One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

He smiled. “Yes.” He turned to my mother. “Now I know where Kiki gets her good looks from.”

  It was a hopelessly cheesy line, but Eric has the sweetness to carry it off. She smiled and maybe even reddened.

  We met only for an hour, as she had her appointment at the hospital. Mostly they talked about politics, leaving me out. When our tea came, Eric watched closely as I put the sugar into my mother’s tea and stirred it in, while she reached around me and poured milk into my cup and then into hers. “You two work well together,” he said.

  They squabbled with good humor over the check when it came, with Eric gracefully conceding defeat at the end.

  Later that afternoon, when Eric was on his way back to the office and I was walking with her to the hospital, she said, “You shouldn’t be so critical of him.” I began to protest—when had I ever complained about him to her?—but she had not finished. “He’s a good person for you, especially now,” she continued. “He’ll hold you together.”

  And later still, when my mother was riding her train back to New Jersey, and Eric and I were having dinner together: “Nice lady, your mother,” he said.

  I nodded and chewed.

  “She’s so frail, though,” he continued, and then he paused. “I didn’t expect that.”

  “But I told you about her arthritis a zillion times.”

  “I didn’t mean physically It’s more that you always make her sound like such a tough cookie, with her wartime childhood and her emigration for love and her bad marriage, and now her arthritis and her solitary life. I suppose she must be strong to have lived through all that, but she seems so vulnerable.”

  “Most men think that about her,” I told him. “She plays up to that, I think.”

  He raised his eyebrows and tapped his fork against his plate. “She’s not reliant on men, at least not on me. She relies on you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, the quickness of my own retort startling me a little.

  “I don’t think I’m being silly. She depends on you—I can see it in the way she listens to you. She listened politely when I spoke, but it’s your words that she really cares about. It makes sense. After all,” he said, lifting his fork to his mouth, “aren’t you all that she has?”

  The phone rings and rings, seven, eight, nine times. My chest begins to hurt. Why would my mother be out on a Saturday night? Tormented by visions of her falling, overwhelmed by premonitions of death, I run over to Eric, who is reading his newspapers in the bedroom, to tell him that I am going to New Jersey to check up on my mother. He looks up, astonished, and it takes him half an hour to coax me out of my fears. He spreads open his paper to regale me with accounts of the latest wonder playing at the art cinema house, and then with considerable eloquence expounds upon the fallibility of the phone system, until finally I smile.

  “You are such a parent,” he scolds, and while I return his laugh, it takes me a full five seconds to understand the joke.

  The train ride to my mother’s house would only have taken an hour. I thank him, though, and get up to return to the living room, but he takes me in his arms and squeezes me tight, and does not release me until I assure him twice that I am fine. I wander back to my favorite place on the sofa, and sit down in the dead center of the circle created by the glow of the lamp.

  Phillip is dozing in the darkest corner of the room. Turning my back to him, I force myself to recall the boy who wanted to spend his life hidden in the quiet metal bubble.

  Obaasama, I will say. Grandmother, surely it’s not just me; surely it’s not just that boy who knows how sweet it is, how necessary and even natural it is to want to take shelter, whether or not there are winds?

  And in the silence that passes between my question and her response, perhaps she, too, will think of my mother, and those swollen hands.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MY MOTHER WAS born a bastard in Japan. As a little girl saying good-night to her parents, she sat with her legs folded under her and bowed until her nose scraped the ground. No one ever kissed her. Under the guidance of a maid, she practiced pouring and serving tea in small cups without handles. With a paintbrush, she wrote letters in a language I do not understand, and when she read, her eyes went from the top of the page down to the bottom, and from right to left.

  She wore long, tight robes that hugged her knees and whispered softly against the floor. She dined on fish and rice until the advent of the war, and then she ate weeds and grasshoppers to supplement meagre portions of rationed food. It was not until after the war, when she was nine years old, that she set eyes on white people, pale giants with eyes that came in vivid shades. When she first saw them, she thought they were a race of chewers, closer to cows than to people in their digestive habits, and it was not until three weeks had passed that a friend at school enlightened her on the wonders of gum.

