Shizuko's Daughter

by Kyoko Mori

  Yuki closed the sketchbook and put it on the bed. She wondered when her mother had stopped loving her father, what she would say if Yuki could ask her now, “Did you regret loving him?” Mr. Kimura had said in February that he wanted to love someone even if it might end in sadness. At the funeral, he was solicitous toward her aunt Aya; he clearly loved her. But love brings sadness, Yuki thought, even when the other person doesn’t hurt you on purpose.

  When all the funeral guests had gone home, her grandmother had sat alone at the Buddhist altar for two hours. Yuki went to join her because she was worried. Her grandmother said, “I’m trying to get used to talking to him this way.” She wouldn’t go to sleep, though Yuki asked her to. Her grandmother would suffer for months, for years: even the simplest things, like planting petunias in the garden or cooking rice, would remind her of her husband, what he would say or do if he had been with her. Everything and anything could bring on the sadness. Maybe she would have been better off, Yuki thought, if she hadn’t loved him in the first place, if she had been alone all along. Still, even while she was witnessing her grandmother’s grief, Yuki had kept thinking of Isamu. She had imagined the photographs he would take of the bamboo thickets behind the house, the swift current of the river, the stretches of rice paddies. She had wanted to show him her childhood places: the chestnut tree she had climbed and couldn’t come down from, the small stream behind the house where she had watched catfish swimming, the paths between the paddies that were covered with clover. She regretted how he would never be able to meet her grandfather or her mother. They would have liked him, she kept thinking. She couldn’t stop.

  Yuki picked up the sketchbook again and looked at the various sketches of her childhood. There she was, page after page, stacking up the wooden blocks into a tower so she could smash them down and hear the crash, trying to feed her peaches to her pink teddy bear, sticking her nose against the curved glass of the fishbowl, standing a safe distance away from the cows at the dairy farm because their large white faces frightened her. She could hear the way her mother used to laugh at her. Yuki, you are simply too much, she would say between gasps of laughter; you take everything so to heart.

  Soon, Yuki came to the last portrait of herself. It was such a cheerful picture. The white daisies in her hands were painted with bright yellow centers. Her mother had used the same yellow, diluted a little more, to paint the background. It looked like a wash of bright light surrounding the scene. Yuki thought of Isamu again.

  On the first day they had gone together to use his camera, he showed her how to focus and center her pictures, how to adjust for light. While he was looking away, she took a picture of a heron wading across a river. “Oh, you need a different lens for that,” he said. “That was the next thing I was going to tell you about.” When they developed the film, the one of the heron turned out to be her favorite shot anyway. The picture looked almost blank at first glance but was actually filled with gray ripples of shiny water like faint pencil scratches; the heron showed up as a blurred white line at the center. “It’s not sour grapes; I really like this,” Yuki told Isamu. “It’s a good picture,” he agreed. “It looks like you were taking a picture of light.” That was what she liked about black-and-white photographs: the way they captured the effects of light.

  Yuki closed the sketchbook and held it on her lap. My mother, she thought, wanted to be that blurred heron at the center of my mind, almost swallowed up by the light around it but always there. She would want me to look beyond her unhappiness.

  She went into the hallway and dialed Isamu’s number. He answered right away.

  “Hi,” she said. “I got off work a while ago.” She stopped, feeling almost shy.

  “You left your bag,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you and make you forget it. Are you feeling okay?” His voice was warm and kind. “I’m sorry if I did anything to hurt or offend you.”

  “I’m all right,” she said. She thought of him developing her portraits in the lab while she was gone, the gray lines gradually darkening into images, into her laughter.

  “You’re not offended?” he asked. “I was afraid you’d never call back.”

  “No,” she said. “I wasn’t offended at all”—she paused—“or hurt.”

  They were silent for a while. Finally, she said, “Are you busy right now?”

  “No, not at all.”

  She took a deep breath so her voice would come out steady. “Could you meet me in the park?” she asked. “I want to talk to you.”

