The Laws of Evening: Stories (12 page)

Perhaps in the future when Grandma is gone, I will walk with my small daughter—who may have even less Japanese blood than I do—through these same neighborhood alleys. And a certain quality of reproach in the late-afternoon sunlight will remind me with a pang, as it does now, of my mother’s confident voice saying, “I’m irreplaceable.”

“Once, when I was a girl,” I will tell my daughter, gripping her hand tightly, “I walked these alleys just like you, with my own mother.” Saying these inadequate words, I will sense keenly how much falls away with time; how lives intersect but only briefly.

“Thank goodness I remembered the shiso leaves,” Grandma says now. She peers over into my shopping basket. “You’re always so particular about wrapping them around your
hiramasa
sushi.”

“That’s not me, Grandma,” I say. “That was Mother.”

“Oh. Well….” She is silent for a moment. “That would make sense,” she says. “Poor thing. It was never available during the postwar years, and she craved it for years after she moved away to…”

“Grandma,” I interrupt gently. “It’s too late for that now. It doesn’t matter.”

Grandma quickens her pace, as she sometimes does when she is annoyed. “One doesn’t always get the luxury of timing,” she says.

S
EVERAL DAYS
before her sixty-fifth birthday, Mrs. Kimura officially relinquished her position as lady of the house. She did this during a natural break in which water was coming to a boil for that evening’s somen noodles. Her daughter-in-law, in anticipation of the ceremony, had already taken off her apron. The entire process—the mutual bows, the long-rehearsed gracious phrases—lasted but five minutes, with only a slight sourness on Mrs. Kimura’s part.

Mrs. Kimura was past her prime. There was word on the alley that (to use a local expression) a stitch or two was coming loose. Even before her change in roles, Mrs. Kimura’s eyes had taken on a vague, inward cast; when she was greeted by neighbors at the open-air market, it took her just a shade too long to respond. Mrs. Kimura would pay for an expensive
aji
fillet, the fish vendor reported, only to walk off without it. Her five-year-old grandson Terao, who had grown two whole centimeters that summer, boasted that Grandma sometimes mistook him for his father. Maa maa, the neighbors could only imagine what went on in that household.

It had not been this hot and muggy in years. “Must be the global warming effect,” was the Kanayagi district’s greeting of choice that summer. Cicadas shrilled up in the ginkgo trees, whose leaves, sticky with dust, cast slow-stirring shadows on the pavement. Moss pushed up through cracks in the asphalt, where housewives tossed out buckets of water to cool the alley when the sun went down.

“It’s all this humidity, that’s what it is,” Mrs. Kimura told her son, Jiro, at dinner. “It plays on everybody’s mind! Ne, who can remember anything in all this heat!”

“Soh soh,” he agreed from behind the evening paper. He turned a page. His wife, Harumi, shot her an inscrutable glance but said nothing.

“It gives me strange dreams at night, even,” Mrs. Kimura said.

While she was lady of the house, Mrs. Kimura had rarely dreamed. Now she awoke each morning engulfed in some residual mood, which spread over the day like an expanse of calm and deepening water. Sometimes no details remained, but other times she could vaguely link her emotion to some throwaway instant from her past: the play of late-afternoon sunlight in the maple trees of a school yard, or a certain way her late husband’s shadow would fall upon the wall, almost twenty years ago, when he went over finances in the evening.

Outside her second-story window this morning, a crow wheeled over the pine branches, landed, then flapped away, leaving a branch swaying. The sun was out in full force already, white and shadowless. Mrs. Kimura lay perfectly still on her futon while last night’s dream dissipated. There was no rush to rise. Meals were no longer her responsibility, and Harumi preferred her upstairs, out of the way, until breakfast was called.

All her life, Mrs. Kimura had been in awe of the passage of time and its powers of annihilation. Looking back across an ever-widening gulf, she had watched her earlier selves grow as implausible as incarnations in previous lives. (Had she really possessed the new body of an infant? Been madly in love?) But lately, she sensed that the past had never really receded but merely accumulated right beneath her waking mind. And now, with this onset of dreams, some barrier was giving way. For the dead were swimming back to life, the long-forgotten becoming the very now.

Downstairs, Harumi began chopping something with a jaunty rhythm (self-satisfied! Mrs. Kimura thought). Little Terao raised his voice in query. Somewhere out in the alley a bicycle bell tinged once, tinged again. Mrs. Kimura was conscious of this day already humming with a tireless grinding force, of which she was no longer a part.