  I cling to the thought of the differences in our childhoods because it serves as a partial explanation of why my mother and I no longer talk. There are the stories about my grandmother, of course, but they function almost as space fillers, clouding the silence around our own private lives. When I told her that Phillip died, I did so a month after the fact.

  Once we did not talk because we did not need to talk. We had an innate and implicit knowledge of each other’s thoughts and feelings, an understanding so deep it might have begun in her womb. Now we do not talk because there would be too much to say, and no common ground on which to begin. Sometimes I cannot believe that we are so estranged; the rift between us seems logically impossible. She is the woman who bore me inside her stomach for nine months. Her breasts fed me and my urine stained her fingers. She nursed me through scarlet fever and the chicken pox and pneumonia, and she taught me how to speak. She bought me my first book. She stayed to raise me after my father left, and she bore the burden of my tantrums. Most of the meals in my lifetime were prepared by her and later with her, and we ate them sitting side by side. Even throughout the time that I most hated her, I sat through dinner with her, and when it was over, we washed and dried the dishes in a rhythm rendered perfect by the years. In the gray winter evenings, we warmed ourselves in front of the same fire as we read, and in the summer we rocked on the porch and drank iced tea in the cool of the afternoon breeze.

  I do not know what she regrets most. Every once in a while, when I catch her in an unfamiliar light or an unexpected pose, I can almost see her as others must: middle-aged and content, serenely resigned to herself and her situation, a strong and independent woman who embraces her solitude. Yet at other times, most often late at night, there is a wistfulness in the way her hand continues to turn the pages of the newspaper while her eyes look into the fire. Dreaming over the newspapers, she seems a completely different person: forlorn, perhaps bitter, almost certainly sad.

  She spends most Saturday nights at home, reading. She subscribes to far more newspapers and magazines than I could even recognize by name, and she reads all of them. In her house the recycling bins overflow with paper. When Eric and she met, they talked only briefly, but even so he was astounded at the breadth and the depth of her knowledge about the world.

  Whereas I am lucky to find my stapler when I need it, my mother’s desk is scrupulously organized and always neat, and the contents of her top drawer have been the same for as long as I can remember. There she keeps my navy blue American passport and her red Japanese one, with the characters embossed in gold across the front. My mother’s devotion to American political events does not extend to a desire for a vote. She has lived in this country now for twenty-nine years, and she has gone back to Japan only once; changing her citizenship would be a mere formality, but out of indifference or perhaps a perverse feeling of patriotism, she has remained Japanese.

  In the top drawer of her desk she also keeps matches and candles. Years ago, some time after my father left, I asked her what they were doing in there among our passports. Her answer was delivered in typically telegraphic fashion: “Earthquakes.” I laughed a little uncertainly
at the thought of an earthquake in central New Jersey, but she had turned away. I stood up and was almost out the door when she spoke again. “Bombs,” she said, tight-lipped. “Earthquakes and bombs.” That was all. After a pause I walked out of the room. We did not discuss the candles again, but I knew then that there is no escape from the terrors of our childhood, that they become our adult nightmares and haunt all our days.

  Grandmother, I will say, Obaasama. How is it that you gave birth to a woman like my mother, so cool and self-contained, and she gave birth to me?

  The violet moths have multiplied; I count them and there are eight. I move out of the circle of light cast by the lamp, and with my head averted, I walk past Phillip, curled in fetal position now on the floor beneath the windows. I pour myself a glass of iced tea, and go to my desk and rustle through the papers until I find the two pictures.

