by Kyoko Mori
Yuki’s grandmother turned away from the conversation. All talk seemed to stop. Yuki put the last plate on the table and then the chopsticks.
“What a strange thing to say,” her grandmother said. She forced a short laugh. “We would bring bad luck to the wedding. We don’t want that.”
Her grandfather said nothing. Mr. Kimura resumed the conversation. Yuki lifted the lid of the teapot. It was only half empty. Still, she took it and stood up to go back to the kitchen.
“Leave the teapot and sit with us now,” Saburo said.
Everybody nodded toward Yuki. She sat down next to her grandmother.
“Mr. Kimura has been telling us about the national university,” Saburo continued. “It’s a shame that you are not going there in April.”
“It’s too late to think about that,” Yuki said. “The exams are already over.” She had told them that after her graduation from high school in March, she planned to go to a small college in Nagasaki to study art.
“But you have good grades,” Aya said. She looked toward Mr. Kimura and then back to Yuki. “He thinks he can arrange a special exam for you in the next week. If you do well, you can still get in. Some people always decide to go somewhere else at the last minute. You can take their place.”
Mr. Kimura also turned to Yuki. “I’m sure you’ll do well on the exam. You don’t have to think I did a favor for you. You would be doing us a favor by coming to our school.”
“Thank you,” Yuki said, addressing just Mr. Kimura. “But my mind is already made up. I am going to Nagasaki. I have been planning it for a long time.”
“Why Nagasaki?” her grandmother asked. “It’s so far away, clear on another island. We’ll never be able to see you. Besides, your uncle’s school has a better reputation.”
“I couldn’t care less about reputation,” Yuki said to her grandmother. “The school I’m going to is a good school for art. I would be happier there. National universities are for people who are ambitious, who want to work for big companies in the future. That isn’t for me. My teachers agreed. I wouldn’t fit in at a national university. I don’t want to fit in.”
Her grandmother frowned at her. Her eyes had gotten to be a paler brown than they used to be. They looked oddly defenseless.
“You have to understand,” Yuki continued, trying to be patient. “I need to go to a school far away. I couldn’t go to the national university or any other school in Kobe because my father and his wife wouldn’t let me move out of their house then. They would worry about what people would say; people would think it strange for me to be moving away from home to go to a school only twenty minutes away by train. If I go to Nagasaki, though, my parents can say that I have gone to a special school on another island. They don’t have to lose face about my moving out.”
“You have talked about this with them?” Saburo asked.
“No,” Yuki said, off her guard. Everyone stared at her. There was nothing to do but tell the truth. “Actually, I haven’t talked about any of my plans with them. But I know what they think. I mentioned going to Nagasaki once to my stepmother, about a month ago, but I don’t know if she was listening. She was cutting up something for my father’s lunch. She didn’t even look in my direction when I spoke. She and I seldom talk to each other anyway, except when she’s very upset with me. Then she talks a lot and I have to listen.” Yuki took a deep breath.
Nobody spoke for a while. Saburo was picking up and putting down his chopsticks. Her grandmother poured herself another cup of tea. Aya and Mr. Kimura sat perfectly still, and her grandfather seemed to be staring at the plates. Back in the kitchen, Etsuko was cutting up the greens. Yuki heard the staccato pounding of the knife.
“What does it matter to you?” Yuki said, “or to me? In a month, I’ll be gone to Nagasaki and I’ll never hear from them or write to them. I’m not going to take any money from them. I’ve been saving from my job at the library. I worked every night so I wouldn’t have to ask them for any money to go to college. And so long as I’m not living with them, I can start coming here every summer just like before.” Yes, she thought, then it would be as though the last six years had never happened.
“But they are your parents,” her grandmother said. She picked up her cup and brought it down without drinking from it. “You have to show them some respect. I’m glad you want to see us, but still, we can’t encourage you to neglect your duty by them. It wouldn’t be right.”
“How can I respect them?” Yuki asked. “They show no respect for me or for my mother, or for you. They were married only a year after her death. They knew each other while she was alive. You might even say they were waiting for her to die.”
“You don’t know what was between them in the past,” Saburo said. “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Just because they worked in the same office, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“But I know. I live with them. I can tell. How I treat them is really none of your business anyway.”
Her grandmother opened her mouth as if to say something and then stopped. She brought her hand to her face and covered her mouth. Her thin shoulders heaved up and down. She shook her head slowly.
Yuki put her hands on her grandmother’s shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please don’t be upset.”
Her grandmother turned away, stiffening her shoulders.
“Sometimes,” her grandfather said suddenly, “you have to show respect to other people before you can expect it from them.”
Startled, Yuki looked toward him. He had not even turned to her to speak. He was still staring at the table. She could not tell whether his comment was meant as a rebuke or just a remark, or whether he knew what he was saying. They are the adults, I shouldn’t have to teach them about respect, she wanted to say, but she stopped herself. Her grandfather grabbed his cane and was trying to stand up. He leaned on his right arm a few times and then gave up. Instead, he let go of the cane and started moving on his hands and knees around the low table toward Yuki and her grandmother. Yuki noticed how his cheeks, red from effort, had gotten more wrinkled and pouchy in the last three years. From the kitchen, she could smell the baking fish, the salty smell of the sea and the burning flesh. She stood up. Her grandfather stopped, his shoulders moving with his breathing. Uncle Saburo put his hand on his father’s back, as if to support him or to hold him back. Her grandfather’s face was gray and sad. Yuki could scarcely look at him.
