by Kyoko Mori
My fear of the countryside also has to do with silence. Out on a rural highway, I am afraid of the quiet. If something happened to me, no one would hear me or come to help me. I’m made uneasy by the sense of isolation or the lack of communication—the great distance to the nearest pay phone or the gas station. I am uncomfortable with the seemingly peaceful and friendly atmosphere because I associate it with the smooth and polite surface of life in Japan. When everything looks peaceful and no one talks, my guard goes up.
In the city, there is always noise. Everywhere I go, there are crowds of people—maybe not all of them mean well by me, but I am willing to take my chances. In most American cities, danger isn’t hidden behind smooth surfaces or polite silences. To me, noise is a relief. At least it gives me a chance to join in and make my own noise, whether to express my opinion or to call for help. In a noisy American city, I feel safe from the oppressive silence of my past.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HOME
Getting on the plane to leave Japan at the end of my trip is like boarding a time machine. The moment I take my seat, everything that happened in the last week falls into the distant past. From the small window of the plane, the observation decks and the gates of the airport look far away, as though I were seeing them through binoculars. That’s how the whole trip strikes me as soon as I’m on the plane: small, far away, detailed. Like the migratory birds I watch through my binoculars, Japan becomes something for me to observe, study, recall.
I am jolted by the sudden shift of perspective. During my stay in Kobe, I feel as though I had never really left my childhood home. “I’ll be here again soon,” I say to my relatives and friends. “We’ll always be in touch.” Vaguely I imagine myself spending more time in Kobe in the future, by teaching a semester at a Japanese university or applying for a grant, and seeing my uncles, aunts, and cousins regularly for a while. If I had a teaching job, I reason, maybe living in Japan would not make me feel so helpless and scared: a job would remind me that I am a full, functioning adult; it would give me a chance to know Japan from a different perspective, and I could finally become more than an occasional visitor to my family.
Sitting on the plane and remembering these thoughts, I wonder, What was I thinking? There’s no way I could stay there for more than a couple of weeks. Who was I trying to fool? As the plane begins to taxi and then to lift off into the sky, I am relieved. I got out of there in time, I think, Thank goodness. Up in the air, it’s easy to admit the truth: it will be a long time before I am in Japan again, on another short visit; until then, I will think of my family and friends often, but they won’t know because I won’t write or call. This truth fills me with regret. I wish things had turned out a different way—it would be so nice if I could live my adult life without leaving behind my past in a foreign country—but a wish is only a wish: a strong feeling that does not affect the course of my life or the choices I make.
Due to the prevailing winds, the trip back from Japan to the United States is a couple of hours shorter than the trip the other way. From Tokyo or Osaka, I fly into San Francisco, go through the immigration and customs lines there, and then continue on to Detroit, where I board another plane to Green Bay. Each time I change planes, there are fewer Japanese or Asian people on board. On my first plane from Japan, I am surrounded by Japanese tourists. All the English announcements are followed by Japanese translations. As I fall in and out of sleep during the nine-hour flight, I hear the people around me talking to one another in Japanese.
On the plane to Detroit, there are only a few other Asians or Asian-Americans—business people traveling alone. The Japanese tourists, who travel in tour groups or with family members, have dispersed, and the bilingual announcements have stopped. All the same, I find myself waking up from sleep, thinking that the people around me are speaking in Japanese. I look around, only to find a blond and blue-eyed family of four, with a baby and a toddler. Awake, I hear the mother say to one of the kids, “Do you want some juice?” I doze off again and wake up, this time thinking that I hear my aunt and cousin speaking somewhere in the back of the plane. Behind me, there are fifteen, twenty rows of passengers, most of them asleep or reading in the narrow cone of light from the overhead reading lamp. Nobody is speaking, in any language.
As the plane speeds toward the Midwest, I recall the promises I made to my family and friends about coming back soon to visit. Even though I wanted the promises to be more than polite remarks, they can’t be anything else. It doesn’t do any good to wish that things had turned out differently. I am a balloon cut off and floating away into the blue sky. I have nothing to hold me anchored to the country of my birth, and yet I feel out of place among people who look nothing like me.
Ten, twenty minutes away from Detroit, the seatbelt sign goes on, and the plane begins to lose altitude. My ears ringing, I close my eyes and feel us tipping to the right, then to the left. People begin to wake up or put away their books; they are collecting their belongings and pulling out their tickets to review their connecting flights. In the general buzz of conversation behind me, I can no longer hear the Japanese phrases. With my eyes closed, I wish I could fall back to sleep and hear my aunts’ and friends’ voices again. I feel nostalgic for the things I was—and am—so willing to leave behind. Just for five, ten more minutes until landing, I want to hear the voices of the past, its familiar intonations, the vague and endless apologies.
