“But Big Sister, this is me.”
“It’s not the sister I used to know.”
“Well, of course not! I’ve grown up. I can’t live in your shadow forever. And now I have something important to share. I can teach you something. So why won’t you let me?” Mrs. Izumi was dead earnest now; she seemed to have forgotten Sarah’s presence. “Why can’t you both, for once, follow me?”
The women were silent.
Mrs. Kobayashi cleared her throat. “It’s a lovely idea, Tama-chan,” she said. “But-” She gestured up at the family altar, and they all knew she was referring to the late Shohei. “It would mean abandoning him. Who’d be left to say sutras for him every morning?”
But he’s dead, Sarah thought, and she’s alive. But even as she thought this, she knew it didn’t matter.
“And when Mother dies,” Mrs. Rexford chimed in, “I’ll be there to say sutras for her. That’s the way it has to be. You can’t just throw away history, Tama.”
There was silence as everyone pictured the chain of favoritism stretching forward into the afterlife.
“But don’t you think God understands? He can make provisions. The magnitude of his love…it transcends genealogy.”
“Maybe,” said Mrs. Rexford. “But here on earth it doesn’t work that way. History creates commitments. That means certain people take priority over others. I can’t see any way around it.”
Mrs. Izumi made a moue as if thoughtfully considering this theory, but Sarah saw that her eyes were watery.
chapter 20
Shortly afterward, Mrs. Izumi went away to pay a call on someone she had met through church.
Mrs. Rexford was irritable and restless. “I think I’ll go out,” she told her mother.
“Soh soh, that’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Kobayashi soothingly. “Take a stroll through one of your old haunts.” Mrs. Kobayashi herself did not go in for aimless walks; she left that to the young people.
“I think I’ll go out for an ice. Come on,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah.
“Are we going to the snack shop?” Sarah asked.
“No. I’m taking you to an old-fashioned teahouse, the kind we used to go to before they came up with those dreadful convenience stores. Can you believe it, Mother? That a child of mine has never eaten shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer?”
“It’s downright un-Japanese,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “You should fix that right away. Run along, then. Go enjoy yourselves.”
They strolled through the lanes, becoming absorbed in the larger outdoor world of cicadas and trees and wind chimes and bicycle bells. Sarah felt her mother’s agitation fade. Smugly, she thought how silly her aunt Tama was to ruin a perfectly nice visit with all that religion.
Her own position, in contrast, felt sweet. How things had changed since America! It seemed ages ago that she had whined because her mother insisted on trimming her sandwich crusts or drawing little sketches on her brown paper lunch bags. Sarah pushed those memories away, ashamed of herself.
And yet-would the changes last? She remembered a science experiment at school, where she had dropped an egg into various liquids. In some, the egg floated to the surface; in others it sank like a stone. What if Japan was the only alchemy in which she could float?
The Kinjin-ya teahouse was small and unpretentious. Sarah had passed it many times on the way to the open-air market but had never gone inside. Its atmosphere was quite different from the modern tea shops downtown. It reminded Sarah of the pickle shop, with its aged wooden walls from when Japan had been a poor country. On one side hung a row of rectangular wooden tablets, one for each item on the menu, bearing the name and price in old-fashioned black brushstrokes. At this time of day the tables were empty; the only other customers were a little boy about Jun’s age and his mother. The boy was spooning his way through a plate of om-rice-an omelette stuffed with ketchup-flavored rice-a children’s favorite since the postwar years.
Mrs. Rexford and Sarah ordered shaved ice topped with a mound of sweetened azuki beans. It came in fluted glass dishes with long-handled spoons. “My generation grew up on this,” Mrs. Rexford said. “Maa, it really takes me back!”
They were silent, savoring the crushed ice and the creamy sweetness of the beans.
“Remember this, remember the way it tastes,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. And Sarah did, decades later. Many random experiences would be cemented in her mind by her mother’s phrase “remember this.”
