by Kyoko Mori
Nice housewives like my friends can take private lessons only if they can be justified as genteel means of cultivating fine, feminine tastes—like ikebana, tea, koto and samisen music—but these are the traditional Japanese arts with the strict ie structure. Joining the ie would involve my friends in another burdensome system of duties and obligations, something they already experience in every facet of their lives.
In so many ways, Japan is a place of no second chances. Many of my friends are in very unhappy marriages. They write to me about the shouting and shoving matches they have with their husbands, about the night they tried to run away, only to have the husband chase them down the street, catch them, and drag them home. Unable to run away, my friends lock themselves up in the guest room or sleep in their daughters’ rooms to avoid sleeping with their husbands. For most American women, leaving a bad marriage like theirs would be nothing but happiness. My friends stay because divorce still carries a big stigma in Japan. If they leave their husbands, they may never be able to see their children again. Certainly, they will not be able to marry again and try another chance at marriage. Nobody marries a divorced middle-aged woman in Japan.
Life in Japan is like an unending stint at a school where you have to keep taking tests—giving your answers under pressure without help or guidance, knowing that you will get no second chance if you make a mistake. Japanese people have to make many of the big decisions of their lives—whom to marry, what company to join—without detailed information, since it is rude to ask direct questions even at omiai meetings and job interviews. They have no choice but to trust authority and do their best, just as they were supposed to do in school. If their job or marriage turns out to be a disappointment, they will be given the same vague exhortations they heard from their teachers: keep trying, work hard, pay attention.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with trying harder. Sometimes when I see my former students in Green Bay seeming to flounder—waiting on tables or working clerical jobs they hate, the whole time talking about their big plans to “go back to school” soon—I think maybe a little Japanese perseverance might not hurt them. I know that for them or for anyone else, going back to school does not guarantee a job or happiness. Within school, too, when my students complain that everything we read in a modern American literature class is depressing or that I simply do not “like” their work (when every poem they wrote in the class is a love poem in couplets), I long for a little Japanese respect for authority. Some of my students would be better off if they trusted me a little rather than questioning my decisions at every turn. Still, I would rather have students who question too much than those who assume that I know best and don’t owe them any explanations. No one should have power that is unjustified and unjustifiable, regardless of how convenient or efficient it may seem for the smooth running of the classroom, the educational system, or the country.
The problem with the Japanese system, ultimately, is that individual freedom—to question the teacher, to disagree—is sacrificed for the supposed convenience and protection of the whole group. The system works well for people who feel no desire to rebel. The Japanese ie system my cousin complained about does ensure that anyone who perseveres in a given art form will have some recognition; periodically, every student is asked to take part in public exhibitions or concerts. Most Japanese students have public-performance opportunities many of my American friends—artists and musicians—don’t.
But for me—as well as for my cousin—the price is too high. The security comes with too many obligations. The ie system asks that you trust your teachers who have not earned or deserved your trust. What you are required to have is blind faith in the ie: like the church or the mosque, the ie is an institution that is designed to inspire total obedience to its rules. In Japan, if you reject your chance to enjoy the security that comes from joining the right group such as an ie, an elite school, a good company, or a respectable family, you will have to leave the country or live in it as an outcast. Life in Japan resembles the harshest interpretation of a religious faith: the Koran or the sword, either you are with Christ or against him, either you join the sheltering umbrella of Japanese security or you have nothing. In school and elsewhere, people are rewarded for obeying the rules diligently, never for taking a chance and being different, or for asking good questions.
But words like security and uncertainty are misleading. Because Dutch-style flower arrangement is not as popular as ikebana and the association does not provide the same kind of protection that a traditional ie gives its teachers, my cousin is struggling to get enough students for the classes she offers. She has quit her clerical job, which she did not like, and committed herself to the life of a flower-arrangement teacher. She isn’t going to get a second chance at being a clerk or going back to ikebana. My cousin’s life is uncertain and insecure. But daily, as she arranges her own flowers and watches her students cutting and arranging theirs, she is certain of other things. She knows when she is making a good arrangement and when she is not. In Dutch-style arrangements, my cousin has learned what colors and shapes look pleasing; she has a firm sense of what she considers beautiful. She also knows that she will tell her students exactly what she thinks about their work rather than keeping her criticism to herself or being vague. Kazumi feels a certainty about truth, beauty, honesty. That is the only certainty worth choosing.
CHAPTER NINE
TEARS
A few days after our father’s death, Jumpei told me that he had cried at the funeral.
“It was a big funeral. Six hundred people came,” my brother said. “The man who gave the eulogy broke down and cried at the podium. He had been Father’s right-hand man at the office. The man said that Father was the most generous person he had ever met. There were hundreds of young women who must have been secretaries and data processors. All of them were crying. I got choked up just watching them cry. It was morai-naki for me.” He tipped his head back and laughed.
