Toyo

by Lily Chan

  The businessman’s secretary was a quiet Chinese girl with lidded eyes slicing into her temples, with the complexion of a peach, her hair falling like black satin. She often attended the lunches, talking to the banker, the other clients, but often chatting with her boss. It was during one of these exchanges, when her head was bent towards him, that Toyo saw the array of unspoken signals passing between them, an invisible code dotting the air. He generated the knowing, charismatic warmth of an older lover. She shone with a solemn intelligence, the serenity of a young and confident woman. Toyo saw these signals and they disturbed her, made her sick in her heart.

  When she heard that their bodies had been found in a hotel room together, surrounded by empty pill bottles, she remembered how often their glances had lit upon each other with a mixture of hope and desperation.

  the tour

  To escape the heat, Toyo toured the Margaret River and Augusta regions on a bus. Yoshio read the pamphlet aloud to Toyo, pointing out the key attractions. There were wineries, cheese factories, chocolate shops, nurseries, underground caves, giant karri trees, lake-side walks and spacious motel rooms. Somewhere between the Dryandra scrub and the canola fields, Toyo hoped to find an affirmation of her move to Australia, for the country to reveal its secrets to her.

  Yoshio dropped her off at the rendezvous point; the bus with its velveteen insides waited to swallow her up. It was full of couples and a group of old women wearing soft woollen things, golf hats and floral scarves. Toyo found an empty seat next to the window. She smiled tentatively at the lady who sat across the aisle. The lady seemed to smile back, until Toyo realised that she was pointing out something in the landscape to her husband, leaning back to murmur in his ear.

  The women had brought their knitting and crochet, and worked on these as the bus trundled along. Toyo watched snacks of cheese and crackers being passed around, containers of apple slices and lamingtons. She was immersed in the sound of conversation; dozed off with it still in her ears. Who had she become but a dispossessed person? When people spoke, their language was a river flowing around her. She watched the glimmering surface of the water and longed to plunge in, to swim with them.

  It was during this trip that she became terribly aware of her own aloneness. She tried to introduce herself to the other passengers but her Japanese-ness set her apart even more than the fact that she was travelling by herself. She was the only non-white passenger. Her English was halting and heavily accented. Before she commenced speaking, she felt the need to apologise and motion wildly with her hands, and then laugh to mask her confusion at their too-fast-to-decipher responses.

  Three times she approached the old women and tried to impart her own enthusiasm for knitting and crochet. She had just finished crocheting a blanket with bright yellow buds, reminiscent of sunflowers. She told them she wished she had brought her knitting needles and yarn so that she could join them. They listened to Toyo politely but did not attempt to continue the conversation. Her words petered out, failing to meet anyone on the other side. She subsided into her seat.

  To Toyo, the wines tasted like vinegar and stale water. The cheeses made her feel nauseated. It was only in the chocolate shop, surrounded by pyramids of melts and assorted candies, that she enjoyed the aroma of caramelised sugar and cocoa, felt a brief respite from the anxiety of appearing happy. She bought a packet of dark chocolate teardrops, a bar of raspberry crunch, and ordered a hot chocolate with marshmallow.

  The waitress looked barely sixteen. Toyo had been sixteen when she worked at the lolly shop. She wanted to tell someone about how Ryu had seen her working there and purchased a bag of red lollies every day, always the same thing. It was only later that she had realised it was not the lollies he wanted.

  “Hello there, I’m also travelling by myself,” a woman said, approaching Toyo’s table. “We’ll probably share a cabin at some point.”

  Toyo was startled that someone had spoken to her. The surprise froze her face for an instant before she relaxed.

  The woman was called Emma. They shared motel rooms. They sat together at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Emma listened to Toyo; Toyo tried to understand Emma. Later, her memories of the trip resonated with Emma’s presence, buffering her from the silence of the other passengers.

