by Lily Chan
Eventually he grew tired of the game. Nobody would answer his questions, so he stopped eating. His eyes grew huge in his thin face. Anguish furrowed Otoya’s brow as he said to Toyo, “What if Ryu is calling him, calling his son back to him?” Toyo took Yoshio to the doctor, who examined him and wrinkled his forehead; there was nothing wrong with him. She told Yoshio to wait outside.
“What can I do? He misses his father. Tell him there’s something wrong with him, and that when you fix it, he will be healthy again.”
The doctor suggested a change of scene. “Spending some time in nature, up in the mountains, can do wonders for a child who is sick in the soul. In the meantime …”
The doctor told Yoshio that he was sick because of a swollen appendix. Once the doctor took it out, he would be cured. A week later Yoshio took home a jar in which his healthy appendix swam like a distorted sausage. He began to eat again.
Seeing this, Toyo felt some of her energy return. She had to eat, because he was eating. The pinkness returned to her cheeks, and a little weight began to accumulate on her arms and waist.
Okaya took her to the park to watch the cherry blossoms bloom. Cherry blossoms fell like pink snow, burying the crowd to their ankles. The petals caught in her eyelashes and mouth and in her clothes, and the children chased them like butterflies, their wispy, impulsive fall from the branches to the ground. A trail of petals followed her for days, in her shoes, underneath the pillow or caught inside her handbag.
grapefruit
Toyo hated cats. Snakes and cats. She tried shooing the stray cat from the street. It picked up fish scraps from the bin outside and kept returning for more. She hated it. The mewling things looked at her as if she were a source of succour.
She felt helpless before the pink yawn of Toyomi’s mouth and Yoshio’s endless pranks. Yoshio and Toyomi were always running and falling as though they were in an invisible fight against gravity, pushing and pulling. Toyo chased after them armed with cotton wads and disinfectant. She pressed the edges of torn skin together. She became familiar with the colours of scabs and drying blood. The streets were small and filled with the sounds of their crying, their shouting, their mirth.
Every summer weekend Yoshio swam in the local pool, concrete seals raising their grey noses at the side. He and his cousins ran about in their little yellow-and-white striped swimming caps and suits, brandishing their rubber doughnuts.
“Don’t go too deep!” Toyo called, and then caught herself – she had become a mother just like the mothers she had once watched, anxiously hovering over their children as they splashed about in the shallows.
Yoshio tried to eat a glass cup. He managed two mouthfuls and a couple of gritty chews before the fragments began to cut into his gums and cheek, the blood sliding down his chin. Akio took him, squalling like a cat, to the hospital, to wash out his mouth and stitch up the cuts.
“Why did you try eating it?” Toyo asked, her head in her hands.
Yoshio tongued the cuts in his tender mouth. “I wanted to know what it tasted like.” He did not tell her how, when he looked at the glass cup, shining in the light, it had caught the light in such a way, in the facets cut into the bottom of the glass, that he had turned it this way and that and the kaleidoscope of rainbows had entranced him, that he had wanted to taste the hundreds of tiny splintered colours. He suspected his mother would not understand and he would get into even more trouble.
She dressed Yoshio in his school uniform. It was white and beige, and neatly ironed. The folds in the shirt matched the lines of his arms, his shoulders, followed them down as though he was a drawing. She showed him how to tie his laces. She packed his bento box.
The bento box was divided into compartments. There was a compartment for rice adorned with a garnish of sesame seeds or shredded seaweed or a pickled plum. There was a compartment for a side dish: boiled spinach leaves or asparagus shoots or tempura or rolls of tofu skin marinated in sweet soy. There was a compartment for slices of chicken or fish. There was a compartment in which to store chopsticks.
She surveyed her creation with the satisfaction of a farmer laying out his crops: miniature fields, perfectly inlaid in a box, squares of colour and texture contained and never bleeding into one another. She tied the bento box with a large cloth, double knots. She envisaged Yoshio unwrapping the box petal by cloth petal when the bell rang for lunch, plunging in with chopsticks, eating beside his classmates at their desks.
