One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  When the funeral was over, Yukiko and my mother talked, not of the terrible fight they had when they last saw each other, nor of the silence that had thickened between them during the long interval that had followed it, nor, even, of Sekiguchi’s elaborate, well-attended funeral, which had almost done justice to his life. They talked instead of the times they had shared long ago: the stories told in the bomb shelter, the days spent playing in the countryside during the war, and the time that Yukiko hitched up the skirt of her kimono to climb up a tree and have tea with her daughter.

  The war loomed large in their memories of the past, but they talked of peacetime, too: of the time that my mother chopped off her hair so that she could play as unhampered as her brothers, and of how Yukiko cried and scolded when she saw the long black locks coating the bathroom floor; of Akiko’s piano playing, and the one time that she, a practiced performer, got stage fright and misplayed during a recital, and how the audience thought it was the piano rather than the popular young pianist who erred. They spoke of the days they had spent wandering the streets of Tokyo together, absorbing the sights and sounds.

  As yet unable to grasp the full import of Sekiguchi’s death, energized by the excitement of his funeral, and intoxicated by this reunion with her long-absent daughter, Yukiko grew younger again as she relived her past. This rejuvenatory process, which took place in department stores, on the crowded Tokyo streets, and of course over tea, went on for six days. At the end of it, Yukiko gave Akiko six notebooks, smelling strongly of smoke and bound together by string.

  “What are these?” asked Akiko.

  “Something I owe to you,” replied Yukiko, her eyes darting away from her daughter’s.

  They had not hugged or kissed when they met, but when they said their farewells, Akiko embraced her mother, and Yukiko slowly raised her bone-thin hands and touched her face in response.

  My mother came home from Tokyo laden with packages. Japanese-style, our relatives had loaded her down with gifts—the delicacies she had been craving for years, dishes, gadgets, a fancy camera for me as well as for her.

  But her most jealously guarded package, the one she carried on her lap from Tokyo all the way to our house, was Yukiko’s diaries, all six of the salvaged volumes, and after she read them our storytelling sessions resumed, this time over meals, in the car, and through long afternoons over tea.

  The letter came two months after my mother’s return. In it Yukiko announced baldly and simply that my mother had come into some money under the terms of Sekiguchi’s will. Half of the estate had gone to Yukiko, but the rest of the assets were to be split evenly between my mother and her two brothers. Although at the time the yen was not as powerful as it would later become, a sixth of her father’s fortune still made my mother a terribly wealthy woman.

  My mother had fought with her parents and had run away from home with a man they had forbidden her to marry, and she had let almost three decades lapse before she went back to her family. Her father had died without seeing her again. She had been sure she would be cut from the will, and even with those envelopes filled with yen that arrived every month, I had never seen a reason to contradict her certainty on this score.

  My grandmother is the most direct of letter writers, spare to the point of rudeness. Before she learned of the existence of the diaries, my mother had speculated that Yukiko was shy about her penmanship; afterwards, she came to believe that her mother had made the conscious decision to save her literary energies and eloquence for an account of her life. Yet whatever the reason for Yukiko’s epistolary brevity, when she included in a letter even a single line that was not strictly business, it was an occasion worthy of comment, and so we exchanged a glance when the letter ended with a postscript: “Do you remember how you once wanted to be a doctor?”

  My mother’s hand rested on the table, over a corner of the letter. I wanted to reach out and slip my hand inside her own, but I was too afraid. The room was still and I heard the sounds of a lone car from the street, and the pine tree brushing against the window. For a few more moments we sat together, the letter and her hand lying between us on the table, and then I spoke.

  “It’s great news,” I said. “Now you can do whatever you want.”

  My mother’s English is very good: it is not often that it fails, but it failed her then. “What—this last question means?” she asked.

  “It’s like the journals—it’s an apology. She’s saying they’re sorry they didn’t give you the chance before.”

  “You really think so?” she said.

  I nodded.

  She looked past me, towards the wall again, and cleared her throat. “Well then,” she said, with a return to her old briskness, “we can’t disappoint her, can we?”

  She had inherited so much money that neither of us would ever need to earn a salary again, and the third thing she did with her inheritance was to buy me my wonderfully spacious apartment, set on a tree-lined street. She also started giving me an envelope filled with money on the first of every month, a practice that she has kept up now through the mail despite my protests about my more than adequate fellowship, despite the fact that the money I save on rent means that I now have piled up more money than I can easily spend, even despite (for my grandmother’s and mother’s strange faith in the postal system is one legacy I did not inherit) my repeated warnings about the dangers of mailing cash.

  The second thing she did with her inheritance was to buy our old house back. Although it had been occupied by a series of tenants, no one had wanted to keep it, and my mother was therefore able to buy it back cheaply. So in August, after fifteen years of living in places permeated with the smells of cleaning wax, raw wood, and strangers, we went home again, to the house where my parents had brought me as a baby.

  But the first thing my mother did was to quit her job on Wall Street. She stayed home, poring over the tiny print of medical journals; she went to the bookstore and bought thick heavy books on biology, and she struggled over old physics problems. The day after New Year’s, she registered for three pre-med classes at the same local college she had attended before, yet after her first day at school, she came home and told me that she was not going back.

