The Laws of Evening: Stories (3 page)

“Mother-san, I’ll finish up here,” she often said brightly as we were cooking together in the kitchen. This, before I had barely even finished washing the rice! I had to fight back just to stay standing.

“A! a! that’s not necessary,” I would reply. “I’m happy to do it. Why don’t you just go relax, put on some cosmetics for when your husband comes home.” Do
something,
so I can have grandchildren.

“I’m already wearing cosmetics.” That short laugh of hers, like a yelp.

Our struggle progressed over the years until Yuri stopped playing fair. Her ultimate victory, driving me out of my own kitchen, finally arrived last year. To my credit, at least, it took several decades in coming. It was Toshihide, my own son, who delivered the blow to me in the garden, stepping cautiously across the moss to where I was bending over to feed the turtle in the stone vat. “Yuri has noticed,” he said slowly and loudly into my ear, “that more than once…left on…gas on the stove. More than…refrigerator…closed all the way. Perhaps…old age…. Would you mind…” From the corner of my eye I saw Toshihide’s Adam’s apple shifting about like the nose of a rabbit. Aaa, I should have had another son! Momoko should have lived.

My whole life has been a process of losing security. Or identity. Perhaps they are the same thing. I may not be a true snake. For each skin I have shed, there has been no new replacement.

I sit upstairs now, relieved of all my household duties, and look down at the smoke rising from Koh-Dai Temple. I wonder if the monks there contemplate life’s cycle as they tend the fire, or if their mundane task is simply a welcome break from more serious duties. Leaves and twigs and straw, all leaving behind their inherent forms and evaporating into space. Next spring their ashes will reemerge without a trace of their former characteristics: as moss, as an earthworm, as a cherry tree whose fruit will be eaten by children in summer then converted to human matter. A pitiless world, this: refusing you the slightest sense of self to cling to.

It is two weeks later when I go for a stroll down to the Kamo River, which is three blocks from home in the opposite direction of the temple. I shuffle through the dappled shade of maple trees and hear cicadas shrilling
meeeeee
overhead, which is impossible in November; a combination, no doubt, of ingrained memory and the hearing aid I wear on my walks in case I meet someone I know.

I head toward a sunny bench overlooking the water. These days walking exhausts me. The river flows past, sunlight glinting on its surface like bright bees swarming over a hive. I can actually hear the bees buzzing, so I take out my hearing aid and put it in my handbag. I sun myself like this for a long time, eyes half shut. I conjure up from memory the surface sounds of the river, its tiny slurps and licks as countless currents tumble over one another. I remember too the soft roar in flood time of the undercurrent as it drags silt and pebbles out to sea.

The music comforts me. I imagine dissolving into the water, being borne along on its current. Something slowly unclenches within my chest. I am pared down, I think suddenly, to Masahide’s poem. And I sense with a slow-mounting joy how wide this river is, and how very deep, with its waters rolling out toward an even vaster sea; and the quiet surge of my happiness fills my chest to bursting.

“Y
OU HAVE A
sensibility for elegant manners,” my tea ceremony teacher once told me, “the way a musician has an ear for pitch.” Even before I could read, mothers were pointing out my floor bows as examples to their daughters: spine straight, its line barely breaking even when my head approached the floor; rear end clamped to heels the entire time with tensed quadriceps. As a teenager I performed the “admiration of vessel” step at tea ceremonies with an artistry beyond my years. I held out the ceramic bowl before me with arms neither straight nor bent, but rounded in a pleasing curve. Tilting my head just so, rotating the bowl in my hands the requisite three times, I lost myself in the countless subtle ways glaze changes color when shot through with sunlight. Such rituals of etiquette lifted me to an aesthetic plane, where often I had the sense—though I could not have articulated it then—of life being a dance, to be performed with stately grace.

But my bearing lacked that ultimate essence of refinement, described by elders as
shibusa.
It had to do with something more than mere maturity and was hard to define. The Buddha’s smile of sorrowful sentience had this quality. A maple leaf in autumn, slowly twisting during its long fall to earth, evoked
shibusa;
that same leaf in midsummer, growing healthy and green from its branch, did not. “Aaa, it will come—” I remember my teacher saying with a sigh.

As a young bride, I was besotted with my husband, Yukio. He was square of face, with a firm straight line of a mouth and hair slicked back from his brow with immaculate comb lines. More than once, others commented on his likeness to those fine three-quarter profiles of samurai painted on New Year’s kites. Like a samurai, Yukio was well versed in martial arts—fifteen years of kendo training—and displayed, unconsciously, those fluid transitions of movement so prized in Noh theater. He was successful in business as well: a fast-rising executive at Kokusai Kogyo, an import-export conglomerate. Years later this company would be disbanded in the aftermath of our military defeat, but at the time it had the clout and prestige of today’s Mitsubishi.

