by Lily Chan
She decided to ride in the last carriage to avoid the soldiers. Sitting in the front row, she felt a tingle on the back of her neck. She turned. The Man With The Limp was leaning against the carriage wall. He saw her looking at him and grinned. She blinked twice. He waved as if they were old friends and grinned some more. Toyo ducked her head and blushed.
“Excuse me, may I escort you to your home?” he asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“That would be too much trouble.”
“It would be no trouble at all.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
Her refusal had no effect. He followed her home, pacing several metres behind. Whenever she glanced back, he grinned and limped forward. She scuttled down the streets like a crab.
“Mother,” she wailed, entering the apartment and locking the door. “A customer from the sweets shop is following me from the station. A scary man with a limp.”
Mother lay in bed, nursing a mug of tea. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Could you pick me up from the station tomorrow? I know you’re sick, but …”
“I’ll be there.”
The Man With The Limp was at the station the next day. He walked towards Toyo and was stopped by Mother, hair piled into a bun, standing like a vengeful goddess in front of her daughter.
“Young man,” she said, “come to my house, please.”
He followed them home this time like a stray dog that knew it might get beaten, but thought it might also get a treat.
Mother was stern with him. “If you want to see my daughter, don’t frighten her by stalking her home. Come to our apartment, introduce yourself, bring some gifts, be a gentleman.”
Later Mother said, “He’s not a bad sort.”
“What about his limp?”
“You shouldn’t judge a man by his limp.”
His name was Ryu Kai Zhang. He was Chinese. Toyo knew he had seven siblings, that he rode a green bicycle. His attentions bewildered her. At first she did not know what to say to him or what to do, but she took cues from Mother and sat quietly as he talked, and then made polite queries about his family and business. He brought expensive gifts of tea leaves and canisters of pickled plums.
Mother stopped working at the café. She was always tired. She went to the hospital and had tests, then more tests. The doctor inserted things into her womb and drew them out again.
In spring they planned to move to Ishikawa-ken and stay with Setsuko-san, Mother’s friend. Toyo felt no regret at the prospect of leaving Ryu behind. However, she could not quite decipher the look on his face as he farewelled her: it was as if he had recognised her and was searching her face in an attempt to pinpoint the memory.
Just before he left, he made to step forward and then arrested the movement, as though he wanted to touch or embrace her, or even – she was startled at the thought – kiss her; and the sensation she felt at this prospect was not alarm or repulsion but something in between, something she could not quite articulate, thrumming at her ribcage like a train passing underground.
She could not stop winding her long hair around her fingers, twisting and untwisting, and when she caught her reflection in the glass, her eyes were wide and feverish.
the guest
“You have a guest, Toyo, from Osaka!” shouted Setsuko-san.
“Osaka? But I don’t have any friends who wouldn’t phone first.” Toyo went to the door.
“Sorry to just barge in like this –”
“Oh my God, it’s you!”
“– but I had to come here for business. I heard you were in the neighbourhood, so I enquired as to your address, to give my greetings to you and your mother.”
Ishikawa-ken was a nine-hour train journey from Osaka, but that had not deterred Ryu Kai Zhang. He was dressed in a suit and tie, and a sheen of sweat covered his forehead.
“Oh. Hello.”
Mother walked slowly to the door. “Please, come in, what an honour to meet with you again.”
His eyes widened at the sight of her. “I hope I did not cause you any inconvenience by turning up so suddenly. It is indeed an honour and a great pleasure to see you both.”
“Oh no, not any inconvenience at all. Please, have some tea. The summer festival is on tomorrow, are you staying? Toyo, boil tea.”
Toyo glowered. They exchanged pleasantries. He joked about the red lollies. Maybe he would come and buy some more from the shop some day? She assured him that it was highly unlikely, as they were now based in Ishikawa-ken. Well, maybe they would move back to Osaka in the future? Maybe. She didn’t know. He drank his tea and twined Mother around his little finger some more by bowing and thanking her profusely, and out the door he went.
