by Kyoko Mori
Most of us fall into the habit of wishful lying. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can even make our lies become the truth. After lying to a friend about not being able to come to her party because we planned to be out of town, we can actually go out of town to make the lie “come true.” In Japan, white lies are widely accepted—even encouraged. From an early age, we are taught that there is a distinction between hon-ne (the truth, literally, the true-sound) and tate-mae (the polite lie, or the facade). Everyone lies from time to time, we are told; it’s naive and even rude to expect otherwise. In the States, sincerity and honesty are ideals, but most people admit to falling short of them. Most Americans believe that there is a big difference between being viciously insincere and being insincere with good intentions or out of politeness. Whatever the ideals and the codes of behavior may be in the two cultures, the result is pretty much the same: we all lie to avoid mutual embarrassment, to save face.
As a teenager in Japan, I did not value the custom of hon-ne /tate-mae. To be insincere, I thought, was the worst offense. My favorite characters in literature were Jane Eyre and Holden Caulfield. I admired their righteous indignation about hypocrisy and phoniness. It didn’t bother me that Holden lied occasionally—his lies got him into deeper trouble rather than giving him an advantage, and besides, he was honest with us, the readers. Trying to be as pure-minded as Jane Eyre, I went out of my way to tell and insist on unpopular truths. I flaunted my disobedience to my father and my stepmother. I confronted my friends with the mistakes they made, the stupid things they said. It’s a wonder that anyone could stand me at all.
Ironically, during this time when I worshipped the truth, I was being fed some big lies by my stepmother. I believed all Michiko’s lies because she was such an unpleasant person. To me, liars were people who pretended to be nice, whose sweet words and malicious actions didn’t match. Michiko never tried to be nice to me, spare my feelings, or save my face, so I assumed that she was being truthful to me. I even thought that blunt honesty was one of her few good qualities. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The whole time we lived together, she was actually trying to isolate me from anyone who could have made me feel loved or valued, and her strategy almost always involved lies.
Even before she moved into our house, Michiko told my father that my mother’s family had made her feel uncomfortable; she couldn’t really be any sort of a “mother” to my brother and me unless we stopped seeing them. My father agreed, but I was still allowed to see Akiko and Kazumi since Akiko was my father’s sister, not my mother’s. I visited them every Sunday and spent my afternoons at their house. When Michiko told me that I was bothering Akiko by spending too much time at her house, I was shocked, but it never occurred to me that she was lying.
“Akiko wants to spend her Sundays alone with Kazumi,” Michiko explained. “After all, Kazumi is her daughter and you are only a niece.”
In Japan, when people are forced to communicate something painful or unpleasant, they use a middle-person, so I assumed that Akiko did not have the heart to tell me “the truth” and had asked Michiko to be her messenger. I stopped visiting Akiko and Kazumi and never thought of confronting them or telling them how hurt I felt.
I was thirteen then and no longer in touch with many people from my childhood. None of my friends at school had met my mother or known me as a girl who had a mother. My family had moved to a new house, so I didn’t play with kids from our old neighborhood. The only people I still knew from my old life were the Kuzuhas, our former neighbors, who now lived a few miles away. My father couldn’t forbid me to see them, since he and Mr. Kuzuha worked at the same office.
For several years after my mother’s death, Mrs. Kuzuha invited me to her house every week to have dinner with her and her sons or to go on various outings with them. Some Saturdays, she took me shopping alone, leaving her sons at home, since they were not interested in looking at women’s clothes or shoes. Mrs. Kuzuha said that I was like a daughter to her, and I, too, felt that she was like a mother to me. Unlike Jumpei, Makoto and Tadashi remembered my mother and talked about her now and then, so they were more like my brothers than my real brother. Mr. Kuzuha, who watched television at home on Sundays or took the boys and me to the park, was so much nicer than my own father. He joked and teased me as my uncles used to. When I was with the Kuzuhas, I felt as though I still had a family. I didn’t know that Michiko was calculating how to separate me from them with her lies.
