by Lily Chan
a dream of dogs
Ryu held Toyo’s hands. Her fingers were long and slender, her skin like silk stretched across a delicate framework of twigs. He traced the nervous tension stemming from her shimmering mesh of palm lines. In his eyes was the gleam of expectation.
Her friends bemoaned her fate. “But how? How can you marry a Chinese man with a limp! So many men admired you, like Hirakawa-san from Ishikawa-ken. You had so many choices.”
“What do you think of the Chinese?” Toyo asked Yuki.
“In Kyoto, the Chinese are studious. They study at universities. They are quiet and intelligent and wear glasses. The Chinese in Kobe have been there for several generations and fit in – they speak fluent Japanese. Only their names give them away. But the Chinese in Osaka are fresh. They send their children to Chinese schools and their manners are coarse. If you are going to marry a Chinese man, you should go for one from Kyoto or Kobe.”
Toyo felt the decision weighing on her, knowing it would be irrevocable. She hesitated. She had seen the way the Chinese were treated. The Japanese could spit in disgust at them. They were not permitted to vote in elections. They were excluded from the health-care schemes and prohibited from working in the public service; they had to register their businesses with the government department regulating alien residents.
Toyo had avoided groups of Chinese men laughing and talking as they walked down the street, emitting sounds like ceramic shattering against an off-key piano. She would be marrying into a group of “third-class residents”, lower even than the burakumin, the untouchables. As with the burakumin there was a fear that they would spread their impurity and taint by association.
Yet Toyo recalled Ryu’s many quiet and unassuming acts of devotion. His limp had become as familiar as his voice, his eyes, his hands. He would not be Ryu without that limp. When she walked by his side, she felt a sudden sharp pride in his exuberant nature, that he did not seem affected by any of it.
“Ryu is my choice. He is a good man, and I want no other.”
With that utterance, a small gap appeared between her and each of her friends. She sensed that it might grow wider as she was absorbed into the role of a Chinese wife.
“I haven’t told my parents about you,” Ryu confessed. “They insist I marry a Chinese girl because the Japanese, they think, are so different to us. My mother greets me daily with the words, If you don’t set an example, then all your siblings will fall into bad ways.
“They’ve set their hearts on a wedding with a girl from a local Chinese family. I feel bound to oblige them, at least for appearance’s sake, for the ceremony, because I am their eldest son. I promise, this will be the last thing I do purely in obedience to them. This is the one wall I have yet to scale, so I want my dissent to be final. I want to be able to say, I married the girl you asked me to marry, but now I have chosen my own wife. Do you trust me?”
She could not speak.
He held her hands, looked her in the eye. “Trust me. I will go to that wedding, but I will not look at the girl. You are the one for me. I will come back for you, I will marry you.”
Ryu helped Toyo pack up the belongings in the small apartment into boxes and bags, and took her to a close friend of his sister, Eiko.
“Eiko told me that Ryu wants to keep you a secret from most of the family,” the friend, Rin, said. “But I’m sure you’ll meet all of them soon.”
Toyo felt guilty for imposing. She was obliged to everyone and she had nothing to give. She was a dangerous parcel about to explode, passed from hand to hand.
“We’re sheltering your girlfriend for a few nights, are we?” Rin’s husband asked in a low voice, raising an eyebrow. “Hiding her from the world?”
Ryu snapped, “Nothing like that,” and planted a hasty kiss on Toyo’s forehead. She stared at him, panic-stricken. He turned and caught her eye. She pushed him away; he pulled her back – they were the tide, rising and falling.
Rin gave Toyo a cup of hot tea and showed her the spare room. She sank into the ocean of blankets, laying her night things in a neat row by the futon. She loved Ryu. He was the only person who loved her in the whole world. The timbre of his voice caught her unawares. It was rich and resonant, caught halfway between youth and man, between charm and command. It intrigued her. Meditating on him thus, she fell asleep in the unfamiliar room.
She dreamed she was drowning underneath a mass of furry dogs falling onto her one by one, with their dark bodies outstretched against the sun. She could not breathe. They clawed at her face and neck and torso and panted and growled and whispered, “Open up your legs, pretty girl.”
