Picking Bones from Ash (29 page)

“Why, that’s wonderful.” He grasped both my hands and the doctor, a man, beamed at us.

François threw himself into impending fatherhood, signing us up for Lamaze classes and dictating my diet. He told our few acquaintances that he knew (knew!) that Lamaze would keep me from feeling any pain during childbirth. He bragged about my stoic nature. Sometimes I caught him saying things to someone on the phone, some mysterious person he spoke to at odd hours of the night. “Well,” I once heard him say, “if it’s a girl, then I’ll be raising two women. I rather like that idea.” When he brought up marriage again, I used a line I’d once heard a hippie say: “Why do you have to define everything?” And he’d laughed and beamed and hugged me and declared that I was a very modern girl, and not at all the kind of stereotypical Asian people were always accusing me of being. “If only people knew,” he laughed.

The baby grew. I know that for many women this is an exciting thing. They cannot wait to make contact with the life growing inside them. Certainly the baby was trying to make contact with me. I would dream about her—I knew very quickly that I was going to have a girl. I could feel her
thoughts intertwining with mine and I would wake up angry. My dreams, my thoughts, my fantasies did not need the interjection of this other voice. Though it was just a very small baby in the beginning, already its personality was quite clear. She wasn’t at all like me, but more like my mother. She would be the kind of child who observed the world with a calculating brain. One day, after observing the bipedal monsters around her, she would simply stand up and walk. She would grow up looking into my heart and knowing that I wasn’t sure if I loved her or not. She would know that I had fallen into the life I was leading now and that I had not deliberately chosen it.

Pregnancy can make women emotional and I was no exception. All the things that had seemed so foreign about America now frustrated me. I wanted my rice and
miso
soup every night, not just once a week as François had agreed to when we’d first decided what to eat and how to eat it. I wanted elderly people to stand up and give me a seat on the bus. I wanted to hear children’s songs in Japanese and not the kind of rock and roll that filled up the lessons on
Sesame Street
, where puppets with large noses lived in trash cans and fought with each other until the humans intervened. I wanted to know where I would take my child on her third, fifth, and seventh birthdays. Home. I wanted home. Desperately. When I mentioned this to François, he suggested I go to a Japanese American Buddhist temple to look for guidance.

I was unprepared for my reaction when I met with my countrymen, for the sound of so many Japanese voices immediately caused me to burst into tears. Once upon a time I had lived in a country where I had effortlessly understood the language, regardless of dialect or class. Then sentences had washed past my ears like river currents supporting a water bird in her natural habitat. I had grown accustomed to living in America, where absolutely everything was an effort due to its strangeness. I had almost forgotten that there was once a place where I might have been unhappy or frustrated, but where I had always felt at ease.

For a time, I liked visiting the Japanese immigrants and hearing them talk. They were full of advice for the coming baby, what to feed her, what to teach her. Eventually, though, I grew frustrated with them. Most were peasant class, uneducated fishermen and gardeners who knew nothing of antiques or classical music.

What I really wanted was my mother.

I wondered if she had become pregnant with me in a similar fashion, if she had been just as terrified. If so, I understood even less why she had been so willing to escape into the domesticity of the Horie household, why she’d been all too happy to pick up golfing and lunches as though she’d always been destined to be a housewife with three daughters to raise. If it had just been the two of us, we would have managed. She could have come to Paris with me, or moved to Tokyo while I’d been in school. There would have been no neglected afternoon cold that evolved into pneumonia, no large house in Hachinohe filled with debts no doubt accumulated by overeager adopted daughters who had deluded themselves into thinking that their family deserved a better lifestyle than they could afford.

I do not like to remember the birth of the baby, whom we named Rumi, or of the days that followed. Fortunately I have been able to put much of it out of my mind. I do remember that I was physically the most uncomfortable that I have ever been. My skin had been stretched, the weight I had gained from pregnancy did not disappear, and I felt as bloated and heavy as the
umi bozu
, or sea monster, with its fat body and bald head that I now like to draw to frighten small children. What would they say if I told them that my scariest monsters are inspired by what I saw when I looked in a mirror during those terrifying days?

