by Lily Chan
During a trip to the abattoir, Toyo saw a large rock embedded in the hillside, stained rust-brown. Holding her bag of chicken cuts, she went closer and closer, her throat clogging up. The rock was where workers slit the animals’ throats and left them for the blood to drain. Repulsion curled in her mouth.
She told her mother about the sacrificial rock, how it made her feel sad for the animals killed and eaten.
“Don’t you dare go there again,” Mother said. “That’s no place for a girl to wander about.”
At the train station, a boy in a high-school uniform said, “Um, excuse me? Excuse me, miss …”
Toyo stared at him blankly.
“My friend wants to go out with you.”
Several boys stepped out from behind the station columns, pushing their chosen victim, bashfully grinning, forward. A sprinkle of acne adorned his forehead. They lingered on the platform, inquisitive gazes sharpened with microscopic intent on her form. They pointed, whispered, smiled. Toyo wondered if a secret message was branded on her forehead.
In her mind the boys swelled to the ranks of an army occupied with following her, staking out her territory, engaging in tactics and covert operations to pin her in corners from which she could not escape. She felt claustrophobic. There was nowhere she could go without their gazes following, their voices whispering. She wished Shingo-san the Sushi Man and the Katana Man were still living across the road. She could tell them about the boys and they would rush out with their sashimi-slicing cleaver and steel-forged katana and frighten the boys away.
Somewhere in this enactment of what-would-have-happened her father made a surprise appearance. He took out a scimitar and shouted at the boys in a booming tenor: “Don’t follow my daughter! Leave her alone!” They fell back against the floor as if a wave had hit them.
Perhaps this was what it felt like to be a star, practice for what would occur if Toyo one day became a singer or performer. If she grew famous and people watched her and whispered about her on the streets, surely that would be more bearable; it would be the price of fame, of adoration.
Toyo idolised the famous all-girl musical theatre troupe from Takarazuka and faithfully collected posters of her favourite otokoyaku and musumeyaku. She imagined she was the star of a musical. She woke up to the blare of trumpets and sashayed down the stairs. Her maths class was a droning military march until the bell marked recess. When she burst out of the door into the playground, she smiled an exuberant actress’s smile. That was her stage. Her classmates were her audience. Her script changed from day to day. Gracefully she bent her head and laughed and waved her arms.
There was so much dirt in the world. Mother told her that illness hid in the pockets of unwashed coats, on the slats of train station benches, on toilet doorknobs, underneath fingernails. She cleaned the dirt from each fingernail, creating perfect, shining moons. Before eating she wiped her hands clean with a hand-kerchief scented with lavender and mint oil.
Her fingers were long and smooth and beautiful like an actress’s. She had legs like an actress’s. She was tall like an actress. She had a face like an actress’s, oval and symmetrical and pleasing, even stunning. She imitated her favourite actress’s way of talking, of walking, with perpetual girlish surprise and innocence. When the customers came in and asked for Mother, she called “Mother!” in her actress’s pitch, imbuing her voice with breathless urgency.
In physical education class, the teacher divided the students into volleyball teams. Toyo, surprising herself, enjoyed it immensely. She was entranced by the upward movement of the white ball, bobbing from serve to spike, and the coordination required by the team members. She committed herself to reaching each ball within her radius, focused so intently on its transit that she failed to see when it was falling outside the court line.
The teacher roared with frustration at Toyo’s efforts at keeping a ball live when it went out of bounds. Toyo, oblivious, chased after each ball, hovering below it, her arms locked into a triangular position ready to receive.
The teacher shouted, “Toyo, do not return a ball that is out of bounds! How many times do I have to say this?”
Toyo was startled, then angry and sullen. She marched home and announced to Mother: “I am never playing volleyball again. Ever! The teacher was so very rude to me.”
She made a new friend, a girl called Kuniko. They were in the same class and sat beside each other for roll call. They made sure they played volleyball on the same team, and they ran on the athletics track together, jogging companionably. During a school excursion into the nearby forest, when a branch whiplashed off the back of a classmate walking through a narrow pass and hit Toyo in the face, Kuniko leaped to her side and laid a cool hand on her neck as Toyo sank to the ground, her vision blacking out.
Kuniko often came to play at Toyo’s house, and her older brother picked her up. He bowed smartly at the entranceway. Kayoko came out with her hair in a graceful knot at her neck.
“You must be Kuniko’s brother,” she said. “Kuniko is a sweet girl.”
“Well,” he said, with a cheeky smile. “Maybe she gets that from me.”
His farewell bow was slower. His gaze lingered on Kayoko.
the stage (ii)
The neighbours’ houses seemed to lean inwards and grow surreptitious ears. Kuniko’s brother was somewhere in his mid-twenties; Kayoko had just turned thirty-one. She wore lemon-yellow and cherry-pink kimonos and laughed and smiled more often. Her hair was curled softly across her powdered forehead. Kuniko’s brother slipped a hand under her elbow as she walked down the stairs; she leaned into him, soft.
