Picking Bones from Ash (10 page)

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Sachiko and her friends chortled.

“I told you,” I said evenly, “he’s not my boyfriend.”

“They must have had a fight,” Sachiko cooed. “How tragic. Like Puccini. Would you consider killing yourself? In Puccini operas, the soprano always dies.”

I picked up a book and hurled it across the room, and the girls all ducked. After that, they stopped teasing me.

Once or twice, Shinobu tried to talk to me about Masayoshi. “Satomi …,” she began.

But I knew what she wanted to tell me. “Don’t,” I said. “It’s a ridiculous idea.”

When I went home to visit my mother during the next holiday, she
casually let it slip that Masayoshi had quit his job as an attorney and had gone to study Buddhism. He was engaged to a girl whose family owned a temple.

“Buddhism!” I exploded. “What is he doing that for?”

“He is thinking of becoming a priest,” she said, quite seriously.

“Why?”

“I think it has something to do with his family. His father had a stroke, you know. And even though he is doing much better, Masayoshi took it very hard.”

“But …”

“You don’t know, Satomi,” she said to me gently, “what it is like to see your family in jeopardy. It can change you.”

You’re my family, I thought. I’ve had to watch you change. Instead I said, “But he can’t change
that
much. No one changes
that
much. He told me he wanted to be an attorney so he could see the world. Go to La Scala.”

She lowered her head. “Masayoshi is doing what he must to help his father. The family is very vulnerable right now. I imagine Masayoshi feels he is helping everyone somehow.”

Still this made no sense to me. I could imagine Masayoshi taking up painting with greater earnestness, or asking for a transfer to go live in Europe. When people receive a shock, they sometimes have the extra energy to do the things they have always wanted to do but have put off. Still, I couldn’t understand how he would suddenly give up his job to study Buddhism.

I had something of an answer a couple of years later. I was visiting my mother again during the last school break I would have before graduation. Mineko was at the house with her two small children, and my mother was busy acting as grandmother. She sat on the floor with them and played with a small wooden top, the traditional kind that you can still find for sale in countryside tourist towns. The top was made of wood and painted with red and green stripes. You pulled a string, then released the top on the ground. Midway through its spinning cycle, if it was handled correctly, the top would flip over and spin on its reverse end. The older girl could make the top spin easily, but the littler girl had difficulty releasing the top so it landed on the ground and spun. My mother was showing her how to do this by holding the little girl’s hands with her own. I couldn’t help but
feel some reproach in the way that she did this, as though she were silently telegraphing to me that should I have children of my own, she’d be willing to lavish them with the same care. This was confusing because I’d always been under the impression that my mother did not want me to follow a domestic path.

I must have sighed deeply because Mineko turned to me and blinked rapidly a few times. “She’ll get it eventually. They aren’t born knowing how to do everything, you know.” She was talking about her children and the spinning top.

“No. Of course not,” I said.

“Children take patience.” She smoothed her skirt and took a sip of tea, the silence giving weight to her words, making it clear that she had meant to insult me.

“Satomi-san is very talented and very busy and it is understandable she doesn’t have the patience to deal with small children,” Mineko said matter-of-factly. The way she said it, she might have been talking to herself, or to an invisible audience about me.

“That’s probably true,” I muttered.

“Yes,” Mineko continued lightly. “It’s one of the reasons why Mother didn’t think it was a good idea for you to marry Masayoshi. With time, of course, he’ll understand that. Actually, I imagine he’s understood it already.”

Ara!
My mother exclaimed. The littler girl was clapping. Her top had finally spun correctly and the older girl was looking uncertain, not sure if she should cheer her little sister for having learned to do something correctly, or if she should feel threatened that a skill over which she once held dominance was now being learned by someone much younger.

“Excuse me?” I said.

Mineko put a hand to her mouth and her eyes opened wide, like the greedy mouths of
koi
seeking food just beyond the surface of a pond. “You knew, though, didn’t you? I hope I didn’t say something I shouldn’t have.” She continued to babble, with false nervousness, that she hoped she hadn’t offended anyone.

