Picking Bones from Ash (6 page)

Matters came to a head one day when I sat down to practice the piano and lifted the cover. For a moment, I froze. Then I screamed. There, wiggling its way across the black and white keys was a brown snake, very much alive and, to my mind, very hungry. I heard Mineko laughing as she raced past me on the wooden hallway in her mini pink socks, her long hair braided by Chieko just that morning into two elaborate plaits.

I ran after her.

Twin braids stuck out, like antlers, and I grasped them as you might take hold of the steering wheel on a bike, and turned them to the right. Her body obediently flipped over. We tussled just on the step by the entryway to the house. Our shoes and umbrellas and bikes were kept on the lower level, and I imagine that Mineko had been attempting to put on her shoes to run away from the house, knowing that I would make an effort to catch her. Had she made it out onto the street, the cars and pedestrians whizzing past would have stopped me in my tracks and I would have let her escape.

But she didn’t make it that far. Instead, her body whipped to the right and she landed on her right hand—her drawing hand. I heard the sound of chalk crunching up against a chalkboard.

Her wrist never healed correctly, and she could never draw particularly well again, so in a way I suppose I accomplished my goal.

After a sullen period during which Mineko recuperated, she emerged from her cocoon to become a strangely older, more serious person who fluttered like a butterfly when she moved, smoothing the pleats of her skirt when she sat down and patting vainly at her hair. She was watchful and shadowy, and had taken to having intense conversations with her sister, who greeted her after the convalescence as though she’d just been waiting for Mineko to turn out like this, so adult and serious.

I was punished, of course. The worst thing my mother could think of was to take away the piano, but she wasn’t about to ban the one thing that she said had prompted her to get married in the first place.

She couldn’t forbid me to see friends because I didn’t really have any. Instead she told me, with a pained, pale face, that for the next three months I was to take all my meals alone in my room. I was not to eat with her or with the girls. Worst of all, she would no longer bathe with me. She said
this severely, while I cried, because already I was starting to feel that she didn’t care for me as she once had. She told me that she thought we needed to do something to get the girls to like
us
. We had to be nicer, she said. Pay compliments. Act as a family. All these years I’d gone without a father and they’d gone without a mother, and now we had a chance to rectify these injustices. Wouldn’t I like to have sisters? I should think about these things while I was waiting for the three-month sentence to pass.

The punishment confused me. This wasn’t the mother who’d told me I was special, just biding my time, waiting for the moon people to appear and rescue me from an ordinary life. What a torture it was to sit alone in my room and to hear the muffled giggles that streamed out from the kitchen, where my mother and the others talked about school, about boys, about parties and college plans. Once I peeked into the front room and saw my mother, who loved to take old
kimonos
and turn them into handbags and blouses long before it became so trendy to do so, sitting next to Chieko, both of them sewing. They were whispering in quiet and confiding voices, pausing to examine each other’s seams and stitches. The image stung. I’d thought my mother would grieve not to have me with her. Instead, she had replaced me.

In my room, I took to listening to a shortwave radio I’d found abandoned in a closet. It was capable of picking up a radio station from somewhere in Russia. In the evenings while my mother and her new family sat in the dining room, I turned on the radio and listened to choral music and orchestral music pouring out of the speaker. One day, I promised myself, I’d be far away in some exotic location Mineko and Chieko would envy, and I’d be responsible for making music just like this. My life would be richer and purer than theirs could ever be.

I started doing something else too. My mother had been so convinced I was to be a musician that it had never really occurred to me to try my hand at any of the other arts. But Mineko’s sketching made me curious. One evening, listening to the chorus from
Khovanshchina
, I picked up a pencil and tried to draw a caricature of Mineko. First I made her a snail, but then I decided that even this animal was too sweet a creature for that horrible stepsister of mine. She was nothing more than a pile of dung. So I tried again. I drew a cat, prancing off from having just gone to the bathroom in a low bush, then drew a pile of waste. There was Mineko, her little precious mouth wailing how she was now nothing more than a pile of brown goo.
I rather liked my sketch and did several versions of it. Sometimes Mineko languished at the bottom of a toilet, her eyes trained to look up at a sky that she would never see. Sometimes, when I was feeling especially cruel, I simply drew an additional picture in which she and the rest of her dung-friends were silenced under a blanket of earth.

