The Laws of Evening: Stories (5 page)

“Ne, Big Sister! Are you ready yet?” he keeps calling from the living room. Makiko is inspecting Toshi’s nails and the back of his collar.

“Big Sister,” Noboru says, looking up as Makiko finally appears in the doorway, “your house is too immaculate, I get nervous every time I come here!” He is sitting stiffly on a floor cushion, sipping homemade persimmon tea.

“Well,” Makiko answers, “I hate filth.” She tugs down her knee-length dress. She has switched, like most women, to Western dresses—they require less fabric—but it makes her irritable, having to expose her bare calves in public.

“Aaa,” says young Noboru from his floor cushion, “but I, for one, am fascinated by it. The idea of it, I mean. What’s that old saying—‘Nothing grows in a sterile pond’? Just think, Big Sister, of the things that come out of filth. A lotus, for example. Or a pearl. Just think: a pearl’s nothing more than a grain of dirt covered up by oyster fluid! And life itself, Big Sister, billions of years ago—taking shape for the first time in the primordial muck!”

“Maa maa, Nobo-kun.” She sighs, double-checking her handbag for coin purse, ration tickets, and handkerchief. “You seem to be learning some very interesting concepts at the university.”

Toshi is waiting by the front door in shorts and a collared shirt, impatiently rolling the panel open and then shut, open and then shut.

Finally, they are on their way, strolling down the narrow alley in the still, muggy evening. The setting sun angles down on the east side of the alley, casting a pink and orange glow on the charred wooden lattices where shadows reach, like long heads of snails, from the slightest of protrusions. In the shadowed side of the alley, one of the buck-toothed Yamada daughters ladles water from a bucket onto the asphalt around her door, pausing, with a good-evening bow, to let them pass. The water, colliding with warm asphalt, has burst into a smell of many layers: asphalt, earth, scorched wood, tangy dragon’s beard moss over a mellower base of tree foliage; prayer incense and tatami straw, coming from the Yamadas’ half-open door; and mixed in with it all, some scent far back from Makiko’s own childhood that falls just short of definition.

“We Japanese,” Noboru is saying, “must reinvent ourselves.” There are, he tells her, many such discussions now at the university. “We must change to fit the modern world,” he says. “We mustn’t allow ourselves to remain an occupied nation.” He talks of the new constitution, of the new trade agreements. Makiko has little knowledge of politics. She is amused—disquieted, too—by this academic young man, who before the war was a mere boy loping past her window with a butterfly net over his shoulder.

“Fundamental shifts…,” Noboru is saying, “…outdated pyramidal structures.” Lately he has taken to wearing a hair pomade with an acrid metallic scent. It seems to suggest fervor, fundamental shifts.

“Toshi-kun!” Makiko calls. “Don’t go too far.” The boy stops running. He walks, taking each new step in exaggerated slow motion.

“So much change!” she says to Noboru as she tugs at her cotton dress. “And so fast. Other countries had centuries to do it in.”

“Soh soh, Big Sister!” Noboru says. “Soh soh. But we have no choice, that’s a fact. You jettison from a sinking ship if you want to survive.”

The pair approach Mr. Watanabe, watering his potted morning glories in the twilight. Holding his watering can in one hand, the old man gives them a genteel bow over his cane. “Yoshitsune-san,” he murmurs politely, “Makiko-san.” He then turns back to his morning glories, bending over them with the tenderness of a mother with a newborn.

“Poor Watanabe-san, ne,” Noboru whispers. “He gets more and more confused every time we see him.”

Yes, poor Mr. Watanabe, Makiko thinks. Bit by bit he is being pulled back in, like a slowing planet, toward some core, some necessary center of his past. Laden with memory, his mind will never catch up to Noboru’s new constitution or those new trade agreements, or even the implications of that billboard with English letters—instructions for arriving soldiers?—rising above the blackened rooftops and blocking his view of the Tendai hills.

Oddly, Mr. Watanabe’s mistake has triggered a memory from the past: Makiko is strolling with her husband this summer evening. For one heartbeat she experiences exactly how things used to be—that feel of commonplace existence, before later events imposed their nostalgia—with a stab of physical recognition, impossible to call up again. Then it is gone, like the gleam of a fish, having stirred up all the waters around her.

They walk on in silence. “Toshi-kun!” she calls out again. “Slow down.” Toshi pauses, waiting for them; he swings at the air with an imaginary bat. “Striku! Striku!” he hisses.

