A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (9 page)

Miai-kekkon: Until the end of the Second World War, most marriages were arranged. Nakodo (a go-between) helps with the exchanges of information between the two families. It is customary for the man to send gifts (usually an engagement ring and some money) to the woman, when his proposal is accepted. This engagement ceremony is called yuino.

My enquiries were discreet but I knew word would soon spread that we were looking for a husband for Yuko. Mrs Kogi was the most highly recommended of Nagasaki's matchmakers. Her network of contacts was extensive. She made good matches and fast. I studied her as she consulted her notebook. She wore a black kimono and her hair was drawn in a tight bun high on her head. Round tortoiseshell glasses sat low on her nose and the smell of mothballs lingered on her skin. She assumed the guise of a widow with little care for personal vanity. The only suggestion of frivolity was the eyebrows she shaved off and painted too high on her forehead. Yuko sat opposite me, next to the matchmaker. A teapot and three red pottery cups decorated the low table in front of us. A beam of sun from the window fell across the room to our incense holder. I wanted to light the sweet musk to mask the odour of this woman Sato had forced into our home. She listened to me with her head bent to the side, a picture of sincere concern.

‘The matter is rather pressing, Mrs Kogi. My husband stresses that while we don't want to lower our expected standards, we are happy to look beyond what would be the more obvious candidates.'

‘Of course, of course,' she said. ‘I understand.' She whispered thank you when I offered her more tea. ‘I do have one young man who might prove suitable.'

‘From a Nagasaki family?

‘One of the islands, Iōjima.'

I saw Yuko's face pale. ‘I'm not sure whether –'

Mrs Kogi placed a fluttering hand on the locket that fell across her flat bust.

‘Yuko, dearest, have I told you about my husband?' Yuko said nothing and Mrs Kogi giggled.

‘My Manabu, so handsome in his youth, clever too, and strong. Here, take a look.' She opened the locket and showed a photograph of her husband, dead five years. A fierce man with a large brow and long chin stared back. ‘Manabu was an island man. Our deputy mayor is an island man. The assistant police chief is an island man.'

I could only guess Mrs Kogi created the facts to suit the business at hand. ‘I meant no disrespect.'

‘I apologise, Mrs Takahashi, that indeed is not what I inferred. Only this young man is quite remarkable. These island men have nothing of the flightiness of the urban male. He's just finished his engineering degree and has secured a position at Mitsubishi Mining. A good, strong character. Quiet, not showy. Solid, like my Manabu.'

‘And his name?'

‘Shige Watanabe.'

‘A picture?'

‘I'm afraid Mr Watanabe is only a new acquaintance and he has yet to provide me with a photograph but I assure you he has a good, honest, solid face.'

That word again. Solid. I imagined a giant cabbage embellished with a pair of spectacles.

‘And his father?'

Mrs Kogi stroked the locket. ‘His mother is a member of the Kawano family, the printmakers down by Dejima.'

I knew the Kawano shop. We had prints in the home; Yuko had copied them as a child. ‘Very good, and the father?'

‘A fisherman.' She must have seen my concern. ‘A love match, I understand, Mrs Takahashi. They found each other late in life. The mother had made something of a name for herself as an artist. I heard she had been more married to work than marriage itself, despite her apparent beauty. Then she met her husband. I'm told there is money to be made in the harvesting of uni.'

‘They eloped?'

‘They took a less conventional path to marriage, certainly.'

‘And the Kawanos had no objection?'

‘The matter was rather taken out of their hands.'

‘This is rather shocking, Mrs Kogi. I'm not sure if the association with such scandal would be beneficial.' I saw a smile tickle the matchmaker's lips and I knew she had worked out the transaction at hand; we were looking for a quick sale.

‘The matter happened long ago and this little city of ours has produced far more food for the gossips in the
intervening years. I can reassure you that Shige Watanabe has none of the impetuousness that his parents might have displayed. He seeks my services, I imagine, to allay such fears. He is an impeccable man, truly.'

‘And are there other options available?'

‘Always, but I'm sure you'll find Watanabe to be a fine prospect. And given your hopes for a spring wedding . . .' Her voice trailed off and she smiled. ‘Would you prefer I look elsewhere?'

‘He is perhaps not what we had in mind but he does seem a possibility.'

Our conversation completed, I asked Yuko to see Mrs Kogi to a rickshaw. I waited for her return, braced for battle. She sat down opposite me.

‘Mother, these arrangements aren't necessary.'

‘Your father thinks they are.'

‘I can't accept this.'

‘You have forced this upon yourself.'

‘I don't want to marry this Watanabe.'

‘Don't be ridiculous. What? Do you think someone else is ready to stake a claim?'

‘They're recruiting at the medical college for nurses.'

