One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  My grandmother said good-bye to Kaori just outside the restaurant in which they had eaten lunch together for years. The day was blindingly bright, with but a few clouds in the sky, yet while they stood chatting, a burst of light rain came down and forced them to take cover under the noodle shop’s awning.

  In Japan, sun showers are associated with magic, foxes that take on the shape of seductive women (with only their long noses and, from behind, a flash of a red brush under their kimonos’ hemlines to give them away), and the sense that the unexpected will happen; more prosaically, they are also associated with the spring and summer months. Yukiko and Kaori had spent their lunch hour skirting around the real topic at hand—the wedding that would take place tomorrow, and their own impending separation—and now, huddling together against the wall of the restaurant, they plunged into an animated discussion of the improbability of a sun shower in November.

  “It bodes well for your wedding,” said Kaori at last, a trifle shyly.

  Yukiko looked down at the woman, plump and sweet-faced, who had climbed into her futon on her first night at the geisha house, and she knew, suddenly, that long after she had reduced her first love Jun to an idyll in her mind (the most distant memory of breath-stealing kisses and steamy afternoons), the absence of Kaori would continue to gnaw at her, try as she might to put the thought of her old pal aside.

  They had once been so inseparable that no one could tell them apart. Kaori had seen her through all her bouts of homesickness, as well as the literally but not figuratively earthshaking loss of her virginity; as they became accustomed to, and disgusted with, the need to flatter, tease, and beguile their clients, they had learned together how reinvigorating it was to laugh themselves sick over the mixture of conceit and insecurities that they found in most of these men. Anything but an uncritically supportive friend, Kaori had scolded Yukiko for falling for Jun, but then, at considerable risk to her own standing at the geisha house, she had helped her meet with him. Kaori had been there to counsel patience when Yukiko thought that she had lost in gambling on Sekiguchi, since he was going back to his wife; she had been there, too, to celebrate when he returned.

  “You haven’t had an easy time of it, have you?” asked Yukiko. “Being my friend, that is.”

  For a few moments, Kaori gazed up at her in silence, and the beat of the rain was all that Yukiko could hear. Then Kaori dimpled, her lips wryly twisting. “Sometimes,” she said, drawling, “you can be so stupid.”

  Yukiko had not cried when she bowed her farewells to her brothers, nor when her father had tried to apologize, in his own way, for sacrificing her to save the family; she had not shed a tear even when her mother clasped her around the neck for the last time, sobbing all the while. So it was only to be expected that she would remain dry-eyed when Kaori raised her rounded arms to give her a quick, hard hug good-bye.

  Yet when a gust of wind blew the rain towards them, drenching them both and sending them into a fit of giggles that was tinged with just a touch of hysteria, it was impossible to say whether the drops (winking, shining as they caught and held the light) on their faces came from the sky or their eyes.

  The daughter of a peasant and his childlike wife, Yukiko felt a perhaps pardonable pride when she looked at her healthy children and her important husband. She held her head high when she walked about town, and she dressed with the elegance and flair of a native of high society. She was, if anything, almost too stylish to qualify for the status of aristocrat, her natural sense of fashion placing her outside of the class of those mostly shapeless women, who wore their high-quality, ill-fitting clothes like a badge of honor. Yukiko’s collection of kimonos was extensive, and they were all not only expensive but well suited for her. Even more than wearing them, she liked to stroll among them in the garden, where they were hung after being washed twice a year. With their sleeves swinging back and forth in the breeze, the kimonos brought back to her the scarecrow that she and her brothers had made from sticks and a rag salvaged from the town dump. Her children played tag in their midst while they dried.

  Yukiko’s beauty was justifiably famous, though she still fretted about the size of her breasts and feet, and she shone at the few parties to which she was invited. In the streets, people murmured and turned to watch her as she passed. None of her children had inherited her looks. As babies and as children they were pleasing enough to look at but ultimately ordinary, and they would continue to be so as adults.