“Mother-san? Mother-san?” said Harumi. “I was wondering if I could do this test on you from my book?” Harumi, in her new role as lady of the house, had bought an enormous hardcover book called
Caring for Your Aging Parents.
It was filled with lists of symptoms as well as photographs of boils, curved spines, and clouded irises. “Stand on one foot for me, please,” Harumi said, “and I’ll time how long you can hold it.”

“What for! My balance is fine!” Mrs. Kimura said.

“Mother, please,” Jiro said wearily from behind his morning paper. It was Sunday, his only day off. “Just go along with it. Please.” So Mrs. Kimura submitted to the indignity while her grandsons, Saburo and Terao, ages eight and five, giggled and leaned eagerly over the low breakfast table.

Harumi was perpetually alert for suspicious developments: sniffing the air for burning smells, halting in midsentence at the hint of a cough or sneeze. More than once Mrs. Kimura had been reminded of those stonecutters she had watched as a child, patiently tap-tap-tapping until the inevitable crack appeared. “You seem a little unfocused this morning, Mother-san,” her daughter-in-law said now, smiling. “Were you lost in your thoughts?” Her silver filling caught the sun and glinted brightly.

“My only thought,” Mrs. Kimura said, “is a wish for peace and quiet.” The boys glanced up with keen animal instinct, but the grown-ups’ faces were as bland as ever.

Jiro folded his paper and stood up, knees cracking. “I’m going out for golf now,” he announced.

“Golf, again?” said his wife. “In this heat?”

“Soh.” Jiro cracked a grin for the first time that day. “All right then, ladies. Remember to keep your blood pressures down.”

Mrs. Kimura’s feelings for Jiro were complex. There was an old saying: “In youth, obey your father; in marriage, obey your husband; in old age, obey your son.” It was one thing to defer to a father or husband, who from the outset commanded respect. But the shift in power between mother and son had cost them both something. Harumi’s presence, most certainly, had not helped.

It was hard to reconcile this laconic businessman with her memory of the warm sleeping infant strapped to her back; or the little boy standing in the doorway, his face tearstained above a broken butterfly net. Or the young man, stiff with pride, placing his very first paycheck before the family altar. One could not help but feel (with unease—for how would Harumi’s book interpret this?) that age revealed reality to be a fragmented thing.

That evening, Mrs. Kimura entertained the boys with a fairy tale while their parents attended a midsummer PTA meeting. They sat out on the garden veranda—the boys in an after-dinner stupor, their soap-scented skin already moist with perspiration. “So young Urashimataro descended to the bottom of the sea,” she said, “on the tortoise’s back. The water around him changed from clear to light green, then darker green, and then a deep midnight blue.” She batted away a mosquito with her paper fan. The sun had just set, and strokes of pink and orange stretched across the sky as if drawn by a half-dried brush, revealing behind its gaps the milky blue of day. “Soon they reached the underwater kingdom.”

Mrs. Kimura told them how, after a short visit to the Emperor of the Sea, Urashimataro came back to his village to find with horror that a hundred years had passed. Just then a bicycle passed by in the alley, flashing in and out of view among the slats of the bamboo fence. Saburo, the older one, looked up with sharp interest. “That’s Shizu-kun’s big brother!” he interrupted.

Mrs. Kimura, ignoring him, continued. “Urashimataro walked down the alley,” she said, “but his old house was gone.” Little Terao was listening rapt, his mouth falling open a little. “His old neighbors were gone. All of them…strangers.” She looked over her bifocals into Terao’s eyes. Their whites were clear and unveined. Limpid irises, like shallow water—she could see almost to the bottom. Terao must be imagining Urashimataro’s predicament now, the way she did as a child, with the delicious thrill of momentarily leaving the safety of his own world. She marveled at his innocence, at his little mind’s unawareness of all that lay around and above and beneath him. His older brother’s mind, by contrast, was branching out rapidly. But he too had far to go; the expanses of time, of space, of human understanding, had yet to unfold. Mrs. Kimura felt all this vaguely, in the space of a heartbeat.

“He opened the magic box,” she concluded, “and smoke poured out, and suddenly he had turned into an old man with a long white beard.”

The sky’s familiar blue was gone now, replaced by an ominous wall of tangerine-pink. In contrast to this incandescence, the veranda below seemed suddenly darker, the boys shadowed and featureless in the twilight. Little Terao was scratching at something on his arm. One flex of her mind…and there he was, become her own son as a little boy, sitting before her on the veranda as he had done so many summers ago. It was Jiro she saw now, from a vantage point she had never known as a young mother. With a surge of emotion, she reached out and grasped Terao’s damp shoulder.

