Yet sculpture was a path that Hana would never pursue, because one day as she wandered through the galleries in Nagoya, she fell in love. The artist's name was Setsuko Migishi—a woman, unusually and impressively enough, and a Nagoya local too, although she had lived almost half of her adult life in France—but it was her work that captivated Hana. On canvases that were as tall as Hana, Migishi painted flowers and mountains, yet they were barely recognizable as such, constructed as they were out of triangles and rectangles that had little to do with the way that the objects actually appeared; they were, moreover, made with smears of paint, so thick that they formed clots on the canvas. If Hana peered close—and she did, for so long that her head began to feel light—she could see the swirls of Migishi's brush stroke. While the colors were dazzling, gorgeous, and varied enough to satisfy even Hana, they were not beautiful paintings: indeed, two or three of them were just short of crude. But all of them had power, so much so that they had no need for the heft and size and extra dimension of sculpture to create the same monumental effect.
It was Hana herself who called the feelings she had about Migishi's paintings love (and later, when she told her daughters about the first time she saw Migishi's work, she would again characterize the attachment she formed in romantic terms, as a passion that developed quickly, but one that changed her for good, so that they would fidget and yawn, wishing she would hurry up and get to the juicy part of the story, her romance with a man—their father!—rather than with dabs of paint upon a canvas). Hana based her self-diagnosis on the chatter of her school friends. If a racing heart, an inability to concentrate in school because of a preoccupation with the beloved, a tendency to go up and down in moods in a way that was calculated to drive your mother mad, and sleeplessness were symptoms of a crush—well, then she had a bad case of it indeed.
IT WAS CLEAR TO EVERYONE, friends, family, teachers, as well as Hana herself, that at the age of twenty-six, she was well on her way to becoming a bona fide eccentric, bookish and perhaps overly fond of solitude. Forgetting what she had been like as a girl, Hana's mother believed that it was her firstborn's long and lonely bout with tuberculosis that had turned her into a dreamer, a woman obsessed with becoming an artist, of all things, who had insisted on attending a graduate program in art, who showed absolutely no interest in boys, and who refused to take seriously the possibility of marrying a prince. And it was true that Hana's long stint away from society during her illness had created a rift between her and her friends that she had not felt the need to bridge; it had almost certainly exacerbated her natural inclination toward solitude.
Yet the fact that she had spent a year alone but for the company of a quiet aunt was hardly the only reason for Hana's lack of interest in the society of both women and men. There was her temperament, for starters: she had always been independent, and while tolerant of the giggling and gossipping favored by her girlfriends, she had never been keen to join in, so that many of her classmates believed her to be supercilious. Then there was her resentment at what she considered the gross injustices done to her aunt Sachiko, and then, too, there was her single-minded pursuit of form and color—all factors that had conspired to keep her curiously incurious about the world around her.
She'd almost bumped into the crown prince of Japan five years ago, sure, and she had been struck then by how soft and white his skin was. But she would think later that she never even really looked at a boy until she was thrust into the middle of a crowd at the opening reception for a new art gallery in town.
She had looked at the art in the gallery and had liked it, especially the two Migishi paintings in the corner, but the crush of people was overwhelming and she had been wishing that she had stayed at home to paint instead when she saw him. He was standing stock-still, apparently transfixed, in front of the smaller Migishi work, the one in deep crimson, a picture of a field of poppies, or was that a sea at sunset? As Hana watched, an older woman bumped into him, hard; he moved out of her way and even bowed an apology, but his eyes did not leave the painting for more than a moment.
Hana watched him for a long time, ten minutes or more, as mesmerized by him as he was by the painting. She watched him until he finally looked away from the canvas—was it her imagination, or did he sigh as he did so?—glanced down at his wristwatch, swiveled around, and began to walk quickly away.
He was a young man, but not an attractive one. Hana was an artist, after all, trained to note form and proportion, and she saw that the pieces of his face fit poorly together, that his nose and forehead were too large, his mouth strangely wide, and his eyes too narrow and small. Still, he moved with an athletic grace, a kind of physical self-confidence bordering on swagger, that she liked and that she wished she knew how to capture on canvas. He looked up and caught her staring, looked away, and then looked back. As he approached, he held her eyes with an effrontery that made her catch her breath. He brushed by her so closely that even though he wore a light jacket and she a sweater, she felt his arm pressed against her own.
As he walked away, Hana closed her eyes and shivered deep inside herself. She would eventually come to see the rest of her life as flowing out of that moment: the few seconds, brighter even than the most vivid colors of her palette, during which he touched her as he walked by.
ALTHOUGH HER ART INSTRUCTOR scolded and her classmates were bewildered, Hana began trying to make pictures as Migishi did, clumps of paint in shapes that came out of her most feverish dreams rather than nature, plastered forcefully on the largest canvases she could find. She worked hard, as she always did, but with what she was the first to admit was dubious success. Still, she eventually managed to produce a number of works that even her teacher was intrigued and perhaps impressed by, and she felt justifiably proud when one of them was accepted for the student exhibit held during the summer at her school.