I was confused. “I knew
what
, Mineko? Speak
clearly
.”

But she wouldn’t say anything more because at that moment the two little girls had begun to fight over the top and who was going to spin it next. My mother looked on in alarm, raising her voice just slightly and
unable to prevent the wrestling match. Mineko, called to duty, jumped up from the sofa where we had been sitting and grabbed each girl roughly by the shoulder, separating them and reminding them that they were to play nicely with each other and to love each other as sisters.

I asked my mother about Masayoshi the next opportunity that we had to be alone, which was in the bath. My mother had relaxed into the water, her hair pinned up against her scalp. Her face was flushed and pink and she looked youthful.

“Okāsan.”
Mother. “Did Masayoshi ask you if he could marry me?”

For a little while I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard me, or that we were going to pretend that she hadn’t heard me. She began to kick her legs in the water in a rapid bicycling motion, working out her joints, which, she had confided at breakfast, were beginning to stiffen. “You don’t really want to get married.”

“But did he ask you?”

“Satomi,” she sighed, “you are far too talented a girl to just go off and get married. We’ve discussed this.”

“But …”

She fixed her eyes on mine and said, “You have a tendency to react to the moment, without thinking of the future. Remember Mineko? Of course that was partly my fault. If you’d had a more secure childhood, you wouldn’t feel the need to fight everyone around you, like an alley cat afraid that each meal might be its last. But, honestly, what kind of happiness would you have in ten years if you married Masayoshi? He is a more conventional person than you realize. He’s fascinated by you for now, but that kind of attraction doesn’t make a really good match in the long run.”

“And you know so much about good matches.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I found us a good home, didn’t I?”

“You found
yourself
a good home.”

“Satomi,” she said. “Of course this is your home. You could have settled in here a lot more easily if you’d behaved differently.”

“You never asked me if I wanted you to marry Mr. Horie.”

She shook her head. “I made some mistakes when you were small. I spoiled you. I let you think you were an adult before you were one and let you throw tantrums for far too long.”

This wasn’t the response I had expected. “Ever since you got here, you’ve
been so different, Mother. You act like Mineko and Chieko are much more your daughters than I am.”

“They
are
my daughters.”

I tried a different tactic. “You sent me away to school. You never sent them away.”

My mother sighed and her breath disturbed the steam on top of the bathwater so that it fluttered. And then in a voice that sounded tired, as though she had repeated this point many times, she said, “You are
talented
, Satomi. They are nice girls, but they are ordinary. You should know this by now.”

“But …”

“One day perhaps you will all be friends. That is my hope.” She began to ask me about my plans now that my final year of school had started. She had all but forgotten the original reason for our conversation, which was Masayoshi and his marriage proposal about which I had heard nothing, and she was carrying on instead about my other future, the one in which I finally fulfilled my promise as Japan’s next great contribution to the world of Western music. She wanted to know what path I had sketched out with my teachers. Try as I might to steer the conversation back in the direction of Masayoshi, she would have none of it. I realize now that in her persistent way she saw Masayoshi as a distraction, the main reason why I hadn’t already debuted with the NHK symphony, and that now that she had gotten rid of him, I could focus on my purpose again.

“Will you play in concert halls?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, sulking.

“What are the other girls doing?”

“Getting married. Teaching.”

“Well, I suppose it’s my fault too,” she said out loud, as though finishing up the tail end of another conversation, one that had taken place in her head. “Perhaps what you say is true. If I had paid more attention to you when you were a teenager, you’d be further along in your studies.”

“Maybe I never really had that much talent in the first place.”

“Nonsense. Remember the story about the moon princess …”

“That was just a story.”

She looked as though I had slapped her. “Of course it was just a story. It was the only way that you as a young child could understand what I saw in you.” She paused. “The only other option for you now is to marry someone
whom Mr. Horie and I think is suitable for you. Or, for a time, you could come work in the business.”

