by Kyoko Mori
My brother and I wondered how Momo Taro could have recruited his helpers—a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant—with the millet dumplings the old woman had made for his lunch. The pale green dumplings, sold at the train station near Momo Taro’s legendary hometown, glittered from the sugar sprinkled on top. They were so sweet, probably no dog or pheasant would eat them, though maybe a monkey would. After a neighbor’s dog bit me for trying to feed him the peanut butter sandwich from my lunch, Jumpei and I became skeptical about the dumpling story, but we didn’t think it was odd for Momo Taro to be born from a peach. In the pictures from before our birth, Takako’s stomach looked like a giant peach, so we imagined ourselves curled up inside, waiting to be born. What Hiroshi had to do with any of this, we never thought to question. As far as we were concerned, everyone was born from a peach.
AS A CHILD, my brother played with the kids in our neighborhood while I rode the city bus to visit friends across town. I took English lessons from our American neighbor, but Jumpei was too timid to come along. I was four years older than he, so it was only natural for me to be more confident. Still, our relatives, teachers, and neighbors commented on how shy he was compared to me, and instead of defending him, I made fun of him. After our mother’s death, we seldom talked even though we lived in the same house for eight more years. He was sixteen when I left.
We didn’t write to each other or speak on the phone till a month before he came to visit Chuck and me in Green Bay. By then, at twenty-seven, Jumpei was a world traveler. He had worked as a movie extra in Australia, hitchhiked through the Middle East, waited tables at a Japanese restaurant in New York, guided tour groups in L.A., and started an import company in Tokyo. He was in South America buying rugs, sweaters, jewelry, and knickknacks for his business partner to sell in Japan. He sent a postcard from Ecuador asking if he could stop in Green Bay to see me before flying back to Kobe to spend a few months with Hiroshi and Michiko.
“All I want,” he told us a few hours after his arrival, “is to make enough money so I can keep traveling. I don’t like staying too long in one place.” Because the technical college he’d attended didn’t have a good language program, he had learned English and Spanish from language tapes and private lessons.
Jumpei showed us the slides of his travels: pink flamingos in South America, a woman in a chador in Saudi Arabia, his friends in a desert in Australia. He laughed about how lax the American immigration laws were. The last time he was in the States, he had entered on a tourist visa, worked illegally on both coasts, stayed several months after the visa expired, and yet he was allowed back a year later with no questions asked. I’d had nightmares my last year in graduate school about the visa problems I would have if I didn’t find a teaching job. My brother had worked at a sushi place in the East Village and chatted freely with the customers, any of whom could have been an immigration officer. A person who didn’t care to stay in one place had nothing to lose. How he became this carefree lawbreaker and I a small-town homeowner and English teacher, I didn’t understand—until he started talking about our father and stepmother.
“After I graduated from college, my father got me a job in Tokyo through his connections, but I quit in three months,” Jumpei said to us as we sat drinking coffee in our living room. “I had to give up the apartment I was renting and go home. Every night, my father threatened to kick me out if I didn’t find another job soon. After a month, he stopped speaking to me. I didn’t want to talk to him, either, so that was fine. But my mother couldn’t stand being in the middle. She told my father that I was going to do whatever I wanted to anyway so he might as well accept it.” Jumpei tipped his head back and laughed. “My mother persuaded him to give me money to go to Australia, because she knew how much I wanted to travel.”
My mother, Okasan, he said over and over in two languages, referring to Michiko.
“Do you remember our mother at all?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “Okasan is the only mother I remember. I wouldn’t know what to do without her. I owe her everything.”
“That’s not what Kyoko thinks about your stepmother,” Chuck said.
“I know my sister didn’t get along with my mother,” Jumpei answered. “But my mother was good to me. I’m closer to her than I am to anyone.” After a few seconds of awkward silence, Jumpei changed the subject. He was careful to look only at Chuck when he declared how much he loved Michiko.
Jumpei had brought back a suitcase full of hand-knitted sweaters from Bolivia, dark pullovers with bright geometric designs in the yoke. He spread them on our living room floor and asked Chuck and me to choose one each to keep. The zigzag patterns—red, green, blue, yellow—ran from one sweater to the next like the mazes in our childhood board games. In all the years we played together before our mother’s death, I hadn’t lost one game of strategy on purpose just to humor him. I was pleased when people seemed disappointed in him for not being as smart as I was. Later, on the nights Hiroshi came up to my room and dragged me downstairs to apologize to Michiko, Jumpei must have been terrified. His room was across the hallway from mine. Maybe he was standing with his ear pressed to the wall, trying to be ready for whatever happened next. Hiroshi and I didn’t consider how Jumpei might have felt when he heard us yelling and crying. We cared only about our own anger.
The sweaters my brother gave us were made from coarse hand-spun yarns that hadn’t been thoroughly washed. The particles of vegetation embedded in them irritated our skin so much that, a few months after Jumpei’s visit, I filled our bathtub with lukewarm water and dunked the sweaters in. Broken leaves, stems, and loose seeds floated up from between the stitches, and the water turned darker and darker as I rolled and swished the sweaters around. If this were a fairy tale, I would have been brewing a magic potion to bring back my brother, to make him forget the past, and to give him a different childhood in which I had guided him out of the woods where we were lost together, abandoned by our parents. But it was much too late for that fairy tale. Jumpei didn’t need me. He was more comfortable talking to my cat, who bit him, than to me. The sweaters took days to dry, and even afterward, they turned our wrists and necks pink. Chuck and I put them away and never wore them again.
