by Kyoko Mori
“You can play on the slide for a while before you take your nap,” Masa said.
“No,” Tadashi said. “I don’t want to get splinters.”
“You won’t get any splinters. See how smooth it is.” Masa ran her hand down the wooden surface.
“I’m too big for it,” Tadashi said.
Masa could remember the day Takeo had finished the slide, two weeks after Shizuko was born. Built for young children, the slide had only five steps. All of her children and grandchildren had played on it over the years. She could remember Tadashi climbing it and sliding down continuously on the day of Takeo’s funeral, while they were waiting for the priest to arrive. When the priest came to chant and the coffin was opened for the last viewing, Tadashi howled until Yuki brought him outside and walked around the garden with him. For months, Tadashi said that his grandfather was stuffed in a large trunk in the attic. When you asked him to play on the slide, he said that it had splinters, that it would break.
Tadashi ran his hand tentatively down the slide. He still held the mayonnaise jar in his other hand. The five frogs in it were immobile.
“Do you find any splinters?” Masa asked.
He shook his head.
“Let me hold your jar while you climb up and slide down, just once.”
“It’ll break,” Tadashi said. “I’m too heavy.”
“Not if you put down the jar. Your father played on this slide until he was much bigger than you.”
Tadashi hesitated.
“Go on,” Masa insisted. “You’re not scared, are you?”
That did it. He thrust the jar into her face and cautiously climbed up the five steps. As he sat on the top with his legs stretched, he looked at Masa, hard, before he let go. It only took a moment before he was on the floor, scrambling to his feet. Without a word, he snatched the jar from Masa’s hand. His jaw was set hard.
“Well, it didn’t break and you didn’t get any splinters,” Masa said.
Tadashi walked ahead of her into the family room, still without speaking. Masa handed him a blanket and a pillow. He lay down on the floor, his back to the altar, and put the jar of frogs by the pillow.
“Do you want me to read to you, or are you already sleepy?”
Tadashi just closed his eyes. To Masa’s relief, he was asleep in less than five minutes. His mouth, so often distorted sullenly while he was awake, relaxed in his sleep and his face was flushed from the morning in the sun. Inside the mayonnaise jar, one of the frogs made a feeble attempt to jump. It made a faint noise against the glass.
Why should I let them die? Masa thought. She took the jar in her hand. Tadashi might cry when he found out that his frogs were gone. Still, someone had to teach him not to kill, not even such small, insignificant creatures.
Masa took the jar out into the garden. She held it upside down and set the frogs free by the peony bushes. The frogs stayed limp and immobile for a minute and then, one by one, they disappeared among the green leaves and the buds. As she dropped the empty jar in the waste bin by the house, Masa caught sight of something white on the window screen. She went closer to see.
It was a cicada, newly out of its shell. Its body and wings were still white, wet, shiny like waxwork. Masa found the brown, cast-off shell on the ground. With its protruding eyes and crooked legs, the shell looked alive except for the crack in the middle. Her boys used to collect them. Takeo used to tell them how the cicada spent seven years underground before it could fly and make droning noises among the tree branches, how it was more patient than any other creature on earth. But the cicada on her window screen looked as though it might be dying, so white and waxlike. After the seven long years, Masa thought, the birds will get at it.
Masa snipped off a peony leaf and put the cicada on it. It was wet and cool, a little slippery to the touch. She walked back to the house and went to the family room. Tadashi was still sleeping. Masa put the peony leaf and the cicada on the altar and sat down. The cicada did not move. If it’s going to die anyway, she thought, it might as well die here, where Takeo can see I have offered it to him, the first cicada this summer. The incense sticks from the morning had burned to the bottom and crumbled, leaving a trace of fine gray dust. Masa closed her eyes and thought of Takeo and Shizuko.
It’s my birthday, I’m seventy-five, and all I can think of is your death, she thought. A few years ago, crying would have relieved the dull pain in her chest, but tears seemed to have dried up in her after Takeo’s death. I’m a woman deserted by her husband and her daughter, she thought. I want to join you soon, she said to them; I pray to you and to the spirits of our ancestors to take me to you. Let me join you in peace.
Imagining that her prayer might be answered if only she could remain still with her eyes closed, she moved away from the altar and lay down next to Tadashi. She was tired. His regular breathing lulled her. As she fell asleep, Masa thought of Shizuko driving all the way from the city to see her. It was Masa’s birthday, and Shizuko had brought her pink and white peonies and a kimono of silvery gray that she had sewn for her. The peonies, larger than her face and so pale, kept nodding, brushing against her cheeks, and she felt her daughter dressing her in layer after layer of soft silk, silver and gray. Like a cocoon, Masa thought, endless folds of silk.
After what seemed like a long time, Masa heard a faint droning from far away. The noise grew louder, faded, and came back even louder. Masa opened her eyes and saw that Tadashi was not in the room. Slowly, she rose and walked to the sun porch, in the direction of the noise. There, she saw the child running up the steps and sliding down the wooden incline in quick repetition, in an almost frenzied circle of movement. For a split second, it seemed as though there was not one but many children—all her children and grandchildren going down the slide, one by one, laughing and chattering. Then it was Tadashi again, and the cicada flying in circles in the porch over his head.
Tadashi, going down the slide, raised his arms. “See the cicada, cicada, cicada. And no splinters on the slide. No splinters, no splinters,” he chanted.
