Turning her head, she looked out the window. The hills were close, invigoratingly close. Rice paddies spread out before her; here and there, dirt paths wound away into the hilly terrain. In the corridors of her memory she saw similar roads stretching away: through rice paddies, through canopies of trees. Many times, after a long day in the fields, the locals had ridden home on a wooden cart, facing backward with their feet dangling over the edge. It struck her now, at eighty-three years of age, that this image-a dirt road stretching away behind her-was the most evocative and defining memory of her childhood. She had one early memory-perhaps it had been her first-of such a road stretching away into a blurry sort of greenery. She had seen it from her mother’s lap, the back of her head resting securely against her mother’s breast. It was so long ago it no longer felt like her own memory but a scene from some nostalgic television drama.
And here she was decades later, a success in life. She knew what her fellow train passengers saw: a well-dressed elderly woman surrounded by a devoted brood. A woman with a secure old age ahead of her. And yet…
She tried to remember how it had felt to sit in her mother’s lap. She tried to picture herself being held close, being coddled and cared for, and something stirred deep in her core. She felt her eyes blur over with tears.
“Would you like a throat drop?” she heard Mrs. Kobayashi say. She must have noticed something, for her voice was gentle.
Mrs. Asaki nodded her head with a little bow of thanks, not because she wanted one but because it was the easiest thing to do. The candy was an old-fashioned flavor she hadn’t tasted in years, brown sugar, and it spread out in her mouth with surprising and comforting sweetness. This, coupled with the unexpected tenderness from her sister-in-law, filled her with a tremulous sense of gratitude.
After a while, still sucking on the throat drop, she turned to the woman sitting beside her. So many times during the war they had come home like this on the train, tired and spent. Once again she had the sensation, as she had at the open grave, of blinking once to find the grieving young woman beside her transformed into a grieving old woman. Who knew Mrs. Kobayashi would lose yet another daughter? Mrs. Asaki, knowing her own guilt in the matter, felt a rush of sorrow.
She said, “Yo-chan was a good child.”
“Yes.”
“She was happy,” Mrs. Asaki persisted. “She loved passionately all her life.”
Mrs. Kobayashi nodded her thanks. The corners of her mouth wobbled involuntarily, for it had been a long day. This was a dangerous time for both of them; they were old women and they had been holding things together for a very long time.
“She was a good child,” Mrs. Asaki repeated. Reaching out timidly, she patted her sister-in-law’s hand. Mrs. Kobayashi did not draw it away. Instead she turned up her palm to meet Mrs. Asaki’s hand with her own. At this surprising gesture, long denied her and coming from such an unlikely source, the old woman felt her throat constrict.
“The way you raised that child,” she said finally, “was a success.” In this heightened moment of compassion and remorse and gratitude, she was moved to offer up the most private, painful part of herself. It was the first time she would admit this to another living being. It would also be the last.
“I could never get Masako to come close to me,” she said.
Part 3
chapter 32
Only during the June rainy season did one notice how many hydrangea bushes there were in the Ueno neighborhood. Normally they were invisible, tucked into corners or overshadowed by more imposing greenery. But now, against the backdrop of wooden houses sodden black from the rain and the vibrant green of surrounding foliage, the clusters of pink and blue and lavender glowed with an eerie intensity. Their litmus hues leapt out at Mrs. Nishimura’s eye as she walked through the lanes beneath her umbrella.
She was coming home from choir practice. Choir always left her with a euphoric afterglow. It was only when she sang, her voice cleaving the air in powerful arcs of sound, that she felt something rising up within her that was equal to any glory the world could offer. Today they had practiced “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” for an upcoming concert, and its inspired strains had echoed through her head during the bus ride home.
Now that melody faded as she attuned herself to the outdoor world: the intimate hush of the lanes, the somnolent drip, drip, drip as light rain made pinpricks of sound on the umbrella and on the surrounding foliage. Bach’s grand surges didn’t fit, somehow, with the peaceful domesticity of these lanes. Mrs. Nishimura was content to leave him behind in the practice hall.
As she breathed in the warm, earthy smells of wet wood and moss, a more fitting melody stole through her head-a child’s ditty synonymous with rainy days. It was about your mother waiting for you after school with an extra umbrella because it was unexpectedly raining. She hummed it under her breath: pichi pichi chapu chapu (that was the sound of splashing water), lan lan lan.
It was a catchy tune in its own way, and just as hard to get out of her head. It was from a past time, a past generation. The lyrics mentioned janome-traditional umbrellas made of heavy oiled paper-which conjured up old-fashioned images of mother and child walking home past frogs croaking in the rice paddies. But certain things never changed: even in Mrs. Nishimura’s youth, whenever it rained unexpectedly there had been a cluster of Ueno mothers standing outside the school gate, holding plastic umbrellas for their children. She remembered that split-second moment of concern, shared by all her classmates: Did my mother come? But she had never truly worried, for her mother was there each and every time.
When her own daughters were small, Mrs. Nishimura, too, had waited outside their school gate (umbrellas with pictures of Ultraman and Lion Man were popular with the boys; for the girls, manga heroines such as ballerinas or stewardesses). As they walked home she had sung the rainy-day song to them, just as her own mother had sung it to her. They paused often to inspect the hydrangea bushes: as small children all knew, their broad leaves attracted snails when it rained.
Ara ara, the song went, see that poor child soaking wet, crying under the willow tree. I’ll give her my umbrella, Mother, and you can shield me under yours…
Ever since learning of her own adoption, she had identified strongly with that abandoned child under the willow tree. But oddly, it hadn’t taken away from her memories of early childhood. That feeling of being safe and cared for was still clear in her mind-of walking beside her mother and looking out at a wet, dreary world from beneath the tinted shade of a red umbrella. She still had a child’s distorted image of the rainy lanes, surreally barren of anything but the pink and blue hydrangea blooms that had pierced her young mind with the beauty of their colors.
She approached the snack shop. Mrs. Yagi, clad in her work apron, was standing under the awning and counting out change to a tall man pocketing a pack of cigarettes. The shopkeeper gave a quarter-bow in her direction, and Mrs. Nishimura returned it with a smile without breaking stride.
Before turning into the lane, she passed the Kobayashis’ long wooden wall with the hinged vendor door that opened out onto the street. Nowadays no one used these doors, with their uncomfortably low lintels, except to put out trash on collection days.
Behind this wall was the Kobayashis’ kitchen. Every so often, if Mrs. Nishimura walked very close along the narrow cement ditch, she could hear the faint thuds of a cleaver against the cutting board. As a child, playing here on the street, she and her playmates had sniffed appreciatively as unfamiliar smells wafted out into the lane: Chinese aromas of garlic or ground peanuts, a whiff of Western tomato sauce. Back then, before the modernization of Kyoto, such dishes had been redolent of the exotic. Mrs. Kobayashi’s ingredients were common enough-she shopped at the open-air market just like everyone else-but she combined them in unusual ways. “She grew up in a port city,” the neighbor women said. “She has high-level tastes, that one.”