Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  It was while she was attempting to muster the energy to put away her futon that she ran her fingers through her hair and noticed that the ends of it felt sticky. After feeling it again more carefully, she realized that it wasn't just sticky; there was an ame, one of the sucking candies that Hana, her oldest niece, loved, stuck in her hair. The candy was bright red and shiny, and judging from the fact that it was less than half of its regular size, its edges worn smooth, it had probably been sucked on for some time already.

  Wincing as she tried to wrest the candy free, Sachiko cast her mind back (while just one night back was all that was required, it was still hard for her, so swiftly did her days pass, and so full did they all seem to be): Hana had nodded off over her homework and Sachiko had picked up the tiny girl to take her to bed; the candy must have dropped out of her mouth then. Sachiko wrinkled her nose. How could she have missed it; how could she have actually spent a whole night with that thing weighing down her hair and pulling it down, and doubtlessly staining her pillow red? And then she laughed.

  That's what Sachiko-san was like back then (Hana would tell her daughters decades later in halting, accented English, shaking her head in wonder, her voice catching a little as she tried to reconcile the image of the older woman she remembered with that of the lighthearted girl who now only existed in stories). Before that August, Sachiko would find something to laugh about even on a busy morning in the middle of the war, even if it was a piece of candy spat out by her niece and tangled up in her hair. It didn't matter that she had slept poorly, her stomach upset by the family's wartime diet of soybeans and cabbage. So what if she was deeply worried, as all her neighbors and friends were, about the possibility of a mass raid on Hiroshima, which aside from Kyoto was the only large city that had not yet been attacked by the B-29s, or B-san, as they were known? She could still throw her head back and let out a hearty peal of a laugh.

  It took Sachiko a good three minutes to get the ame out of her hair. Then she dressed herself in a cotton kimono, folded and put away her futon (moving with a briskness that was not customary to her; the thought of her mother trying to feed all those children made her feel a little guilty, although she herself was the first to admit that how much she could help was another question altogether), and went to the bathhouse to wash out her hair.

  SHE WAS THE YOUNGEST of five siblings. The next one up, her brother Motohiko, was eight years older and already married, his second child on the way; Sachiko's oldest sibling, her sister Yuka, was thirty-seven in 1945, almost a full generation older.

  Sachiko had come as a complete surprise to her parents, a gift that arrived in their later, more tranquil years, when they not only had more money but also more leisure, and their attitudes toward child-rearing had changed. They were (as they told themselves as well as each other at her birth), old hands at parenting by this point, able to anticipate well in advance any problems that would come up in the process of raising a child. Surely they could afford to let up considerably on disciplining little Sa-chan, who, poor thing, wouldn't have brothers and sisters of her own age as playmates. After all, their four oldest children had grown up fine, with barely a knee injury among them.

  That Sachiko's parents spoke to each other of the need to be lenient toward their youngest child was probably unnecessary. The family would soon come to agree on the fact that being stern with Sachiko was not a possibility. As the oldest, Yuka remembered what all her siblings were like as babies, and Sachiko was different.

  “The happiest baby ever,” pronounced their mother, crooning as she cradled Sachiko to her.

  And despite a momentary pang of jealousy, Yuka had to agree.

  IN THE BATHHOUSE, Sachiko removed the wooden planks that rested on top of the bath and kept the heat of the water in. Humming one of the songs that her sister Yuka sang to her children, a ridiculous jingle that she hadn't been able to get out of her head all week, she took off her kimono and hung it on a nearby hook.

  She thought of Takuro as she dipped one of the containers stacked in the corner into the steaming water and raised it over her head. He was in the army now, as all the young men were, but even though it had been four months since they'd met, it had seemed lately as if he was always in her mind, infuriatingly catchy and as difficult to forget as a child's jingle. What if they had (here Sachiko allowed herself a small smile as she blushed, the hot water spilling over her face) a daughter of their own who was partial, as so many children were, to sweets? And then what if one morning Sachiko woke to find a piece of hard candy spat out by her daughter caught in her hair: how would Takuro react? Perhaps he'd be fastidiously revolted; perhaps he'd laugh at or with her. Or would he cluck his tongue and gently tease the candy out of her hair?