Mrs. Rexford leaned back in her chair, gazing about her with a pleased expression. The seasonal cloth flaps over the open doorway cast a bluish tint on the room. Every so often, a breeze broke apart the heavy flaps and let in a flash of sunlight.
Taking advantage of this peaceful moment, Sarah ventured, “It’s weird now, isn’t it, with Auntie being Christian.”
“Well,” her mother said, “she never had top priority growing up. But it couldn’t be helped-you know how complicated things were back then.”
Sarah nodded.
“It’s an issue in every family, though. Remember that day we had snacks at the Asaki house?”
“Oh right, the bottle of Fanta.”
There had been one large bottle of orange Fanta to share among the three children. Dividing it was quite a project: first the empty glasses were lined up side by side, then each one was filled with the same number of ice cubes, and finally Mrs. Nishimura had poured the Fanta, little by little, until the levels were precisely equal. Momoko and Yashiko seemed familiar with the routine. They had crouched down on their hands and knees so as to be eye-level with the glasses, making sure that neither sibling got a milliliter more than the other.
“You and I are lucky,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Some people never get to come first.” Sarah thought of her aunt Tama making a moue to hide her tears. She thought of her aunt Masako waving from her shadowed gateway as the Kobayashi household strolled past, laughing and chatting, on their way to the bathhouse.
But now for the first time her sympathy was tinged with something hard, an unwillingness to give up her advantage. Her grandmother’s favoritism might not be working in her aunts’ favor, but it was working in hers. For the first time in her life she was blooming. This was the luck of the draw, and she was tired of feeling guilty. In some dim recess of her mind she had begun to feel she deserved it, that fate had recognized her worth and was finally rewarding her.
“I guess there’s no way around it,” Sarah said, echoing her mother’s words from earlier that day.
“I guess not,” said Mrs. Rexford. They were silent, spooning up the last of the azuki beans.
“When you come first in someone’s heart,” Mrs. Rexford said, “it changes you. It literally, chemically changes you. And that stays with you, even after the person’s gone. Remember that.”
Sarah nodded. The idea of chemical change resonated with her, and once again she thought of the eggs floating.
She let out a little sigh of well-being. So this was how it felt to eat shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer. It was pleasant to sit in the path of the old-fashioned fan and feel the air flow over her moist arms and legs, exactly as it must have done when her mother was a girl. She felt curiously relaxed, all her pores open to the world. For the first time she noticed that some defensive part of herself-her habitual readiness to shrink and harden at a moment’s notice-had melted away, leaving a sense of implicit trust in the world. This, she thought, is how it must feel to be a queen bee.
They left the teahouse in excellent spirits.
“That was yummy.” Sarah used the childish word on purpose.
“It was, ne,” agreed Mrs. Rexford.
They walked slowly, in no rush to get home. They took a roundabout route through a neighborhood Sarah had never seen. Some of the houses had old-fashioned thatched roofs instead of the usual gray tile.
“They look like the houses in those history books Grandma sent me,” said Sarah.
“This lane hasn’t changed in generations,
” Mrs. Rexford said. “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”
They passed under the shade of a large ginkgo tree that leaned out over an adobe wall into the lane. The fan-shaped leaves, dangling from thin stems, fluttered and trembled. The meee of cicadas was directly overhead now, sharpened from a mass drone into the loud rings of specific creatures, each with a different pitch, a different location among the branches. Mrs. Rexford paused and lowered her parasol to see if she could spot one. Not finding anything, she lifted her parasol and resumed walking.
“Mama?”
“Hmm?”
“Were you always Grandma’s favorite?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Even before she knew what kind of person you’d turn out to be?”
“Soh, even then. Because I was part of her old life before the war, back when she was happy and in love.”
The lane narrowed and they fell into single file. The dappled shadows danced on the back of Mrs. Rexford’s parasol.
Sarah pictured Shohei’s handsome, unfamiliar face. It was odd to imagine anyone other than her mother holding such power over her grandmother’s heart. That it was a man seemed especially strange. Sarah had grasped early on that while the men in this family were flattered, catered to, and fed extremely well, they were not that important in the scheme of things.