TAKAKO HAD BEEN THE OLDEST of six children. She was planning to attend medical school after the war, but when her family lost their land in the farm reform, she had to go to work as a secretary to support her younger siblings. Her sisters did the same after they graduated from high school, while two of their brothers went to college. The boys had scholarships, part-time jobs, and whatever money the family could scrape together for the tuition. Shiro became a college professor, and Kenichi a high school teacher. My middle uncle, Yasuo, didn’t attend college only because he hated school. Shiro said my mother and her sister Keiko were smarter than he or Kenichi so they should have gone to college, but there had been no scholarships or campus jobs for women.
Although my mother often reminded me to be patient with Jumpei, she only scolded me half-heartedly when I wasn’t. She knew my advantage over Jumpei was temporary. That’s why she sent me to private lessons—English, calligraphy, piano, modern dance, water color—by myself. “Your brother will have plenty of opportunities later,” she explained. If I had stayed in Japan, my father wouldn’t have gotten a job for me in Tokyo or paid for me to travel alone to Australia. Instead, he would have gone to see an omiai broker and found me a husband from “a good family.” My wedding would have taken place a few months after my college graduation, before I had time to find my own apartment or a job to support myself. For a woman from an upper-middle-class family like ours, education only proved that we had good, intelligent genes to pass on to our children.
No one in our family was surprised by how adventurous my brother had grown up to be. He was a modern-day Momo Taro. He traveled all over the world speaking three languages and collecting treasures, while I stayed home with my writing and knitting. I wouldn’t have lasted a day in the places where Jumpei traveled, s
leeping on the dirt floor of strangers’ houses or in a hammock pitched on crowded ships. My brother could tough it out in the world, because he had a home to go back to and a “mother” who supported him no matter what. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had gotten along better with Hiroshi and Michiko. I was only a daughter; he was the son.
EARLY PROFESSIONAL KNITTERS were mostly men. In the medieval cities, only men were allowed into the guilds that controlled the licensing of handcrafts. In the countryside, men as well as women made mittens, hats, and socks to sell during the winter months when farm work became scarce. Sailors and fishermen knitted their own sweaters during their long voyages. But today, amateur and professional knitters are predominantly female.
One well-known exception is Kaffe Fassett, who studied painting at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston before moving to England. He shied away from needlework until he was twenty-eight, not because he was a man, but because he believed that serious artists did not dabble in the crafts. Then he “finally succumbed” to the colorful yarn he found at a fabric mill he visited with friends: he bought twenty skeins of yarn and a pair of needles. His first sweater, a striped cardigan he started on the train ride home (one of his friends gave him a quick lesson), used all twenty colors including peach, aqua, black, and turquoise. His books are organized around motifs (stripes, diamonds, stars, flowers, etc.) rather than garment types. He favors unisex pullovers, cardigans, jackets, and vests—simple squared-off garments like canvases—that he can “paint with wool.”
Fassett’s first book, Glorious Knits, was published in 1985. Every serious knitter I met in the late 1980s had a copy. Far more esoteric is the 1972 pamphlet by Dave Fougner, The Manly Art of Knitting, with a cover photograph of a young cowboy knitting on horseback. The flyleaf shows a bare arm grasping a needle that looks more like a barbecue skewer. The patterns are for a dog blanket (“Start by knitting something for someone uncritical”), a ribbed cap, a wall hanging, a horse blanket, and a hammock made from rope, using shovel handles or pool cues for needles. According to the pamphlet’s author biography, Fougner lived on a ranch in California and bred horses, flew an airplane, sold real estate, played tennis, and “relaxed in the evening with a pair of wooden knitting needles and a skein of yarn.”
I envied the exuberance with which Fassett and Fougner tackled every project. Like my brother, they did what they wanted and reveled in their eccentricity. No woman who defied conventions ever seemed so happy-go-lucky.
THE ONLY MALE KNITTER I KNEW in person was the best poetry student I’d ever taught, and his name, like Fougner’s, was Dave. Dave knitted a scarf for himself while he sat in the living room of his fraternity house where one of his roommates was distilling lettuce to see if a person could get high from it. Their fraternity, Kappa Chi, promoted “open-mindedness” (to what, they didn’t say). When the poet Maria Gillan visited my class and asked each student to write a poem whose first line was “The mother/The father I wanted would have ...,” Dave described his imaginary mother playing the saxophone in the garage, the notes bouncing off the concrete walls and floating up to the sky as she takes a funny, self-deprecating bow and smiles to herself—while his real mother sat in the living room reading home-decorating magazines. The silence Dave portrayed was the opposite of the yelling and the crying my brother had hidden from at eight, but Jumpei, too, might have longed to hear one of us playing a saxophone solo in the garage, lost in beauty.