‘Did he put this in your head, this married doctor? Why stop at a nurse if you are so determined to ruin this family? I hear the brothels of Maruyama are recruiting too.' She lowered her head. ‘This man, this doctor of yours, needed a whore, nothing more, and he was too lazy, too arrogant to find one by more regular means. We should all be grateful if this Watanabe, this fisherman's son, agrees to take you.'

‘I won't marry him.'

I leaned forward and grabbed her chin. ‘You promised your father.' I looked in her eyes and stroked her soft cheek. ‘Daughter, why did you let him touch you? If you care for me, your father, this family, you will forget Sato. Be grateful only that this engineer will consider you.'

‘I love Jomei, Mother.'

‘You think this love? This was not love. Women are not put here to love. The folly of romance. This doctor would have ruined your life. We saved you, Yuko. I ask only one request from my one daughter: consider the engineer. Not for our sakes, Yuko. For yours.'

My words must seem harsh. I wonder now what the alternatives could have been. I think back to the years before 1936 when Yuko talked about wanting to become a printmaker. What if she had become an apprentice immediately? What if we hadn't made her wait that year? How would her life have been? Would she too have run off with a fisherman to some island?

I believed Yuko did not need a profession because marriage would be sufficient and the role of a housewife was an important one. I wanted to save her from having to work because you had no choice, because not to do so meant going hungry. I did not appreciate the satisfaction and use and freedom of a job. I looked only to my own life: an engineer had brought me emotional and financial security. Why couldn't this Shige Watanabe do the same for my daughter? As I read her diary, I realised I had been so preoccupied with my own strategy that I didn't see Yuko had her own.

‘I made a mistake telling Mother about the nursing positions. She
is even more determined to marry me off, no doubt terrified I'll
somehow
find Jomei again. She wants marriage to become my new prison after this one. She tells me again and again that Jomei has left Nagasaki but I do not believe her. Yes, maybe he could leave me, but his work, his life, this city? She wants to kill my hope of a reunion. But if Mother is right, if Jomei never loved me, I need to hear him say this, not her. In his absence, I will believe what he told me. He will come back for me.

‘I write him letters but I am never allowed out on my own so I have no way of delivering them. I need an excuse to leave the house. Perhaps the only answer right now is to go along with Mother's plans? Today I told her I would meet this Shige Watanabe. She said they would invite him to the house for dinner but the thought was unbearable. I asked that the meeting happen outside our home. She insisted I take a chaperone. At least, in the city, free to walk the streets, I can believe in the possibility of seeing Jomei once more. There will be a reason he hasn't contacted me.'

Yugen: Elegant simplicity is one of the traditional aesthetic concepts of Japanese poetry and often regarded as a term for ideal beauty pursued particularly by poets and novelists of the medieval times. Later it became a kind of critical term used for discussions of Japanese classical literature. It has now several shades of meaning: the subtle and profound, the simple and elegant, or the tasteful and graceful.

I crouched down on the wooden stool between a woman humpbacked with osteoporosis to my left and Yuko to my right. She had coiled her hair high on her head in a damp, loose knot but tendrils had worked their way free and snaked down her shoulders. Other women, naked and wet, sat in the communal baths as steam sizzled from floor to ceiling in the tiled room. Frosted-glass windows high above our heads depicted green dragons and white cranes flying over autumnal orange ginkyo trees. Mirrors reflected the light from outside onto clouds spewing from the boiler room. I filled a bucket with hot water from a tap in front of us. ‘Let me clean your back.'

Yuko slouched forward and I slid the bar of soap along her shoulders and down her spine and began to rub with a rough cotton towel. ‘Give me your arm.' Yuko lifted her hand and we intertwined fingers. She closed her
eyes and surrendered to my touch. The heat made my head dizzy and my heart pound. ‘This reminds me of when you were a baby. You hardly ever cried. It made me worry so much. Aren't babies supposed to cry?' I picked up her other arm and my words caught and rode through the ringing of blood in my ears. ‘You were born so prematurely. We thought for weeks we might lose you. Maybe those early fears never left and made me too protective.' She glanced up at me. I had not realised how physically alike we were but our naked bodies differed only by the weight of years. This difference made me sharp with my own vanity. ‘You were so reserved as a child. I thought you shy, but it's not shyness at all, is it?'

She replied neutrally, ‘Shall I wash your back?'

I thought of those hands on Sato's body. ‘No, thank you.' The old woman next to us was cleaning her feet, the only part of her that she could reach with any ease. ‘Excuse me, would you like my daughter to help you?'

