Toyo

by Lily Chan

  Kazuko called Toyo. “I have terminal cancer,” she sobbed down the line. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You knew and didn’t tell me.”

  Genkan paid the cancer specialist to operate; Kazuko went under the knife three times, emerging thinner and weaker each time.

  She remembered Okaya’s morphine smog, her blank face. She read about people spending their last days locked onto machines, tubes connecting them to artificial respirators and IV drips, morphine fed into their bloodstream to drown the pain.

  “I don’t want to be a spaghetti person,” she said. “I don’t want all these tubes coming out of me. I just want to be comfortable. I don’t want to live as long as possible.”

  Her doctor disagreed. “It’s my duty to keep you alive as long as I can.”

  At night her son crawled into her bed, weeping, holding her. Kazuko talked to her family about everything except her impending death or the pain or the medication; she smiled and laughed in her pallid skin, hair limp against her scalp. She wrote and rewrote her will, pressing lightly against the papers in her neat script. Yoshio peered into her hospital room and she quickly hid the papers under her pillow. She spent money on luxury items, overseas trips, good food. She tried to fit all her lost years into a few months. Her face shone with a distracted self-absorption.

  When Toyo hugged her small frame, she squeezed as if she could imbue Kazuko with her own strength, as if the life in her body could seep into her sister-in-law’s bones.

  Kazuko visited her family members, making the rounds to each of their houses. She kissed the children, inspected gardens, drank tea, offered her greetings at the house shrines, and then went to Osaka Castle. High up, there was a lookout point over a moat filled with shallow water. She took off her shoes and placed them on the bench, on top of an envelope that contained five hundred thousand yen and a handwritten note:

  If you are the first to find my body, please check to see my face is presentable for my family’s sake. Please call an undertaker beforehand. My deepest thanks.

  Yoshio and Shigeo were called to the police station to identify her body. The detective who greeted them was a middle-aged man with a paunch. His eyes were moist. He showed them the room.

  “Your mother? No, aunt, is it? Your sister?” the detective said. “What a shame, what a shame, it’s so sad, my condolences to you and your family.”

  Kazuko’s pale legs emerged from her skirt, scratched and dirty. Her nose was broken. There was dirt on her clothes, sand on her eyelids. Yoshio wanted to wipe it off.

  “You know, no disrespect for your aunt, but she really is a good-looking lady, isn’t she?” the detective babbled, his hands waving in the air. “She has a great figure, what a shame, what a shame.”

  Yoshio felt nauseated. He swallowed an impulse to punch the detective. Shigeo’s face was tight and red. They both couldn’t wait to get out of there, out of the station and away from the detective with his pouchy face and moist eyes.

  Tansu, ordinarily reserved, collapsed and sobbed in front of the family headstone, in front of them all, crying with complete abandonment.

  “Nichan, Okaya, Otoya, Kazuko, now you are all gone to heaven. You have enough players for mah jong.”

  He sobbed and sobbed until his tears stopped. Then he rose, wiped his face with a handkerchief, and never cried in front of them again.

  Toyo’s eyes were swollen red. The Zhang family retreated and began to count their losses. Their dead were piling up one by one. Toyo kept looking at the place where Kazuko had once sat at the table and felt as though someone had yanked one more tooth out of her gums, raw. In her mind, Kazuko’s final moments played out over and over again, in slow motion. She leaped from the castle. Her silhouette froze against the sun. The moat rose up to meet her. The water lapped at her hair as she sank.

  On the horizon, Osaka Castle could be seen from any direction, like a compass pointing a needle across the sky to the place of Kazuko’s death. Toyo did not visit the grounds again; she did not picnic there or take any of the children to play in the gardens or run through the many rooms and floors.

  the coin laundry

  A letter arrived, penned on cream paper. Mr Takahashi’s granddaughter had tracked them down. Toyo and Yoshio agreed to meet her in a café. She walked through the door; her oval face lit up when she saw them.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed at Yoshio. “You are so tall! My grandfather was also tall.”