  The first photograph is of myself when I am three. I am sitting on white sand in front of a very blue ocean, and by some accident of the camera, I am caught in a pose more than half flirtatious, a small hand lifted in a provocative gesture to hair disheveled in the wind. Although my lips curve with only the faintest trace of a smile, my eyes are laughing. I was a happy child then, and it showed. I sometimes think I can almost remember this moment, the sun shining down, and me on the brink of laughter because of something that my father said. But I do not really possess such a memory. Rather I look at this picture so often that I have imagined myself into it, like the stories about Japan I heard over and over until they became first a myth and then a dimly remembered part of my own past. I love this picture, with my body size just right and my face looking remarkably like it does now—thin, with the features in even harmony; I look cheerful and normal and effortlessly beautiful. With this photo in hand, I can almost pretend that all the intervening years of fat and misery and ugliness had never been.

  The next photograph has sharper detail and the paper is of a superior quality. It is in black and white, and it is a very obviously posed shot. The picture is of three children. They are slender and they seem almost deliberately doll-like, with delicate hands and wrists peeking out through the wide sleeves of their kimonos. Their faces seem scrubbed clean of smiles, though the younger boy looks as if he is just barely suppressing one. The girl has long dark hair that drops straight down, like water falling from a great height. She stands apart from her brothers. Her face is round and she is frowning slightly; while the others are merely solemn, she is grim. With her hands folded primly in front of her, my mother looks so stiff and serious that few would guess she is only ten years old.

  My mother was born in the spring but she was named for a different season altogether—Akiko, or Autumn Child, after Yukiko’s mother, the sunny-tempered, energetic woman who hummed as she worked through the night. In naming her child after an unknown grandmother, Yukiko began a tradition that my mother followed. While I was born on a warm day in May, my name is written in Japanese with the character for snow, in honor of the blizzard that raged on the night that Yukiko was born.

  From a very early age, my mother displayed a wholly unexpected gift for music. Just as Yukiko’s beauty seemed to spring out of nowhere, so, too, did my mother’s talent appear without precedent: her grandmother’s humming was never in key, and her parents were similarly tuneless. Her nurse sang lullabies to her, though, and family lore has it that my mother sang with her from the crib, her coos and gurgles and babybabble striking every note like the hits of an expert marksman: bull’s-eye. Yet it was not until the age of four, when she was placed in front of a keyboard, that my mother’s musicality found its true outlet, and she became irrevocably smitten. Her love affair with the piano lasted for decades, although eventually it, too, came to an end.

  She was born with her grandmother’s marvelous store of energy, her father’s ambition and brains, and her mother’s single-minded approach to the passions in her life—a disastrous combination for a girl growing up in the Japan of the forties and fifties. Through luck and sheer will, Yukiko, who came from a family so poor that they had to sell her to survive, got everything she wanted: the man she loved; a home of her own; children or, more specifically, sons; marriage. Born into wealth and privilege, smart, talented, and doggedly hardworking, my mother was defeated at every turn.

  She was eight when the bombing in Tokyo became so dangerous that her family packed up their things and moved out to the country. Only her father, busy as always with work, stayed in Tokyo, taking the train into the country on the occasional weekend to see his wife and children.

  To Akiko it seemed a glorious vacation. Food was scarce and she missed the calming presence of her father, but the lush fields, the mountains, and the wide spaces of the countryside made an impression on her, a born-and-bred city girl, that she was never to forget. She ran and played until her knees and shins, like her mothers at her age, became checkered with scabs, cuts, and bruises. At school, the village children mocked her for her Tokyo dialect, but she had her brothers, and she felt confirmed in her view that this was paradise on the day her cousin arrived.

  Kenji was a fabulous child, clever and energetic, and able, too, to make boats that skimmed the surface of the lake from sticks, string, and scraps of cloth. He knew half a dozen card tricks, and he was tolerant of his little cousin, in large part because he, with his Korean blood, was also shunned by the village children.

  Kenji was the son of Akiko’s father’s sister, Mieko, who had had the unspeakable temerity to marry a Korean against her parents’ wishes, to give birth to a child and then to die, with the bond between her and her family still severed. While Mieko’s parents would eventually have forgiven her for the marriage, they could not forgive her early death, which left the child permanently out of their reach: Kenji’s father hated them for their snobbery, and refused to let them associate with the boy.

