Polite Lies

by Kyoko Mori

  Traveling in Japan or simply taking the commuter train in Kobe now, I notice the silence around me. It seems oppressive that you cannot talk to someone who is looking at your favorite painting at a museum or sitting next to you on the train, reading a book that you finished only last week. In Japan, you can’t even stop strangers and ask for simple directions when you are lost. If you get lost, you look for a policeman, who will help you because that is part of his job.

  A Japanese friend and I got lost in Yokohama one night after we came out of a restaurant. We were looking for the train station and had no idea where it was, but my friend said, “Well, we must be heading in the right direction, since most people seem to be walking that way. It’s late now. They must be going back to the station, too.” After about ten minutes—with no train station in sight yet—my friend said that if she had been lost in New York or Paris, she would have asked one of the people we were following. But in her own country, in her own language, it was unthinkable to approach a stranger.

  For her, asking was not an option. That’s different from when people in the Midwest choose not to stop at a gas station for directions or flag down a store clerk to locate some item on the shelves. Midwestern people don’t like to ask because they don’t want to call attention to themselves by appearing stupid and helpless. Refusing to ask is a matter of pride and self-reliance—a matter of choice. Even the people who pride themselves on never asking know that help is readily available. In Japan, approaching a stranger means breaking an unspoken rule of public conduct.

  The Japanese code of silence in public places does offer a certain kind of protection. In Japan, everyone is shielded from unwanted intrusion or attention, and that isn’t entirely bad. In public places in the States, we all wish, from time to time, that people would go about their business in silence and leave us alone. Just the other day in the weight room of the YMCA, a young man I had never met before told me that he had been working out for the last two months and gained fifteen pounds. “I’ve always been too thin,” he explained. “I want to gain twenty more pounds, and I’m going to put it all up here.” We were sitting side by side on different machines. He indicated his shoulders and chest by patting them with his hand. “That’s nice,” I said, noncommittal but polite. “Of course,” he continued, “I couldn’t help putting some of the new weight around my waist, too.” To my embarrassment, he lifted his shirt and pointed at his stomach. “Listen,” I told him. “You don’t have to show it to me or anything.” I got up from my machine even though I wasn’t finished. Still, I felt obligated to say, “Have a nice workout,” as I walked away.

  I don’t appreciate discussing a complete stranger’s weight gain and being shown his stomach, and it’s true that bizarre conversations like that would never happen in a Japanese gym. Maybe there is comfort in knowing that you will never have to talk to strangers—that you can live your whole life surrounded by friends and family who will understand what you mean without your saying it. Silence can be a sign of harmony among close friends or family, but silent harmony doesn’t help people who disagree or don’t fit in. On crowded trains in Kobe or Tokyo, where people won’t even make eye contact with strangers, much less talk to them, I feel as though each one of us were sealed inside an invisible capsule, unable to breathe or speak out. It is just like my old dream of being stuck inside a spaceship orbiting the earth. I am alarmed by how lonely I feel—and by how quietly content everyone else seems to be.

  In Japanese, I don’t have a voice for speaking my mind. When a Japanese flight attendant walks down the aisle in her traditional kimono, repeating the endlessly apologetic announcements in the high, squeaky voice a nice woman is expected to use in public, my heart sinks because hers is the voice I am supposed to mimic. All my childhood friends answer their telephones in this same voice, as do the young women store clerks welcoming people and thanking them for their business or TV anchor women reading the news. It doesn’t matter who we are or what we are saying. A woman’s voice is always the same: a childish squeak piped from the throat.

  The first time I heard that voice coming out of my own mouth, about three years ago, I was lost at a subway station in Osaka. Though there were plenty of people gathered around the wall map I was trying to read, I did not stop any of them. I flagged down a station attendant, identifiable by his blue uniform. “Ano, sumimasen,” I started immediately with an apology (“Well, I’m so sorry to be bothering you”). Then I asked where I could catch the right train. Halfway through my inquiry, I realized that I was squeezing the air through my tightly constricted throat, making my voice thin and wavering. I have to get out of here, I thought. It’s a good thing I’m leaving in just a few days.

