Finding an English-speaking obstetrician wasn’t difficult, especially in Roppongi. Dr. Sayoko Makabe was just a ten-minute walk from I-House. An assortment of affluent, pregnant gaijin—Danes, Australians, Egyptians—filled the chairs that lined the waiting room and continued halfway down the hall. After a two-hour wait I was shown to an examination room. I stripped and sat on what looked like a pink dentist’s chair tricked out with metal stirrups. Dr. Makabe came in, said a brisk hello, and pressed a series of hydraulic buttons that lifted and tilted it slightly back. I was essentially still upright and feeling considerably less vulnerable than on a Western-style table. Dr. Makabe’s English was reasonably good—she’d completed her training on an American military base—but that didn’t necessarily make communication easier. She popped a vaginal ultrasound wand inside me without warning, without so much as an “Excuse me, but now I’m going to shove a giant, penis-shaped hunk of plastic inside your body.”
“I think I’m about six weeks along,” I said, wincing. “Is everything okay?”
“Too early to tell,” she said. “But yes, don’t worry, it is fine.”
She lowered the chair and scribbled out a prescription for Chinese herbs, explaining that Japanese doctors are schooled in both Eastern and Western techniques.
“To prevent miscarriage,” she said, handing it to me. “Fill it at the pharmacy downstairs.”
I hesitated. “Don’t worry,” she continued. “It won’t hurt the baby. Dissolve it in boiling water and drink. Like tea.”
I didn’t bother explaining that I had no access in my room to boiling water. I tried mixing the herbs in the hottest water from my sink’s tap, but they lay like sludge at the bottom of the cup. In the end, I took a swig of tepid water, poured the herbs in my mouth, and swished. I would spend the next several hours picking grit from my teeth.
Over the following weeks I monitored every twinge. Was that a cramp? Oh, God! A flicker of nausea? Thank goodness! In the midst of interviewing a woman on the advantages of childlessness, I sprinted to the bathroom to vomit. It was humiliating (not to mention ironic), but at least I knew I was still pregnant. I amassed a new set of talismans: a tiny, mottled Buddha that I found at a flea market; a fertility charm I’d bought at the Meiji Shrine; a postcard of a female deity whose name I didn’t know. I set them on the shelf above the sink and appealed to them each morning and evening as I brushed my teeth. That, I figured, couldn’t hurt the baby, either.
The Japanese women I interviewed seemed to have no interest in having kids. “Once you become a mother, you’re only a mother,” explained Ami, a thirty-three-year-old secretary with fashionably lightened chestnut hair and a Chanel bag. “You’re not a woman anymore. You can’t work anymore. And the father’s not involved. It’s very confining. It limits your activities, your financial freedom.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste and added, “It’s really not attractive.” Her mother would probably agree; in one recent survey, the majority of Japanese women over fifty had said they found marriage disappointing and motherhood a burden. What’s more, they’d told that to their adult daughters, encouraging them to stay single. At the same time, the younger women weren’t interested in becoming the woman in the gray flannel kimono, either, slaving round-the-clock at their offices the way Japanese men do. They weren’t sure what they wanted. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll try mountain climbing some day,” Ami said dreamily. “Maybe I’d be passionate about that.”
After a while I noticed the odd-sounding word wagamama coming up in nearly every interview. When I asked about it, my interpreter, an aspiring film producer who was herself a “parasite,” laughed. “It doesn’t translate exactly,” she said. The closest she could come was “selfish” or “willful,” but in a culture where personal sacrifice is the highest virtue, the connotation was far harsher, especially for women. The parasites had taken on the word as a term of defiance—somewhat like the way American women use “girl” or African Americans say “nigga”—transforming its meaning to something closer to “choosy” or even “self-determining.” Women’s magazines had caught the trend, featuring headlines like “Restaurants for the Wagamama You.” One afternoon I even walked by an office building on which WAGAMAMA was painted in English letters ten stories high. I began asking my subjects if they were wagamama. They would initially startle, but then, with some self-mockery, accept the label. It had clearly become a kind of resistance against narrow expectations.