She jerked awake. A man was astride her, running his fingers across her breasts. She screamed and twisted away from his searching hands. “Get off me! Get off me!”
“Aren’t you Ryu’s plaything? Aren’t you my plaything too?” he said, pinning her firmly against the futon.
“I am not Ryu’s plaything! I will be his wife!”
He tweaked her nipple and rose reluctantly, adjusting his clothes. She curled up and stared at the door until morning came. She could not look at him in the morning. She gulped down miso soup and rice and tea and pickles, but could not taste anything. The sliced radish pickles clung to her chopsticks like sticky worms. She said thank you in a peremptory manner. Rin’s smile hurt. She could not return it. The next two days crawled past. He did not return to her room.
When Ryu came to pick her up (chin dusky with stubble; eyes tight with lack of sleep, narrowed into almonds), she leaped to his side, shaking. He followed her into the room where she had stayed.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, holding her hands, massaging them in his grip.
Toyo felt nauseated. Her head spun. The figure of Rin’s husband and his bulky shoulders and blunt nose merged with her dream of furry dogs leaping and clawing. When Ryu asked the question again, she could not speak. She felt choked in her throat as if the dogs had pushed the words down into her stomach.
“So I was married for a few days, but now I’m divorced. How’s that for fast?”
Toyo began to cry. As she tried to stop herself, Ryu’s tired grin turned into alarm. He pulled her to him and pressed her face into his shoulder, and she breathed in his smell.
“It’s okay. My parents know. I have told them about you.”
He told Toyo about the wedding, how he had sat next to the girl without looking at her as their families dined and celebrated around them. After the ceremony they were waved off to their honeymoon in nearby Nara – their parents had booked a room at a sauna retreat.
He lay down in the room beside the bedroom, on the tatami mats, and did not speak to the bride. She understood. By dawn she had packed her things and returned to her parents’ house.
Ryu’s parents were stunned; at first, they could not muster the anger he had been expecting.
“A Japanese girl, you say? Ah, it’s the beginning of the end!” his father said.
wedding photo
Toyo took her identity certificate to the government department and filled in the required form. The clerk looked over Toyo’s handwritten notations. “So you’re getting married, is that right?”
“Yes,” Toyo said. Even to herself, her tone sounded defensive and small.
“To a Chinese man. It’s a shame about your citizenship,” he said and took up a thick calligraphy brush, dipped it in red ink and drew a large cross over her name.
Toyo watched in horror. The certificate displayed her name and date of birth, and was proof of Japanese citizenship. She felt a pang in her chest. She wanted, suddenly, to take it back – not her decision to marry Ryu, but her certificate, her identity, to hold it close and safe and soothe it like a baby. She felt as if her body had been crossed out, as if she no longer existed.
Her new identity pass was issued by Alien Registrations. The clerk t
here pressed each of her fingertips on a blue ink pad, rolling them firmly from side to side, then onto one of the pages of her pass. The identity pass displayed her photograph and her new name: Dong Yang Zhang. The Chinese words were harsh and alien to Toyo. She could not fathom this change, the soft syllables of her mother’s name evaporating and the creation of this new entity.
For the wedding photo Toyo wore a satin cheongsam, her hands placed in her lap, poised like royalty, her oval face full of reserve, eyes glimmering. Ryu stood beside her in a suit, leaning into the curve of his elbow on the chair. He looked somewhere beyond the camera, as if contemplating the sky or reading a scroll of poetry, as if he saw the future in a flash and did not flinch but accepted it in its entirety, accepted it fully. She was eighteen years old; he, twenty-four.
