Mrs. Ichiyoshi bowed and stepped into the cement vestibule. Waving aside Mrs. Kobayashi’s invitation to come up, she perched informally on the raised ledge of the tatami floor, not bothering to take off her shoes: the classic posture of a neighborhood gossip.
“And who might this be?” She looked curiously at Sarah, who had knelt down beside her grandmother on the tatami matting. Mrs. Ichiyoshi had a deep, masculine voice.
“This,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her, “is Yoko’s girl, all grown up.”
“Aaa, Yo-chan, of course…” The old woman’s face brightened with fond recognition. Then she leaned in closer. “Have you heard?” she whispered in her gravelly voice.
Sarah wondered what news about her mother could possibly be so urgent, since she had been dead six years now.
“She’s marrying a gaijin!” Mrs. Ichiyoshi told them. “The girl’s lost her mind! A gaijin! Maa, can you imagine the to-do over at the Kobayashi house!” Her face contorted with a look of scandalous glee that Sarah had never seen. It reminded her of the time she was fourteen, when she had looked up at the Asaki balcony and seen a stranger staring at her through Mrs. Asaki’s eyes.
It was the first time she had encountered a senile person. But the greater shock was seeing her mother’s past come alive with such ugliness.
Before anyone could respond, Mrs. Ichiyoshi’s daughter-in-law came scurrying to the open door. She steered the old woman back toward home, periodically looking back over her shoulder and making jerky bows of apology. Sarah and her grandmother followed them out into the lane, bowing back in polite reassurance and staring after their retreating figures.
“Poor thing, ne,” Mrs. Kobayashi said lightly. “Gone funny in the head and still so young.” She avoided looking at Sarah. It was unbearably painful that her daughter’s disgrace had been witnessed by her child. Sarah would have felt the same way if her grandmother had known of her mother’s disadvantages in America.
Later that day Mrs. Kobayashi remarked, with a strange vehemence, “If her real father were alive, he would never have allowed her to marry an American.” With this cryptic comment, the subject was closed forever.
There were certain things Sarah never discussed with her grandmother. She never let on that her mother had been anything but a queen bee in America. And she never mentioned their fights.
In turn, she knew her grandmother kept certain things from her. When Sarah was fourteen, her aunt Tama had told her that when her mother left on her honeymoon, Mrs. Kobayashi had dropped her brave face and wept for days afterward, huddled on her knees in the parlor. “I didn’t know what to do!” Mrs. Izumi said. “I thought she was going to get sick.” At the time, Sarah had assumed this was natural behavior for two people so close. But years later, shortly before she died, her mother had said something surprising.
“It was healthier for me to go away,” she said. “We were too attached.” That surprising remark had stuck in Sarah’s memory like a shard of glass.
She wished she could ask her grandmother about it. But how could she risk hurting an old woman who had suffered so much? The very idea would have outraged her mother, with her Benkei-like protectiveness.
There was one other topic they didn’t discuss: the problem of her mother marrying an American. Until now, Sarah hadn’t grasped the full magnitude of the situation. “There was a little resistance at first,” she was told as a child, “but then you were born, and everyone’s heart just melted into a puddle.” This had seemed reasonable. In Sarah’s generation, there was nothing shocking about a mixed-race marriage.
The Ichiyoshi incident made Sarah curious about her parents’ marriage. She had grown up hearing her parents reminisce fondly about their courtship. She had been delighted by the tale of stuffy relatives-a socially prominent branch of the Sosetsu family-who had begged the Kobayashis to stop the marriage. It would impact their children’s prospects, they pleaded, referring to matchmakers who dug deeply into family histories.
“But you stood up to those silly people and made them go home, didn’t you, Mama?” young Sarah had said happily.
“Of course I did,” her mother replied. “And your grandmother backed me up, one hundred percent.”
The couple had met while Mr. Rexford was in Japan on a two-month vacation. In the fifties, Japan was still struggling to catch up with the modern world. Students were urged to practice their English on any foreigner they met. Since foreigners were scarce in inland cities, Mr. Rexford was approached by a good many college students. Faces stiff with embarrassment, they would blurt out, “Hello, I have a black pen,” or “How is the government in your country?”
One spring day he was standing in a shrine yard, in front of a wooden structure with an enormous rope hanging from the eaves. This rope was meant to be grasped with both hands and shaken, so the large bells overhead would clang and alert the spirits. Then it was customary to drop a coin into the slatted donation box, clap three times, bow, and pray.
Yoko was sitting a few yards away, a sketching board across her knees. She had recently graduated from college with a double major: one in classic Japanese literature and one in English. She was eager to display her skills to someone capable of appreciating them.
“Excuse me,” she said. “That rope at which you are gazing is made of the hair of female prisoners.”
“It was the best opening line I’d ever heard,” Mr. Rexford told his daughter years later.
Their meeting was the start of a tender friendship. After Mr. Rexford went home to America, he wrote her every week. Through their letters, they fell in love.
For many years, Yoko kept their correspondence a secret. After all, Japanese girls from good families did not consort with Americans. She explained away the letters by telling her mother that Kyoto University had a pen pal program, designed to help alumni maintain the foreign-language skills they had learned. Sarah loved the story of her grandmother innocently saying, “Here’s another letter from your pen pal!” as she collected mail from the wooden box at the visitor gate.
“I always had a gut feeling about him,” Mrs. Rexford used to tell Sarah. “I just knew. There was something in his eyes.”
Sarah had never seen beyond those charming anecdotes to the true problem: Yoko had lied to her mother for years. The sense of betrayal must have been especially great because mother and daughter were best friends. Many nights after everyone went to bed, the two had stayed up late into the night, laughing, gossiping, holding philosophical debates. How hurt her grandmother must have been when she learned the truth!
It bothered Sarah that she knew nothing about the most intense and painful time in the women’s relationship. What guilt her mother must have felt! How did she reconcile that remorse? Knowing the answer might have given Sarah a vastly different understanding of her own relationship with her mother.
chapter 43
The public bathhouse was closed for maintenance, so Sarah was preparing to bathe at the Asaki house. She padded up and down the hall, collecting clean underwear and socks and a new woolen undershirt from the tansu chest in the parlor. Her grandmother was staying home; she would wait until the bathhouse opened on the following day. “You go ahead,” she urged Sarah. Even now, old boundaries stood firm: Mrs. Kobayashi never visited the Asaki house except on formal occasions.
It was years since Sarah had bathed at the Asaki house. She had often bathed there as a child; it was quicker than public bathing and it gave the girls more time to play.