“Very good,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Then what would happen?”
“There’s more?”
“This is really not that hard,” her mother said. “Use your brain. If the harmony of their house is disturbed, who has to act as go-between and calm everyone down?”
“That would be your auntie,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “And a thankless task it is,” she added grimly.
“So then you’d have three adults upset and troubled, all because you didn’t think ahead. Is that what you want?”
“No! I don’t want that.”
“Then as strange as it may seem,” concluded her mother, “slipping out like this is actually the best solution.”
“Very true,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.
For Sarah, this was an unfamiliar way of thinking. It was exciting but also exhausting, like that playground game where balls came at you from every direction. Despite the good intentions, it struck her as vaguely distasteful. The Asaki household would be shocked and hurt if they knew how much strategy lay behind her grandmother’s and mother’s actions…or would they? Apparently large families were much more complex than Sarah had imagined. Those big, jolly families she read about in children’s books, the kind that stood around the Christmas tree holding hands and singing, never seemed to face these kinds of issues.
“Are they really that sensitive?” she asked her grandmother later that day. “Do you really think we have to be this careful?” She had waited to catch her grandmother alone, because she feared her mother would tell her to mind her own business.
“Saa…,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied, “it’s better to be safe than sorry, don’t you think?”
“Are all Japanese families like this?”
“Probably not,” her grandmother said.
chapter 8
Normally Sarah and her mother and grandmother walked to the open-air market together, but one morning Mrs. Kobayashi stayed behind. She was cooking a big pot of curry while the day was still cool.
“What I’ll do is divide this into packets and put them in the freezer,” she told Mrs. Rexford. “That way, we can heat them up anytime we’re in a rush.” She demonstrated by crouching down and pulling open the door of the icebox, which was barely half the size of the Rexfords’ freezer back home. Women in the Ueno neighborhood didn’t need much storage space, since they bought fresh fish and produce every day. “See?” Mrs. Kobayashi revealed a tiny freezer compartment crammed with small, shrink-wrapped lumps and squares. “Look, I even froze the potato croquettes. Plus that filet mignon Sarah didn’t finish-actually we could chop that up today, don’t you think, and use it in fried rice?”
Sarah and her mother now strolled through the narrow lanes toward the open-air market. Mornings in this part of the neighborhood were always heavy with silence, except for those brief periods when clusters of children tramped to Tai Chi Hour or summer school meetings. Dark wooden houses rose up on either side, somber and shrinelike. Up in the trees, cicadas shrilled and shimmered, their unrelieved drone intensifying the silence instead of lessening it. Walking through this noise was like walking through the very heart of summer.
For a while, neither said a word. They hadn’t been alone together in the daytime since…probably since America.
They passed old-fashioned houses similar to the Kobayashis’. One had a charming trellis fence made of bamboo poles, whose deep golden hue contrasted nicely with the black twine knotting them together. Tall shrubbery from the garden poked out through the square openings, creating a nice textural effect while protecting the occupants’ privacy. Many of these fences were deliberately rustic, homages to country dwellings of the past. Sarah’s favorite was a fence that looked like a solid wall of dried twigs, cleverly held in place by slender crosspieces. But she also admired one of its neighbors that stood farther down the lane. It was a large property, with the slightly forbidding air of a yashiki manor. The fence consisted of a low foundation of boulders that was reminiscent of the stone bases of imperial castles. From these stones rose a solid, dun-colored wall of mud plaster, topped by a miniature rooftop of gray tiles. Above it, only the tops of the trees within were visible.
“I used to come and play here all the time,” Mrs. Rexford said, trailing her fingers along the mud wall. And Sarah marveled that none of this held any mystery for her mother.
They reached Umeya Shrine and cut through its grounds toward Tenjin Boulevard. Umeya was a tiny neighborhood shrine, well below the radar of those official tour buses that rumbled in and out of the So-Zen Temple complex several blocks away. The grounds here were deserted, the white expanse of raked sand emphasizing the gravity of the dark, moss-stained structures lining its periphery.
This was where Sarah and her cousins came each morning, before breakfast, to do tai chi exercises. They were joined by other neighborhood children, as well as old people who no longer needed to go to work or prepare breakfast for their families. At first, the children had stared at Sarah. But by now they had grown used to her presence, although there were still some who sneaked glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. Momoko and Yashiko didn’t seem to mind being seen with her; they acted nonchalant, as if they hosted Western visitors all year round.
Today a young mother stood in the open space, tossing out bread crumbs to a half circle of pigeons and urging her toddler to do the same. The little boy clutched a fistful of his mother’s skirt and gazed distrustfully at the bobbing, pecking birds. “Hato po’po…,” the woman sang softly, trying to encourage him with an old-fashioned ditty about feeding pigeons in the temple.
“Do you remember that song?” asked Mrs. Rexford. “I used to sing it to you when you were little.”
“I remember,” Sarah said. It seemed a lifetime ago. It was unsettling to hear this strange young woman singing it. She remembered a time when her own mother’s voice had held such unguarded tenderness, and sharp sorrow slipped through her belly.
They walked on, passing a stone statue of a fox deity, and entered the shade of a row of maple trees. “Granny Asaki says that starting in October, it’ll be against the law to feed pigeons,” Sarah said. “She says their droppings are ruining all the wood.”
“Did she? Well, it was bound to happen,” said Mrs. Rexford, “with so many tourists nowadays. But it’ll be strange, won’t it, not having them around anymore.”
Within these cloistered grounds, they sensed the busy, noisy world lying in wait just beyond. Somewhere behind one of the shrine buildings, someone hammered, paused, then began hammering again. At the other end of the grounds, in the gap framed by massive vermilion gateposts, cars and buses flashed by with a muted whizzing.
Mrs. Rexford halted in the shade of the maple trees. Lowering her parasol, she lifted her face toward the leaf-laden branches.
“Look, Sarah,” she said, pointing up. “You see how the sunlight’s coming down through these leaves?” She had a tendency to lecture when she felt deeply moved. “This is exactly the way it used to look when I was a child. The exact same way.” She kept on pointing, as if determined to press these unremarkable trees onto her daughter’s memory.
“Oh,” said Sarah.
Mrs. Rexford raised her parasol, and they walked on.
Once Sarah had read a poem about “a lifetime caught in a fall of light,” or perhaps it was “a century caught in a fall of light.” She remembered nothing else about the poem, just that phrase, which rose up from nowhere to claim the moment.
She pictured her mother hunting for cicadas as a child, perhaps in these very trees: a tomboy with a bamboo pole, squinting up with determination through the knife-edged glints of light flashing through the leaves. She pictured her mother in later years, reading and sketching outdoors. There must have been moments when she paused in her work to look up at just such a canopy of tiny, star-shaped leaves, their green made translucent by the sun. She thought, too, of an anecdote her grandmother had told: when Sarah was a baby, her mother had held her up to a tree branch, then laughed and laughed with delight when her child reached out and curled her tiny fingers around a low-hanging leaf.