  She didn't know him well enough to say for sure, of course. Yet even in the one brief, formal encounter that they had had, she had been able to see the snap of humor in his eyes, and so she strongly suspected that if he saw an ame swinging from the ends of his wife's hair, he, too, would throw his head back and laugh out loud, forgetting for one sweet, precious moment that their country was in the midst of a great and terrible war.

  SOMETIMES WHEN SHE TALKED about her aunt Sachiko to her daughters, Hana would interrupt her own narrative.

  “In Japan back then, women didn't have a lot of decisions to make,” she'd say, her face uncharacteristically stern and her gaze focused so intently on Kei and then Rei in turn that they wondered if she was thinking about the unfolding of their fates rather than that of the doomed figure of their bedtime stories, their mother's youngest aunt.

  “Choosing a husband was important. Every woman married and had children—they didn't have a choice about that.” Then, as she looked at the eagerly attentive faces of her American-born daughters, Hana's voice would soften. “Not having choices—you don't know about that,” she'd say, not needing to add—because someday, if not already, they'd be saying it too—thank God.

  It was when Hana came down with tuberculosis, the year that she turned sixteen, that she first began to appreciate not only what her aunt Sachiko had gone through and continued to go through on a daily basis but Sachiko herself. Until then, Sachiko had been all too easy to ignore, a pale, far too thin woman who smiled a lot but said little. While still the darling of her parents, doted upon and spoiled more than ever, she lived like a permanent houseguest in one of the small bedrooms in her parents' house; it was hard not to see her as a highly favored maid of the family. Hana knew Sachiko's history, but although it made her a tragic figure in her eyes and, as such, an object of some interest, she personally seemed rather dull, silent for lack of anything to say rather than because of grief or any hidden depths.

  Hana's tuberculosis kept her bed-bound and in isolation, in a room that was separated from the rest of the house by a long corridor. Her year would have been unbearably lonely were it not for the fact that a quarter of the way through it, Sachiko took the train down to Nagoya and moved in. Replacing the maids, she nursed Hana and, even more importantly, provided her with company, reading her books, playing her records, and sitting in the room with her for hours, when Hana's mother did not dare to do more than call out to her from the hallway once a day.

  Hana was too weak, even, to hold up a paintbrush, and certainly not a book. Lying in her bed throughout that long year, a quietly companionable Sachiko sitting by her side, she stared at the ceiling (and for variety, sometimes the wall) and pondered the importance of having and making choices.

  In the end, the prince probably wouldn't have wanted her anyway (she'd tell her daughters); after all, she'd had tuberculosis (turning her face here and lowering her gaze, so that they thought that it must have been hard indeed for her, shut up alone and shunned by her family—even her mother!—and friends; they wondered if the memory of her sickness, even now, caused her shame). As a person who had contracted that dreaded and highly infectious illness, she would have been judged a poor candidate for marriage by many middle-class Japanese men, let alone by the crown pr
ince's handlers and family.

  Yet the prince never got the chance to pursue and court Hana actively, for when she met a man who offered her a life that was less glamorous, perhaps, than that of an empress, but also far more free, she decided quickly, even spontaneously, that she would marry him.

  RETRIEVING ANOTHER CONTAINERFUL of water from the bath and closing her eyes, Sachiko began the long process of trying to rinse the soap out of her hair. When had she decided that she would marry Takuro? Much as she tried, she couldn't remember. One morning almost three months ago, she had woken up and there the knowledge was, lodged as securely in her mind as the candy had been in her hair today (and greeted by her, perhaps not incidentally, with the same combination of surprise and laughter): Takuro was the one she wanted to marry. And given that a proposal had arrived from his family and her parents had raised no objections, he was the one she would marry.

