From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Fall 1991, Vol. XIII, No. 4
Because they had both been married once before, the ceremony was short. Her aunt Aya wore a light gray kimono and Mr. Kimura a plain dark suit. They sat in the middle of Yuki’s grandparents’ largest room, the one the Buddhist altar was in. The grandparents, Uncle Kenji and his wife, and Yuki sat in a circle around them. While the priest in his white robe waved a green festooned wand over the couple and chanted, Yuki thought of a folk story her mother had told her a long time ago. Eight children sat in a circle singing and playing. Sometimes, a ninth child, neither a boy nor a girl, appeared and then disappeared. Soon the other eight noticed and began to chant, “Someone’s missing, someone’s here, someone’s missing, someone’s here,” while the ninth child, the pale one, continued to appear and disappear. The chant whirled around Yuki’s mind the way the bare trees of February had flown past the train window early that morning on her way. For the second time after her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, her father had allowed her to come to the house of her mother’s parents in the country. Coming home, her mother used to call this journey.
The priest left shortly after the ceremony. Yuki went to the kitchen to help her uncle’s wife Sayo prepare the food. It was to be a simple traditional dinner of celebration: rice with red azuki beans, greens, a red sea bream. Sayo was already cleaning the fish at the counter. She was expecting their first child in less than a month. She stood back from the counter a little to leave room for her stomach and let her shoulders lean forward over the cutting board. The knife in her right hand made swishing sounds as she scaled the fish.
“I should do that,” Yuki said, standing behind her, uncertain. She didn’t think she could do it.
“Oh, no, I like preparing fish.” Sayo didn’t look back. After she finished scaling the fish, she cut a long straight opening in its stomach and took out dark red parts. Yuki looked away. The fish would be baked whole. Its skin would be slightly wrinkled but glistening, tinted orange, and underneath, the flesh would be packed like fallen peony petals, pinkish white. Yuki could never eat the fish and Uncle Kenji would make fun of her the way he’d made fun of her squeamishness all her life, those times he’d gone fishing for bass or pike and she’d refused to eat any of it. She had not seen Kenji or the others for the last three years; she had never met Sayo till this morning. Still, she knew that they would tease her. She wasn’t sure whether the thought amused or irritated her. At home, her stepmother often cooked things Yuki could not eat, pink shrimp with their tiny legs and feelers curled around themselves, little clams in their shells, boiled quail eggs smaller than her thumbnail. Sick to her stomach, Yuki would sit at the table sipping her glass of water. Her stepmother would say nothing. As soon as Yuki got up from the table, she would reach out for the plate and scrape the untouched food into the wastebasket, glaring at Yuki but still saying nothing.
“I’ll manage the fish,” Sayo said. “You can wash the greens and the rice.”
Yuki went to the sink and washed first the rice and then the greens. The greens consisted of Chinese cabbage and the leaves and tiny buds of kikuna, edible spring mums. They reminded her of the daisies and nasturtiums her mother had put into salads, straight from her garden, fragrant and bittersweet. They tasted the way Yuki had always imagined light to taste. She left the greens drying in the colander and went to the cupboards to take out the plates and bowls they would need to set the table.
Even after three years, she knew exactly where everything was kept— her grandmother’s good white china with designs in relief of tiny petals, the red lacquered chopsticks. It was the same as when she was a child; she’d come home to her mother’s people every summer and find everything in the same place, year after year. In her father’s house, her stepmother had thrown out the things that had belonged to Yuki’s mother and rearranged the cupboards with her shiny blue china. Early Saturday mornings, Yuki went downstairs for orange juice before she went to a track meet, and she still missed her mother’s unglazed white goblets with a honey-colored tint, how the orange juice looked like the full moon in them.
She put the china on a tray and walked to the room with the altar. There, they would set up the black japan table and celebrate their festive dinner before the spirits of their ancestors, just as they’d done on other special occasions.