It was one of her friends who reported, giggling, that Hana had a fan. A young man, no less, who made all the other girls blush and giggle too, so what if he wasn't strictly speaking handsome. He had come and stood in front of her paintings, for almost half an hour every evening, three days in a row. Hana thought immediately, and with an unfamiliar sensation of light-headedness, of the man whose arm had brushed against hers—he so clearly loved Migishi's work; that he would also like a painting in the same school only made sense. For weeks Hana had been looking for him in different galleries throughout the town, and a number of street corners besides, hoping for another chance encounter. How ironic, and perfect too, that he would turn up here, in her very own exhibit hall.
She staked out her painting every evening for the rest of the week, but it wasn't until the end of the last day of the exhibit (a detail that always made Rei and Claudia shudder—fate clearly liked to play it close), when the large, well-lit room was empty and quiet and she had just about given up hope, that she saw him again. She'd thought she was alone when an all but imperceptible noise made her turn, and then there he was, just a step behind her. At the sight of him, Hana felt neither surprise nor relief.
“It's you,” she said, as if she had known him all her life and he had just stepped out of her sight for a few moments, as if she had been expecting him to be there when she turned.
Surely he also should have been surprised by the way she addressed him, at once so familiar and bold. Still, he, too, seemed calm, as if young women he didn't know talked to him every day.
The very first time she saw him, Hana had thought that he seemed slightly dangerous, perhaps because of the swagger in his step, and that impression had been confirmed by the way he had stared at her and how he had walked up to her so closely they had touched. So she was taken aback at his fine accent when he spoke to her and that he used the honorific and bowed low.
“I'm Seiji Watanabe,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
She may have been flustered, and perhaps a little disappointed too, but she was a well-brought-up girl, and she bowed politely back. “I'm Hana Kawabata.”
“Ah,�
�� he said, smiling, and Hana remembered belatedly that the cards on the wall bore the full name of each artist. Seiji nodded at the oversized picture behind her. “So this is your painting.”
His mouth, already outlandishly wide, grew even larger as he smiled, but it was a pleasant smile, kind and warm. Still, his eyes were intent; Hana was acutely conscious that he was watching her closely. He looked back at the painting, and Hana braced herself for the inevitable question about what it was supposed to represent or, even more annoyingly, what it meant.
“What I like about your painting,” he said instead, “is that you've really caught the way in which birds beat their wings.”
Birds? It was a picture of her aunt Sachiko at the piano; there was nary an animal of any kind in sight.
Giving the young man—her first fan!—the benefit of doubt, Hana squinted hard at her painting, trying to see how he could have come up with birds, but she came up with nothing.
“You can see how they flutter their wings here”—he gestured at the space where Hana had drawn her aunt's hands in motion—“and how much they love to soar. They're so graceful in their flight, it's almost as if you can hear them sing.”
So maybe he wasn't deluded; so maybe she wasn't completely devoid of talent.
“I'm going to be an artist,” Hana said abruptly. She spoke with something approaching desperation, feeling a need to remind herself of what had been, up to now, the focal point of her life.
“It seems to me that you already are,” Seiji said, looking past her to her painting again.
Was she already an artist? She had always thought she had such a long way to go. Hana straightened her back. “Are you an art student yourself?” she asked, to cover her own confusion rather than to find out the answer. What else could a man who lurked in galleries and university art shows and stood spellbound before Migishi's paintings be?
“No,” he said, briefly smiling again and glancing down at her. “I just like art. I'm a banker.”
Given that she had guessed wrong about him in almost every crucial respect, it was only natural she felt off-balance. “I plan to live in Paris someday,” she said, her words running together, “and I'd like to paint there—”
“—like your idol, Migishi. Of course,” he said, his words measured and his eyes still on her work. “I'm going to America, probably in the next three months. My bank is sending me.” Then he turned his gaze back to her. “I understand they have a good art scene in America too.”
Hana gave him a long, steady look, but she hesitated only momentarily. “Yes,” she said, “I believe that they do.”
SHE WOULD MARRY THIS STRANGER with what her friends and, especially, her royalty-obsessed mother would consider to be undue haste, and she would never look back. Together they would move to America, find and settle in a brownstone in Boston, and have two children and almost, heartbreakingly, a third.
It would be Seiji who chose the names Keiko and Reiko for their daughters. Years after he was gone, the girls, outraged by the thought that the ko attached to the end of their names meant child and that, even worse, such an ending was a convention peculiar to female names only, would contemplate officially becoming known by the easy, American monikers they had been using since their late childhood, Kei and Rei. Independently of each other, they would both come to decide against making the change unable to bear the idea that they would have names that their father had never called them by.
Long before that, though, Hana would find that she was right in her initial assessment that Seiji was in many respects an unusual man. Partly in an effort to placate their parents, who implored them weekly to come home, he did give their children proper, even slightly old-fashioned Japanese names, but he himself was anything but traditional. Hana would soon learn that her husband's taste for the avant-garde encompassed far more than art and that he had an unbridled, almost childish enthusiasm for anything innovative. Seiji read up faithfully and avidly on the latest scientific discoveries; the antithesis of the conservative banker, he came home daily, it seemed, with the latest in gadgets, transistor radios, tape recorders, video cameras, lawn mowers, and one day even an electric meat slicer, never mind that Hana hardly ever cooked meat.