  At the end of the tour, as she saw Yoshio pull up in his car, tears began spilling out of her eyes. She continued to sob during the drive home. Yoshio carried her suitcase into the house as she retreated to her bedroom, avoiding the astonished Shuying. Lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, she could hear Yoshio and Shuying talking in low voices in the hallway. She remembered Emma sitting next to her on the bus, pointing out the ocean as it appeared over the hill, white sails dotting the horizon.

  the round room

  Toyomi’s impulses were made affordable by her husband’s wealth. They holidayed frequently, purchased expensive gifts, ate at fine restaurants. Toyo worried about Toyomi’s failure to seek moderation. Her hunger flared, her face alight with the fervour of tasting and seeing new things. Watching Gone With The Wind again and seeing Scarlett O’Hara’s bright eyes framed by brunette curls, the corset and layers of petticoats and swathes of material unable to restrain her spirit, Toyo recognised the same look in her daughter’s eyes.

  Toyomi had been so young when she had the twins. Afterwards, she could hardly be called a girl and yet she still was one. Her hair in two neat braids, her cheeks round with youth, she viewed the twins with a kind of curiosity. They grew and grew like voracious plants on sunlight alone.

  At a school play Toyo had watched in Osaka, eight-year-old Shishin was dressed in a light-green leotard with a mask framing his face in crepe-paper petals; Shika in a pink version. The twins appeared midway through the second act, when Tinkerbell entreated the flowers to help her find Peter Pan. They burst out singing and danced a little synchronised jig as flute chords floated through the auditorium. Toyo went to hug them at the back of the stage. The twins were giddy with excitement, fluttering about their friends, petals crumpled on the ground.

  On one of Toyomi’s visits to Perth she spoke of the possibility of moving there herself. Toyo was ecstatic; as a gift, she and Yoshio paid for a year’s lease on a penthouse suite in City Beach. The tower was round, so the apartment itself had curved walls. Once inside, Toyo felt she was enclosed in a spaceship. Through its long wide windows, the sun rose and set. The lift opened straight into the apartment foyer onto ivory tiles.

  Toyo watched her daughter move about the new kitchen, cooking a mushroom curry and plating a spinach salad, setting bowls and cutlery. The problem with Toyomi was that she was so easily bored. Her mind moved so quickly from place to place, and like her mind her tongue was sharp and witty. Discontent and amusement flickered across her face in equal measure. Toyo sensed her unhappiness. All was not well.

  The twins were twelve years old when they moved to Perth. They had reached that gangly phase where their arms and legs were flung out in summer-browned angles.

  Months later, Toyomi told Toyo that she was worried about them; they struggled with English and were falling behind in their classes; they were quiet and introverted; Shishin spent hours playing games on the computer; Shika collected swathes of pop-up cardboard anime structures and magazines and kept them neatly stacked in her drawers, but hardly ever wanted to go out.

  Toyo remembered how they had once dressed like flowers and had run to her with their loud, excited voices, words spilling out. She did not know how to reconcile their childhood selves with these sullen personas.

  Toyomi’s husband purchased a mansion in City Beach. A spiral staircase led to the master bedroom, cream carpet lined the floor, a grand piano perched in the foyer, and the atrium shed white light across the tiled hallway. The mansion was enclosed by a limestone wall, quartz blocks hewn and stacked on top of each other like an igloo, alongside impenetrable and spiky hedges.

  When Hiroto,
Lily and Anabel visited, they swarmed about like excited ants. Footsteps appeared across the grass tennis courts. Wet towels left damp stains on the brickwork next to the pool. Lily, dressed in her underwear and a T-shirt, swam back and forth inside the circular spa, gripping the edges with a mixture of fear and ecstasy.

  Shishin was quiet but not meek. Somewhere between childhood and adolescence he lost the unmarked gaze of a boy, replacing it with a wall. He brooded; his eyes had the watchful look of one who reserves judgement.

  His parents did not know what to do with him. When he was sixteen he came home with a silver stud in his ear. His parents shouted at him. Exiled to his father’s office for two hours, he faced the window with tears falling silently from closed eyes.

  red and white

  Toyo still struggled to maintain a conversation in English. Words rushed past her at the shops and cafés. She was stumped by the thur in Thursday; it defeated her every time. And her tongue reluctantly moved between the R and L sounds that her teacher rolled out with such easy grace.