Still, not everything was the same. As she entered the room, she saw that her uncle had already set up the table and everybody was sitting around it, drinking the tea Sayo had brought earlier. Aya and Mr. Kimura sat side by side. Her grandmother, her grandfather, and her uncle Kenji each took one side of the table. In the last three years, her grandmother had grown much thinner while her grandfather had grown stout. Her grandmother still sounded pretty much the same. She talked very fast in her high-pitched voice. Her grandfather, though, sometimes paused in the middle of his sentence now, to collect his thoughts or his breath, Yuki could not tell which. He spoke much more slowly than he used to. During the short wedding ceremony, he was crying, not openly, but still tears were welling out of his eyes and rolling down the side of his nose while he blinked. At Yuki’s mother’s funeral, he had not cried. He’d said repeatedly that her face in death had shown no suffering, that she was at peace going into the spirits of their ancestors, that they should be thankful for that peace. Yuki had been able to tell his sadness only by the way his voice cracked from time to time, although he was trying to hide even that.
Yuki knelt next to her grandmother, set the tray down on the tatami floor, and began to distribute the plates and bowls. She sat seven places. The others, except her grandfather, continued to talk about Mr. Kimura’s job at the National University in Kobe. Her grandfather was silently watching Yuki.
“We should set another place, shouldn’t we?” he said abruptly. “For your mother.”
Yuki’s grandmother turned away from the conversation. All talk seemed to cease. Yuki stopped setting the table, the last two sets of chopsticks still in her hand.
“What a strange thing to say,” her grandmother said. She forced a short laugh. “We’ll be bringing bad luck on the wedding. We don’t want that.”
Her grandfather said nothing. Mr. Kimura resumed the conversation. Yuki put down the chopsticks and lifted the lid of the teapot. It was only half empty. Still, she picked it up and stood up to go.
“Leave the teapot and sit with us now,” Kenji said.
Everybody stopped talking and nodded toward Yuki. She sat down.
“Mr. Kimura’s been telling us about the National University,” Kenji continued. “It’s a shame that you’re not going there in April.”
“It’s too late to think about that,” Yuki said. “The exams are already over.” She’d told them that after her graduation from high school in March, she planned to go to a small college in Nagasaki to study art.
“But you have good grades,” Aya said. She looked toward her new husband and then back to Yuki. “He thinks he can arrange a special exam for you in the next week or so. If you do well, you can still get in. Some people always decide to go somewhere else at the last minute. You can take their place.”
Mr. Kimura also turned to Yuki. “I’m sure you’ll do well on the exam. You don’t have to think of me as having done you a favor. You’d be doing us a favor by coming to our school.”
“Thank you,” Yuki said, addressing just Mr. Kimura. “But my mind’s already made up. I’m going to Nagasaki. I’ve been planning it for a long time.”
“Why Nagasaki?” her grandmother said. “It’s so far away, clear on another island. We’ll never be able to see you. Besides, your uncle’s school has a better reputation.”
“I couldn’t care less about reputation. The school I’m going to is a good school for art. I don’t think it matters about going so far away. It isn’t as though we’ve seen each other a lot in the last six years anyway.”
Her grandmother looked at her in silence. Her eyes had turned a paler brown than they used to be. They looked oddly defenseless.
“You have to understand,” Yuki continued, trying to be patient, “if I were to go to the National University in Kobe, it would be difficult for me to live away from my father and his wife. They’d worry about what people would say; people would think it strange for me to be moving away from home to go to a school only twenty minutes away by train. If I go to Nagasaki, though, they can tell everybody that I’d gone so far away, that naturally, I’d had to move out.”
“You’ve talked about this with them?” Kenji asked.
“No,” Yuki said, off her guard. Everyone stared at her. There was nothing but to tell the truth. “Actually,” she said, “I haven’t talked about any of my plans with them. But I know what they think. I did mention going to Nagasaki to my stepmother once, about a month ago, but I don’t know if she was listening. She was cutting up something for my father’s lunch. She didn’t even look in my direction when I spoke.” Yuki took a deep breath. My mother would have wanted me to be honest, she thought.