  She was a small, elegant woman dressed in a fitted suit. They nursed cups of coffee amid awkward niceties. Toyo told her how, as a child, she had been whirled around a shopping emporium floor by Mr Takahashi’s son, that he had tap-danced and made her laugh.

  “Really, he was so graceful, like Fred Astaire,” Toyo said.

  Eventually the woman pulled out a thick blue coat from a plastic bag.

  “This belonged to my grandfather. It should be yours. He adopted and raised my father as his own, but it is in your veins that his blood runs. You are the remaining family of the Takahashi.”

  Yoshio shrugged the coat on. It fit across the back, but the shoulders were too tight and the wrists rode up. Toyo touched the blue coat and marvelled at how her son had grown bigger than her father, who had been a gigantic man, a sumo wrestler, in her mind.

  It was as if Yoshio had grown up instantly. One moment she had been singing lullabies at his bedside and carrying him on her hip, the next he was a slender young boy, the class monitor, the head boy, the captain of the basketball club, and his eyes were dark and serious, even when he made everyone laugh, even as he was laughing himself. There was an iron dark will in him which she leaned against, until the memory of when he was small and helpless seemed as faint as a faraway dream, the echo of a strange and unreal memory.

  Yoshio showed Toyo a photo of his girlfriend, a pharmacy student called Shuying. She had a thick pageboy bob framing an almost gamine smile. Her eyes were clear and beautiful.

  “Wait, wait,” Toyo said, and went to the kitchen, took two beers out of the fridge and placed them on the table. “Now tell me again what you said, tell me again.”

  “This is the girl I want to marry,” Yoshio said. “We’ve known each other for a while – she’s a member of the Kyoto branch of the Chinese Youth Association, and sometimes we hold social events together with the Osaka and Kobe branches. Ice-skating meets and so forth.”

  Toyo took a gulp of her beer. “I am so happy,” she declared. She could not stop smiling. “I am so very happy! Are you bringing her to visit, then? When can I meet her?”

  Yoshio cradled the small black-and-white photo in his hand. “How about Saturday, for lunch? I’ll bring her over.”

  “I’ll cook something, so make sure you tell her not to eat anything beforehand except a light breakfast. What should I cook? What does she like? Is she allergic to anything?”

  “No, Oka, she likes anything. She just likes food. I often take her to the ramen stall or for hotpot.”

  When Saturday arrived, Toyo was ready with a signature dish: beef chunks and hok sai stir fry with a sweet thick sauce. The red chunks of beef stood out amongst the green leaves. She rose early to mop the floors and wipe the tables, took care with her dress and make-up. She served tea and had chilled water ready in a sparkling canister. Toyo greeted Shuying with a bow, noting with approval her trim figure. Her voice was sweet and pleasant and she laughed without restraint.

  The only thing Toyo could point out for improvement was a propensity, when Shuying was listening intently to someone, for her jaw to drop open slightly, and her eyes to widen, so that it appeared she was perpetually surprised.

  Yoshio suggested to Shuying that they both qualify as after-school tutors in order to supplement their income and save up for a wedding. They enrolled for training. On the classroom wall were cutouts from American and British magazines; pictures of towns, cities and
people, highlighted phrases used by students to practise their English.

  Yoshio pointed at one of the cut-outs. “What’s this?”

  “That’s called a laundromat. Apparently they are common in America,” said the teacher. “People who can’t afford a washing machine or dryer – like students – or who rent a small apartment with no space, pay for their washing at the laundromat. The machines are coin-operated.”

  Yoshio spent a week ruminating on the concept, then another week composing a business plan and loan application. He ordered a dozen Whirlpool washing machines and five dryers and enlisted the services of tradesmen to install them on the ground floor of the Hattori hostel, reconfiguring the plumbing and electrical outlets. He hung a dark blue banner emblazoned with the bold white characters Coin Laundry across the entrance.

  It was an instant hit. Apartment dwellers popped yen coins in the slots, waited in the lounge chairs and watched their laundry spin until it emerged, fluffy and clean.