“When your grandfather died,” said Mrs. Rexford, “all her love for him had to go somewhere. So it came to me, all of it. Maybe I turned out the way I did because of that early love. It’s hard to say.”
“So it’s like you piggybacked off of what they had,” Sarah said.
“That’s right. And now you’re piggybacking off of what she and I have. That’s why you’re the favorite grandchild, you see?”
Sarah pondered this. She had always thought love began and ended with the actual person involved. She remembered her mother telling Momoko about emotions fermenting over time and getting blurred together till you couldn’t tell them apart. It seemed that love, too, was blurry when it came to recipients. The remainder of one love could go on to feed the next, like those sourdough starters that American pioneer families had handed down for generations.
“It’s not on your own merits,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Not yet. You reach her through me. Remember that.”
“Okay,” Sarah agreed.
They strolled through the shifting tree shadows of late afternoon. The k’sha k’sha of gravel was loud beneath their feet. The buzz of traffic floated over from some larger street several blocks down. Trailing her fingers along a low wall, Sarah felt its braille of pebbles and straw; she breathed in the scent of sun-warmed adobe. She felt perfectly happy.
They approached two young boys standing under a tree with a plastic insect cage at their feet, staring up at a horned beetle just above their reach. They turned toward Sarah with that look of avid curiosity she knew so well. But they seemed mollified to see her mother was Japanese; she wasn’t, then, a complete outsider.
“Where are your nets, boys?” Mrs. Rexford called out in the friendly tone of a fellow enthusiast. “Do you need me to get that for you?”
The boys gazed with tongue-tied gratitude as she pulled the horned beetle from the bark and transferred it to their plastic cage. “Look at the size of these antlers,” she said. “It’s a real beauty.” Too shy to speak, the boys broke into big foolish grins. Sarah, who had always felt uneasy around small Japanese boys, marveled at how harmless they could be, how sweet.
As they resumed walking abreast Sarah remarked, “Little kids don’t stare as much when I’m with you.” It was the first time she had openly referred to her shame.
“Let them stare,” her mother said breezily.
“Soh ne,” agreed Sarah with her new queen-bee expansiveness. What had she been so afraid of?
Mrs. Rexford gave her daughter an approving glance but said nothing.
Years later Sarah would remember this afternoon for its intensity of color: the gleaming lacquer of the beetle against the bark, the hills rising all around them in a crescendo of green. The parasol cast a rose-colored glow over her mother’s face, drawing Sarah’s eyes to its unfamiliar beauty. Even the air had color, a whitish glow like light refracted through a shoji screen. When she grew older and began falling in love with men, she would experience this same sense of heightened color-although in a weaker form-and see this for what it had been: her first and most powerful romance.
chapter 21
O-bon was almost upon them. It was a three-day festival of reunion, when spirits of dead relatives returned to visit the living. Families were walking en masse to bus stops and train stations that would take them to ancestral gravesites out in the country. This was the time for graveyard maintenance. The fathers carried garden tools; the mothers carried delicate food offerings for the dead (and, if they were old-fashioned, a hearty picnic lunch for the living) discreetly wrapped in silk furoshiki; the children trudged behind with flowers.
As the Kobayashi household ate breakfast, they could hear the crunching of gravel as chattering families passed directly outside, taking shortcuts through the narrow lane. A woman’s voice cried, “A! We forgot the thermos!” It was the last weekend before the holiday. Everyone, it seemed, was heading out to the country.
“They’re getting ready for O-bon,” said little Jun in a sullen voice. Everyone else was silent, chewing.
“I’m afraid we’ve held you back in your preparations,” Mr. Izumi said. He was referring to the housecleaning, for family altars were just as important as graves. “It was thoughtless of us,” he said. Sarah’s heart went out to him. His fine long eyes, slanted ever so slightly downward, gave his face a mournful air.
