Toyo

by Lily Chan

  The chubby little girl on television looked like Toyomi. Shika had suddenly grown up and sat by her bed, smiling and stroking her hand, and Toyo asked, bewildered, “Are you allowed to stay here?” and Shishin came to pay her a visit, but when he turned around he was Hiroto, and Yoshio had disappeared to be replaced by a strange man in a blue jumper and a green beanie but he was just as kind and his voice was warm and soothing and he led her from the kitchen to the bed and tucked her in and turned on the television where a chubby little girl struggled to lift a box of tofu and carry it to her mother and Toyo remembered that she needed to buy Toyomi a pair of red shoes on sale in a shop down the road and they were very pretty with embroidered birds flying across the toes in iridescent thread so she struggled out of bed and shuffled into the lounge room where the strange man in the blue jumper and green beanie sat her down on the couch and handed her a plate with a slice of cake on it.

  The plate suddenly began to tremble in her hand – it bobbed up and down as if it were dancing. A little demon sat on her wrist bones, pulling her tendons like reins. Toyo watched the cake dance upon the plate and began to laugh and tears came to her eyes and she laughed and laughed while Lily who turned into Shika again during the course of the television show watched her silently, eating her own slice of cake, watching with those watchful eyes. A deer had watchful eyes and Shika was a deer. The meaning of Shika was a deer, loping through the woods, nibbling honeyed grass. The cake tasted like honey and lemon and banana and grass and wood.

  you don’t have a ticket

  The image was close and white like the flesh of an apple crunching under her teeth: Toyo’s brother tap-dancing on the floor of a department store.

  Sweating under the summer heat she shuffled her pink sneakered feet along the pavement. The houses looked vaguely familiar and if she just turned the next corner she would see him standing there with a big grin and his shoes gleaming, tap-dance-worthy. He would greet her with joy and offer her iced tea. She would laugh at his jokes. They would dance together.

  She walked and walked. The houses began to repeat themselves. The same bricks, the same colours. Toyo turned around and started again. The sun breathed down her neck and she shuffled her pink sneakered feet along the pavement.

  Yoshio followed her and kept repeating his absurd statement: “Your brother died in Japan, long ago. Your brother died in Japan, long ago.”

  Yoshio was wrong. She had seen her brother just the other day and the memory was white and close like the flesh of an apple crunching under her teeth. They danced together in the shopping centre. His shoes gleamed and the white walls enclosed them in a swirl of breathless joy.

  Toyo shuffled her pink sneakered feet along the pavement. The houses began to repeat themselves; the same bricks, the same colours. She turned around and started again.

  Toyo disembarked at the Tenma train station. A lady in a red coat asked, “Are you Takahashi Kouzo’s daughter?”

  Toyo was surprised. “Yes, I am!”

  “I was told to look out for you. Your father’s grave is nearby. Let me show you.”

  The Red Lady led her to her father’s memorial. It was a black stone obelisk stretching into the sky. People swept the grounds and watered the flowerbeds. Others placed flowers at the feet of the memorial. Toyo pressed her hands to her mouth and cried, for her father was still remembered after all this time: he was alive in the hearts of people.

  In the morning Toyo prepared to pay her respects at her father’s grave. Her family watched her fuss with her clothes and handbag and were silent as she railed at them to dress appropriately for the occasion. They ignored her demands to buy flowers. She paced back and forth and grew agitated. They tried to convince her that the memorial wasn’t real. They told her that she was in Australia, a long way from Japan, from Tenma, from her father’s grave. She felt betrayed. The great black of her father’s memorial shot from her mind, The Resting Place of Takahashi Kouzo carved upon it in granite characters.

  Sai Baba began to visit Toyo. He disappeared as soon as someone else entered the room. The first time he visited Toyo, she had been packing for India. He appeared as if he had always been there and just become visible.

  “You need a ticket to go to India,” he said. “It’s hard to get a ticket. You don’t have one.”

  She was dismayed. “What? But I want to go to India. I would like to see you.”

  He turned upside down and hung suspended in the air, looking at her feet, smiling gently. “You don’t have a ticket,” he repeated, and disappeared.

  He began to hide messages on the tags of her clothes and the linings of her bed sheets, on toilet paper and tissues, inside books and at the bottom of rubbish bins. She read each one then folded it up and kept it. He would appear and tell her these messages: how to get to the toilet, how to pull up her pants, how to open the door. The shoes were lined up outside in a code, lined in singles and pairs, in colour combinations which rang with a silent music.

  “I can’t do things anymore,” she said to him. “I’m ill. I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re doing fine,” he said, appearing again. “You just have a lot of pride.” He showed her a baby in his arms, a charming baby girl with soft cheeks and huge eyes. Is this me? she wondered. Is he showing me my new self?

  The blemish in the hollow of Toyo’s collarbone, raised and mole-like, kept growing bigger. She examined it with repulsion, twisting the skin around it. She ran her fingers over it again and again, as if doing so would reduce its size. Then another one appeared next to her left eye, on her temple, like a point in an acupressure diagram.

