“I don’t know. Troubles at work.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me? Why don’t you talk to me? You used to talk to me.”
“I don’t know … please come home. I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.”
“Well … OK. I’ll be home after work tonight. And Hiroshi?”
“What?”
“I can’t go on with you if you’re going to yell and throw things around. You understand that, don’t you? And if you have problems, you have to tell me about them. That’s the kind of marriage I want.”
“OK. See you tonight.”
“I’m home. Hiroshi! Why are you back so early?”
“…”
“Oh no. Not this again. I have some good news tonight and I want you to listen.”
“What is it?”
“I finally got promoted! My boss says I’m doing great work and I’m going to be at the head office starting next month!”
“…”
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
“I guess you’ll be home less than ever now.”
“What do you mean?”
“No dinner, no children, you hardly even have time to clean. Look at this place!”
“But both of us are working hard at jobs we like. We don’t have much time to ourselves, but that’s natural at the beginning. We’ll have time later on—”
“Huh! Do you want to know what MY day was like? Because I have some news too.”
“What is it?”
“I almost lost my job! I got a warning from the boss!”
“Oh, Hiroshi. How awful for you.”
“He said I was too short-tempered with the staff. Of course I’m short-tempered! I work so much, I hardly have time to breathe, and then when I do get home …”
“What? When you do get home, what?”
“My wife isn’t there! Or if she is, she just feeds me on crap! Never does anything I say! Always prancing around bragging about her wonderful job!”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I’ll show you how serious I am!”
“Hiroshi! What are you doing! Stop it! Stop breaking things!”
“…”
“If you don’t stop …”
“…”
“Oh! Look what you did! Smashed my very favorite coffee mug! Don’t you remember buying this for me? Okay, that’s all. Let me out. Get out of my way!”
Yuko turns the key in the lock of her apartment door. For a month she has been happy on her own, self-contained, and busy at her work. She often wonders about Hiroshi, because she genuinely loves him. But when he stopped talking to her, when he started to say mean things and break her treasured objects, she had no choice but to leave. Still, she misses him as he used to be, misses their companionship. What caused him to change so drastically?
She lets herself in and turns on the lights. She puts down her things and, going into the little kitchen, puts some water in the electric kettle for a cup of coffee. As usual, she feels a twinge of pain at the thought that her favorite red coffee mug is no more. While waiting for the water to boil, she moves around the kitchen, washing her hands and tidying up. She makes a cup of tea in her second-favorite mug and carries it into the living room, thinking to turn on the TV to catch the news.
That’s when she sees it. A face looking in from the balcony. Low down, as though the person is sitting on the concrete just outside the glass sliding door.
With a frisson of horror, Yuko moves toward her bag and her phone. I have to call the police.
But wait. Could that be … Hiroshi? It is. She sinks down onto the sofa, her legs weak with reaction and relief. She looks at his face—it’s tear-stained. So he was crying in the train, she thinks. But how did he get here? How did he know where I was?
These thoughts are a little disturbing, but it is her husband, the man she loves, on the other side of the glass. She approaches the sliding door, unlocks it, and opens it a crack. There is still a locked screen door between them. She sits down on the floor inside the door, just a few inches from him. “What are you doing here?”
“Please don’t be angry. I saw you getting off the train, and I followed you.”
“I saw you in the train.”
“Why didn’t you say something? I would have, if I’d seen you.”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m still angry with you. You behaved so badly the last few months we were together. Maybe I was a little scared too.”
He looks down. “I’ve missed you so much, Yuko.”
“Well, I haven’t missed you. Not the way you were then.”
A couple of minutes of silence falls, and she can hear him sniffling. People say women are weak, but it’s men who are weak. We’re the strong ones really. “Hiroshi. What changed? How come everything was so good for a while and then it all went so wrong? I don’t think I changed—but you did. Why?”
He gulps, and she senses that he is getting up his courage. Finally he murmurs, “I got a letter from my dad. He was asking when the grandchildren would be coming along. He said a woman who didn’t have children was worth nothing. He said all kinds of awful things about you.”
“Oh, Hiroshi.”
“I hated him—but I hated you too. I thought in many ways he was right. My mother never took an outside job. She waited on us hand and foot, cooked every day, raised us kids, was always there. I got to thinking how different our married life was—yours and mine.”
His voice is hesitant, and she knows he is speaking from the heart. She lets out a deep breath. She hasn’t heard this candid, sweet voice of his for months. In reply, she chooses her words carefully.
“I see … and, so, Hiroshi, do you think your parents are happy? Do you think your mother is happy? Has she had a good life?”
He doesn’t reply.
“Do you think your parents have a better marriage than we do?”
Still no reply, but she can hear him crying.
“When we were students together, you always said how happy you were to be able to speak your mind and communicate freely at last. I guess you didn’t have much of that when you were living at home.”
He nods, and wipes his eyes with his sleeve.
She feels her own eyes filling with tears. “So what we had was better. It was. Say it.”