  Toyo instructed customers on the difference between a washing machine and a dryer, for many had never seen the latter before. Despite the warning signs, some customers tossed dirty laundry into the dryers and it would emerge encrusted with green lumps of washing powder. When Toyo spotted these errors, she soaked the clothing in warm water and then put it through the washing cycle.

  She washed the windows and mopped the floors and folded the clothes when they emerged from the dryer. If she thought they needed another round, she put them through again at no extra cost to the customer. She bought magazines and daily newspapers for the coffee tables.

  Yoshio purchased, on a whim, a second-hand games machine. He installed it in the foyer of the coin laundry. When he returned the next day, the coin box was full. Astonished, he bought more machines.

  Within a month, the game machines made more money than the laundry machines. Yoshio joked that it should be renamed “Games Arcade” with complimentary laundry machines.

  Toyo and Yoshio emptied the coin compartments several times a day. Toyo cycled home on a yellow bicycle with bags of coins loaded in the front basket. The whole house smelled of coins; the copper scent hit them as soon as they opened the door. She sat with an abacus on her desk, sliding the beads up and down the slender rods, piles of coins piled up around her, counting and re-counting, filling out the deposit slips.

  A Yakuza fronted up to the laundry one afternoon, slick as a black seal. “Where’s the money?” he demanded.

  The laundry was empty except for Toyo, who was folding clothes, the pink blouse in neat folds on top of beige pants.

  “Excuse me, who are you?” Toyo asked. She continued to fold clothes, piling them into a plastic bag. Out of the corner of her eye she observed his rounded chin, the brittle edge of uncertainty in his voice.

  “I’m the Yakuza, woman. I’m collecting debts.”

  “You from Nobu?” she asked casually. Nobu’s son had attended the same school as Yoshio. If her hunch was right, he was still running the local gang.

  The young Yakuza did a double take. “You know Nobu?”

  “Good friend of mine. We go way back. Now get out of here.”

  He wavered.

  “Or shall I tell Nobu you were bothering me? Tell him Toyo, the mother of Zhang Yoshio, sends her regards.”

  He sidled out. Toyo sighed and collapsed into the chair. Her hands shook as she wheeled her bicycle out of the shop and, in a giddy rush of euphoria, cycled too fast, took a sharp turn to avoid a street lamp and fell.

  The coins spilled out of the money bags and all over the ground, paving the concrete in silver and bronze discs. She cried out, leaping to pick them all up again, but in her panic she dropped as many as she picked up. A young man stopped to help her gather up the coins and his calm voice dispelled her panic. She tried to press some yen notes in his hand in gratitude, but he bowed and refused her thanks.

  The banking official was barely a man, his chin soft with first growth. He sat across the table and updated her on the accounts, eyes averted, hesitantly pointing out the growth margins.

  “What a strange young man!” she exclaimed to her friend. “He won’t look me in the eyes and he speaks to the floor. It’s like he’s scared of me.”

  “He has a crush on you, Toyo-san.”

  Toyo blushed, then blushed some more because of her age. She wasn’t an old woman, but she was getting there.

  Every second weekend Toyomi and her husband came with the twins, delivered them to Toyo’s door and went out for dinner. Toyo bought double of everything for them: double pram, double toys, double jumpsuits, double mittens, hats and socks, in blue and pink assortments.

  Shishin was one armful and Shika another, chubby and yawning. Toyo blew up and framed a photo of the twins swaddled in matching fleeced hoods, pink and blue, their cheeks rosy against a background of cherry blossoms raining down. Toyo and Toyomi’s faces gazed sedately over their little round heads into the camera, their faces growing out of the frame.

  the whirl

  At his wedding Yoshio dressed in a white suit, his eyebrows angular and high and so like his father’s. Shuying was demure through a series of dress changes: a white wedding gown with puffed sleeves for the ceremony, then a green kimono for the reception, and finally a pink cheongsam with silver dragons twining down the front to farewell the guests. Toyo wore a gold cardigan and a purple-black cheongsam.

