by Tracy Slater
I have no fixed answers, nor any firm plot beyond hopefully getting through my pregnancy, meeting our baby, and surviving childbirth without the epidural the Japanese prenatal nurse assures me they don’t use. “Ja, ganbatte, ne!” “So, just buck up, okay!” she tells me with a cheerful smile before she settles down to chastise me for all the weight I’ve gained. I don’t tell her that, according to my American pregnancy books, my size is right on track. Since my first appointment over the summer at the hospital where I’m to give birth, she has been fretting about my “fat.”
“Americans, you like juice! But you must stop drinking juice!” she’d commanded, even though Toru assured her that despite my nationality I wasn’t partial to the beverage. I was frequently too nauseated for anything but ice cubes. By August, the nurse had started reminding me of December’s culinary dangers. She looked at me with a mix of sternness and pleasure on her face when she enthused, “The holidays are coming up. So please don’t enjoy!” Although she speaks some English, Toru had to translate my explanation that I’m Jewish, so I don’t celebrate Christmas, nor do I tend to eat more in December. She’d stopped a moment when Toru tried to clarify this, asked some questions in Japanese about what Jewish meant and what our winter holiday was called. Toru attempted to explain Chanukah, though I added that, really, Chanukah was a holiday for children, and as an adult, I didn’t celebrate it anyway. Taking in this strange new information, the prenatal nurse paused a moment longer, tipping her round face in contemplation. Finally, she straightened and smiled brightly, eyeing me directly once more. “Well,” she said, “you’ll still probably be too fat in December!” Then she turned back to Toru with more admonishments for him to translate. He told me she suggested I weigh myself “one time every morning and one time every night,” so I don’t forget how fat I’m getting, and then, despite ourselves, he and I both burst into laughter.
Soon, although I’m at the doorstep of my sixth month, my neighbors begin to ask excitedly if it’s twins. One points to my belly, holding up two fingers, and I laugh and say no, lifting up just one. When the same neighbor, a mother with three children of her own, repeats this same question every time she sees me, I smile a little tighter. Does she think they’re going to suddenly discover a second fetus growing at twenty-four weeks into my pregnancy?
Another neighbor stops me at a little place around the corner from our apartment where I buy smoothies. She has an answer for my conundrum about my baby being simultaneously like I am—American—and from a foreign country. Instead of both, the child is apparently “hafu,” meaning “half.” Not both anything, not double, not even a whole, apparently, but half Japanese, as if no other half exists or needs be named. She points excitedly to my belly and tells the two cashiers that she is my neighbor, that my husband is Nihonjin, Japanese, and that the baby inside is hafu. The three of them coo and smile and chatter about how cute hafus are, reminding me I must bring the baby in after she’s born so they can see her. Meanwhile, at another café down the street, the cashier looks happily at my stomach and asks “Sugu?” “Isn’t the baby coming soon?”
But as long as the little one and I are healthy, I remain unconcerned about my weight gain. Beyond the birth itself, I’m still terrified of motherhood, even while I feel something miraculous is happening to me. It’s uncomfortable, scary sometimes—a lot of times—but I know now that this discomfort, this disorientation, this is life. Not a failure to plan. Not a mistake in decisions made or destinations chosen. Just the inevitable arrival hall where reality continually delivers us, again and again. If we’re lucky.
I spent so much of my early adulthood terrified of losing myself, grasping on to some illusion of having firm control over life, an unshakable plot. But I’m starting to realize—after having immersed myself so deeply in the quagmire of Japan, of Otosan’s illness and death, and of modern marriage—that you can’t properly find yourself if you haven’t let yourself get lost in the first place.
• • •
IN BED, I cup my bulging belly, shifting from my back, where I know I’m not supposed to rest for long (something about the fetus’s growth and the blood supply to the placenta, I’ve read). I stretch out beside Toru. He leans over to talk to the baby, whispering as he does every night in Japanese, saying who knows what. (Probably “Don’t listen to the foreigner,” I joke to my friends.) He puts his lips to my belly button and converses, as if it were a phone line to my uterus, some intergenerational portal connecting past to present to future. Then he lays his face against my abdomen and I feel the scratchy stubble of his chin on the surface of my skin, and then the baby kicks from inside, and he lifts his head up and smiles.
“Is it lovely?” he asks me, and the word sounds a little like “rubbery” from his accent, and it takes me a moment to understand what he means. “To feel the baby inside?” he says.
“Well, it’s actually a little odd,” I say. “But, yes, it’s very lovely.”
I think back to a night years earlier, when we’d lain together in bed just after we’d been married, before either birth or death had become such loaded or real topics to us. That night, Toru had been tipsy, tossing about in an uncharacteristic attempt to get comfortable. He’d just come home from an afterwork nomikai, a drinking party, a ubiquitous part of Japanese corporate culture that neither wives nor partners are invited to join.
Suddenly, he paused his quest for sleep’s perfect pose, raised his head to look at me, narrowed his eyes. Then he broached a grave issue: if I’d gargled that evening with antiseptic, another of Japan’s beloved health obsessions alongside keeping one’s belly warm.
