The Flower Master (Rei Shimura #3) (12 page)

"But, Rei, you should shower first. Please, I'll help you," Norie protested when I stepped directly into the tub that she was filling rapidly with hot water.

"I can't stand up long enough to shower." It was true. My poor, shot-up buttocks were screaming in protest. I didn't care that stepping into a bath unclean went beyond the limits of Japanese etiquette. It was my own bathtub, and as long as I didn't use soap I wouldn't damage the heating mechanism.

"Ah, you really do need me. Don't worry. I will take care of everything." Aunt Norie placed a warm washcloth on my forehead and left the room.

My gaze went around the tiny peach-colored room. As was traditional in Japanese bathrooms, the tiled room worked like a giant shower stall, with a small but very deep bathtub taking up one side. Aunt Norie had shaken some bath salts into the water; a quarter cup of powder turned a plain bath into a bright yellow scented one.

I lay back, letting my hair get wet and fan out like strands of seaweed in the surreal yellow sea. I couldn't believe that I'd vomited in front of everyone at the ikebana show. I had felt fine before I went to Mitsutan. I could not have poisoned myself with leftovers.

"Rei-chan, I am coinming back in." Aunt Norie poked her head through the door. "Tsutomu has gone away, so you can dress outside. But do it soon, neh? The lieutenant is on his way, and it would not be good for you to be undressed."

Not even my bathroom was private. But when I limped out of the bath, I realized I needed Aunt Norie to help me. I allowed her to bundle me into tights and a wool skirt and jacket, clothing that was slightly warm for the season, but what Norie considered appropriate for a police interview. She had also tucked away my futon.

"There, you sit in that chair and wait for the lieutenant. I feel terrible taking you out of bed, but it's not appropriate for a lady to receive a gentleman that way."

"But I thought you told Tom I was too weak to see the police," I protested, longing for the soft quilts and cushions.

"Tsutomu is the man of our family, Rei. What he says must be done." Norie sighed. "At least he won't be here for a little while. If you feel well enough, you can use your free time to write thank-you letters for your beautiful flower gifts."

My aunt whipped out a pad of stationery for the purpose: pale yellow sheets patterned with flowers. At the top was inscribed the word FLORESCENCE in capital letters, and following it was the Keats quotation "A thing of beauty is a joy forever; its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness." Only in Japan, the country that had invented the word 'salaryman,' could a word like 'florescence' pop up on stationery. The message didn't make sense to me, either—the words about beautiful things remaining joys forever. It was a vast exaggeration. All one had to do was consider the flowers around my apartment, which would no doubt be wilted within a few days.

Most of the participants in the ikebana exhibit had sent a bouquet. I wrote to Lila Braithwaite in English, and to Mrs. Koda, Mari Kumamori, and Natsumi Kayama in Japanese, with Norie serving as my hand- writing coach. It turned out the cherry blossom bouquet that I'd immediately noticed upon waking was as artificial as I'd thought. The cherry blossoms came from Richard Randall, who either was being ironic or didn't have the cash for anything fresh.

Aunt Norie stamped the letters when I was finished and put them in her handbag to take out to the post office. Lieutenant Hata was due any minute now, so my aunt bustled around the kitchenette, turning on the small water heater on my counter to boil water for tea.

"You know how sorry I am about everything, Rei," she said.

"You mean about not being on hand when I vomited? Obasan, that was something you really couldn't have prevented."

"No, I mean that I feel regret about the whole business of asking you to study flower arranging when you didn't want to do it. I had the best of intentions, you know." She took a deep breath. "I enrolled you at the Kayama School in part because ikebana is known to sometimes lead to . . . marriage."

"But it's all women there!" I couldn't help laughing, although it hurt my stomach.

"I thought the nice ladies who study there could introduce you to their sons or nephews."

"How can you talk to me about arranged marriages when you and Uncle Hiroshi didn't have one?"

"I did meet Hiroshi myself, and if you would be as lucky as that, I would not worry. But consider your life! You were with the nice Scottish lawyer for a little while, but then he left. Now you are twenty-eight years old and alone. As you lie ill in bed, only one man in Tokyo sends you flowers, and those are made of cheap polyester. Artificial flowers, when all of Japan is in bloom!"

