Talking to me about him more than a quarter of a century later, my mother said with a sigh that while she cried hard when he left, she was young and callous, and so had forgotten him before she returned to Tokyo. Yet really she only mislaid the memory of him, for when they encountered each other years later, she knew him as soon as she saw him.
I heard the teakettle’s whistle faintly through the door as I fumbled in my knapsack for the keys. It was a cold day in March; I was nine years old and I had just stepped off the school bus. In the front entrance, I stood still and listened for my mother, but the whistle drowned out all other sound. “Mama?” I started to walk towards the kitchen. “Mama?” The whistle seemed to get shriller, and I moved faster until I was running.
Although the kitchen is not far from the front entrance, it seemed a longer way than usual on that day. Yet when I finally got to the kitchen door, I could only stand there because there was nothing else for me to do. I do not remember if I was breathing hard. The kettle was out of control, whistling furiously and spitting steam from its spout, but my mother was sitting calmly at the table; she was drinking tea and flipping through the day’s paper, and she looked as she always did: neat and smart in her well-tailored clothes, every hair impeccably in place.
While it was gray outside, the kitchen was warm, and the lamps gave off a golden light. Copper pots gleamed on the wall, and the plants glowed with health. The shrillness of the whistle made me grit my teeth.
“Yukiko,” she said, and she raised her teacup to her lips and drank. “Yukiko, you’re home.”
It was hard to hear her over the whistle of the kettle. I nodded mutely back: Yes, I’m home.
“I have some bad news.”
With another nod I showed her I was listening.
“It’s about your father.”
I waited.
“Your father has gone away. He won’t be living with us anymore.”
I walked across the room, turned the stove off, and faced her. We stood maybe five feet apart in the large, airy kitchen. She took a long, slow sip from her cup without taking her eyes off me. Her hand did not shake.
I turned around and was about to walk away, but she stopped me.
“Yukiko …”
“Yes?”
“It was his decision.”
I remember wondering why she had bothered to articulate the obvious. “I know,” I said.
At the age of sixteen I fell in love with Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. On a school trip I had seen him on stage in New York City, but I was not interested in the actor, lithe and graceful though he was; I was in love with Hamlet himself. Although his treatment of Ophelia left something to be desired, I pined to spend my life with a man like that, mad and brilliant and witty. In contrast, the boys at school seemed tame and bland.
When my mother was sixteen, she wanted to be a doctor more than anything else in the world. She had a passion as well as a natural aptitude for math and science, and her favorite activity was to pore over textbooks until well into the night.
Aghast at the studious habits of her only daughter, my grandmother Yukiko waged a none-too-subtle campaign against them. She spoke ominously of the damage that long hours spent hunched over tiny print would do to eyesight and posture, and she nagged at Akiko about her music, asking why she spent only two hours a day at the piano, when she used to spend four. Complaining that she could not find her way alone through the meandering streets of Tokyo, Yukiko made Akiko go for long walks with her, and when they passed by fine stores, she dragged her into them, and tried to tempt her fancy with fine clothes, and trinkets for her hair.
Worst of all, at least according to Akiko, were the lessons in conduct. When Akiko became a teenager, Yukiko set about teaching her once again how to walk, dress, and talk, as if she had not already learned these skills as a young child. Akiko was reinstructed in how to get from one side of the room to the other (one foot placed directly in front of the other, and the toes turned ever so slightly inward); she was shown once again how to put on a kimono (low in the back, so that the skin can be seen below the hair); she was retrained in how to engage men in conversation, with bantering and also flattery.
In her own way, of course, Yukiko was trying to be a good mother, as Akiko knew even then. But she was so determined to procure a wealthy husband for her daughter that she could not bear to hear Akiko say that what she really wanted to do was study, and her quick temper flared up when Akiko refused to wear the clothes and baubles that she bought for her.
It was with little hope, therefore, that Akiko went to her parents and bowed low to them, her nose resting on the ground. “In the matter of my going to medical school, what do Father and Mother say?” she asked.
My grandfather inclined his great head and thought. “If you go to medical school,” he said at last, “no one will marry you.”
My mother kept her eyes on her hands, which were shaking slightly inside their long empty sleeves. She thought of how close she and her mother had been, and still were; she thought of all the hours they spent walking and shopping together, and chatting, too. No one knew her better than her mother.
“And what does Mother think?” she asked.
Yukiko did not bow her head, heavy with the weight of her hair, to think. “Your father is right,” she said. “For a woman, marriage is the most important thing.”
Akiko did not ask them again. She stayed home and continued to read medical books late at night, after she finished practicing the tea ceremony.
At some point in my teenage years, a neighbor of ours donated a box of trashy romances to me, and I read them all. Invariably these books featured a heroine with a small, heart-shaped face, a pair of huge, wistful eyes, and a body with curves that she strove in vain to conceal. Forced by her wretched life to take a humiliatingly subservient job, she would somehow meet up with a dark, aristocratic man who slept around a lot. At first he wolfishly hungered after our heroine, but her baggy clothes could not hide her virtue any more than her breasts, and after becoming first convinced and then enamored of her goodness, our dashing scoundrel of a hero would forsake his wolfish ways, and beg her to be his bride. The books were old and early on I spilled some ice cream on them: it is for this reason, perhaps, that I associate the idea of fairy-tale romance with the smell of mildew and rotten milk.
