Sarah had thought the same thing ten years ago, when the burbling of pigeons brought back her eight-year-old self.
“Where are the pigeons?” she said now. “I don’t hear any.”
“Aaa, they’re all gone. The temple ban finally had its effect.”
They ate silently. Sarah’s thoughts returned to her grandfather. It was a pity that as she grew into womanhood, the scrim separating adult and child had never lifted between them as it had with her grandmother. Now he was gone, and his inner life would always be a mystery. He must have been lonely, she thought. He must have had love to give, though much of it had gone unclaimed.
chapter 38
Sarah and her grandmother were walking to the open-air market. The morning was hushed and gray, absorbing sound and turning the lanes into a silent movie.
“Oh, that smell!” she cried, breathing in the long-forgotten aroma of burning leaves. Back home in California, backyard fires were against the law.
“Soh, it’s that time of year,” agreed her grandmother, as if humoring a child.
This was the first time Sarah had visited in November. The pungent smell took her far back in time, to her kindergarten days in the Kyoto hills. During recess their teacher had tended a small fire in the center of the playground and raked out indigenous sweet potatoes, blistered and blackened, for the children’s afternoon snack.
They approached Murasaki Boulevard and crossed the intersection. “A! A!” Mrs. Kobayashi exclaimed. “Good thing I remembered! Remind me, if I forget, to buy shiso leaves. You know, to wrap the sashimi in.”
The open-air market had changed since the seventies. There was a new supermarket, where they bought a small bundle of shiso leaves. The store wasn’t as big as the supermarkets in California; the aisles were too narrow for shopping carts. But it was just as well, for once-a-week shopping was still an alien concept for Ueno women. The supermarket was popular for its cheap produce, mass-farmed and shipped in from distant places. Women had stopped buying locally grown vegetables; they were too expensive during the economic recession. Vendor carts were a pleasant rarity. The sun-browned farmers in their old-fashioned garb seemed like relics from another era.
“This street’s so quiet!” said Sarah. Vendors no longer hawked their wares with loud, exuberant bellows. Cash registers had replaced abacuses and jingling money bags.
“Remember how quiet the weavers’ alley was just now?” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “That’s the way it was in wartime, when I was a young woman.”
Sarah remembered her mother’s comment about looms moving in tandem with the stock market. “It’s odd,” she said, “that even in this bad economy, there’re all these new buildings. So many things changing.”
“Not everyone’s hurting, I guess.”
They approached the “expensive” fish store. The open-air market had two seafood stores: the expensive place with the good-quality seafood, and the cheap place with affordable seafood, mostly imported.
“You’re visiting at the perfect time,” her grandmother told her. “The fish right now, the big heavy cold-current ones, they’re at their fattiest this time of year. Sashimi is at its prime!”
Sarah noticed there were no customers in line. Plenty of people were bending over the crushed-ice display, but no one was buying.
One of the vendors, a shrewd older woman, came out from behind the counter to show Mrs. Kobayashi her most expensive items. “Madam!” she said by way of greeting. “After your granddaughter goes home to America you’ll be kicking yourself, with all due respect, for not letting her taste this highest-quality roe! At its absolute prime, madam, this time of year!” She waited, with a complacent smile, as Mrs. Kobayashi wavered. Reaching out a hand, she let it hover dramatically over a display of enormous scallops. “Sashimi grade,” she said simply. “Flown in a few hours ago from Hokkaido.”
It occurred to Sarah that she hadn’t heard her grandmother bargain in a long time. That practice must have gone out of style.
In no time at all, the woman was wrapping up their fatty sashimi plus several other unplanned purchases. She rang up the total on a cash register. “It’ll be good for the young miss,” she reassured Mrs. Kobayashi, “to eat good-quality seafood prepared properly in her granny’s kitchen. In America ”-her eyes slid over in Sarah’s direction-“those people eat their fish cooked in vegetable oil.”
Sarah laughed, tickled by her expert salesmanship. The vendor responded with a homey smile, revealing a gold tooth.
“You have your mother’s laugh, don’t you,” she said wonderingly. “Startles me every time, miss, coming from that American face.”
Sarah, who had long ago outgrown her insecurity over her Caucasian features, could appreciate this paradox. “She’s right, you know,” she told her grandmother as they walked away. “I don’t resemble anyone on my Japanese side.”
“You have lots of family characteristics,” Mrs. Kobayashi said firmly. She counted them on her fingers: a widow’s peak, a thumb that joined her hand at exactly the same angle that her grandfather Shohei’s had, a floating cyst on her neck that had been passed down through several generations of Kobayashis.
“And let’s not forget your voice.” Sarah’s voice was identical to her mother’s. In the early days, whenever Sarah said “moshi moshi” over the telephone, Mrs. Kobayashi had felt a wild lurch of hope that her daughter’s death had all been a big mistake.
“And on top of all that,” the old woman concluded, “you have the same open presence your mother and your grandfather had.”
Sarah pondered this as they turned homeward. She wondered what her grandfather Shohei would think if he could see them now: an unlikely pair! She imagined his shock and bewilderment at seeing his own wife walking alongside an American, channeling to her all the love that had once gone to him.
Walking abreast, they turned off the main street. They passed the Kinjin-ya teahouse and entered a narrow residential lane that headed west toward So-Zen Temple. On Sarah’s last visit this lane had been gravel; now it was paved. Their shoes made flat slapping sounds against the blacktop, and Sarah missed the gentle k’sha k’sha that had so often reminded her of walking on new-fallen snow.
The sun broke through briefly, its pale light slanting tentatively into the lane. Many of the rickety doors had been replaced by sturdier models with slats of brown plastic instead of traditional wood. One corner house had been torn down altogether and replaced with a Western-style model home, complete with white aluminum siding and a door that opened with a knob. Hanging from the knocker was a painted wooden cutout of a puppy, holding in its smiling mouth a nameplate spelling out THE MATSUDAS in English letters.
A bicycle bell tinged behind them. They backed off to the side, careful not to bump into a motor scooter parked beside one of the doors. A straight-backed housewife rode past with a bow of thanks, her wire basket filled with newspaper-wrapped groceries.
“We’ll have this sashimi for lunch, with hot rice,” Mrs. Kobayashi said as they resumed walking abreast. “You’re not here for very long, so we need to plan the menu carefully. We can’t afford to let a single meal go to waste.” Energized by this task before her, she walked briskly. “Do you have any cravings?” she said. “If you do, tell me now.”
“Grandma?” Sarah asked. “Whatever happened to the little lane that hadn’t changed in generations?” That summer day, when she and her mother had strolled home after eating azuki ice, already belonged to a different lifetime. “You know, the lane with the thatched roofs?”
Mrs. Kobayashi gave a short, puzzled laugh as Sarah described it to her.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “They’ve torn a lot of those down.” Then she suddenly stopped short. “Sarah-chan,” she said, “do you remember if we locked the kitchen door when we left?”