She had her chance one evening when I was sixteen, when Mrs. Kuzuha took me out to dinner in Osaka. By then, Makoto was attending a boarding school in Tokyo and Tadashi had too much homework, but she brought along Makoto’s roommate, who happened to be staying at her house for a few days. At the end of the evening, she asked the roommate to walk me home from the commuter train station because it was late and she did not want me to walk or take a cab alone. “I just want Kyo-chan to be safe,” she said. “I can’t come along because I can’t walk in these high heels.”
The boy and I assured her that we would be safe and told her not to worry. When the two of us got back to my house, though, my father had been looking out the window, waiting for me. As soon as he saw me with a boy, Hiroshi assumed that I had lied to him about going out to dinner with Mrs. Kuzuha—all along, he thought, I was dating a boy in secret. He came running out and started yelling at us. I asked the boy to leave. “You’re only making it worse,” I said. “Go.”
The next day, I called Mrs. Kuzuha from school because I felt mortified by my father’s behavior. She told me it wasn’t my fault, and I thought that was the end of the incident.
When I got home, Michiko came running to the door to meet me. “You won’t believe what happened this afternoon,” she said, standing in the hallway with a dirty dishrag in her hand. “Mrs. Kuzuha called and she is furious with all of us.”
“What?” I asked, confused. Michiko had not given me time to take off my shoes or put down my books.
“Mrs. Kuzuha was upset at your father for yelling at her son’s friend, but she wasn’t too happy with you, either,” Michiko said, breathless with excitement. “Mrs. Kuzuha thinks that you aren’t such a nice girl anymore. ‘Kyoko is changing,’ she told me. ‘She’s taken to flirting with boys. I’ve caught her making eyes at my own sons.’” Michiko snorted through her nose as though she were upset. “Mrs. Kuzuha then accused me of not being a good parent. She kept saying that you used to be such a nice girl and now you aren’t because I must not be doing a good job.”
Michiko went on about all the bad things Mrs. Kuzuha had said about me. I stood there in shock. I had no idea then that Michiko had made up the conversation she was reporting, though I know now that Mrs. Kuzuha only called to say that I hadn’t been lying to my parents, that I really had been out with her. Michiko invented everything else. But back then, I assumed that she was telling me an unpleasant truth. After she was finished, I went upstairs and cried. I felt angry at Michiko for the apparent pleasure she took in reporting the conversation she’d had, but I was angry at Mrs. Kuzuha, too, for pretending to be so nice when she had such a low opinion of me.
I saw the Kuzuhas only a few more times after that day. Mrs. Kuzuha continued to call me and invite me to her house. When I couldn’t come up with a good excuse and went there, she was friendly and kind. There was no sign that she thought of me as “not a nice girl anymore,” but I concluded that Mrs. Kuzuha was an expert pretender—a hypocrite.
The following spring, I left to spend a year in Arizona as an AFS student. I didn’t write to the Kuzuhas; I didn’t contact them when I got back. In two years, I was gone again for good. I never tried to get in touch with the Kuzuhas again.
From time to time, though, I thought about Tadashi and Makoto. They appeared in my dreams, as children or teenagers or even as grown-ups. When I saw my father in 1990, I asked him if he ever ran into any of the Kuzuhas or heard any news of them.
“No,” he replied. “I never hear anything about them.”
I was
in Kobe for eight weeks that summer. I looked in the phone book and found out that Mr. and Mrs. Kuzuha still lived in Ashiya. I thought of calling them, but I kept putting it off until it was too late. I didn’t know what I could say to them after all those years.
When I was in town after my father’s death, I looked up the Kuzuhas’ phone number again. This time, I called. Mrs. Kuzuha answered and said that she had heard the news of my father’s death, that her husband had also died the year before.