Nobody said anything for a while. Kenji was picking up and putting down a pair of chopsticks. Her grandmother poured herself another cup of tea. Aya and Mr. Kimura sat perfectly still, and her grandfather seemed to be staring at the plates.
“What does it matter to you?” Yuki said, “or to me? In a month, I’ll be gone to Nagasaki and I’ll never hear from them or write to them. I’m not going to take any money from them. And so long as I’m not living with them, I could start coming here every summer just like before.” Yes, she thought to herself, then it would be as though the last six years hadn’t happened.
“But they are your parents,” her grandmother said. She picked up her cup and brought it down without drinking from it. “You have to show them some respect, too. I’m glad you want to see us, but still, we can’t approve of your not doing your duty by them. It wouldn’t be right. It puts us in an awkward position, you see.”
“How can I respect them?” Yuki asked. “They show no respect for me or for my mother, or for you. They were married only a year after her death. They knew each other while she was alive. You might even say they were waiting for her to die.”
“You don’t know what was between them in the past,” Kenji said. “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Just because they worked in the same office, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“But I know. I live with them. I can tell. How I treat them is really none of your business anyway.”
Her grandmother started weeping. She pressed the long sleeve of her dark gray kimono to her eyes. Her thin shoulders moved up and down.
Yuki put her hands on her grandmother’s shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please don’t cry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Her grandmother continued to weep. Her shoulders were stiff against Yuki’s touch.
“Sometimes,” her grandfather said suddenly,” you have to show respect to other people before you can expect it from them.”
Startled, Yuki looked toward him. He had not even turned to her to speak. He was still staring at the table. She could not tell whether his comment was meant as a rebuke or just a remark, or whether he knew what he was saying. In any case, they are the adults, I shouldn’t have to teach them to be decent, she wanted to say. But she refrained. Her grandfather began to slowly move around the table toward Yuki and her grandmother. He did not stand up. He was creeping forward painstakingly on his hands and knees. Tears trickled down his face, and Yuki again noticed how his cheeks had gotten more wrinkled and pouchy in the last three years. From the kitchen, she could smell the baking fish, the salty smell of the sea and the burning flesh. She stood up.
“I need fresh air,” she said. “I’m going outside for a while. I didn’t mean to offend anybody. I’m so sorry.”
She started walking, then walking faster, then running. She went through the front door, ran across the yard to the back of the house, and then to the persimmon tree farthest away from the house.
She was cold without her jacket. Shivering, she leaned back against the trunk of the persimmon tree and closed her eyes. She thought of the green wand waved over Aya and Mr. Kimura, her father and her stepmother, her father and her mother a long time ago, Aya and her first husband, Mr. Kimura and his first wife, each time exactly the same way. Back and forth like a pendulum while some priest in a white robe chanted. Her grandparents, too, more than fifty years ago, had been married in the same way. She thought of them now, her grandmother weeping into the sleeve of her kimono, her grandfather moving toward her on his hands and knees, tears on his face, each step. About ten years ago, her grandfather could still outwalk her on a mountain path. She remembered his black hiking shoes coming down heavily and steadily. He’d wait for her, and together, they’d run down the last hill. At the bottom, her mother stood holding white peonies she was bringing to the family grave. Yuki’s thoughts wandered to Sayo, her stomach big with child, splitting the fish’s stomach and taking out the red entrails. Still shivering, she opened her eyes and looked up. The persimmon tree spread its bare branches into a stiff net against the steely blue sky of a late winter afternoon. Between the house and the tree, where her grandmother’s flowers would be in the spring and summer, the plots were frozen hard. The bench that would be under the persimmon tree in the summer was gone for the winter, stored in the shed with all the tools, useless now till spring. When Yuki was a child, her grandfather had sat on the bench with her in the evenings and shown her all the summer constellations. He had connected the stars, shiny dots, into people and animals, into stories. The tree would be full of soft green leaves then. In the fall, the leaves turned pinkish orange and fell. After that, the tree would bear bright red bell-shaped fruit on the otherwise empty branches. Yuki knew this only from the pictures Kenji had sent her. By the time the persimmon bore fruit, she’d be back in Kobe, back to school. The fruit was bitter when it came off the tree. But her grandfather would stand on a ladder and pick all the ripe ones, dry them on long skewers hung on the wall. When they were dried, the persimmons turned very sweet. Every December, her grandfather sent a large box of dried persimmons to the city, and Yuki and her mother would eat them all winter, reminders of their summer in the country, to taste over and over. All that, she thought, was a long time ago. Her mother had been gone for six years. Her grandmother now wanted her to show respect to her father. How can she say such a thing, she wondered. She knows how badly he treated my mother, her own daughter. Yuki sighed and looked toward the house. Mr. Kimura was coming through the back door, holding a bundle in his arms. She watched him as he made his way toward the persimmon tree.
