Now the two women noticed her. After a brief, awkward moment, they invited her, “Come on up! Have a seat!” with expansive, welcoming gestures.
“No, no,” she laughed, stepping slowly up onto the tatami matting. “I can’t stay. I’m just here to say a quick prayer for Yo-chan…”
“Are those peach blossoms?” said Mrs. Kobayashi. Even in her grief, she was staunchly lipsticked, powdered, and pompadoured. “Maa, how lovely. Are they from the Morinaga vendor?”
“Soh,” affirmed Mrs. Asaki. “They’re nicer than cherry, I thought.” As if to make sure, she held out the long branches, with their reddish-pink blooms, at arm’s length. “Not quite as common.”
Mrs. Nishimura got up from her floor cushion and relieved her mother of the flowers. “Thank you, let me go arrange them,” she said, as if this was her home now and Mrs. Asaki was a guest.
Mrs. Asaki shuffled slowly down the hallway toward the other end of the house. She no longer had the energy to keep wrestling for her daughter’s heart. It was an indulgence, and she would have to give it up. At least her daughter would be there for her in old age. She would be taken care of, no matter what.
In the parlor, the glass panels had been opened to let in the spring air. The clear light, not yet tinged by the green foliage of summer, shone through the white gauze curtains and illuminated the currents of incense circulating in the room. She knelt before the funerary table, took out her prayer beads, and lit another incense stick. Before striking the miniature gong she glanced briefly at the framed photograph, taken four years ago during the O-bon festival. Mrs. Rexford looked relaxed and maternal in a summer cotton yukata. It touched Mrs. Asaki to see the womanly warmth that had replaced her niece’s expression of wary attention.
She was an old woman and had prayed at many wakes. The first had been her mother’s, when she was still a young girl in the country. “Pray with all your might,” her elders had told her. They explained how, during those thirty-five days, her mother would labor up a mountain wearing a white funerary robe and carrying a wooden staff, her forehead adorned with a small white triangle of cloth. “Dead spirits are reluctant to leave this world,” they had explained. “They’re afraid of the unknown so they keep looking back, they keep stalling. It’s our job to help them along. Each prayer we say is like a strong hand at her back, pushing her up that mountain. So encourage her. Tell her, ‘Keep going! Keep climbing, Mother! You’re almost there!’”
In this spirit Mrs. Asaki now prayed for her niece, physically leaning her torso into the words of the sutra. She remembered her athletic physique, her powerful tennis backhand, and she hoped those qualities would help to ease the difficulty of the climb. This one, she thought, will pass into the next world with a minimum of fuss. She’ll go bravely, in order to spare her mother.
As she prayed she felt as if she, too, was laboring up a mountain. For the first time in her healthy life, she felt unequal to the climb before her.
Mrs. Nishimura entered the parlor just as Mrs. Asaki was putting away her prayer beads. She set down a celadon bowl from which the plum branches, their bases secured on short iron spikes, rose up at random angles like the live branches of a tree.
“Well done!” said Mrs. Asaki, admiring this simple arrangement with maternal pride. Ikebana was her special talent, one she had successfully passed down to her daughter.
As if to make up for having lingered over tea earlier, Mrs. Nishimura now removed a clean cloth from her apron pocket and began polishing the varnished wood of the tokonoma. “The priest’s coming in a few hours,” she remarked. “And then the Izumis are coming tomorrow.” She ran her cloth over the surface with the sure movements of a woman who had grown accustomed to her surroundings. Mrs. Asaki knew what a thrill it must have been for her daughter to spend time here, inhabiting the Kobayashis’ intimate space for the first time since those long-ago days when she had played with the Kobayashi children.
“What time are they coming?” she asked, referring to the Izumis.
“Late afternoon, I think she said.” Mrs. Nishimura sounded wistful, for this meant her time here was drawing to its end.
Mrs. Asaki now rose to her feet, and an involuntary sigh of exertion escaped her.
“Are you still feeling tired, Mother?” Mrs. Nishimura sounded concerned. “I’ll bring home some of that fish broth.” She was making it from scratch to build up Mrs. Kobayashi’s strength, using kelp for its iodine and red snapper heads for the therapeutic benefits of their glands and cartilage. This had once been a common household practice, but in the last decade or so, Ueno housewives had switched over to dehydrated fish powder.
“No, no,” protested Mrs. Asaki. “She needs every drop of that broth. We both know she isn’t well.” Mrs. Kobayashi had suffered from episodes of weakened eyesight where everything skittered into flashing lights. Once, on her way home from the bathhouse, her knees had turned to jelly for no reason and she had collapsed onto the pavement.
“But you don’t seem well either,” Mrs. Nishimura said doubtfully.
“No, no,” Mrs. Asaki insisted, “I’m perfectly fine.”
“Well then, if you’re absolutely sure…”
“I’m sure.”
If only her daughter was more like Yoko, with that willful protectiveness that warmed the heart. “Nonsense, Mother,” she would have insisted. “There’s plenty in the pot. I’m bringing some home, and I’m going to make you drink it!”
chapter 26
But maybe Masako was born that way, thought Mrs. Asaki as she shuffled down the lane. Having grown up in the country, she knew firsthand how gestational environment affected the personalities of young animals. During her first pregnancy Mrs. Kobayashi had been happy; she had been in love. She was constantly nibbling on some newfangled treat Shohei had brought home: imported bananas, buttered popcorn, Chinese pork buns. But her second pregnancy was filled with worry and grief. She had scraped by-as they all had-on a substandard diet.
This very lane, now covered over with gravel, had once been their only source of greens. The neighbors had farmed it until it was nothing but a narrow dirt path cutting through rows of radishes and chrysanthemum shoots and spinach. In between their black-market trips to the country, the Asakis, too, had coaxed vegetables out of the meager city soil, which they fertilized with human excrement carried out discreetly in covered buckets.
The things that shape us, she thought.
Take her own life. What if she had adopted a child like Yoko? What if she had given birth to her own children? What kind of person would she have turned out to be?
And most important: what if she had allowed her only chance for a child to slip through her fingers?
War had created an opportunity. And Mrs. Asaki had grabbed it, with a cunning aggression that surprised even herself.
Heart pounding, she had broached the first part of her plan to her sister-in-law. “Why not marry Kenji?” she said. “He’s coming home from Manchuria soon. And he’s always been sweet on you.” It was the perfect solution. They both needed spouses; the children needed a mother and father. All their family problems could be solved at once.
This time, when she saw the trapped look on her sister-in-law’s face, she felt only a faint irritation.
Mrs. Kobayashi’s lips worked silently as she searched for a polite excuse. “But-his child is the same age as Masako!” she said finally. It was a good point. Second marriages, especially those with children from both sides, were best forgotten by the public. But how was this possible, with two siblings so close in age? It would be obvious they came from different parents.