  She enjoyed an easy, uncomplicated relationship with her youngest son, as, to be fair, everyone did, for Tadashi was a merry child, perpetually laughing and without a weighty thought in his head. She was harder on her older son, exerting considerable pressure on him to do well at school, but Isamu, who was both competent and docile, managed to cope with her demands. So it was only my mother who clashed with Yukiko, and she did so ferociously and often.

  But none of her children really knew what to make of Yukiko. Whereas they adored and even worshipped their father, they were embarrassed by Yukiko’s almost foreign glamour, and spent much of their childhood wishing that she looked and acted like other mothers. Still, it was she who raised them. She woke them in the mornings, fed them all their meals, greeted them when they returned from school in the afternoons, and usually listened when they talked about their lives. She scolded them when they came in drenched and shivering after staying out too long in the rain. She was capable of extravagant acts of playfulness, as in the tree-climbing episodes, but guided, perhaps, by the memory of her own mother, who though tender and warm had still let her go, she always kept a certain distance from her children.

  Deep down she knew she was too cold to them. It was for this reason that she (dogged by the hereditary insomnia that torments all the female members of my family) stayed up late at night and wrote. Those terrifying hours in the bomb shelter, during which she had pulled out her childhood like a bauble in order to entertain her daughter and her sons, had wakened in her intimations of mortality as well as a yearning to acquaint her children with her life. So she began to set her life down on paper for them, scratching away each night with her fountain pen, and when her notebooks started to pile up, she took down from the highest cupboard of her bedroom a tea box, which was lacquered black on the outside and red within—the only possession she had kept from her most distant past. She stacked the books inside it, noting with satisfaction that they fit as neatly as her hair once did.

  When Tadashi’s hair began to fall out, a year after the family evacuated to the countryside where fried grasshoppers were the feast of choice, it was my mother, Akiko, who first noticed. He was playing on the parallel bars at a nearby playground, and trying in vain to coax his older sister, whose fear of heights extended to gym sets as well as bridges, to join him. “Watch,” said Tadashi, “it’s a cinch.” He swung himself back and hung upside down, his shorts slipping down to expose his belly button and his striped underwear.

  Akiko stared.

  “It’s much easier than it looks,” the now red-faced Tadashi explained kindly, still upside down.

  Her mouth open, Akiko could only point at her brother’s head.

  When she showed the egg-shaped bald spot on Tadashi’s head to their mother, Yukiko only sighed, for she had long suspected that her children, living as they did on a diet of grasshoppers and rice and powdered potatoes, were poised on the brink of malnutrition. Their diarrhea was all but constant. Lost in thought, she barely remembered to pat Tadashi’s head to reassure him.

  She went to her chest, chose her most gorgeous kimono, and folded it into a neat square packet of blue and gold, musing all the while on a day no more than fourteen years ago, when her own mother had dressed her in a red kimono borrowed from a cousin. After telling Isamu to stay at home and watch over Tadashi, Yukiko took Akiko firmly by the hand and walked outside. It was October, Yukiko’s favorite time of the year. The trees were red and yellow, and the evening was cool and breezy.

  They knocked at a farmer’s house that was
even shabbier and smaller than their own. The farmer’s wife was spiteful and barely civil, hating Yukiko for her citified ways, her air of elegance, and even her height. Offering the kimono and begging for food, Yukiko bowed low and used the honorific. Akiko, who was sitting beside her, bowed as well, so that their dark heads rested like twin polished stones on the ground.

  In one of the more ironic incidents of Japanese history, the Emperor spoke over the radio to Japan for the first time, but was not understood. He had long been regarded as a god, with pictures of him hung on the walls of every classroom and in shrines in public homes, and he spoke in a dialect of his own. Until he came on the air to announce Japan’s surrender in an almost foreign tongue, no one had been sure that he was human.