For a number of weeks Toyo was startled by the unfamiliar presence of the identity card in her purse. She had to carry it with her at all times, in case an official asked to view it, and did so diligently for the first month. Then she followed her mother-in-law’s example and stored it at the back of a drawer in her room. Every three years she returned to the department in order to renew her fingerprint records.
knitting
On her journeys, Toyo carried rivers of wool. She kept a collection of knitting needles of various widths and lengths in a tweed satchel. Bundles of wool, all colours of the rainbow. Blended. Pure. Ribboned. Threaded. Looped. Fluffy. Mohair. Instruction booklets. Thimbles. Thread. Toyo carried the wool with her from Osaka to Kyoto. From Kyoto to Hattori. Back to Osaka. Three packs would last a month. Her needles click-clacked and shone, and loops of wool slid over, under, around and in. Purl. Plain. Purl. Plain. Switch colour. Drop off stitches. 7. 8. 11. Reverse needles.
“Thanks, big sis.” Ryu’s younger brother Takeo scrunched up his eyes as he pulled her hand-knitted jumper over his head. She watched, appalled, as he wiped his perpetually running nose on the sleeve she had so lovingly knitted; in time the sleeve was caked in hard snot, the woollen loops calcifying, frozen in clear glaze.
She had knitted one for each of her seven new in-laws: two girls, five boys. Ryu was the eldest, then Eiko, Tansu, Akio, Shigeo, Kazuko, Takeo and Hideo. The youngest boys, Takeo and Hideo, were nine and seven. They ran about like wild cats, constantly plotting some kind of mischief. Tansu was twenty-two, and the other boys, Akio and Shigeo, were in their teens. The girls, Eiko and Kazuko, had long hair with a brushed sheen.
The first time they were all introduced to Toyo, lined up in a row, she tried not to gape. How would she be able to remember all their names? They looked at her with the same dark-ink eyes as her new husband. Eiko offered a smile and squeezed her arm, in apology for the onslaught.
Ryu’s mother was a stocky woman with a square chin and watchful eyes resting in pouches of white skin, soft as a dumpling. Her legs and arms were thick like radishes. She examined Toyo from her face to her shoes.
Toyo did not mind being examined. Her mother-in-law’s gaze was benign like the moon. Her father-in-law stood beside his wife, rattling off a string of quick witticisms through a gap-toothed grin. She fell in love with him instantly.
Toyo was thorough in the execution of her chores, sincere and glowing in her interactions. Ryu’s parents would always prefer a Chinese daughter-in-law, and in the marriages of their other sons, Chinese women were brought into the Zhang household. But Ryu was so happy with his acquisition, and Toyo so gracious and helpful, so anxious to please, that in time their reserve gave way to fondness. In time Toyo would hear them say, “We can’t have the Japanese overrun this place. The boys should marry good Chinese girls. Toyo’s the exception – she’s Chinese now … well, almost.”
The words Okaya and Otoya – Mother and Father – felt awkward on Toyo’s tongue, but she forced herself to address them in the same way their own children did. How else would she come to belong?
Okaya commanded a retinue of workers to serve the large Zhang family. The first time Okaya clicked her tongue and led Toyo into the kitchen, Toyo was overwhelmed by the huge knives rising and falling, the woks nestled in flames and the methodical chaos as servants bustled around the tables. The chopping boards were lined up in rows with the ingredients for each dish apportioned in neat pyramids.
Okaya moved briskly but calmly, as if she held the world inside her stomach and her centre of gravity rotated while the clouds rushed over the land. Her pudgy fingers reached out and rolled spoonfuls of minced pork and garlic into round pastry skins, then folded them expertly. The parcels of pork seemed to roll off her arms and onto the floured plate in one swift motion. The finished dumplings looked like baby’s ears. Toyo’s attempts were lopsided and timid and Okaya could make three dumplings in the time it took Toyo to make one.
Okaya cooked steaming hot pot with pak choy greens, forest mushrooms, oysters, noodles, spring onion, slices of beef and fish and pork. She heated a wok with liberal spoonfuls of oil and threw the river salmon live into its black mouth, holding a lid over it to quell the salmon’s desperate thrashing. The salmon leaped up and down, banging against the metal lid like a gong.
Toyo listened to it dying and bit her lips in horror. Okaya announced, “It tastes much better when you fry it alive.” She anointed the pink flesh with lashings of soy sauce and pickled ginger. Okaya was right. Toyo had never before tasted such succulent salmon.