In my angriest days I liked to tell anyone who would listen that my mother had sacrificed my happiness for hers. This isn’t entirely true, of course. When I won a scholarship at age fifteen to attend a high school in Sendai, a good five hours away by train, my mother urged me to go, insisting that this was the chance we had been waiting for. “You’ll finally be around other artists,” she said. Mr. Horie, who had become tolerant of me after I’d gone for a good year without maiming any more members of his family, agreed to pay for my schooling, and for the train rides home on holidays and long weekends. Occasionally he sent me some money himself with a note that said things like “Buy yourself a blouse” or “Go get some sheet music.” I suppose he was kind in his way.

I did well in high school, and by my senior year, everyone knew I’d be going to the Tokyo University of the Arts, or Geidai, as it is commonly known. This is the most prestigious arts university in Japan, akin to Juilliard in America. My mother was ecstatic.

“You see?” she said to me one evening in the kitchen when the two of us were alone and peeling freshly picked
tsukushi
horsetail shoots. “You are finally becoming the person I knew you would.”

She accompanied me on the overnight train trip from Hachinohe to Tokyo, a journey that invoked our voyage to Akita so many years ago.

“Do you remember,” I said to her, “when you made me enter that competition? And afterward, the neighbors wouldn’t let you take a bath.”

“It was worth it,” she said. “That competition gave you the confidence to be here today.”

“Mother, did you
ask
the men to give you money? Or did they offer?”

She smiled. “Why, they offered, of course. I never had to ask.” She set her hands primly in her lap. “It’s a skill we women have. We know how to talk to people so an idea seems to have occurred to them, even if we are the ones who really suggested it. That’s why we can do witchcraft and men cannot. But you, Satomi, I don’t want you to ever have to rely on such
tricks to survive. I want your life to be more secure. Whatever happens to me now, I know you will survive on your own talents. You won’t need to be like me, turning to men for help.”

It was a strange speech and I did not fully understand it at the time. “Do you ever wish you hadn’t married Mr. Horie? That we could return to life the way it was before?”

“Ha!” she laughed. “I know
you
do. Look, Satomi, you’ll be able to decide who or
if
you want to marry. But really, what choice did
I
have? Anyway, I like those two girls. It’s wonderful to be part of a family. I know you don’t understand.”

“I would have protected us, even if you hadn’t gotten married.”

“That’s the problem,” she sighed. “You thought you could be a woman and a man rolled up into one, and you couldn’t at that age. Soon you’ll be old enough.” She turned her head and gazed out the window.

We arrived at Ueno station early in the morning and, after a fitful night of sleep on the train, were eager for a nap. I wanted to find a
ryokan
as we had on our trip to Akita, but my mother disagreed. We would stay in a business hotel near Ueno Park. When we arrived, we had to use a cramped shower for bathing in lieu of a nice hot spring, then slept for a few hours. When we woke, we each bought a
bento
lunch and ate in the park.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said to her. “I want to see the Ginza.”

“We’ll need to take the subway for that.”

“Don’t you know how?” I asked, for I still believed she could do almost anything, and indeed, she navigated the maps and the fares and soon we were standing in that fabled neighborhood, in front of the Mikimoto storefront where girls with white gloves had just begun to remove strands of pearls from the windows to put away for the evening. Nearby was a small café selling Parisian pastries. Men stopped to look at my mother—she was so beautiful—and I felt pride because she was
mine
.

“Let’s eat cake,” I said, steering her into Fujiya, where I ordered a mont blanc because I’d once overheard someone describe it on a train. She ordered an éclair.

“Is the cream fresh?” she asked the waitress.

“It’s been refrigerated.”

“Yes, but is it
fresh
?”

“I will ask.”