Dave had attended a private high school in a college town. By the time he took my class, he was well beyond the sing-songy rhymes most of my beginning students wrote. But my best fiction student started out as my worst. Rob was a hockey player from rural Wisconsin—a trouble-maker and a straight-A student. When he signed up for my fiction workshop, his sophomore year, he was about to be kicked out of his dorm for starting a fight and vandalizing a parking lot sign, but he’d been hired as a tutor in the writing center and a research assistant for one of my colleagues. In the first two stories he wrote, everything happened only to illustrate an obvious point. Rob had an eye for a quirky detail and an ability to turn a good phrase, but he didn’t know how to take advantage of his talent and he hated being told what to do. He was a big kid with a crew cut. The room we met in had tiny chairs with writing pads attached to the arm. The longer Rob sat silent in one of these chairs, the redder his face got. By the time he started his rant about how much he disagreed with me, even the tips of his ears were bright pink. I let him talk because arguing with him seemed pointless.
Rob came to my office one late afternoon toward the end of the semester and said, “I need to talk to you.” He slouched in the doorway in his hockey sweats and sighed loudly.
We’d already had several tense discussions over the two stories he’d turned in. Though I asked him to have a seat, I couldn’t have sounded too welcoming.
“I’ve been wrong all this time,” he said as soon as he sat down, facing me across my cluttered desk.
“Wrong about what?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said, shaking his head. “I went to see my girlfriend in Minneapolis this past weekend and we went running. Halfway through the run, there was a big hole in the sidewalk with an orange cone next to it. Neither of us wanted to let the other go first, so we started running faster. When we were maybe five steps away from crashing into the cone, I thought, ‘This is a moment of epiphany, with a hole in the ground, an orange cone, and two people trying to run each other off the road.’ My girlfriend and I had no future together. I finally understood what you’d been saying in class. An important moment is also ordinary. I’m sorry I’ve been such a jerk all semester.”
“You haven’t been a jerk,” I said and he laughed, because we both knew I was only being polite.
BEFORE HE GRADUATED WITH an English major, Rob took two more writing classes with me as well as an independent study. In the stories he wrote after his “epiphany about the epiphany” as he called that moment with the hole in the ground, a grocery store clerk corralled the shopping carts in the parking lot and dreamed of traveling out west, or a young married couple who ran a lawn care service—like Rob’s family did—fought about the husband overcharging one of his customers. I remembered Rob’s stories whenever I drove through the small towns in Wisconsin. I expected to run into his characters at some gas station off the highway. While Dave went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and moved to San Francisco with the poets he met there, Rob took a job as a traveling salesman for the company that installed floors in—among other places—Starbucks. Whenever the company sent him to New York, Boston, or Chicago, he asked for an extra day to visit museums so he could continue his education on his own.
The women who came to small Catholic colleges like ours were better students than the men. Most planned to teach grade school or high school. A few went on to study law or library science. All expected to marry and have children. If there was one thing these women were dying to know, it was how they could pursue a career and still raise a family. They didn’t want to study poetry or write short stories or be anything like me, a childless writer. The students who took creative writing were mostly men who belonged to the “open-minded” fraternity or played hockey and soccer and had no idea what they wanted to do in the future. Dave and Rob had good grades, but the others had been sliding through school with B’s and C’s. When they started writing, they were surprised by how much they actually cared.
Rob, Dave, and their friends (the kid who was distilling lettuce to get high was also one of my favorite students) were as quirky and over-the-top as Kaffe Fassett and Dave Fougner. If they had been professional knitters instead of writing students, they would have used twenty colors in their first sweater and sharpened pool cues into needles to make hammocks. They came to college without a plan and left to do something they hadn’t imagined before—which was what my brother had done, too, when he taught himself two languages and set out to see the world at twenty-three. While I resented Jumpei for his freedom, I champion
ed my students. I gave them advice and defended them when they got into trouble with my colleagues, the college, even the local police. I wrote them recommendations, lent them books, and took them to museums. They gave me a chance to be the big sister I’d failed to be for Jumpei. Even so, I was only helpful to them by luck or default. It was Rob’s honesty, not mine, that ended our stalemate. My father was right: I was only interested in taking care of myself. Hiroshi and I understood and hated each other’s selfishness because we were alike, though I didn’t allow myself to consider that until he was dead.
IN THE DIARY MY MOTHER BEGAN in October of 1967, she described how dark and drafty our house was. She wrote once or twice every week, noting the gloomy winter landscape— the bare trees stabbing at the sky, the shadows angling across the road, our neighbors’ houses with their windows shut tight. In every entry, her dread of the cold seemed inseparable from her belief that she had wasted her life. Then in mid-March, she suddenly stopped writing. For the next seven months, there was only one short paragraph in July about the flowers and the vegetables in the garden, how the lettuce was growing faster than we could eat it. She must have thought her mood had lifted for good. When she began writing again in October of 1968, however, her misery had returned worse than ever, and she anticipated that every year from then on would be the same. The following March, she only felt strong enough to kill herself rather than wait helplessly for the whole cycle to begin again. She left the diary on the kitchen table, next to the letters she’d written to my father, grandparents, and me.