“There’s nothing to be afraid about.”
“None of these people care about me. A birthday should be celebrated quietly, if at all. With my family. My son. Anji-chan. Hiro-kun. You three are the only family I have.”
Itou sighed. “I have my reasons.”
“Yes?”
He maintained the silence as long as he could, but Sayoko’s stare finally wore him down. “I’ll explain them to you someday.”
Sayoko said, “Soon, I hope. Do you think I’ll be around forever?”
“No,” Itou said, and then it seemed to come to him—the simple absurdity of it. “But I have to plan our lives and our finances as if that is possible. You and I could both need care in the years ahead. For a very long time, longer than nature ever intended. And then what?”
“So my birthday party helps with your job,” Sayoko said.
“Of course it does,” Itou said. “I’ve never denied that.”
“And so does showing off Hiro to the public,” Angelica said.
“Well, yes,” Itou conceded.
Sayoko turned to Hiro, “You understood this from the beginning, Hiro?”
“I have come to understand, day by day, that I am different.”
Sayoko looked to her son again for more explanation. When it wasn’t forthcoming, she turned to Hiro. “You must explain. I insist.”
“I have capacities that some nations disallow. Many view me as legally questionable.”
Hiro turned his head, gaze shifting from Sayoko to Itou.
Itou said, “You’ve gone this far. Get on with it.”
Hiro nodded. “My assumption is that there is a debate at METI involving this issue, and that Itou-san has placed his bets, and lined up at least a few trading partners, most notably Taiwan, the country that made me and will profit when my model goes to market. On the opposite side of the rift is South Korea, a social robotics leader that has developed and supported certain AI limitations. To favor Taiwan is to stand against China. To stand against China is to stand with India.”
“I don’t understand,” Angelica said.
Hiro continued, “Everyone needs more advanced robots but the question is who will make them and who will decide what a robot may do. High intelligence is only one limitation. Emotional capacity is another. To throw off the limits first, to defy international conventions, is a risk. But a profitable one. The Pause will have ended, with or without international agreement. To keep rising, Itou-san must not fail. For Itou-san to not fail, I must not fail.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Am I correct?” Hiro asked.
“You are not incorrect,” Itou replied in a tired voice.
“And so you’re using me—all of us—to get your next promotion,” Sayoko said. “But son, you don’t even want that promotion or the next one. You never wanted to die like your father from overwork. You’ve never wanted to be head of METI.”
Itou made no secret of his bitterness.
“Mother, it has been many decades since I made any choice selfishly. You taught me, years ago, not to pursue my own happiness.”
Angelica was stunned by his remark, but Sayoko seemed to expect it. She protested, “If by happiness you mean music, you were no good at it! You made mistakes all the time!”
Itou bowed his head. “Thank you, Mother. Thank you for being brutally candid when it comes to my weaknesses, if never when it came to admitting your own. You have managed to live a hundred years and I still know almost nothing about you.”
Everyone—Angelica, Sayoko, even Hiro—held their breath.
Itou continued. “I am still undecided about Hiro. I will not recommend him until I’m sure. No one will fool me. And no one will rush me.”
After an awkward silence following Itou’s departure, Sayoko said, “I don’t think I want any more tea tonight. Do you think something stronger would do any harm?”
Angelica went to the kitchen and returned with a sake bottle and three cups. Sayoko was sitting in front of her dressing table. Her hair was dry and pulled back in a long thin braid that fell over her shoulder. Hiro and Sayoko were both looking down at a scrapbook of old photos that Angelica had never seen.
When Sayoko heard Angelica’s footsteps she turned to glance over her shoulder, the braid falling softly around one side of her face, and down over the shoulder of her pearl gray informal kimono. Angelica had rarely studied Sayoko’s eyes in low light, when she wasn’t frowning or squinting in amusement. Sayoko’s eyes were surprisingly large, double-lidded in that way that some younger Japanese and Korean woman found so enviable that they’d endure surgery. Her retinas were medium brown, her pupils large. In low light, she looked thirty years younger. Angelica could see the middle-aged woman she had been, and further, to the young woman who had become that middle-aged woman.
Sayoko asked Angelica, “Three cups?”
“It seemed more polite,” Angelica said.
“Maybe you are becoming Japanese,” Sayoko laughed.
“Impossible.”
“Eh?” Sayoko asked.
“Impossible for a foreigner to pass as Japanese here. That’s what I’ve come to realize.”
“You think so, do you?”
Sayoko turned and shared a wry smile with Hiro, and though he said nothing in return, he cocked his head slightly, and then even less perceptibly, barely lifted his chin. It was all those little gestures that made a robot seem intelligent: not the voice, not the face, not the perfected bipedal motion. A week ago Angelica would’ve said it was a programmed action of sorts. Now she felt not only that Hiro knew Sayoko’s secrets but that he could read her mind, and perhaps she could read his. He let her in, in all the ways that Angelica did not.
“You asked me tonight if I had a memory that won’t stay buried,” Angelica said. “I have many. But here is one.”