Taking heed of the doctor’s advice, Toyo had scouted for a school in the hills. It was twelve stations away from Tenma by train, and then a twenty-minute walk up through the hills, buffered from the urban soundscape by a forest of bamboo. The green trunks were slender young girls, reaching into the sky, rubbing shades of green and grey upon each other like secrets.
On the long train ride Toyo watched the rails move in front of her, winding and sloping like steel snakes, and the railway posts clicked past like the beat of her heart, clicking and clicking, and Yoshio held her hand and looked out of the window where the mountains loomed closer, and the undifferentiated green became concise shapes, and spurts of leaves became gnarled trunks, carved into existence by the distance closing in between them.
Yoshio liked his new school. A creek ran through the corner of the playground and Toyo watched him collect pebbles and skim them across. On a good cast, two or three ripples spread in quick succession over the water. Watching him crouched in front of the running water, the bamboo trees framing his intent and chubby face, Toyo felt a small warmth glowing in her chest.
Toyo remembered Mother holding her hand as they walked over a bridge. The wind blew in a gust and Toyo almost flew over the rails. Then Mother’s firm grasp pulled her back and she buried her face in Mother’s knees and cried. The world was blue and blurry then and the shadows beyond the bridge and the rushing creek below filled her with fear.
Toyo held Toyomi’s little hand and remembered the bridge as she crossed another one. Toyomi was fearless. She tugged at Toyo’s hand, wanting to walk faster, to see more things, to point out the silver fish, the rocks. It was as if the absence of a father had endowed Toyomi with beauty. Her white face, framed in a winter hood, stopped people in the streets. They gaped at her.
A man had followed Toyo and Toyomi over the bridge. Toyo glanced at him, lifted an eyebrow. He held a camera and his face shone with perspiration.
“Young madam!” he shouted. “This is a little unusual, but I am a photographer, and I’m hoping … well, can I take a photo of you?”
“Why?”
“You have such a photogenic demeanour – you must take up a modelling career!”
Bemused and flattered, she let him take several shots. He delivered them a week later: black-and-white and sepia portraits. She leaned against a fence, demure, her eyes quiet, one foot before the other. Toyomi squirmed at her side.
The young widow and her daughter stood by the bridge as the photographer took a shot. The absence of a husband thrumming by her side, gaping like the river underneath the bridge. Her hair in elegant waves.
Yoshio remembered riding on his father’s motorbike, being scrubbed in the baths, watching his familiar limp. His uncles and grandparents rushed to fill the gap. Tansu took him to a sushi carousel on Saturdays. “Eat all the sushi you like, Yoshio. I’ll pay for it. Don’t tell, it’s a secret between us.” Okaya bought gifts of bicycles, clothes, gadgets, bags of sweets and nuts and corn. She watched the children anxiously; their laughter, their voices, their achievements made her heart ache.
Every month Okaya took Yoshio to the pictures. She bought tickets for whatever was showing at that time and promptly fell asleep in the opening sequence. Yoshio would sit wide-eyed for two hours, clutching a bag of pork crackles through a horror film, a romance or a samurai-infested epic ending in gore and glory. Okaya woke at the end credits and said, “Did you like that, Yoshio? Good! Let
’s go get some steamed buns, shall we? Or hot noodles? Or omochi balls?”
Otoya told Yoshio and Toyomi, “You can call me DeiDei. I will be your father. Do you understand? Call me DeiDei. It is a special thing just for you both.” So Yoshio and Toyomi began to call him DeiDei. The other grandchildren soon followed suit, until an entire clan of toddlers and children could be heard referring to their grandfather as “Father”.
The neighbours were bemused. “Are you really their father? What’s going on in this house, strange things?”
Otoya looked abashed, but he never retracted his instruction.
On the family’s bi-yearly train ride to visit Ryu’s grave – once on the anniversary of his death, and the other during the Qingming festival, which honoured the deceased – Otoya would sit Yoshio on his knee, pointing out the landscape and the light and shadow engulfing them as they passed through the tunnels. “See, it’s light … then dark … light … then dark! Isn’t it fun, Yoshio?”
