“Are you sure you don’t have an Asian-woman fetish?” I say, trying to keep my tone light, but in vain.
He pushes me away so he can peer into my face. “Are you going to start that again?”
I look away, deliberating the question.
He sighs. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I just prefer Japanese names, that’s all. We’re not going to fight just after getting engaged, are we?”
“But you know that those men who ask me out in coffee shops, and who always try to talk to me in Japanese, and secretly yearn to see me dressed in a kimono, would just so much prefer Yukiko to Kiki….”
“Stop it,” he says. “I don’t have an Asian-woman fetish, okay? I would never ask you to walk on my back, and I wouldn’t—”
I freeze, stilled, momentarily, by the memory of a dark room with a crooked pool table, and a tall man I had fled from without a word. “What did you say?”
“I said I’m not going to ask you to—”
Quickly, before he can repeat that phrase, I stop him. “Ever heard of the expression ’one hundred and one ways’?”
He wrinkles his forehead. “It rings a bell,” he says. “Why?”
I shake my head, and manage to keep my voice even. “Just something somebody told me once. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
I reach out and draw him close again. My left hand is pressed against his back and as I slide my fingers across the smoothness of his skin, I imagine that I can feel the emptiness in the center of each of my fingertips. “Promise me,” I say, my voice muffled against his shoulder. “Promise me you aren’t attracted to me because I’m Japanese.”
Again he draws back to look me in the face. His eyes, searching mine, move back and forth as Phillip’s always did. He draws a deep breath in, and holds it. I count the seconds, waiting, expecting and dreading a lecture, but when he finally lets his breath out (… seven Mississippi…), his voice is quiet. “I promise,” he says. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m fine. Should we go out to dinner tonight, to celebrate?”
He nods. “But—”
I pick up the phone and drop it in front of him. “Here, make a reservation,” I say, standing up and moving away before he has a chance to refuse. “I’ll be right back.”
Grandmother, I will say, my tongue stumbling over the word that I learned three months ago, when my mother first told me about her visit: Obaasama. What did you do when faced with the assumptions of the men who desired you, the men who believed you possessed a set of keys that would unlock their bodies with a groan, one hundred and one times, one hundred and one ways?
In the bathroom I automatically flick on the light and I catch a quick glimpse of myself in the mirror before I turn the light off again; my face is pale and vague without the definition of fresh makeup. I shut and lock the door, and then I put down the lid on the toilet and sit on it to rest. The faint light coming through the shades of the small high window illuminates the toiletries lining the shelves. Eric’s green toothbrush has a place of its own in a cup of its own. My brown toothbrush, which is in a smaller cup next to his, looks dwarfed and dull by comparison.
One night I sat on the edge of the tub and watched Eric as he brushed and flossed his teeth. A lot of people remark on how striking his smile is, but I think his teeth are too large and too white. He is very proud of the fact that he has never had a cavity. Standing up, I move my toothbrush to another shelf.
I lift the lid of the seat and flush the toilet, letting the good clean water explode away, and then I step out of the bathroom. The hallway to the living room is long and tunnel-like, and my feet move slowly. As I pass the open doorway to my bedroom, a movement out of the corner of my eye catches me and then I stop and stare into the room because Phillip is sitting on the windowsill, his arms hugging one leg to his chest while the other dangles down just above the floor. Apart from the threat of Eric in the next room, Phillip is in plain view from the window across the way, perhaps even from the street.
He looks more solid and vivid than he has for a long time. These past few weeks I have been able to see the light shining through him when he is positioned at certain angles, but today he is opaque, every feature distinct, even with the sun streaming behind him. As usual he is expressionless, watching me intently.
Grandmother, I will say, Obaasama, When my grandfather tendered you his far less reputable proposal, did you, too, feel inside you the silence of a house in mourning? Or were you able to blot out the memory of the eyes of your secret lover, and the thought of a sick and hysterical woman? Were you so happy that you walked away from your geisha home without a backward glance?
“Kiki.” Eric is calling out to me but caught beneath the set gaze of Phillip’s eyes, I cannot move. “Kiki, what are you doing back there?” I wrench myself away from Phillip with a suddenness that tears me.
“I’m coming,” I say to Eric. As I walk past the bookshelves I run my hand along the spines of the books, and they bump against my fingers like actual bones. When I enter the living room I keep my eyes fixed upon Eric, handsome and elegant in spite of his knees, but I can feel Phillip’s unblinking gaze piercing my back until I can no longer bear it; I tell Eric I have a headache so that I can escape to the bedroom and He with my back pressed against the bed, my hair fanning outwards as my grandmother’s never did, and my eyes scanning the blank ceiling in a futile effort to avoid the now empty windowsill.
There is time, in the last seconds before I fall asleep, for me to wonder once again at the oddness of Eric’s proposal. How strange to run smack up against a happily-ever-after ending, when here I had been thinking that my story’s just begun.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SLIT BETWEEN an Oriental girl’s legs is as deliriously slanted as her eyes. Or so the saying goes, according to one man who never did find his way to my bed.