Sayoko closed the scrapbook. Angelica glanced at Hiro as if to blame him and thank him—both things at once—but in any case to let him know he had talked her into this. For what it was worth.
“We had heard a typhoon was coming,” Angelica began, “and of course, we had lived through many. Peak winds were supposed to arrive near dawn the next day. Half of us stayed back at the house: Lola and the baby, Marta, and Datu and me because you could not leave an old woman and a baby alone, and typhoon season was also a time when there were more burglaries, especially if people had evacuated their homes. Strangers took advantage.
“The other half of our family went to a shelter in the next village over, where emergency supplies had arrived. They went, came back, and went again, because the first time, the supplies were insufficient. They left in the afternoon, and by nighttime had not returned. But this might’ve only meant the estuary between the villages had risen too high for crossing on foot and the boats knew better than to head out to sea when the winds were already blowing. We would never see them again.”
She stopped. It was too much to explain, and she felt tired. She was not a storyteller, and did not want to be.
“Let me fast-forward.”
“It’s all right,” Sayoko said. “You’re doing fine.”
Angelica began again. “The storm picked up, worse and earlier than we expected. Lola and Marta were in the front of the house, sleeping, and Datu and I were in the back, whispering as we listened to the wind howl: Where were our parents? How would they ever get back if the estuary was flooded?
“Suddenly the house was down around me. I was trapped in the rubble. The entire front of the house was gone, and the sea had risen. There was no sign of Lola or Marta. The waves were not far.
“Night came. I had only one hand free. I could not feel my legs.”
She could not tell every part, had no wish to recount the hours of calling out for her parents and Lola. She did not want to admit she’d listened for the sound of her baby sister
crying in the wind, and knew if there was no crying, it could only mean the worst. There were no sounds coming from any of the neighboring houses. Datu had staggered out of the dark and come to her, finally, and started digging. He had told her what she did not want to hear, that it was too late for the others, and that he had to leave, to get help. So she waited.
“A dark hill rose up far in the distance, with farms at its base,” Angelica continued. “The rain was getting lighter. Eye of the storm. At the base of the hill, sometime that night, I started to see flashes. Rescuers. I could see them moving, maybe walking. I imagined them digging people out, coming to find me. My eyes were wet, my face was wet, it was hard to see, but I would not take my eyes off the lights. I knew that Datu was with them, and bringing help to me.”
Angelica’s sake cup was empty and small, but she held it close to her face, as if she could hide behind it.
“They were not flashlights,” she said, finally. “The sun rose and I heard nothing, saw nothing. The typhoon had worsened again. We were not yet through it. Night came a second time. I was half-buried, numb, cold, and beyond scared. I did not want to live.”
When she stopped again, Sayoko spoke. “Hiro, please, fill her cup.”
“Not yet,” Angelica said. “There isn’t much more to say. I’m not a storyteller.”
“We are all storytellers,” Sayoko said, and the look in her eyes, of such intensity and shared sorrow, made it hard for Angelica to speak. If it was hard to see malice in another’s gaze it was equally hard to see compassion. She did not feel she deserved it.
Angelica said, “The second night, I saw the lights again. I watched them glow and move but never get closer. And I realized—” she tried to sound composed but her voice wasn’t cooperating—“they were only fireflies in the distant fields.”
Sayoko whispered, “He did not come back.”
“Not quickly.”
“He had reasons, I imagine.” Their voices stayed conspiratorially hushed.
“He did not need reasons,” Angelica whispered, “because he saw it differently. He has always seen things differently. Perhaps he was confused by my location. Perhaps he begged them to look for my parents instead. In his position I might’ve done the same.”
“Of course,” Sayoko whispered.
“But he did come back, finally, and he helped save my life.”
“This you both agree upon?”
“That, and nothing else.” There was no point in explaining the rest, the news she had just received from Datu himself. There was no easy way to explain that you could survive something together and not be stronger because of it, or that you could break a bond that tradition said would never be broken. If he did not believe in utang na loob he did not believe in anything. He had managed to travel farther than any Pinoy she’d ever known. He had left his people and his culture behind, altogether.
“But the hardest part,” Angelica said, holding her head higher, “was that my mind kept wanting to see those sparks as flashlights, even on the second and third nights. My mind played tricks. I had to close my eyes.
“It’s very hard to force your eyes shut when you’re thinking that at any minute you’ll see a person, or a lantern, or anything that could be there but isn’t coming. I had to say, no, you must stop looking. You must stop expecting. No one is coming. You must accept it.”
Angelica stopped. Sayoko and Hiro seemed to be waiting for more, but there was no more, except to say quickly, “On the third day, after the storm had passed, in the afternoon, Datu finally directed the rescuers to me and I was dug out. I still had a brother, but I never really had a family again.”
Sayoko nodded slowly several times, as if she were remembering the storm and the loss, too. Angelica was grateful for the silence that followed, preferring it to empty words of consolation.
After a moment, Angelica gestured to Sayoko’s scrapbook and the other photos next to it, including several unframed prints.
