by Lily Chan
A short walk away was the new hostel site commissioned by the Zhangs. Within a year of Toyo’s wedding, the sixty-room hostel was completed. It was commemorated by temple monks, who chanted blessings and trailed incense through the new floors and stairwells to celebrate its birth. Okaya, Otoya and their six youngest children moved into the hostel, and they rented out the rest.
Now Toyo helped Okaya operate the hostel; there were tenant records to update, rent to collect and staff to manage. At dinner they often all ate together, the family and the staff, from a banquet-laden table.
Toyo felt that she had married into a business to locate wives for the Zhangs. There was a complex process of match-making, wedding preparations and ceremonies that were prolonged and elaborate. She made lists for Okaya and carried out shopping expeditions, mailed invites, purchased decorations, browsed dresses and catering options and asked for venue-hire quotes.
The brothers teased her, poked her, made her laugh. She revelled in their attention. But when they began to bring their own brides to live at the hostel, she came to realise that she did not like spending a lot of time in close proximity to other women. She grew conscious of her odd and sidelined upbringing, her lack of siblings, of a father, of a family she could rotate in and out of.
The women crowded the bathrooms till there was only time to splash water on her face and scribble black liner around her eyes. One wife left her knickers floating on top of the bath water. Toyo picked up fallen hairs from the sink, from the floor, her lip twisting.
Tansu had married Haruko, whose parents owned a mah-jong bar. The revenue from customers produced her expensive wardrobe; Haruko guarded it jealously.
“Someone’s touched my clothes, I can tell! Who was the sneak thief? My drawers have been moved.”
The servant girls emerged weeping from her room. Toyo placed a sisterly hand on their shoulders and they gossiped for hours about Haruko’s shrill voice, her illogical hysteria.
Toyo concealed her doubts and insecurities behind an immaculate smile. She mocked the way one of the cleaners spoke in her thick Kansai accent. She was not conscious of her hypocrisy when she condemned a neighbourhood girl born out of wedlock.
“That girl was born into dysfunction. Clearly she will remain dysfunctional. Look at the way her mother lived. No wonder she doesn’t want to marry!”
She tested out loyalties, alliances, saw fractures and widened them when it suited her, quickly assessed the Wives as they were introduced to her, one by one, newly married and slightly nervous; leaned her weight against one, then the other, in this ever-widening war between her and Haruko. Then there was the scrutiny to which all Wives were subjected, in which they noted who had purchased what. They emerged from their bedrooms dressed in pretty clothes, a never-ending fashion show.
Toyo was an intensely social creature and moved, a line of grace, between irregular triangles and lopsided squares. She listened intently to what people said, noted what they failed to say, and inferred as much as possible. She tried to replicate their movements and imitate the behaviour expected of a wife, a young woman, and follow the rules operating within the sprawling family. There was a particular way of eating, of meal preparation, of cleaning, a ritual for every daily activity, and she had to replace the rituals she had learned from her mother with these new ones.
At night she often dreamed about carrying a giant ceramic plate. The intricate rice-grain patterns set in the plate began to shine, blinding her, and she felt the plate slip out of her fingers and splinter on the ground. The family turned to look at her down the long length of the dining table, their faces hard and blank.
She woke sweating, exhausted, rice grains swirling beneath her eyelids. Ryu slept on. Sometimes she would gaze at his sleeping face, the light from the window catching subtle angles of his eyelids, his cheekbones. He was the most beautiful thing she owned. At night he seemed removed and alien, as if sleep transformed him into another being quite different from his waking self.
otoya and okaya
Okaya had been the town beauty in a village in Jiangsu, in eastern China. She stood at the bedroom window every evening to comb her hair, watching the crowd pass by through a small gap in the curtains.
A young man walking past her house was struck by her black gaze and sweeping forehead. She curled pink fingers around luscious swirls of hair. All the cells of her body pulsated with youth, with beauty. His heart quickened.
He passed by the house at the same time each day and was rewarded regularly. His entire day built up to that moment, that gap in the curtains, the glimpse of her face. His mind was full of her: what she would smell like, what she would feel like in his arms.
She walked beside him. She watched him read the daily newspaper. He ate a bowl of garlic dumplings in soy sauce from a street vendor and shared them with her. There was one in her mouth, one in his. Strands of hair wrapped around her nose and mouth and caught in her eyelashes.
She was not beside him every minute and this filled him with anguish.
The young man was disillusioned by the opium malaise spreading through the local population. After a number of years, a brisk black-market trade had reduced friends and relatives to addicts. He took the bold step of going to Japan, roping in a number of like-minded men from his part of town, including two apprentices to work in his barbershop.
The migrants all stayed in touch, moved into the same part of Osaka, set up shop along the street which would become one of the longest enclosed shopping strips in the world: restaurants and barbershops, mainly. The street was busy, adjacent to a major train station, and the flow of customers regular. Chinese dishes were a novelty for the Japanese. The restaurants ran hard and fast, doling out steaming platters of stir-fried noodles, dim sum, pork rolls and spicy soup.