When I was eighteen, I was a freshman at Princeton, and terribly homesick. I was also thin for the first time in six years. At the end of the first term, my roommate dragged me to a party given by the debating club. I felt so uncomfortable there among all the drunk students that I ended up losing my virginity to the club treasurer, a lanky senior who went on to Washington and later became an important White House aide. We went out for two weeks and feverishly vowed eternal love to each other, but when he called me over the winter vacation, I felt no desire to be friends or even to talk.
When my mother was twenty-one, she walked into a small apartment in a trendy students’ district in Tokyo, and saw a young man standing amidst the crowd. He was by the window, deep in impassioned argument and with his back turned towards her, but she noticed him immediately. It was something in the way he stood, the tension in his shoulder blades that stretched the shirt taut across his back, or the length of his neck rising naked and exposed above his collar. She was distracted, consumed by an almost physical sense of loss, which came welling up inside her throat and tasted unexpectedly like lime. Her best friend, Rié, who was chatting in an endless stream into her ear, had to ask her twice if she wanted something to drink.
When he turned around, he saw her staring. His eyes passed over her, sweeping by as he took in the rest of the room, and then they flicked back, and then again. She saw his eyes narrow and then widen with disbelief, and then he walked over to the host, who was sitting on a couch not far from him, and she saw their quick whispered consultation, their eyes glancing over at her, and the host’s repeated nods of confirmation. The young man straightened his narrow back, squared his shoulders
, and moved towards her.
His voice was deep, a stranger’s pitch. “I believe I am your cousin,” he said, using the honorific. “Your cousin Kenji.”
Thirteen years had passed since they had run across the train tracks during an idyll in the middle of the war. In spite of the malnutrition he had suffered, he had grown well, and now stood half a head taller than most of the men in the room. Where his face had once been rounded and smooth, it was now gaunt and angular, and the new geometric theme continued with his head, which was almost triangular. His nose was tall, as the Japanese say, always with admiration. His Adam’s apple was prominent in his long neck, and his chin had a new, aggressive thrust to it. His hair, which had once been straight and fine, had thickened and coarsened so that it now stood up on its own like a brush.
Neither he nor Akiko noticed Rié, who had come back bearing two glasses of water, and who for once was speechless, dumbstruck at the intensity of their gaze.
My mother looked into Kenji’s eyes—so earnest now, and darker as well—and innocently smiled. “You haven’t changed a bit,” she said.
Two months later, she went out on a date that had been set up by her parents. The matchmaker introduced her to Tatsu just outside the restaurant, and then quietly disappeared.
Running her eyes quickly over the man picked to be her future husband, Akiko smiled in spite of herself, liking what she saw—a slim young man with bright eyes, and an overbite that gave his smile a disarming vulnerability. Her favorable impression of him held up through the course of the three-hour meal, for the matchmaker had done her job well: Akiko and Tatsu had so much in common that there was not a chance they would run out of things to say.
He had performed poorly in his studies at the University, but he was a music lover, and inquired with real interest and intelligence about her playing. While they had not met before, they traveled in the same large social circle, and they discovered with some hilarity that they shared the same opinions of all the people they both knew. By the end of the evening, they felt so comfortable together that they were able to joke about the awkwardness of this prearranged date, and the profound skepticism that they each had felt at the thought of their matchmaker—an old woman so nearsighted she could not reliably tell men and women apart—finding them someone to marry.
There was much about the date that was delightful, but what impressed Akiko most of all was Tatsu’s sweetness, a desire to please and be pleased that she felt most keenly at the end of the meal, when they were pushing away their plates and getting ready to leave.
“What do you think?” he said, just as she was about to stand. “It could work out, you and me.”
Halted in her movements, Akiko looked across the table at him, and knew he was right. Not just because she, having been briefed by the matchmaker, knew his particulars (his kindness to his elders, his gentleness to women, and the high-paying job he held in the company owned by his father), but also because the three hours they had spent chatting over dinner had given her a glimpse into the life that her parents—or more precisely, her mother—wished her to have. It was a life with few worries and even fewer surprises. There would be large family gatherings at fancy restaurants; two, three, or even four children running around at her feet, and that strangely disarming overbite beaming down at her at all times.
Seeing the hopeful expression that lit up Tatsu’s face, my mother sighed, and stifled a momentary pang of regret. It was not that she had the perplexing sense of standing at a crossroads, for the course of her life had already been set. Nor was it that she regretted having promised herself to her cousin Kenji just four days earlier: she did not wish even for a second that she could spend her life with Tatsu instead.