Early in our marriage Yukio was transferred overseas, to the Chinese province of Pei-L’an. It was 1937, seven months after the province had fallen to Japanese rule. “Don’t forget to write!” my girlfriends clamored; then, in hushed tones, “And give us details! Those women’s bound feet…”

One would think that sailing away to China would have exposed me to the cruelties of life. Today there is fervent talk on the radio of our soldiers’ atrocities there: villages burned, women raped, soldiers butchered in prison camps. But all I knew of Pei-L’an province was our executives’ housing compound: nineteen eaves sweeping up, pagoda-style, their ceramic roof shingles glazed a deep Prussian blue. The high wall enclosing our compound was white stucco, and the large main gate (through which we women passed only when escorted by our husbands) was topped with a miniature stylized roof in matching blue tile. I had little curiosity about how the region beyond had been defeated, and it would have been ungallant, ill-bred even, for Yukio to disclose the morbid details of war to a young bride. I wonder now how much he, as a mere civilian, knew of all this at the time. At any rate, I was more interested in immediate events, like the ripening of persimmons in autumn. That fine play of color—bright orange globes against the dark blue—gave me stabs of delight; it added an exotic touch to this new foreign experience.

The company had hired nineteen housemaids from the local village—one for each house. They arrived each day at dawn and were let in by the compound guards. Sometimes Yukio and I, drowsing under our futon, heard their faint voices coming up the main path, the harsh grating of consonants making the women sound as if they were perpetually quarreling.

Xi-Dou, the maid assigned to our home, was about my age. I sneaked curious looks at her while she worked; back home, domestic servants were rare. Her feet, far from being bound, were even bigger than mine. But despite her callused hands and faded mandarin tunic, she had a pleasing face, with full lips and wide-set eyes. She never laughed and only rarely smiled—wistfully, with a slight pucker of brows. Those smiles caused me intense guilt over my own newlywed bliss, which seemed selfish and indulgent in contrast. “Yukio,” I said one night when we were lying in bed gazing up at the shadowed beams of the ceiling, “I wish Xi-Dou could join us for dinner.”

I heard the slow crunch of his buckwheat-husk pillow as he turned his head in my direction. “Xi-Dou? The maid?”

“I saw the poor thing crouching on a stool in the kitchen,” I said, “eating our leftovers. It ruins the harmony of this home for me, seeing something like that.”

“Maa, such a gentle heart you have…,” Yukio murmured, his forefinger along my cheek as slow and deft as the rest of his movements. “And a face to match…. But”—his finger trailed away—“that’s the procedure with servants. I assure you she doesn’t take it personally. The food here is a lot better than what she’s getting at home.”

“It seems impolite, when she’s already right here in the house,” I said.

Yukio propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at me with his handsome samurai face. “Darling?” he said; in the moonlight his brows lifted in amusement like dark wings. “We just defeated these people in a
war
.”

I did not reply.

“I’m not suggesting,” Yukio said finally, “that etiquette—or consideration, whatever—shouldn’t exist in wartime. Far from it. People need it to cope with life. But your nebulous gesture isn’t practical. Ne? It would give her false hopes, make her life look bleaker in contrast.”

“Wouldn’t it give her—dignity? Or—” My voice trailed off in embarrassment. He was right, I saw that now; what would Xi-Dou want with the company of Japanese strangers?

“True kindness, in my opinion,” said Yukio, “is good pay.” He kissed my forehead once, twice, then fell back on his pillow with a scrunch. “Give her occasional tips, how about that? It’ll do you both good.” In a moment I heard his soft snore.

I was not fully satisfied by Yukio’s solution. On the one hand it pleased my sense of order: for each situation, there should be a proper and logical course of action. Yet some additional dimension was missing, though I could not have defined it.

His comment interested me:
people need it to cope with life
. That had not been my own experience. I had never used etiquette to “cope.” But I understood how its ethereal quality, like temple incense, might lift one out from the realm of daily cares.

I continued gazing up at the ceiling. These Chinese roofs were lower than I was used to, pressing down upon me in the darkness. Maa—I thought—whether in kendo or in matters of judgment, Yukio always hits the heart of a matter with one sure blow.

Yukio soon became friends with another executive in our compound, Mr. Nishitani. They were the only two men in management who were still in their thirties. Both were tall and striking, with that genial assurance that comes from a lifetime of excellent schooling and privileged treatment. Nishitani-san, a bachelor, began dining frequently at our house.

In certain ways Nishitani-san was the opposite of my husband. With Yukio one got the impression that behind each word or motion was a hidden reserve of strength, of discipline. It was evident in the way he told jokes at company parties: so deadpan that when he delivered his punch line it took a moment for his audience to react. Only after they burst into laughter, roaring and shrieking, did Yukio give in to laughter himself, his rich baritone notes pealing forth from well-conditioned lungs.

