Toyo

by Lily Chan

  He opened the door and the morning had suddenly turned into a black toad, encroaching over the doormat.

  “Okay, okay,” she muttered, and retreated. “I’m not going anywhere. I was just looking.”

  She pulled tissues out of the tissue box and folded the white squares. With each fold they increased in value. She would place them in front of her father’s grave so that he would be rich in heaven.

  “I was trying to write a poem before,” she told Lily. “I was trying to write a poem, but now all the words are lost.”

  the descent

  Living with Toyo was like living with strange and unpredictable weather. For a long time blackness seemed to mass at the horizon and Lily waited for the storm to break. Toyo’s façade of civility was ice-thin; a breath, a stray glance, a cough, would crack it and cause an avalanche. She was immaculate before strangers and guests, biting to family. Exhaustion engulfed her as she withdrew from her performance, from the stage. She pecked at her grandchildren’s postures, their smiles, the way they sat or crossed their legs or replied to her questions: replies which were often repetitive reassurances, for the language of Alzheimer’s had only one meaning despite the differences in words, like the shifting waves of an ocean.

  Lily filled out forms and assessments for Toyo to qualify for admission to a nursing home. Every time they received a call advising that Toyo had now reached the top of the waiting list and a space had opened up, Yoshio refused to accept it.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We can still look after her. She’s not ready.”

  It took some time for Lily to realise that Yoshio viewed his own care and treatment as superior to any of the nursing options available.

  Throughout this cycle Toyo floated like a boat in Lily’s mind, on the swell of the tides, turning ever so gently one way and the next. Lily began painting her grandmother, watercolours and sketches where the contours and shadows of her face began to tremble and melt into the background, into the paper, as if eaten up by a luminous blue fire, burning up her eyes. In them Toyo was clad in garb of metallic gold, dining with apparitions of her younger self, who floated around her like ghosts.

  The art tutor looked at this body of work quietly, shuffled some of the portraits into a pile, turned them face down. “That’s enough, don’t you think?” she said, and patted Lily’s shoulder. “That’s more than enough.”

  Lily dreamed that her grandmother was a glowing white space. In one of these dreams, Lily put her arm around Toyo and led her through the airport. Yoshio and Shuying waited for her on the other side. They bundled her into a car and drove away.

  In another, Lily lifted Toyo out of the bathtub, her upturned face flat as parchment. Toyo perched on Lily’s shoulder like a parrot, with her small white limbs curled up. They stood on the verandah of a house suspended in the middle of an ocean glimmering like blue paint and Yoshio and Shuying floated towards them in a white boat. Toyo reached out to them with all the joy she could muster, trembling and calm.

  Toyo danced around a cemetery and fell, one leg in, to a freshly dug grave; clambered back out, laughing.

  Toyo appeared, alternately beautiful and regal, leaning against the wall, or else screaming, clawing and biting. She leaped forward and punched Lily in the heart and Lily fell to the ground, smiling, pleading, asking her How are you, Nene? How are you? Are you well? Toyo pinned her to the ground with her elbows and wild eyes and grey hair springing electric from her scalp. How are you, Nene? Are you well? Each punch rang through Lily’s body like a gong.

  Then the family was in the car and Yoshio was driving along a stretch of road. He drove fast, too fast to take a sudden left turn, but he swung the wheel anyway and the car spun on the gravel and out of control. Lily watched the fence posts rotate away from them in slow motion as the car flipped and flipped, and a voice said sometimes dreams tell you things you already know but have not yet realised and it was her own voice saying these words and they crashed.

  Miraculously they were all unharmed. They winched the car wreck up a nearby cliff and began to repair it piece by piece. The wheels; the doors; the motor parts; the windows; they carried the shattered parts to the base of the cliff and the car gradually became whole and Lily woke up and she was crying.