“I need fresh air,” she said. “I’m going outside for a while. I didn’t mean to offend anybody. I’m so sorry.”
She started walking, walking faster, running. She went through the front door, ran across the yard to the back of the house, and then to the persimmon tree farthest away from the house.
She was cold without her jacket. Shivering, she leaned back against the trunk and closed her eyes. She thought of the priest’s wand waving over Aya and Mr. Kimura, her father and her stepmother, her father and her mother a long time ago, Aya and her first husband, and even before that, Mr. Kimura and his first wife. Each time the wand moved exactly the same way while a priest in a white robe chanted the same words. Her grandparents, too, were married in the same ceremony more then fifty years ago. She thought of them now, her grandmother turning away from her angrily, her grandfather too weak to rise to his feet and walk. Ten years ago, her grandfather used to outwalk her on a mountain path. His black hiking shoes came down heavily and steadily. Often, he got ahead of her. He would wait for her, and together, they would run down the last hill. At the bottom, her mother would stand holding white peonies she was bringing to the family graves. Yuki’s thoughts wandered to Etsuko, her stomach big with child, splitting the fish’s stomach and taking out the red entrails. Still shivering, Yuki opened her eyes and looked up. The bare branches of the persimmon tree looked like a net spread under the steely blue sky of a late-winter afternoon. Between the house and the tree, where her grandmother’s flowers would be in the spring, the plots were frozen hard. The bench that was placed under
the persimmon tree in the summer was gone for the winter, stored in the shed with all the tools useless now till spring.
When Yuki was a child, her grandfather had sat on the bench with her in the evenings and shown her the summer constellations. He had connected the stars, shiny dots, into people and animals, into stories. The tree was full of soft green leaves then. In the fall, the leaves turned pinkish orange and fell. After that, the tree would bear bright red bell-shaped fruit on the otherwise empty branches. Yuki knew this only from the pictures her uncle had sent her. By the time the tree bore fruit, she was back in Kobe, back to school. The fruit was bitter when it came off the tree. But her grandfather would stand on a ladder and pick all the ripe ones, then dry them on long skewers hung on the wall. When they were dried, the persimmons turned very sweet. Every December, her grandfather sent a large box of dried persimmons to the city, and Yuki and her mother would eat them through the winter, reminders of their summer in the country. All that, Yuki thought, was a long time ago. Her mother had been gone for six years. Her grandmother now wanted her to show respect to her father. How can she say such a thing? she wondered. She knows how badly he treated my mother, her own daughter. Yuki sighed and looked toward the house. Mr. Kimura was coming through the back door, holding something in his arms. She watched him as he made his way toward the persimmon tree.
When he was close, she saw he was holding her jacket, the sea green one she had saved money to buy the winter before. She had spent the whole afternoon in downtown Kobe trying to buy just the jacket her mother might have bought her.
Mr. Kimura stood next to Yuki and handed her the jacket. “You must be cold,” he said.
She put on the jacket and buttoned it up. Mr. Kimura was looking up at the bare branches.
“I’m sorry about what I said in the house,” Yuki said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
“The last time I saw your mother,” he said, “we went to see the pine tree that you said looked like a fox in a wedding dress. But when we stood right in front of the tree, by the breakwater, the tree didn’t look much like anything. I guess the distance was wrong. You needed to be farther away to see. That was before I drove her home and the three of us had tea in your kitchen.”
The image of the tree floated into Yuki’s mind, green in the middle of winter, framed in the center of the kitchen window. It would still be there, by the sea. She wondered if the people who lived in the house now had noticed it.
“I thought about that again last night. Your mother called me later that night and said it was the last time she would call or see me. She said she was too unhappy to be my friend, it wouldn’t be right. I tried to persuade her to let me see her now and then, just as a friend, but she wouldn’t change her mind.”
“I know she called you,” Yuki said.
“Do you? I suppose she told you. You were very close to her.”
“Yes. She couldn’t be your friend because of me.”
Mr. Kimura nodded. “I wanted you to be at my wedding because I wouldn’t have met Aya if it wasn’t for you. Your bringing us together was the one good thing that came out of so much sadness. I’m glad you came.”
Yuki surveyed the frozen garden before her. There was something she wanted to ask him. On the train that morning, she had thought of many different ways to ask it. But there was no tactful way, she realized. She turned to Mr. Kimura.
“Did you marry Aunt Aya because she reminded you of my mother?” she asked.
Mr. Kimura looked her straight in the eyes the way very few adults did. “Yes,” he said. “Do you think that’s bad?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It doesn’t mean that I don’t love Aya for herself. I think that we often love someone because at least initially, that person reminds us of someone else, someone we have loved before. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone except my mother and my grandparents and Aunt Aya and people like that—my mother’s family.”