I smiled. Here we were in Tokyo and my mother knew how to behave with such dignity. Even here everyone deferred to her.

“Like this.” She showed me how to hold my fork. “Mmm. Isn’t it delicious?”

“Like the moon,” I said.

Later we walked along the perimeter of the grounds of the imperial palace; the actual castle was buried deep within a forest of trees. We craned our necks to see past the palace walls, hoping for a glimpse of the emperor, but of course he was probably fast asleep already. Now it was night and taxis whizzed by and neon filled the sky. “I wish it was always this way,” I sighed.

“When you are rich and famous, it will be,” she said. “You can hire maids to look after Mr. Horie and Mineko and Chieko, and I can be with you.” She said it like a challenge.

“So you
do
wish it could just be us.”

She paused, then smiled at me a little sadly. “It’s just us right now.”

In the morning, she took me to the school, whose campus was made up of an impressive collection of very Western-looking brick buildings that dated from the Meiji period. Together we completed my registration and paperwork, all of which took longer than expected, and this meant she did not have time to get me settled into my living quarters.

“I will call you,” she said as we said good-bye at the entrance to the dormitory.

“Can’t you take the next train?”

She shook her head. “Mineko needs my help with some sewing.” She touched my face. “Don’t cry. You will come home at the end of the term.”

I waved halfheartedly and turned so she would not see my tears.

The inside of the dorm was musty and smelled of rosin from violin bows, old
tatami
mats, and freshly laundered curtains. I pretended to sneeze and wipe my eyes from dust in case anyone saw me crying. Then I began to search for the room I would share with four other women. A familiar shape was sitting in the middle of the
tatami
floor when I slid open the door. The surprise was enough to stanch my tears.

“Hello.” The girl turned to look at me. While I stared at her, she smiled and asked, “Are you still stealing competitions?” It was Shinobu, the Korean girl from the competition in Akita.

I set my bags down in the corner of the room. For the next four years, my roommates and I would move low wooden desks onto the floor to study. At night, we would put the desks away and pull
futons
out of a cupboard and unfurl them onto the floor. I would be alone only when I practiced the piano or went to the toilet.

“Are you still flirting with judges?” I asked.

“I can’t help it if I am charming!”

“Where did you go to high school?”

“Kikuzato. My parents moved to Nagoya just for me.”

“To make sure you could get into university in Tokyo.”

“I’ve always known my future.” She grinned. “That’s why I never bother with fortune tellers.”

We became friends. Our bond was partly inevitable, for we discovered early on in the semester that we were outsiders: Shinobu because she was Korean, and I because I was from the country. Most of the girls were from the major cities: Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka. They were here at Geidai because their parents wanted polished daughters who would either capture the eye of wealthy and accomplished husbands, or who could go back to their fancy neighborhoods to teach music. To be from the countryside, as we were, was to be an outsider forever. “How,” asked our roommate Sachiko, a soprano from the Ginza district of Tokyo, “did you even become interested in music?” We were in the large communal dining hall eating off heavy tables that had been there since the Meiji period.

“Everyone
likes
music,” Shinobu said.

“Yes, but most people where you are from become farmers, don’t they?”

I tried to set my chopsticks down carefully, but they clattered and one rolled and fell to the floor. In Japan, a single chopstick is a bad omen. “You think you know what the countryside is from posters you see in train stations, don’t you? The world is not so well defined.”

“Yes, but how did you even find a decent teacher?”

“There are teachers everywhere,” I said.

“Yes, but the best teachers stay in the cities. They study here, like we are doing now, then go back to their neighborhoods to teach the next group of students. And if they do come from the countryside, they don’t go
back
. So, how did you ever find a good enough teacher to get into Geidai?”

I put my palms on the table to anchor my weight and began to stand up, but Shinobu put her hand on my knee and kept me in place. I looked at her,
furious that she would prevent me from engaging Sachiko, but was startled to see her smiling that enchanting smile she’d used on the judges years ago in Akita. It was like being caught in a strong stage light and I was momentarily hypnotized into inaction.