It occurs to Makiko that this war has suspended them for too long in an artificial, unsustainable state of solidarity. For a while, everyone had clung together in the bomb shelter off Nijiya Street, thinking the same thoughts, breathing in the same damp earth and the same warm, uneasy currents made by bodies at close range. But that is over now.

Makiko thinks of her future. She is not so old. She is still full of life and momentum. There is no doubt that she will pass through this period and on into whatever lies beyond it, but at a gradually slowing pace; a part of her, she knows, will lag behind in the honeyed light of prewar years.

“Toshi-kun!” she cries. “Wait!” Her son is racing ahead, his long shadow sweeping the sunlit fence as sparrows flutter up from charred palings.

At her first glimpse of the festival, Makiko’s stomach sinks. Although she has come to this festival for Toshi’s sake only—she herself having no interest in children’s festivals, not having attended a Tanabata Night fair since her own teenage years—she is nonetheless taken unawares by the difference between the bright, colorful booths of her childhood and what now stands before her: four poles in the earth, supporting a crude black canopy made from some kind of industrial tarpaulin. A few tattered red paper lanterns, probably dug out from someone’s attic, hang forlornly from the corners. Under this cover, corn is roasting on makeshift grills made from oil barrels split lengthwise. It puts Makiko in mind of a refugee tent, the kind she associates with undeveloped countries somewhere in Southeast Asia, where natives and stray dogs alike mill about waiting to be fed. The shock of this impression, coming as it does at this unguarded moment, awakens anew the shame of defeat.

“Ohhh-i!” Toshi yells out to one of his friends, and almost scampers off into the crowd before Makiko grabs him.

“Well,” Makiko says, turning to her younger brother.

“That’s the spirit!” Noboru says heartily, surveying the crowd. “Fall seven times, get up eight! Banzai! Banzai, for national rebuilding!” He proclaims this partly for Makiko’s benefit and partly for that of a pretty young girl who is approaching them, no doubt a classmate of his. She has short hair with a permanent wave, like that of an American movie actress.

Standing in line with the young couple and a fidgety Toshi, Makiko wonders if the time will ever come when she can see a postwar substitute without the shadow of its former version.

But now, despite herself, she is distracted by the nearness of the corn, sizzling and crackling as the soy sauce and sugar drip into the flames. Her mouth waters. And when she finally takes her first bite, she is amazed to find it tastes exactly the way it did in her childhood, burnt outside and chewy inside. The surprise and relief of it bring tears to her eyes, and she chews vigorously to hide the sudden twisting of her features.

“This corn is so
good,
ne, Mama?” Toshi keeps saying, looking up from his rationed four centimeters of corncob. “This sure tastes
good,
ne?” The joy on his face, caught in the red glow of paper lanterns, is like a tableau.

“Yes, it’s good,” she says with pride, as if this is her own creation, her own legacy that she is handing down. “We ate food like this when your father was alive.” She watches her son gnawing off the last of the kernels, sucking out the soy sauce from the cob. She hands him her own ration, from which she has taken but one bite.

“What a greedy piglet,” Noboru teases, pretending to box his nephew’s ears. Then he turns serious, remembering the girl beside him with the permanent wave. He is impressing her with his knowledge of astronomy. “Do you know which stars represent the separated lovers in that Tanabata legend?” he asks.

“I remember my father once pointing them out to me,” the girl says. They are both gazing up at the sky, even though it is too early for stars. The girl gives a long sigh. “I’ve always loved that story,” she says. “It’s so sad and romantic, how once a year on Tanabata Night they’re allowed to cross the gulf of the Milky Way, just for a few minutes, and be reunited again.”

“The Western names for those stars,” Noboru murmurs to her, “are Altair and Vega.”

Later that night Makiko stands outside on her veranda, fanning herself with a paper
uchiwa
. Toshi is already asleep. The night garden is muggy; the mosquitoes are out in full force. She can hear their ominous whine from the hydrangea bush, in between the rasping of crickets, but they no longer target her as they did in her youth. She is thinner now, her skin harder from the sun, her blood watered down from all the rationing.

What a nice festival it turned out to be. More somber than in the old days, yet with remnants of its old charm. With the coming of the dark, the tent’s harsh outlines had melted away and the red lanterns seemed to glow brighter. Shadowy forms gathered at the river’s edge: adults bending over their children, helping them to hold out sparklers over the glassy water. The sparklers sputtered softly in the dark, shedding white flakes of light. Makiko had watched from a distance; Toshi was old enough, he had insisted, to do it by himself. She had remarked to Noboru how there is something in everyone that responds to fireworks: so fleeting, so lovely in the dark.

