Sarah knew that Granny had been asked to stay upstairs to make things easier on everyone. It was too bad; social activity had been her lifeblood. Mrs. Kobayashi sympathized too. “Poor thing,” she had said. “It would be so much healthier if she could chatter away in a public bathhouse, instead of being cooped up there all alone.” But theirs was more of a philosophical pity, for they also understood Mrs. Nishimura’s position. As Sarah’s mother used to say: What can you do? There was no perfect solution, and right now it was Mrs. Nishimura’s turn to bloom at the expense of someone else.
The old woman never let on that her circumstances weren’t ideal. “Who wants to run about at my age?” she bragged. “I’m perfectly happy in my little kingdom upstairs. Surrounded by family, waited on hand and foot, maa maa, I’m incredibly lucky…”
Sarah scrutinized the photograph again. Mrs. Asaki, glancing over to see what was taking so much time, gave a little laugh of recognition. “I was young then,” she said.
In college, Sarah had learned that history was the study of power rising and power falling. Sitting here, leafing through the pages of another woman’s life, she felt the truth of this and was humbled. It occurred to her that her own past-the trio of her mother and grandmother and herself that had once seemed so extraordinary, strong and shining like the sun-was hardly unique. Countless other suns, like her great-aunt’s, had risen and fallen as a matter of course, each with its own forgotten story, its own poignance.
chapter 45
Sarah found her aunt alone in the kitchen, making preparations for dinner. “I’m just finishing up this side dish,” she told Sarah, in apology for cooking in the presence of a guest. She was sautéing a combination of julienned carrots, hijiki seaweed, and fried tofu skin. It looked identical to the dish Mrs. Kobayashi often made, but this would have much less soy sauce and sugar. Mrs. Kobayashi disparagingly referred to it as “Kyoto flavor.”
Before going off to undress, Sarah leaned against the kitchen doorjamb and watched her aunt. The radio was on, a plastic Hello Kitty model long outgrown by Momoko and Yashiko. For years now, it had been tuned to the same classical station that played everything from the Western melodies of Strauss and Puccini to the elegant notes of koto, punctuated by a shamisen’s bitter twangs.
In general, Mrs. Nishimura seemed unchanged. Under her apron she wore a blouse of pastel yellow, with a round collar that had embroidered daisies on it. She still wore the short bob, although Sarah could see it was professionally cut at a salon, with graduated layers and the subtlest of brownish highlights to indicate she was coloring her roots.
But on closer inspection, Sarah did sense something of the change her grandmother had mentioned. That virginal, ethereal quality was gone. As Mrs. Nishimura reached for a bottle of seasoning, she leaned across the counter with an unfamiliar physical brio that reminded Sarah, for an unsettling moment, of her own mother.
She stared, but Mrs. Nishimura made no more surprising moves. Stirring quietly at the stove, she was once again the aunt of Sarah’s childhood: a gentle figure who never frowned or grimaced, who hovered with a damp cloth for wiping children’s fingers.
An early memory floated up in her mind. She was six years old; they were walking to the park on a winter afternoon. She was in the middle, between her aunt and Momoko-Yashiko wasn’t born yet. “Hold on to Big Sister’s hand, for safety,” Mrs. Nishimura had told Momoko. As young as she was, Sarah knew her aunt was doing this to flatter her; any other adult would have walked in the middle, keeping one child on either side. Little Momoko obediently clutched Sarah’s hand with her mittened one, looking up at her with a chubby, trusting face framed by a knitted hood with animal ears. Sarah felt a rush of importance, followed by overwhelming love for her aunt. The three of them held hands and strolled down the sidewalk. “Ten ten ten-ten koro rin…,” Mrs. Nishimura chanted softly as they swung their joined hands back and forth.
It had struck Sarah, with a small child’s intuitiveness, that no one but her aunt could have been capable of such sensitivity. Looking back now, she wondered if even then she had sensed a kinship between them, for they both knew how it felt to be on the outside.
“Sarah-chan,” her aunt said, “are you finding this Japanese weather too chilly?”
“Not at all, Auntie. Today’s quite warm, I thought.”
“Yes, you’re right!” said Mrs. Nishimura. “It’s unseasonably warm.”
Talking to her aunt was slightly awkward, as always. On a purely technical level, she wasn’t used to making allowances for Sarah’s simple Japanese vocabulary. Mrs. Kobayashi had the knack for putting complex ideas into simple terms. Nuclear physics, for instance, became “the rules of science involving-” followed by an exploding sound, with both hands outlining an enormous H-bomb mushroom. “Right, right!” Sarah would say, laughing and nodding. But her aunt would use the term nuclear physics, then be at a loss if Sarah didn’t understand. So she usually stuck to the simplest of conversational topics.
But language aside, direct emotional entry was difficult. Mrs. Nishimura had a particularly traditional sensibility, with an oblique quality Sarah recognized from historical films. She had to remind herself that her mother, who had married a foreigner, was the unusual one. Mrs. Rexford had little patience for old-school Japanese opacity. “I have a cosmopolitan soul,” she used to say, only half joking.
“Auntie,” Sarah said, “I’m really looking forward to attending your concert.”
Mrs. Nishimura glanced up from the stove and laughed, waving her free hand before her face in a no-no motion as if the very idea of her performing in a concert was absurd.
“I feel bad that I never even knew about your choir.”
“You mustn’t feel bad,” her aunt said mildly.
After some more small talk, Sarah went off to undress behind the cotton curtain. It seemed odd that the informal dining room should adjoin the bathing room, but this was common in traditional Japanese homes where private baths had to be added on. It made more sense, she thought, than the Western custom of placing the bath in the same room as the toilet.
Fully naked, she slid open the glass door and entered the steaming bathing area. The tub was deeper than it was wide, with a lid to keep in the steam. Directly above the bath, mounted on the tiled wall, was a digital water temperature monitor (she was amused by this modern gadget, which was out of place with the rest of the house). At the other end of the room was a waist-high shower nozzle. Retrieving a low plastic stool from a stacked pile, Sarah drew it up before the nozzle, sat down, and soaped herself. As she shampooed her hair, she could hear faint clattering sounds in the kitchen, the energetic chatter of a commercial on the radio. Then the commercial ended and music came on. She recognized Pavarotti’s soulful tenor launching into his classic rendition of “Ave Maria.”
“Ave Maria”! There was a family story…
“She learned this new song in middle school,” Mrs. Asaki had once told the children. “And every day, when she went upstairs to hang up the towels and handkerchiefs, I’d hear…” The children waited eagerly as she placed her teacup deliberately onto the saucer with an elderly hand that, even back then, trembled. “Ave Maria!” She said it ominously: Ah-beh-mah-lih-ah! “All those strange foreign words-” Mrs. Asaki threw back her head and trilled an affected operatic tune. “Aaah…lalalaah…So loud! All over the neighborhood! I finally had to make her stop. Maa, what the neighbors must have thought!”