“Can you come to visit me?” she asked. “I’ll come and get you in my car. We should have dinner.”
“Of course,” I said.
As soon as I met Mrs. Kuzuha in her car, I knew that she had never said a bad thing about me. She turned to me, put her hand on my cheek as though I were still a little girl, and cried. I realized how ridiculous I had been to believe that she would complain to Michiko—a woman she never liked—about me, a girl she had known for years, a girl whose mother had been her best friend.
During our dinner at her house, Mrs. Kuzuha mentioned that she had run into my father at a restaurant in the early eighties when Makoto was working in Chicago. She asked him where I was, and my father did not tell her. “Makoto is in Chicago right now,” she told him. “He would love to get in touch with Kyoko. I heard a rumor that she, too, was in the Midwest.”
“Yes, she is,” my father answered but would not tell her where. When Mrs. Kuzuha asked for my address, my father walked away from her.
“Makoto looked in the phone books of all the major cities in the Midwest, but he couldn’t find you,” Mrs. Kuzuha told me.
I had been in Milwaukee at the time, but my phone number wasn’t listed. I was disappointed to learn—years too late—that Makoto and I had been within two hours’ drive of each other.
I called Tadashi from Mrs. Kuzuha’s house, and he, too, said that he had run into my father once in the mid-eighties and had talked to him briefly.
When my father told me, in 1990, that he hadn’t heard a thing about the Kuzuhas, he had actually seen both Mrs. Kuzuha and Tadashi not so long ago. I was angry that he had been rude to them and then lied to me.
When I came home from Mrs. Kuzuha’s house, I told my aunt what I had found out.
“Why would my father say nothing about meeting the Kuzuhas when I specifically asked him about them?” I asked, more or less rhetorically.
Instead of agreeing with me that my father’s behavior was odd or wrong, Akiko frowned and shook her head. We were having tea in her kitchen. She put down her cup and shrugged.
“I don’t know why your father was rude, but in a way, I understand. Mrs. Kuzuha hasn’t always been fair to you,” she said. “Your father told me what happened.” She proceeded to tell me a story about myself that amazed me.
According to my father—who heard it from Michiko—when I was sixteen I wrote numerous love letters to Makoto’s roommate who had walked me home that one night. Over and over, I begged the boy to visit me. The roommate’s family discovered the letters and got very upset—they asked the Kuzuhas to make me stop. Mrs. Kuzuha, caught in the middle of an awkward situation, was angry at me. She called our house and yelled at Michiko and blamed her for not having kept a better eye on me. Michiko had to talk to me and make me promise that I would never write, telephone, or try to see this boy.
When Akiko finished her story, I was too astonished to speak for a while. The story sounded so completely authentic even though I knew it to be a total fabrication. How could I defend myself against such a good story? “But I never wrote any letters” was all I could say right away.
“You didn’t?” Akiko asked, looking surprised.
“I can’t even remember that boy’s name,” I told her. “I only met him that one time with Mrs. Kuzuha and never thought of him.”
My aunt frowned. “You never even sent him one postcard?”
“Why would I? I had nothing to say to him. Think about it, Aunt Akiko. Why would I write love letters to a boy I only met once? Especially when that boy was Makoto’s roommate. How embarrassing.”
“I did think it was odd,” Akiko admitted. “I was a little surprised when your father told me.”
“Believe me. I never even thought about that boy, much less wrote to him.”
“I believe you,” Akiko said, frowning and nodding at the same time. “I feel bad now that I was so foolish.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Aunt Akiko. Michiko is a pretty good liar.”
Akiko and I couldn’t get over Michiko’s skill at deception. To me, Michiko had reported a single fictional conversation with Mrs. Kuzuha. Maybe that wasn’t so hard. But to my father, she had concocted a long story about my love letters, their discovery, and Mrs. Kuzuha’s complaints. She must have also told him about an invented conversation she and I had had, in which she made me promise not to write to the boy anymore. She would have had to make up details about how I had been forced to admit “the truth” about the letters, how I had cried when she confronted me. “There’s no need for you to say anything,” she must have told my father. “It’s all taken care of. I told her that in return for her promise, I would make sure no one else would ever mention this embarrassing event to her again. So you should say nothing. I only told you all these unpleasant details so you would know the whole truth. After all, you are her father.”
