The Good Shufu

by Tracy Slater

  “Huh.”

  “I don’t really mind, actually. Strange as that sounds. I feel like it’s just something I do a few times a week out of respect to Toru’s father. Like it’s his culture, so this is what I do to respect him in it.”

  “Yeah . . . ,” my brother said. “I don’t really see you hopping up and serving and doing the dishes all by yourself for some American guy. But still.” He paused. “It doesn’t bother you? You? To assume such a traditional role?”

  “That’s just it,” I admitted, trying to arrange more neatly the items I had already washed, now piled at haphazard angles in the drying rack. “It feels almost like an act, just a role I’m playing. Like this isn’t my culture, it’s just something I pretend at.”

  “But it is your family, right?”

  I couldn’t explain it to my brother, nor to myself for that matter. But Japan remained so opaque to me, its rhythms and customs so different that playing a traditional “housewife” role here felt unthreatening. Especially since I still had access to a whole other half of my life—the American half—that bore no resemblance to my identity in Osaka.

  “Well,” my brother grumbled before he got off the phone, “I just don’t get it.” Then he repeated, “I just don’t see you jumping up and serving some American dude.”

  “Neither do I,” I admitted.

  But after we hung up, I wasn’t sure what I had told Scott was entirely true, at least not anymore. Ending up in a life with Toru that seemed so . . . so retro, where he gave me money because I couldn’t communicate with bank tellers, where he handled all the logistics of our existence while I played housewife, had made me reconsider what it meant to be independent. Sometimes, I was learning, what mattered most wasn’t the category of our roles, or even the limitations we confront and the sacrifices we make, but whether we’ve chosen these roles or sacrifices and have some way to shape them ourselves, whether we’ve been given alternatives and still found a way to make the more traditional scenario fit us. Instead of always needing to be a completely autonomous woman in total control, maybe I could even be a housewife, at least part-time—as long as I chose that existence and could mold it as my own. As long as I could find a way out if I needed one.

  Later, my stepsister called. I replayed the night’s events for her. “Who are you?” she asked, laughing.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME I organized my first Four Stories event in Tokyo, I’d started believing that I could build a worthwhile life—even one I could be proud of—that didn’t perfectly mimic my long-held image of success. But I was still troubled by that malingering question, When will I fall in love with Japan the way I’ve fallen in love with Toru? After all, I loved Boston. Wouldn’t I need to love Osaka before I could finally let go of my regrets about the faraway life I’d chosen?

  Sitting on the bullet train to Tokyo, I was surrounded by salarymen eating bento lunch boxes, while outside my window, Osaka streamed into Kyoto, then Maibara, then Nagoya, our pace thrilling as we sliced through landscapes blurred with speed. Electric poles along the track morphed into solid streams of white against green rice paddies spread like shagged quilts.

  I thought about one flip side of expat life: how easy it could be to impact Japan’s small foreign scene. After one of my first Four Stories a few months earlier in Osaka, the Japan Times, the country’s largest English newspaper, ran a piece about the series on the front page of their national section. The editor, an Osaka-based American married to a Japanese woman, had been easy to contact and kindly receptive to stopping by one of the events, and a few months later, he agreed to be one of my future readers. For the Tokyo evening, I’d been contacted by an editor at another major English paper, the Daily Yomiuri.

  The authors I’d found for the Tokyo event tended to publish with smaller, more regional presses than many of the writers at Four Stories Boston. But they were just as gracious and eager, in some ways more so because nothing like Four Stories existed in East Asia. They were also more distinctive because Japan had so few authors publishing in English. As a foreigner here, it wasn’t unusual to track down another expat and just e-mail him or her (whereas in the U.S., it could seem a bit off just to e-mail one of the country’s most widely published writers and ask if they’d like to read, for free, at your local literary event). Frequently, you found friends in common.