On a sojourn to the beach she shyly undressed to reveal yellow bathers, yellow like the sun, the sand and the shouts of her new brothers. They looked her up and down. She tried not to notice. They nudged Ryu and whispered, “So how was the wedding night?”
“The neighbours lined up to stare at her when she first came because she was a beauty!”
“Mrs Tanaka strained her neck.”
Ryu shoved them aside, laughing: “Hey, hey, boys.”
Later he told her, “You have a beautiful body, the body of a woman.”
The water stung and the foam was at her hips, her chest, neck. Ryu engulfed her from behind, laughing as if the joy stemmed from somewhere deep inside him. His family watched them from the shore, their eyes weighted like pieces in a go game, waiting for the next move.
She cried out in shock as the cold water rose and rose. A wave threatened to topple her and she yelped, clung to his white back, remembered their wedding night and blushed.
the wives
For months after the wedding Ryu was ecstatic. He had finally caught her, having chased her from Osaka to Ishikawa-ken – not that she was unwilling prey – not that his persistence had exhausted him – but now she was his, and she gazed at him in the perfect clarity that they were each other’s alone, and somewhere an old goddess with the crescent moon in her hair and the sun shining on a finger had tied the two red strings of their destiny together.
Newly wed, newly tied, and the ring was a benign gold weight on Toyo’s hand. Ryu’s family absorbed her. Her new relatives pressed like gauze against the wound of her mother’s death. She plunged into a huge household filled with music yells for beer warm baths food arguments baseball scores laundry to do tiles to scrub fish to strip.
She was startled by their warm affection. They touched; they embraced; they patted shoulders; arm-wrestled; pinched bottoms; yelped; tickled. Toyo gaped when Otoya pinched her bottom. Ryu winked at her and she swallowed her gulp and moved on, giggling.
Ryu’s sister Kazuko began to trail Toyo to the shops and the kitchen and the baths with a blissful smile. She began to dress like Toyo. She wanted the same scarves, coats, boots and blouses that Toyo wore.
“Humour her,” Ryu said.
Toyo was susceptible to adoration, and accepted Kazuko as her constant companion.
“Another one?” Toyo exclaimed, delighted at the discovery of a crumpled love note in Kazuko’s school locker.
Kazuko had striking cheekbones. They glazed the sunshine and sliced the shadows into two parts: darker a
nd lighter. Her eyes sat on top of her cheekbones with a curve, sliding into her temples. Boys stuttered at her; she could correct their grammar while all they could think about was kissing her pert lips. She enrolled in modelling school and learned about manicures, pedicures, skin massage points, creams and the secrets of a flawless complexion.
“Look at me, Toyo-nesan!” she exclaimed with a heavy book balanced on her head, walking back and forth along the corridor. “This is how models walk.”
Toyo lived with Ryu in the building that housed his menswear shop. From her window she could see customers entering and exiting, the traffic from the nearby train station ebbing and flowing as work began and finished.
At first Ryu did not want her to assist in the shop. She could not see why and was affronted by his refusal even to let her come downstairs: “Get back up, Toyo! Don’t let the customers see you.”
Kazuko told Toyo that he wanted to keep her beauty all to himself, that her entry into the Zhang family was already spreading like wildfire down the street, and the increased traffic past the menswear shop consisted, partially, of nearby shop owners and their families coming to peek at her.
“You should stop dressing so well, Toyo-nesan, and wear rags and smear dirt on your face,” Kazuko said, and they laughed together at this incongruous image.
Every week Ryu drove back from the tailoring factory, his van loaded with bundles of suits, and Toyo ironed the display ones and cut loose threads and dressed the mannequins, adjusting shoulder pads hidden with neat stitches in the lining; counting shirts and sewing loose buttons. The only thing she refused to do was measure and adjust trouser hems, being disturbed at the prospect of kneeling in front of perspiring, hairy, stocky-legged men. Eventually Ryu grew used to her assistance in the shop, and even valued it.