by Kyoko Mori
In Japan, the English adjectives wet and soft are often used to describe people who are sensitive and emotional, while hard and dry mean being practical and rational. People I meet on business there, especially the journalists who interview me about my books, are always astonished that I am so “hard and dry.” Because I have written about loss, sadness, and family tragedy, I am assumed to be a very sensitive person or even a dark tormented soul. People are disappointed by how cheerful, ordinary, and ultimately boring I am. I am not the tragic character they hoped to encounter.
There is nothing inherently emotional about being a writer or an artist, but both in Japan and in America, many people like to envision artists as sensitive souls in the grip of wild sorrows and joys. A few years ago, when my friend Kate started painting, a mutual friend wrote to her and praised her in what we thought was an over-dramatic way. He commended her for trying to find joy in the true nature of things, for wanting to be one with beauty. He encouraged her to let her heart be filled with whatever she was feeling, to trust her emotions. Kate laughed and said, “You know, when I’m on that path by the river with my sketch pad, I’m not thinking these big thoughts. I don’t say to myself, ‘I must open my heart to the true nature of things.’ No, I’m thinking, ‘I hope I remembered to bring some bug spray.’ I hate bugs.”
A few days after she received this letter, Kate and I stopped at a rummage sale in a small town, where she found a fold-up stool. It was perfect for her outdoor sketching. She bought the stool and looked forward to using it on the next sunny day.
Kate and I are too practical to regard our “art” as an emotional catharsis. We are more concerned about bug sprays and fold-up stools that won’t fall apart when we sit down.
I haven’t always been the practical and even-tempered person I am now. On a recent trip to Japan, I was forced to remember the crybaby I used to be. Our old neighbor, Mrs. Kuzuha, reminded me while I was having dinner with her.
“You came running to me every time you and Tadashi had a fight. You’d say, ‘Obachan, Tadashi said a mean thing to me,’ ‘Tadashi pushed me,’ ‘Tadashi won’t let me read his book,’ and you’d cry. I always took your side and told Tadashi to be more considerate.” She laughed. “You were cute. I envied your mother for having a daughter as well as a son.”
“You envied her for having a couple of crybabies as kids?”
“No. You were both such nice children.”
Jumpei and I might have been nice children in our own ways, but we were the biggest crybabies in our neighborhood. When we bickered, he would cry and say that I had been mean to him. Then I would have to be “nice” to him because I was the older one. Even though I resented my brother for getting his way by crying, that didn’t stop me from doing the same thing to Mrs. Kuzuha’s sons—Makoto, who was three years older, and Tadashi, who was my age but taller and bigger. I cried and tattled on them and fully expected Mrs. Kuzuha to take my side.
A few days after I saw Mrs. Kuzuha, Tadashi came to town to have dinner with his mother and me.
“Kyo-chan has become a vegetarian,” Mrs. Kuzuha said while we were driving to the restaurant, which she had chosen because they served some vegetarian dishes. “She doesn’t eat any meat or fish. If she didn’t look so healthy, I would be worried about her eating habits.”
Tadashi snorted and laughed. “I’m not surprised. Kyoko, you were always such a picky eater.” Mrs. Kuzuha was driving, Tadashi was in the front, and I sat in the back. Tadashi turned around in his seat and grinned at me.
“You remember my being a picky eater?” I asked.
“How can I forget? You were terrible at meals. You’d sit there picking at your food and whimpering, ‘I don’t want to eat this. It’s bitter,’ ‘I don’t like this because it makes a funny noise when I bite into it.’ You’d complain until your mother gave up and brought you something else to eat. I used to think, ‘Wow, my mother would make me sit at the table until I finished. How does she get away with being so spoiled?’”
“Yes, but you were the total opposite,” I pointed out. “You could eat anything.”
Tadashi laughed. I could picture him at eight or nine, cracking red boiled crab legs and sucking the meat out with a noisy slurp. His plate was piled with the empty shells of legs and bodies.
“You made fun of Jumpei for being a crybaby,” he said. “But you were ten times worse at meals.”
Tadashi was right. My mother was particularly indulgent in some ways. There were things she was strict about—like being considerate to our friends, showing respect to older people—but she didn’t tell us not to cry or force us to eat foods we hated. She did not stress the Japanese virtue of gaman, “stoic perseverance.” When we cried because we didn’t get what we wanted or because we were mad at each other, she didn’t scold us and tell us to suffer quietly. Maybe she trusted that we would stop crying on our own sooner or later. Or maybe stoic perseverance was not a virtue she particularly valued. From time to time, she called our attention to other children, grown-ups, or characters in books or movies who she thought were good examples. “See how considerate that girl is to give up her seat to that old woman on the bus?” she might say; or “Your Uncle Shiro studied very hard to become a professor” or “Your grandfather is a good teacher because he is patient.” From these comments, we knew that she valued kindness, intelligence, and hard work—but she didn’t seem to admire perseverance in the form of quiet suffering. When she told us to be patient, she meant being nice to other people or working hard. She wasn’t telling us to shut up and suffer.