  When her medicine wore off, Toyo grew irritable. She became a monster stomping through the house, furrowing her brow, yelling at everyone for breathing, for eating, for living. Lily imagined a beetle crawling in Toyo’s head, rolling protein clots together and depositing them between her brain neurons. Upon swallowing the small white sedative her irritability vanished; she was dewy-eyed with tenderness; she reached out for kisses; her face was soft and open like that of a blinking doll.

  For the first two minutes after she awoke, a small window of clarity, she spoke clearly. Then it was as though a computer program scrambled her speech into mumbled, half-finished syllables. This bed is drowning. I am swimming in this bed, she said. Kiss me. Come and kiss me. She patted the bed beside her skinny legs. Come and lie down by me.

  The moments of clarity burned even more than the illness itself, so that once she reverted, it was almost a relief; they did not want to see her cognisance of this tragedy. It was only then that a kind of peace began to descend upon them.

  The anger and denial in Yoshio was gradually replaced by a modicum of humility. The boundaries of his life shrank, became microscopic, and he reduced the capacity and length of his thoughts so that they were finely attuned to Toyo’s moods and the timetable of her bodily needs.

  He learned to interpret her oblique references to the weather, the landscape and other people as requests for assistance. Caring for Toyo became part of a ritual; he saw, in her, insights and sacraments into the spiritual life. Just as Toyo sought meaning in her own hallucinations, dreams and fragmented recollections, Yoshio, too, searched for signs in the debris she left behind. She began to symbolise the essence of what he believed in. Her face was luminous with the joy of forgetting.

  between the summer and the thunderstorm

  Flicking through an old family album, Lily saw a series of black-and-white photos of Ryu pouting at the camera, looking sullen. “Was he in a bad mood then?” she asked.

  Yoshio said, “He was sick. His face was swollen with sickness.”

  Ryu had shuttled between hospital and home in the months before his death. It had not been sudden and unexpected in the way Toyo had recalled, who wept in grief and shock each time she revisited it. One photo, which showed him lying on the tatami mat, peering up and bouncing Yoshio on his knee, had become the moment just before his collapse, convulsing on the stairwell. His swollen face was a symptom of toxins travelling in a circular route, trapped by his own skin and a defective kidney.

  Yet this was the way Toyo recalled her husband’s death, what she had told Lily: Ryu had been perfectly healthy, the summer had been a little hotter than usual, he had vanished without warning, without reason. There was no transition between summer and the sudden thunderstorm. Despite the doctors’ prognosis and his growing fatigue, his swelling face, it was never an option that he would abandon her.

  Perhaps he, too, never believed it. As he was being wheeled into intensive care and she was riding on the elevator clinging to his bed, he had opened his eyes briefly, astonished, laughing. “Well, I almost made you a widow there, Toyo,” he said. “I very nearly did.”

  Somewhere in the photo album, at a point Lily could not quite pin down, Toyo’s mien changed from girl to woman. There was something in her eyes, in the lines of her face, weariness and alertness combined. The camera caressed her alabaster features.

  There were shelves full of these photo albums in Toyo’s Narrogin studio, locked away and boarded up. The floors and surfaces were covered in a thin layer of dust, the insect screens on the verandah ripped in places so the dry leaves blew in and piled up against the house. Lily swept the pathway free
of a year’s worth of dead leaves. She fought through a wall of briars and thorns as her grandmother slept white in her casket.

  “Sometimes you have to tie up your anger and your frustration in your belly and hold it down. Do you understand, Lily? If I had any secrets, I wouldn’t be able to live.” Toyo laughed helplessly. “If I told you my secret, you wouldn’t be able to live in this house.”

  Lily dug into the mountain of photos, letters, notebooks and ornaments in Toyo’s studio. She looked for secrets in the snapshots of impossibly young men and women, shining in sepia and black and white. There were things hidden from view, things Toyo did not speak of or that were lost because they were never brought into the sunlight.

  However many times Toyo wrote her name as Takahashi Toyo, it was not that. The truth pressed up against her ribcage. Her secrets cracked open, one by one at first, then hordes tumbled out like baby turtles scrambling towards the sea. It took seventy-four years to crack the last secret.