I was dutiful about feeding Rumi. She was always hungry, and I began to wonder how my life had been reduced to being nothing more than a food dispenser. I waited for the moment when everything in my world would feel right and I would be happy to be here with François, when I would be happy to be a mother and to have this little baby, to be in this story that was my life. The moment refused to come. I waited for it. Prayed for it. I sat in a chair by the window and watched the sky turn dark, then watched the sun rise again. I cried and I slept. It was more frightening to me to hold the baby than it was to hold a ten-thousand-dollar piece of porcelain. I might drop her. I might accidentally snap that soft neck. I wouldn’t mean to drop her, but it could happen. I would never be forgiven.

All of the melancholy I had felt while I was pregnant now coalesced into one unbearable burden: the baby. I could not give her back, could not set her down for a day or two while I collected my thoughts and decided whether or not I wanted to be a mother. Well, that was just it. I had to be a mother. I didn’t like not having a choice. So I’d put her down and go for a walk, and François would find her unattended and he’d scold me.

From the moment the baby was born, François adored her. Almost instantly after her birth, his face took on a different cast that is difficult to describe. He looked … satisfied. I did not understand how someone could change so suddenly, and become so contented. It was eerie. Watching him, I knew that he could never understand my frustration, my longing to go home. We’d come such a long way, he declared, and now we were a family. Things were as they were supposed to be. Couldn’t I feel just how right it was to have Rumi in our lives? He knew how hard it had been to adjust to living in San Francisco, but why was I having so much trouble
now
?

“Don’t you realize,” he declared, “how much I love you?”

I didn’t realize. At the time, I couldn’t even believe him. I searched for a way to respond, but all I ever managed to relay was that I was deeply tired. At this he would relent for a while before growing angry again when I neglected the baby once more.

These were my lowest days. How had I come to this? A girl from Japan full of talent—of passion, Sanada-sensei had said—now living an unremarkable life in America. Worst of all, I couldn’t muster the energy to change my circumstances. I was like one of our neighbor’s cars that coughed and gurgled in the driveway, but whose engine never managed to catch fire. I wondered if all the rest of my days were going to be the same. So aimless.

And then one day while I was staring out the window, I saw a woman, stooped over, with a basket on her back. She was elderly, perhaps around eighty, but carried her head with dignity, like a dancer. She turned, seemed to see me, and smiled as though we shared a secret before shuffling on and out of sight. I thought of the old woman I’d seen in the bamboo forest so many years ago and of Sanada-sensei and my mother too.

At that moment, I felt split in two. There was the Satomi leaving the baby by the window and going to her room. She removed the brown bag filled with money from her drawer. Why had she been saving all this money if not to give herself some kind of choice?

This Satomi looked at the clock and calculated that François would be home in just a few minutes. She hurried to go out for a walk, knowing that this time she would never return. The other Satomi watched, horrified, but also fascinated that such a choice could be made. She allowed herself to be carried along, fairly certain François would find the baby, just as he always had. But by then the first Satomi would be far away where he could not find her.

Rumi

Tokyo, 1991

An hour before my plane landed, a peak of white snow punctured the dual layers of mist and earth. The cabin came to life, and half a dozen people, mostly Japanese men, pulled out their cameras. “Fuji-san!” someone exclaimed. We circled around the mountain, then began to press down against the sky, and rice paddies and little roads with bright blue trucks and slate-roofed houses came into view. I thought of all the little hand scrolls I’d seen over the years. It was as though one of them had come to life, its images growing exponentially until I had fallen down into this landscape I knew so well from pictures and books.

However, the actual land of Japan was quite different from the one I knew from my studies of art. Very quickly, I realized how little conversational Japanese I actually understood. In the terminal, I listened to a recording, first in incomprehensible Japanese, then in studied English, advise me to keep track of my belongings. I exchanged some dollars for
yen
, then boarded a train bound for Tokyo’s city center. Through a green-tinted window, I watched bamboo forests and rice paddies, brown in winter, give way to the spread of buildings capped by halos of neon and inscribed with one-word messages: Glico, Seiko, Panasonic. It started to rain, and a cheerful, high-pitched female voice announced that we would soon be making a brief stop.