  “I’ve missed out on too much,” she said. “I’ll never catch up.”

  I felt as if I were about to cry, but she had eased herself onto the ground, and she was lifting a corner of the carpet to examine the floor underneath. I could not see her face.

  “I’m going to redecorate the house instead,” she told me. “What do you think about hardwood floors?”

  It must have hurt her, crouching on the ground on her swollen hands and misshapen knees, but her smile as she glanced up at me was determinedly bright.

  With its silvery sheen, my grandmother’s hair is still pretty, but it is far less full than it used to be, and more brittle, too. It only reaches down to her shoulders now, and in the daytime she wears it gathered at the nape of her neck in a simple bun.

  At night before she sleeps, I will go to her room and loosen her hair and comb it out, as her maid always did. I will work slowly and carefully, making sure the comb does not take with it any more of the precious remaining strands than is inevitable, and when I am done, I will fluff out her hair around her face so that it frames it. We will look into the mirror then, and there we will see me standing behind her in an upside-down family tree, and the woman who serves as the link between us will be an absence that both of us note.

  Grandmother, I will say (busying my hands with her locks once again, and keeping my eyes fixed upon the back of her head), Obaasama. What price a woman’s life, if all it consists of is loving one man forever?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IT MAY BE that Sekiguchi left her alone too long during the war, and after it, too. For when Yukiko returned to Tokyo at the end of it, eager to resume a life with him after their long separation, it was to find him increasingly preoccupied with his business and affairs of state.

  I tender this ex
planation because after the war, there were signs that my grandmother Yukiko began to pine for her first love, Jun. Ten at the time, Yukiko’s only daughter was old enough to notice and remember the signs, although it would take her a few more years until she could add them together and come up with the figure of another man. In the afternoons she heard sobbing, muffled but distinct, coming from her mother’s bedroom door, and occasionally odd snatches of love songs, sung in that off-key voice that made Akiko, whose pitch was perfect, wince. There was also Yukiko’s impatient wait for the mail, and the bad temper and sulks that followed the day-after-day arrival of nothing except business letters for her husband.

  But first came the day that Akiko, walking through the streets of Tokyo, heard a man hail her mother.

  “Yukiko, Yukiko,” he called out, his voice strangely quavering.

  Turning, Yukiko and Akiko found themselves confronting an unexpected tableau: two women wearing the elaborate kimonos and makeup of geishas, and sprawled out on the ground between them a man. He was dressed in the overalls of a working-class man; his collar was set on a crazy angle and vomit stained his shirtfront. His face was marked with the telltale flush of sake.

  “I miss you, Yukiko, I love you how I love you,” he said, and then to Akiko’s horror, he began to cry, repeating all the while his litany.

  One of the geishas knelt down to tend to the man, attempting to soothe him with words and her touch. Yukiko started forward as if she, too, would kneel by his side, but the other woman barred her way, standing guard over the man with her feet planted wide and her hand held out in front of her, as fearless as a traffic cop who would stop an oncoming fifty-ton lorry with a gesture.

  Yukiko looked at her, and froze. “Kaori,” she said.

  The woman gazed back at her calmly. “You’re the one who chose to go. You can’t come back now,” she said. Then she added, her voice lower, “It’s for your own good.”

  All Yukiko had to do was walk around that palm facing her. Yet the woman who had mounted guard over the man was not only as fearless as a traffic cop, but apparently as effective as one as well: Yukiko did not approach, rooted in place with her hand still clutching that of her daughter. Without taking her eyes away from Kaori, she gestured vaguely towards the crying man. “What are you doing to him? What are you doing with him?”

  Her tone was fierce, and when Akiko turned to look up at her, she saw that a vein stood out in the center of her forehead.

  “Nothing,” said Kaori. She dropped her arm, letting it fall limply to her side, and shrugged. “I’ve just been looking out for him, that’s all. As you can see, he’s fallen apart pretty badly in these last few years.”

  Yukiko nodded. The three of them—Kaori with her feet planted wide, and Yukiko and her daughter—remained still for a few long moments in a tableau of their own. It was Kaori who broke the spell at last. “You should go. Remember the child,” she said gently, still speaking to Yukiko, but smiling down at her daughter.

  Drawn by the man’s sobs and ranting, a small crowd had gathered by then. Yukiko, after all, had a position to maintain. With a nod to Kaori and one last glance at the man, she turned and fled, walking so swiftly that Akiko had to half-skip and half-run all the way home.

  Inside the entrance of her fine grand home, Yukiko kicked off her shoes and ran inside, leaving Akiko alone at the door. Still in her coat, she flew into the living room, where she threw herself into an armchair and began to sob.

  After five minutes she looked up, tear-stained and red-eyed, to the sight of her daughter staring into her face.

  “What are you looking at?” she screamed. Then Akiko’s world went red in one sudden flash, and she felt a burning pain and, though she did not know it, the sense of vertigo that had come over her mother when she embraced Sekiguchi for the first time.

  Then she was sitting on the ground, holding her cheek. Yukiko had hit her.

