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Chapter One
JEWELED DREAM
My grandmother is my mother's jewel.
The words form in my predawn sleep. Jewel, treasure, I can't tell if the words are coming in English or Japanese. But I awake to the thought, It's all right, then.
My grandmother is my mother's jewel.
It's all right. I can go home again.
CALIFORNIA WINE
Twenty years after its opening, the Tokyo International Airport at Narita continues to be called the New Narita Tokyo International Airport in the English announcements issuing from the limo speaker. The voice is synthetic female, the accent a regionless, classless simulation of British English. From the seats behind mine, an indeterminate number of male American voices fill the air during the ride into the city, normally requiring ninety minutes, but on this Saturday evening, under heavy monsoon skies, stretching to two hours.
--Where're we going, anyway?
--Dunno. Here, let me take a look at this map. Well, we're not too far from Tokyo Station.
--D'you know where to go tonight?
--Yeah, we're going to Roppongi. The main drag. I know a great place to eat. It's really spectacular. You won't believe it.
--Do they cook things there?
--Yeah. I don't like Japanese food.
--Aren't you gonna prepare for the meeting tomorrow?
--If I can find the papers.
--You're gonna wing it? ... Where're we going next?
--Singapore. No. Malaysia. Then Thailand.
--Do they have business class out there?
--Yeah, they've got it out of somewhere. Where was it. Fukien.
--They've got business class out of Fukien?
--Yeah, Fukien.
A long silence. I wonder if they're dozing off, as I am. Flights from New York, Chicago, and Seattle arrived within minutes of each other. Wherever they're from, they've been traveling for a while. One of them begins reading out loud.
--"Welcome to Japan. During June we have a rainy season. Yesterday it rained, today it is raining, tomorrow it will rain, Sunday will be fine."
Laughter.
--"Maybe you will have jet lag. So tomorrow, I will meet you at hotel around 9:30 or 10:00."
Guffaws.
--"I will call you from hotel front. As you well know, my English is not so good. Please speak slowly. Yours ..." How d'you pronounce his name?
--How's it spelled?
--S-h-i-n-i-c-h-i.
--In the Army we'd say, Hey, Alphabet Soup, get over here.
--No, no, no. "Shin'ichi."
This is the voice that identified Fukien. It's the same one that knew the great restaurant in Roppongi. The pronunciation is powerfully American but plausible. Pity for Shin'ichi wells up from the depths of my jet lag. These men don't know, don't care to know, how carefully he's planned their visit, how early he'll get up in order to meet them at 9:30 or 10:00. I become indignant on Shin'ichi's behalf, then check myself. This is the new Japan. It's probably Shin'ichi who has the advantage.
If so, these Americans are happily unaware. They aren't young. One of them has already referred to a son's graduation. They talk about faxes and voice mail matter-of-factly. Small-scale multinational entrepreneurs? Maybe Army experience allows one of them to call himself a Far East expert.
Conversation starts up again between the two seated directly behind me. Because they are no longer trying to communicate across the aisle, their voices are muted. Even so, the entire bus seems poised on their words.
--I'm glad Clinton's doing what he's doing.
--So am I. There oughta be a lot more American cars on this road.
--Wonder why he's just going after the luxury cars, though. He oughta go after all of them.
--He's gotta start somewhere.
The urge to retort grips my throat: What about the World Trade Organization? Don't you know cars aren't really the problem? Show me one thing NAFTA's done for American workers, anyway. But my brain hears a tired voice, female and pedagogical, and the impulse subsides. I don't feel like disrupting their camaraderie, secure in the presumption of being unheard, or rather, uncomprehended. I'm glad I can't see them. They don't see me. At most, they see the top of my head, as disembodied as their voices. These limousine buses come with luxuriously high-backed seats.
Even the static monsoon sky darkens as the bus hums along the expressway, punctuated only by electronic boards announcing the length of various stretches of congestion. Silence settles on the bus.
--What's that you got there?
--I saved the wine from dinner.
