The Laws of Evening: Stories (10 page)

“Sohh—” said one woman, nodding deeply. “Parents are pressuring him.”

He’ll liven up, Mrs. Wakame assured them, once he meets Ritsuko.

The problem, according to one of the housewives, was that matchmaking was not what it had once been. Men who used it these days no longer understood the subtle difference between evaluating an arranged-marriage prospect versus a love-match prospect. This boy Kanzo, with his fancy hobbies (neighbors had seen photos; old Mrs. Wakame had made copies), seemed typical of a new breed that confused matchmakers with dating services.

“Soh soh,” someone else said, “they grow up watching
actresses
on television.”

A Mrs. Konishi, whose own daughter had just gotten engaged (a love match), made a pretty moue of concern. Poor Ritsuko, she said. In the old days she would have been just fine. Ritsuko had the qualities of an ideal wife: gentleness, deference, domesticity. Plus a college degree.

Eighty-two-year-old Mrs. Tori, bowed over a trembling cane, lifted her head. Even in our day, she said querulously, men liked women who could at least hold up their own end of a conversation.

Aiko, Mrs. Nakajima’s eldest daughter, came over from Gion on the local bus. It was Thursday. Ritsuko’s date was set for Saturday afternoon.

“I don’t understand,” Aiko said to her mother, who had been waiting for her outside in the alley. “Chie knows makeup as well as I do. Plus she
lives
here.”

“It isn’t fitting,” Mrs. Nakajima whispered, glancing toward the house, “for younger sisters to be teaching older sisters. Besides…” She lifted her head, its home-permed waves webbed with white hairs, and looked up at her tall daughter. “Besides, Chie has the wrong attitude.” Her haggard expression gave Aiko, who had seen little of her family since her own recent wedding, an eerie glimpse of her mother in old age.

In the dining room, which boasted the best natural light, Aiko now spread out the contents of her plastic makeup pouch onto the large low table. “We’ll just do one side of your face,” she told her little sister, “so you can see the difference.”

“Haaa…,” Ritsuko agreed, nodding but not venturing to touch anything. Mrs. Nakajima retired to the kitchen in high spirits, humming a Strauss waltz.

As children, Aiko and Ritsuko had played together at this table when Aiko’s more lively neighborhood friends were unavailable, for the sisters were close in age, whereas Chie was five years behind. Today Aiko recalled an early memory: a silent house, rain making pinpricks of sound on the broad hydrangea leaves in the garden. In the bracken-filtered light, she and Ritsuko had drawn pictures or gazed out the window.
Jikkurigata,
their mother had teased: characters of contemplation. Time passed. They were—in her memory—silent: mindless, timeless, knowing they were provided for, vaguely registering the faint clatter of the outside world. Dinner noises in the kitchen…an ambulance siren in the distance…

Ritsuko had managed to remain in that world. Aiko thought of what awaited her back at home: laundry, cooking, wrapping tea sweets for tomorrow’s customers, the already faded romance with her husband, the perpetual polite tension of living among in-laws. She sat on an unfamiliar red floor cushion that must have been purchased after she moved away, and she thought how quickly she had become a visitor in her own home.

Ritsuko, with self-conscious care, was dabbing her face with a damp foundation sponge. “Egg-Face,” some boy had once called her in fourth grade, and the name had stuck for the remainder of her elementary-school years. Her mother would pacify her (“An oval face is a sign of beauty! White skin is better than dark!”), while Granny, skilled at self-promotion, remarked, “At least she takes after me in the skin area.” In truth there was a certain quality to Ritsuko’s cheekbones, packed high like an Eskimo’s, which lent to her face the suggestion of a blank shell. Her other features, overshadowed by this denseness of bone, appeared shrunken in contrast. The children in their unwitting astuteness had caught her essence: that bland surface of her personality which allowed, with minimal effort, deflection of any attack.

“Now some blush.” Aiko handed Ritsuko the oversize brush. “Put on as much as you’re comfortable with. No, right here. The round part of your cheek.” Ritsuko touched the tip of the brush to her skin: once, then twice.

“More than
that
!” Aiko’s voice rose in exasperation. She flicked her own wrist rapidly, suggesting many, many more strokes.

“Ara!” Ritsuko breathed as a soft stain of pink, barely visible, bloomed on her cheek. “It’s pretty.” Then, apparently embarrassed by this outburst, she lowered her gaze to the blush compact in her lap. She shut it with a tiny click.