Nishitani-san, by contrast, carried all his energy on the surface. His smiles were dazzling, sudden and unexpected like flashes of sunlight on water; the older wives whispered among themselves that those smiles took your breath away, quite! Somebody once said that even the air around Nishitani-san seemed to shimmer. In excitement his voice rose and his cowlick shot up like a tuft of grass; in a burst of good humor he was not above breaking into some Kabuki chant—right in public—or improvising a silly jig. “Won’t you ever learn to behave—” I chided him with motherly resignation, though I was five years younger than he. Compared to Yukio, Nishitani-san was just a bit boyish for my taste. But that quality would later endear him to my little boy, Kin-chan, with whom I had recently learned I was pregnant.

Xi-Dou, our maid, fancied Nishitani-san. On the evenings he came over she plaited her hair loosely, draping it over one shoulder in a long gleaming braid instead of pinning it up into a bun. On a few occasions I could have sworn her lips were faintly stained with lipstick. One of mine? I wondered. I never mentioned this to Yukio, but it did occur to me, once or twice, that “coping with life” was not such a clear-cut business as he had implied. Certain needs, however impractical, will transcend all others. From the corner of my eye I watched Xi-Dou as she backed away from our table, clutching the empty serving tray to her chest, then turned to the door with one last look over her shoulder at Nishitani-san. As far as I could tell, he was oblivious to her presence.

Nishitani-san brought out a side of Yukio that I did not often see. When it was just the two of us, my husband was reverently tender or else serious and philosophical. But when Nishitani-san came to dinner he became witty, full of one amusing anecdote after another. Nishitani-san, who flushed easily when drinking sake, responded in kind, determined not to be outdone. I would laugh and laugh, gasping for breath, forgetting even to cover my mouth with my hand, till the muscles in my cheeks ached.

Those were such happy times, right before the Second World War.

Sometimes I left them—either to give Xi-Dou instructions or else to use the bathroom, something I did frequently now that I was expecting. I was not yet far enough along to feel the baby inside me, but surely it was soaking up all this laughter, growing stronger and finer as a result. In the privacy of the hallway I often stopped to tuck in wisps of hair which, on such evenings, invariably came loose from my chignon. Before me was a small window with a view of the Xiang-Ho mountains. Beyond the pagoda-style roofs I could make out their blue outline in the gathering dusk, high and jagged in the distance. And I, heartbeat still high from the hilarity of the evening, would stand in the hallway and gaze out for a while before going on my way. I thought of Yukio’s deep laughter, of his large hands; of this coming child and of business continuing to boom—and I forced myself to be calm, to concentrate on those somber mountains darkening and fading beyond the compound walls that enclosed us.

From the next room I could hear the men’s deep voices, laughing.

I have learned since that no experience lives on in memory. Not in the true sense. It becomes altered, necessarily, by subsequent events. My memory of China is steeped in a sense of encroaching doom that was surely not present then, like a scene flooded with the last rays of sunset.

War was declared in 1941, when Kin-chan was three years old. Kokusai Kogyo pulled up its Pei-L’an branch, and we employees sailed back in shifts to our various homes in Japan. Nishitani-san sailed home to some town near Nagasaki; the three of us came home to Ueno. Bombs dropped on our city; there were fires. One day, while I was standing in a rationing line on the other side of town, a bomb dropped on our neighborhood. What terrible luck that Yukio was home on leave that week; I had left him and Kin-chan in the garden, playing hide-and-seek. Our son was five years old.

Over the decades, this period has faded in my memory. Only occasionally now will it seep out into my body, staining my saliva with a faint coppery taste, which makes me think that somewhere, within the tissues and nerves of my body, I am bleeding.

One morning a year after the surrender—Kin-chan would have turned eight by now—an odd thing happened.

I was crouched beside the kitchen door out in the alley, watering my potted chrysanthemums. In one hand, I held the watering can; with the other, I was twisting off a browned leaf here and there. Hearing the slow
k’sha k’sha
of gravel, I turned around to see a seafood peddler pass me in the alley, bowed under the yoke of his pannier. His blue jacket looked unfamiliar; he was not from our neighborhood.

This was not unusual; residents of other areas often used our alley as a shortcut to Kamogawa Bridge on their way downtown.

As the man bowed slightly, in gratitude and apology for using this shortcut, our eyes met briefly. Then he stopped, a startled look on his face. He lowered his baskets, brimming with shijimi shells and pickled seaweed, onto the gravel before me. Something about him looked familiar—perhaps the shape of his lips, curled up slightly at the ends as if to get a jump start on a smile. But I could not place him.

The peddler stepped toward me, then bowed deeply. It was a well-trained bow, slow and straight-backed, unsettling in a man of his station. I hurriedly rose, still holding my watering can. “Goto-san, do you remember me?” he said. “I’m Nishitani. I once had the pleasure of your friendship, and your husband’s, back in Pei-L’an.”

Again our eyes met, and I glanced away. The shame in his look made my heart contract with pain. Even for such times, this was extreme misfortune. I fancied I could feel his loss of face pulsing out toward me, like heat waves.

We exchanged pleasantries. Nishitani-san had lines on either side of his mouth, like parentheses. Had they been there before? Something seemed different about his features—he had lost that shimmer, I think now, which had once played upon them.