I’m still amazed at her confidence. If my father had made even a slight reference to the supposed love letters, I would have said, “What love letters? What are you talking about?”
But as Michiko would have known by that time, my father always assumed the worst about me. He wasn’t the kind of father who would have thought, “Maybe there was some misunderstanding. I want to hear my daughter’s side of the story,” or “If my daughter wants to write to someone, she has every right to do so. It’s no one else’s business.” My father was probably relieved that he would not have to talk to me about this—or anything else. He must have seen the whole incident as another example of how I made him and our family look bad. He snubbed Mrs. Kuzuha at the restaurant and refused to give her my address because he was angry at her for the part he thought she had played in adding to our humiliation. It didn’t occur to him that a woman who was my mother’s best friend might have defended me if I had been found in the middle of an embarrassing situation. Like me, my father believed everything Michiko said.
Michiko hasn’t changed. She continues to tell stories that show everyone but herself in a bad light. I am sure that I am still a subject of her wild tales, but I don’t confront her with her lies because it is useless. No matter what I say, she will make up more lies. Maybe in some crazy way, she is convinced by now that I really did write love letters to Makoto’s roommate, that no one in this world is as virtuous or as put-upon by others as is she.
A few months ago, I was looking through the Joy of Cooking to find a recipe for a cookie frosting. I thumbed through the book instead of using the index and found myself browsing in the Game section. On the first page of that section, there were drawings of rabbits and squirrels. The one that caught my eye showed a stylishly laced-up boot placed firmly on a squirrel’s tail while two gloved hands pulled up the legs. The drawing went with the instructions for skinning a squirrel:
ABOUT SQUIRREL Gray squirrels are the preferred ones; red squirrels are small and quite gamey in flavor. There are, proverbially, many ways to skin a squirrel, but some hunters claim the following one is the quickest and cleanest. It needs a sharp knife.
“Hey, look at this, I called to the friend whose book it was.”Did you know your book had these helpful instructions about cooking squirrels?”
We read the rest of the instructions and laughed in the way we would laugh at anything that was “sick” or “gross.” My friend, who grew up in rural Wisconsin, admitted that he had eaten squirrels in the past when his grandmother put on an annual “squirrel feed,” but no, he had never skinned or cleaned them himself. I wanted to know all about what they tasted like and how they were serv
ed. “They didn’t taste like chicken, did they?” I asked.
“No, they tasted kind of gamy,” he said.
“What does that mean anyway, gamy? That’s no more specific than saying that something ‘tastes like chicken.’ Does that mean sweet, bitter, sour, or what?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “For someone who doesn’t eat meat, you’re kind of fascinated by all this.”
I couldn’t stop asking about all the gory details. I learned that at my friend’s grandmother’s house, squirrels were served with their heads, tails, and feet cut off, looking like “squirrel chassis.” I liked that expression because it sounded almost surreal—a Salvador Dali combination of the natural and the mechanical. For weeks, I kept telling everyone who had the Joy of Cooking to look at page 453.
What is repulsive is often fascinating, especially if it’s detailed. The squirrel picture would have been less interesting if the boot placed on the tail had been a workboot, like the Sorels that many Midwesterners wear in the winter. The delicate shape of the low-heeled but slim boot—unmistakably a “ladies’” boot—made the picture memorable. I wondered if the artist had chosen that boot to communicate to the readers—most of them women—that they did not need a man in order to cook squirrels. At the same time, the instructions mentioned “hunters,” making it sound like certain people hunted squirrels as a way of life. All of those details interested me very much.