The woman twisted around. ‘Thank you, most kind.' Yuko accepted her offering of a cloth and soap and placed the rag against those domed shoulders. ‘No need to be gentle, dear. Scrub away.' I remember the way the old lady sat with her hands on her knees, braced, her toes curled around the edge of the gutter that took the dirty water away. She would probably have been younger than I am today, but she seemed ancient, shrunk by life. Is this what people see when they look at me, this costume of old age: the liver spots, the raised veins and watering eyes?

I washed my legs upwards from ankle to knee and then
thigh. Wisps of air curved around my feet, calves and up to my hip and across my breasts. I shivered against the caress.

Yuko studied me as I reached for more soap. ‘You never talk about your childhood.'

Voices from the men bathing in their own section seeped over the gap at the top of the partition that separated us. ‘Don't I?'

‘No.' She tipped the water from her bucket and turned on the cold tap.

‘That's because there is nothing to tell.'

‘You never say where you grew up, you never talk about your family or how you and Father met.' Maybe she felt emboldened in this public setting.

I washed between my legs and then rinsed the rag out beside a metal drain, where clumps of hair had gathered. ‘I'm getting fat.'

The old woman tutted. ‘No, you're not.'

‘Believe me, you should have seen me when I was young.' I whistled.

The old woman laughed. ‘You should have seen me too. What a body.'

‘You still have a good figure,' I said in a chiding tone.

The woman patted the air and giggled. ‘Back then, the men, so many, all taking turns to knock at my father's door with gifts and proposals and poems, so many poems. Always some dreadful haiku. He had to beat them away with a broom. It's true.' We all laughed then. Even Yuko. She lifted the strands of the woman's grey hair and washed her neck.

I wondered how many more visits to the bathhouse
I would have with my daughter after we found her a husband. I had always cherished my hours spent at the sentos, especially when her age. I'd come two or three times a week with my friend Karin. We would listen to the women chatter about annoying husbands or disappointing lovers and emerge into the cool air with tingling skin, blanched and renewed. Those visits had done more than clean me. I turned to the old woman. ‘My daughter wants me to reveal all the secrets of my youth. Should I tell her, Grandmother?'

She cackled and tried her best to stretch up. ‘Secrets are best kept just that. The past is the past is the past. No good can come of raking over those used coals.'

I soaked a fresh cloth in the water from the running tap and squeezed it over my breasts.

‘Listen to the wise woman, Yuko. You would do well to follow her advice.'

Yuko handed the soap and rag back to the woman. ‘There we go.'

‘Thank you, most kind.'

The old woman smiled. ‘You forget, don't you?'

‘What's that?'

‘The comfort of the human hand.'

I placed my palm on the woman's shoulder. ‘Celebrate with us, Grandmother. My daughter is meeting a man today.'

The old lady clapped her hands together. ‘A husband?'

‘Maybe, if my daughter so wishes.'

‘Want some advice?'

Yuko bent down to the woman's level, ever polite. ‘Of course.'

‘If he comes bearing a haiku run all the way home. No poetry.' This time Yuko did not smile.

‘Come, Daughter, we must get ready.'

The woman raised her cloth aloft, a white flag on a twisted pole of sinew and bone. ‘Good luck, good luck.'

We entered the changing area where steam, carried from the hot pool, lingered below the ceiling. I was surprised Yuko had agreed so easily to the meeting with Watanabe and this surrender in turn had led to many smaller ones. Her diary revealed her quiet cunning.

‘I could feel the thud of my heart and the flush of burning skin. I felt woozy, drugged into submission. Mother was using a cloth to wipe her damp skin and pat dry her hair. I looked at the eggplant-coloured kimono she had chosen for me to wear. No patterns adorned the material, nothing vulgar, or garish, a blank canvas to be sketched upon as this Watanabe desired. I have agreed to Mother's demands, but she does not know why. The arranged meetings with him will give me enough time and opportunity, I hope, to apply to nursing college. Money is an issue. I cannot afford rent or food yet, but when I work out a way, I will leave, and if I find the courage, look for Jomei. I need to find him, whatever he says. Until then, I will submit to Mother's wishes. She is easier to handle when she thinks she is getting her own way.'

Yuko was right, she had fooled me. As we dressed in the baths, I had no idea that such plans were afoot. I was too involved in the immediate task at hand. ‘Be polite to the man.' I stepped into my slip and it clung to my damp thighs. ‘Do not embarrass us.' I pulled my white under-kimono across my shoulders. ‘If not Watanabe, we will find you someone else.' I tied a ribbon around my hips.
‘With each instruction, she covered the old painting of me with
these clean, new strokes.'
I bared my teeth. ‘And remember to smile. If there is one talent that most women possess, it is the ability to hide our worries.' I dipped my head and arched my eyebrows, curled my mouth into the teasing smile of the concubine. ‘See?'