  I was afraid of being stuck in Japan, unable to speak except in that little-bird voice. I’m afraid of the same thing every time I go there.

  People often tell me that I am lucky to be bilingual, but I am not so sure. Language is like a radio. I have to choose a specific station, English or Japanese, and tune in. I can’t listen to both at the same time. In between, there is nothing but static. These days, though, I find myself listening to static because I am afraid to turn my dial to the Japanese station and hear that bird-woman voice. Trying to speak Japanese in Japan, I’m still thinking in English. I can’t turn off what I really want to say and concentrate on what is appropriate. Flustered, I try to work out a quick translation, but my feelings are untranslatable and my voice is the voice of a foreigner. The whole experience reminds me of studying French in college and being unable to say or write what I thought.

  In my second-year French class, I had to keep a journal. I could only say stupid things: “I got up at six. I ate breakfast. It’s cold. I’m tired.” I was reduced to making these idiotic statements because I didn’t have the language to explain, “It’s cold for September and I feel sad that summer is over. But I try to cheer myself up by thinking of how beautiful the trees will be in a month.” In my French, it was either cold or not cold. Nothing in between, no discussion of what the weather meant. After finishing my entry every day, I felt depressed: my life sounded bleak when it was reduced to bad weather and meal schedules, but I wasn’t fluent enough in French to talk about anything else. Now, my Japanese feels thin in the same way.

  In any language, it is hard to talk about feelings, and there are things that are almost unsayable because they sound too harsh, painful, or intimate. When we are fluent, though, we can weave and dodge our way through the obstacles and get to the difficult thing we want to say; each of us weaves and dodges in slightly different ways, using our individual style or voice. In the way we say the almost unsayable, we can hear the subtle modulations and shifts that make each of our voices unique.

  When I studied the poetry of Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath in college, I was immediately drawn to their voices. I still love the eloquence with which these poets talk about daily life and declare their feelings, balancing gracefully between matter-of-fact observations and powerful emotions. After a particularly emotional statement, the poets often step back and resume describing the garden, the yew trees and blackberries, before returning to the feelings again. They say the almost unsayable by balancing on the edge of saying too much and then pulling back, only to push their way toward that edge again. Reading them in college, I wanted to learn to speak with a voice like theirs.

  My whole schooling has been a process of acquiring a voice. In college and graduate school, I learned to speak, write, and think like my favorite writers—through imitation and emulation, the way anyone learns any language. I have not had the same experience in Japanese. The only voice I was taught was the one that squeezed my throat shut every time I wanted to say, Help me. This is what I want. Let me tell you how I feel.

  On my trips to Japan, I am nervous and awake the whole way. Sitting stiffly upright in the cone of orange light, I read my favorite novelists in English: Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan, Anne Tyler. I cannot shed my fear of the Japanese language. When the plane begins it
s descent toward Tokyo or Osaka and the final sets of announcements are made in the two languages, I don’t try to switch from the English station of my mind to the Japanese. I turn the dial a little closer to the Japanese station without turning off the English, even though my mind will fill with static and the Japanese I speak will be awkward and inarticulate. I am willing to compromise my proficiency in Japanese so that I can continue to think the thoughts I have come to value in English.

  Yet as the plane tips to the right and then to the left, I feel the pull of the ground. Gravity and nostalgia seem one and the same. Poised over the land of my childhood, I recognize the coastline. The sea shines and glitters just like the one in the old songs we sang in grade school. The mountains are a dark green and densely textured. It comes to me, like a surprise, that I love this scenery. How could I have spent my adult life away from here? I wonder. This is where I should have been all along. I remember the low, gray hills of the Midwest and wonder how I could have found them beautiful, when I grew up surrounded by real mountains. But even as part of me feels nostalgic, another part of me remains guarded, and my adult voice talks in the back of my mind like a twenty-four-hour broadcast. Remember who you were, it warns, but don’t forget who you are now.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FAMILY

  When people ask me about my brother, I find myself mumbling a polite but lame disclaimer: “Jumpei is a very nice person and I like him. We get along just fine, but …”

  What follows is not criticism but something possibly worse.