  In Tokyo, I was staying with my new friend Ariel, another American writer who was married to a Japanese dentist. I’d met her through the foreign-wife grapevine, easy to navigate, especially compared to the much larger community of white men married to local women. Ariel had long blond hair—mussed and a little wild—and an offbeat fashion sense. She reminded me of Botticelli’s Venus emerging from a shell in frayed jeans and cowboy boots. Like I did, she made a living as a freelance writer and editor, although she worked on textbooks for English as a foreign language. Ariel took to the expatriate life more easily than I, had sought it out when she went to South Africa for graduate school, but she was liberal and funny, funky and kind, and like Jodi and Jessica, a woman with whom I knew I could build a lasting friendship.

  My other new friend, Leza—a Jewish vegetarian from Berkeley, married to a Japanese man, and the owner of a Tokyo-based yoga studio—was going to read at the event. She had published a number of books through small independent co-ops and presses, and had won a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She’d also been the longtime editor of author and film critic Donald Richie. He wasn’t well-known outside of the circle of East Asian scholars, but he presided over the Japanophile literary and academic scene like Oscar Wilde, Michel Foucault, and Lafcadio Hearn rolled into one. Leza had convinced Richie to read along with her at Four Stories Tokyo opening night.

  Leza also introduced me to the venue I’d found, called the Pink Cow. The restaurant was popular with the Western expat crowd and owned by a Californian, named Traci. She’d been in Japan for decades, and her hair was even longer, blonder, and more tousled than Ariel’s. Traci bopped from the bar to the restaurant floor throughout the event, passing out drinks, flinging Japanese here, English there, like a boisterous bilingual surfer girl who had washed up in downtown Tokyo. That night, I read something I’d researched and written about a prison reform activist from America named Stephen Donaldson, who in the 1970s was the first man raped in a U.S. prison to speak publicly about sexual violence among male inmates. It was edgy, but it apparently appealed deeply to Traci, who every once in a while during breaks in the readings would scream across the floor to me, “Oh, my gaaad! I feel like we are sisters! Like spiritual sisters or something! With the same name!” Sometimes she followed up with a bear hug.

  The crowd in Tokyo was, not surprisingly, smaller than the ones in Boston, but opening night drew about sixty people, and I was pleased. Among both the attendees and readers, Donald Richie fascinated me most. He was in his early eighties, and he wore a dark suit and round black-rimmed glasses and had thinning gray hair whose wisps strained to escape a light pomading of his head. He read a passage from his classic travel book The Inland Sea, contrasting Japan and the West. When Richie smiled, he revealed a line of slightly crooked teeth. Altogether, he emitted an air both erudite and mischievous.

  Richie had arrived in Japan as part of the U.S. occupation forces after the war, and except for brief trips back to the U.S., he’d never really left. I couldn’t get over that he’d lived here for more than half a century. He must really love the place, I thought.

  After the readings, when we were mingling and drinking, I put my burning question to him. “When did you actually start to love Japan?” I waited a beat, then said, “I mean, how long did it take after you arrived to really feel like you fell in love with the country?”

  “My dear,” Richie drawled, looking down at me from behind his owlish glasses, “no one loves Japan.” He threw his arm out as if for dramatic effect. “It’s just that the country is so endless
ly fascinating. That is why we stay.” His voice sounded gravelly and grand, like an Oxford don addressing a toddler.

  I felt the shock of one who has spent hours searching for an object, only to realize she was holding it in her pocket the entire time. No one loves Japan! His words upticked gleefully in my head. Riding back to Osaka the next day on the bullet train, I continued to turn Richie’s proclamation over in my mind. Mount Fuji peaked in the distance on the right, white-capped, immortal. Nagoya, Maibara, Kyoto. The country no longer felt so insurmountable, and relief rushed through me as the ground outside flew by. I may never love Japan, just as I had always expected—and feared. But, apparently, I didn’t need to.

  • • •

  I RETURNED HOME for the fall. In October, Toru came to Boston for two weeks, bringing with him his father, Michiko-san, Hamatani-san, Kei, and her husband. Our families together, we provided my mother with her first chance to find her own unfettered joy in my marriage to a Japanese man: we agreed to have a wedding blessing at Temple Israel, complete with a bimah (a raised platform where the Torah is read), a chuppah (the makeshift structure under which a betrothed Jewish couple stands), and Rabbi Friedman.