Toyo did not like him. He had suggestions about how to run the second-hand kimono store; they were always “stupendous” or “defining” ideas. He spent too long in the bathroom, emerging with hair slickly combed. He neglected his studies to stay at the pachinko parlour. Yet Toyo tried to like him and sometimes she was convinced that she did. He folded yen notes into tiny paper cranes in the time it took Kayoko to make a cup of tea. He made yen coins disappear into Toyo’s ear and come out of Kuniko’s.
Kuniko was happy that her brother was engaged. Kuniko’s family came to their house and bowed and took tea with Kayoko and Toyo. They were ecstatic that this woman would shape their lazy, handsome bachelor of a son and turn him into a respectable success.
Kayoko ordered a wedding kimono with white satin folds. When it arrived in a box, folded in soft tissue paper, the white travelled up into Kayoko’s face as she bent over it, glowing.
Toyo found blood in her pants. Mother showed her how to pad her knickers with old cloths, folded several times and sewn together, and then soak them in water.
The nubs on Toyo’s chest began to grow. She felt lanky and out of proportion, like a praying mantis. The blood coming from between her legs made her feel disconnected from her own body. The blood was manufactured secretly within her body outside her control. The cells bunched up together and tallied their losses and began again with the wax and wane of the moon. She was repulsed and excited at the same time.
Mother said that Toyo was becoming a woman, and blood was a signal from her body that she could have children of her own. Toyo thought it was strange that the blood was a dull brown stain, like dirt.
Kuniko’s older brother looked at her as if he were a fox, eyes gleaming, head cocked to one side. Sometimes she thought it was because she smelled, because she hadn’t washed enough.
While Mother was hanging up the washing outside, he and Toyo sat and sipped plum tea. It was a quiet morning. It made Toyo wonder about other people’s families. Perhaps this was what a family was like. Everyone quietly doing their own things but living in the same house.
Kuniko’s brother motioned for her to pour plum tea.
“Thanks, Toyo,” he said. He looked at her wrist, white and turned beneath him like a peeled radish, and stroked it. “You
’re a good girl.”
She smiled awkwardly and fled to the kitchen.
After that he often touched her in the most secret ways. Passing by in the entranceway, he would hold her waist so briefly that sometimes she convinced herself that she had imagined it. He would slide a finger along her collarbone, remarking on the way the sun fell across her face, or bend to pick a piece of tobacco from the floor, lingering to brush against her leg.
She began dreading his visits. He frightened her. There was a clot in her throat whenever she tried to speak to Mother about her unease, and she swallowed all the honey tea she could to sweeten her fear.
He casually asked if Mother could guarantee one of his loans. She did so on strict oath that he’d repay it.
“I have a business, my love,” she laughed.
He called her “my good luck charm”.
Because Toyo was tall for her age and many boys had been whisked away to join the growing post-war industry, she was allocated a gentleman’s role in her dancing class. Her concert costume was a vest and bell-jar pants.
Mother frowned when she read the dancing teacher’s notice and fiddled with the necklace of yen coins strung around her neck.
“We’re going to Kamakura tomorrow,” she said, packing a small bag for the train.
“Why, Mother?”
“Because I said so.”
The train journey took up the next morning. Toyo watched the landscape change outside the window and fell asleep. She awoke to Mother’s voice and sleepily disembarked. They walked to the bus station and boarded a bus. Then they walked some more. Finally they entered a white house where a man opened the door.
With a shock, Toyo recognised Father. He was still a big man, but his chest had deflated. Grey strands ran through his hair.
“Hello, Toyo,” he said quietly. “Hello, Kayoko.” His eyes were small and puffy in his broad face.
“Otosan,” she replied, just as quietly. The word sat uncomfortably on her tongue. This was not the time to jump into his arms. There was something about Mother’s serious eyes, Father’s tired jawline, which stopped her.
She sat in the corner of the room and fiddled with the tatami lining. Mother went into the next room with Father and closed the door. Toyo heard the sound of their voices, but the words were muffled. When they emerged, Mother’s face was drawn and tight-lipped. There seemed to be no time to stay.
Toyo turned to look at Father’s figure as they marched down the street. He did not wave. She stared as long as she could without her neck hurting.
Mother was sullen on the ride home. She offered a single sliver of information.
“When your father returned from Qingdao, he found out his second-in-command, his own secretary, had filched most of his money. And he can’t do anything about it now. He’s poor.”
For the end-of-year concert Mother combed Toyo’s short hair to the side and helped her put on her vest and bell-jar pants. The make-up lady scribbled a moustache on her upper lip. Toyo strode onto the stage, leading her smaller female partner with all the chivalry she could muster. She folded the image of Father into the curtains, tied him back so he would not disturb the stage.
Kuniko’s brother stopped visiting their house. Mother’s face grew pinched and tight. She went to Kuniko’s house, but he was never home. Kuniko was embarrassed by her brother; she stopped talking to Toyo, and Toyo missed her at school. The circles of plum tea stains ceased to appear on the table every morning.
Toyo was relieved and blurted out, “I’m glad he’s not … coming to visit us anymore, Mother.”
