As they ate, Sarah surreptitiously watched her mother and aunt. But they looked relaxed, even happy. They said little, laughing appreciatively at the men, who were joking about getting heatstroke at the dinner table. Mrs. Kobayashi pretended to be insulted, and the men grinned at her with their lean, handsome faces.
Mrs. Izumi lifted the teapot and refilled her big sister’s cup in an intimate gesture, accidentally spilling some drops in the process. Mrs. Rexford wiped them away with an ill-mannered swipe of her finger, glancing furtively at her mother as she did so. Mrs. Kobayashi didn’t notice. Both sisters giggled under their breath like naughty children.
Sarah felt sorry for her cousins, who were missing this dinner. Thinking of them reminded her of that strange regret she had felt this afternoon, when she knew she could never rejoin their world. She wondered if her mother had also known this feeling.
It was a fleeting thought in an otherwise golden hour. But in years to come, it would sadden her to remember two grown sisters giggling behind their mother’s back like the partners in crime they had never been.
Part 2
chapter 23
It was a sunny afternoon well into spring. Cherry petals, crisscrossed with bicycle tracks, littered the Ueno lanes like old snow.
Mrs. Asaki had come home from shopping downtown, dragging her tired feet through the dirty petals. She tapped on the Kobayashis’ kitchen door in order to drop off a package of seasonal grass dumplings. There was no answer. Gingerly, she slid open the door-the short curtain wasn’t drawn, so someone had to be home-and heard a strange keening coming from the family room. Slipping off her shoes, she stepped up onto the tatami floor.
Mrs. Kobayashi, seated at the low table, looked up with bloodshot eyes.
“Yoko’s dead…,” she said.
“Hehh?” Mrs. Asaki’s shopping bags, all five of them, hit the floor with a thud. She sank down beside her sister-in-law. “Yo-chan? Dead?!?”
“Sarah just telephoned.” Sarah was eighteen and in her first year of college. “Yo-chan and her husband were driving somewhere together, and…” Mrs. Kobayashi winced, as if talking hurt her.
“Was it an accident?”
“It was instantaneous…both of them.”
They continued to sit, at a loss for words.
It felt eerily similar to when Shohei had died in the war. Then, too, the news had come from afar. Like his daughter he had died in a strange land, suddenly and in his prime. Mrs. Asaki remembered young Mrs. Kobayashi saying, “I just got a telegram…,” with that same odd catch in her voice.
Mrs. Asaki’s grief for Shohei had been intense, for the siblings were close. After their mother died, she had cared for him like her own son.
Now she said helplessly, “It’s a terrible thing. A terrible thing.”
Mrs. Kobayashi nodded.
If only she would cry, thought Mrs. Asaki. In the old days, her sister-in-law had trusted her enough to cry in her presence. Together they had sobbed over Shohei’s death. It was the first time Mrs. Asaki had felt close to her. Until then, she had secretly resented this young woman who had captured her brother’s heart so easily and completely. She wasn’t proud of her feelings, and luckily Mrs. Kobayashi never suspected.
Mrs. Asaki’s dislike went deeper than just Shohei; she had felt it in her gut the first time they met. Her sister-to-be had worn a Western dress of sky blue, with a purple sash and a small bunch of violets pinned dashingly at the base of her V-neckline. She had an air-not arrogance so much as a kind of bright self-satisfaction, typical of girls who had been sheltered all their lives.
“What a fashionable dress,” Mrs. Asaki had said.
“Oh, it’s just cheap fabric…I’m embarrassed, seeing the beautiful kimonos here in Kyoto.” It was a perfectly correct response, but her expression belied the words.
Mrs. Asaki, confined to the Kyoto area all her life, had never had met anyone like her. She had never visited a dance hall. She had never worked outside the home. Every morning she followed her husband out into the lane, where she sent him off to work with a deep formal bow. Every Monday, he discreetly slipped her an envelope containing the household allowance for the week.
For the first time, the older woman had a dim sense of what she had missed: an unfettered, independent youth in which she might have tried out her own powers. Her envy was like physical pain. This would have surprised her Ueno neighbors if they had known, for in their eyes Mrs. Asaki’s beauty surpassed anything the newcomer had to offer. Locals compared her to the popular actress Sono Fujimoto, for they both had a doe-eyed beauty and drooping distinction. She was admired by men and women for her graceful way of sashaying in a kimono that made her look liquid, almost boneless.
That was a long time ago.
“I think I’ll lie down for a bit,” Mrs. Kobayashi said.
“Soh. Soh, of course. Would you like me to pull down some coverlets for you?”
“That’s very kind, but there’s really no need.”
Reluctantly, Mrs. Asaki took her leave. She hurried home to break the news to her daughter, the shopping bags banging against her legs.
Only then did she wonder what this might do to the carefully calibrated balance between the two houses.
In the Ueno neighborhood it was often said that Mrs. Asaki and her daughter made a picture-perfect pair. “Never a cross word between them, ne…,” they said with wistful sighs. “So respectful of each other-a pleasure to see.” One housewife had remarked, “They’re so polite. You’d almost think they were in-laws.” Only a careful observer would have noticed a certain thinness of flavor in their relationship, not unlike their cooking.
No one was more conscious of this than Mrs. Asaki herself.
How it started, she could not have said. She was better at acting than at reflecting. At any rate the process had been so gradual as to be invisible, like the growth of a child.
There was a time, decades ago, when Masako had been like any other child, with eyes only for her mother. Those early years still glowed in Mrs. Asaki’s memory for their simplicity, for their lack of the emotional ambivalence that would haunt her in later years. One of her favorite memories was the day she had taken little Masako to Umeya Shrine for her traditional Seven-Five-Three Blessing. She could still see it: a crowd of children aged seven, five, and three, dressed up in their best kimonos and tottering about in their shiny new slippers like bewildered little dolls. And among them was her precious Masako, the only girl to wear a tiny white fur wrapped around her neck over her pink silk kimono. Mrs. Asaki had sewn the entire outfit herself, sacrificing the last of her prewar finery.
And it had been worth it. “Look, Mama, I’m pretty,” little Masako had breathed, eyes shining as she reached up to pet the unaccustomed fur with the clumsy, reverent fingers of a five-year-old. And Mrs. Asaki had known a moment of keen joy.
That night at the Asaki house, dinner was subdued. Cooking was out of the question, so Mrs. Asaki phoned in a sushi order for both houses. The delivery boy had just come by on his bicycle, balancing on one hand a precariously high stack of lacquered wooden boxes. As usual, only the women and children sat at the low table. Mr. Nishimura didn’t come home until almost 9:00 P.M., a typical hour for a salaryman in middle management.
“I doubt if she’ll have any appetite,” said Mrs. Asaki. “But the sushi from Hideko is her favorite. If she can swallow even one or two bites, that’ll be better than nothing.”
There was a murmur of sympathetic agreement around the table. With guilty expressions, Momoko and Yashiko tried to eat more languidly. But it was hard, for sushi from Hideko was a rare and delectable treat.