  The war was over, and soon Yukiko had moved herself and their children back to Tokyo. Japan had changed beyond measure and also beyond repair, but Yukiko and Sekiguchi, at least, managed to slip back into something that came very close to their old life. They found a new and more beautiful house, replaced the kimonos that Yukiko had sold, and once again fed their children full meals and fine delicacies. Most importantly, death was no longer a threat that hovered constantly in the sky.

  Still, Yukiko continued to stay up late at night, writing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE DIVIDE BETWEEN Yukiko and my mother may have begun at the moment of my mother’s birth, when the unmarried Yukiko, in despair over what she considered her slipping place in Sekiguchi’s affections, looked up, flushed and sweaty after her labor, saw that she had given birth to a daughter, and turned away with a sinking heart from the child. An hour later, she was calling for the baby, and she cosseted her for years in an attempt to rid herself of her guilt over that initial rejection. My mother in fact only learned of that first loveless hour when she read Yukiko’s diaries, but still her fierce independence from Yukiko may have had its origin in that short period, for who knows how deeply a baby’s first moments of life shape and mark her?

  During our nighttime storytelling sessions, my mother always lapsed into a certain dismissive tone when she spoke of Yukiko and her fantastic, fortunate life, which became, after the hiatus of the wartime years, once again one of extreme ease and luxury. Even after they healed the breach, writing letters to each other that started the steady rise of warmth between them, this measure of scorn remained. When they met at my grandfather’s funeral, after a separation of twenty-nine years, they did not hug or kiss.

  After running away from home, Akiko stayed for a few weeks with her younger brother, who was in college at the time, and ensconced in comfortable accommodations of his own. Isamu’s sympathy for my mother’s cause was to remain constant through the years, even though he himself later submitted to Yukiko’s bidding, and married the woman she found for him. His marriage evolved quickly into a felicitous coupling, proving either that parents do know best, and matchmakers are well worth their keep, or that luck plays an unprecedented part in affairs of the heart.

  My mother left her family, her home, and the country she had been born in for the man she loved. But she herself did not view it as a sacrifice. She had not been happy as a Japanese daughter, and perhaps she was right to suspect that she would have been even less happy as a Japanese wife.

  She borrowed money from Isamu for the plane tickets, and taught Japanese for two years in Boston, while Kenji earned his Ph.D. in physics. He won a hefty science fellowship, and they soon saved enough to pay back Isamu with interest. Later, after Kenji found a job in a laboratory in northern New Jersey, they had enough to make a down payment on a house located in the small town of Garrison.

  After my father began working, my mother enrolled in science classes at the local college. For three years she studied every day, slowly mastering the English language so she could understand the textbooks filled with technical terms, and in 1963 she received a bachelor of science degree with high honors from the college. Perhaps her elation at her triumph made her careless. She knew she was pregnant within three weeks after graduation, and though she managed to get in two semesters of medical school that year, she took an indefinite leave of absence after I was born. I was a sickly baby, and my mother gave up studying in order to take care of me.

  By the time I was old enough and well enough to manage on my own, she had to deal with Kenji, who had become irrational and unkind with drink. He told her that she was too stupid to be a doctor, and that with the added expense of a child, they could no longer afford medical school. I sometimes wonder how much my mother regretted her decision to keep her first child. A year and a half after my birth, she aborted the fetus when she discovered she was pregnant again, but I could not be flushed away so easily.

  My father was a brilliant and charming man given to excesses of alcohol. After the evenings on which he did not come home for dinner, I sometimes woke up in the darkest part of the night and heard his voice, pitched unnaturally loud and high, and then the sound of blows and running feet. On the mornings following those nights, my mother had bruises on her neck and arms; occasionally she had a black eye and once she was missing a noticeable amount of hair. She never said anything about those marks, and I never could bear to ask.