Right now the stars are out, although the surrounding rooftops obscure most of the night sky except for a full moon. She had noticed the moon earlier, at dusk, opaque and insubstantial. Now, through shifting moisture in the air, it glows bright and strong, awash with light, pulsing with light.

Surely tonight’s festival owed its luster to all that lay beneath, to all those other evenings of her past that emit a lingering phosphorescence through tonight’s surface. Which long-ago evenings exactly?…but they are slowly losing shape, dissolving within her consciousness.

Perhaps Toshi will remember this night. Perhaps it will rise up again, once he is grown, via some smell, some glint of light, bringing indefinable texture and emotion to a future summer evening. As will his memory of being carried by his father before an open window, or a time when he prayed before his father’s picture.

A
T BREAKFAST
she plays Strauss waltzes, arias from
Carmen,
Italian classics such as “Santa Lucia” sung by robust, ardent men. And tangos: “La Cumparasita” in particular always brings her up off the floor cushion—where she sits alone at the low table eating miso soup, rice, salted salmon, and seaweed—to advance haughtily over the tatami matting, knees bent and one arm outstretched; then a snappy turn of the head (her aged body following more slowly) and a few more steps before sitting back down, heartbeat high. All it takes is music from when she was a bride—when she and her first husband, Shigeru, went ballroom dancing every Saturday night, in the years before the war took him away—for the vibrant, romantic young woman that she once was to flare up again, like dry kindling.

A widow of two years, Hanae has learned to utilize music with the same careful respect a medicine man gives his potions. She keeps two rice cracker tins filled with cassettes, all taped from the classical radio station and grouped by mood. Happy music works best in the morning, when a solitary day stretches before her like a long shadow. The elegant pace of traditional stringed koto is lovely for an afternoon tea break, when her chores are finished and she is feeling the satisfaction of a day used well. Every so often, however, especially if it happens to be raining outside, the meditative koto strains will cast a pall. In anticipation of this possibility she has scheduled her tea break for three o’clock, right before she leaves for the public bathhouse, the highlight of her day. And so Hanae listens with a serene heart: while washing tea utensils; while scurrying to pack her vinyl bag with washbasin, talcum powder, and soap; while setting the supper table for her return.

“Use music,” she tells her youngest daughter, Kimiko, who comes visiting sporadically on weekends, “at crucial times in the day, to trick your mind into well-being.” For Kimiko, Hanae recommends Edith Piaf. Frank Sinatra’s love songs. Jazz from the big-band era, which has transcended her own generation. They are all available on the public radio station. “Clap your hands to this,” she says as “Hanagasa Ondo,” a Japanese peasant festival tune, plays on her portable radio–cassette player. “Just try it, hora. Clap, clap.” Kimiko and her husband clap twice politely, then stop. Kimiko’s two children, nine and eleven, pound their palms as fast and as loud as possible.

“But Grandma
said
!” they cry gleefully at their mother’s glare.

“When something lifts your spirits, even for a few minutes,” Hanae tells her harried daughter, raising her voice over the children’s clapping, “like beautiful music, or a nice shade of lipstick, it raises the level of good hormones inside your body. And that starts a chain reaction. Better digestion, a better immune system. Therefore more protection against disease and senility.”

Since her second husband, Daigo, died of esophageal cancer, Hanae has become something of an expert on health. Her knowledge comes from a popular NHK television program that airs weekdays at lunchtime. The show’s host, Kenzo Uetani, presents multiple-choice questions to his celebrity guests, such as: Which fruit is most effective for preventing sinus infections—apple, orange, or banana? Yesterday afternoon the question was: Which part of the body, if massaged before bedtime, can lower blood pressure—foot, top of the thigh, or shoulder? Each celebrity took a guess, following it with a witty or coquettish rationale. The audience was polled. Finally the camera panned to a doctor in a conservative suit, looking slightly ill at ease among the vivacious media personalities. Each episode features a different doctor, perennially overqualified: Head of Hematology, Tokyo University Medical School; Head of Research, Kansai Cancer Institute. “The correct answer is the top of the thigh,” the doctor announced, causing a twitter of amazement. He then proceeded to explain, in layman’s terms, why this was so, showing simple diagrams of cells, blood vessels, and lymph nodes. He alluded to ground-breaking research unveiled at a medical symposium in Munich and published in America’s
New England Journal of Medicine
.