  Sunspots emerged on her face and began to spot her arms, a solar storm. She sat at the dining table and rubbed her finger over these dark spots, as if rubbing would remove them. They needed to be cleaned. Things needed to be folded, to be put away, to be clean.

  The television was on; Shuying chopped vegetables in the kitchen; Toyo slipped out the side door. She had places to go and people to see. She marched along the road in her pink sneakers. She was pretty sure that this was Osaka, although the telegraph poles reminded her of Narrogin and the flower shop wasn’t as big as she remembered.

  She dug into her pockets for money but found she had none. Her handbag was gone. A thief had stolen it. She remembered his face peering at her from the window of the flower shop. It was a cheeky face. He didn’t mean much harm, but he was heading for ruin if he kept up his stealing. And now she had no money to buy flowers for her father’s grave.

  She turned around and trekked home. A lady in a red coat stopped her on the road.

  “Can you remember the old Japan?” she asked.

  “Yes, the old Japan where girls never did their make-up on the trains!” Toyo replied. “It was such a good time. Everyone knew how to behave, how to be polite.”

  They chatted awhile. Then the Red Lady asked Toyo a question she never wanted to hear again. “Where is your daughter?”

  Toyo was stunned by her audacity. The Lady asked again. Toyo snapped, “What a rude question! How dare you ask me that!” and turned away. She bumped straight into her son, who was running down the road.

  “There you are!” he puffed. “I’ve been looking everywhere. Where have you been?”

  “You didn’t have to rush out, I’m perfectly all right,” she replied. “I was going to buy some flowers. Then I met a lady in a red coat and she asked me the most horrible question in the world.”

  travelling the moon

  Toyo had lost something and she was determined to regain it. Frustratingly, she would often forget that she had embarked on this quest. Her horse would spot a patch of clover and refuse to trot forwards. She would be distracted by stalls selling yakitori, skewers of chicken grilled on charcoal along the road. She could not help but browse the array of pickles, trinkets, fruit, kimono pieces and silk scarves on display. Sometimes a café wo
uld turn up on the road, out of the blue, serving cakes and coffee and handcrafted chocolates on white plates.

  The Sushi Man offered her freshly sliced sashimi, pink and translucent. The Katana Man swung a sword to impress her, a silver arc across the grass. The painter turned up with his brushes and paints, then threw them all down and demanded that he see her mother.

  “But you see, Mother isn’t here,” Toyo kept saying, trying to placate his anger. “She’s at the sweets shop.”

  Toyo saw her father and mother and Okaya and Otoya and Ryu lined up like grey stone statues on the way to the temple, decorated with yellow sashes and white flowers. Yoshio turned on the television in her room and a horde of children rushed by with their mouths full of rainbow lollipops. She rose and fell like a ship.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she asked, but then forgot the question, and looked around as if it were lying on the floor.

  She strung reasons and sentences together, for anything to fill the gaps. She was imbued with a sense of urgency. X and Z equalled Z and Y. The unknown value burned in her equation. She woke up and the X was everywhere, glaring at her, humming at her.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  They looked up at her, and she became blank. The X burned into her mind.

  “Where is your father? Where is he?”

  “You must be cold, aren’t you cold? You should wear something warm.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “Where is your father?”

  She looked for an anchor, for something to anchor her. It did not help that her mind would suddenly become overcast and unclear. She watched syllables float by in the air. She wanted to catch them, to pin them down.

  “Very good!” she blurted out at the half moon passing over her bed. The half moon paused in its endless rotation through the dark night and looked at her.

  “Very good?” it queried.

  Toyo’s eyes filled with tears. The clump in her throat eased slightly.

  “Very good!” she choked again. “I’ve been trying to say that for so long.” She clasped Lily’s hand and wept. “She wouldn’t let me dance anymore. She said I wasn’t allowed. But I so wanted to, I so wanted to dance!”

  Somewhere, a clock was ticking. Her body felt heavy, as if stuffed with fat, a gooey thickness. She wanted to fall back to bed, replete, sink into sleep. She wanted to dream of all the Takarazuka extravaganzas.

  The moon began to travel across her bed again, pulling the night with it, carrying mountains and valleys behind it, burying her under grass and soil until she began to sweat and disintegrate into loam, until the perspiration evaporated in the air and condensed again into sweet rain, drowning her, filling her, as flower-patterned waves of fabric rolled over her body, heavy and dense and light all at once. The syllables began to float in the air like wisps of cotton.

  At a nursing home, Toyo walked through the closed ward smiling at the people wandering the corridors. They did not smile back. They milled like ghosts. Their wrinkled skin hung from their necks and they floated from room to room in white nightgowns, some of them babbling incessantly, others silent, their hair like white fire.

  She might be able to bear it if Toyomi was there. If Toyomi cared for her, she would be the happiest old lady in the world. Toyo didn’t know where Toyomi was, but she wanted her daughter to come home. She wanted Toyomi to sit her in a chair and shape her eyebrows again, leaning in close so Toyo could watch her face go still, the delicate lines of her eyelids and cheeks. When Toyo went shopping, she looked for gifts for Toyomi, things for Toyomi’s kitchen, for her hair, clothes, ornaments, vases.

  Every evening the family sat in meditation, facing the altar. Their backs were still except for the movement of their breath.