“Not in the least, Izumi-san!” Mrs. Kobayashi batted the air dismissively, as if to swat away his concern. “The O-bon dinner will be over there”-she gestured toward the Asaki house-“so there’s really nothing for me to do.”
They all knew this was a lie. Housewives cleaned obsessively before a priest’s yearly visit. The priests from So-Zen Temple had already begun their neighborhood rounds, chanting long incantations before each family altar to guide the spirits on their return journey. This was a grueling time for priests, who made back-to-back calls from morning till evening. It was for such occasions, as well as for funerals, that they practiced year round. No priest from So-Zen Temple had yet marred a ceremony with coughing or hoarseness.
“This house is spotless all the time, anyway,” said Mrs. Izumi.
“Mommy,” said Jun, “can’t we stay for O-bon night dancing?”
“No-I already told you. We’re going home tomorrow.”
Another set of footsteps crunched by on the gravel. They heard a small child’s excited voice saying, “…great big rice balls, sprinkled with sesame salt!”
“I don’t envy those people,” said Mr. Kobayashi with well-meaning heartiness. “It’s going to get really hot today.”
“You’re absolutely right, Father-san,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied. “Maybe we should have grilled eel for lunch. It’s good for heat fatigue. Would everyone like that?”
“O-bon, O-bon, it’s almost O-bon,” Jun droned tunelessly.
“Jun-chan, stop that,” said his mother. “No singing at the breakfast table.”
Sarah felt bad for her aunt. In the excitement of the upcoming holiday, the Izumis’ departure would create hardly a ripple.
Afterward, washing dishes at the sink, Mrs. Rexford said, “I can’t believe she went out to pay calls again. On her last day. Who’s she visiting, us or the Jehovah people?”
“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Mother, it’s not all right.”
Having finished the dishes, Mrs. Rexford began wiping the sides of the sink. Mrs. Kobayashi continued to dry, passing the dishes up to Sarah, who was kneeling on the tatami floor of the dining room. The girl stacked each item on the shelves of the floor-level cabinet. Every time she reached into its depths, she breathed in a faint,
familiar aroma from her childhood: the wooden damp of freshly washed chopsticks, soy sauce within its cut-glass cruet, condiments such as seven-spice and sesame seeds.
“She won’t even help around the house.” Mrs. Rexford wrung out the dishtowel with an angry twist. “You know what? She hasn’t changed at all. She says long prayers at the table but doesn’t care if our food gets cold while we wait. She sips tea and talks about charity, and meanwhile her aging mother’s slaving away down in the kitchen.”
“Nnn!” protested Mrs. Kobayashi. “‘Aging mother’?!”
Mrs. Rexford refused to be sidetracked. “That kind of hypocrisy earns no respect from me,” she said. “None!” Sarah was fascinated, even excited, to see her mother angry at someone other than Sarah herself.
“Don’t,” said Mrs. Kobayashi quietly. “You know how guilty I feel about her.”
There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Rexford said.
Afterward Sarah and her mother went to a graveyard in the city to see the O-bon decorations. The somber headstones were transformed by sasaki grass, fruit and flower offerings, and branches of umbrella pine; the crumbling baby Buddhas were resplendent in new red bibs. White threads of incense wavered up by the dozen, hovering in the humid air like ghostly forms bending over their own headstones.
“We’ll visit our own graveyard after your aunt and uncle leave,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. “It won’t be as crowded as this one, because it’s out in the country. But it’ll be lovely too in a different way.”
Lately, with Mrs. Izumi away so much, Sarah and her mother had been going out alone. Sometimes they visited a little-known restaurant whose only item on the menu was dumplings from a secret family recipe handed down since the Momoyama era. Once they visited the Gion district to look at geishas. But mostly they wandered through out-of-the-way haunts from Mrs. Rexford’s youth. They strolled past the tennis courts of her old high school or lingered in a neglected children’s park on the bank of the Kamo River. Mrs. Rexford told stories of her youth, and Sarah listened with an attentiveness she had never shown back home.
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