  “But I don’t really know him,” I have to admit. “He’s like a nice guy I scarcely know.”

  Jumpei is my only immediate family left, but I have seen him only four times in the last twenty years. He spends the year traveling in South America, buying sweaters, rugs, and jewelry to sell in Japan. He doesn’t stay anywhere long enough to receive letters. Most of the time, I don’t know where he is.

  As children, we never imagined that we would live our adult lives in foreign countries, so far away from each other. My brother and I grew up in a series of small suburban houses, our rooms always right next to each other’s. Before our mother’s death, the three of us were like a single-parent family during the week, though on weekends and during summers, we belonged to a large extended family. We hardly saw our father, Hiroshi, who left for work before we got up, came home after we were asleep, and took numerous out-oftown business trips. This work schedule was typical of men his age, but Hiroshi was also gone on weekends—playing rugby or golf with his old college friends—while other people’s fathers fixed things around the house, took their children to the zoo, or sat in the living room watching TV. Jumpei and I spent our weekends going on picnics, swimming at the beach, or hiking in the mountains with our mother, Takako. We visited our grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins on her side, and also our father’s sister, Akiko, and her daughter Kazumi. If we had been asked to name our family in grade school, we would have named each other, our mother, and then added, “and our father, who’s never home,” before moving on to a long list of relations. We knew we were family to each other, then.

  Though Jumpei was taught to call me “Oneichan” (big sister) as a form of respect, I wasn’t a very good sister. When my brother and his friends wanted to play with my friends and me, I talked my group into running to a hiding place. “Leave us alone. Go play by yourselves,” we yelled before dashing away, leaving the younger kids to cry. Like most brothers and sisters, though, we would have gotten closer as we grew older. But our mother’s death changed everything.

  The afternoon our mother decided to end her life, my brother and I were shopping downtown with Hiroshi. It was one of the few Sundays our father ever spent with us. We came home to find Takako unconscious on the floor with the windows shut and the gas pipe held to her mouth. Hiroshi turned off the gas, laid out the futon in his room, carried her there, and called a friend of his, a surgeon. His friend agreed to drive to our house to try to resuscitate Takako. Hiroshi told him that he would run out to the main road down the hill and meet him there so that he would not get lost.

  By the time Hiroshi was off the phone and opening the windows, my brother and I were sitting down on the tatami floor next to the futon, looking down at our mother. Jumpei was crying. I was not. Because I had known how unhappy our mother was, I wasn’t surprised. I had the feeling that my worst nightmare had come true—I was scared and my heart was beating very fast, but everything seemed familiar, as if I should have predicted it. Hiroshi came and sat down next to me so that I was between him and Jumpei, all of us looking at Takako with our heads bent down.

  “It’ll be all right,” Hiroshi mumbled, more to me than to Jumpei. “Don’t worry.”

  I turned to him then, and the two of us stared at each other, listening to my brother cry. We did not embrace each other or cry. We did not touch my brother on the shoulder or pat his head to comfort him. More than likely, it was already too late for the two of us to give or offer comfort. I was a sister who ran away with her friends while her younger brother cried. My father, as I would find out later, was already having an affair with Michiko, the woman he would start living with only a month later and marry within a year. The only person who held the three of us together and made us feel like family was my mother, who was dying by her own choice.