“He had no particular business in Ishikawa-ken, I suspect, which would involve selling menswear,” Mother said, after he left. Toyo, still startled by his visit, could add nothing to this deduction.
The following summer they returned to Osaka. Ryu sniffed them out again. He came every week for afternoon tea, always neat and polite, and Mother pressed Toyo to accept his invitation to show her around his shop. He sold menswear near the Tenma railway station: suits, blazers, ties and trousers packaged in plastic or displayed on mannequins.
His father had started off with a small barbershop and now, by purchasing retail space throughout Osaka, had a small empire to distribute among his sons and daughters. The Zhangs operated restaurants, cafés, side-street pubs, hostels and shops. They observed demand and reacted to it, adapting their business practices.
“I’m happy to help with anything, so if you have concerns, let me know,” Ryu told Toyo.
She looked at him suspiciously, but his face was open as a white scroll, his eyes earnest, drawn in graceful ink strokes.
His visits began to feel familiar, like the smell of fresh bread baking in the early morning. Her polite nods evolved into smiles of secret pleasure. She tried to quell this, as he had tried to quell his own smile the first time they met at the sweets shop. Toyo did not like showing her emotions; Mother had trained her well. Toyo washed and ironed her well-worn clothes so that they looked new. She spoke gently, softly, with the cultured tones of the upper class taught by Mother.
On one of their dates, she wore clothes Ryu had bought her: a yellow dress with sunflower detail on the shoulders and a wide white hat framing her face. She looked pretty and she knew it.
They went to the famous restaurant in the Teikoku Hotel. There was a hot-spring bath next door.
Ryu’s eyes lit up. “Why don’t you have a soak while I go shopping?”
“Why can’t I come with you?”
“You’ll get bored. I need to grab a couple of things for the store. Come on, the baths here are first-class.”
She was alone in the baths. She sank into the steaming water with a whale sigh of release. The white steam rose and filled her eyelids and anointed her skin with dewdrops. A half hour, forty minutes of dreamy stupor, then the sound of footsteps and male voices intruded.
A bevy of middle-aged men marched in, their groins wrapped in guest towels, their man breasts sitting upon rotund bellies. They splashed into the water. Toyo shrank to the size of a prawn and edged around the corner of the baths, feeling for something to hide her. Ryu ran in, eyes wide with panic, brandishing a large white towel.
“I’m sorry, Toyo! The staff told me that nobody would be coming for hours.”
She was forced to emerge, red as a lobster, and Ryu wrapped a towel around her and ushered her through the doors. She changed into her clothes, cursing him. He sat outside the cubicle, apologising every few seconds. She snapped, “You wanted to see me naked, didn’t you? I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life!”
He placated her with a dish of sashimi and Hokkaido pickles. The translucent slices of fis
h were sharp on her tongue, like her words of anger.
the yellow handbag
“The doctors said I have cervical cancer. I’ve got six months left, at best.”
Toyo felt a hollow sensation in her chest, as if someone had reached in and scooped out a cavity, as if she had turned into a soft jelly, palpitating. She jerked forward as though reaching out to catch something, a teacup, falling off the edge of a table. Something. She jerked forward and stopped.
“Be strong, Toyo. Be strong.” Mother began to cry. Toyo had never seen Mother cry before. Not when they lost the café. Not when Kuniko’s brother left. Toyo watched her face, wrinkled as a cauliflower, and froze. She didn’t know what to do.
The doctor told them what would happen, and when, and what to do to ease the pain. He visited their apartment and took Toyo out for lunch. On his third visit he bought her a pretty yellow handbag and a white summer hat. She bowed, full of gratitude.