  She patted Lily’s shoulder. “My mother did the wrong thing. You must not become pregnant before you are married. Do you understand? You must not be like my mother.”

  “Toyo would impress upon me the fact that her mother’s real name was Takahashi Kayoko,” Shuying said to Lily. “But Takahashi wasn’t listed in the official documents, in portrait photos. Toyo’s father, Takahashi Kouzo, hardly visited them at all. I thought it was strange that she kept going over and over the only two visits she could recall.”

  Yoshio said, “That’s not true. Her father visited many times.”

  In the silence following his statement, Lily wondered whether her father had been complicit in this appearance of legitimacy, perpetuating a denial even without being instructed to do so.

  Lily wrote letters to the librarian at Gotoretto. She asked questions of Ryu’s sister, Eiko. Letters came back, long letters of nostalgia and amazement. A letter came from Toyo’s long-lost cousin. It was written on transparent rice-like paper, sewn together with a line of blue thread, small kanji characters falling down its length like black raindrops.

  I remember when Kayoko and Toyo visited Gotoretto. Kayoko was dressed in Western clothing and also dressed Toyo in a similar style. They did not have brown tough skin like us and we were fascinated by their beauty and strangeness. Toyo was very quiet and held her mother’s hand. She looked like a little doll. Even after they left we spoke about them. They were so different from us, so otherworldly.

  twenty-eight cockatoos

  The police searched the house and fanned out into the dark streets. By that time Toyo was three blocks away, wearing one of Lily’s size ten shoes on her right foot, having dropped the other shoe somewhere on the road, shuffling along like a homeless empress, trembling with cold.

  They brought her home. Shuying and Yoshio bathed her in warm water until her pale skin grew tight and shiny, her forehead adorned with blue gem-like bruises. She looked up and smiled with the blank, adoring incomprehension of a baby.

  “I went to find Toyomi,” she said. “I went to buy red shoes for Toyomi.”

  Lily and Yoshio lifted her out of the bathtub, her face ravaged and twisted, wrung out like a towel.

  “I have been abandoned,” Toyo said quietly.

  She kept pacing towards the windows, flicking the curtains open and closed, as if Toyomi would turn up any time. Toyomi is gone, she’s gone away. Sometimes Toyomi was dead; sometimes she was alive; sometimes she committed suicide; the stories kept changing.

  When Toyo talked about her mother, her eyes widened in childish innocence, defending her own actions and mistakes, looking as lost and abandoned now as if she had never lost the language of abandonment, as if it grew stronger as one grew older and was written all over her face in its lines.

  Then, at last, they were all together; Toyomi flew in from Japan. Yoshio and Toyomi sat on a park bench. However numerous her visits, it was always the first time, always the last. Toyo sat in her wheel­chair, facing them, talking in her jumbled sentences, but even before these words reached their ears, the wind came between them, as if the wheelchair and the park bench formed a tunnel, and the wind took away her words and replaced them with leaves, dancing and twirling. Yoshio did not try to catch Toyo’s lost words. He nodded and smiled and gave generic responses.

  Cockatoos flew over them, white silhouettes cutting through the air, through the dark trees, and Toyo said, “Twenty-eight.”

  “They’re cockatoos, Toyo,” Yoshio said, “not Twenty-Eights.” The Twenty-Eight was a colourful breed of parrot.

  “Twenty-eight,” she insisted, as the cockatoos circled the parklands again, alighting briefly on tall pines and forming an elegant white arrangement along the foliage.

  Yoshio counted them. There were twenty-eight cockatoos.

  For days after Toyomi’s visit, Toyo was uncharacteristically quiet and placid, as if her long-running desire had been fulfilled, and she sat licking her lips like a cat pensive about the milk.

  On Toyo’s last trip to Puttaparthi, the road to the ashram had been dotted with dozens of stone cairns built by the villagers, perhaps memorials for the deceased, or markers of holy places, miniature shrines in front of shops and houses, constructed from sticks, twigs, stones and strings of flowers, the remains of fruit offerings and incense attracting ants and flies.