“Why’s that?”
“… He was strange.”
“In what way?”
“He touched me sometimes.”
Mother’s eyes became huge and dark, almost swallowing the rest of her face. “Where?”
Toyo shifted her feet. “Uh, different places. Like my legs, and arms, and waist …”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. We’re rid of him now.” She did not speak of him again.
Toyo returned from school to find red tape stuck over her bicycle, her mother’s oak-wood record player, drawers, furniture, crockery and china. The bank had come to redeem the value of the unpaid loan.
Mother calmly greeted the debt collectors. She did not shout or cry. The two men were expressionless, but their shoulders fell when they saw she was a woman.
loveable’s the apple
Toyo and Kayoko followed the black cloud of their fortune to Miyakojima, a business district in Osaka. The house they moved to was small; the rent was cheap. Bugs scuttled across the floorboards.
Kayoko worked in a café, making coffees and teas and scheduling shifts for the waitresses. The owners liked her. She was efficient and graceful, and she had impeccable manners.
Toyo could not return to high school; she was to assist in making ends meet. The café owners gave her a job in their sweets shop, next to the Tenma railway station. She sold chocolates, lollipops, green-tea drops and peppermint bursts. She doled out scoops of cinnamon babies to the kids eagerly crowding up to the counter, their cheeks blowing out in anticipation of sugar flooding their mouths, their sweet teeth aching.
“More, Miss! Can I have some more?”
“That jar.”
“Two jellies. Mint and pineapple.”
Clamorous, they jostled and exchanged coins for white paper bags.
“I’ll give you a yellow chrysanthemum for the red-bean flavour.”
Every few days a young man limped into the shop and bought a bag of red lollies.
“Is that all, sir?” she asked the first time.
“Yes, that’s all,” he replied. He smiled strangely. A queer upturning of the mouth, mobile, as if he had to quell it or else it would continue riding up and up, a great slashing curve in his cheek. His eyes sought hers like a puppy’s, moist and eager brown.
She wrapped the red lollies in a square of paper, tucking the corners in.
“I’m buying them for my siblings,” he said. “I have seven!”
“Oh,” she exclaimed politely. “That’s a big family.”
“Yes,” he said. He stood there and grinned some more.
“Are you the eldest?” she asked.
“I am,” he said.
He limped as if there were a sore growth in the heel of one foot. He compensated by adopting a sling of the arms, dipping down with each step, like a listing ship. She saw him take a green bicycle leaning against the shop and hop on with easy familiarity.
When Toyo came home, Mother was lying on the couch, a hot compress against her stomach.
“What’s the matter?” Toyo asked. “Are you sick?”
“I took work off this afternoon. I don’t feel very well.”
Whenever the Man With The Limp came into the shop, Toyo automatically reached for the jar of red lollies.
“Oh, you know me too well,” he laughed.
Toyo smiled weakly. Why didn’t he buy any other sweets? She’d tasted the red lollies and they were mildly addictive, but much less so than the gelatin jellies with the cream centres. He was a little strange, with his limp and his easy laugh. She wondered why he limped.
Toyo boarded the first train carriage every day to go to work. She clung to a handhold, swaying with the force of the train as it shuttle-clicked along. The handholds resembled nipples on a dog’s underside, and she suckled on her thoughts and fancies. She loved going to the cinema, and after seeing a film she replayed the scenes in her head over and over again. She watched her favourite films two or three times.
Once she snagged a seat next to a young man reading a newspaper. She began to read it out of the corner of her eye, and as the train sped past several stat
ions, she leaned in closer and closer, fascinated by an article on the royal family.
The young man turned and smiled at her. “Interesting, isn’t it? Would you like to read it?”
She gasped in surprise and shook a blushing denial, hands clenched in her lap. “Ah, sorry, excuse me, no thank you.”
“The royal family and their dilemmas,” he said, folding up the newspaper. “I’m getting off here. What about you?”
Toyo was intensely embarrassed and could not look at him. “Tenma.”
“I’m Hirakawa Satoru,” he said as he rose from his seat. He gave her a dazzling smile that caused her to blush even more. “Good day.”
Another day three American soldiers boarded her carriage. They talked in that lanky English with its fast nasal syllables. She was afraid to look at them, but she sensed one soldier stop when he spotted her and move closer. He said something to her and she looked up, startled, as he touched her hair. Her hair was thick and luscious, like liquorice sliced into tiny strands and melded on her scalp. She brushed it every night at Mother’s command. The two other soldiers gestured in amazement and began to stroke her hair as though she were a cat.
Toyo stood rigid as a statue. Don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t touch me. The passengers edged away, ignoring her humiliation. Tears crept into her collar. The soldiers laughed and stepped closer. Their large red hands twisted strands of her hair between stubby fingers. They stepped closer and framed her body between theirs and laughed and made nasal sounds at each other.
When they exited at the next station, her muscles trembled with the exertion of holding her body up, her breath coming in short gasps. Nobody caught her as she collapsed against the carriage wall. For days afterwards she wanted to cut her hair off. It burned with her fear.