The contradictory emotions I feel are nothing unusual. Most of my friends experience the same feelings when they visit their parents’ home in another city or another state. During the visit, they feel as though they had never left home, but as soon as they drive away or board the plane, the week they just spent “back home” seems more a part of their lives from twenty years ago than a recent event in their present life. “Was I really helping my father with his lawn this morning, or was it twenty years ago before I went to college?” they wonder as they travel back to their present homes—already making plans for the classes they will teach on Monday or reminding themselves that tomorrow is their daughter’s first soccer game of the season. The week “back home” with their parents seems oddly out of place and time. The visit is a trip across time as well as distance.
When people ask me how I could leave my “home” at twenty and never go back, I remind them that there is nothing unusual about my choice. Many people leave home at eighteen to go to college and end up settling in another state, perhaps across the continent. They don’t write, call, or visit their original families much more than I do. Or else people move to the next suburb only three miles away and yet feel a dissonance when they go “home” on holidays, because they have traveled a long distance from their parents’ politics or religion. It’s not so difficult to leave your “home” at eighteen or twenty, when you think of it as a place you were born to, not a place you have chosen. It didn’t require any special courage for me to leave behind everything I loved about my home at twenty. There was very little I loved about Kobe back then. I was eager to leave the house where I never felt safe, much less “at home,” and the culture that did not value intelligent and independent women—the kind of woman I wanted to become.
When I miss home now, it is the place itself I miss more than anything. At least once every month in my dreams, I stand on a seashore looking at a blue stretch of salt water, knowing that I am home. The dream may start out in another part of my home town: the busy downtown shopping district, my grade school up on the hill. Or it may begin some place far away. I am driving across the bridge on a country road in Wisconsin. Below me, there is an ice-covered river, and ahead, another long expanse of bare, brown fields. I turn the next corner, and suddenly, I am face to face with the salt water of my childhood.
The landscapes of childhood are imprinted on our memory. Many of us, miles, oceans, and years away from our first homes, return to them in our dreams. Chuck keeps dreaming about the only busy intersection with four-way stops that was in the small town where he went to kinder
garten. In the dream, he may be walking on Seventh Avenue in New York, but when he crosses the street, he will find himself standing at the old intersection with an A&W behind him, a Mobil station ahead, and a grain mill down the street to the right. All new places, perhaps, point us back home.
Kobe is a city built on a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea. No matter where you are in the city, you can see the mountains to the north or the sea to the south. When people in Kobe give directions, they don’t say kita (north) and minami (south); they say yamagawa (mountain side) and umigawa (sea side), even if they are in the middle of town, a few miles from either the mountains or the sea. I once took a cab in Kobe with three people from a publishing company in Tokyo. The cab driver asked us if the building we wanted to go to was on the sea side of the train station. A woman from Tokyo said, “No. The building is only a block from the station. It’s not near the sea.” “He means south,” I told her as though she did not speak the language and I were her interpreter.
Landscape is more potent than culture. Even though the people from Tokyo had lived in Japan all their lives, they were like foreigners in Kobe. Tokyo is built on a flat plain. To people who grew up there, the mountains of Kobe must look overwhelming. All three of them kept squinting as they looked north, as though they could not quite believe what they saw. They were surprised to meet old men and women walking up and down the steep hills that are everywhere in the city. Though I had not lived in Kobe for eighteen years, I felt completely at home.
But the familiarity with childhood landscapes is only one way to feel at home. Happy as I am to see the mountains and the sea on my trips back “home,” I begin to feel restless after only a few hours there. As I gaze at the mountains and the sea or sit down to dinner with my family and friends, time goes into slow motion. Moments seem like lifetimes, and I want to live them as though nothing else mattered, but deep down I know this is not my life, that my real life happens far away from my childhood landscape.
We mean so many things by home. Kobe would still be my home if home simply meant the place where we grew up, a place that is special to us because of our memories. But home also means a place where we have made a life for ourselves, where we feel a sense of purpose. I have never held a full-time job, voted, or paid taxes in Kobe, never supported a political cause or donated money or volunteered my time to help other people there. I could never call a place home without doing some of these things—without feeling that I have a part to play in the community. I left Japan because there was nothing for me to do there. I could get married and try to become an exemplary mother and wife, or live alone to pursue a career in isolation. Neither of these choices offers the kind of community involvement I find fulfilling: to have my own life and yet to be part of a larger life, a web of friends and like-minded people.
I don’t regret leaving, but as a result, I have two halves of the whole when it comes to home—home as a special place of childhood, home as a place where I can live, work, be part of the community, and feel happy. The two halves don’t make a smooth whole. Driving through the endlessly flat landscapes of the Midwest, I long for the mountains and the sea, the dramatic rise and fall of land and water around me. Like most people who grew up near any sea, I stare at Midwesterners with polite disbelief when they tell me that the Great Lakes are like the ocean. Nobody who grew up near salt water would say that. I am always lonely for a home where I can have everything: the past, the present, the future.