  The country still failed to accept Toyo, or perhaps she had not accepted it wholly, and this conflict was embodied in her growing disconnection from her grandchildren. Yet there were parts of herself she had renounced because she had absorbed Australia, retaining elements of it despite herself. She grew faster at unscrambling English signs and notices; the letters lined up like magic. By contrast, her grasp of Japanese was shrinking. Rarely used kanji characters disappeared from her repertoire. Internal strokes went missing. They looked strangely lopsided.

  Toyomi spent more and more time in Japan until she had virtually returned there. She mailed parcels to Toyo on her birthday, and at Christmas: gifts of fluffy house slippers, socks, confectionery, CDs, videos, magazines and books.

  Shika and Shishin, too, shuttled back and forth between Osaka and Perth. Shishin dabbled in acupuncture, worked as a kitchenhand and a chef, and then abandoned his studies in favour of travel and transient work. Eventually he decided to settle down and told his parents he would like to open a café; relieved he was seeking a more stable life, they agreed to assist with finance. The Blue Billabong Café, staffed by Australians on working visas, opened at the northern end of an Osaka shopping strip.

  When not helping with the café, Toyomi and her husband retreated to their holiday house in Hokkaido. They mailed photos of the winter view – a snow-covered mountain, sentinel in a silent land enveloped in white.

  Every year, without fail, Toyomi taped the NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen – the red and white music battle – and mailed the cassette to the Chans. Broadcast on New Year’s Eve, the battle showcased popular J-pop bands and enka singers. At the end of the night, the studio audience held up a red or white baton, signalling the team of singers they favoured.

  Toyo, Yoshio, Shuying and the children watched it together, eating sweet glutinous rice with sesame powder, bowls of red-bean soup and seaweed crackers coated in brown sugar. They unwrapped white rabbit candies with rice paper layers circling a kernel of milk-flavoured stickiness.

  In her dreams Toyo wandered the streets of Tenma near the train station where she had once sold gloves over winter, where Ryu’s menswear shop had stood, where she had bought steaming hot ramen from a street stall. Toyomi said, “You should come back to Osaka. You can stay with me. All your friends will be so happy to see you again. I told you how the other day I bumped into Yuki. She was asking after you.”

  Toyo felt a rush of nostalgia and fondness for her friend and for the life she had left behind. There was no history in Australia, no long friendships she could rely upon without thinking, like falling back upon a mattress: she and Yuki on a train out of Osaka during the war; crying over rotten rice balls.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  A documentary about meat screened on SBS. Workers in abattoirs strung up cows and sheep, slashed their necks, quartered their torsos and left them to bleed to death, hanging from steel poles. Toyo ate fish, beef, chicken and lamb, and whale when she lived in Japan, but had never seen the process by which they were brought to her table. When she was a child, her pet rabbits became rabbit soup. She felt sad, but she was hungry and it was wartime. Many things happened during the war that would never happen again. She would never eat fried locusts again, or snake soup.

  At the end of the documentary she turned to Shuying and Yoshio. Their faces reflected the same disgust and shock she felt. “Shall we try being vegetarian from now on?”

  They began to eat more tofu, to substitute mushrooms for meat, shop for more vegetables. On sukiyaki night, the lampshade hovering like a moth, the big pot of vegetables bubbling away on the turntable, they would lean in with chopsticks to spear the wombok, vermicelli, tofu, shiitake mushrooms and mock chicken in turns.

  It was on one of these sukiyaki nights that Toyo made her decision, silently. She would stay. She would stay with the family in Perth. It was partly because the family needed her; she knew they needed her. The grandchildren were so young. It was partly because it felt right. It was also partly because she had struggled to adjust to Australia and she was curious to see whether, ultimately, she would see something grow out of this time that she could call a settlement.