  The matchmaker had arranged for her to meet five men all told, all of whom came, as she did, from respectable, well-to-do families; Sachiko had liked them well enough. But sometimes, she had to admit, it was hard to tell whether she had liked the man or the meeting itself. The possibilities of these meetings fascinated her; she liked to look at the man sitting across from her and imagine the life that they would lead together, the talks over dinner and the evenings they'd spend reading over the kotatsu and, most of all, the children that they would someday have.

  But the fifth meeting had been different. Takuro she had liked for himself—how soft his eyes were! a deep brown, with the hint of laughter always dancing behind them—and not just for the fact that he would give her a life that she could imagine and anticipate with pleasure.

  She tossed her hair back and blinked the water from her eyes, and wondered if it would rain soon—her affection for the cool misty gray of clouds, the initially soft but then growing roar of raindrops, and the messy but also strangely satisfying act of splashing through puddles a trait that she shared with Rei, her American-born great-niece.

  When, in less than half an hour, she would step outside and see a great light flash across the sky over the city, Sachiko would be too startled to be afraid. Even from where she stood, she would be able to feel the force of the blast, but although she would sway and totter back a few steps, she would catch herself in time and not fall. She'd know that this explosion was not a B-san. The light was so strong and blinding, it had to be the sun itself that had swooped across the sky. She would think that the white-faced, green-eyed American demons had turned the life-giving brightness of day into their own personal agent of destruction; they had managed to harness and also subvert the power of the gods in their attempt to destroy her country.

  She would be stunned speechless when she saw the flash of light, but when she saw a huge, dark cloud form over the city, she would cry out. The fact that the cloud was in the shape of an umbrella—a benevolent object, one used for protection from the rain and the sun—would convince her once and for all that the Americans had rendered the forces of good into something dark and unrecognizable.

  Sachiko combed her fingers through her hair, checking to see if any soap remained. Thinking of the candy that had been caught in it, she smiled once more. She would find time around her chores later this morning, she resolved, to fit in a game of tag with Hana and her younger sister.

  IN THE 1940s Hana lived in Nagoya, almost six hours by train from Hiroshima. Although she and her family happened to be visiting the small town outside of Hiroshima in which Sachiko lived with her parents on that first week of August, 1945, Hana did not know her mother's youngest sister well then, and so to her lasting regret she would have few memories of her aunt, prewar, to pass on to her daughters. Her descriptions of Sachiko as a woman who would throw her head back and laugh during the middle of the war because a sticky piece of candy was entangled in her hair came secondhand to her, from her mother and grandmother, these recollections becoming heirlooms, possessions that were prized as rare jewels, the passing down of which elicited not only awe but sadness.

  The woman Hana remembered as Sachiko was a different person: mild-mannered and gentle, cheerful enough but certainly not quick to laugh. Furthermore, even though the sight of the mushroom cloud—ominous and almost unearthly—would be fixed in Hana's memory until the day she died, years afterward she would tell her children that she could not recollect the rash that her aunt developed along her hairline, nor how lethargic the usually lively Sachiko became. In any event, Hana and her family returned soon enough to their home in Nagoya. She would say later that she seemed to remember hearing her parents whisper of what had happened to Sachiko, and seeing her mother cry over a telegram that contained the latest update on her health. But Hana's mother cried so often those days, it was impossible to know for sure.

  That Sachiko showed signs of radiation sickness after that day came as a surprise to the doctors who saw her. Given that she was so far from the city center, the exposure that she, a grown woman, had suffered upon walking out of the bathhouse should not have been enough to create a risk. The fact that the doctors did not initially believe Sachiko could have developed radiation sickness gave her and her family hope at first, but in the end it only served to point out to them how little the medical community knew about the effects of the bomb and the strange illness that it could cause. For there was the rash and the fatigue that was more intense than any she had ever experienced and then, when she was tested at the hospital, there was her low leukocyte count—unmistakable symptoms all. Not a severe case, the doctors finally pronounced, but a case nevertheless.

