’s telling, she was a girl helped by a cat, a peacock, and a whale who transported them to the island of the goblins. Yuki fell asleep while they were riding the whale back to the girl’s house. The next day, she came in second at the competition. Soon
, she forgot about Mr. Kimura’s card.
* * *
Yuki didn’t see Mr. Kimura again for three years, until she was living in Tokyo with her aunt Aya. By then, it was the end of February, eleven months after her mother’s death. Her father was planning his second wedding. Yuki was scheduled to go back to live with him and his wife as soon as they were married.
One cold evening, while Aya and Yuki were finishing their supper, someone came and knocked on their front door. Aya went to answer. Yuki followed and stood in the hallway, watching.
The man stood in the doorway with his black hat in his hand. “I was a friend of your sister’s,” he said to Aya. “Your mother gave me your address. I only heard the news two weeks ago, through a friend, so I went to see your mother. She told me your niece is living with you. I wanted to see her. I come to Tokyo once a month to see my daughter.” He put his hand on the doorframe and looked down. “If I had known,” he said. “If I had only known how truly unhappy she was.”
Yuki stepped up from behind her aunt.
Mr. Kimura raised his face. His eyes were red. “Hello,” he said to Yuki. “Do you remember me?”
“Yes,” Yuki said. “You are my mother’s friend from grade school.”
Mr. Kimura put his hand on Yuki’s shoulder and hugged her. “I’m so sorry to hear about your mother,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I know how much she loved you.”
* * *
Yuki got up from her desk and lay down on her bed, staring at the ceiling. It was completely dark now, but she didn’t turn on the light. Downstairs, her father and stepmother were arguing again. Their voices came from their bedroom, directly below her. Soon, a door slammed. Her stepmother must have walked out. Yuki held her breath and listened. The footsteps went down the hallway toward the living room. Another door slammed. Now her stepmother would sit on the couch until her husband came to apologize.
The last time her stepmother shut herself up in the living room like this, a few months ago, her father came up to Yuki’s room. He barged in without knocking and said they both should apologize because it was Yuki, more than himself, that her stepmother was angry at.
“It’s your stubbornness,” he said. “You’ll ruin my life with it.”
When Yuki hesitated, her father said, “You owe me this. If she leaves me because of you, you’ll have to quit school and keep house for me. You’re old enough now. Come on. You have no choice.”
So she went down with him. Her stepmother talked bitterly about what a selfish person Yuki was, how her mother had spoiled her and taught her nothing.
Yuki turned over onto her stomach and pressed her face into the pillow. Downstairs, her father was walking out of the kitchen. He was going down the hallway. Yuki listened, hoping to hear the living room door click open and then shut behind him. But his footsteps didn’t stop. They turned the corner and kept right on up the stairs. He was walking so heavily that the wood rattled under his feet.
Yuki rolled onto her back, ready to get up. Her door had no lock. He would come in any moment and find her lying in the dark. She jumped to her feet and took a step, then stopped, dizzy from standing up too soon. Her vision was full of yellow dots rising and falling. She pressed her fingers to her temples. She was seeing thousands of golden fish jumping up and then splashing back into the water.
If the golden carp had come back to pay its debt, she thought, her mother would have wished for someone to love.
She reached toward the wall and switched on the light. Her father was on the landing. His footsteps stopped. Yuki stood still and tried to compose herself before he swung open the door.
11
WINTER SKY
(February 1975)
Because they had both been married once before, the ceremony was short. Her aunt Aya wore a light gray kimono and Mr. Kimura a plain dark suit. They sat in Yuki’s grandparents’ family room in front of the Buddhist altar. The grandparents, Uncle Saburo and his wife, Etsuko, and Yuki sat in a circle around them. While the priest in his white robe waved a green wand over the couple and chanted, Yuki thought of a story her mother had told her a long time ago. Eight children sat in a circle singing and playing. Sometimes, a ninth child, neither a boy nor a girl, appeared and then disappeared. Soon the other eight noticed and began to chant, “Someone’s missing, someone’s here, someone’s missing, someone’s here,” while the ninth child continued to appear and disappear. The chant whirled around Yuki’s mind the way the bare trees of February had flown past the train window early that morning on her way. For the second time after her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, Yuki saw the rice paddies and the rivers of the countryside she had visited every summer with her mother. The scenery looked unfamiliar in winter. Coming home, she thought, all the same; I am coming home to my mother’s family.
