Picking Bones from Ash

PICKING BONES FROM ASH

“When there are secrets, the flower exists;
but without secrets, the flower does not exist.”

Zeami, FROM
FŪSHIKADEN

(TEACHINGS ON STYLE AND THE FLOWER)

Satomi

Kuma-ume, Japan, 1954

My mother always told me that there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably, and masterfully talented.

This is different than being intelligent or even educated. The latter, she insisted, could get a girl into trouble, convincing her that she has the same power as men. Certainly the biggest mistake a woman could make was to rely on her beauty. Such a woman is destined to grow old and ugly very quickly because she is so much more disappointed by what she sees in the mirror than someone who is busy. “But when you are talented,” she whispered to me late at night as we lay in our
futons
, “you are special. You will have troubles, but they won’t be any of the ordinary ones.”

In the beginning, we thought my talent was going to be music. Mother had an old out-of-tune piano that she kept in our small second-floor apartment and that I practiced on as a child. “It’s such an ordinary piano,” my mother lamented to the other ladies in town. “Nothing like the fine
koto
or
shamisen
I used to play. It’s unfortunate because Satomi has talent. I know better than anyone else that talent must be developed when one is very young.” My mother ran an
izakaya
, or pub, downstairs from our apartment, which meant that she was home most afternoons when I returned from school. It also restricted her social interactions with other women to
the buying of vegetables or clothing from the shops during the day; she had no time for lunchtime get-togethers. In the evening, after I’d eaten my dinner and become consumed by homework, she was serving drinks to tipsy men and entertaining them with her wit.

“What,” murmured the other women of the town, “does she mean when she says she knows that talent must be nurtured when one is young?”

“Witches,” someone muttered, “must start training when they are young. Perhaps Satomi’s mother is a witch.”

“Witches are blind,” another woman scoffed. “Satomi’s mother can see.”

“Well, she must be a geisha then,” someone else said. “She became pregnant with her lover’s child. He wouldn’t leave his wife. And here we are with Satomi and her mother living in our town. Remember? They just showed up one day after the war ended.”

“Satomi’s mother
is
very beautiful.”

“And accomplished.”

“She isn’t
that
beautiful.”

After a moment, one of them added, “But her daughter
is
very talented.”

Having decided that my mother was no less than a retired geisha, the other women gave her as wide a berth as possible, and kept an ear out for any gossip that involved the interaction of their husbands with a woman who had doubtless been trained since she was very small in the art of engaging a man in meaningful conversation.

I heard about all of this from Tomoko, who was my best friend until middle school. Tomoko often looked for ways to cheer me up because she knew how much it bothered me not to know my father’s name. There were other children without mothers or fathers, and even some orphans who lived with their grandparents, but at least these children all knew who their parents had been. I only knew my mother. This ignorance hinted at a willful dismissal of social niceties in my personal history, and this past negligence was often enough reason for me not to be asked to parties or to be invited to walk home from school with the other girls. “But everyone thinks you are talented,” Tomoko comforted me.

“I’d rather be pretty.”

“
I
think you’re pretty,” said Tomoko of the little nose, slim hands and
legs, and small round mouth. “In the long run, I suspect that being talented is going to matter more than being pretty.”

My mother was not some geisha. But because we lived far north of sophisticated Tokyo or Kyoto, it was easy for her to maintain the illusion that she had once been connected to the old Japanese tradition of hospitality and art. This trick protected us for a long time. Women were nervous around her, and men saw her as some sort of ideal they should strive to impress and protect. The women knew how the men felt and it bothered them, but because there was never any definitive gossip linking my mother to one particular man, they mostly left her alone.

My mother was very particular and had a strong aesthetic sense that could at times be intimidating. Given a choice between two kinds of tea bowls—a gaudy and greenish
Kutani
teacup or a
wabi-sabi
style
Shino
—she would always choose the latter and couldn’t understand anyone who would choose the former. She was rigorous in training me to see these differences too, every so often pulling out her small collection, amassed during and immediately after the war years, for our tutorials. I was allowed to touch the plates and bowls, except for one light-green-colored pot in the shape of a melon. “That one,” she said to me, “is Korean. Maybe you can play with it when you are older.”

To women she would say things like: “Did you see the
kimono
display in Kyōya’s? Why would anyone with such cheap-looking
kimonos
even pretend to have a relationship to Kyoto?” Or, “Really, didn’t you know that those bright
meisen
kimonos are considered unsophisticated now? It’s a good idea to just cut them up and turn them into
futon
covers.
I
can show you how if you don’t know.”

With men she affected an alert, almost childlike expression, wide eyes taking in everything they said as though it was all, right down to the most inane reenactment of a day at work, the most interesting information she had ever heard. At the same time she kept her lips pursed in a little closed-mouth smile to make it clear that while she was good at listening, she would not disclose their secrets. When things became heated, as they did when a man was momentarily convinced that he should leave his wife for her, she knew how to deflect this kind of ardor with a lighthearted remark that would spare the man any embarrassment the next day when he was
sober. “Nobata-san has done much better with his wife than he would ever do with me,” she would smile, with no small hint of regret in her eyes. In the hazy morning that followed a night of drinking, the men remembered her as a beautiful if tragic figure who knew her place and thus was deserving of patronage the following evening for yet another round of
shōchu
to drink.

The
izakaya
was small, with perhaps enough room for eight people at the counter and ten more in the back. The wall behind the counter was stocked with a supply of liquor and glasses. There was also a small refrigerator, stuffed with vegetables, meat, and the frozen ingredients my mother needed to cook her specialties. She was a wizard at utilizing every single spare corner of that refrigerator. Even now, when I pack a suitcase, I feel ashamed that I am not similarly gifted.

Although she only had four small gas burners and a fish grill, my mother managed all the orders for beer,
sake, oden
, and
tempura
. Alone, she kept the place clean and tastefully decorated following a rustic theme befitting our mountain town, Kuma-ume. Here and there were muted patchwork wall hangings refashioned from our drab wartime clothes, dried flower arrangements, and mismatched glasses and blue-and-white teacups she’d rescued from various trash cans. It is a style that is very popular now but seemed elegantly eccentric at the time. It was a feminine enough place that men always bowed when they entered and wiped up any beer that they spilled, but not so oppressively frilly that they were afraid to get drunk and talk politics until the early morning.

I never did learn where she developed her sense of taste, because she never told me where she was born. Instead, she filled my head with stories about the moon princess who as a baby was discovered stuffed inside a fat bamboo stalk by a poor bamboo cutter. The baby grew up to be a beautiful and accomplished young lady who was ultimately reclaimed by the kingdom of the moon.

“One day the kingdom of the moon will come for you, and I will be rewarded for having cared for you all these years.”

“If I’m your daughter, you must be a princess too,” I said.

“That has to remain a secret.” She sighed deeply. “You see, I resolved a long time ago not to be a princess, but to teach everything I ever learned at the palace to my daughter, so she could go and reclaim her rightful place.”

It was a lovely fiction for a child to believe. Sometimes I ran around in the forests near our home looking for a stalk of bamboo large enough for a baby. I’d already seen how certain stalks could hold enough water to support a bouquet of lilies, and how the fattest trunks could reverberate like the rain when they were tapped with chopsticks.