  Temple Israel was Reformed, the most liberal strain of Judaism, and Rabbi Friedman was known to perform weddings for gay couples, rendering moot one of my main objections to the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, its homophobia. Besides the religions’ historical intolerance of homosexuality, I also disdained both their bibles’ attitudes toward women. But I’d already wed a man in whose language “husband”—shujin—technically meant “master,” so now was no time to take a symbolic stand on gender in the Old Testament.

  In preparation for Toru’s presentation at the temple, that summer, while we were still in Osaka, my mother had mailed him a collection of books. One was titled What Is a Jew? while another covered “four thousand years of Jewish history” and spanned almost six-hundred-fifty pages. Opening the box she’d sent, we found one of her yellow sticky notes embossed at the top with her usual monogrammed script, now bearing her name from her second marriage, FROM THE DESK OF CHARLOTTE ROSEN, and below that, a large smiley face she’d penned along with an encouraging “Enjoy!” Although her enthusiasm was sweet, neither one of us could help snickering over the title of the first book. Then we took the whole stack and stuffed it at the back of a bookshelf.

  Before he even got to Boston, though, Toru charmed my mother by saying he wanted to wear a yarmulke (“one of those little Jewish hats”) at the temple. Privately, he joked to me that he was planning on perching it sideways in homage to a rapper’s cap, but my mother thrilled to his choice of headgear. “You know,” she said to me later, after I’d arrived home in mid-August, her voice hushed with gravity, “he’s doing this out of respect to me.” Then she nodded, her blond hairdo dipping in her own apparent homage to Toru’s Confucian values.

  That fall in Boston felt golden. I decided not to teach at the prison, and I scheduled all my half-semester MBA writing seminars for the two months before Toru and his family would arrive. Otherwise, I spent the semester on some small freelance projects.

  Back in my South End studio, I hung up copies of old pictures I had found at Otosan’s apartment along with more recent photos: Toru as a baby in his kimono-clad grandfather’s arms, the garden in the background faded around the edges from age; a series of before-and-after snapshots Toru and I had taken on the winter day we were legally married at the Osaka Central Ward Office, our cheeks stung with cold, me in a white faux-fur hat, Toru in a knit ski cap, in the last picture his mouth open and eyes widened in mock horror; some old photos of Toru and his sister as toddlers at the beach, Kei’s little red bikini askew, Toru’s chest puffed out in older-brother pride. His mother was beautiful in her sunglasses, his father standing in the water with a touch of Elvis Presley in the dark sweep of his hair.

  At home, I’d sit in bed leisurely reading a novel or Vogue or watching TV, newly enamored of Gossip Girl and Criminal Minds, and then I’d turn my head and see the pictures of Toru and his family, the roots of my Osaka life, and I felt full. Toru and I talked on our usual three-times-a-day schedule. Although frequently the conversations involved lists of what he’d eaten for lunch or dinner, our brief connections built a structure of intimacy around my independent Boston existence. I wondered sometimes whether I should be more worried about the banality of these discussions, whether their lack of intellectual banter meant something serious, but then I’d tuck these thoughts away behind the warmth I felt at knowing for certain that my solitary days would always be enclosed by the reliability of his three calls.

  I spent nonteaching days at various cafés in Central Square, sipping spicy chai or peppermint tea and reading the New York Times, then grading assignments, the leaves turning yellow along Mass Ave. At night I’d go out to dinner with friends: my favorite linguini with Seth and Robert at the Franklin Café, garlicky grilled chicken salad with lime-cilantro dressing at the Miracle of Science with Jenna and Megan or Stacey, all the foods and people I missed in Japan.

  On Saturdays, I’d make no plans and spend the day shopping or just walking along Newbury Street, a geography I knew perfectly. International students from nearby colleges milled around me wearing designer clothes, hopping out of sports cars, calling to one another from their early alfresco cocktail hours on restaurant terraces. Tourists loitered near sidewalk vendors with bad hair selling art. Teenagers in cutoffs and flip-flops walked and squawked on cell phones. We were all languid, unhurried under a crisp blue sky, watching one another lazily as the sun bounced off smooth store windows. I wandered in and out of boutiques, picking up knickknacks or clothing I knew would fit, turning each item over in my hands while I listened to the voices around me: the novelty of conversations I could understand completely.