It happened seven years ago, when I was a sophomore in college, and still overwhelmed with gratitude for what a toss of the head (a shake of black hair) could do to the male students who hovered around me.
“I bet you do know one hundred and one ways, don’t you,” he said, putting down his drink.
“One hundred and one ways of what?” I asked, raising my voice slightly: the music from the party was audible still, though distant enough not to be deafening.
“One hundred and one ways to love a man,” he said. “That’s what you Japanese women—or is it Chinese?—are supposed to know.”
His hand drifted down to rest on my shoulder. I felt an itch beginning where his hand rested; it spread upward to my throat, the back of my neck, my scalp. Slowly, as if without thinking, I eased my shoulder out from under his touch.
“Says who?”
“I don’t know. It’s the name of a book or something. Maybe it’s some geesha thing.”
He was tall and well built, athletic as well as smart, and cousin to one of the more famous families of the country: women sighed and re-crossed their legs as he walked by. I had been flattered by his attention, enthusiastically allowing myself to be led to this dark room, which was empty save for a crooked pool table, and two worn armchairs placed conveniently close together in a dark corner.
“Geisha,” I said, correcting him automatically. “It’s pronounced geisha.”
“Whatever,” he said, moving his face closer to mine. “Anyway, shouldn’t you walk on my back or something?”
A crash of glass and a burst of laughter came through the door, followed shortly by a group of six or seven revelers. Without noticing us, the group crowded around the pool table; fishing a cue and a couple of balls from the ground, they began to argue loudly about who would be first to play.
His face was two inches away from my own. The smell of alcohol was strong on his breath.
“You are so pretty,” he said. His hand was once again upon my shoulder; the itch was once again spreading. “You know what they say about girls like you?”
Blue eyes wide, he gazed at me; he di
d not seem to need to blink. I stared back, for the moment, spellbound: mesmerized as any student faced by a charismatic don.
“The slit between an Oriental girl’s legs,” he said, reciting, as if by rote, as if it were a line he had learned at school, “is…”
I jerked my head back, clearing it of his spell; I stood up, none too steadily, and began to walk away, picking up my pace as I went.
“…as deliciously …”
That well-bred Boston voice was raised a notch now. At the pool table, heads were turning, curious glances cast our way.
“… slanted…”
I was all but running at the end, but he finished his sentence in a piercing stage whisper that sliced through the music, silenced the crowd at the pool table, and followed me across the room and out the door.
For years now, though especially of late, I have been hoarding questions to ask my grandmother Yukiko. These questions start out to be about her life, and then turn out to be about my own. But then again, the differences between us have always seemed slight.
We have never met, except once or twice over the phone. Her English is poor, my Japanese worse. Yet my mother assures me that three months from now, when Yukiko comes to New York, we will be able to communicate, and I believe her. Even on the phone, in those recent conversations filled with static, stammers, and banalities about our health, there is a bond that connects my grandmother to me. It is not our physical resemblance that draws us together, nor does it matter that we share the same name. I know that our similarities run deeper than that, for I have thought long and hard about the key to our secret kinship, and it is this: what a geisha is to Japan, a Japanese woman is to America.
My grandmother worked before the war, when being a geisha meant bedroom entertainment as well as the more innocent pleasures of music and party help. These days, of course, business suits are the norm for Japanese women, and a geisha decked out in her old-style kimono rides on the novelty of being as patently a period piece as a dinosaur. But even back when my grandmother worked, a geisha trafficked in sexual nostalgia, since her makeup and especially her manner were heavily, headily redolent of another era, a time in which the division between a man and a woman was even more sharply drawn.
In Japan and even America, the word “geisha” casts a spell of enchantment, conjuring the apparition of a beautiful woman, demure, docile, highly sexed and, most of all, always available. What my grandmother was to her customers, so, too, am I to a significant number of American men, Eric among them: the repository of wiles, feminine and erotic, one hundred and one of them.
My detailed knowledge of my grandmother comes from my mother. After my father left us, she took over his old job of nightly storytelling, and began lulling me to sleep with stories from our past. I could not tell the difference between the stories of my grandmother and the tales of princesses and dragons and peas that my father had read to me from books, so that even now, life in Japan seems shrouded in myth and mystery, remote and impossible as the pumpkin that turned into a coach.
My mother never tried to teach me Japanese. We did not throw beans to bring luck and chase the trolls away in February, nor did we decorate bamboo with wishes scrawled on paper and cranes made of origami in July, and we did not light lanterns or leave food in the cemetery during the week in the summer that our ancestors return to earth. Instead we faithfully punctuated the end of December with a pine tree, the third weekend of November with a turkey, and the last day of October with a pumpkin candlelit from within. We ate with fork and knife; I did not know how to use chopsticks until the age of twenty-four, when Phillip showed me how.
But almost in spite of myself, those nighttime stories about my grandmother got under my skin. My mother told me the stories in her usual measured way, with little variety of expression and such leisured pacing that I often had to break in and bark at her to hurry, or I would fall asleep before she finished. Yet my barking was to no avail, since the cadences of my mother’s storytelling never changed; every night I fell asleep with the singsong of her voice murmuring on, and her words and images blending with my dreams.