Yoshio did not realise then that it was Otoya who needed comforting, to fight back tears, and who had sought to frame the entire trip as a fun ride of sorts, the destination being not a plunging slide or a dinosaur’s jaws or Disney characters spinning about on a wheel, but a tombstone carved with his father’s name, the lighting of incense, the offering of flowers, a one-sided conversation and some tears before a picnic lunch in the nearby park. Yoshio, exhausted by the day’s adventures, would often fall asleep in his grandfather’s arms on the train ride home.
Sometimes Toyo felt her husband’s hands and lips and breath. She turned in her sleep toward him and clasped air and blankets, her body drenched with sweat.
These things reminded her of Ryu, suddenly and sharply: a stranger’s face, the planes of his cheeks, his piercing eyes. A green bicycle. A train. A lolly shop. Baseball games. She stifled the urge to run after people who looked like him. She did not have to wait long. Each look-alike walked without limping, and at that first straight step she felt her hope curl up.
She stood on the beach as the sea coughed up seaweed, clusters of the ocean’s jelly grapes, shells like white fingernails, blobs of blue jellyfish resembling tiny plastic bags with blue stitching trailing away into the sand. She stood on the beach and watched the sea cough up its insides. All would vanish the next day. People’s footsteps from their arches to their insteps and the ridges of their shoes stamped into the blank canvas of the sand all washed away in a few hours. The next day it would be a new beach. The sea would regurgitate new exotica. She wanted to stand on the beach as the waves kept washing in, creeping up, until she was disintegrating like a sand castle, reduced to something formless and then, gradually, nothing. As though she were never there.
When she cut grapefruit open, she could see all the sections of the fruit, neatly enclosed in thin film. Her mother had eaten grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar for breakfast. She tried it once, wrinkled her nose at the sharp citrusy tang and sugar mixed together in her mouth. This was what life tasted like. Sharp and sweet, bursting in her mouth, granules of sugar clinging to her teeth and gums. The gift of joy came packed in the rind of grief. She peeled a mandarin and popped segments in her mouth; she wanted to separate their sweetest moments like this, eat them again, sink her teeth into them.
Akio – kind, gentle and quiet – was the new husband candidate. She felt the family’s anxious eyes on them both. Something stopped her advancing that way; away from Ryu, to his younger brother. A wasp in her ribcage stung her deep whenever she thought about the prospect.
She opened the door to find mewling cats gathered in the alleyway. They looked at her and meowed, showing the pink of their mouths. She hissed, “Hush! Go away, away! I’ve got nothing for you.” But they were there the next day, and the next, and the next.
She thought she was going crazy until Akio noticed a rotting smell emanating from the laneway next to the house. When he moved the stack of crates leaning against the wall, he found a dead cat squashed against the concrete.
war
Toyo bought a white Pomeranian and named him Koro, short for koro koro: rolling, tumbling. Snapping snacks out of the air, his neat jaws opened and closed. The children took him for walks. They rested their hands in his white fur as he curled up beside them. He did not bark at strangers, but wagged a furious tail, and he did not evoke in Toyo the wariness she felt for other dogs; he was unabashedly affectionate, his tongue rasping when he licked her leg. Her father had kept white dogs.
It was Kazuko who spotted them first. Three men dressed in suits strode up to the door, sunglasses hiding their eyes. It was a Saturday; the entire family, except Eiko and her husband, had gathered at the hostel for lunch.
“Toyo! It’s the Yakuza. Call the boys!”
The Yakuza were like parasites. If they were given money, they were back the next week, wanting more. Toyo rushed to the window.
“Tansu! Akio! Shigeo!” she shouted. But they had already appeared, hefting bricks and sticks.
“What do you want?” Tansu asked. He crossed his arms and shifted from foot to foot.
“You owe us money,” said one man.
“No, we don’t.”
“You do.”
“We don’t.”
They looked at each other, the three Yakuza on one side, the Zhang brothers on the other, foreheads furrowed.