Morai-naki (to receive crying) refers to the way a person is moved to tears by watching others cry even though he or she has no personal reason to feel sad. It seemed peculiar that my brother, the only son, should think of his own tears at the funeral as a stranger’s tears. But I understood. My brother and I weren’t as close to our father as were the women who held temporary clerical jobs at his office. We didn’t know the “generous” man his co-workers mourned. To us, Hiroshi was a scary character from our childhood. We had spent our adulthood trying to avoid him—living as far away from him as possible. Even while he was alive, Hiroshi seemed more like a bad memory than a real person.
“Father was such a strange character,” Jumpei said.
I nodded. We were in a cab. I had just arrived from Green Bay and my brother had met me at the airport. Now we were headed for our aunt’s house, where I was to stay for a week. In the rearview mirror, I glimpsed the eyes of the driver and wondered if he had been listening to our conversation. The driver appeared to be fifty-five, sixty—almost our father’s age. He could have been appalled by how unfilial my brother and I sounded, but his eyes showed no emotion.
My brother continued talking as if the two of us were alone. No one in Japan expects a cab driver to show—or even experience—any emotions in the presence of his customers. That is part of the paradox about emotions in Japan. We are taught to refrain from expressing our feelings in public because to do so is rude, intrusive, and selfish; and yet it is all right for six hundred people to cry together at a funeral, or for an important company official to break down in public in the middle of delivering a eulogy. To start crying at the sight of other people’s tears may be a common human response, but not every culture has a name for it. In Japan, morai-naki is an accepted form of crying that merits its own name.
Morai-naki is acceptable because community is everything. If everyone is crying at a gathering, you should, too. Certain public rituals—funerals, grave visits, other Buddhist ceremonies related to death—are set aside as occasions for everyone’s
tears, for mass displays of emotions, while private, individual tears (and displays of other emotions) are considered inappropriate and embarrassing. In Japan, you can cry all you want in a group. Crying is often the most appropriate public gesture you can make.
The distinction between public gestures and private feelings affects the Japanese attitude toward death, especially chosen death. Japanese history offers many examples of honorable suicide. As a child, I watched numerous historical dramas on TV in which a brave samurai would commit seppuku to avoid being captured by the enemy, or as a form of apology for letting down his master. Honorable suicide was not reserved for men. Princesses and other noble women cut their throats or swallowed poison to avoid being captured by or married off to the enemy. This kind of suicide was carried out as a public ritual—men and women dressed in their best white robes to express their purity and killed themselves in the presence of witnesses.
Although the TV movies were dramatizations, many of them were based on historical events from feudal times. There have even been a few instances of ritual suicide in modern times, the best-known being the writer Yukio Mishima. Mishima and his followers stormed into one of the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Army and held a general hostage. After delivering a long speech about honor, duty, and the samurai tradition, Mishima committed seppuku in the presence of his followers. Even though some people considered Mishima to be a fanatic, no one thought that his suicide was a shameful and embarrassing event to be covered up. At worst, his death was seen as a misguided public gesture, a crazy attempt to deliver his message about honor and glory.
When my mother decided to end her life, she was making the same choice as the samurai or the noble women: not to continue a life she considered unworthy and unhappy. But nobody saw it that way. Even my mother’s family did not console me by saying, “Your mother believed that she was making the only dignified choice possible. You don’t have to agree with her, but you must try to understand and forgive.” No one encouraged me to talk or think about what my mother might have been thinking or feeling. My uncles and maternal grandfather burned incense in silence. My aunts and grandmother said very vaguely, “Your mother was very unhappy. You have to be strong and try to live a happy life so she can rest in peace.” From the way they looked at me, their lips pursed, their eyes downcast, I knew they did not want to continue what could only be a painful discussion. My father and paternal grandfather were less kind. They told me that my mother’s suicide had shamed our family, that I was never to mention the event because if people found out about this disgrace, my brother and I would never be able to marry or get a job. Though my aunts and grandmother meant well and my father and paternal grandfather did not, they agreed on one thing: my mother’s suicide was too horrible to be discussed. Her action was an expression of private despair, not a public gesture, so it was shameful instead of glorious.
The distinction between the private and the public also influences the Japanese attitude toward tragedy as an art form. Almost all the famous Japanese plays from the nineteenth century and before are tragedies about lovers who kill themselves together because they cannot marry (there is a Japanese word for this type of double suicide: shinju—literally, “inside the heart”) or faithful servants who sacrifice their lives to avenge their master’s death (Chushingura is the most famous version of this story). These plays are a public ritual: coming together to see them, people can cry and express their emotions without shame or embarrassment.