Hanae jots it all down in a cheap student’s notebook, consulting it later in order to fine-tune her diet, her exercise, her entertainments.
Moist environment crucial for warding off cold germs
—
boil water in kettle? fill vases with water? Iron more potent when taken with vitamin C
—
lemon juice with spinach? orange slice with everything? Keep dream journal: excellent mental benefits
.

Each new secret may yield days, even months, of additional life.

Last month, inspired by an episode about the effect of color on mood, Hanae redecorated her tiny bathroom: red gingham curtains, a pot of red plastic tulips in the corner, a red floor mat, red and white hand towels. For counterpoint, she hung a miniature teddy bear—brown—from the end of the light cord. The charged merriment of this room gives her a boost each time she enters, like wandering into Christmas in Europe. Assuming she uses the bathroom eight times a day for, say, an average of three minutes, in the course of a month that would add up to over ten hours of lifted spirits.

Hanae’s sister-in-law Mitsu, eighty-one years old, is passing by Hanae’s garden, shambling slowly and noisily through the alley gravel. Each Wednesday afternoon between two and three o’clock, she catches the bus to buy persimmon tea leaves from the Chinese herbalist. Hanae waters her arum lilies, which are managing to hold on despite the recent chill of autumn nights, and watches Mitsu’s frail, bent body flashing in and out of view through the tall bamboo slats of the garden fence.

Two years ago, shortly after Hanae’s second husband died, Mitsu had come to pay her respects. Even though she lived just two alleys away, she came shuffling through the gravel decked out in a formal kimono and matching zori slippers, ringing the bell at the visitors’ gate instead of tapping on the kitchen door as usual. She knelt before Hanae in the guest room, her palsied fingertips resting on the tatami floor in prebowing position. “My little brother,” she said, “did not deserve such a good wife. Daigo was gloomy and angry and
maaa,
nothing like your first husband, I’m sure…. Daigo used to be different, you know, before the war. But still, he gave you a hard life. Anyone would have understood if you’d shirked your duty near the end. But you are a fine woman…a fine woman, Hanae…please, accept my apologies and utmost respect.” Then, going against standard etiquette—even though she was the elder of the two, as well as a relative on the husband’s side—Mitsu had bowed down: not the routine forty-five-degree bow, but all the way down, until her head touched the floor.

Maaa,
that someone like Mitsu should have the audacity to live so long. That whole family always got their own way. How graciously this woman humbled herself, so nobly apologizing for her little brother as if she hadn’t been the one to coerce Hanae into that marriage to start with! Hanae breathed slowly and deeply as she bowed back, mindful not to activate the bad hormones. Flashes of latent anger did surface in her occasionally, but she was resigned to them, and kept them to herself. At this point in their lives, the two women had developed an easy acquaintance based on shared history and mutual advanced age.

Not like your first husband—if
that
wasn’t the understatement of the Showa Period. Even nowadays, while cracking open a peanut (which is high in protein, vitamin E, and beneficial monounsaturated oil), Hanae thinks back fondly to the handsome young man who would superstitiously persist in hiding away peanuts from her while she was pregnant. “Peanuts and twin babies: both come two in a pod!” he warned when he was confronted. Shigeru lavished expensive substitutes upon her: dried white anchovies, fashionable imports such as buttered popcorn and bananas. Before their baby’s unfortunate crib death, he even washed the diapers himself, hunching over the washtub in his summer underclothes. She never allowed Shigeru to hang up the wash in the yard, however; he would have lost face if the neighbors saw him doing women’s work.

Years after her first husband died, Hanae would reminisce about him to Daigo. He listened grimly. “You think he’d be acting that way now, all playful and romantic and such, if he were still alive?” he had once roared at her, drunk on sake during a fight early on in their marriage. “What do you think happened to boys like that after years of jungle fever and prison camps? Stupid woman!” Hanae had turned up her nose and ignored him.

When Shigeru died in the war, Hanae had barely had time to grieve. Bombs dropped on their city, and she had managed to escape to a small city called O-Shige, whose inland location was safer. In her widowhood, Hanae was practically destitute. She had married a poor man, openly flaunting her family’s wishes, and now pride kept her from crawling home to ask for help. Alone in this new city, Hanae scraped by on her widow’s pension and on what meager savings her husband had left her, until Mitsu entered the scene.