“But there must have been boys you have at least liked,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t teasing her. He was serious.
Yuki thought about the boys at school. In her mind, she always pictured them huddled together, tittering about something—the way some girl’s slip showed under the hem of her skirt, the tight blouse of a fat girl, an awkward tall girl’s slouch. The ones who didn’t huddle and titter, the smart ones, the popular ones, hung around in twos and threes, and often went about with tall girls who also came in twos and threes. These girls wore slim dresses to school. When they passed by, Yuki could smell the faint fragrance of their face powder. During lunch, while the unpopular boys huddled in the hallways and the popular boys and girls walked about the school ground and the other girls sat in the cafeteria, Yuki went out to the track and ran laps. One fast, one slow, one fast, one slow, until her legs, shoulders, and arms hurt. She would shower quickly and go to her fifth-hour class, and after all the afternoon classes, she would change into her gym clothes again and go to cross-country or track practice, depending on which season it was. By the time she had to go home to eat dinner with her father and his wife, she was usually so tired that she could hear a humming in her ear. She would sit quietly and focus on the dull pain in her legs and shoulders, concentrate on those concrete pains. Then she would go to work at the library, shelving or labeling books or writing up order forms. She came home at eleven at night to do her homework. There was no time to sit around and daydream about boys. The only person she had daydreamed about was Sachiko, three years ago. After their summer of running together, Yuki saw her only a few times, when Sachiko came to watch track meets to cheer for her former teammates. By then, Sachiko had stopped running. She congratulated Yuki for winning and then went to join her friends. Now, Sachiko had gone to college. Even before that, Yuki could tell that she, too, was turning into a girl with makeup who walked about with boys.
“No,” she said to Mr. Kimura. “I don’t think I’ve ever liked any boy. Do you think that’s odd?”
“Not at all. Maybe you’ll like somebody later on. I don’t think there’s any hurry about something like that.”
“No, there isn’t,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to be in love. Half the time it doesn’t turn out right.”
He didn’t seem offended or even surprised. He continued to look into her face.
“Of course I don’t mean that about you and Aunt Aya,” Yuki added. “I was thinking more about my father and my mother. They loved each other once.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I was married once myself. We got divorced, as you know.”
“And Aunt Aya. When she first married, she must have loved her husband. It never occurred to her that in only three years, he would die in a traffic accident. The other people weren’t seriously hurt. He died on the spot from hitting his head. She could never foresee that. He didn’t even drive that much.” Yuki thought for a second and then went on. “I believe that if we could foresee the future, none of us would ever fall in love. It comes to nothing one way or the other.”
Mr. Kimura leaned back against the tree, his arms folded. He seemed to be thinking for a long time. Finally, he said, “When I was younger and my marriage was going badly, I used to think the same thing too. What’s the point? It all turns out badly. I felt that way again when I heard about your mother’s death. I was forty then. But in the last few years, as I’ve gotten to be forty-five and forty-six, I began to think differently. I think now that it’s worth it all the same, loving someone. It may not turn out right, but I want to love someone in spite of it. In a way it means more because the odds are against us. If I didn’t think that, I would never have married Aya.”
Yuki tried to imagine it—herself at forty-five feeling that love was worthwhile. It was difficult. All she could think of was herself now running around the track, a fast lap, a slow lap, endlessly, while the others fell in love.
The distant sound of the door interrupted her thoughts. She looked toward the house. Aya was coming through the back door in her light gray kimono, a white knit shawl over her shoulders. She was walking toward them in the slow, steady way women in kimonos walked. Mr. Kimura had noticed her; his body was turned toward her, slightly leaning in her direction even though she was still quite far away. Yuki thought of Aya’s first wedding. She had only been four, so she remembered little except that at the reception dinner, they had served carrots cut like flowers. And there were yellow chrysanthemums on the tables and her mother was wearing a light blue kimono hand-embroidered with flowers and leaves in a darker blue.
Aya was only about ten steps away now. She smiled at Mr. Kimura, and he began to walk toward her. Yuki realized that it didn’t matter what she had said to her grandparents—Aya and Mr. Kimura were too happy now to be offended. They stood together. He was straightening out her white shawl, which had slipped off one of her shoulders.
Yuki looked away from them at the webwork of branches above her, the sky so far behind them like an endless pit she could fall into backward. She tried to imagine the persimmons in the fall, bright orange bells on bare branches, promises of untasted sweetness. But she had never seen them, except in photographs. She closed her eyes. In a moment, she would walk back to the house, to take her mother’s place as best she could among her family. Opening her eyes slowly, she wished for her mother, her grandfather of ten years ago, someone, to read the sky at night, to name the winter stars.
12
GLADIOLI
(March 1975)
The attic was dark and cold. Yuki climbed through the trapdoor and shone her flashlight at the walls lined with cardboard boxes. Moving the light across the room, she found the three wooden boxes on the floor, exactly where she and her aunt Aya had left them. Yuki had half expected to see the attic empty. She pulled the cord that hung from the ceiling and blinked under the sudden yellow light.