Their mother came in to view the result: a job worthy of the Shiseido ads, in subtle tones of gray and peach. Mrs. Nakajima examined it with a look of wonder; she herself had never gone beyond liquid foundation, adding red lipstick only when she went out. “Lovely,” she said, “just lovely. Aren’t you glad, Ritsuko-chan?” Ritsuko, with an obliging laugh, nodded. “Look at yourself in the mirror!” her mother said, steering her around to face the mirror and looking over her shoulder.

Mrs. Nakajima, peering at Ritsuko’s flushed face in the mirror, understood that a change had taken place. In her daughter’s eyes was a look she had seen in alley cats, when they warily approached a proffered treat. It was a look terrible and bottomless in its hope. Mrs. Nakajima’s belly shifted in unease, as if her body knew something she did not.

Unsure what to make of this, Mrs. Nakajima put it from her mind. The three of them went upstairs to show Granny. She was hunched over on a floor cushion, watching sumo on television. “There—which side of her face looks better?” Aiko demanded, pushing Ritsuko forward.

“Maaa, what an improvement!” cried the old lady, looking up and clapping her hands. “That side, definitely. Look how dewy and white the skin is!”

No one spoke.

“Granny!”
said Aiko. Her voice became loud and slow even though there was nothing wrong with Granny’s hearing. “We didn’t even
do
that side. We did the
other
side.” She exchanged a wry glance with her mother. Even Ritsuko gave a little smile, tucking her hair behind one ear.

After they had gone, Granny turned back to her little television set. She could no longer concentrate on the sumo match; she still seemed to hear Aiko’s muffled laughter drifting up the stairs. Maa, so what if her eyesight was no longer perfect? In her own day, at least, she had been a great beauty. Upslanted eyes (“exquisite, like bamboo leaves,” someone had said), a face compared with the one in that famous Tondai lithograph, a long shapely neck that was the envy of her village. She had held sway over a dozen eligible suitors, eventually marrying into a professor’s family despite her own lack of education. How dare they forget it! Her daughter-in-law, her granddaughters—for all their pitiful fuss over face paint—had nothing to work with. Ridiculous bumpkins! Oh, youth and insolence would leave them soon enough. A nervous tic began throbbing under her left eye.

“How did it go, do you think?” Mrs. Nakajima whispered for the second time to old Mrs. Wakame, who was sitting beside her on the homebound train. “Did he like her, do you think? Will he ask to meet her again?” Ritsuko was sitting three seats ahead, out of earshot.

The lunch date had taken place at a restaurant called Miyagi, whose sushi turned out to be, befitting its seaside location, of uncommonly good quality. Old Mrs. Wakame loved sushi, especially the
kampachi,
which she and her husband could now rarely afford on his pension. But her matchmaking duties came first, so for the first half of the date she delayed eating, chatting instead about everything from weather to chrysanthemums. The auspicious cuisine, as well as the pleasant conversation (mostly among the four parents, although this was to be expected), erased the uneasiness of her earlier meeting with Kanzo.

It was further into the lunch, after they had covered jobs and hobbies (Ritsuko’s hobbies were walking and reading) and the table’s energy was flagging from the generous portions of salmon and
hamachi
and eel and squid, that Kanzo began amusing himself with questions of his own. “Ritsuko-san, what is your favorite color?” he asked, tapping his cigarette over an ashtray. “Ritsuko-san, what is your favorite animal?”

Old Mrs. Wakame threw him an uncertain glance, but his handsome face looked reassuring, full of the grave manly concern that was so attractive in samurai dramas. And Ritsuko was holding her own so well, answering each question correctly after a long thoughtful pause, although at times she did present her answers with unnecessary bows that were quick and clumsy, like a child’s. So Mrs. Wakame paid them little heed. Hunching over her lacquered box, she applied herself single-mindedly to the sushi she had been waiting for, narrowing her eyes in pleasure as the freshly ground wasabi warmed her sinuses.

She suddenly came to. Kanzo’s question was ringing in her ears: “Ritsuko-san, what do you want most in life?” The table was silent, save for the steady clinks of ice in the men’s whiskey glasses. Kanzo’s mother, a fashionably dressed woman, glanced at her watch.

“Saaa—” With all eyes upon her, Ritsuko cocked her head.

“We all want the same thing, don’t we,” Mrs. Nakajima broke in, nodding at her daughter as if in agreement. “A long healthy life, happiness…”

With a small predatory smile, Kanzo Funaba exhaled cigarette smoke toward the ceiling.

Recalling this now, old Mrs. Wakame sighed and shifted position on her train seat. “Saaa, it went well enough, don’t you think?” she said to Ritsuko’s mother. “Who can predict?” she added.