After a year the young man returned to his hometown to find a wife. He pawned his watch and some of his belongings and bought a white suit, a wooden cane, leather shoes, a cluster of gold necklaces and a ring enclosed in a satin box. He took a deep breath and knocked at the girl’s house. Her father was a court official who wasted no time in interrogating the young man.
“What do you do?”
“I have a business in Japan. I trade in various products between Japan and China. I brought these samples as a gift for your daughter.”
The girl’s father was flabbergasted. “You propose to take my precious daughter to a land where the Chinese are both hated and degraded?”
“To Japan, yes. But if we were hated and degraded, sir, would I stay there? I am in daily contact with the Japanese through my business. They are good customers.”
“And how do you propose to care for my daughter, should I agree, which I most certainly do not?”
“I would care for her with my life, sir. I would do anything for her. I would starve if it would give her a morsel more food.”
The young man was persistent. He knocked on their door every day. He brought gifts; made witty conversation; wooed the official for his daughter.
She was sixteen years old and greeted her new husband with small, tottering steps. Her feet had been bound. Upon landing in the port at Kobe she released the binds. Her feet uncurled into awkward nubs which she could walk on slowly, using a walking stick. She leaned into the sea spray and breathed in the sky.
With pride her husband took her to Osaka, to his home and business: a small shop in a narrow street marked by two red-and-blue striped poles. Her husband showed her the small kitchen and the tiny bathroom in which she would have to squat for washing. She had envisioned luxurious space, a horde of Japanese servants.
A few months of misery in a foreign country without friends, family or connections, fumbling for Japanese phrases in her thick accent, and she had had enough. Her husband noted her long absence from the house. With a sinking heart, he rushed to the local port; the ship was lowering the boarding planks, its
anchor raised.
“Hey!” he shouted. He could see her white dress blowing in the wind, her averted face. He ran up the boarding planks and jumped up and down waving his arms, shouting to the captain.
The captain stopped the ship. He was bemused. He watched the young man dragging a sobbing, pregnant woman back onto the land. She stumbled over her twisted feet.
When swarms of soldiers returned from the war they had failed to win, Otoya and Okaya set up makeshift tables and seats – plastic cartons, wooden stumps, cardboard boxes – on which they could play mah jong, and the soldiers, with nothing much else to do, entertained themselves while waiting for fried rice and hot tea.
The alley in which this mah-jong café operated was soon packed. Lines of restless men smoked while they waited their turn, watching the other players, shouting suggestions, egging on a risky move, placing bets with cigarettes, pipes and the occasional yen.
Okaya spent hours tossing fried rice on a gigantic wok and serving platters to the soldiers, a baby tied to her back. She slept in between her shifts by leaning against the adjoining wall to the kitchen.
They had eight children. The ninth died, at five months, from being fed a contaminated milk powder. All that remained was a handful of photos showing the blurred softness of a baby, the moist eyes of the just-cried.
Their children filled the house with laughter, moans, lost socks, discarded jumpers, shoes, textbooks and mingled Japanese and Mandarin syllables. As the Zhang family grew, so did their shops. They branched out into stores selling suits for men. Some of the suits were white with gold lapels, and Otoya pointed them out with a huge smile. “I proposed to Okaya in a suit like that. She couldn’t resist me!”
The memories of war and its devastation seemed to fade as quickly as the end credits of a film, rolling into the new age where television was possible, where train lines branched out across the city and into the countryside, where young people set up shop wherever they could and made money. Everyone wanted something, and there was always room for something to be offered. Otoya was astonished when he first saw a television. He walked all around the plastic box. He put his ear to the sounds coming out; he watched the people talking with his mouth agape. He crouched down and tapped at the screen. “How did those people get in? Why are they inside? It looks very small in there.”
Okaya reigned over the sprawling household like a silent queen, enforcing harmony through a pause, a look. When Otoya and Ryu argued over the redesign of the hostel baths, dinner became a conciliatory ritual; Okaya would not allow anyone to eat until both men sat at the table. She watched the family, noting tensions, connections, fights and laughter. Okaya never talked ill of people. Her motto was, “If there’s a rumour, then laugh it off. If they say it in front of you, it’s either true or untrue, and you can deal with it accordingly.”
She liked to eat two pieces of toast every morning coated in a thick layer of sugar. She crunched into them with gusto. Her legs thickened into white trunks, the fine lines of her Quan Yin face blurred with age and weariness, but her eyes remained dark and watchful.
Every few days Okaya asked Toyo to prepare the ingredients for dinner.
“Where are you going?” Toyo asked, tying her apron.
Okaya hissed at her, patting her hair into place, bustling from the mirror to her handbag. “I’m going, I’m going!”
“Going where? I need to know in case anybody asks.”
“To the bar.”
“What for?”
“Ah! To play mah jong!” Okaya’s thick fingers fumbled for her purse and she bustled out of the house. “I’ll be back before eight.”
One night, Haruko’s hysteria lashed out against Okaya and she rained insults upon her mother-in-law.
“Dirty old woman!” she shouted. “She doesn’t understand anything!”