Quiet suffering was exactly what I chose, though, after her death. I gave up crying in public no matter how bad I felt, and I wrote cheerful newsy letters to my mother’s family, whom my father did not allow me to see. My letters boasted about how much I enjoyed my studies, what good times my friends and I had. I now realize that no one was fooled by my stoicism.
After my father’s death, Aunt Akiko was sorry that I had not had the chance to say goodbye to him or try to make peace with him. But in another way, she said, she did not feel too bad about my absence from my father’s deathbed.
“Maybe it was just as well you weren’t there,” she told me one night when we were having tea in her kitchen. “Your father looked very bad in the last few months of his life. I didn’t mind Jumpei and Kazumi seeing him like that, but you are more sensitive than they are. It would have bothered you.”
Her words stunned me. Akiko knew that none of us had been close to my father—to us, seeing him sick didn’t mean watching the suffering of someone we loved—and yet, she thought I was too sensitive to see my father looking bad.
What she said was the exact opposite of what I wanted to believe. I had thought of myself as the toughest of us three children since I was the oldest, the most stubborn, and the most outgoing. Kazumi and Jumpei were always nicer than I could ever be. I bullied them and made them cry when we played together as children—they never once forced me to cry or to give in and do things their way. As it turns out, Akiko had never bought my tough-guy act. She knew the truth. If I had seen my father’s swollen legs or sallow face, I would have had nightmares for decades—long after Kazumi and Jumpei had forgotten. I acted the toughest and yet I was by far the biggest wimp.
In the twenty years since I left home, my life has been fairly smooth even though there were some bad times, like the last few years of graduate school. During those years, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish my work and even more worried that I wouldn’t get a job when I finished. Getting a job didn’t immediately make me happy, either: I was miserable during the first five years at my college because I didn’t have time to write. Recently, going through a divorce, I cried a lot with Chuck and with a few close friends. Our breakup still makes me sad. But the bad times I had as an adult in America are completely different from the bad times I had as a teenager in Japan.
My mother’s suicide singled me out as a girl without a mother. No matter how much my friends lov
ed me, they could never understand what I was going through. I felt sealed inside my unhappiness, unable to talk about it or ask for help. I had a problem nobody could understand, in a culture where nobody was supposed to talk about personal feelings. I could see no way out of my misery. Quiet suffering was all I could choose.
During my twenties and thirties, I was not alone. I was married most of that time; Chuck and I were going through the same stages of slowly settling into the life of a full grown-up. Though neither of us liked to talk at length about how bad or scared we felt, I always knew that we were experiencing the rough transitions together. I had other friends, too. My close friends finished graduate school at the same time I did. Even after we scattered all over the country for our jobs, we stayed in touch. Last year, when I saw my friend Henri Cole at his poetry reading in Milwaukee, we reminisced about our early thirties and he said, “Those were such lean years for both of us.” I felt comforted by his comment—even after we were living in separate cities, Henri in New York and me in Green Bay, Henri remembered our sharing a bad time together.
My life in Japan was miserable because I was alone and I always expected to be. When Chuck and I were going through our divorce, I didn’t feel that as a divorced woman I would be all alone in the world. At least half our friends were going through the same thing. More than that, I never doubted that in spite of our divorce, Chuck and I would always have each other as good friends, as people who have shared a past. When my mother decided to die, she left me with nothing but memories I could share with no one else.
Living in the States, I am allowed to talk about painful situations and cry about them with a few friends. The bad things that happened to me after I was twenty were the same bad things that happen to many other people. I don’t feel singled out by tragedy the way I used to. The platitudes people say—“Everyone has problems sometimes,” “No one’s life is easy”—apply to my life as an adult. I would have to be remarkably weak or petty to continue to see myself as a tragic character or a “sensitive” person. It’s only natural for me to be cheerful and even-tempered now, but that is precisely what my relatives don’t know. They have not known me as an adult.
When I do see my relatives, my behavior unfortunately confirms their misunderstanding that I am still a “sensitive” person. Having adopted American ways, I can’t always refrain from crying if I am with people I know well and trust. For a Japanese person to cry in a private situation, even in front of family, would indicate a suffering so great as to defy politeness, self-control, perseverance, and everything she has been taught. My relatives see my tears and conclude that I must be suffering from unspeakable hurt. On the same trips when I astonish strangers by appearing “hard and dry,” I alarm my family by being “wet and soft.”
On my last visit to my Aunt Keiko, when I knew—and she knew too—that she was dying of cancer, I tried very hard to remain cheerful. My Uncle Kenichi and his wife, Mariko, had brought me to Keiko’s house. We had sat on the floor in her Japanese-style living room for a couple of hours and talked. I was all right until the time came for us to leave. I knew that my aunt and I would never see each other again, that we were saying goodbye for the last time. Immediately, I felt the tears in the back of my eyes, and my throat got choked up. I had been sitting next to Keiko. I leaned forward and hugged her shoulder with my right hand, very lightly. Though Japanese people don’t touch very much, a small hug is acceptable between women. As I pulled back, Keiko reached out and took my left hand in hers.
“You always have such a cold hand,” she said, “just like your mother.”
“It’s a sign of a warm heart,” Mariko said.