  The service was followed by a banquet reception to which it seemed Osaka’s entire Chinese community was invited. They clapped and sang. They left red envelopes of cash at the front door. It was over in a whirl.

  Shuying had worked in her family’s restaurant waitressing and doing the dishes while her mother and brothers cooked. Now Toyo started her off with the basics: peeling garlic cloves, dicing onions, washing pak choy leaves, picking the ends off string beans. She became an apprentice in the kitchen: eager to learn, obedient, and quick with her fingers. Shuying’s dumplings sported a robust shape like middle-aged men with beer guts. In comparison, Toyo’s dumplings evoked the delicate folds of a kimono with their bellies contoured like the crescent moon. Their rice balls were just as different. Shuying’s were large and hearty, and Toyo’s were dainty triangles.

  Cooking, cleaning, washing, greeting and entertaining guests all had particular qualities to be honoured, dissected, made apparent to her new protégée. Shuying was a willing student, but after six months her eyelids began to flicker during Toyo’s lectures and her face assumed a resentful look. She began to take shortcuts and modify protocol.

  It distressed Toyo to see disorder and discontinuity in her household. “She’s a nice girl, Yoshio, but she doesn’t have that keen sense of propriety, of finishing things off.”

  Yoshio promised to speak to Shuying about it. Though it was her son who was newly married, it was Toyo who felt she had to adjust to the new household dynamic. Herein lay the conflict: Shuying was comfortable with the naked statement of fact; Toyo was a teller of stories. For her, time swam in strange currents. She could knit together unrelated details with deft stitches and make any number of associations that would astonish Shuying.

  Later, Yoshio would explain to Shuying how Toyo saw events. He would tell her about the need for secrecy, affirmation, gossip and relevance. He would tell her about the rapid imagination that created apocalyptic consequences for minor acts of delay. Shuying listened to Yoshio’s explanations without the slightest trace of understanding: she could comprehend his words, but she could not understand their import. Her own world was like jigsaw pieces slotting together. There were no hidden nuances in words, in conversations.

  Toyo, in contrast, invested herself in every little action as if it were a part of her soul. When the garden was overgrown, she felt as though the plants were claustrophobic and suffocating each another. Armed with the large clippers from the garage, she clipped away at the lemon tree
and the hedges, feeling glorious and light as surely the plants would be with the open air, their leaves and branches falling down in heaps. Shuying rushed up and said, “You have to stop that, Mother. You’re cutting back too much. The plants could die!”

  Toyo looked at her handiwork and saw that Shuying was right. In her enthusiasm she had gone too far. She felt the light feeling fade away. In her aspiration to help the plants she may even have damaged them. She felt such distress she could not do anything for the rest of the evening. She was quiet during dinner and retreated to her bedroom early. She brooded over Shuying’s words. Perhaps there was a better way to say such things, to be less hurtful.

  When Yoshio’s first child, Hiroto, was born, Toyo was astonished at the size of his head. He was a round dumpling.

  “I never want to give birth again!” Shuying announced at the hospital, unaware of the four children (Lily, Anabel, Saishan and Seva) to emerge over the next eleven years.

  Hiroto was the apple of Toyo’s eye, irrepressibly cute. His cries were a strange kind of beauty. She wanted to rush to him and comfort him, with his bright eyes and big head.

  Yoshio, Toyo and Shuying hunted for a house suitable to raise young children. An application for a spacious townhouse in Miyakojima was rejected by the agent on the grounds that they were Chinese.

  “Disgraceful!” Yoshio said. “The agent seems to think that we can’t pay rent and will only smear dirt over the walls like beggars.”

  They eventually purchased a house in Miyakojima and a three-tiered holiday house in Mino that featured an immaculate Japanese garden on the top floor, complete with stone features, a rock pool and bonsai.

  The family retreated to Mino during the summer months. Toyo stayed on the second floor. She swung Hiroto in her arms, hoisted him onto the window ledge. They could see the trees, densely packed together, and the sweep of the valley as its inclines turned into the nook of a river, fat with salmon and brown pebbles.