They both fell silent, sipping Morinaga Orange Drink from slender cans around which they had wrapped their handkerchiefs.

The train rattled along the tracks and the city spread out below them: modern high-rises crowding out old buildings of wood and tile, balconies and verandas bedecked with futons hung out to air. The spring air was translucent with smog. All the soot expelled during the day—all the soot expelled during this long depression—was falling back down to earth, the sediment floating in the busy streets. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through it, creating an amber viscosity in which the traffic below would eventually still.

Old Mrs. Wakame stood up to roll down the shade, and her eye fell upon a travel poster displayed above the window: a promotion for some resort showing, in brilliant colors, a lone crane flying over snowfields. It brought to mind the television program she had seen last night, an NHK dramatization of the Crane Maiden legend: a crane, rescued from a trap by an old weaver, returns to him disguised as a beautiful maiden. This role was played by the lovely Junji Mariko in a rare appearance. The credits said so, at any rate, but who could really tell? Her face was averted from the camera, shielded by a fall of glossy hair. She would weave him wondrous silks free of charge, she murmured, as long as he promised never to watch her in the process. “You mustn’t peek,” she implored. “I couldn’t bear for you to learn the secret of my weaving.”

Something about that graceful turning away of the head—so old-fashioned, and now extinct—had touched old Mrs. Wakame deeply. And when the weaver, overcome by curiosity, finally peeked through a crack in the shoji screen (“Is that actor Mori Daiji?” asked her husband, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Maaa, he’s certainly aged”), Mrs. Wakame had uttered a shrill cry of awful nameless regret. She had felt silly afterwards. For everyone knew what he would see: a crane, half-plucked and grotesque, feeding its own feathers into the loom…

What this had to do with anything, Mrs. Wakame did not know. Again, she shifted position on the plush seat. Images flashed into her mind of Ritsuko at the lunch table: lipstick smeared on her front tooth, trembling hands with red-painted fingernails bitten to the quick. “I would like children,” she had said, as smoke from Kanzo’s ashtray rose up between them. “I have always wanted children.” Remorse hit old Mrs. Wakame like a wave, and she lowered her Morinaga Orange Drink onto the windowsill.

I
WAS THIRTEEN
when my mother and I flew back to Japan on what, unbeknownst to us, would be our final visit together. I was eager, after a five-year absence and eleven hours of flying, to see our family. But when we emerged from airport customs into the path of countless searching eyes, it took some moments to spot them. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, pressed up against the rails: Grandma, Aunt Miho, Uncle Koku, my cousins, Grandpa Ichiro with his special-occasion beret. A fraction of a second later, I felt Mother’s carry-on bag swipe my arm as she rushed past me toward her mother.

The rest of us watched, keeping such a respectful distance from Mother and Grandma that several travelers used the space as a pathway, momentarily blocking them from our sight. The two women faced each other and gripped hands, their knuckles white. Being Japanese, that was all they did, but with such trembling intensity, like lovers, that I almost shriveled with embarrassment.

Mother and Grandma stayed indoors during the entire month of our visit, chatting away with hardly a break. They paused only out of politeness to others: my aunt Miho, who lived ten blocks away; Grandpa Ichiro, asking vague questions about America (do they eat bread at every meal?); phone calls; visitors. “I’m
bored
!” I said. “Can’t I go swimming? Can’t I go to Summer Haunted House?”

“Go with your cousins,” they suggested. “We’ll just stay here.” They waved good-bye from the doorway as Aunt Miho, with us four children in tow, headed down the alley to the bus stop under the glaring summer sun. When we reached the corner and looked back for a final wave, the two of them were bending over some potted bonsai trees, already engrossed in conversation. They saw us, quickly straightened, and waved in unison.

I grew familiar with the ebb and flow of their talk. In the mornings—while cooking breakfast, washing up, walking to the open-air market—it was bright and animated, bubbling over with bits of gossip, or additions to previous conversations, which had risen to the surface of their memories during sleep. Afternoons, in the lull between lunch and four o’clock (when the local bathhouse opened), gave rise to more sustained, philosophical topics. Since Grandpa Ichiro took his nap then, it was also a good time for whispered confidences. “Nobody knows this except you,” I heard Grandma say many times. They sometimes discussed mysterious financial issues: in the trash can I found scratch paper with hastily scrawled calculations using multiplication and long division.

I hadn’t caught such nuances when I was eight; I now watched these comings and goings with avid foreign eyes. But even more fascinating than these allegiances was the change in my mother.