Masa walked to the window and pulled it open. Immediately, the cicada flew out and swirled up, merging into the blue sky. Masa stood by the open window and watched the child still running up the steps and going down the slide. She laughed, and cried copious tears, until her chest and shoulders ached from joy.
Notes on the Setting
This novel takes place in Japan, whose four major islands are Hokkaido, Honshu (the main island), Shikoku, and Kyushu. Most of the chapters are set in Kobe, a city on the main island, about four hours southwest of Tokyo by the express “bullet” train. Along with its neighbor Osaka, Kobe is one of the major industrial and cultural centers of Japan. Like many large cities in Japan, Kobe developed as a port town on a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the Inland Sea.
Himeji, another city mentioned in the novel, is also in the southwestern part of the main island. It is a much smaller city, however, and the area around it is rural: rice paddies, timber forests, rivers, and small villages scattered among them. Though the actual distance between Kobe and the countryside around Himeji is much shorter than the distance between Kobe and Tokyo, travel to the countryside would take several hours because the trains and buses that go there are fewer and slower.
Nagasaki, the setting of some of the later chapters, is on the southernmost island, Kyushu. Developed as one of the first Japanese port towns in the sixteenth century, Nagasaki is also a major city, but the area around it is mostly agricultural. It would be a long day’s journey by rail (on trains that go through an underground tunnel between the islands) from Nagasaki to any of the cities in the Kobe-Osaka area.
Another thing to note about the setting—aside from the geographical references—is the Japanese school year. While the American school year consists of two semesters of roughly equal length, the Japanese school year has three terms of varying length. The year, which begins in April and ends in March, is divided up this way: the first term starts i
n early April and ends in late June. After a two-month summer vacation, the second term is from early September to late December. Then after a two-week winter vacation, the third term goes from early January to mid-March. Students stay in the same grade from April until the following March. As in the United States, students go to six years of elementary school and six years of secondary school (three years of junior high school and three years of high school). At the end of their last year in high school, students take entrance examinations to get into colleges of their choice.
Glossary
Chapter Three
Kyoto, a city famous for its historical sites (old temples, shrines, palaces), is about an hour from Kobe on the commuter trains.
Land reform: After World War II, the occupation government in Japan attempted two reforms meant to aid the rebuilding of the country’s economy. One was to break up the financial conglomerates, which monopolized the industries (and also had manufactured weapons during the War); the other was to redistribute the land on which people cultivated rice, the major agricultural crop of Japan. While the first reform never succeeded, the second made major changes in the countryside. Before the War in the rice-growing villages throughout Japan, one or two families owned all the paddies and rented them out to others, who worked as their tenant farmers. Though the tenant farmers performed the actual task of cultivating the rice, they had to pay a large portion of their crops to the landowning families as rent and were very poor. In the process of the land reform, the landowning families were required by a special ordinance to sell their paddies to the government for very little money. They were allowed to keep only a small portion they could cultivate on their own. The government then distributed the newly acquired paddies to the tenant farmers. While the reform increased productivity among the former tenants (because, as predicted, people were more willing to work hard on land they owned rather than rented), many landowning families felt that the reform was unfair because they lost the land that had belonged to them for generations. Most landowning families were reduced to sudden poverty.
Chapter Four
Futon: a Japanese-style bedding or mattress. It is often folded up and stored in the closet during the daytime so the room has more space. A typical Japanese house in a city would have both the traditional straw-mat (tatami) rooms, where people sleep on futons, and “Western” wood-floor rooms, where people sleep on beds. Houses in the countryside, on the other hand, tend to have only the traditional straw-mat rooms.
Pottery villages: In the mountains north of Kobe are small villages where people make pottery. A typical pottery village would consist of several multigenerational families that own kilns. Almost everybody in the family would learn and perform some part of the pottery making, such as preparing the clay; forming the clay on potters’ wheels; glazing, painting, or drawing on the pots; or firing the kiln. People who collect pottery often visit these small villages.
Chapter Five
Because the novel takes place in Japan, the distances for the athletic events are in metric units. The race Yuki runs—1,000 meters—is approximately 1,100 yards.
Chapter Nine
Tempura is a traditional Japanese method of preparing vegetables, seafood, and meats by cutting them into small pieces, dipping them in a flour-and-egg batter, and deep-frying them.
Chapter Fourteen
Haori jackets were traditionally worn with kimonos. Today, older people often wear them over their Western-style clothes.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of the following chapters were previously published:
“Housebound,” “The Wake,” and “Tiptoes” as “Yuki” in Maryland Review, Fall 1988/Spring 1989, Vol. 3, No. 1.
“Pink Trumpets” in Florida State University’s Sun Dog: The South-East Review, Summer 1985, Vol. 6, No. 2.
“Yellow Mittens and Early Violets” in The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Mayumi Tsutakawa. Copyright © 1989, Calyx Books.
“Grievances” in Crosscurrents, 1991, Vol. 10, No. 1.
“Homemaking” in Prairie Schooner, Summer 1992, Vol. 66, No. 2.
“Winter Sky” in The Kenyon Review—New Series, Fall 1991, Vol. 13, No. 4.
“Epilogue” as “The First Cicada” in The Apalachee Quarterly, 1982, No. 18.
About the Author
Kyoko Mori was born and raised in Japan. Now an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, she has published her poetry and short stories in leading magazines such as The Kenyon Review, The Apalachee Quarterly, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. This is her first novel.
Copyright © 1993 by Kyoko Mori
All rights reserved.
Published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.,
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