Still, I believe that there is another way to come home. A few years ago, on my first visit to Cleveland, Ohio, I stood in front of the paintings by van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Bonnard in the Impressionist wing of the museum. I felt oddly at home: I had stood in front of some of these paintings at different times, in different cities—going back decades to the first traveling Impressionist exhibits I saw with my mother in Kyoto when I was eight. Thirty years later, I was standing, again, in the same space: six inches away from the canvas, the space my mother and I had occupied for a few seconds on a cloudy day in Kyoto. I felt comforted by the familiar paintings, just as I felt comforted by the familiar landscapes of Kobe.
This sense of home has little to do with actual places. The Impressionists painted places I have never seen in my life: the gardens of Giverny, the bridges over the Seine, the rail works and gray cobblestones of Paris. All the same, these were the images my mother had loved and taught me to love: Bonnard’s white explosion of apple blossoms, Monet’s blurred light on water lilies.
Art brings me home. Walking through the various museums all over America, I walk in the beauty my mother taught me to love. I stand between Monet’s wisterias and van Gogh’s irises and think of the gardens my mother planted, the letters she wrote home, telling her parents when the peonies bloomed, when we picked the first strawberries. Like paintings and gardens, words, letters, and books, too, can bring me home.
I grew up reading an assortment of British and American novels. My favorite books between ages eight and twenty were: Emily of New Moon, Little Women, The Secret Garden, The Catcher in the Rye, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Returning to these books, authors, or similar books and authors now, I feel a sense of homecoming. Last winter, in bed with a flu, I started Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Only a few pages into the book, I was struck by a sense of familiarity. I recognized the ironic voice of the narrator. I knew the leisurely pace of the first scene. Already, I anticipated the slow unfolding of the story, which I knew would gain momentum and become a page-turner. I was back in the world of my favorite nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors: Austen, Eliot, Hardy, Trollope. I was home.
Looking back at my favorite books, I notice that few of the main characters have a home they can take for granted. Jane Eyre and Emily Starr are orphans. The Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice know that the home they grew up in will belong to a distant cousin after their father’s death; unless they marry, they will be homeless. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield briefly comes home, only to hide in the closet, worry about the ducks in Central Park, and give his sister the broken pieces of a record. Holden wants desperately to come home, if not to his parents’ apartment, then to the rye field where he can catch the falling kids. It doesn’t matter that his dream is based on the lyrics of a childhood song he remembers imperfectly.
Holden’s rye field is very much like my sense of home: an imagined place that brings together the comforting elements of childhood. For Holden, these elements are the remembered song, the dreamlike images of other children, and an urge to love and protect them. For me, the sense of home brings together the paintings and the books my mother taught me to love. Cézanne’s pears and the robins and ivy of The Secret Garden connect my childhood home to the home I have made in Wisconsin, where I look yearly for the return of the migratory birds and the blossoming of wildflowers. I keep coming home to books just as my dreams bring me back to the expanse of blue water.
Living in and between two cultures, I am often more confused than helped by the lessons I learned or rebelled against in both places. The question of home will always make me feel a little anxious and edgy. Often, when I meet people at academic conferences and tell them where I live, they laugh a little and say, “Really?” as though there was something incongruous about me—a Japanese woman from Kobe—making my home in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Perhaps these people are right. If I could move my job and my close friends, my whole adult life, somewhere else, I would choose to live in Milwaukee or Chicago. Ten years ago, if someone had asked me to name my ideal city, I would have said New York or San Francisco, or even Albuquerque. I’ve settled into a life in the Midwest. I love the easy pace of life, even the all-pervasive “niceness” I used to make fun of a long time ago: a place like Green Bay allows my friends and me to put together a living without much effort, to do whatever we want among people who are too nice not to let us be. So I don’t long for the coasts or even for better weather. Some days I still m
iss a childhood place where everything seemed clear and simple—north meant the mountains and south meant the sea—but I know that this place is more mythical than actual. The past doesn’t have all the answers.
In spite of my mother’s love, my childhood home was a place of sadness, secrets, and lies. My mother’s unhappiness with her life, a life that included me, is one of the hard truths I have to face. Love isn’t always enough to keep someone alive or to pull her out of unhappiness. My mother chose to die rather than to practice the Japanese virtue of gaman in hopes of a better future with me. I know she would be pleased with my attempt to be honest about that. My mother spent most of her adult life trying to live a polite lie of a stable and harmonious marriage, trying, day after day, to make the lie become the truth somehow; her death meant a final rejection of that lie. If there was one thing she wanted me to do, it was to resist the polite lies and the silences of my childhood, to speak the truth.
The last conversation my mother and I had, when I was twelve, was over the phone. Somehow, that has made it easier for me to imagine her voice even after her death, even in a foreign country. I picture invisible telephone wires stretching over the ocean, across that immense gap of time I travel into my childhood on my visits to Japan. My mother’s voice continues to reach me across that distance and time. The summer I left home, I stood looking at the waves coming in to San Francisco Bay and knew that in a roundabout way, the same water moved back and forth across the world—it didn’t matter where I was. I had left home, I was sure, not to forget about my mother but to be closer to her memory. All these years later, my conviction remains the same: I speak her words though I speak them in another language.