I wasn't going to bother explaining that Richard wasn't interested in me that way. I think she already knew that, although I'd never explicitly said to her that Richard preferred men. I steered us away from the topic by saying, "Growing up means relying on yourself, not your parents or relatives."

"I can tell you about that!" Aunt Norie muttered, turning her back to me and searching my kitchen for something.

"Please do." I adjusted myself in the chair, bringing my knees up to my chest, which helped a bit with my stomach cramps. Takeo's request for biographical information on Aunt Norie floated into my mind, but I pushed that memory away. I was listening for my own benefit, not his.

"I was a first-year student at Ocha-No-Mizu Women's College, very shy and unsure of myself. Our school was holding a dance and I had no boyfriend to invite. In the end, I invited a male friend I knew from high school who had gone on to study at Keio University. At that time, women could not enroll there."

These days it was still hard for women to gain admission to top schools such as Keio and Tokyo University. I'd thought about trying for a fellowship but, considering my poor kanji knowledge, had decided not to bother.

"My friend asked me to find a girl who would be good for his friend Hiroshi Shimura, who came from an old samurai family. I begged my friend not to bring Hiroshi, because I hadn't met many people of that class. I was afraid that I would use the wrong words or manners. We are no longer a nation of masters and servants, but I felt too insecure to spend time with a samurai."

"But you were one of the wealthiest young women in Yokohama!" I objected. When my father had told me, I'd been very surprised, because Norie was the kind of person who did her own cooking and cleaning and never put on any kind of airs.

"Not upper-class," Norie said swiftly, and I sensed an old hurt. "My father was a pharmacist, and with his savings, he bought some cheap parcels of bombed-out land in downtown Yokohama. During the rebuilding he was able to sell them for higher prices. Whereas the Shimura family had lived for five generations in a large house in West Tokyo. You could have built six homes with gardens on the property they had."

Dad never told me about that. All I ever knew was the apartment where Grandmother forbade me to touch any furniture, I said. Part of the reason I'd built a career in Japanese antiques was because I had been so resentful about not being able to touch such things in my grandparents' apartment.

"Your grandmother had to sell the house and move to an apartment to pay off the high inheritance taxes that were levied when your grandfather died. This happened around the time Hiroshi was an undergraduate at Keio, and your father was already doing his residency in the United States." The water heater beeped its readiness, and Norie poured some into an Arita teapot to get the ceramic properly warmed. She turned on the water heater again and continued. "Hiroshi wanted to be part of Japan's industrial future as soon as possible, while your grandfather had wanted him to work in a more scholarly area."

That didn't surprise me. Although I'd never known my grandfather, my father had told me that he'd been a professor of classical literature at Keio. After the war, my grandfather had found it difficult to abandon the idea of Japan as the world's supreme culture. He had been forced to retire and, until his death, spent his time working on a manifesto that was never published but probably rivaled Yukio Mishima's work in terms of right-wing ideological passion.

"So what was Uncle Hiroshi like when you met him?" I asked.

"Let's get back to the dance. My friend insisted on bringing Hiroshi, and so I set up my friend Eriko, whom you know from ikebana class, to be his date. She didn't like Hiroshi because he was two inches shorter than she was. She danced off with somebody else. I felt sorry about her behavior and stayed next to Hiroshi, talking nonstop so he couldn't ask me what had happened to her. It turned out that no young woman had ever chatted so long to him. He asked me to go for a walk the next day to see if I would have anything left to say!"

"You almost lost your husband to Eriko?"I was stunned by the implications. How lucky that Eriko had been a snob about height.

"Actually, Eriko blames herself for making a poor choice. The tall, handsome man she married became a heavy drinker. Last year his company fired him. But don't worry about that. Here, please try the tea."

"Is this some kind of meat broth?" I had been expecting smooth and subtle green tea, but this brew was reddish brown and surprisingly salty.

"No, it is tea made from the beefsteak plant. It's very good for invalids."