  Toyo spotted a photo on the table and picked it up to take a closer look. It was a photo of herself holding two knitted dolls complete with knitted socks and knitted overalls and knitted hats and curly woollen hair. A song drifted up from the depths of her mind, a song she hadn’t sung since she was five years old.

  She rang the meditation gong, took a deep breath and began to sing.

  The family turned around and laughed and she began to laugh too, with tears of joy in her eyes. She had remembered something at last!

  Yoshio began to sway from side to side. “Sing that song again. Sing it again.” He made movements for each line, for each description, rocking his arms from side to side, my doll is a good doll, making his eyes big and eyelashes flutter, her eyes are wide awake, her skin is very white, framing his mouth with his fingers and squeezing it shut, her small mouth is oh so cute. Toyo watched him intently.

  “No, you rock the doll like this.” She demonstrated, rocking her arms.

  “Come on, high five,” he said.

  She smiled and hesitated.

  “Come on!”

  She hit his hand.

  When she called out she called out his name and there was silence the whole house was full of silence the silence poured into her ears like liquid and she called out and each time her voice was swallowed up oh! in this house of silence in which nobody lived. Eventually two angels came and unwrapped the layers of cloth from her body. She was swaddled like a baby. Tears began falling out of her eyes. Slippery bubbles slid against one another and failed to come out of her mouth.

  The pill clotted her tongue and stopped the words coming out. Lily’s moon face loomed towards her to kiss her goodnight and Toyo flinched back with fear and repulsion, that they would see her speechlessness, her cloying white tongue, limp inside her mouth, and catch it, be infected by her illness.

  “Don’t come near me,” she whispered. “I am sick.”

  When she emerged it was as if she had burst out of ice-cold water, the surprise flickering on her children’s and grandchildren’s faces an indication of how deeply she had been submerged, so that the submersion itself had become normal.

  the white scroll

  In her dream, Toyo wrote a poem in calligraphy strokes down a white scroll but she could not finish it, and the scroll uncurled at her feet like a long white beard, flapping. The black ink dribbled down her brush and spotted her feet. When she woke up, she could not remember the poem, however hard she tried; not a word. The poem had been beautiful, aching with heart, with vivid images. It floated away from her like steam.

  The room was dark. Her mind was fuzzy. It was as if she were awake but also asleep. She couldn’t decide. She swung her leg over the side of the bed. The blankets engulfed her, reared up like a giant wave. They swam around and around like sharks, like a whirlpool. Her leg tilted over the edge of the bed. She felt her toe nuzzle the carpet. She swung her leg like a pendulum, like a dead weight. When she stood up she was confronted by a white maze of walls and doors. When she turned around, the doors changed position. The windows opened and closed. She tried to sit down somewhere, anywhere, and the chairs danced out of reach. She knew this house was not her house.

  She packed her clothes into a bag, but they would not fit. She folded tissues over and over into ever smaller squares. She built a white tower of tissues. She stacked them on top of each other. They grew and grew into a tower stretching into the sky. She secreted the tissues in her sleeves, her pockets, on top of the toilet, the shelves, the tables; she passed them to her children and grandchildren. She motioned for them to open their hands and placed the white tissues in their palms like an offering. “They’ll be useful. They’ll be useful.” The white tissues cascaded like a long white scroll, blank. She had dreamed of filling it up with a long poem, but now it was blank and fresh and new again, and she could not remember what she wrote. She patted the tissues into place. She folded them over and over, into tiny squares, so they would increase in value.

  Every night the grey bathtub swallowed Toyo up like a pearl. She became transl
ucent; her eyes were dark sultanas embedded in the soft white dough of her cheeks. She was luminous, washing away layer by layer, dissolving in the water.

  “It would be nice, you know, if there was a handsome young man who came into the bath with me. It would make it so much more enjoyable.”

  She rested in the lukewarm bathwater, a rubber floatie curled around her neck to stop her sinking, and she slept, immersed in her dreams. Some time later she felt hands gripping her head, her shoulders, under her arms, her knees, and she was raised from the grey bathtub, raised from where she had slept, marinating, hibernating, raised up towards the sparkling light, the waters sluicing off her body. Yoshio and Lily hoisted her out of the bathtub. Her legs were like long white tusks. She was as light as cardboard.

  She was carried across the floor into a dark haven of towels and blankets and pillows where she lay like a baby and people bent over her, murmuring, mopping, wiping, patting her dry, enclosing her in a cocoon. She was carried from cocoon to cocoon. Warm nests swallowed her whole. She was limp with exhaustion, as she was swallowed and born and swallowed and born again and again, into light and darkness. People swarmed over her like ants, swabbing and patting and folding, and she whispered, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  It was always morning when Toyo woke up and the sun rose through the grey sky. It was always morning and she yearned to go somewhere, somewhere she could not name, but the restlessness pulsed through her and as she moved towards the door, she recalled her father’s grave. It rose tall and black in her mind’s eye.

  She reached for the doorknob, but Yoshio wedged his body in between her and freedom. She looked up at his stubborn face and her hope faded.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “It’s night-time. You can’t go anywhere. Look!”