When he was close enough, she could see that the bundle was her jacket, the sea green one she’d saved money to buy the winter before. She’d spent the whole afternoon in downtown Kobe trying to buy just the jacket her mother might have bought her.
Mr. Kimura stood next to Yuki and handed her the jacket. “You must be cold,” he said.
She put on the jacket and buttoned it up in silence. Mr. Kimura seemed to be looking up at the bare branches.
“I’m sorry about what I said in the house,” Yuki said finally. “I didn’t mean to be rude. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
“The last time I saw your mother,” he said, looking at the middle distance between the tree and the house, “we went to see the pine tree that you said looked like a fox in a wedding dress.”
The image of the tree floated into Yuki’s mind, green in the middle of winter, framed in the center of the kitchen window. It would still be there, by the sea. She wondered if the people who lived in the house now had noticed it.
“I thought about that again last night,” he said, “that tree and your mother, and you. Even though I didn’t meet you that time, I would never have met your aunt if I hadn’t come to see you in Tokyo after your mother’s death. I wanted you to come to the wedding because of that. I’m glad you came.”
Yuki could clearly remember the first time she’d met Mr. Kimura. It was about two months after her mother’s death; she was living with Aya in Tokyo. He came to their house one evening without warning. Aya went to the door to answer the knock. Yuki was watching from behind the kitchen door. He stood in the doorway with his black hat in his hand. “I was a friend of your sister’s,” he said to Aya. “Your mother gave me your address. You see, I only heard about it later, through a friend, so I went to see your mother. She told me that your sister’s daughter was living with you. I wanted to see her. I come to Tokyo once a month to see my son.” Then, still standing in the doorway, he had cried. “If I’d known,” he’d kept saying, “if I’d known.”
After Yuki had left Tokyo to live with her father and his new wife, Mr. Kimura had gone on seeing Aya, and after years of it, they had decided to marry. There was something Yuki wanted to ask him. On the train that morning, she’d thought of many different ways to ask it. But there was no tactful way to ask it, she realized. She turned fully toward him.
“Did you marry Aunt Aya because she reminded you of my mother?” she asked.
He looked away from the garden and turned to her. He looked her straight in the eyes the way very few adults did. “Yes,” he said. “Do you think that’s bad?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It doesn’t mean that I don’t love Aya for herself. Maybe you’re too young to know this, but I’ll tell you what I think. I think that we often love someone because, at least initially, that person reminds us of someone else, someone we’ve loved before. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone except my mother and my grandparents and Aunt Aya and people like that—my mother’s people. “
“But there must have been boys you’ve at least liked,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t teasing her. He was serious.
