KOUMI LINE
I would say O-Hatsu has seen more changes in her lifetime than I have. After all, she lived for most of the century when this country was changing faster than it ever had before. Even so, I have a feeling that the inside of her head has remained much the same as when she was a girl. By “the inside of her head” I mean the way she sees the world around her—the language she uses to make sense of it. In my case, the very way I looked at the world and the words I used to understand it had altogether changed.
O-Hatsu has always been good to me, just as she was good to my mother. So for the past few years I’ve made a point of paying her a visit at New Year’s. I always think it might be the last time I’ll set eyes on her, on her weather-beaten, wrinkled face. She still lives in the same place where my mother’s parents’ house once was. But the house I knew as a child, with its thatched roof, was torn down decades ago, and even the two-story house that replaced it is gone. The present building, put up by O-Hatsu’s grandchildren a year or so ago, is utterly modern, with radiant floor heating and various other amenities. When I go to visit, she’s usually sitting on the sofa in the warm living room, watching television and nibbling on some Pockys, those chocolate-coated sticks. With a knitted woolen cap on her head, she sits there with her legs folded under her as though she were on a tatami mat rather than a sofa.
“Auntie!” I call out—loudly, since her hearing isn’t good. She turns around and sees me standing there.
“Well, if it isn’t Fumiko,” she says.
The voice belongs to someone who knew me as a child; someone who hasn’t changed much at all since then. More even than Mount Asama or the Chikuma River, the sound of that voice—the accent the same as ever—is a direct link to my past. But it also reminds me how much I’ve changed.
Invariably, it takes me back to those winter nights fifty years ago.
I can hear O-Hatsu and my mother talking in low voices as they sit sipping tea by the hearth. I can also hear the crackling of the mulberry roots burning. Outside, it’s windy and cold. Just a little girl, I’m bent over a pile of acorns I gathered that day, first wiping them with an old rag and then stringing them together on a thread. I can feel the mountain winter with my whole body at moments like these. When I raise my eyes, I see their patient faces, the faces of people who’ve endured years of hard work, in flickering light and shadow. Looking at them, my heart fills with a mixture of comfort and concern.
THE HOME MY mother came from was barely a fifteen-minute walk from the house where I grew up. After she moved into her husband’s house as a new bride, she didn’t dare return to her parents’ except on special days like New Year’s or the Bon festival. That changed when my father went off to the war and my mother was left to look after her in-laws. With no one else to help her, she had an excuse to visit her own home more often. Those winter evenings when, after dinner, she and I headed over to my grandparents’ place are still fresh in my memory. My mother held my hand, and in her other hand she carried a pole with a lantern dangling at the end of it as we made our way down the hard, frozen lane, shivering.
My mother was always tense and silent as we trudged along. Only when there was trouble could a bride go back to her former home. When we finally got there, she’d blow out the lantern and nervously, her shoulders hunched forward, slip into the side entrance of the house, which was floored with packed earth like ours.
“Good evening to you,” my mother called out. That was the way people in those parts greeted each other at that hour.
“Oh! Good evening to you too,” O-Hatsu said cheerfully as she appeared at the entrance. Her voice was always bright, which was unusual in a farmwife. Thinking about it now, she must have known that it wasn’t good news we were bringing, but she always greeted us warmly anyway. That brightness was a quality we all admired in her. Her mother-in-law—my maternal grandmother—was unhealthy and died before the war, leaving O-Hatsu the sole woman in the household. The confidence she developed managing on her own became part of her character. Some people thought she was bossy, but in my eyes she was just someone you could depend on.
By the time my mother had sat herself down on the raised wooden floor, tears already stood in her eyes, she was so ready to cry. O-Hatsu’s bright, sympathetic voice released all the misery she kept bottled up the rest of the time.
“Now, now, stop your cryin’. What’s the matter this time? Tell me what happened.” O-Hatsu would go over to her, take her hand, make her stand up, and lead her to sit by the fire.
For my mother, O-Hatsu was more than just a sister-in-law; she thought of her almost as a parent. O-Hatsu had married the eldest son, and my mother was the youngest of eight.
Once at the hearth, she’d plop down, pull out a small hand towel from the waist of her trousers, and sit there sobbing and sobbing.
My mother was a good person, but she wasn’t strong. After the war robbed her of a husband, she buckled, body and soul, under the weight of her troubles; she didn’t know how to carry on by herself. She started to ask favors of her own family. Just little things: a bit of money to get her through the end of the year, a helping hand from one of the boys for a day or two. Her eldest brother was too old to be called up, and two of his four sons were too young, so luckily, they still had an unusual number of men living there. In our house, the only man left when my father went off to fight was Grandpa, and soon afterward he had a mild stroke and turned so doddery he barely had the strength to chop up the mulberry bushes for firewood.
As my mother poured out the troubles she had in the household she’d married into, O-Hatsu would go about her business as usual. With rationing in force, we rarely had any sugar. But she always had some on hand; a pinch of the precious stuff was dissolved in a cup of hot water and given to me to drink. Then she poured a cup of tea for my mother, and put out a variety of crunchy pickles and sweet miso for us to have with our hot drinks.