I am, perhaps, more Japanese than I know.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER Yukiko worked as a geisha, she kept her hair coiled in a round tea box next to her as she slept. Every night she brushed out her hair, the ends of it tickling the upper slope of her buttocks, and poured it into the box in a glossy black pretzel before she knelt to crawl into her futon.
Although a restless sleeper, she managed to wake in the mornings after her nights off with her hair more or less still in its rolls. The essence of the tea that had once been stored in the box lingered still, and faintly scented her hair with the poignant smell of smoking leaves in autumn. But after her working nights she usually woke with her hair impossibly tangled, and damp and rank with a strange man’s sweat.
The box was lacquered black on the outside and red within, with a spidery pattern of pine trees along its walls. Every morning a fourteen-year-old apprentice put it away, along with the futon, which had to be folded and lifted and stowed into a closet, while Yukiko brushed out her hair again and rolled it up on her head. She used two pins carved out of ivory to hold it in place. Her hair made a heavy crown, but she always kept her head upright, her neck long, and her back effortlessly straight.
She had come a long way from when she was a child. She was born on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, where the climate, with its dark, snowbound winters and long-lit summers, came closer to that of the continent than that of the rest of Japan, and where there was only one carefully tended crop of rice per year, growing a rich green through the water that mirrored the coolie hats of the peasants and the cranes flying in the sky. In Hokkaido the West could be felt in more than the weather. At some distant point in the past, the people there had intermingled with Russians. They were therefore taller and fairer than the other Japanese, and as such much admired.
Yukiko’s mother had been married at the age of fourteen. A small, plain woman who still looked like a child long after her wedding, my great-grandmother Akiko was blessed with a sunny disposition and a miraculous store of energy. As poor a sleeper as her daughter later became, she stayed up far into the night, cleaning and doing the cooking for which her work in the fields left her little time, and humming all the while. As if her nonstop activity, her bad sleeping habits, and her constant humming had drained her body of the capacity for much noise, she spoke in a lisping voice that was hardly ever more than a whisper. Demonstrative to an extent that was not often seen in their little village, she hugged her children often. They paid her back with their adoration.
Yukiko was a tomboy, spending her free hours in the trees with her three brothers rather than sewing or throwing bean sacks with the neighborhood girls. Serious and given to strange fancies, she lacked her mother’s easy charm but had apparently inherited more than her share of plainness, with dark skin, gangly limbs, and mortifyingly large feet that outran, outjumped, and outclimbed those of her brothers. Her hair was gorgeous, though, even then, and her mother stroked it often, marveling aloud at its softness and weight.
From an early age Yukiko and her brothers labored with their parents in the fields. In the spring she waded into the paddies that had been flooded with water, and set the roots of the baby rice plants into the mud. She developed cricks in her neck and back from weeding all day, and ran screaming with her brothers to keep away the birds. They were helped in this last endeavor by the scarecrow they had fashioned by tying two sticks together in the shape of a cross; dressed in an old cotton kimono, it flapped to great effect when the wind blew.
The peasants worked the land for a local lord, whom they regarded with an ancestral awe that bordered on religious worship, and an inkling of scorn and condescension that they did not admit even to themselves. The scion of a minor dynasty, the lord had been born into wealth and power, but while his rule had once extended over seven villages, with the decline of the feuda
l system the base of his power had shrunk steadily until it consisted only of this: his handsome house and its tidy gardens, and the fields, no more than fifty acres, where the rice grew. At the height of his career he had been but an ineffectual ruler, petty and weak. Now he spent all his time watching the peasants work the land. Leaning slightly forward, his old eyes weeping in the sun and the wind, he stood all day at the edge of the fields with his hands clasped behind his back. At his feet, the birds feasted fearlessly on the grains of the rice crop.
At twelve, Yukiko was lean-hipped and unusually tall, with features that were spare and clean. She could have passed for a boy had it not been for her breasts, which were clumsy and enormous, an embarrassment far worse than her feet.
The boys in the village made loud rude comments about mosquito bites and bee stings whenever they were in Yukiko’s presence. Among the girls it was fashionable to be smooth and straight, as streamlined as a boy, and so to them Yukiko was an object of pity. Her breasts distorted the lines of the cotton kimonos she wore in the summer and threatened to burst the folds open, straining to break free. Arriving before her when she walked through a door, they eclipsed her entrance. Even worse, they weighed her down so that she could no longer run with ease as her brothers did; they flopped from side to side, up and down, in great untidy arcs, and they continued to sway even after she stopped, leaning against a tree and panting.
Like mushrooms, they seemed to have sprouted overnight, but they were far more difficult to accommodate. The young Yukiko managed poorly, underestimating her own dimensions and banging into the table when she bent over with the dinner tray, and whacking walls and people when she suddenly turned, so that at night when she bathed by the light of a waxed paper lantern, she was not startled to find bruises the color of a sunset, blue and red and gold, splashed across each of her breasts.
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