  “Are you sure? I keep thinking you’re mad at me.”

  “Believe me,” she said. “I’m not mad.” She waited a while and added, “I missed you too, when I was gone.”

  “I’ll meet you in the park in a few minutes,” he said. “I’m leaving right now.”

  Yuki went back to her room and picked up the sketchbook, looked briefly at the last picture of her father, closed the book, and put it in her desk drawer. She wasn’t going to write to thank him. She couldn’t. It was better to be silent than to lie or be insincere. She couldn’t thank him unless she felt real gratitude toward him. Until then, she would say nothing. Maybe I’ll show the sketchbook to Isamu, she thought, next time. I’ll remember her with him, and that would be the closest they could come to meeting each other.

  She ran out of the room, down the stairs. The park was a block away, between their two boardinghouses. Running down the street, she kept thinking of the various sketches of herself. My mother wanted me to be happy, she repeated to herself. She didn’t leave me to hurt me or to make me sad all my life. At the entrance of the park, Yuki slowed down. Isamu was already waiting by the swings. She waved at him and stopped. Seeing her, he picked up her bag and started walking toward her, flicking his feet outward just a little with each step. She had noticed this habit of his when they ran together for the first time in May. “Slow down,” he had kept asking her then. “I’m not up to your speed, Yuki. If I had known I was going to meet you, I would have been training all last year to keep up with you.” When they were done, he had flopped down on the grass and stretched his arms to the side. “I think I’m going to die,” he said. It made her smile to remember that. She stood on the edge of the grass and waited.

  “Hey,” she called to him. “Hurry up.”

  He waved to her and smiled. Next time he turned to her with his serious look, she would take his hand and draw closer, then hold still while her heart beat faster. She looked around at the swing set and the slide, the flower beds clustered around walkways. Isamu was still smiling. He was getting ready to say something. As Yuki stepped out onto the grass to meet him, her mind kept taking pictures of the surrounding light.

  Epilogue

  (May 1976)

  On the morning of her seventy-fifth birthday, Masa woke up to the music from the schoolyard, where the neighborhood children were performing eight o’clock calisthenics. Sunlight streaked yellow on the side of the family altar. Masa lay gazing at the painted images of Buddha in his various manifestations. They were in the back of the altar, almost hidden behind the incense burners and unlit candles, spring chrysanthemums in a brass vase, and the small cups in which she offered food and tea to the spirits of her ancestors.

  Since her husband Takeo’s death, nine months ago, Masa had taken to sleeping in the family room. As soon as she woke up there, no longer in their old bedroom, she remembered that Takeo was gone—she didn’t have to forget momentarily and then remind herself as though she had to hear the same sad news over and over. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes every morning was the Buddhist altar, where she honored the spirits of the ancestors Takeo had joined.

  Masa lay thinking about the spirits. Fifty-five years ago, when she was newly married and she began her morning ritual at her husband’s family altar, the spirits of the ancestors had seemed like a large white cloud—a nameless benevolent force floating over her. Since then, the spirits had taken more familiar forms: her firstborn, who had died of measles befor
e the others were born, another son killed in the War, her parents and parents-in-law. But these days, when she placed food and flowers on the altar, she thought of her husband, Takeo, and her daughter Shizuko. She prayed or talked to these two when she bowed at the altar, where she came to spend more than a minute in silence. The others had joined the general dead, whom she spoke and thought of as “the spirits of my ancestors,” but Takeo and Shizuko remained separate, individual in her grief. They were waiting for her, she thought, before the three of them could join the ancestors and merge into the white cloud of peace. She wanted that day to come soon.

