“We’re so embarrassed!” added Mrs. Kobayashi, even though it was Mrs. Asaki who was clearly breaking the rules.
With both hands, Mrs. Asaki waved their words away. “Maa maa, everybody so formal!” She laughed. “What does it matter? We’re all family!” Here the old woman cocked her head, like some coquettish bird, and appealed to Sarah-“Ne?”-as if the two of them were the only sane people in the room. Sarah, unable to keep from smiling in delight, agreed with a vigorous nod and an “Nnn!”
“Wait! Let me heat up some more tea,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, rushing across the tatami and down the wooden step. The kitchen, which was an extension of the vestibule, stood on a lower level than the rest of the house. The architecture was a carryover from a bygone era when women had done their cooking away from the main house, in lean-tos or covered porches.
“No no, don’t bother on my account.” Mrs. Asaki climbed up onto the tatami and looked around at everything with her bright eyes.
Mrs. Rexford was waiting for her in an open space away from the others, seated with legs folded beneath her and fingertips pressed to the floor. “Sarah!” she hissed in her obey-me-now voice. Sarah scurried over and assumed the position next to her mother, self-conscious because everyone else was watching with interest.
Mrs. Rexford bowed first, barely giving Mrs. Asaki enough time to get down on her elderly knees. She had a finely trained bow that put the older lady’s to shame, and she was fully conscious of this advantage. Mrs. Kobayashi, unlike her sister-in-law, had a background of rigorous training in formal etiquette associated with the high arts, and she had ensured that her daughter received this same training. Mrs. Rexford’s skill was evident in the way she pulled back her shoulders and arched, catlike, to the floor.
“My mother, my daughter, and I,” she said, shifting into a refined, inflectionless tea-ceremony voice, “live perpetually in your debt.” She timed her bow so that its lowest point coincided with the end of her sentence. “With your gracious permission”-here she lifted her head from the floor and paused, then slowly began rising back up-“we remain indebted to your kind regard during this coming visit”…she straightened up to a sitting position for full effect, fingertips still poised on the floor…“and for many more years to come.” She bowed once again, this time in silence. She knew it intimidated Mrs. Asaki to be faced with such a display of formality, and this knowledge somehow compensated for the fact that her flustered mother was down in the kitchen, scrambling to put together a pot of company-quality sencha tea.
Mrs. Asaki returned the bow with an appropriate response. Mrs. Rexford then looked pointedly at her daughter.
Now was the time for Sarah to bow correctly, as she had been taught. She counted silently to herself-one million one, one million two, one million three-timing her bow to end at the count of three. She could hear someone unwrapping a chocolate. Spine straight. Rear end down. It was a difficult, almost athletic feat. Her mother, trying to coach her a month before their visit, had said despairingly that a good bow just couldn’t be faked, any more than a dancer’s pirouette could. It took too long to train the right muscles. A bow was an acid test of one’s daily habits.
Sarah returned to a full sitting position before she realized she had forgotten to utter a single word. She had learned a simple speech, something to the effect that she was happy to be back and grateful for Mrs. Asaki’s kindness. But she couldn’t remember a word of it.
“Well done, well done!” Mrs. Asaki sang out with her cheerful cackle, and clapped her age-spotted hands.
“Granny-san,” said Mrs. Rexford, returning to a tone of affectionate familiarity that her daughter nonetheless suspected was an “outside” voice, “sit down here on my cushion. Ne, please.” She smoothed the cotton fabric in a deferential gesture of invitation. Mrs. Asaki accepted, ducking her head in a pleased quarter-bow, and Mrs. Rexford went away to help her mother with the tea. “Sarah,” she called back over her shoulder, switching once again to a disciplinary tone, “clear those dirty dishes off the table. Quickly!”
Sarah obeyed. Carrying the loaded clearing tray with both hands, she stepped down into the kitchen, feeling with her bare foot for the wooden step she couldn’t see. She liked her grandmother’s kitchen, with its vaguely primitive, backstage atmosphere that was so different from the rest of the house. It had a long narrow floor lined with wooden planks. Overhead were high exposed rafters blackened by years of smoke, from which a lanternlike fixture hung at the end of a long rope. Best of all, a miniature door opened right out onto the street so they could trade with vendors.