--Why'd you do that?
--Hey, I've got an idea. This is what we'll give'm. Alphabet Soup. What'd you say his name was?
--Shin'ichi?
--Very nice. Very, very nice. California wine. I saved mine, too. We'll tell him this is the real thing, California wine.
Another challenge for Shin'ichi. He will have to produce surprised gratitude for wine he would find tossed in the bins of his local supermarket, selling for the equivalent of a very few dollars.
The party gets out at the first hotel stop. There are five or six of them, mostly middle-aged, dressed inconspicuously enough. There's nothing about them to offend the casual glance.
The bus heaves a collective sigh and stretches its limbs to fill the space left by the Americans. Here and there, muffled conversation rises into the dark.
ESCALATOR CONFUSION
Only a few hours earlier, I wouldn't have thought to identify with Shin'ichi. The plummeting dollar of the preceding few months had precipitated the phrase "currency exile" as my likely fate, and stepping into Narita I found myself wearing it as a secret badge of martyrdom. Lacking a yen income, how much longer would I be able to keep coming home?
It's still early for the touristic migrations of summer. Alone on the escalator leading to immigration and customs, I am veiled in anticipatory mourning. A certain loftiness, even romance, inheres in the word exile, but there's an unglamorous aspect to my alienation. It's the whiff of poverty. No, I prefer to think of it as austerity. Approaching the gleaming floors and orderly space, I brace myself.
Prosperous middle-classness is the postwar Japanese national identity. The hard years after surrender have congealed as fable, and even the malaise now setting in after the bursting of the bubble economy only confirms the degree to which prosperity had become the norm. Slipping from that middle-class identity threatens my precarious national filiation. My Occupation soldier-father met and married my Japanese mother a year before I was born, giving me American citizenship long before I would set foot in the United States. I was never a Japanese citizen, for until 1985, Japanese citizenship could not be granted through the mother. American citizenship regulations governing citizens born abroad had a residency requirement (eventually struck down as discriminatory), so for a while I ran the risk of ending up stateless. By now, quite apart from my legal status, my clothing, gestures, and even features are stamped American. Does that mean people will think of me as a more mature, sedate version (marked, therefore, with pathos?) of the young white men and women who spread their generic ethnic jewelry outside the National Museum of Western Art?
I'm getting carried away. Even I can see that. Maybe it's just a version of the hysteria induced by transpacific crossings, probably by any adult homecoming.
In the limo my heart went out to Shin'ichi because the confident American male voices threw me back to a childhood when all Japanese, men and women, looked small and poor and Americans tall and strong. In any case, it's entirely possible for Shin'ichi to be the entrepreneurial gopher for the Roppongi-dining Americans in the new global economy. And there remains the fact that they speak better English, and that their ignorance of Japanese doesn't count. I may be stunningly wrong, but I still think they're likely to be taller, too.
I'm taken aback by how much I'm afraid of being--of seeming--poor, ever so mildly and even temporarily. Back in Chicago, I'd be instantly, unmistakably, middle class. So how is this different from, say, the (hoped-for) passing poverty of young-adult studenthood? And do I believe that being middle class constitutes my authentic self, which I'm pained to have misrecognized? Is it that the sensation of schooling, profession, and an assortment of social competencies melting away along with a dissolving dollar makes me queasy?
As a child, I think I understood citizenship as permission to stay in a certain place. I was fearful of being snatched away from home. Now I can see that so much of the way class is lived has to do with where you feel you have a right to be, or where you feel you belong, because you can easily feel yourself an impostor even when you have not only the right but the means to be someplace. And where you can go and where you can stay are hugely important in determining your identity. No wonder a threat to class identity can feel like a threat to national identity, and vice versa.