“What we had was better.”
She lets out another long breath. He continues, spilling out the words.
“It was my job, too. Suddenly it all seemed overwhelming. After student life, it was so different. Pressure, responsibilities. I couldn’t handle it.”
“Well, but you never told me you were having trouble. I could have helped you.”
“I guess so. But you know, my dad, he never talked, never complained …”
“As far as you know. You didn’t see their whole relationship, only what a child sees. Hiroshi, we have to grow up now. We have to figure out how our lives will be. We can’t take our parents as our models. We have to do it ourselves. Decide what we want.”
“Well … do you want kids?”
“Eventually, of course! But I just want a little time to myself, you know, to have my job and see if I could be a success at it.”
“How’s it going these days?”
“It’s fine. But I’ve had to get used to late nights, I’m usually not home so early.”
“Me neither,” he responds with a little sound that is like a laugh. “I happened to have the day off today because there was a funeral for one of the supervisors.”
“So that’s why you were riding the train and watching our wedding video over and over?”
“You saw that? Yuko … I’ve made such a mess of things. What can I do to fix them? Oh—one thing I can do. Here.” He pulls a small package wrapped in brown paper from a satchel beside him, and places it on the door frame. “Will you take it?”
She looks at the irregular package, which is quite crushed. It must have been in the bag for a long time. She thinks very hard for a moment.
He looks ashamed.
“But I’d like to see you again. We need to talk. Can you come to the Star Café on Sunday? The one near our old apartment?”
“Sunday? That’s our second wedding anniversary.”
“Yes, it is. I’ll meet you there. Say eleven o’clock.”
He gets up and puts the satchel over his shoulder. “I’ll go now.”
She gets up too, so they are standing face to face, looking at each other through the glass. “How did you get up to the balcony, anyway?”
“Oh, I climbed up. It isn’t really that hard.” They both giggle a little. Then he goes to the balcony and cautiously eases himself over the edge, and disappears.
Yuko waits for the sounds of his departure to die away. Then she unlocks the screen and picks up the little package. She locks both doors again—is it really so easy to climb onto the balcony? That’s unsettling—and unwraps the package as she walks toward the kitchen.
In her hand is a red coffee mug, the twin of the one that was broken.
Showa Girl
A sharp bird call scattered Misako’s dream. A moment later, her eyes popped open in response to the pressure of daylight. She knew she couldn’t stay in her snug futon any longer. The futon next to hers was empty, and the muted sound of Mother preparing breakfast came to her ears, as the rich salty scent of miso soup drifted to her nose.
Mother’s voice, faint through two sets of paper doors, called her to get up. She was expected to help in the kitchen. Misako threw the quilt back and, shivering, stepped out of her night kimono and folded it sketchily, placing it on her little bran-filled pillow. At the same moment she remembered her dream—something about a fight with the next-door children—and shook her head vigorously to dispel it, her straight black hair flying around her face like a little fan. Quickly she found her clothes and pulled them on, then slid open the door and ran barefoot into the outer room. With a brief “good morning” to Mother standing at the stove, Misako stepped down to the earthen floor of the kitchen, maneuvered her feet into wooden clogs, and went out into the sunshine to wash her face. The basin of water stood on the wellhead as usual, big puffy clouds reflected in its surface. As she reached blindly for the hanging towel, face dripping, gasping with cold, she could smell plum blossom. It was March, and today was the last day of the school year.
Father came clumping into the yard. He was big and rugged, with a calm, ugly face. He had been preparing for the rice planting, still a month away. He swept his daughter up and carried her back into the kitchen. She giggled, looking straight down into the soup pot from the impossible height of his warm homespun shoulder. When she had slithered down to the floor again, Mother frowned at her absently through a cloud of steam. “Go and wake up Teacher, he can’t be late for school, today of all days.”
Misako shuffled out of her clogs, climbed up to the living area floor, and knelt and reached down, carefully lining up the clogs before scampering off down the corridor. She might be only six years old, but she knew what her mother meant. No one could be late on the last day, especially a teacher. She felt a child’s precarious self-importance: the schoolteacher lived right in her house! She slid the door open a crack and peeped in with bright eyes. “Time to get up!” she cried. The mound of quilt on the floor twitched suddenly, almost as if her voice had come into his dream like the song of a bird. The thought made her giggle, and then his tousled head appeared and she tiptoed rapidly away, half exhilarated and half afraid.
A few minutes later, as she helped her mother set the table, Teacher came in and, as usual, bowed slightly and greeted the parents formally before settling in his place, crossing his legs with rough adolescent movements. He was a very young teacher, and Misako thought him unbearably handsome, with his level brow and beautifully shaped lips. Her mother was filling bowls with a wooden paddle from the steaming iron pot, mounding the rice and fluffing it up just so, and Misako passed the bowls around the table. When all were served with soup and rice, they paused for a word of thanks before beginning the meal. Father talked to Teacher, and although Misako tried to listen, she was distracted by her mother’s muted directions—pass your father the pickles; get Teacher’s bowl, he wants a refill—and in any case, she could hardly understand a word of the talk. One word, though, kept recurring: “Manchuria.” She wondered what it meant.