  All these years later, I keep picturing my father, brother, and me sitting together in that small room for a few minutes before Hiroshi went away to meet the doctor. Even though I lived with Hiroshi and Jumpei for eight more years, I think of those few minutes as the last time the three of us were together. It was the last time all of us were feeling the same things: panic, remorse, and an urge, however vague, to stick together, to turn to one another for comfort. When Hiroshi said, “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry,” he must have meant to say more, to offer stronger assurances. I’m sorry that neither of us could keep the conversation going. I wish we had cried or embraced and said something. If that was not the last moment we were a family, then certainly it was the last moment we could have become one.

  Jumpei and I went to live with our aunt, Akiko, for a month before returning to our father’s house, where Michiko had moved in. For the next eight years when both of us lived at home, our bedrooms were next to each other’s, separated only by a narrow hallway. We never crossed this hallway to go into each other’s room. Every night, I was in my room studying or reading and seldom came out. I could hear my brother laughing and chatting with Michiko downstairs in the kitchen, spending the whole evening there. Hiroshi still worked late, but he was home on Sundays now, watching TV with Michiko all day. Both he and Jumpei loved to be with Michiko—one of them was always in the kitchen or the living room, laughing with her. But it was never the three of them. They were both close to Michiko, but not to each other, and I was close to nobody. Alone in my upstairs bedroom, I imagined myself on a hot-air balloon, drifting away.

  After I left home, I did not see my brother again for twelve years. Finally, while I was living in Green Bay with my husband, Chuck, Jumpei visited us, bringing an American friend. It wasn’t much of a visit, really. Jumpei said they were on the way to a camping trip and could stay only one night. In the morning, before they left, we all went to a restaurant for breakfast.

  “My mother would love to have a sports car like yours,” Jumpei said to Chuck and me while we waited for our food. “My mother loves to drive. She drives rather aggressively, like a man.” He chuckled in the amused way people do when they are talking about someone they love.

  A little later, I said something about “our stepmother.”

  Jumpei’s friend, Jeff, looked surprised. He said to my brother, “Oh, I didn’t know that your parents were divorced. Your father is remarried and you have a stepmother?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yes, but not in the way you think. Our father is remarried and we both have a stepmother, but that’s because our real mother is dead. The woman Jumpei calls ‘my mother’ is actually our s
tepmother.”

  I looked across the table at Jumpei, who turned away and would not look back at me. He stammered a little and announced to the whole table, “Well, that’s true. But she is my mother, really. At least, she’s the only mother I remember.”

  That’s how I found out that Jumpei remembers almost nothing about Takako. At first, I couldn’t believe that. I have a lot of memories of Takako from before I was eight. If I could remember going to the zoo with her at five, how could he forget about our summer trip to the seaside when he was seven or the weekends Takako took us to the pool after we were both in grade school? When our mother kept crickets in glass jars, Jumpei cut up the watermelon and eggplant to feed them every day and spent hours listening to them sing; he was the one who cried in October when one by one, the crickets died—to comfort him, our mother told us stories about crickets going to insect heaven where they flew around all day eating big watermelon slices. How could he forget her stories?

  But there was one big difference between Jumpei and me. Our mother had been there until I was twelve to help me remember: when I was nine, ten, and eleven she and I would reminisce together, “Remember when you were in kindergarten and we went to see the fireflies by the river?” “Remember our old house and that dog who lived across the street?” By the time I was twelve, I remembered these long-ago events as though they were old stories I had memorized. The reminiscences we shared were the stories of my life, of my mother’s and my life together. My brother didn’t have the same chance. By the time he was twelve, there was no one to tell him the stories of his life.

  I could have been—should have been—that person. Instead of staying shut up in my room, studying and feeling sorry for myself, I should have spent my teenage years taking care of my brother. That’s what I had been taught to do, what I had promised my mother. When I called her from downtown on what turned out to be the afternoon of her suicide, my mother said, “You are a nice girl, Kyoko—a considerate person. Be good and take care of your brother for me.” That was the last thing she said to me; as soon as we got home, I knew that she had meant it for a lifetime, not just for that afternoon.