The home I dreaded being taken from was my grandparents' small house and garden, but I also knew, without understanding how, that they were part of an entity called "Japan." I didn't want to be taken from Japan, but in the public world of school bus and playground, although I identified with puny Japanese against gigantic Americans, I didn't want to be identified as Japanese. I suppose I could rationalize and say that I intuited that my right to stay in Japan depended on possession of what was then an awkwardly sized gray booklet, a United States passport. But I think I simply and cravenly preferred to be identified with power.
At passport renewal time I stood dumb in a cavernous room in the embassy, smelling the American smell of disinfectant. America was the land where germs couldn't survive, I thought. (Japan, by contrast, swarmed with deadly germs. My father had impressed me with an encyclopedia picture of a horse's cadaver to reinforce his warning not to eat Japanese strawberries.) My right hand was raised too high, as if I were back in the classroom where, scanning my modest collection of English words, I would force myself to participate, to keep up the show of belonging with teachers, classmates, and most of all myself. The embassy official muttered the oath and a long silence followed, my weary arm still raised Statue-of-Liberty fashion, until my mother whispered, Yes, and I said, fervently, thankfully, Yes. If the grown man felt silly asking a child in a starched cotton dress whether she would refrain from aiding or giving comfort to the enemies of the United States, he didn't let on.
In my childhood in early postwar Japan, citizenship as confident propriety, easy laughter, and imposing stride--as the right to be there--was American. Overwhelmingly, it was also male. Had I sniffed harder through the air of disinfected authority, I might have sorted out the smell of my father's masculinity--sour, inconsequential, yet menacing.
Now that, as people tirelessly repeat, the cold war is history, I mostly cluck my tongue over the spectacle of American embassy staff administering loyalty oaths to children. I have even begun to imagine with sympathy the lives of all those American boys who came home from the War with exotic brides, the boys who came back to uncomprehending if not hostile families, who awoke on American shores to the silent immobility of non-English-speaking, non-driving women.
Nevertheless, it felt good to be inconspicuous in the dark limo, to fancy myself joining in the collective relief of the Japanese passengers when the Americans got off.
HOMECOMING
--I'm home, Obaachama. It's me.
My grandmother's eyes roll up. I am afraid. I've seen this twice before when she lost consciousness. Both times, she came back to the world in a flood of perspiration. This time I can see that she's breathing. So I can breathe too. Stop, I want to say to the pupils. Stop and hold me. I'll stay still. Does that make it easier? Just hold on to my face and let me into your mind.
--I came back to see you. I promised I would. Last summer. Remember?
Her pupils have stopped drifting. We lock onto each other's gaze.
--Can you tell who I am?
Her lips are closed tight, making her jaw square.
--Can you tell who I am?
Gravely, almost imperceptibly, she shakes her head, No. The next morning, she will nod, Yes. Equally gravely, equally faintly.
I need to learn to read these signs. It's imprecise to talk about nods, a careless surrender to habit. It's not that her head moves to signal the difference between yes and no. Maybe her jaw muscles shift. Maybe it's a flicker of the eyelid. But her meaning is unmistakable.
More than twenty years ago, a teacher said his body had learned to register minute temperature changes in Hawai'i. He wanted to show how one might become a reader of ninth-century Japanese poetry, to develop the capacity to appreciate faint variations between two assemblies of thirty-one syllables dedicated to, say, late spring snow. Some years later, I understood what he meant while waiting for the subway in lower Manhattan. It was July, I was enormously pregnant, and succeeding waves of friends needed to be shown around New York. The fleeting movement of air inside the black tunnel before and after the passage of a train made it a source of refreshment more munificent than a roaring window air conditioner.
Now, three years after her first stroke and two months after the second, I experience again the force of minute difference in peering at my grandmother's face. I don't know if I will learn to read its signals.
FANS
The kitchen fan died today.