  When the music from the schoolyard had stopped, Masa rose, wrapped a gray kimono around herself, and began to fold her futon. On the quilted cover of the futon, she could always recognize some of the kimonos that had gone into its making. There was the red silk, the color of ripe strawberries, that her daughters had worn when they were children. Then the pinks and maroons from their teens, and the blues and lavenders from their twenties. Nobody wore kimonos anymore, except on special holidays. Her daughter Aya sometimes sent her modern clothing—white blouses and pale blue or even maroon skirts—and asked her not to wear her gray and brown kimonos anymore; they made her look so old. Masa continued to wear her kimonos. She was an old woman, she reasoned, and old women did not wear blues and maroons—no more than men wore pinks and reds, although young people now seemed less concerned about such distinctions.

  As she tightened the mottled gray sash around her kimono, Masa thought of Yuki, who had visited her for two weeks during spring break. Together, they had sown the early seeds in the garden: peas and spinach, radishes, pansies. One afternoon, Yuki went through the old kimonos Masa had saved in the attic from her younger days. “You wouldn’t want to wear those,” Masa told her. “I don’t know what I saved them for.” They were not her best kimonos, which she had sold to buy food for her family after the War when they had lost their land and were poor. The kimonos in the attic were the cheaper ones she had worn from day to day. Most were damaged by moths and mildew. “If you don’t mind my changing them or cutting into them,” Yuki said, “I would like to have a few of them. Maybe I’ll use parts of them and sew something I can wear. My friend Isamu and I are going to learn to sew. We found someone to teach us. I didn’t learn enough homemaking in high school.” “You’re welcome to the whole lot,” Masa told her. “I’d have thrown them out a long time ago if I had ever gotten around to cleaning the attic.” Though she laughed at Yuki’s wanting such old useless things, she had been pleased. With her latest letter, Yuki sent a picture of herself wearing a quilted vest she had made from the kimonos. “What do you think?” she had written on the back. “I hope you don’t mind my cutting them up so much. I wanted to wear the same things you did, only in a different way.” Masa didn’t mind at all. She was touched. Yuki would come for another two-week visit in June. “Can I invite a friend just for a few days while I’m there?” she had asked on the phone. “I want him to meet you and see where I grew up. He’s my best friend.” She paused. “He’s also my boyfriend,” she said. “You’ll like him.” “Of course,” Masa said. “It will be good to see him.” After they hung up, though, she felt sad that Shizuko and Takeo would never be able to meet any boy Yuki went with. Even the things that brought her happiness, Masa thought, made her sad.

  Masa put the futon in the corner of the room and went to the kitchen. It was already the end of May, but on entering the kitchen she felt the chill. Because she no longer cooked a great deal, her kitchen was always cold. Shivering a little, she put rice and beans on the stove and waited for her daughter-in-law, Etsuko, who would drop by with her older son, Tadashi. For the last year, Etsuko had been working every other day at a factory in a nearby city, sewing cheap clothing, and Masa took care of Tadashi, who was four. There was a room at the factory where the children could play, and a woman was hired to watch over them. Etsuko left her younger boy there, but Tadashi sulked all day and got into fights with the other children. After he gave one boy a black eye, Etsuko was asked not to bring him back. Tadashi didn’t take much to anyone except his parents. As far as Masa could see, Yuki was the only person he seemed to like from the first time he saw her. On her last visit, he had followed her around the garden. They went to the small stream in the back of the house to watch the catfish swimming. Once, they even waded into the mud, “to see if the fish would swim over our feet,” Yuki said. They had come back with their toes caked with mud and laughing.

  When the food was ready, Masa brought the tray from the altar. She cleaned up the cups, filled them with the freshly cooked rice, beans, and tea. She carried the tray back to the altar, lit two incense sticks, and bowed her head.

  Before her thoughts formed into a prayer, the front door rattled. Masa left the incense burning and went to answer. Smiling and brisk, Etsuko nudged Tadashi into the doorway. His eyelids looked puffy.

  “Please make sure he takes a nap,” Etsuko said. She was carrying the younger boy, Tsutomu, on her back. “He didn’t sleep well last night. It’s getting so humid in the house.”

  “I don’t want to take a nap,” Tadashi said.