Here in the narrow kitchen, Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford were standing side by side. It was the only way they could both fit. Their backs were to Sarah, so they didn’t notice her approach. A newly arranged tray of tea utensils lay at the edge of the counter, ready to be carried up to the guests. Mrs. Kobayashi was lining up individually wrapped tea cakes on another tray beside it. Mrs. Rexford poured hot water from the kettle into a teapot.
“…like a hawk. Even now, she won’t trust Masako and me together,” Mrs. Kobayashi whispered.
“I still can’t believe Granny came.” Putting down the kettle, Mrs. Rexford wiped stray drops from the surface of the counter.
“Never let down your guard,” whispered Mrs. Kobayashi. “She’s aware of everything. Remember that.”
Mrs. Rexford mulled this over. “It’s so unlike Masako,” she said finally. “Usually she’s more careful. If she hadn’t stayed this long, Granny would never have come over in the first place.”
“It’s awkward,” agreed Mrs. Kobayashi.
Sarah, who all along had sensed some disturbing point outside her range of vision, felt a small thrill as it came into focus. The girls’ early arrival had been no accident. Mrs. Nishimura had wanted to come here; she had wanted to linger at this untidy breakfast table. Sarah recalled the guarded, apprehensive smiles of her grandmother and mother.
Now the two women fell silent.
“Hora…” Mrs. Kobayashi let out a sigh. “I had a feeling you should have gone there first. Didn’t I tell you? After this many years, you develop a sixth sense about these things.”
Noticing the girl’s presence for the first time, the women immediately switched to an animated discussion about the freshness of the tea cakes.
chapter 5
There was no chance to ask questions until late that night, when Sarah and her mother finally lay down on their futons.
They were side by side in the parlor. The walls were plastered with a mixture of fawn-colored clay and chopped straw. Like all traditional parlors it had a tokonoma, a built-in alcove of polished wood. Within it hung a long summer scroll with flowing black script. The scroll was the only object of pure white in the room, and it leapt out at the eye from inside the shadowed recess. At the foot of the alcove, in a shallow glazed bowl, Mrs. Kobayashi had arranged a single yellow lily from the garden, deliberately angled across long clean lines of summer grass.
Back in America, Sarah hadn’t remembered much about this room. But as soon as she arrived, everything had fitted seamlessly back into her memory, like the pigeon calls this morning. In fact when she first entered this room, she had immediately noticed that the stringed koto, which her mother had played in her youth and which stood in its original sheath of faded red silk, was now leaning against the tea cabinet wall instead of the tokonoma wall.
Sarah and her mother lay on their backs. Moonlight shone through a gap in the heavy drapes, which were slightly open to let in the breeze. For the first time that day, the house was utterly silent.
“When I was little,” said Mrs. Rexford, “there used to be a snake living up in the attic.”
“Ugh, a snake!” said Sarah. “Did you see it?”
“No. I just heard it at night, when I was lying in bed. The mouse would run-its nails went k’cha k’cha-then there was a quick dragging sound. After that, it got quiet again.”
“Weren’t you scared?” Sarah asked, even
though she knew better. Her mother disapproved of timidity in any form.
“What for? Snakes bring good luck to households, remember? In the old days, farmers stored grain in the attic. Grain attracts mice, and mice attract snakes. So having a snake in your attic meant you were wealthy. During the occupation, I’d listen to that sound and feel safe, because the snake was protecting our black-market rice.”
“Black-market rice? In this attic?” Sarah strained her eyes in the moonlight. She could make out the shadowed, roughly hewn rafters of the ceiling, curiously out of sync with the polished gleam of the alcove and wall posts. The attic was silent. Never in her lifetime had Sarah heard any sound. But these were modern times after all, when nothing exciting ever happened.