Inevitably, they would also point to Crown Princess Masako as the justification for their behavior. Her life story served as a warning, a kind of reverse fairy tale. Before her marriage, Masako Owada had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, spoke five languages, lived in four countries, and pursued a glamorous career as a diplomat. Prince Naruhito proposed three times before she succumbed, many believe out of a sense of duty to family and country. Young women all over Japan held their breath: a woman so vibrant, so unapologetically modern, would surely drag the monarchy into the twenty-first century—or at the very least out of the tenth—and the rest of Japan along with it. Instead, from the moment Masako donned her Shinto wedding costume—a wax-encrusted wig and thirty-pound, twelve-layer kimono—she began to fade away, receding under the weight of tradition until she was nearly invisible. She walked several paces behind her husband, eyes downcast, a forced smile on her face. She abandoned foreign travel. She spoke so infrequently that during a rare press conference in 1997, her vocal cords gave out after just three questions. Most important, her worth as a person became contingent on bearing a male heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. So far, in seven years of marriage, she’d had only one pregnancy, which had ended in miscarriage. After that she retreated even further from the public eye. (Shortly after I left Japan, the Imperial Household Agency announced that the princess was again pregnant. The baby, however, turned out to be a girl so can’t rule unless succession laws are changed. Masako soon stopped appearing in public entirely. In 2004 it was revealed that she was undergoing treatment for depression.)
I was tempted to pity Masako—and all Japanese women—to feel smug in my American opportunities and choices. Yet how many of my friends had made professional compromises that they’d never ask of their husbands? How many had abandoned personal dreams and wrapped themselves in the mantle of traditional motherhood? How wagamama were we willing to be? Hadn’t that been one of my greatest concerns about motherhood? And what about me? How was it that despite my achievements, my education, my professed feminist politics, my self-worth had been reduced to whether or not I could produce a child? As I choked down my herbs, I often thought of Masako; the silenced princess may be a bigger part of our own psyches than we’d care to admit.
I wasn’t lonely anymore. I felt a current, almost like a silvery thread, running between me and my little zygote. Once again I named him Kai—I was certain that this one, too, was a boy. I imagined his little bundle of cells burrowing safely into my belly, settling in for the nine-month ride. I talked to him while I showered, sang to him before falling asleep. Each morning, I would describe our walk to the subway, pulling my thin jacket tight around us against the bitter winds of March. (A Californian by predilection if not by birth, I was chronically underdressed for the season.) One day, when I was nearly eight weeks pregnant, I noticed that the trendy clothing shop on our corner had transformed overnight into an even trendier café. That was Japan, I joked to Kai. Perhaps tomorrow it would be an Italian restaurant.
Suddenly I felt the thread, that silvery strand connecting us, snap. Just like that. “It’s over,” I whispered and started to cry.
At my next appointment Dr. Makabe again jabbed her ultrasound wand inside me. She poked around and frowned.
“No heartbeat,” she said.
I squeezed my eyes shut trying to push down the dread. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shrugged. “The egg sac is a little large and that can sometimes … well, not sometimes, but rarely indicate a chromosome abnormality.”
“Wh
at are the chances that’s the case?”
She frowned again. “Percentage? I’d say eighty percent that everything is okay. It’s still early to see a heartbeat. I will see you next week.”
The first magazine feature I ever wrote was a posthumous profile of Atsuko Chiba, a Japanese journalist who penned a newspaper column in the early 1980s about her struggle with, and ultimate death from, breast cancer. This was before I had the disease myself, before I’d visited—or ever thought of visiting—Japan. It was uncanny how the themes of her life had resurfaced in my own. One of the things Chiba wrote was that Japanese doctors lie to protect their patients’ feelings. It’s considered legitimate, for instance, to withhold a cancer diagnosis from a woman even after a mastectomy so that she won’t fall into a suicidal funk. So I didn’t believe Dr. Makabe.
I e-mailed Risa; she wrote back that the heartbeat should indeed be visible by now. “It doesn’t look good,” she said. “But she’s right to wait another week to be sure.”
“How do you feel?” Steven asked when I called to tell him.