  Hovering on the border of sleep, Akiko opened her eyes in the night to find her mother standing over her. Gradually she became aware of the touch of her mother’s long cool fingers on her face: a mute apology that she, the girl who was to become my mother, met and accepted with equal reserve.

  “Who was that woman?” she asked drowsily.

  “The woman was my old friend Kaori,” said Yukiko, her voice for once soft. “And the man,” she continued slowly, “the man is nobody, or at least nobody you have to worry about. Now go back to sleep.”

  Yukiko pined for a few months, only gradually settling back into her marriage. First she stopped waiting for the mail, then she stopped the singing, and then, finally, the sobbing was heard no more. Sekiguchi was as thoughtful a husband as he could be, given his devotion to his career, and he spent every single free moment he had with his wife and children. When he was home, Yukiko glowed.

  My mother is the only source for this story. When she was given her mother’s diaries some four or five decades after this event, she read them carefully, searching for a write-up of—or even just a reference to—this unexpected encounter, a hint to throw light on how Yukiko felt, meeting up with these ghosts from her geisha past. Given that there was not a line in the diaries to indicate that this scene even took place, I am sorely tempted to believe that my mother dreamed it all up. Yet it is all too possible that Yukiko was being discreet, mindful of the prying eyes of her maids and even her children; even more likely is the possibility that the journal documenting her affair with him was yet another of the casualties of the fire.

  I try as much as possible to avoid thinking about this man, this strange character who could only have been her first love, Jun. But he, like Phillip, haunts me. Lurking only in the edges of Yukiko’s story, his is a figure that casts a long shadow, dimming and diminishing the brilliant success that is her life. Unlike Phillip, who carries with him the tantalizing, agonizing thought of all that might have been, this man makes a tedious spectre, for he appears side by side with the bleak possibility that all is not perfect in the best of all possible loves; that in the happiest of all marriages, regret is still a fact, sacrifice still a necessity.

  He also strikes a discordant note, as off-key as Yukiko’s singing, even beyond the question of dreary warnings. This man, sprawled out on the road, blubbering drunkenly, his face red, his shirtfront stained with vomit and his collar askew, his image all but eclipsed by the moon-faced Kaori, guarding him as if she were a traffic cop: he has no place in the picture that I have assembled from all the stories that my mother has told me about Yukiko. Surely it is not only because my father’s fairy tales and my mother’s family stories have become confused in my mind that Yukiko’s life seems a romance for the ages, filled with enchantment and true love. The sense of longing that the reappearance of Jun provoked unsettles me because no matter how I look at Yukiko’s story (and I have turned it over and over in my mind for years now, examining it from every possible angle, in every possible light), what I am sure of is that she loved Sekiguchi.

  Yet she must still have nursed a secret passion for her first love, as I am otherwise unable to explain the off-key love songs, the muffled sobbing behind closed doors, and the slap that left the imprint of Yukiko’s hand upon my mother’s cheek. And so it is that I am forced to entertain the possibility that Sekiguchi left her alone too long during the war, and after it, too.

  Grandmother, I will say. Dear Obaasama, my fairy-tale princess, spinning a life filled with misfortunes into pure gold. If you, ensconced in your castle with your prince, felt a momentary pang for the wild sweetness of the goatherd’s son, his rough skin and his bare feet, and the hours he had to while by your side—if you pined for a time to live in another kind of story, you do know, don’t you, that no one could blame you?

  I least of all, for all that I dream of a fortress so strong it can lock out the past.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ERIC DOES NOT phone during the night, but I wake up early on Thursday morning, feeling unusually refreshed. After I get dressed, I go out to the superma
rket, stopping to browse at the local secondhand bookstore on the way back. As I reenter the lobby of my apartment building, I nod to Julio, my favorite doorman.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he says, winking.

  “How fun,” I say “What is it?”

  “Come with me.” Mysteriously he beckons me towards one of the storage rooms at the side of the lobby. “Wait here,” he says, walking through the door. Almost immediately he comes out with two fistfuls of balloons, yellow and blue and green and red. He shoves them at me.

  “These are for you,” he says.

  “For me?” I say, puzzled.

  “Wait, there’s more.” With an enormous grin on his face, Julio walks back into the room and reemerges with another fistful, and then he goes back in and comes out with two more. Weighted down with iced tea and toilet paper and four used books, I cannot hold all of the balloons, and they drift to the ceiling, where they scatter, the strings dangling down just within reach. The lobby is teeming with them.

  “They just came in,” says Julio. “Somebody likes you an awful lot, eh?”

  “I guess so,” I say, smiling.

  Finally Julio hands me a card. I thank him and read it as I wait for the elevator. Written in an unfamiliar hand (Eric’s secretary? the receptionist at the balloon store?), the note capitalizes the first letter of every word, so that the message reads like the tide of a song: “I Hope We Can Always Be Together. Love From Eric.”

  I can only get about fifteen balloons into the elevator with me at once, so I leave the rest floating in the lobby while I take the first load up. As I fumble with my locks in the hallway, old Mrs. Noffz opens her door and peers out at me and my balloons. “My oh my,” she says. “How pretty.”

  “I think so, too,” I say, opening the door and releasing them into the living room.