Five years earlier, my mother, my Caucasian father, and I had sold our home in Japan and moved to a small logging town in Northern California, surrounded by miles of walnut and plum orchards. “Did you meet up with your husband when he was in the service?” Americans always asked Mother. She hated that question. “Don’t these people
think
?” she fumed in private. “Do they even realize what they’re insinuating?”

“No…he was never in the service…,” she always replied, as if in apology. “I have never had the
honor
of meeting a service man.”

“Oh, honey,” the neighbor women told me, “your momma’s just
precious
!”

Back in America, Mother spoke English: heavily accented and sometimes halting, but always grammatically correct. When she felt lighthearted, she broke into Japanese with me. For the most part, however, she was a severe disciplinarian. She never lounged. She never snacked between meals. She scrubbed, gardened, hand-laundered, even in cold weather when the skin on her fingertips split open in raw cracks. She pulled back her hair, which was glossy even though she used nothing on it but Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, into a French twist. Only occasionally at bedtime would I see it undone at shoulder length, making her face look unformed and girlish.

But here in Japan, she gossiped, giggled, teased. Once or twice I caught her watching me with that eager, open look of someone in love. While Grandma made the miso soup for breakfast, Mother stood before the cupboard and nibbled on red bean cakes, beckoning for me to join her. I did, warily.

“Koraa!” Grandma scolded, coming in from the kitchen with the tray.

“But, Mama,” Mother protested in a loud voice, with a conspiratorial glance at me, “these taste so
good
…Meri-chan and I are so
hungry
…”

I remember thinking that each language carried its own aura, its own mood, and that people fell under its spell.

“I suppose it’s only courteous,” Mother said, “to visit Miho’s house in return. After all, she’s always coming over here.”

“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” Grandma said. “But hurry back.”

“How come Grandma likes you best?” I asked my mother as the two of us walked toward Aunt Miho’s house.

She laughed it off with her new playful air. “Saa, I happen to have a lot of special qualities,” she said. “I’m irreplaceable.”

Aunt Miho was young and pretty; I had often fantasized about having her for a big sister. She and Mother were half sisters, due to some family complication I grasped only dimly at the time. Aunt Miho’s father was Grandpa Ichiro. Mother’s father—my own true grandfather—was long dead.

“How’s your visit so far?” Aunt Miho asked me at the lunch table. “Are you having lots of fun?” Her intonation was gentle and courteous, like that of a JAL stewardess, with each word hanging in perfect balance.

“Yes, Auntie,” I said.

“Hajime said he heard lots of laughing the other night,” she said, “when he passed by your place on his way home from work.” We all looked at Aunt Miho’s husband, who glanced up, discomfited, from his plate of skewered miso dumplings.

“Oh—there must have been something funny on TV,” Mother said. “
The Nishikawa Gang,
probably. Do you ever watch it? That is a
hilarious
show.”

“Soh, it
is
!” I assured Aunt Miho. “Grandma was saying she hasn’t laughed like this in years!”

“Oh,” said Aunt Miho. “How nice.”

On the tatami floor, right under the low table where we all sat, I noticed a leather-bound Bible. By overhearing—or eavesdropping—I knew that Aunt Miho had turned Christian during our absence. I lifted the book out into the open; Mother frowned and jerked her head no.

I put the book back.

“You can look at that anytime you like,” said Aunt Miho in her serene voice. “It’s filled with strange and wonderful stories. About loving without limits. Despite anything others might do.”

“Even if they’re
murderers
?” I asked. Mother shot me a cold glance.

Aunt Miho smiled. “There is no power,” she said, “greater than forgiveness.” Aunt Miho’s husband, a quiet man, got up and went to the bathroom.

“A
hilarious
show…,” murmured six-year-old Mikiko. I glanced over at my three small cousins, sitting quietly at the far end of the table. With what must have been ease of habit, they had filled their glasses with exactly four ice cubes each and lined them up, side by side, on the table. They peered, unblinking, as their mother poured the orange Fanta, the children hunching down at the low table so as to be eye-level with the glasses, thus ensuring that no sibling got a milliliter more than the others.

“Did you see them with those drinking glasses?” Mother said on our way home. “If you had brothers and sisters, that’s what you’d be doing. See how lucky you are, being an only child?”

I did. I would undoubtedly lose out in a competition of favorites. With a flush of shame, I remembered my behavior back home: how I constantly contradicted Mother in an exasperated tone, taking advantage of her ineptness in what, for her, was a foreign country.