The priest left shortly after the ceremony. Yuki went to the kitchen to help Etsuko prepare the food. It was to be a simple traditional celebration dinner: rice with red azuki beans, greens, a red sea bream. Etsuko was already cleaning the fish at the counter. She was expecting in less than a month. She stood back from the counter a little to leave room for her stomach and to let her shoulders lean forward over the cutting board. The knife in her right hand made swishing sounds as she scaled the fish.
“I should do that,” Yuki said, standing behind her, uncertain. She didn’t think she could do it.
“Oh, no, I like preparing fish.” Etsuko didn’t look back. After she finished scaling the fish, she cut a long, straight opening in its stomach and took out dark red parts. Yuki looked away. The fish would be baked whole. Its skin would be slightly wrinkled but glistening, tinted orange, and underneath, the flesh would be packed like fallen peony petals, pinkish white. Yuki wouldn’t be able to eat the fish, and Uncle Saburo would make fun of her the way he had made fun of her squeamishness all her life, those times he had gone fishing for bass or pike and she had refused to eat any of them. She hadn’t seen Saburo since the third anniversary of her mother’s death; she had never met Etsuko till this morning. Still, she knew that they would tease her. She wasn’t sure whether the thought amused or irritated her. She had always been particular about what she could and could not eat. Her stepmother often cooked things she could not eat, pink shrimp with their tiny legs and feelers curled around themselves, little clams in their shells, boiled quail eggs smaller than her thumbnail. Sick to her stomach, Yuki would sit at the table sipping her glass of water. Her stepmother would say nothing. As soon as Yuki got up from the table, her stepmother would reach out for the plate and scrape the untouched food into the wastebasket, glaring at Yuki but still saying nothing.
“I’ll manage the fish,” Etsuko said. “You can wash the greens and the rice.”
Standing at the sink, Yuki washed first the rice and then the greens. The greens consisted of Chinese cabbage and the leaves and tiny buds of kikuna, edible spring mums. They reminded her of the daisies and nasturtiums her mother had put into salads, straight from her garden, fragrant and bittersweet. They tasted the way Yuki had always imagined light to taste. She left the greens drying in the colander and went to the cupboards to take out the plates and bowls they would need to set the table.
She knew exactly where everything was kept—her grandmother’s good white china with designs in relief of tiny petals, the red-lacquered chopsticks. It was the same as when she was a child; she would come home to her mother’s family every summer and find everything in the same place, year after year. Her grandparents’ house seemed more familiar now than her father’s, where her stepmother had replaced everything. Sunday mornings before track meets, Yuki went downstairs for orange juice and still missed her mother’s white ceramic goblets, how the orange juice looked like the full moon in them. Now, she had only the pictures in her sketchbook. When the new, fragile glasses and plates broke or chipped, her stepmother just went to a department store and bought more. There seemed to be no end of glasses and plates that looked exactly the same.
Yuk
i put the china on a tray and walked to the family room. There, they would set up the black-lacquered table and sit on the floor in front of the altar to eat their festive dinner.
As she entered the room, Yuki saw that her uncle had already set up the table and everybody was sitting on the floor, drinking the tea Etsuko had brought earlier. Aya and Mr. Kimura sat side by side. Her grandmother, her grandfather, and her uncle Saburo each took one side of the table. In the last three years, her grandmother had grown thinner while her grandfather had become stout. Her grandmother still sounded pretty much the same. She talked fast in her high-pitched voice. Her grandfather, though, sometimes paused in the middle of his sentences now, to collect his thoughts or his breath, Yuki could not tell which. As soon as she had walked into the house, she had noticed the change in him. Everything about him had slowed down. Because his legs had gotten weak, he now had to walk with a cane. Each step seemed to take a deliberate effort. His face turned red and he breathed heavily. During the short wedding ceremony, Yuki had sat directly opposite him. In the light from the window, his eyes looked wet, and he kept blinking. Yuki wasn’t sure if he was crying or if the light was hurting his eyes. Her grandfather didn’t cry easily. He hadn’t even cried at his daughter’s funeral. He said that Shizuko was at peace, going to join the spirits of their ancestors; that they should be thankful. Yuki had known how sad he really was, but only from the way his voice had cracked from time to time.
Yuki knelt down next to her grandmother, set the tray on the tatami floor, and began to distribute the plates and bowls. She set seven places, putting Etsuko next to Saburo and herself next to her grandmother. Everyone, except her grandfather, continued to talk about Mr. Kimura’s job at the national university in Kobe. Her grandfather was silently watching Yuki.
“We should set another place, shouldn’t we?” he said abruptly. “For your mother.”