My mother would thank her tearfully before going on with her story, without touching the tea. O-Hatsu listened sympathetically to her complaints, sometimes putting in comments like “You shouldn’t have swallowed all that. If it were me, I would’ve given them a piece of my mind.” Her tone was half scolding, half encouraging.
A good long cry seemed to help, and my mother would slowly calm down. O-Hatsu would then point to the tea and pickles, urging her to help herself. By the time she picked up the chopsticks, raising them with both hands briefly in thanks, and reached toward the plate, her cheeks were dry.
“Everything’s so tasty,” she’d say. Though she would start out reluctantly, it was hard not to enjoy these treats. At our house, we couldn’t manage to make that many kinds of pickled vegetables by then.
After a second cup of tea, it was time to go. My mother said her thanks where she sat, bowing deeply, both hands on the floor.
It would have been a little too obvious if she had come carrying an empty bamboo basket on her back, but that also meant that on our way home she had her hands full of potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables we’d been given, and it was my job to hold the lantern.
I remember another time when O-Hatsu looked her over and said, “Gracious. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?”
My mother had been very fair-skinned, but working all day in the fields had turned her skin so dark and rough it might as well have been a man’s. But O-Hatsu’s comment apparently didn’t upset her—didn’t hurt her at all. She just smiled, looking a bit embarrassed.
Partly because I loved sweet drinks and partly because it made me happy to see my mother cheer up, I looked forward to these visits. I was the perfect image of a “country girl” back then—someone I barely recognize now.
ONE THING I’VE thought about as an adult is what a boring life it must have been! You were born in a place where everything was the same as it had always been. You walked out of the house and, as far as you could see, you were surrounded by sameness: farmhouses with the same thatched roof; stretches of the same paddy f
ields and mulberry bushes; farmers wearing the same rough clothes, their faces all browned by the sun the same way. No matter where you went—a neighbor’s house, a friend’s place, your relatives’—the same kind of people sat around the fire, eating the same kind of food. Yes, here and there you saw prosperous-looking houses with white stucco walls and tiled roofs on top—these belonged to the landlord, the village headman, the owner of the sake brewery. But the rest were all the same. The tedium of it all could only compound the drudgery of working literally from dawn to dusk, like ants. I’ve heard that people now have a romantic view of country life, but when I think back to my childhood, it doesn’t surprise me at all that practically everyone moved to the city after the war. It wasn’t just because they needed work.
My family were farmers, but not tenant farmers. We owned our own plot, and generations back, once everyone saw the money you could make from silkworms, they stopped keeping half their land for millet and other grains and planted it with mulberry bushes. Most of the other farmers did the same. The golden age of the silk industry, however, was over by the time I came along. We lived with my father’s parents, and it was all the way back when Grandma was a young girl that the industry made real money. Grandma worked with her younger sister in the silk mills and, both being very good at it, they earned more than most men did in those days. I remember sitting by the fire with Grandma and listening to her tell stories about when she worked, while we shelled and sorted beans and kneaded dough for udon noodles. One of her favorites was about how a different factory had hired her and her sister away, treating them to second-class seats on the train—first-class seats only went to dignitaries—and bottles of beer. “They treated us like royalty!” Though her sister ended up catching tuberculosis in the factory dormitory and being sent home to die, Grandma somehow still looked back proudly on that time, when she made more money than a man. By my parents’ day, the silk mills had begun to shut down, and the government ordered farmers to cut back on growing mulberry. Times were hard for silk farmers.
The year I was born, 1937, was also the year Japan went to war with China.
That was when the grown-ups started clustering in worried groups, spending hours talking about how to make ends meet. That was when farmers in the area began pulling up stakes and moving to Manchuria. It turned out that more people emigrated to Manchuria from Nagano Prefecture than from anywhere else in Japan, because of the decline in the silk market. Luckily, I understood all this at the time only the way an ignorant girl could. My younger sister and I were close in age, and we spent our days playing together: in winter, we made snow bunnies, with red berries for eyes, and in summer we dug up wild potatoes, cooked them, and made them into dumplings. For me, the years passed happily enough; only the mood of the grown-ups cast a shadow.
At some point, the Pacific War started. As a little girl who hadn’t even started school, I had no idea what this would mean for us. I paid almost no attention when the grown-ups talked about spinning mills being turned into munitions factories. But then our men began to disappear. From my family, my father’s younger brother, who was living with us, disappeared. A year passed, two years went by, and by the time groups of children evacuated from Tokyo turned up in our part of the countryside, my own father left. The eldest sons in farming families were supposed to be exempt from the draft because someone needed to stay and grow rice, even with a war on—or so it was said, and we believed it, until the draft notice arrived for my father.