What Akiko felt sorry about was that she had not backed out of this date, as she had originally intended. She should have announced to her parents that she had already decided she was not going to marry the man they had selected for her through the long, expensive, and elaborate matchmaking process. She should have resisted her curiosity; she should have turned down what seemed to her a perfect lark—the chance to take a peek at someone else’s life; the opportunity, even, to live inside someone else’s skin, if only for a night.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and then she hesitated, not knowing how to continue. “I am so very sorry.”
From the way my mother recounts this story (and I have heard it from her dozens of times), I know this was a hard moment for her: watching the brightness in Tatsu’s eyes dim, and that caricature of a smile falter.
Without Kenji’s success in his field, Akiko’s old case of hero worship might not have made the transition to adult love, for she was like her mother in that she needed a man she could respect. As it was, the transition was amazingly smooth, and swift to boot: she knew in a week, a full month and a half before he did, that she would marry him.
Kenji was a physicist. His professors and fellow students whispered that he was brilliant, the best in his generation, a genius.
Confident and almost too proud, he knew of these rumors, and spun them into webs that eventually snared him as well as my mother.
“Honorable Parents, please may I marry this man,” she said. She bowed, her heart thumping against the tatami floor as she waited for their response, her nose pressed against the ground.
“No,” said Yukiko, preempting her husband. “Tatsu liked you, and thought you liked him. He’s a nice young man, and second cousin to the Prince—”
My mother sat up, her face red from the blood that had rushed to her head as she held her bow, and glared at Yukiko. Five years had passed since her parents had denied her medical school, and she was stronger now and more truculent, with a will to match her mothers. “Is it because Kenji’s my cousin, or because he’s poor, or because he’s Korean?” she demanded.
“None of those reasons,” replied Yukiko, yelling back. “It’s because you would be ruining your life with him. I know what he’s like, and—”
“You’re lying,” said my mother, and then she screamed, “You’re lying! You’ve forgotten that you were once just a fancy whore, and I never, ever want to be like you.”
Bursting into tears, she ran out of their room; as soon as she reached her own, she began to pack.
She never looked back—or so, at least, she told me, many years later. But I have always figured that statement for a lie, if one made with only the kindest intentions: to keep me from feeling that she ever had cause to regret the marriage that led to my birth. For how could she possibly have avoided looking back? Sure, she likes America, with its roomy, well-built houses, its broad streets, and its well-tended green lawns that remind her of the Japanese countryside. I will even concede to her the point that New Jersey was a far better place than Tokyo to raise me, a girl. Still, even so, I find it impossible to believe that in all the years that followed that breach with her parents, she never once mused wistfully on the life that she let some other woman take.
Abused and then abandoned by Kenji, left with a child on her hands, poor, alone, stranded in a foreign country and cut off by her own pride from her family, she must have looked back, at least once, on that moment she ran out of her parents’ room, and wished that instead she had stayed.
Yukiko’s rejection of my father, which lies at the root of the years of coolness between her and my mother, will be the subject of the first set of questions that I ask her.
Obaasama, I will say (respectfully marveling), how did you know about Kenji? How did you see through the promising student to guess at the spoiled child who lay underneath, the strain of madness, and the abusive temper that no one had ever controlled?
Did you ever wish (I will say, bolder now, daringly moving on to far more rocky terrain) that you hadn’t been able to predict how my mother’s marriage with him would fare? Or even that you had kept your fears to yourself, and supported her in her wish to marry him instead? Did you ever regret that you—wishing your daughter only the best, the brightest, and the happiest of all po
ssible futures—tried to make her repeat your successes, rather than let her create her own; did you secretly weep with remorse, as my mother did, over the rift that lay between you for almost thirty years?
CHAPTER SEVEN
OLD MRS. NOFFZ catches me, as she almost always does, even though I all but sprint on tiptoe the two-yard stretch from the elevator to my front door. The problem is that I am too slow and too loud with my keys.
Mrs. Noffz lives alone with a moody parrot across the hall in 16D, an apartment that is the mirror image of my own, and she spends her days lying in wait, listening for the sound of my locks being unbolted.
She makes an unlikely stalker. With wide eyes, an O of a mouth, and a pink-tipped little nose, she bears an uncanny resemblance to the children in a Dr. Seuss book. Even her hair, white and sparse though it is, looks childlike, tied in a single braid that follows the slope of her neck to reach the top of her back. Tonight she is standing under an umbrella, and she is wearing red Wellingtons under her nightgown. Smiling vacuously and continuously, shrunken but upright, she calls out to me from her doorway. “Good evening.”
“Hi,” I say, holding the door open just enough to be polite.
“It is hot out, isn’t it.” Mrs. Noffz’s clothes are shabby and her hair is in constant disarray, but she takes great pains with her speech, enunciating every syllable with care.
“Yes, it is. Well, I should be going now. My mail, you know,” I say, nodding at the bills in my hand.
“I think Mabel is feeling the heat quite a bit. She has buried herself in her feathers and she refuses to speak to me.”
“That’s too bad,” I say, pulling the door shut another inch.
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