She shifted her body to look over at her mother, and the buckwheat-husk pillow gave a loud crunch. Mrs. Rexford lay with her hands clasped behind her head. In the moonlight her face looked unformed and unfamiliar, framed by a cloud of hair loosened from its French twist.
They had never slept together in the same room before.
“Mama?” Sarah spoke softly, aware that these rooms were divided by nothing but paper panels. “How come things are awkward with Granny and Auntie?”
“Hmm?”
“I heard you talking in the kitchen.”
Mrs. Rexford gave a sigh of reluctance. Sarah waited patiently. Usually her questions were met with a brisk, “You’re still a child, it’s none of your business.” But this time-she felt sure-her mother would take her into her confidence as a form of damage control.
Sure enough, her mother whispered, “I suppose you’re old enough.” She switched to English. “But you’re not to tell Momoko or Yashiko-they don’t know yet. And don’t bother your grandmother.”
“Okay.”
“Your auntie Masako was adopted as a baby. The Asakis weren’t her real parents.”
“Oh. Then who were?”
“She and I have the same parents,” said Mrs. Rexford. “She’s my full sister by birth.”
“So Grandma’s her real mother…?” Sarah’s mind raced back over that morning. The tightness between her temples intensified as her brain realigned itself.
“That means your auntie is your true aunt. And Momoko and Yashiko are your true cousins.”
Sarah mulled this over. “Why did Grandma give her away?”
“She didn’t just give her away. It was more complicated than that.”
They were silent. Outside in the lane, a neighbor’s bicycle crunched slowly over the gravel.
“Here’s what you need to know. After your real grandfather died in the war, your grandmother was beholden to the Asakis. It was wartime and…things were complicated. She didn’t want to give up her baby, but she felt she had to. That’s it, basically.”
“But why-”
“No more questions.” Her mother switched back to Japanese. “We have to get some sleep.” Resigned, Sarah rolled onto her back and pulled the light summer comforter up to her chin. “Good night,” she said.
“Good night.”
She closed her eyes. Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t shut down her brain. It was as if she’d been awake for so long, she had forgotten how. Inside her skull the echoes of Japanese voices chattered on and on, and would not stop.
After several minutes, her mother spoke again. “You mustn’t judge your grandmother. It was a difficult time.”
“I won’t.”
“In-family adoptions are actually an old tradition. In the villages, if you didn’t have children there was no one to take care of you in old age. So extended relatives had to help each other out. But they always kept the child inside the family. Japanese people never give away their babies to strangers.”
“Hmmm…”
“People still do it. Sometimes it’s to maintain the family line. That’s really important, you know, because family altar tablets have to be passed down from generation to generation. Or else rich families do it so they can pass down assets to a member of their clan.”
“Is that why-”
“No. Go to sleep.”
Mrs. Rexford soon drifted off. Sarah lay listening to her deep breathing.
If she had known of this adoption as a child, she probably would have thought nothing of it. Small children accepted everything as normal. After all, how was this any stranger than her grandmother marrying two brothers? Talk about keeping things within the family! Mrs. Kobayashi had married twice, the first Mr. Kobayashi for love and the second Mr. Kobayashi out of necessity. It had never occurred to the girl to find this curious. As a child, all she cared about was that her grandpa was related to her by blood, even though he wasn’t technically her grandfather.
Her thoughts drifted to the attic, silent now, emptied of snakes and black-market rice and the energy of a turbulent past. She thought of the war that polite people never mentioned-the war that had brought illegal rations into this house, caused her grandmother’s second marriage, and somehow contributed to her aunt’s adoption. In the shadowy rafters, the brutality of those times seemed to still linger.