Everyone was standing up except for Keiko and me. Keiko’s husband, Mr. Maeshiba, and Kenichi walked out to the hallway while Mariko lingered near the door.
“It was good to see you,” I managed to say to Keiko. My voice came out like a hiccup, and tears began to leak out of my eyes. There was nothing I could do to stop crying. The harder I tried, the worse I felt.
“Be well,” she said to me.
I nodded, still trying to stop crying so she wouldn’t have to say a polite lie about seeing me again. I wanted her to remember me smiling and looking happy so she wouldn’t have to worry about me.
“I’ll be thinking of you,” I said, leaning forward to give her another quick hug. She let go of my hand, I got up, waved, and walked away, afraid that I might cry harder if I didn’t hurry.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” she called out in her clear high voice.
I turned around and waved one last time before going out into the hallway. Everyone was outside, waiting for me by Kenichi’s car. When I caught up with them, my face wet and my nose stuffed up, they all looked away, trying not to embarrass me. I knew fully that this was a gesture of their concern, respect, and love for me. They were sparing my dignity. In Wisconsin, I thought, my friends would hug me and tell me that everything would be OK—a meaningless thing to say, really—and I would cry harder for a while. I smiled and nodded at my relatives, rubbed my face with my hand, and wished that someone would hug me and tell me it was all right to cry.
Later in the car, when I had calmed down, I said that I was sorry to have cried.
“That’s all right,” Kenichi said. “You were always such a sensitive kid. Your mother used to worry about you.”
“I’m not like that anymore,” I protested, but my words sounded lame. My uncle had no reason to believe me.
“You want to listen to some music?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Sure,” I answered.
Kenichi turned on the car stereo and played the sixties rock ‘n’ roll music my cousin Asako had taped for him. It seemed absurd to be in Japan, listening to the Rolling Stones from another era after seeing my aunt for the last time. I felt as though my whole life had been reduced to a sad anachronism, but I said nothing.
We were already a few miles away from Keiko’s house. Kenichi sped up, getting ready to enter the freeway, which looked like a tangled-up concrete sculpture. As we got on the narrow, steep ramp, I took a deep breath, trying to fight off a feeling of panic. My heart was pounding, and my palms were sweaty. There was no reason to be afraid. The freeway was not as crowded as usual. I had driven through worse traffic in Chicago or Milwaukee and had never felt nervous. But I couldn’t get used to how everything happened backward in Japanese traffic, the right and the left reversed. Kenichi stepped on the gas and pulled into the right lane to pass a few slower cars. Then he pulled back into the left lane, in front of the cars he had passed. To my right, across the concrete divider, a few trucks were barreling down. I was in a crazy mirror world, moving eighty miles an hour. I couldn’t help imagining us in an accident, flying through the windshield or crushed against bent metal. Trying to relax, I closed my eyes. Immediately, my mind reversed the right and the left—picturing Kenichi sitting to my left and, beyond him, outside the window, the empty passing lane. It was an old reflex. I wanted to feel safe. I couldn’t help trying to imagine that everything was where I wanted it to be.
The summer I worked as a volunteer songbird rehabilitator in Green Bay, many of my friends told me that they would never be able to do the same work because they were too emotional. They would get too attached to the birds they cared for and have to cry every time one of them died. They said I must be a brave person to take on a big responsibility that could end up in heartbreak.
I didn’t think my work required courage—all I had to do was be sensible. From the beginning, I knew that some of the birds I tried to save would die. Even regular birds succeed in raising only about half their young, so babies who fall out of the nest at two or three days old are doomed to die. Any minute they lived in my care was an extra minute they wouldn’t have lived, so I had no reason to cry when they died. Most of the birds I took home were a little older; they survived and were ready for release in a month or so. Release was a task some people found difficult—after spending so much time with the bird, y
ou have to let it go, to live or die in the wild as it was meant to—but I liked doing it. I loved opening the door of my outdoor cage and watching the finches and waxwings fly out, swirling up into the sky without looking back once at me. Some of the robins stayed around in our yard for a few weeks, begging food from me, but even they left to join the other birds.
In mid-August, someone brought in a baby nighthawk, and the curator, Mike, gave it to me. Nighthawks, unlike most songbirds, don’t gape for their food. They come running at you, whistling and hissing, flapping their wings, opening and closing their mouths very fast. You have to have perfect timing to put food in their mouths. Because the birds are nocturnal, they don’t start flying around during the day, as other birds do; nor do they perch on branches—their feet are made for staying on big flat surfaces. I spent more time and care on this bird than on the others, trying to teach him to fly and eat. After three weeks, I noticed that the nighthawk’s beak was slightly crooked and his mouth did not close tightly. Mike arranged for me to take the bird to a veterinarian in town.
After examining the bird, the veterinarian told me that he had most likely suffered some traumatic injury when he fell out of the nest, and as a result, his beak would never develop properly.
“This is a bird that has to fly around at night. He flies with his mouth open, and moths and mosquitoes get trapped inside his mouth. Your bird is not going to be able to do that with this deformed beak.”
“What can we do?” I asked, thinking that there must be some corrective surgery or even braces we could use—I had seen all kinds of injured birds nursed to health.