“Numb,” I said. “Sad.” Sadder than sad. My heart constricted around my sorrow, held it close, rocked it like … a child.
“Me too,” he said. Again, I considered going home, but although it wasn’t as bad as the first time, I was still so sick. I hated throwing up on planes. Besides, Japan has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. The Pill was virtually illegal there until recently, so condoms, and as a result abortions, are the primary methods of birth control. I wouldn’t let a local dentist fill a cavity, but a D&C? That’s one medical procedure the Japanese ought to do well. Once more I opted to stay.
I spent the next seven days, an eternity, enough time to create a world, trying to argue myself out of my certainty. What if my negativism caused a miscarriage, if my doubts made my fears come true? My friend Eva back home tried to rein me in. "If you could think your way to a miscarriage, there would be no unwanted babies,” she wrote in an e-mail. “There would be no teenage mothers.” I threw away my talismans in case they were having the opposite of their intended effect, in case they were somehow cursed. I mentally scanned my body to see if I could rekindle that tiny filament. I couldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t.
“The egg sac is empty,” Dr. Makabe intoned when she looked at the wavy lines of the ultrasound screen. She lowered my pink padded chair. “Shikataganai,” she added. It can’t be helped.
“Do you want to go or not?” Steven said, barely controlling his impatience.
“I don’t know,” I stammered. “Yes. I mean no. I mean, I want to want to but …”
Whatever psychic glue held me together over the previous weeks dissolved when I picked up Steven at Narita Airport. It was not what he’d expected. He was disappointed, too, but the pregnancy had been more abstract to him. I had discovered it thousands of miles from home. When I miscarried, I was still an ocean away. Nothing had changed for him, nothing tangible had happened. So he was unprepared, perhaps naively so, for the force of my misery, for the sheer wretchedness of the woman who fell sobbing into his arms.
Weeks before, when I still believed I was pregnant, we had discussed spending a couple of nights of his visit in Hakone, a popular resort area outside Tokyo. Now I didn’t want to go. Until the D&C, which was scheduled in five days, I would still feel the seasickness and exhaustion of pregnancy, sensations all the more unpleasant since there’d be no reward for them. At the same time, I didn’t want to disappoint Steven—he’d come all this way, how could I say I just wanted to lie in bed and watch Rocky?
“I don’t care what we do,” he said. “I’m not asking you to be a martyr by saying you want to do things that are ‘fun’ and then complaining the whole time that you don’t feel well. I’ll stay within your limits if you tell me what they are. Just don’t expect me to read your mind.”
I should’ve said, “Honey, I feel lousy. I can’t eat. I’m nauseous and depressed. I know you wanted to have fun, but I’m not capable of it." Yet, I couldn’t. I felt too guilty about feeling sick, too guilty about losing another pregnancy. I wanted to do what would make him happy, but I was too far gone to know what that might be. Instead, I did just the opposite.
“Okay,” I said, lifting my voice a notch above leaden. “Let’s go.”
There are few undiscovered vacation spots in Japan. Mostly, the only places to go are those where everyone goes. The only ways to explore are the ways everyone explores. The Way to See Hakone is to ride through on its various fanciful forms of transport. After getting off the train from Tokyo, we boarded a tram that cut switchbacks up a mountainside into the town of Gora, where the hotel was. From there we took a cable car ride to an art museum (which was closed until summer). Next, onto a ropeway that swayed precariously above a vast, volcanic crater whose fumaroles billowed yellow steam. A pirate’s ship worthy of a Disney set ferried us on the last leg of our journey, across four-hundred-thousand-year-old Lake Ashi, with its waters that mirrored a view of Mt. Fuji. Then finally we took a bus back to the hotel.
How could I have brought us on a trip involving so many things that rocked, swung, lurched, or heaved? I was miserable; Steven was sullen. “Why are we here?” he asked as we crossed the crater.
“I thought it was what you wanted.”
“Jeez, Peg, sometimes you’re so eager to please that you don’t even listen to what I’m saying.” We looked out opposite windows and I held my breath against the crater’s sulfurous reek.