  If she returned to Japan, she knew she would begin dreaming of Australia: of the sky temple stretching over the city, the convergence of blue.

  pilgrimage

  Before Yoshio could embark on a business venture in Perth, he was overtaken by an intense restlessness. He followed trains of thought to their inevitable end: What is the meaning of life? Is there a god? What is a good life? Who can show me how to live?

  “There is something unexplainable, a presence, a mystery,” Yoshio insisted. “I want to get to the bottom of it. You remember that psychic I went to last month. She was talking to a crowded hall full of people, and I was late so I just slid in against the back wall. But soon after I had come in, she looked up from the front of the room, where she sat on a chair – she looked up at me and called out loudly, ‘The gentleman in the yellow jumper, right at the back there.’ I looked around me but I was the only one wearing a yellow jumper. ‘There is a man who is always following you. He has a limp and wheels a green bicycle alongside him. He is always looking after you, protecting you.’”

  Toyo burst into tears.

  Yoshio began to visit churches, meditation centres and the meetings of the Theosophical Society. He urged Toyo to join him. She felt a blanket of incomprehension settle over her as people talked about god, love, spirit, consciousness, forgiveness, reincarnation, karma, great joy, deep sadness. It was not that she did not believe; rather that she did not often turn her mind to whether something existed beyond what existed now, beyond her daily life. Her daily life was absorbing. It had always been enough. Yet she could not help being moved when the people spoke about the power of prayer, when their voices trembled with emotion, and when Yoshio recounted to her their tales of redemption and salvation and sacrifice. She could not dismiss their faith. When she entered these places, these halls, these temples and churches, she felt something, hushed and soft in her chest, stirring to life.

  Yoshio called Toyo and Shuying to the lounge room. He inserted a tape into the VHS player and a man appeared on the screen, dressed in a red robe with an almost violently thick black afro. He held a vase upside down with one hand and inserted the other hand into the mouth of the vase and shook it so that a stream of ash came out, much more than could possibly be contained within. Every time he took his hand out of the vase, the stream stopped. He poured the ash onto a small silver statue. It was hard to see the statue, but after some scrutiny Toyo made out the shape of a bearded man, seated with one leg crossed over the other, a cloth wrapped around his head. At the end of the ceremony the statue was buried in a pyramid of cloudy ash, and the man with the afro looked exhausted.

  Toyo and Shuying concurred in their view. “That looks fake. It’s a tr
ick, surely. There must be something behind him, pouring the extra ash so it looks like it’s coming out of the vase.”

  Yoshio was adamant. “There are so many other things he does which can’t be explained away. I’ve been reading about him and watching videos. There are doctors from America, scientists from Japan, visitors from Russia and Italy and all over the world who have written and talked about him. Each of their experiences is too unusual to be fabricated.”

  To Toyo, the man with the afro just looked strange. He was small and dark and wore robes of various sunset hues. When he spoke, his voice was high-pitched and fast, and a translator beside him would give the English version in an Indian accent. Even his name was strange: Sai Baba. Yet if Yoshio was convinced that a small Indian man with an afro who pulled never-ending ash out of a vase could answer some of his questions, he would chase him down, Toyo knew, dragging her along.

  The video had been the start of their pilgrimages to India.

  Five months later, Toyo lined up to use the toilet at the Bangalore airport. A lady in a faded floral sari leaped up, thrusting refreshments – their due dates no doubt long past – into her face. She shook her head and the woman retreated, still smiling, her cheeks sunken. Juice boxes sold in a toilet. Drink it in, it would come straight back out again. The thought of the lukewarm juice with bacteria colonies swimming in their millions made her feel ill.

  The toilet cleaners did not know the meaning of hygiene. Toyo came out gagging, a scented handkerchief pressed against her nose. The walls and floor were stained with excrement. The toilet was a hole in the tiled floor that she had to squat over. The refreshments lady offered to wash her hands, to dry her hands, to turn off the tap, to hold open the door for her as she stepped through. Smiling, smiling.