In Japan, where close friends or family struggle never to cry in front of one another, there is no embarrassment about crying at theaters or in front of the TV set. My father claimed not to have shed a tear at his own mother’s deathbed, but he often sat with wet eyes in front of the TV, late at night, watching some cheap love story. Audiences at traditional Kabuki or joruri (puppet theater) cry without inhibition. The less emotional, more abstract Noh theater does not have the same popular following as Kabuki and joruri. American movies that become box-office hits in Japan are Hollywood tearjerkers like Love Story, Gone With the Wind, A Star Is Born. The same people who cry at these movies would be totally embarrassed if they saw your eyes fill with tears while you were having coffee with them.
Many of my Midwestern friends—especially men—are the same way. They refrain from crying in front of their close friends when they are sad about something private, and yet, in the middle of a mediocre movie, they are not embarrassed to sniffle. The only difference is that while Midwesterners may be unwilling to cry, they won’t politely look away when someone does.
If I cried in front of my Midwestern friends, they would hand me a tissue, ask me if I was all right, and try to make me laugh. Humor is a common Midwestern antidote to sadness. I often find myself resorting to it. At the funeral of our colleague’s mother, one of my friends started crying as soon as we entered the church and saw the coffin by the altar. My friend had recently lost both his parents, but he felt silly about crying since he hadn’t known the woman who had died (too bad he wasn’t in Japan—he could have explained his crying as morai-naki, which it was). My friend tried to make light of his tears, calling himself a “big wimp.” As I sat down next to him, I didn’t lean over and hug him or encourage him to talk. I made some wisecrack about how churches should be equipped with boxes of Kleenex tucked between the hymnals and missals. I was only doing what I was supposed to do as a friend—help him downplay his sadness by turning it into a good-natured joke. A note of cheerfulness is valued in the Midwest, just as quiet dignity is valued in Japan.
My own feelings about crying are a confused mixture of values and behaviors I have learned and those I rebelled against. I don’t enjoy crying, alone or in front of people, but if I had to, I would rather cry with a few close friends than in a large crowd of strangers or all alone. I feel too self-conscious to bawl in a public place, and yet I am not one to indulge in a good solitary cry. In the last years of her life, my mother cried all day by herself—I know this from her diary as well as from my memories of her red eyes—so I think of solitary crying as a sign of great unhappiness, a warning that I should seek help. Some of my friends think of crying alone as a catharsis, but I hate the choked-up feeling tears cause, the way crying hurts my throat and nose and blocks my breathing. Even alone, I feel a little foolish for carrying on.
The public catharsis of crying at a movie theater seems even more silly and unnecessary. A few years ago, a group of my friends went to see The Joy Luck Club without inviting me because they thought the movie would be too upsetting for me, since one of the main characters loses her mother to suicide. They didn’t know that I had already seen it with Chuck.
When Chuck and I arrived at the theater, an earlier show was just ending, so we stood outside the doors, which were open. As the credits rolled on the screen, we could hear people sniffling and blowing their noses in the dark and trying to gather their purses and jackets and keys. We didn’t dare look at each other, for fear of bursting into embarrassed giggles. There was a smaller audience for the later show, but twenty minutes into it, almost everyone was crying. Again, we heard people sniffling and blowing their nose and sucking in their breath. When our eyes met, we could no longer contain ourselves. We sat there laughing quietly, trying not to let on, because it seemed rude to laugh when other people were crying.
My friends said they had cried throughout the movie and were surprised to hear about my reaction. But I have never cried at a movie in my life. Just when I feel a little sad, everyone starts crying, and that makes me want to laugh. Crying with a group of people requires perfect timing. If you miss the right moment, you can only feel stupid, like someone who missed the punch line of a joke.
I did cry, though, when I read Amy Tan’s book, upon which the movie was based. It wasn’t the weeping kind of a catharsis that people were having at the movie. Being moved by a book is a quiet experience. One of the books that made me cry was Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The narrator, a British butler, and I had nothing in
common, and I didn’t find him entirely likable. All the same, I cried when he admitted that his heart was breaking as the woman he had come to see was boarding the bus to leave him. What made me cry was not the butler and his situation but the words and the sentences Ishiguro had written for him—how inevitably one word followed another as the narrator was forced to confront a painful revelation.
I was moved by the way Ishiguro had arranged those words and sentences so that the essential moment stood out and seemed so starkly there. My tears are for the author rather than for the characters, the situation, or the story. Reading a good book is like watching an Olympic athlete: I cry because the writer’s performance is as beautiful and perfect as the athelete’s. Perhaps for this reason, almost all the books that make me cry are written by my contemporaries. Much as I love Jane Austen, Shakespeare, or John Donne, I am not moved to tears across the long, blank stretch of time. What fills me with awe is the fact that someone who is living at the same time as I—someone who shares my world—can write so beautifully.