At Shinjuku station the blond and brown heads of American travelers disappeared into the tide of subway riders and taxicab seekers. I was alone, the heterogeneity of my fellow world travelers diffused by the population of Tokyo.

It was nearly eight in the evening when I reached the hotel. The man at the desk greeted me with a bow and proceeded to walk me through registration. He handed me an envelope containing a note whose English letters had been written with extra courtesy and attention.

A Ms. Shizuka would be coming to see me at eleven o’clock the following morning. She would meet me after breakfast.

A porter carried my things up via an elevator to a sterile room on the fourteenth floor. After he left, I opened the curtains and peered out over the neon horizon. A low spread of buildings swelled and crested to a tidal wave of skyscrapers in the distance. Unlike San Francisco with its centralized downtown, Tokyo was a city in which tall buildings sprouted from a number of neighborhoods, where helicopters winged from district to district across a red sky.

I closed the shades and sat down on the bed. Everything was cold and new and I longed for the green hills of California, for the gentle lapping of the fog in and out of our neighborhood. As so many travelers have before me, I turned on the television and went to sleep.

Seventeen hours behind me, San Francisco whirled slowly, emerging into the dawn of the day I was now leaving.

At eleven the next morning I went down to the hotel lobby and found Ms. Shizuka waiting for me. She was rail thin and elegant, with tiny wrists and slim fingers. She wore an immaculate navy blue suit with a restrictive little blouse that gathered around her throat, and the skin on her face was flawless. Standing in front of her, I felt unkempt and sloppy. It was as though she had mastered all the secrets of the material world. Not even an atom would be out of place in her orbit.

Ms. Shizuka bowed, then extended her hand timidly, as if testing the air between us. We shook hands, then sat down on two large armchairs.

“How was your flight?”

“Fine,” I said. “Long. Your English is very good.”

She smiled. “Twelve years at the International School here in Tokyo. I went to UCLA for college. Would you like coffee?” She motioned to a hotel attendant.

“Yes please,” I said.

While we waited for our refreshments, she reached inside a small briefcase and pulled out a long envelope.

“So, I am here,” she said in a formal tone of voice, “because my law firm was contacted by Mr. Sumiyoshi in America. I believe he represents Timothy Snowden?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Timothy Snowden is a friend of the family. He used to know my mother.”

“Our firm was unable to locate any records related to your mother, Satomi Horie. There was such a person at one point, but she has simply disappeared. This is unusual in Japan. We keep good records of all our citizens.” She frowned.

“You don’t know how she died or where she was buried or anything?” I sank into my chair.

“No. However, we did follow up on the Muryojuji temple connection for you.” Now she extracted documents from the envelope. The first was a pamphlet. “The Handa family, who live at the temple, have requested that you come to see them.”

Our coffee arrived, and while we took a few sips, I examined the brochure. On the cover was some
kanji
lettering, a picture of what looked like a large cabinet with two doors on hinges, and roman letters at the bottom that read “Muryojuji Temple.” The cabinet housed a national treasure, a sculpture put on view only once a year. The temple was out of the way, but well known among art devotees for its collection of statues, donated by a pious, not to mention wealthy,
shogun
some three hundred years ago.

“Why do they want to see me?” I asked. “And who are they exactly?”

“It isn’t entirely clear,” she said. “Masayoshi Handa, the head of the family, is related by marriage to your mother. When we asked for an explanation as to what happened to her, he would not tell us. He only said he wanted to meet you.”

She handed me a small map and a train ticket. I would need to take the bullet train from Ueno station to Morioka, then change to another bullet train that would cross the mountains and go all the way over to Akita, in the northwest corner of the main island. The entire trip would take around four hours but she thought I would be comfortable, and she had reserved my seat in the First Class Green car.