  There were long stretches when my father remained at home and all was well; he was so funny and strange that I laughed until I screamed, and even my mother permitted herself cautious smiles. But in my memories he is mostly an absent presence. I did not see him on most mornings because I left early to catch the school bus, and he usually slept in until the last possible moment before going to work. Now I cannot clearly recall his face. When I try to envisage it, I see the unused plate and silverware at the dinner table. Every evening I set the table for three people, but almost always my mother and I ate alone, silently passing the food back and forth between us over his empty plate.

  I do not know where my father is now. My mother and I packed all of his clothes and books into a trunk and two suitcases and shipped them to an address in West Virginia, but he has probably moved on from there.

  My mother then sold the house, which was too large and drafty, and filled with too many memories, and we moved into an apartment building on a temporary basis. While she looked for another place, a small house in another clearing of the woods, we moved from one set of rooms to another. I badly wanted a home of our own, but she was strangely fussy and found something to criticize in every one of the houses that we saw. Her search went on for years.

  The spring during which my father left us was one of the worst that Garrison had ever seen. March was freezing cold, and April even worse. To cut down on electricity bills, we kept the heater turned off, and I became used to sleeping in my coat. My mother pared away at her shopping lists until she was buying only the most essential items: spaghetti, sauce that came in a jar, milk. We sold my three-speed bicycle for $45, which is what it was worth. My mother insisted on that price even when Mrs. Wright, an officiously kind neighbor, wanted to give us $75. It was hard to give up that bicycle. My mother did not hold me when I cried, yet she did not scold me, either, when I slapped little Peggy Wright for leaving her new bike out in the rain.

  My mother was in her late thirties, alone in a country run by tall white men, and she was saddled with a child of nine. She had a house, some savings, no income and no professional skills, yet acting out of a predictable pride, she refused to write her parents about my father’s departure. Still, after less than a year, fat envelopes, filled with yen, began arriving from overseas on the first of every month: money that went far in those lean times. (Obaasama, I will say, you wise woman, you sly puss, what gave it away? Was it a mother’s instinct, or clever deduction? Was it the fact that my mother had to keep up with the biannual tradition of sending photographs of me: did you realize that your worst fears had been confirmed when you saw that I was alone in all of the photographs now, my father gone and my mother always on the other side of the lens?)

  By May of the year after that, after twenty-two months of waiting by the window
and four months of scouring the classifieds, my mother had found a job. Long before she came into her inheritance, she was making money as a translator for a Wall Street firm. Every weekday morning for ten years, she caught the 7:25 express to Penn Station and was at her office by 8:15. I did not see her very often during those years. She got home in time to eat dinner with me, and then she usually dozed off over her work. After four months, she became the personal secretary to the Japanese vice-president, and after three years of poor pay and long hours, she climbed up into a rather high administrative position. At the end, she was making quite a bit of money, but she did not like the work. “Learn,” she told me. “Read books, study hard.”

  My mother had been a plain child, but she grew prettier over the years, and she was a slender, elegant woman at thirty-nine, when she found herself single once again. It was widely believed that she was legally separated from her husband, and she had only one daughter. She met a lot of men at work, and while many of them wanted her, and at least a few would probably have been happy to marry her, she never dated any of those men for longer than a month.

  In the summer of last year, she gained a new admirer. I always liked Mr. Lewis, a widower and one of the more recent additions to our neighborhood. Gray-haired and soft-spoken, small of stature but solidly built, he is a lawyer by training and a farmer by inclination, spending most of his free time in his vegetable garden. Even in the winter he is always working outside, clearing dead brush away or covering weak plants from frost.

  I used to make it a point to go see him whenever I was visiting my mother. “Hey Mr. Lewis,” I would call out, hopping off my bike. “Hey Kiki,” he’d reply, taking off his gardener’s gloves, encrusted with dirt, to warmly shake hands. While he was always careful to ask me about school and life in the big city, I could tell that the only answers he really cared about were the ones concerning my mother. “Is she in?” he’d ask, looking wistfully over at our house. “How’s her health these days?”