Mitsu, a neighbor who for several months had been merely a polite acquaintance, accelerated their friendship one day with black market offerings of fabric, eggs, and soy beans. “My little brother has connections,” she explained airily, and from that point on, she never missed a chance to praise Daigo, who had recently returned from the war. Hanae, naively gladdened by Mitsu’s overtures of friendship, had accepted many such favors by the time homely Daigo took advantage of the situation to begin a courtship. Well, perhaps that was being unfair; no one had actually forced her to marry. But if she had only had more options! If only she hadn’t indebted herself in that way to Mitsu, who had surely planned this in conjunction with her brother, then the outcome might have been different.

Delving too far into such memories, Hanae feels the bad hormones beginning to broil inside her body, the miasma of digestive juices rising up in her throat. The gerontologists on NHK are always warning her to think positive thoughts. Once you’re old, they say, it takes very little to throw your mind and body out of kilter. With her knife, Hanae saws furiously at the arum lily stalk. She will put the flower in a vase on the family altar, then chant her evening sutras earlier than usual. By then, it should be time for the bathhouse to open.

For decades, Hanae had lived off the secret hope that her situation would change. She hadn’t the slightest idea how, but who analyzes miracles? Some sudden spark of grace, emerging through the vagaries of chance…. But in the period after her second husband’s funeral, Mitsu’s condolences had brought home the truth: despite anything else fate might still hold in store, the basic outcome of Hanae’s life was complete. Mitsu’s formal dress and prostration had impressed this onto Hanae’s mind like a huge red stamp on a shipping crate: Unfortunate Life. Dashed Hopes.

But in spite of everything, she does miss having her husband around the house. Ironies of life! Now Hanae is changing the water in the altar vase, throwing out last week’s chrysanthemum, which has begun to shed, and replacing it with the arum lily from the garden. Actually Daigo wasn’t such bad company in his last few years, illness and age having turned him rather docile. And he was the hub around which she had learned, out of necessity, to orbit. So what is the point now of cleaning house and cooking nice meals? But, a! a! That is a bad attitude. Things are getting better…for instance, at breakfast when she moves her body to the ballroom music….

Hanae is a close observer of her elderly neighbors at the bathhouse. Drawing upon her steadily growing store of medical knowledge, she reconciles the state of their health to what she knows of their daily habits. Konishi-san, a mere sixty-seven, is a finicky eater. “I don’t like the taste of eggs,” she admits apologetically to the older women, lowering her head with proper obeisance. “Shabu-shabu beef sits like a lump in my esophagus. Raw vegetables are hard on my teeth.” No wonder Konishi-san is always missing baths because of colds. There is an old saying from China: the key to good health is eating thirty different varieties of food a day.

Daigo was a difficult eater too, but in a different way; sometimes, when the depression overtook him, he would shut the shoji door to his office and refuse food for an entire day or two. And look what happened to him: cancer.

Ueno-san, a venerable eighty-five, lives in the weaving district on the other side of Daruma Boulevard. Her back is curved from all her years at the loom. But her naked body, seen from behind, is youthfully fleshy with a supple sheen. Ueno-san loves food; it is her favorite topic of discussion, and this afternoon she and Hanae are exchanging a catalog of everything they have eaten over the past week. Ueno-san has eaten braised eel, roast pork with noodles and green onions, lobster, and
hamachi
sushi from Niji-ya. High in vitamins and healthy monounsaturated fat—good, good (and high in price as well! Ueno-san’s son, who left weaving for the merchandising business, must be doing extremely well lately).

“A certain amount of fat in the diet is essential,” Hanae informs this small group of naked women. “One must never make the mistake, especially when elderly, of cutting healthy fats out of the diet.”

“Soh, soh, I watched that episode too!” Ueno-san cuts in loudly, grinning with all her expensive dentures. Well! That is typical behavior coming from a simple, uneducated weaver’s wife with the sensitivity of a potato and even less tact. It quite possibly accounts for her long healthy life as much as the food she eats.

There is actually much to be learned from these peasant types. Just the other day, Hanae heard of a new medical study suggesting that people with loud, unself-conscious voices have less danger of becoming senile than people with refined, timorous ones. That is something to consider, even though it goes against her entire upbringing. Hanae does not see herself as timorous, although she knows that in some ways she gives off that impression. For example, having lived in this city for over forty years, she still does not know her way to the downtown Civic Auditorium, or even to the famous Ryu Temple on the east side of the city. Hanae explains to the bathhouse women, and to her incredulous grandchildren, that she and her husband never went out much, and that when they did, she was always in the passenger seat thinking other thoughts.