Teacher finished his breakfast with a word of thanks, and returned to his room, emerging a moment later wearing his jacket and carrying his book bag. Misako glanced at him as she carried dirty dishes carefully into the kitchen. She wished she were old enough to go to school, so she could be in his class and see him more than just a few minutes each morning and evening. He stepped into his shoes and opened the front door, murmuring the customary words.
“I’m going, and I’ll come back.”
The mother raised her eyes from the washing bucket to answer him, “Please go and come back.” Then, as the door closed, she admonished Misako, “Go and get the rest of the dishes! I want you to finish this job. I have to change my clothes.”
Misako took over her mother’s task, finally struggling out the door with the wash water, which she dumped on the stone flags outside. She paused, stretching her back in unconscious imitation of Mother, who would be busy in the vegetable patch this morning, clearing out the rest of the cabbages and starting the work of preparing the land for the summer vegetables. Misako would be helping, carrying the cabbages, fetching the tools her mother wanted. She looked up at the spring sky with its white clouds like saturated sponges. Her dream came back to her, and she wondered again why the children next door were always bullying and teasing her, calling her “Princess” and other sarcastic names until she cried.
Her mother’s voice cut through her musings, and she ran out to the vegetable patch in front of the house.
Misako flung the lightweight quilt off. The summer sun, already high in the sky, illuminated the plump, fine-skinned fourteen-year-old as she hurried to dress. The school term was ending, and she had a record of perfect attendance which was her pride and joy. But she had a lot to do before she could hop on her bicycle and pedal off to the middle school.
Stepping into wooden clogs in the kitchen, she went out into the sunshine to wash her face and draw another basin of water for the next person. No time now to look up at the clouds or listen for birdsong. Back inside, she put water on the stove to heat for soup, fetched pickles from the pickle bed in its brown ceramic pot, and set the rice mixed with millet, soaked overnight, on another stove burner to cook, all with smooth, practiced movements.
She set the table for two. As always, this gave her a pang. Father had passed away just a few months earlier, and she missed his rugged love. Also, Teacher was not there. Before her eighth birthday, he had disappeared from the house. Her father had told her that Teacher had gone to Manchuria to help set up a school in the new Japanese colony. Then the war had come, and since then, no one had heard a thing. Misako heard people say he must be dead. She and her mother went on with the housework together. Their experience was not unusual—every house in the village was short of able-bodied men. The rapid changes of the years had dazed them all.
She clearly remembered the mustering of the local boys as they boarded buses to be taken to the train station and then off to war. And their mothers, dressed in their best with blinding white aprons, waving little Rising Sun flags distributed by the government, the fluttering red and white hiding the faces fighting back tears. The buses departed, and the women dispersed to their homes, closing the doors so they could be alone with their grief and anxiety. The radios blasted out martial music and barked reports of victory. Sometimes the air was full of the drone of small airplanes taking off from the airstrip in the next town.
And then, sudden silence.
The kind of silence that follows an enormous noise.
Misako didn’t live close enough to hear the two giant detonations that ende
d the war, but she heard the silence. People discussed Japan’s surrender in muted tones. There were muttered lamentations about the awful waste of lives and resources, and muttered speculation—what would happen to them now? She herself hoped that the postwar era would include more food. They had more food here in the countryside than people in the towns did, but still, delicious treats hardly ever came her way.
Breakfast over, Misako gathered her school books, pencil and notebook, and rushed out the door with a hurried “I’m going, I’ll be back.” Her mother, slower now, answered in the usual way as she washed the breakfast dishes.
As she cycled through the cool morning, Misako reflected that one at least of her childhood mysteries had been solved. Two years before, upon entering middle school, the office lady had gone over some official papers with her. She had peeked at them and discovered, beside her name, the word “Adopted.” That day, her anxiety had nothing to do with the hunger and sadness which increased with each passing month of war. She went to her mother for an explanation. Tearfully, the mother revealed what she had hidden from her daughter for so many years. Misako had been born in the house next door, the youngest of five children. At the time of her birth, her biological mother had been ill, and had asked her sister, married, childless, and living next door, to care for the child. By the time the illness had passed, the sister was so attached to little Misako that an adoption was arranged. Misako’s adoptive mother and father were happy to have her, even if she was a girl; they could always find someone’s younger son to marry her and take on the house and family name. That was the pattern, as Misako had heard time and again. The eldest son inherited the house, while the younger sons went off to find some other house to inherit by marrying the eldest girl from a family with daughters. Their own family had been without sons for almost a century; her adoptive father had married into the family as well. Child trading and marital machinations among the relatives’ houses in the village had gone on constantly as long as anyone could remember. The houses were the important thing, the continuity of inheritance.
The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories Page 9