“Is that you?” she asked, studying the picture of a young woman, dark-haired, narrow-waisted, in a formal kimono, next to a Caucasian man in a military uniform. Occupation era.
Sayoko grunted softly. “Yes.”
“And the man?”
“One of the decent ones, but not right for me,” she said.
Angelica did not want to use the wrong word: boyfriend, date?
“Someone you cared for?”
“How could I have cared for any of them, by then?”
Angelica didn’t know how to interpret that, or how to respond.
“Did you marry soon after the war?” She had seen the framed oval wedding portrait hanging in Itou’s bedroom. It was in color, but had that pastel-tinted look of a black and white photograph touched up to emphasize rosy lips and cheeks, the baby blue of the studio backdrop. In it, Itou’s parents were wearing formal kimonos, and Sayoko’s dark glossy hair was piled atop her head, in traditional style. It could’ve been taken anytime: a century ago or yesterday.
“Not until almost 1961. And then my son was born.”
“You remained a bachelorette a long time.”
“There were many of us, and not enough of them. And to find someone who did not look too closely or make too many demands: even harder.”
“Was Itou-san’s father a good man?”
“He was always the last man to leave the office. If that makes a man good, he was very good. He was the one who requested when we married: say you are thirty-two, not forty-two. Let people assume you were a child during the war. Fewer questions. No one’s business.”
It made sense to Angelica. Then as now: it was often safer when others knew less. “Middle-aged, but you managed to bear a child.”
Sayoko shook her head, reliving the surprise. “And not only middle-aged, but far from the picture of perfect health. When I was first married, I had miscarriages, but my husband wanted to keep trying. I can understand the pain that women are going through now, struggling to make the babies that their husbands want so badly.”
“Well, the women generally want them, too.”
“It depends on the circumstances,” she said. “I don’t think my mother wanted to have me, but she was glad later. I tried to be glad each time my sons were born, but it wasn’t so easy.”
Sons? But Angelica waited for her to explain.
“When I asked to name my second son Ryo, because I wanted to let that name live again, my husband wrote out the kanji, and I let him. Lightness, he wrote, without even pausing. Not Forgiveness. As if he knew one could not expect a child to bear such a name. It was a better choice. My husband wasn’t wrong about everything.”
Sayoko poured sake into all three cups and handed one to Hiro. When she bowed her head slightly, he bowed in response, lifting the cup to his mouth. Angelica watched, fascinated. But he didn’t drink. As she had expected, he couldn’t.
Sayoko was watching closely, too. She chuckled now, girlishly. “I thought you’d do that.”
Hiro’s chin dropped down into his chest, a gesture of embarrassment. He lowered his arm, the cup still cradled in his palm.
“How did you know he’d do that?” Angelica asked.
“It’s what we girls did. We were supposed to make the men feel like they were drinking in company, when of course they weren’t. There wasn’t enough liquor to go around. But if we pretended to sip, or even just held a cup delicately in one palm, like so, they drank more, and were more satisfied with our services.”
It finally dawned on Angelica. “You were a geisha?”
“No, Anji-chan,” Sayoko said. “The geisha are artists. We were only slaves.”
18 Sayoko
Grandmother had died the winter before, and Daisuke two years before that. I visited Lee Kuan Chien only rarely, but I did visit him. He was right to think we would’ve been a good pair. I was no less strange than he was. I, too, was a loner
who left my hut only when necessary, relying on my feeble gardening skills, eggs from a small gaggle of geese, and the charity of a few distant cousins who kept me provisioned with rice and millet.
“I’ve come to tell you because I think you have a right to know,” I said, interrupting his early dinner.
“I was asked to report to the police station about a possible job. I’ve been offered paid work.”
His chopsticks clattered to the floor.
“By whom?”
“The government.”
I hurried to find him another pair of chopsticks before the food went cold.
“They’re looking for nurses,” I said.
“You don’t know anything about medicine.”
“I’m a quick learner.”
“Are you? Did you learn where they’ll be sending you? Under what conditions? There’s a war going on. If a bullet or bomb doesn’t get you, the unsanitary conditions will.”
But I hadn’t expected him to understand.
My father had been a traveler. My mother would’ve had a restless spirit, too, if she’d lived longer. She left to join the road crew fearlessly enough. I had traveled all the way to Tokyo, and though that trip left me unhappy, I had not been afraid to make it. This opportunity was better than mere travel. It was work, and I had been approached specifically, as if the authorities recognized the value of my skills or my personality. I had not been wanted or needed for anything for as long as I could remember. I was thrilled to be recruited. I scarcely recall the faces of the men who lured me with their lies, and maybe that’s because I was so nervous I kept my eyes on my toes, groveling, even as they praised my Japanese speaking ability, my youth, my physical health. I was so nervous about how they would judge me that it did not occur to me that I should be judging them.
I think we’re going to Taipei, I told Lee Kuan Chien, naming the only Taiwanese city I had ever visited.
Lee Kuan Chien stood up and shuffled toward the back of the house. Taipei, he muttered, from the dark.
Why did I even pretend? They had told me nothing, least of all the truth.
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