Seiji's embrace of the new could also be seen in the fact that he was a progressive thinker. To take just one crucial example, there was the fact that if he felt disappointment, as almost any Japanese man of his class and upbringing would, when they had daughters rather than sons, he never betrayed it. And even though he denied it, saying that it was all about his work, Hana would always wonder (to herself, and also out loud, years later, to Kei and Rei) whether Seiji was fully and immediately supportive of her suggestion that they extend their stay in America at least in part because of his daughters—because he saw and did not like that women had narrower lives in Japan, their possibilities at once more limited and scant.
To the very end he would love America, its uninterrupted sky and its wide, endless streets, the taste of its hot dogs, the loose-limbed friendliness of its people, and the possibilities that floated down its rivers and swung like lanterns from its trees.
WHEN REI FINISHED telling Claudia the story of how her mother and her father, a man whose face she could barely recall, met, there was always a short silence. How easy Hana and Seiji made love look, how simple, direct, and quick! Who would ever have guessed that it would make itself felt so strongly and, perhaps even more shockingly, so soon; who would have known that a look held in a crowded room, a press of the arm, and the exchange of a smattering of words was all that it took? Perhaps, Claudia would worry out loud, she had already passed by the boy she was destined to love and marry and had failed to recognize him. Which always made Rei laugh—maybe it's that guy crossing the street three blocks away, you'd better run if you're going to catch up with him, or could it be that boy in the backseat of that car that just whizzed by?—even though she tried more often than not to be sympathetic to all of Claudia's concerns.
But the real lesson of this story (the stepsisters agreed) was not how suddenly love could make itself felt in your life, nor even how vigilantly you have to examine every chance encounter to guard against its passing you by. So was it the fact that happiness lay in choosing love over a more glamorous match—that love, which might just be life's ultimate goal, was captured by Hana only because she could see that the handsome, glamorous Emperor-in-waiting offered less than the banker with the oddly mismatched face?
An obvious point, not to mention an almost disappointingly clichéd one: fairy tales are not about finding a literal prince. And, in this case, inaccurate besides. For while Hana had indeed chosen a match that offered her love rather than wealth and glory, while she opted to live in a brownstone with the man she loved rather than in a palace with the one she didn't, it was far from clear that she had seen the decision that confronted her in those terms, as love vs. wealth and glory, or even that she had seen marrying the prince as a viable option at all. Five years had passed between her encounter with the prince and her meeting with Seiji, after all: what had really happened was that she had chosen being single over the prince, and then Seiji over a lifetime of being single. Perhaps Hana just instinctively knew that she would have been miserable cooped up in a palace, with her primary responsibility being the bearing of sons. What else had the example of patient, lonely Sachiko and the experience of being quarantined for a year taught her but that she wanted to roam about and breathe?
Hana had wanted a life in which she would have decisions, in which she could be the kind of artist she wanted to be, and she had gotten that; she had wanted passion and love, and she had gotten that too. So perhaps (Rei and Claudia tentatively asked each other) the lesson to be derived from the story of Hana's and Seiji's romance was a somewhat dangerous one—that one should set one's priorities and then shoot for the moon, never settling for less? Perhaps that was it.
While both Rei and Claudia knew that there was one more possible lesson that could be teased out of this
story, it was one they could not bear to say out loud, even to each other. It was also one that they would have struggled to articulate, since it involved a slippery concept, one that they, as children, necessarily grasped only poorly—regret. Hana married Seiji and, the story went, never looked back. Still, how could she not? Sure, she also fell in love with America as she fell more in love with her husband—one love affair, at least, that would last her all her life. It was also true that she possessed the necessary steel in her character—that determination that had served her so well in her career as an artist of modest fame—to hold herself as well as her children together after Seiji died. But given that her marriage gave her ten years of utter happiness but nothing more, didn't she look back at least once or twice to contemplate, maybe even with regret, what would have happened if she'd chosen the prince instead?
Perhaps she sometimes suspected and often half believed, as Rei and Claudia were wont to do, that happiness was apportioned to everyone in equal measure but that how or whether you rationed it out was a decision left up to you. And if so, then wouldn't she also have to wonder, as they did, whether she should have doled out her allotment of happiness slowly, in teaspoons over a lifetime, rather than dousing herself in it all at once, and for all too fleeting a time?
Chapter Twelve
Rei
Boston, 1999
LIKE AN ATHLETE AFTER A WORKOUT, CLAUDIA HAS A towel slung around her neck. It's a dish towel, orange and red with a picture of a teddy bear on it, but she wears it as an athlete would, with comfort and grace. She is washing potatoes, chatting to me as she does so, her voice raised to carry over the sound of running water. She turns, empties the potatoes from the colander onto the cutting board, takes out a very shiny knife from a drawer, and begins to peel them. Her fingers move so fast and the knife looks so sharp, it's difficult for me to watch. Which is ridiculous, since if nothing else, I should remember that much about her—the girl knows how to skin a potato. Still, I look away from her hands, up at her face.
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