“You must keep safe,” he told me, throwing his head back on the pillow when I’d admitted that, no, once again I hadn’t been able to toss the Betadine-like substance down my throat. “Then you’ll live to be a hundred and twenty,” he said, “like really old people in Okinawa.” He thought for a minute, started to hover toward sleep. “I’m younger than you,” he eventually mumbled, “and I’m Japanese, so I’ll live longer.”
“But I’m a woman, and women live longer than men.”
“But if we both live to be a hundred and twenty,” he’d said, his voice fading, “then I’ll still live longer than you, because you’ll be reaching a hundred and twenty before me.
“But that’s okay, that’s good,” he’d said, his voice a dream-filled mutter. “Because then, then I can send you,” he’d murmured softly, and fell fully into sleep.
Now, in bed and forty-six and pregnant, I remember this night while I stare at him, resting heavily on my elbow. He turns to lie peacefully on his back, his hand lingering on my stomach before he pulls it away and allows sleep to pull him gently under. This is a man who plans, without one doubt, to stay beside me always, I think, until he can help me through the hardest and most terrifying journey of all—the last arc into death. Then I know I really am home, at least in one of life’s most fundamental ways, even if I still don’t know exactly where I am or how to guarantee a home’s fixed location.
For just a second, I sense a faint, residual reluctance to admit I’ve proven both so dependent and such a cliché: a woman who has realized that “home” and “life” and “love” and “husband,” and now maybe “child,” too, all comprise each other; a woman who once gave up her own plans and world for a man. But in doing so, I grew a greater sense of rootedness, a new kind of faith in some fixed strength within my skin, an internal place of permanence even more personal, more mine, than any cartographic coordinate. Knowing this, a deeper truth dawns on me: of my incredible good fortune, despite all my foiled plans, to have spread my singular little arms across the globe, let go, and ended up holding such a cliché as my own.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to my family: to my parents and eldest sister, who were reluctant to have private conversations and memories aired publicly but still supported, with immense generosity, my writing of this book; to my broth
er Scott, who gave me endless encouragement; and to my middle sister Lauren, who never failed to welcome my own efforts to write, and whose prose—in its sheer beauty—will always awe me and give me something to aim for. Deepest thanks as well to the entire Hoshino clan, who welcomed me in and taught me not just about Japan but about what it means to be family.
Without my editor, Sara Minnich Blackburn, this book would not exist. Her insight, wisdom, support, and encouragement got me through the writing of this memoir, but it also gave me something hopeful to work toward during dark times, so I am profoundly grateful to her both as a writer and a person. I still can’t believe my luck that I got to work with her. I also feel lucky to have had the chance to work with my agent, Rachel Sussman—my literary hockey mom!—not just for how she helped me as a new author navigate the world of publishing but for our fun conversations along the way. Thanks in addition to the entire team at Putnam that helped make these words an actual book. Without Eve Bridburg, I never would have found Rachel. I also want to recognize Dorian Karchmar: I so appreciate your kindness and your advice about agents when I was looking for representation. In addition, I’m grateful to KJ Dell’Antonia from the New York Times blog Motherlode, who was the first to invite me to tell parts of this story publicly.
So many friends helped me with the writing of this book. Jennifer Ivers, Mark Kaufman, and Sari Boren were incredible editors as well as unspeakably generous readers, as were Megan Sullivan, Jessica Goodfellow Ueno, Jodi Harmon, Peter Kreig, Lisa Theisen, Colleen Shiels, Susan Blumberg-Kason, Paul Morrison, Mary Hillis, Zoe Jenkins, Sasti Lavinia, Tracy Nishizaka, and Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich from Grub Street Boston. Tim Huggins helped immeasurably not just as a friend but also with advice about publishing, publicity, and bookselling, as did Michael Lowenthal, Jennifer Haigh, Elyssa East, Kaitlin Solimine, Elizabeth Mckenzie, Elizabeth Searle, Don Lee, Bret Anthony Johnston, Ethan Gilsdorf, Leza Lowitz, Alison Lobron, Linda Schossberg, and Heidi Durrow.
I offer great thanks to the authors who have read over the years at Four Stories, not just for your generosity in sharing your work at the events but for all you’ve taught me about writing and reading narratives that transport. As a group, you’ve moved, inspired, and wowed me.
I’m also fortunate to have gotten great support from the instructors and students in my Mediabistro courses. Jill Rothenberg and Kelly McMasters, I don’t believe I could have written a successful proposal without your guidance! Megan Parks, Scott Rodbro, Robert Henderson, Karla Bruning, Marin Heinritz, John Dillon, Isabelle Marinov, Pete Evanow, and the rest of the Mediabistro crew, I’m so glad I got my start on this book with all of you.
Finally, I want to thank Toru, although in so many ways I don’t properly have the words to do so, and Elli, who gave me a happier ending than I ever dared imagine.
1 That the term shufu remains singular even when referring to a group reflects one more lesson I’d come to acquire: Japanese contains very few plural forms, as if no meaningful distinction exists between the individual and the communal.
2 Even today, this relative lack of women in Japan’s workforce persists. See for instance a recent Japan Times article on women after marriage, which reports that “74 percent of college-educated women [in Japan] quit their jobs voluntarily—more than double the rate in the United States (31 percent) and Germany (35 percent)” (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/04/21/commentary/saving-japan-promoting-womens-role-in-the-workforce-would-help/).
3 See the BBC News article “Faking It as a Priest in Japan,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6067002.stm for more.
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