It was at least twenty years old, but even so it was incomparably more advanced than American fans today. To call it a thing of grace would be excessive, but its blades were a translucent azure, its neck telescoped with the flick of a lever, its arc adjusted from 180 degrees to zero. The wider the angle, of course, the greater number of people who could benefit from its fleeting breeze. That was how my grandmother preferred it, even when she was standing over a wok frying shrimp and vegetables in August. She didn't like too much air coming at her, whether from a train or bus window (in the days before such vehicles were uniformly air conditioned) or from a fan. It wasn't good for her weak heart, she would say. It was the closest she came to complaining. Like many Japanese--it must have been a conspicuous news item years ago--she believed that letting the fan blow on you all night was an invitation to disaster. She predicted it would lead to death from heart failure. (Seeing me emerge for breakfast morning after morning never dislodged that conviction.) At any rate, Japanese fans, including the one that died, come with timers. In addition to the numbered settings for degrees of strength, the kitchen fan had one labeled "Refreshing." It was weaker than the weakest, number three; it was my grandmother's favorite, and its button was larger than the others and colored to match the blades. She showed alarm if she found that someone had (mistakenly, she was sure) pressed the number two button. This was a fan made for her.
When my children were small, all the fans in the house--the kitchen fan, the upstairs fan, the downstairs fan for guests--were covered with lace trimmed with elastic for a snug fit. In retrospect it seems unlikely that these pretty covers would have kept a determined toddler's fingers from the blades, but such exploration in fact never took place. Was it because the delicate netting in aquamarine or pale green (refreshing colors) sufficiently signified "barrier"? By contrast, the real barriers, the sliding doors in my grandmother's house, whether of translucent white paper for separating rooms from verandahs or heavy patterned paper for separating closets from rooms or rooms from each other, were riddled with holes created by the fingers of my children and generations of cousins. My grandmother was never annoyed, even when a crib had been foolishly placed next to a newly repapered door.
At the end of the summer, my grandmother cleaned the fans and shrouded their awkward forms before putting them to rest, just as she drained, cleaned, and wrapped up the kerosene stoves each spring. In later years these became my mother's annual tasks. Since her stroke, my grandmother has lain in a room whose temperature is regulated by a computerized heater/air conditioner installed near the ceiling of the room next to hers. (It was still unthinkable to have cold or hot air blowing directly on her.) Whenever she thinks of it, which is often, my mother stoops to read the thermostat on the remote control placed on my grandmother's nightstand. Inevitably, she is moved to grasp it, march to the next room, and aim it at the sleek grey god. To the accompaniment of discreet beeps, its green eyes blink; flaps open and close. As if this weren't enough, a hygrometer has appeared on the wall next to the nightstand. Now my mother studies this instrument more religiously than the thermostat. Predictably, she gasps at the reading and invokes the Summer Dry setting. Why can't you rely on your own body, I grumble. Japan is different, she says, not bothering to be defensive. You don't know how humid it gets here. How has she managed to make it absurd for me to point out that I was born here, that I have spent nearly half my life here and most pertinently, virtually every summer?
The kitchen fan is sitting outside by the gate now, waiting for the Large-sized Trash Pickup requested by my mother. I bring the upstairs fan down to take its place. It's almost as old as the dead fan but much less used. I wash its blades and frame with vinegar, the kind sold as "salad" vinegar in American supermarkets, a cut above generic vinegar. It's not as rusty as the old kitchen fan. My mother turns it on with excessive alacrity for these dark monsoon days. I find that I have to change seats. I miss the Refreshing setting.
TIME
A week has passed since the limo ride. I run along a route plotted to take me by favorite houses that no longer stand while avoiding others whose reasons for avoidance are mostly forgotten. Every step restores my equilibrium, adjusts my limbs, eyes, ears, and even tongue to the territory. Idly I think, what about the twelve hours lost over the International Date Line? Of course, they're made up when I cross the other way. What if I never did, though? Is that day lost forever? I know the twenty-four time zones are arbitrary demarcations. Human lines laid over the face of the globe. But they are also tied to the time of the solar system. If I never recross the date line, the hours lost to me are lived cumulatively westward, until, finally, they spill over the Greenwich meridian and become a twelve-hour day.