  Toyo saw these passing one by one and began to feel, in a drowsy and hypnotic daze, that they symbolised each of her lives, the ones she may have gone through but could not now recall, the many births and deaths and dreams and travails and joys and sorrows repeated until they became echoes, imprinted like the fine lines on her hands, her fingers.

  She was crying in the taxi and did not realise the tears were running down her cheeks until Yoshio asked her, astonished, what was the matter.

  She may have remembered this moment, or perhaps it was another memory altogether. When Yoshio came to her bedroom and drew back the curtains, she reached up and gripped his hand. “I need to go out, I need to tell something to someone.” Her eyes were clear.

  Yoshio helped Toyo to her feet. She shuffled towards her youngest grandchild, who was looping a basketball between his skinny legs, T-shirt flapping like the wings of a bird. His face glowed; he was the sun.

  Perhaps Toyo saw, suddenly, that he was part of the constellation, that his very soul was flaring and bursting, and in the trajectory of his life, she could see her own intersect with his, the tenuous point of connection flickering like a sparked wire, yet to come into being. “You’re such a good boy,” she said, reaching out and holding his hand. “One day, when I am reborn again, I will be able to see you. And I will be so happy, and you will be so happy.”

  the girl from gotoretto

  On the ship heading towards Japan, Kayoko held the bulge of her stomach where her child slept and occasionally kicked. The ocean unrolled itself in a long blue line. Back in Osaka, a bed was waiting for Kayoko, white linen and pillows. A nurse who would ask no questions.

  Takahashi Kouzo had arranged everything discreetly. After the birth she would move into an apartment. He had paid for the lease, the furniture, the doctor’s visits, and arranged for a living allowance.

  The baby was her tie to Takahashi Kouzo. Conceived in Qingdao and to be born in Osaka, the baby was the only thing that showed Kayoko’s journeys were real and existed outside of her nightmares. Her growing belly imbued her with a strong and burning purpose, a reason to rise in the morning. She greeted the gods by burning incense, offering water in a ceramic cup, and clapping her hands twice before the shrine. Kyo mo yoroshiku onegaishimasu.

  The nurse placed the wrinkled, bloodstained bundle on her chest and Kayoko gazed down through a film of exhaustion. The baby was so small, so fragile. After everything had turned to dust, after paths had collapsed in on themselves like walls of a maze, perhaps, after all, she had only herself to blame for these choices.


  She was aware of the framework within which she acted, of the lines set out to mark what she could and could not do. If there were terrible consequences to the act that had brought her daughter to being, she would ensure that her daughter would not suffer these consequences. This child of hers would have an impeccable life. This child would cling to pride like a forest monkey in Arashiyama, its dark eyes swivelling from side to side, watching the shadows.

  One of Kayoko’s older brothers tracked her down. She opened the sliding door warily. They looked at each other like strangers, sipping tea. Eventually he burst into tears and clutched at her hands. “Sister, dear sister,” he said. “What have they done to you?”

  There was something in her brother’s face, a kind of broken hope, which felled her. He had carried an image of what she would one day be, that there would be a beauty and a smoothness to her life that was embodied in her smooth, clear features – for even though she was a fisherman’s daughter and had mended the torn nets and cooked the fish and tended the vegetable fields, there was always a restlessness flickering at the corners of her eyes, her strange blue-green orbs that were an inexplicable colour like the ocean, which not one of her own family had.

  It was as if some foreign matter possessed her and kept the horizons shifting. When she first stepped onto the boat to Qingdao, certainty had nestled in her toes. There had been no fear in her heart. She remembered what it was like, that first step, giving her the strength for what would come next. The sudden sting of homesickness surprised her.

  Kayoko longed for Qingdao one moment, and Gotoretto the next – equal strains tugging at her until her heart could have split into two finely woven braids upon which her daughter balanced, unaware of the precariousness of her position.