It was the only time Toyo saw Okaya shed tears of frustration, wiping them away with hands that were creased with hard work. She folded into herself like an abandoned dog.
“That’s the first time anyone has spoken to me like that.”
Okaya howled and sobbed in her room for a day; only the combined forces of Kazuko and Eiko, cajoling her from the hallway, prompted her to unlock the door.
Tansu arranged an armistice; he, Haruko and their son moved from the hostel to nearby Hattori. Tansu visited every day but Haruko showed her face only a handful of times. Okaya ruled the household once again.
if only i, too, were a man
Ryu was stubborn. Once his mind was made up, he refused to change it even a little. Toyo would not shout at him when the Wives were within hearing. She was determined to set an example of feminine docility and serene contentment, even if Ryu turned up drunk on sake more often than she liked.
On these occasions Toyo donned old pants and scrubbed at the stains and mould on the bathtubs and tiles of the hostel. Okaya popped in and patted her on the shoulder. “You feel better now, Toyo?”
Turning to face the wide mirror stretching across the bathroom wall, she noticed her eyes looked engorged in the summer heat, gleaming with anger.
“Don’t pout. You’ve blown up like a puffer fish!” laughed Ryu later, and squeezed her arm.
She began to feel something pushing behind her eyes, a growing ache. She applied compresses of cucumber slices and lavender-scented pillows, retreating into darkness.
The old lady next door had heard from so-and-so that Ryu was having much more fun than he should. Apparently, she said, it was all around the neighbourhood. Toyo grew suspicious. Ryu went away on golfing weekends with Tansu, Akio, Shigeo and friends. She imagined him supine, drenched in sake, sandwiched between long-limbed escort girls. Ryu came home to her bared teeth and her walls of ice, and pounded against them.
“Do you think I would do something like that? Do you?” His dark eyes pinned her. “Look at my face!”
She wept, hardly knowing what to believe, hurt beyond words at the possibility that he was lying.
“You could have had anyone, you beautiful thing,” he said, touching her hand with a finger. “And you chose me, a limping old man.”
Okaya spotted Toyo’s red eyes and patted her shoulder. “That old lady is a gossip-monger. Besides which, Toyo, you are too naïve. Stop showing your soul to people who don’t deserve to see it. Grit your teeth, greet her calmly and thank her for the information.”
The next time they met, the old lady said, “I saw Ryu the other day with a girl, a very pretty girl. They were walking together near a pachinko parlour, did you know about that?”
“Sounds like my husband is having a grand old time, whatever he’s doing!”
“Aren’t you upset, Toyo-san?”
“No! Why should I be? If only I, too, were a man. To walk freely down the street with whomever I choose!”
Upon hearing this, Okaya burst out laughing. “You’re such a wonderful daughter-in-law, Toyo. You do know who that girl is, don’t you?”
“No.”
“It was Akio’s girl! We’re trying to get him married off, and Ryu escorted her home the other day. We thought it would be okay because he was already married. But the gossip-mongers can get at anything.”
When Toyo stayed in the family hostel, something felt wrong as she bathed. Somebody was watching her. She could feel it. She dried off quickly and dressed. She examined the walls of the bathroom and found holes crafted by an enterprising peeper.
She pasted over the holes with tape. The next day the tape had disappeared. She taped over them again. The tape disappeared again. She confided in Kazuko, who laughed in exasperation.
“It’s one of the bastard little brothers. He’s curious …”
The next time, Toyo turned on the taps and loudly declared she was taking a bath. She took off her jumper, then leaped to the door and flung it open. There was a yelp from Takeo –
who had just turned eleven – holding his toe and hopping.
Kazuko sprang at him from the corridor. “You pervert!”
“I’m not! I wasn’t doing anything, I was just walking.”
“Liar!”
The ache behind Toyo’s eyeballs began to burn, spreading across the bridge of her nose and under her sockets. She rubbed at her eyes, trying to push it away.
Ryu turned her face towards the bed light. “It looks like your eyes are swelling out of their sockets,” he murmured. “Are you sleeping well?”
The skin there felt taut, as if it were being slowly stretched on a canvas.
The next day, he took her by the hand as she washed the dishes after breakfast. “Just finish that up, and I’ll take you to the doctor, okay?” His hands were soapy from touching hers, but he did not seem to mind. His breath smelled like miso soup.
At the clinic the doctor tilted her chin and touched her swollen eyes. He prescribed a medicine to treat her thyroid gland. Toyo caught her reflection in the mirror and was startled to see how prominently her eyes protruded. She resembled a startled goldfish.
When she took the tablets, the ache and the protrusions began to subside.
“Where’s my lovely pokey-eyed wife now?” Ryu said.
It was then that Toyo understood her husband’s affection. He would love her even if she looked like an owl or a racoon. He would love her if her eyes fell out of their sockets.
As she went about her chores, she knew he was thinking about her, and his thoughts formed a blanket, a cone over her head, invisible and serene, and when she saw him again at the end of the day it was as though the sun rose, white and shining, enveloping her.