We move through twenty-four hours apiece three hundred sixty-five times a year. Alternatively, at any given hour, we collectively make up the length of the sun's shadow across the earth.
NEIGHBORHOOD I
On a Sunday morning around seven o'clock, no one is stirring. For some years, probably three decades, all the streets in my grandmother's neighborhood have been paved. Last summer's record-breaking heat was made the more unbearable by the unabsorbing asphalt. Ishigaki Rin, on the verge of old age, writes about how it's no longer possible to wear clogs because they're too noisy on paved streets. But it was precisely that clatter I once loved: the music of the street, from a brief moment when wooden clogs and asphalt came together.
Grand or modest, all the streets are cramped. Garage doors line the more aspiring ones. Side by side they are blank eyes turned upon the silent morning. Soon they will open their heavy lids. Out come--not cartoon flames, but gleaming cars, aloof to the narrowness of the street. Their drivers are fiercely skilled: day in and day out, they execute egress and entry without sound or scratch.
FLOWER TALK
A burst of astonishing blue stopped me in my tracks as I walked absent-mindedly to the neighborhood library to copy articles from month-old newspapers. It was a hydrangea bush, tall enough to fall into that ambiguous zone between bush and tree. When I was little, I was entranced by hydrangea blue, and I begged and begged my grandmother to get one of our very own for the garden. She said the bushes grew too big. Eventually she broke down, but by then my heart was unavailable for capture by a magical shade of blue.
Hydrangea changes color from blue to purple to pink or crimson in the course of a flowering season. Therefore, says my pocket dictionary, it symbolizes fickleness. The usage example has it modifying woman.
This one on the street was of the variety called "picture frame," in which each bloom consists of what look like fully opened blossoms encircling tightly closed buds. Five days later I passed the street-corner bush, then turned back sharply. Where there had been hundreds, not a single blossom remained. The stems were cut clean, their white edges raw against the dark green leaves. Evidently no fickleness is permitted in this household.
My aunt next door brings over potted flowers for the garden and arrangements for the house nearly every day. A woman of abundant talent, she seems not to know how, or lacks the patience, to grow flowers herself, or to make them bloom from year to year. When my grandmother was healthy, this youngest daughter brought all her ailing pots for her mother to cure. Now she fills the garden with purchased pots. The arrangements for the house combine all manner of flowers, usually pink, one of my aunt's favorite colors. Along with flowers, she skewers multicolored paper birds into a sponge base. She replenishes the water in the plastic container every day. Because the whole affair is done up in lacy cellophane and ribbons, she cannot tell how much water to add. Later, my mother removes the soaked doily underneath. If she doesn't catch it, the Home Helper will, with much muttering. The Helper has been coming mornings since my grandmother came home from the hospital four years ago. She is a force to be reckoned with, as such personages are apt to become.
My aunt has also tried planting some of the potted plants in the ground. After nightfall, my mother pulls each stem from the ground. My other aunt, the middle sister, once threw all the flower pots purchased by her younger sister into the street. (Good thing no one was passing by, is my mother's afterthought.)
A potted picture-frame hydrangea sits outside the front door. It has already changed color twice. My mother says she will toss this pot the day after tomorrow, a Combustible Trash Pickup day.
All three sisters like flowers, the middle one passionately. The garden was my grandmother's great luxury. Her flowering trees and her perennials were also the delight of passersby. Would she have dreamed that flowers would become weapons in her daughters' hands?
In the meantime, a city in the metropolitan region has begun a "sunflowers for peace" campaign. Sunflower seedlings are being handed out at local schools on successive Sundays. In the spring schoolchildren had started thousands of plants from seed. The idea is that on August 15, the anniversary of surrender, full-grown sunflowers will impress the bright face of peace upon the citizenry.
Following Jacques Chirac's announcement of the resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific, Australian labor has called for a boycott of French goods. In the Only Country in the World to be Hit by Atomic Bombs, no one is clamoring for a boycott.
Sunflowers forever.
Copyright © 1997 Norma Field. All rights reserved.
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