Toyo and Kazuko clutched each other on the stairs.
A melee. Shouts. Bricks hit flesh hit sticks hit flesh. The women pressed their hands to their mouths, except for Okaya, who yelled furiously back at the Yakuza in her accented Japanese – who the hell were they to come here and ask for money, dirty mongrels, good for nothings – bodies hitting the concrete, the cuffed fist and knock of teeth against skull and grunts from men unused to fighting but stubbornly refusing to stop until the Yakuza ran from the house, blood streaming from their mouths and noses and their hair ruffled and suits crooked and cursing as they retreated before the solidarity of brothers, desperately holding onto their sticks and bricks, blood trickling from cuts in their faces, giving birth to bruises.
The women rushed to treat the men with antiseptic liquid and cotton buds and bandages and creams. As Toyo poured lemonade into glasses and filled bowls with warm water and carried towels and bandages, she thought that there had never been a more exciting moment than this, never more alive than when the entire house gathered to protect itself.
Yoshio began turning into a little warfare Yakuza himself. He fried ants with a magnifying glass. He collected beetles, spiders and worms in his empty lunchbox and presented it to Toyo with an innocent smile. He trapped snakes in his umbrella and released them gleefully inside crowded train carriages. He collected jellyfish in a bucket and turned them inside out until they broke in half, gelatinous cusps with flailing tentacles. He speared a toad through the mouth then ran away, repulsed, as it gaped at him in warty radiance, pinned to the rock. He caught a fish and filled its mouth with stones, watching the pebbles scrumble out of the gills.
Raising Yoshio was like trying to raise an irrepressible, precocious magician. He shot up like a tree. His eyes moved like dark beads of amusement; jokes fell from his lips like pachinko balls through the slot machines. Anything lying around the house became a potential prop in his gags. He stuck on a false moustache. He taped up sunglasses, drew large, drunken, thickly lashed eyes on the tape and wore them, stumbling around. He was an excellent mimic.
High-school girls fawned over his tall, lean frame. He was elected head boy, excelled in all his classes, and dabbled in rock-climbing and rafting and basketball and choir-singing and moustache-growing. He worked as a golf caddy, a waiter and a school tutor. He made friends with the bullied and the shy, the quiet ones who ducked their heads in the classroom when it was question time. An ebullient strength rose up within him, honing the sharpness of his retorts, his clown antics, his resonant voice rolling across the gr
ounds. Toyo attended his school choir concert and heard his bass ring out like a deep strong bell.
At the beginning of one summer holiday he announced that he would be living with the untouchable community in Kita-Kyushu for three weeks – he had befriended a boy his age. He returned with his face shining. “They work in low-wage jobs and live in cramped units. They’re poor. And they’re so funny and cheerful and large of heart. It was wonderful fun.”
Toyo reached the age Ryu was when he died. She passed it. With each year she became older while he stayed twenty-nine years old. On the twenty-eighth day of the month – the day of his death – she asked a monk to visit the hostel and intone prayers of salutation and blessing on his departed soul.
She took Toyomi and Yoshio to his grave at least once a year to pay their respects; Otoya accompanied them until he fell ill and was bedridden.
Yoshio took Koro to the convenience store and tied him to the post outside, next to a man smoking a cigarette, a man who looked like he was waiting for someone.
“Can you keep an eye on my dog?” Yoshio asked. The man nodded.
When Yoshio emerged with milk and a tin of seaweed pickles, Koro had vanished. The man was gone too.
For weeks afterward Yoshio moped and berated himself. Toyo looked for Koro everywhere. She saw Koro in the white dogs of the neighbourhood, multiplied into a hundred Pomeranians, their bright, steady eyes and thick fur, snapping snacks out of the air in quick barks.
gloves, gloves
Kazuko morphed from a besotted and devoted little sister to an assured young woman. She married an amateur photographer called Genkan and his hobby married seamlessly with her desire. She became his muse and spontaneous model of any moment. He framed her figure against fields, hills, waterfalls, the dappled sunlight, leaning into the wind.