Day after day, the jacket he’d always worn when he worked in the fields hung untouched on a peg in the dirt-floored entrance. Left with no one but Grandma and Grandpa to help her, my mother worked all day in the fields, taking a break only when she needed to nurse my baby brother. Even to a child, the world felt gloomy. Japan had always been at war, ever since I was born; again and again, adults had put a Rising Sun flag in my hand for me to wave. I didn’t know that the war was something that would eventually end; I only knew we were waiting for my father to return. It was from then on, I remember, that my mother began taking me to visit O-Hatsu, where she would sit by the fireside with her and cry. Even at New Year’s in what turned out to be the final year of the war, my father had still not come home. But that same spring, my uncle Genji came back after losing his house in Tokyo in one of the fire bombings.
It was Uncle Genji who would give me my chance to leave. I had heard lots of stories about my mother’s brother, but I’d never met him. My mother barely knew him herself, since he was the second of the eight children and she was the youngest, with nearly fifteen years between them. She was still a little girl when Genji left the house to support himself so his family would have one less mouth to feed. It didn’t take him long to find work as a busboy, in the Mampei Hotel restaurant in Karuizawa. He worked there during the summer and on ocean liners from autumn through spring. Then, one year, he didn’t get off the boat when summer came around, and ended up spending the next twenty years at sea. He was a clever and capable man, this uncle of mine, and he eventually worked his way up to being a purser. Somewhere along the way, he even found himself a wife, and they settled down in Asakusa, in Tokyo. However, on March 10, 1945, he went to his in-laws’ place out in the country to ask for some fresh food for his family, and spent the night there: that happened to be the day of the worst fire bombing of Tokyo. He himself escaped what must have been hell on earth, but he lost his house, his wife, and his young daughter.
With nowhere to stay in Tokyo—and hardly any food for anyone in the city—my uncle decided to come home. I’d just started my second year of elementary school, and one day when I got home I heard the news that he was back. As the oldest of the children, I was the family babysitter, so I strapped my brother on my back, took my sister by the hand, and we hurried off to meet this character. Because he had lived so long abroad, I was sure he would look like a foreigner.
When we got there, O-Hatsu steered us into the sitting room. We tiptoed in to find only an ordinary man with a shaved head, wearing a drab wartime outfit, slumped in front of the little Buddhist altar with his back to us. I noticed two memorial tablets sitting in front of the altar. The man looked just as poor and exhausted as any of the family members I was used to seeing every day.
“I should’ve been satisfied with just paying for a woman once in a while, instead of going out with a nice girl and thinking I deserved a wife. This was my comeuppance,” was how he summed up this episode in his life years later, when I was grown up.
That day he said, “You must be Fumiko,” and stroked my hair. His Tokyo style of speaking impressed me.
Not long afterward, Uncle Genji moved into our house. Apparently he never got along with his no-nonsense elder brother. Besides, they had enough men on the farm already, while at our place there was only Grandpa hobbling about. It was a blessing for us to have any able-bodied man around, even somebody who had forgotten how to farm. Only later did I find out that O-Hatsu was the one who saw where Uncle Genji would be better off and do the most good, and made arrangements for him to move.
At some point during the war, the big barrel wrapped in straw where we usually kept the sake ran dry. We were getting our ration of sake, but it never lasted long—Grandpa drank it all. The night Uncle Genji moved in, though, my mother somehow managed to scare up a bottle. And to go with the sake, she put chopped butterbur sprouts with miso on a long, narrow wooden board and roasted them lightly. Uncle Genji scooped up some with his chopsticks and took a taste.
“Now, that’s what I call finger-lickin’ good!” he said with obvious satisfaction, letting loose with a country accent—something he didn’t often do.
Just then, Grandpa, who had been trying to light his long metal pipe, choked out a cloud of smoke, and my baby brother, eyes bulging, gulped a big breath and started wailing. But instead of getting flustered as she usually did, my mother just laughed and picked him up. The whole family looked happy, I remember, almost as if my father had come home.
Uncle Genji starte
d to help out around the place. On top of that, he was roped in on some public works projects for the military. We used to hear him moaning about how tired he was. “I don’t mean to boast, but while I was away, I got used to working with my head,” he’d say. I was still too young to be any real use on the farm; about all I could do was weed the paths between the rice paddies or gather locusts with my sister, carrying my baby brother on my back. But these little jobs gave me a chance to hang around my uncle and hear about life at sea or in places far away, when he took a break. He would narrow his eyes and gaze into the distance at Mount Asama, then sigh and talk, almost to himself. Once in a while, he would turn to us as if he’d just noticed we were there and tell us to keep these stories to ourselves.
Summer came, and we finally got a notice saying my father was a casualty. He had been wounded in the leg during the battle of Shuri in Okinawa, and, unable to retreat with his unit, took his own life—so we were told. People tried to explain to me what “a heroic suicide” meant, but I couldn’t believe that the father I knew would do such a thing. Years later, when I read different accounts of the war, I came to my own conclusion: that he was probably killed by his own side because he couldn’t walk. Back then, though, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
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