  At Crate and Barrel, I found ceramic rice bowls in the Asian food and cookbook section. They were slightly larger than traditional Japanese ones and embossed in a modern black-and-white cherry-blossom pattern. I brought four to the register and asked the twenty-something clerk to wrap them carefully. “I live overseas and need to take these back in my luggage,” I explained.

  “Cool, where?”

  “Oh, in Japan, actually. My husband is from there.”

  “Oh, wow, cool!” the clerk enthused, and I felt proud and more smug than I knew was seemly with my veneer of multiculturalism.

  • • •

  THE WEEK BEFORE Toru arrived, I turned forty. My mother and stepfather took me out to dinner at an expensive restaurant in Back Bay with perfectly al dente pasta, a wine list I couldn’t read, and paper-thin filets of veal. In no uncertain terms, my mother warned me that my idea of wearing a black dress to the wedding blessing was “unacceptable.”

  “But I always wear black when I dress up. And besides, this isn’t like a traditional wedding. And I am not wearing a white gown.” I staked my claim. “Toru and I can’t afford some expensive dress; that’s just not how we live,” I admonished, signaling to the waiter for another fifteen-dollar glass of malbec. “Plus, white’s the color they wear to funerals in Japan.” I had no idea whether this was still true, though I knew they used to wear white at traditional Shinto funerals. But I also knew my mother would have to back down at the threat of a cultural faux pas. (Eventually, I’d learn that most people in Japan wear black or dark colors to funerals today, just like we do.)

  A few days later, my mother took me shopping at Saks. Despite my snarkiness about the wedding industry, my mother seemed happy at the prospect of shopping for a dress with her daughter, her smile regal, her eyes rolling along with the saleswoman’s, all of which secretly I found touching. We finally both agreed on a little knee-length cream-colored cocktail dress with a black border cinching the waist, marked down to one hundred fifty dollars, so I could still maintain my opposition to the commercial rip-off of contemporary nuptial rituals.

  I’d also been playing phone tag with my sister
Lauren, which quickly devolved into a battle, waged over voice mail, about who was failing to call whom back in a timely manner. “Are you coming to the wedding blessing or not?” I said in a huff on her recording. “I really need to know soon, because we have reservations for dinner at L’Espalier afterward.”

  When we finally reached each other, we argued some more, rehashing a variation of the same fight we always had. Something was said about her not getting my voice mails and why I hadn’t just called back. Something else was said about her never, ever returning calls like a normal person. A surprising amount of energy was expended, on both ends, about the likelihood of Sprint’s voice mail system failing as well as the exact definition of the word “soon.”

  “Okay,” Lauren eventually said, the word floating through the night on a little jet stream of agitation, “I agree to take fifty percent culpability for the misunderstanding. . . . But now,” she added levelly, “I want you to take—to make very clear that you take—at least fifty percent culpability, too.”

  “Well, I take some responsibility, but fifty percent, no. Maybe forty percent. Maybe forty-five,” I counteroffered.

  “That’s not good enough. I want it understood—I want it very clearly agreed upon—that this is not my fault. I refuse to have this go down in the family narrative as one more time I screwed up.” Then for good measure, she added again, “I refuse that.”

  “Well, I refuse to be lumped in with the rest of the family. This is between you and me,” I added, feeling pleased at the simple calculus of my rejoinder, “and I don’t believe, if we’re going to define it precisely, that your stance is as logical, as reasonable, as mine.”

  Then I stopped. Replaying my words in my head, I realized why we always rehashed this argument: it was how we bonded. We listened to ourselves fight, secretly claiming points for the elegance of our barbs. As sisters from opposite ends of the family spectrum, never mind children of first- and second-generation Americans who strived to belong by attaining advanced degrees, we’d loved each other largely through the struggle to make meaning. What we really longed for was to reach precise designations upon which we could all agree. And because this had always been a losing battle, and because we knew this but couldn’t stop trying to deny its inevitability, we fought all the more furiously.