Regarding the mound of shopping bags on my kitchen table, I had a feeling I was going to be exposed to more foods for the sickly. I tried to suppress the sensation that I was drinking beef bouillon and took another sip. "So you and Uncle Hiroshi decided to manrry."

"Decide is a strong word for it. We asked our parents for permission. Mine were delighted, but they were too obvious in their pleasure. Mrs. Shimura and her high-class relatives thought we were trying to better ourselves." Norie sighed. "It became very painful. When Hiroshi's parents said no, he was very discouraged and said that it would be impossible to go against them. My parents decided that if they had several proposals for me from other families, this would build my value in front of the Shimuras. So they contacted a matchmaker who suggested I study ikebana and tea ceremony to become more cultured. These activities took so much time that I was forced to drop out of college. And I was afraid that in the meantime my parents would find somebody else for me to marry."

"Ah, so you didn't want an arranged marriage. Like me, you wished your relatives would stay out of your business—"

"Actually, I found that through their clever thinking, I was being called to drink tea in hotel lobbies with many interesting men." She smiled coyly. "The girls studying at the Kayama School had brothers, and of course at that time Masanobu-sensei was a young teacher supervising us, and he was very attractive. I kept in touch with Hiroshi through occasional telephone calls, and when he called once and my mother greeted him with the name of one of my other suitors, Hiroshi became jealous. He told me that he wanted to manrry me as soon as possible, and he told his mother that if she would not allow me to join the Shimura family register, he would change his name and join mine. Mrs. Shimura decided they could not afford to lose their name."

"How were things with my grandmother after you married?"

"My family was worried that I'd be treated badly by Mrs. Shimura, so they built us a house all to ourselves in Yokohama. As a matter of pride, Mrs. Shimura never visited us there, not until Tom was born. A grandson who would perhaps earn a doctorate from Keio! She could not stay away."

"But what about girls? I met my grandmother when I was four. I wonder if she ever imagined that I'd come here to live for good," I said. What I mainly remembered about that first visit was how funny it was to lie next to my parents on a futon spread underneath a grand piano, because there was no spare room in my grandmother's place.

"It was hard at first. You actually first visited Japan when you were one year old. Your father and mother tried to visit your grandmother, but she refused to see them. She made an excuse about being too tired. Your parents were devastated. They stayed with us that year, and each year after that until you turned three."

"Why was my grandmother so hateful?" I felt as if I'd been slapped.

"Your father had married out of his racial group. He was removed from the family register. And she really didn't want to see the issue. I'm so sorry, Rei-chan. I don't mean to hurt your feelings. But that is the truth about your grandmother."

I turned away from my aunt's concerned gaze, trying to compose myself. This was a major shock. I never really had warmed to my grandmother, but I thought it was because she was so old and formal, so different from my beloved Aunt Norie, who had gone to the effort of enrolling me in summer kindergarten and primary school classes so I could learn what it was like to be a Japanese child. I asked, "How did it ever come about that my parents were allowed in my grandmother's apartment?"

"I mailed your grandmother a photograph of you wearing a kimono at age three, when you participated in a coming-of-age ceremony at the Meiji Shrine. I dressed you in a kimono similar to one she'd worn for her own childhood celebration. You were the exact image of her at that age. Her heart softened, and she invited your parents to see her the next time they were in Japan."

"She cared about how I looked. The surface," I said.

"She was a strong woman," Norie said. "But think about things from her side. After the war, she and her husband lost their entire world. All they had was their name, and neither of their sons married women befitting it."

"And now you are the champion of that name." The conversation that started off as an idle diversion had wound up making me feel bitter. I shouldn't have felt angry with my grandmother, who had died from a stroke years earlier—but hearing these stories, I was.

The buzzer at my door sounded, signaling a visitor.

"That must be Lieutenant Hata," Norie said. "Sit politely, Rei. Yes, with your skirt over your knees and your feet on the floor."

I had pulled my knees up to my chest because it lessened my stomachache slightly. I rearranged myself into decency as Lieutenant Hata came in, murmuring the customary words of apology for disturbing the household. He looked around swiftly, then smiled at my aunt.