She ate a bowl of udon noodles and tempura, sipped at her iced tea, nodding gratefully as he talked, as he pushed his glasses up his nose, smiled, leaned in, held her hand, told her he understood her grief, it must be very hard, very hard, he knew, he had seen it before, and you only have your mother, don’t you …? Nobody else? Ah … but I will be here for you, I’m your doctor, and it’s only right that I look after my patients and their families. Overwhelmed, Toyo dabbed at her tears with a handkerchief. He squeezed her hand again.
She loved the yellow handbag. It was soft and lined with a flower pattern. When she came home, she touched its softness over and over. She couldn’t wait to use it.
Mother noticed the gifts when she awoke. “They look expensive. How are we supposed to pay for the medical bills and the rent and the food if you go shopping?”
“The doctor gave them to me, as gifts. He was very kind. When you were asleep, he took me to the restaurant down the road, and –”
Toyo stopped speaking. Mother displayed that stillness, the volcanic calm before the eruption. “The doctor took you out for lunch?”
“… Yes.”
“Was this the first time?”
“The third.”
“… You! You don’t know anything!” Even though she was weak, her hand was hard. Toyo recoiled, gasping. “You know nothing!” The pain sliced her mother’s body in half, so she bent from the waist, clutched the edge of the bed and hit her daughter while tears slid down her face. Toyo cried too, bewildered.
That afternoon, Mother spoke to Ryu for a long time. Toyo could hear them laughing and she was struck by their affinity, felt somehow excluded from it by the strength of their mutual understanding. She was sent on an errand to purchase pickles and rice. On her return, Mother said, “Never see that doctor again. Do you understand, Toyo? We are changing doctors. Ryu says he knows a good female doctor.”
Money trickled away, eaten up by hospital bills and medicines and food. Ryu offered to pay the rent. His visits punctuated Toyo’s long days when she read books until Mother needed water or food or to pee into a pan. Ryu dragged Toyo out of the apartment, fed her hearty noodle dishes, brought gifts for her mother.
He bought sushi from one of the famous restaurants in Takarazuka. The container was a deep red and the sushi pieces were a perfect line within it, neat circles of white rice and seaweed, pickled plum and bursts of raw salmon, thinly sliced. Mother ate with more than usual energy that night, emitting little sighs of satisfaction.
The unmarked face of her daughter hovered before Kayoko; Toyo’s smooth hands dabbed at her forehead with a damp towel. Toyo knew little of middle-aged doctors who bought handbags and hats for young women. She knew too little of everything and this filled Kayoko with anguish.
Kayoko did not burden Ryu with tears. She sipped tea in between her slow words, words that tied her only daughter to a Chinese man. She knew that he knew that the Chinese were a small minority in Japan, bristling with the tension of the Japanese invasion of China and the ghosts of the massacred thousands in Nanjing. They set up shop and flourished quietly, unobtrusively. They sent their children to Japanese schools and assimilated without fanfare or protest. They made themselves essential in the provision of services and products, staples of the consumer service industry, their shops growing into local institutions.
“I like the Chinese,” she told Ryu. “I’ve always liked them. The Japanese are a little crooked, a little bit snobby. The Chinese work hard. Once you earn their trust, they are simple and open about their motives. I liked the Chinese when I worked in Qingdao. I worked for Toyo’s father, you know, for a while, in Qingdao. I made friends with some of the Chinese people. So, Toyo is a good girl. I trust you will look after her.”
the kabuki mask
The new female doctor visited for a weekly check-up. As soon as she stepped into the house, her nose wrinkled and a look crossed her face.
“It’s nearly over,” she told Toyo. “I can smell death in the air. When a patient with cancer exudes this smell, they are rotting from the inside.”
Toyo was not surprised. Her face was a kabuki mask painted white with slits for eyes. Her red lips pressed together like a wound sewn closed.
“Is there anything I can do?”
The doctor looked at the buckets of warm water, the mound of white towels, the sodden red towels soaking in the laundry, the blood creeping through another towel packed under her mother’s legs.
“No. You’re doing quite enough.”