She thought about the boys at school. In her mind, she always pictured them huddled together, tittering about something—the way some girl’s slip showed under the hem of her skirt, the tight blouse of a fat girl, an awkward tall girl’s slouch. The ones who didn’t huddle and titter, the smart ones, the popular ones, hung around in twos and threes, and often went about with tall girls who also came in twos and threes. These girls wore slim dresses to school. When they passed by, Yuki could smell the faint fragrance of their face powder. During lunch hours, while the unpopular boys huddled in the hallways and the popular boys and girls walked about the school ground and the other girls sat in the cafeteria, Yuki went out to the track and ran laps. One fast, one slow, one fast, one slow, until her legs, shoulders, and arms hurt. She would shower quickly and go to her fifth-hour class, and after all the afternoon classes, she would change into her gym clothes again and go to crosscountry or track practice, depending on which season it was. By the time she had to go home to eat dinner with her father and his wife, she was so tired that she could hear something humming in her ear. She would sit quietly and focus on the dull pain in her legs and shoulders, concentrate on those concrete pains. There was no time to sit around and daydream about boys. The only person she’d daydreamed about was a girl who jumped hurdles on the track team of another school, about three years ago. They ran together one summer vacation, but now the girl had gone to college. Even before that, Yuki could tell that she, too, was turning into a girl with makeup who walked about with boys.
“No,” she said to Mr. Kimura. “I don’t think I’ve ever liked any boy. Do you think that’s odd?”
“No. Maybe you’ll like somebody later on, at the college in Nagasaki. I don’t think there’s any hurry about something like that.”
“No, there isn’t,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to be in love. Half the time it doesn’t turn out right.”
He didn’t seem offended or even surprised. He continued to look into her face. His expression, she thought, was very mild.
“Of course I don’t mean that about you and Aunt Aya,” she said. “I was thinking more about my father and my mother. They loved each other once.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I was married once before, myself. We got divorced, as you know.”
“And Aunt Aya. When she first married, she must have loved my uncle. It never occurred to her that in only three years he’d die in a traffic accident. The other people weren’t seriously hurt. He died on the spot from hitting his head. She could never have foreseen that. He didn’t even drive that much.” Yuki thought for a second and then went on. “I believe that if we could foresee the future, we’d never fall in love with anybody. It comes to nothing one way or the other.”
Mr. Kimura leaned back against the tree, his arms folded. He seemed to be thinking for a long time. Finally, he said, “When I was younger and my marriage was going badly, I used to think that too, just as you do. What’s the point? It all turns out badly. I felt the same way when your mother died. I was forty then. But in the last few years, as I’ve gotten to be forty-five and forty-six, I began to think differently. I think now that it’s worth it all the same, loving someone. It may not turn out right, but I want to love someone in spite of it. In a way it means more. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have married Aya.”
Yuki tried to imagine it—herself at forty-five feeling that love was worthwhile. It was difficult. All she could think of was herself now—running around the track, a fast lap, a slow lap, endlessly, while the others fell in love.
The distant sound of the door interrupted her thought. She looked toward the house. Aya was coming through the back door in her light gray kimono, a white knit shawl over her shoulders. She was walking toward them in the slow steady way women in kimonos walked. Mr. Kimura had noticed her too, and was looking toward her, his whole body turned toward her, slightly leaning in her direction even though she was still quite far away. As she stood there waiting, Yuki thought of Aya’s first wedding. She’d only been four or five so she remembered little except that at the reception dinner, they’d served carrots cut like flowers. And there were yellow chrysanthemums on the tables and her mother was wearing a light blue dress hand-embroidered with flowers and leaves in a darker blue.
Aya was only about ten steps away now. She smiled at Mr. Kimura, and he began to walk toward her. Yuki realized that it didn’t matter what she’d said to her grandparents—Aya and Mr. Kimura were too happy now to be offended. They stood together. He was straightening out her white shawl, which had slipped off one of her shoulders.
Yuki looked away from them at the webwork of branches above her, the sky so far behind them like an endless pit she could fall into backwards. She tried to imagine the persimmons in the fall, bright orange bells on bare branches, promises of untasted sweetness. But she had never seen them, except in photographs. She closed her eyes. In a moment, she would walk back to the house, to take her mother’s place, as best she could, among her people. Opening her eyes slowly, she wished for her mother, her grandfather of ten years ago, someone, to read the sky at night, to name the winter stars for her.