Charlie Chaplin had been a guest at the Fuji-ya Hotel, where we were staying. So had Franklin Roosevelt, Clark Gable, Albert Einstein, and John and Yoko. But these days it looked like something from The Shining. The carpets in the underlit hallways were stained. The mattress in our room sagged. The floor sagged, too. The bathroom taps, which ran water from natural hot springs, took fifteen minutes to warm up. Even the bellhops looked dusty. There was an inviting mosaic-tiled indoor pool, but we hadn’t brought suits. So we ate French food served by diffident waiters at the hotel’s restaurant (where they forced Steven to put on an antediluvian, and mismatched, tie and jacket) then retired to our room to play Scrabble. That was better. As long as neither I nor the surface I was sitting on moved, I was okay; I could even enjoy myself. The serrated edge in our voices began to smooth. We laughed about the kitschy pirate ship and the overcooked lamb shanks. We started to feel like “us” again, at last.
That night as we drifted off to sleep, I whispered to Steven, “I’m so sad. And I’m scared.”
He shrugged. “You have to learn to roll with it, Peg.”
I sat up. “Roll with it?” I repeated.
“You have to be semi-objective.”
“Semi-objective?” I exploded. “Screw you! I’ve been alone and puking in a foreign country for a month. For the last week I’ve known I wasn’t pregnant and had to feel like crap anyway. In two days I’m getting my insides scraped out.” Finally, an excuse to let go, to rant, to wail. I would’ve spewed sulfur myself if I could have. “Why should I be objective? I’m angry and upset, and I hate myself for not having babies when I was thirty, because now I’m obviously going to run out of time.”
“I know you want me to be sympathetic, but I’m not,” Steven shot back. “I’ve run out of sympathy. I’m tired of your self-absorption. I’m tired of how you make this all about you. I’m tired of how in love you are with your own misery. You are not the only one in pain here.”
That stung. So maybe I had cast him as a bit player in my own personal opera. Maybe I had considered his feelings beside the point (if I’d considered them at all). But at that moment I didn’t care. My rage—at fate, at him, at myself—would brook no remorse. “Maybe,” I sneered, “you just have to roll with it.” I lay back down, seething, glaring at the ceiling. Steven didn’t apologize. Neither did I.
D&Cs are a two-day affair in Japan. On the first morning, Dr. Makabe inserted four match-sized sticks of compressed seaweed, called laminaria, into my cervix. Over twenty-four hours, e
ach stick was supposed to swell to the size of a pencil in a slow, steady dilation. That sounded fine to me. Natural.
“Will it hurt?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “Maybe a little.”
I forgot my own caveat about Japanese doctors. I believed her.
We’d checked into the Tokyo Hilton for the rest of Steven’s stay. (A bathroom of our own! What luxury!) By the time we got there, an hour later, I was doubled over in pain. The cramps came in long, slow-breaking waves. My cervix was indeed dilating—I was in labor. I called the clinic and demanded to speak with Dr. Makabe.
“I am in extreme pain,” I gasped as another cramp washed over me.
“Can you gaman?” she said. Gaman is a fundamental Japanese precept. It means persevering at all costs, suffering in silence. As it happens, I’m not Japanese.
“No!” I said. “I cannot gaman. I can’t even stand.”
She suggested I take some ibuprofen.” Gambatte,” she said and hung up. Also key to the Japanese character, gambatte means “Do your best. Don’t quit.” In this case I suspect it was closer to “Suck it up, loser.”
I lay curled in a ball on the bathroom floor, hoping the cold tiles would distract me from my pain. Steven flipped around the TV channels with the remote, saying little. In general, our cultural differences add zing to our marriage, a welcome shake of spice. On the issue of complaint, however, that spice is red-hot chili pepper. I’m a Jew—I consider kvetching my birthright, a way to connect to those I love, to communicate. If I have a hangnail, you’re going to hear about it. Like many people of Japanese descent—particularly from the samurai class that his great-great-grandmother was part of—Steven calls complaining monku-’mg and to him it’s shameful, the worst thing you can do. He is the most compassionate person I know except when his monku radar gets tripped—even if the self-pity that sets it off is justified.
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