But my behavior had changed since our arrival; the language also cast its spell over me. I was fluent in Japanese—it was my first language—but since our move to America, my vocabulary had stayed at a fourth-grade level. So in Japan my speech, even my thoughts, reverted from those of a cocky teenager to those of the more innocent, dependent child I had been five years ago. Here I was no longer capable of arguing with the contemptuous finesse I used back home. Here I was at a loss.

“But don’t worry, Meri-chan,” my mother said. “I could never have feelings for any other child but you.” I was still unused to
chan,
that tender diminutive to a little girl’s name for which English has no equivalent. Hearing such words, after all those years in America, made my throat grow tight. I could not have talked back, even if I had the words.

Mother took advantage of my weakened state. She slipped her hand into mine, a big girl like me, right in public. During the course of our stay, she would do this several times: tentatively at first, then with increasing confidence as the month wore on. This would not last once we flew home; the mere act of standing on American soil would destroy that precarious balance.

Now Mother strode along, leading the way; among the local Japanese, she seemed much taller than her five feet three inches. Near the steps of Heibuchi Shrine, we ran into Mr. Inoue, her former high school principal. “I hope you take after your mother,” he told me. “She was the first girl from the Ueno district to pass Kyoto University entrance exams.” I stood with my hand damp and unmoving in my mother’s, still bashful from our newfound intimacy. I watched the old man bowing with slow, ceremonious respect. I heard their polite conversation, replete with advanced verb conjugations. My mother’s sentences flowed sinuously, with nuances of silver and light, like a strong fish gliding through the Kamo River.

The next day, I asked Mother whom she loved best in the world.

“My mother, of course,” she replied. We were coming home from the open-air market. She was walking ahead of me; the alley was too narrow for the two of us to walk abreast. Dappled shadows jerked and bobbed on the back of her parasol.

“And my dad?”

“He’s number two.”

“Who’s number three?”

“You! Of course.” But I suspected, with a flash of intuition, that I was a very close third, probably even a tie for second. Not that I deserved it. I was an unpleasant teenager, whereas my father was a good, kind man. Nonetheless I belonged to this Japanese world, whose language and blood ties gave my mother such radiant power, in a way my American father never could.

“Who’s number four?” I asked, assured of my good status. “Who’s number five?” Too late. Mother’s thoughts had drifted somewhere else.

“When you come first in someone’s heart,” she said, “when you feel the magnitude of another person’s love for you…” Her gait slowed, along with her speech. “You become a different person. I mean, something physically changes inside of you.” Her voice choked up behind the parasol and I hoped she was not going to cry. “I want you to know that feeling,” she said. “Because it’ll sustain you, all your life. Life…life can get so hard.”

So hard
…Was she referring to my behavior back home? Guilty and defensive, I trailed my fingers along a low adobe wall in nonchalant fashion, over its braille of pebbles and straw. A smell of earth, intensified by midsummer heat, wafted toward me.

My relationship with my mother was not a bad one, by normal standards. I understand this now. But back then, the only yardstick either of us had was the bond between Mother and Grandma; it must have been a disappointment to my mother, as it was to me that summer, that we could not replicate it.

“You’re Grandma’s favorite grandchild,” my mother said eventually in a recovered voice.

“Really?” I said, gratified. That question had been next on my agenda.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, “that it’s on your own merits. Not yet. It’s because you’re my child. You reach her through me. Remember that.”

“Okay,” I agreed. The
k’sha k’sha
of gravel was loud beneath our sandals. The buzz of late-afternoon traffic floated over from Shimbonmachi Boulevard, several blocks down.

“You and I are lucky,” Mother said. “Some people never come first.” I thought of Aunt Miho, how she had turned back at the corner to wave.

In silence we entered the shade of a large ginkgo tree, which leaned out over the adobe wall into the alley. Its fan-shaped leaves, dangling from thin stems, fluttered and trembled.

Mother stopped walking and lowered her parasol, turning her head this way and that. The
meeeeee
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.

“Take a good look around, Meri-chan,” she said, attempting to make a sweeping gesture with an arm weighed down by a plastic bag full of daikon radishes and lotus roots. “This alley hasn’t changed a bit since I was a girl. It’s still got the
feel
this whole city used to have, once.”

I looked. My eyes, still accustomed to California sun, registered this new light of a foreign latitude: a hushed gold approaching amber, angling across the alley in dust-moted shafts as if through old stained glass. An aged world. I pictured Mother playing here decades ago, to the drone of cicadas and the occasional
ting
of a wind chime: countless quiet afternoons, their secrets lost to the next generation.