  Mieko died on Kenji’s fifth birthday. Seeking, perhaps, to make up to his son for this early trauma, Kenji’s father spoiled and indulged him, often leaving him to rule over and abuse the maids and nannies, who dared not quarrel with the young master.

  But Kenji was unusually kind to Akiko, even though a certain amount of bullying was probably inevitable. Given that kindness, as well as the fact that he was easily the smartest boy in school, a genuine whiz in science and math, it is not surprising that she came down with a severe case of hero worship. An only child, he reciprocated by sharing with her his darkest secret: his chronic bed-wetting, which all the ingenious punishments devised by his father could not cure.

  Akiko enjoyed an easy, uncomplicated relationship with her father, and felt sad that work kept him so busy that even in Tokyo, he was rarely at home. While she was closer to her mother, her relationship with her was far more difficult, for even at the age of eight, Akiko was beginning to strain under the enormous burden of the expectations placed upon her as a girl, and no one was more responsible for this weight than her mother. It was Yukiko who insisted on practicing the tea-ceremony lessons, when Akiko would so much rather be playing outside with her brothers; it was Yukiko who dressed Akiko in those expensive kimonos that caught and tripped her when she tried to run.

  Akiko’s brothers were fiercely defensive of her when it came to outsiders, folding in to present a united front to any tormentors. Even Tadashi, who was almost four years younger, worked hard to shield her, as if guessing in her stubbornness the outlines of her fate. Still, despite their protectiveness, despite the fact that they liked and respected her, Tadashi and Isamu were an almost inseparable duo, which made Akiko the odd man out.

  So it was in the absence of any other real companionship that Kenji and Akiko became a twosome. He liked to play, most of all, on the railroad tracks, which they followed a little farther every day until they came to a gorge, over which trains traveled on the narrowest possible strip of a bridge. Climbing on the strip on her hands and knees, which was all that she could manage, Akiko peered through the slats of the tracks and saw the stark edge of a cliff, falling many
kilometers downwards, and at the bottom a river, which was so far below that only if it was absolutely quiet, and only if she really concentrated, could she hear the rushing of the water.

  Drawing back to the safety of the ground, she looked down again and felt her stomach somersault, and experienced a perhaps hereditary urge to fall. She did not realize she was gradually leaning into the abyss until Kenji, with a curse, caught her by her kimono sleeve just as her foothold slipped, and she began to pitch forward. “Stupid,” he yelled, his face red with anger. “What are you doing—trying to kill yourself and get me in trouble?”

  They did not know the train schedule, and had not been successful in figuring out even its roughest guidelines. At times the trains came in rapid succession, with one appearing from behind the hill even as another disappeared around the bend, and then Kenji and my mother would exhaust themselves by running and screaming beside each train, chasing it as far as they could. At other times, none came for hours, and birds would roost on the tracks while rabbits ran across them, and then the two children would be bored. He told her stories, then, to while away the time: mostly tales of what he would do with his life, the inventions he would make and the countries he would visit, and the tree house he would build and live in with Akiko at his side.

  After they discovered the gorge, his greatest delight was to run up and down the bridge, on a few memorable occasions chased by oncoming trains. When the wind blew, the tracks creaked and swayed, yet Kenji never paused. Dazzled by hero worship, dying to follow but afraid of the yearning to jump that came over her like a spell when she looked down, Akiko crouched on the ground by the tracks, and prayed for Kenji’s life.

  Kenji went back to Tokyo in the spring, yanked away from this pastoral romance by his father, who had begun to fret in the absence of his only child. It was a selfish move on Kenji’s father’s part, for food was even more scarce in Tokyo than in the country. My mother later heard that Kenji’s stomach had swelled up as if he were with child, while the rest of him grew thin and wasted away—a second false pregnancy in the saga of my family.