“Jiro-kun,” she said.

In the dusk, Saburo snickered.

By now the color had leached from the sky. The white light of morning, the wheeling crow, was a distant memory. Even the quality of air had changed along with the fading light; she recognized in this evening the quicksilver quality, the shifting groundlessness, of her dreams. And it seemed to her that here was life’s essence, revealed as it never could be in the level light of day.

“Ne, is it a true story?” asked Terao.

Saburo snorted. “Of course not!” he said.

One afternoon in late summer, the mailman delivered a parcel of high-grade
gyokuro
tea, compliments of one of Jiro’s business contacts. To Mrs. Kimura, an avid tea lover, it was clear that the subtle bitterness of such a tea would be wasted on ordinary bean dumplings; it required a dessert with correspondingly subtle sweetness, like plum
yokan
.

“The open-air market?” Harumi said. “Must you go right
now,
in the middle of this heat? At your
age,
Mother-san?”

“I’m not helpless yet,” Mrs. Kimura said, shaking out her parasol.

“You wait till evening,” said the new lady of the house.

Anger tightened around Mrs. Kimura’s chest like a vise. It was hard to breathe. “Allow me the freedom,” she said coldly, “to come and go in my own house.”

Harumi sighed, with that puckering of brow used by long-suffering women in samurai dramas.

Seething, Mrs. Kimura stalked down Ushigome Alley and onto Kinjin Alley, past houses with their sliding doors half-open in hopes of a breeze. The children had gone back to school. All was silent save for the one-note shimmering of cicadas which, in its constancy, was a silence in itself. She passed an open window, where someone was washing dishes and humming behind a flowered curtain. She felt light-headed. It was hard to breathe. That Harumi! Suddenly the alley seemed to undulate in air as dense and distorting as old glass.

Slightly dizzy, Mrs. Kimura halted. Ara, where was she? Before her was an unfamiliar temple entrance flanked by two stone lions. She stumbled inside and sank down onto a nearby bench in the shade of a ginkgo tree. Black spots bloomed and shrank before her eyes. She lowered her head between her knees.

As she stayed bent over in this position, the roaring in her ears subsided and she became conscious of a distant clamor: the honk of a car, bicycle bells, the bellowing of vendors. The open-air market must be nearby. From somewhere a school bell tolled—
kinn konn kann konn
—and children’s voices rose to a crescendo, then faded into stillness.

When Mrs. Kimura finally sat up, an aged man was sitting beside her in the shade. A leaf drifted down between them. “Another hot day,” he said, placidly fanning himself with a pocket-size folding fan as if behavior like hers happened every day. He gestured to a water-filled paper cup on the seat between them. “From the administrative office.”

Mrs. Kimura bowed her thanks, then sipped with unsteady hands. “Yes, it’s gotten hot,” she replied. A strand of hair had fallen loose from her bun, and she tucked it behind her ear. “It must be the global warming effect.”

“Is that so,” said the aged man. His voice was clear and resonant, the voice of a younger man or even—she had the fleeting impression—of a spirit speaking through a medium. “Maybe,” he continued, “the globe never really changes. Maybe it’s just the people.”

“Or their circumstances,” said Mrs. Kimura. She smiled over her paper cup, pleased with that one.

“Aaa soh, madam, circumstances.”

What a restful conversation. It was such a relief, compared to what she went through at home: scrambling after little facts and details, all of which came naturally to the young and gave them the upper hand in everything from avoiding oncoming bicycles to making fast replies.

They sat in silence.

“Do you live nearby?” she asked, hiding her feet, with their plastic household sandals, under the bench.

“No, no. Wakayama Prefecture. I came today by train.”

Ah! She must have wandered, then, into Ko-ken-ji, a well-known local temple dedicated to the Easement of Pain. It served the blue-collar neighborhood of shopkeepers and weavers who made their living in the open-air market. This temple was said to attract visitors from as far away as Nagasaki—cancer victims, arthritics, the brokenhearted—who found it out, somehow, through some underground source. Through the years, Mrs. Kimura had spotted them disembarking from buses, directions in hand: pausing dazed as straight-backed housewives whizzed past on old bicycles; as vendors bellowed for attention up and down Kanayagi Boulevard—“Fresh fish, horaa! Wel-cooome, madam!
Fresh-fresh-fish!
” She had seen them wander tentatively past shop after rickety shop, searching: past wooden barrels of yellow pickled radishes, ivory prayer beads with purple tassels, fragrant baked eels glistening with dark sauce.