  Before that day, Sachiko had thought that her current existence—living at home with her parents, helping them out around the house and with their visitors—was not meant to last long. She was in an interim stage, pleasant enough in itself but not anything, she was optimistically sure, compared to what would follow: a home and children of her own. This so-called transitional phase instead became her life, as the symptoms of radiation sickness that she had were not only unmistakable, they were also impossible to hide. Reports of the unlikely fact of her sickness spread, and one by one, the offers of marriage that had come for her were hastily withdrawn, with the family of Takuro Tanaka, the man she had most preferred, being the first to pull out.

  PULLING HER HAIR BACK from her face, Sachiko gathered it into a long, black rope and squeezed it tight, wringing it. She dressed herself quickly in her kimono and slipped her geta on, enjoying how cool the wood felt against her feet. There was a lilt to her step as she walked down the hallway from the bathhouse toward the door leading to the garden; she could almost have been dancing.

  She held her damp hair clenched in one fist, like a bouquet (she thought with a smile) of black, bedraggled seaweed. Would Takuro laugh, too, at the idea that she held her tangled wet hair like flowers? But at least it smelled clean; at least it was no longer sticky.

  With that she stepped outside, turning around only to pull the door shut behind her.

  Chapter Ten

  Claudia

  Boston, 1999

  “SO IF YOU TWO ARE SO CLOSE, KINDRED SPIRITS AND mirror images and sisters-in-all-but-biology and all the rest of it,” says Vikrum, his eyes narrowed as he watches me, “then how come you haven't seen each other for so many years?”

  We sit on a bench on the banks of the Charles, surrounded by geese. In the way of all geese, or at least of all the geese I have ever met, these birds look plump but act famished. I throw a handful of bread crumbs at them; it's good to see how hungrily they eat. There is always one goose in the group that stands guard over the others, and I have, as usual, saved a few extra crumbs for him. I toss them in his direction, but he does not even deign to look down at where they fall; his neck stands proud and tall, at the top of which his head swivels slowly, vigilantly surveying the world for possible predators. Is it an honor to be designated the sentry? Was he happy when he received the secret tap (bestowed by a beak, perhaps, on the base of a left wing) that let him know he had been
chosen, or did he sigh, at least at first; did he groan and mutter audibly to himself and everyone else in his vicinity?

  I throw my last handful at him; my aim is better this time and the crumbs land at his feet, but still he ignores my offering. I am impressed, of course, by how seriously he takes his responsibilities, and I certainly do not want him to shirk them in any way. Still, it seems highly unlikely that he is getting enough to eat.

  Vikrum nudges me. “They probably take turns. He'll get to eat later.”

  My laughter makes one or two of the geese hop away and a few more flutter their wings; the sentry sharply swivels his head toward me. I swallow my laugh quickly and lower my voice. “How'd you know what I was thinking?”

  He smirks. “I'm a magician, remember? Trained in the ancient arts of mind reading.” He takes my hand, now empty of bread crumbs, and interlaces my fingers with his own. “But enough about me, and it's definitely been enough about geese. How about we talk about why you and Rei haven't seen each for so long instead?”

  It might just be my imagination, but it seems as if in the last two months or so, Vikrum has been getting increasingly reckless. Across the shining swath of the river lies Cambridge and, beyond that, the town of Medford, where at the end of a street there stands a crumbling but well-patched Colonial house, the top two floors of which are occupied by a shiny-haired South Asian woman and her two children. More to the point, perhaps, it is just past four, and while the geese outnumber the people now, the balance is about to tilt the other way very soon; on such a beautiful day, it would take an avian assault of Hitchcockian proportions to counterbalance the throngs of joggers, walkers, and Rollerbladers that can be found on the banks of the Charles at the end of the human workday. I carefully disengage our hands.