chapter 6
After the formal visits of the first day, the two houses kept mostly to themselves. They did, however, drop by almost daily to share freshly cut flowers from their gardens, or an extra eel fillet bought on sale, or half of a designer melon received from a visitor. On certain evenings, Mrs. Kobayashi had Sarah walk over a platter of tempura or pot stickers, hot and crisp from the frying oil. These were greeted with great enthusiasm because-as Mrs. Kobayashi explained privately-the cooking over there was not so good. The Asaki household followed the old Kyoto tradition, using seasonings so subtle they were practically flavorless. (Mrs. Kobayashi, the Kobe native, went on to say that Kyoto people were notorious for donning beautiful silks in public but making do with substandard cuisine in private.) Sometimes Mrs. Asaki, laden down with shopping bags and beaming-she loved going downtown, where all the action was-tapped on the Kobayashis’ kitchen door on her way home and dropped off a French bakery bag filled with brioches and frankfurter pastries. But these exchanges lasted only a few minutes, and the women rarely took off their shoes and entered each other’s houses.
“How come we never sit around and talk, like we did the first day?” Sarah asked. Deep down, she knew why. But a childish part of her was disappointed, even petulant; she had been hoping for a constant round of social activity.
“Goodness, child. Who has the time! A house doesn’t just run itself,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, laughing.
Mrs. Rexford shot Sarah a glance of warning. “People need boundaries,” she said.
Luckily the children had no such restrictions. Sarah spent hours at the Asaki house. Within that household were two different worlds, one downstairs and one upstairs.
Downstairs was Mrs. Nishimura’s domain-not just during the day but also at night, when she and her husband rolled out their futons in the television room. Unlike the sunny rooms upstairs, the ground floor was tinged with restful green light from the garden. Since the formal dining room was used only for guests, the children gravitated toward the informal eating area that directly adjoined the kitchen. Under the large low table, stacked in tin boxes, were snacks: rice crackers wrapped in seaweed, shrimp crackers, curry-flavored puffs.
In the pale underwater light, Mrs. Nishimura glided in and out of the kitchen bearing delicate glass dishes of flan pudding, or salted rice balls, or crustless sandwich triangles garnished with parsley. “Hai, this is to wipe your fingers,” she told them, offering steaming-hot hand towels rolled into perfect tubes, just like the ones in restaurants. Her conversation was as soft and serene as the leaf-filtered light. “Do you like juice?” she would ask gently, as if Sarah were still seven or eight instead of fourteen. She made conversation by saying things like, “Yashiko’s favorite spoons have Hello Kitty on them, don’t they, Yashiko?”
Sarah sometimes wondered if her aunt switched personas as soon as she was alone with her own children, dropping her outside face an
d talking in rapid, droll sentences like everyone else. She watched carefully when her aunt was in the company of other women. Although Mrs. Nishimura did switch to an adult-level vocabulary, her demeanor remained as soft and ethereal as with the children. She lacked the impulsive, gossipy spark that the other women seemed to share in abundance. Once, in a private uncharitable moment, Mrs. Rexford sighed sharply to her mother, “I swear! She’s like a blancmange pudding.”
Then Mrs. Rexford had immediately rectified her blunder (“Because blancmange pudding is pure and white, never sullied by anything ugly”) to ensure that there would be no true understanding on her daughter’s part.
“It’s okay, Mama, I know,” said Sarah. “She’s sort of like a Christian Madonna, isn’t she.”
Mrs. Rexford’s relieved eyes met hers. “Exactly,” she said.
It wasn’t as if the two sisters disliked each other. Mrs. Rexford was protective of Mrs. Nishimura, who in turn looked up to her big sister with sincere admiration. But they weren’t everyday friends, the way Mrs. Rexford was with their mother.
When the girls tired of playing downstairs, they climbed up to the second story, where the tatami mats were warm from the sunlight flooding in through the glass wall panels. Sometimes they slid shut the latticed shoji screens against the midday glare. Then a soft, diffused light glowed through the rice paper and created a lovely effect, as if they were living inside a giant paper lantern.
The girls’ room wasn’t a true “room” in the Western sense, since the entire second floor was one enormous room. In place of solid dividing walls, there were fusuma: wall-to-wall partitions of sliding doors that were left open during the day and slid shut at night. These doors were covered on both sides with thick, durable paper whose fibrous surface was interwoven with what looked like delicate strands of green seaweed.
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