  Etsuko momentarily tightened her grasp on his shoulder and then said to Masa, “My husband tells me to pick you up after work and bring you home. It’s your birthday, isn’t it? We want to have you over to dinner.”

  “That’s kind of you and Saburo.”

  “I should be here around five. I’d better go now.”

  Etsuko drove off and, as usual, Tadashi spent the first half hour sulking. Masa left him on the threshold, where he sat drawing on the ground with broken twigs. Once in a while, he lifted his foot and rubbed out the pictures with his shoe. Masa ate her breakfast and cleaned up the kitchen. Tadashi had refused to eat with her ever since he had found a dead fly in the corner of her cupboard. Etsuko permitted him to bring his own box lunch, which he ate with his own chopsticks brought from home in a plastic case, and a thermos of weak tea, which he drank out of a plastic cup attached to the lid. It was as well. Masa no longer ate lunch herself.

  After her breakfast, Masa worked in the garden. There were dead leaves to be snipped off her spring chrysanthemums, weeds to be pulled. Tadashi sat by the hedge and caught tiny tree frogs in a mayonnaise jar. That was what he did nearly every morning they were outside. It didn’t matter how many times Masa explained that the frogs would suffocate inside the jar. Day after day, Tadashi would go home with a jar full of dying frogs.

  “Why don’t you help me pull these weeds?” Masa said.

  “That’s boring.” Tadashi grimaced.

  “You can make it less boring by pretending. The weeds are enemy soldiers and you can behead them, like this.” Masa pulled a handful to show him. “And while you’re doing that, I have to go to the shed and get more sticks for the peas to climb onto. They’re getting tall now.” She walked away, seeing the child slowly move toward the flower bed.

  Inside the shed, before her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Masa almost stumbled over the bench that was once placed under the persimmon tree. Takeo used to sit on the bench after his evening bath to point out the constellations to the grandchildren. He told them the story of the two stars separated by the Milky Way, how they came close in July and then were pulled apart again, night after night. In the fall, when the grandchildren had gone back to their cities, Masa and Takeo would sit on the bench under the sky studded with persimmons and talk late into night. Now, everyone was grown up except for Tadashi and Tsutomu, who scarcely remembered Takeo.

  A garden snake crossed her path, thin and gray like her sash. Masa took a few of the bamboo branches left against the wall and walked away.

  When she returned to the garden, Tadashi was sitting between a small heap of weeds and another small heap of white chrysanthemums. He shook the mayonnaise jar to make the frogs jump.

  “Why did you snip off the flowers?” Masa asked.

  “They died fighting the enemy soldiers,” Tadashi said.

 
Masa did not know whether to laugh or scold. She seldom scolded. All the same, children and grandchildren alike had always taken to Takeo, who knew exactly when to scold and when to be amused. She finished putting up the sticks for the peas, while Tadashi dug a hole in the corner of the garden to bury the dead of his flower-weed war. If he buries them deep enough, she thought, the weeds won’t come back up.

  The noon siren went off in the distance while Tadashi sat on the steps and ate his lunch. Masa was crouching several feet away over her lantern flowers. Something was eating their leaves, but she couldn’t see what. The tight buds were a darker purple than the flowers.

  “Mama’s just getting off for lunch now, isn’t she?” Tadashi asked.

  “She must be,” Masa said.

  “She said there are hundreds of sewing machines. Are there? Where she works?”

  “I guess there are.”

  “I know there are. I saw them in my dream. Needles came out of them like bullets.” Tadashi had put down his chopsticks and was squinting into the sunshine.

  “Is that why you can’t sleep? You have bad dreams?”

  Tadashi took up his chopsticks and stuffed his mouth with rice, yanked at a bit of chicken. Between mouthfuls, he said, “No. I can’t sleep because it’s too hot.”

  After he had finished his lunch, Masa took him inside the house. On the sun porch, Tadashi stopped and looked at the wooden slide.