Mother had bouts of the sleep-walking again, stumbling from her futon to write characters on the apartment walls. This time Toyo gently prised the pen from her thin fingers and carried her back to the futon. She was too weak to resist.
Her insides gushed out in a tangled mess: spider webs cut up into white strings, enmeshed in slices of her uterus. Toyo imagined it peeling piece by piece off her abdominal cavity, like a ripe plum exfoliating. Every few hours she changed the white towels, dyed with cancer-ridden cells, dipped in blood. A distant part of her mind thought the crimson beautiful like crushed silk or the vestiges of sunset dissected by red rays. She could paint a vivid watercolour with that shade: the edge of a girl’s plum lips, a red dress, a tray of summer apples.
She was horrified by how easily her mother’s body, seemingly so solid and bony and hard (and she had felt the hardness of Mother’s hand, slapping her time and again), was reduced to this thinning vessel of liquid, her organs crumbling into moist slush and bursting out. Toyo wanted to reverse the process and sew up her mother’s body with healing threads and a magical poultice.
“Toyo, I’m thirsty,” snapped Mother, her thin hands limp over her bony chest.
Toyo tilted a pipette to Mother’s lips, pouring water through it, a sliver of liquid, a miniscule fall. Mother drank painfully, in gulps. A look of relief passed over her sunken face, then she was gone. Her head slid off the pillow, soaked in sweat.
Toyo held the pipette, half full of unswallowed water, in her seventeen-year-old hands. She did not cry. Perhaps a giant crevasse was yawning up in front of her, and she would continue to walk into it, oblivious. But at that moment she was calm and still as a Golden Buddha under the moonlight.
She put on her coat, slung her handbag over her shoulder and walked to Ryu’s shop. Only Ryu remained. He was her tenuous connection to the world, Ryu with his green bicycle and his limp and his earnest wit, Ryu with his warm reaching arms. She threaded her way through racks of printed ties, leather belts, starched white collars and black pants, folded cleanly as a ruled line, pressed into submission by the iron.
“Please call Ryu. Tell him it’s Toyo,” she told the girl at the counter. “I’ll wait outside.”
She stood at the window. The people walking past became a blur, flowing and eddying. Details flashed up like flotsam. A pair of white sandals; a man’s angular hands worrying at his briefcase; a woman’s hat, askew; a barber’s red-and-blue rev
olving poles across the street; a little black dog; a green ribbon stamped into the ground.
What am I doing? she thought suddenly. I hardly know this man. I’m ashamed to ask him for help.
She began walking away, but too late. Ryu burst from the shop.
“Toyo! What happened?”
“My mother died – just then.”
He gave a startled intake of breath and crushed her to him. For a moment she was smothered against his coat. Ever conscious of the curious glances of passers-by, she stiffened, stepping back.
“Please,” she hissed. “We’re in public.”
He softened in compassion. He saw her barriers guarded by soldiers, spikes and an iron drawbridge, chained and fastened. He knew how to dissolve the locks. He ordered the death certificate, cleaned up the house and packed her mother’s belongings in boxes. He made an appointment with the nearest crematorium. She sat and stared out the window. She settled in as if diving through layers of soft cream. Whenever she emerged from her stupor, she stood up, asked to help, was led into her room and offered cups of herbal tea.
She attended the crematorium for the brief funeral. Yoshino and her husband were there; so were Yuki and her mother, who had travelled up from Ishikawa-ken. Toyo greeted them without tears, with a self-possession that was a symptom of her immersion, the void in which only she and Mother had existed. Mother’s half-empty body, drained from cancer, was reduced to an oval canister of ashes the size of a melon.
After getting off the train, Toyo cut a detour through a park and smelled the freshly cut grass exuding its moist green juices. She plucked a shard of grass and ran it over her fingertips, tapped her nose with it, let it fall at her feet. She could lose herself in the wind. It blew her away, these bursts of air, threading with clouds and blowing her mother’s ashes into unknown oceans.