“Fishing?”

“Hasn’t it paid for your schooling so far?”

The very thought of working down by the wharf where I would doubtless need to get up early in the morning and wear a pair of rubber boots and tromp around in cold saltwater and fish blood disgusted me. “There is one thing,” I said. “You remember Rie Sanada? She says that I would benefit from studying in Europe. She wants me to audition for school in Paris.”

“Oh?” My mother raised her eyebrows.

I chose my words carefully. “She says that I have a passionate nature and that I would do better in Europe. She lived there for several years before coming back to Japan. I remind her of the French musicians. She says that Japan isn’t going to be able to teach me everything I need to know and that if I am going to perform before an international audience, I have to, well, ‘lose my accent.’ ”

My mother settled back into the water again and I waited to see if my words would have an effect. “Of course,” she finally said. “Japan didn’t invent classical music. The Europeans did. It shouldn’t be expected that you would learn to play truly great music here in Japan.”

I thought of the jazz musicians that Masayoshi and I had gone to hear. “I wonder if we will ever play as well as they do.”

She laughed. “Eventually we’ll play better than they do. And so
you
must be part of the new wave of artists who truly master Western classical music and come back to Japan to show us how to do it correctly.
Sah
.” She stood up out of the water and began to walk across the tiled floor of the tub to the steps. She gripped the railing with one hand and held a small white towel over her breasts with the other. Slowly she began to climb out and I looked at her figure, still so girlish. How could she have changed so much, but still look so young?

“Masayoshi …,” I began, but she waved her hand at me.

“You’ll see him from time to time because he is family. But he’s changed the path of his life. You must continue on the one that you started.”

Sanada-sensei and I continued my Thursday lessons, working and reworking the repertory I would use to audition for the École Normale in Paris.
But one afternoon when she let me in, she surprised me by asking me to sit at a table by the window. As we made small talk, she served me a small meal of bread, soup, and sardines.

“You have to learn to eat soup with a spoon,” she said. “That’s what they do.”

“I’m not going to play today?” The sudden barrage of eating utensils and the formality of so many cups and plates intimidated me.

“I think we are all done with lessons,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“I still have my last exam. And I have to record my audition tape.”

“You’re ready for all that.”

“You’ll be there for the exam?”

“Of course. I suppose I’ll have to see if there is anyone else with any talent I can take on. Mostly, it’s been so disappointing listening to those children.” She sighed.

I watched her cut her sardines in half and followed suit.

“Do you have any questions?” she asked.

I spent a minute chewing and swallowing my food before I asked, “What if I get there and I’m not good enough?”

“Not even a question anymore.” She smiled kindly. “I know for a fact that all the teachers at Geidai think you are ready to go overseas and that your ability would be wasted here. They find you an overly emotional player, of course. Rather baroque. So while no one is going to help you with the NHK symphony, they do support your application to go overseas. Satomi, it’s really up to you now and up to your will. Many things can happen to a young woman to derail her. I should know.”

“War,” I said. “Bad health.”

“A broken heart,” she replied, darkly, and I wondered to whom she referred.

“But you still played.”

“Yes. Because the piano is my first love.” She watched me intently and set her fork down on a plate. “You are wondering if you will be happy.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a question with you, isn’t it? Will music be enough for passionate Satomi? Will it make you feel secure, even? I don’t know. It has been my focus. You will find out if it is yours.”

I passed my exams easily and was admitted to school in Paris just as Sanada-sensei had foreseen. Though I was elated to have accomplished
something so few Japanese students had even dared try, I was also deeply uneasy.

“I’ll miss you,” I bawled to Shinobu. As I have said, I can be a terrible crier once I begin. That day I was a geyser of tears and she dutifully handed me Masayoshi’s handkerchiefs one after another while I sobbed. “Who will rescue me when I am in trouble?”