The Laws of Evening: Stories (4 page)

“Nishitani-san, do you have a moment to sit down?” I sank down onto the kitchen step. “Here with me?” My voice came from far away. Even the weather had a surreal quality to it, I remember. It was overcast. The sky was not gray but whitish, like thick membrane, and light glowed behind it with a brightness almost brutal.

“Saa, that would be fine,” he said. A faint version of his old smile brought back China to me, like a whiff of old scent. “Just for a few minutes.”

Nishitani-san offered no explanation of his situation, nor did he mention what he was doing in this part of the country. I avoided looking in the direction of his baskets, for I wanted to spare him as much discomfort as possible; I kept my gaze trained on his face and never once glanced down at the hip-length vendor jacket he wore, cobalt blue with the store owner’s name written in white brushstrokes down the length of its collar. Nishitani-san smelled so strongly of fish blood, sitting beside me, that my temples were tightening into a headache. And he had once used such lovely cologne, from Paris.

He asked after Yukio and Kin-chan, and I told him, in the briefest terms. “Aaa, here too…,” he murmured. I remembered then that he had lived near Nagasaki. “How you must have suffered,” he said after a silence, gazing at my face. I knew he was registering the premature streaks of white in my hair, the sun damage on my once flawless complexion.

“Do you remember,” Nishitani-san said abruptly, and he began to reminisce about the delicious roast duck at our dinners, Yukio’s old jokes, the comical quirks of our compound neighbors. I heard in his voice a new gravity, a new tenderness, that seemed to lift each memory—like some precious jewel—and hold it up in wonderment to the light.

“You know,” I said, “Kin-chan missed you for almost a month after we sailed home. ‘Uncle
Nee
-tani,’ he kept saying with that lisp of his, and he looked so worried, with his little forehead all wrinkled up, that everybody just had to
laugh
—”

“A whole month, really?” Nishitani-san said. His lips curved up into his old dazzling smile. “That was unusually long for a three-year-old!”

“You see, hora, you’re the type,” I said with my old playful air, “who makes a huge impression on everyone he meets!” I froze then at my choice of words, for it skirted a little too close to the impression he would be leaving me with today. But Nishitani-san seemed not to mind, for he tipped back his head and laughed.

I pictured him back in China, on a sunny Sunday afternoon a few months before war was declared. He had been striding away after luncheon at our home, a tall, confident man; the force of his gait made the back of his white shirt, always immaculately starched, balloon out above his belt like a full sail. “Uncle
Nee
-tani! Uncle
Nee
-tani!” Kin-chan had shrieked, running after him through the dappled light beneath the persimmon trees, losing his red sandal in the dirt, fumbling to put it back on, then losing it again after a few steps.

Nishitani-san had glanced back. “Escape, Nishitani-san, escape!” I called out to him, laughing and shooing him away with both hands. He had flashed me a big white smile and, with a boyish laugh, trotted away in mock haste, leaving Kin-chan bawling in the middle of the path.

Remembering all this, I felt the prickle of approaching tears and lowered my eyes to hide it. Nishitani-san was still laughing; it surprised me that his hands, red and raw like a laborer’s, were trembling on his knees.

“The aristocrats of the ancient court,” I say, “were devout Buddhists.” It is decades later, and I am lecturing to my older tea ceremony students on the origins of etiquette.

“Buddha taught that life is filled with pain,” I tell them. And suddenly an image of Nishitani-san’s hands comes to mind, as they looked one day in the year 1946. There were dark scabs on his knuckles, hard as horn and soon to become calluses; on the rest of his hands were thin red scratches. I remembered my first glimpse of his baskets, full to the brim despite the lateness of the morning hour.

Clearly he was new to this, and struggling; he had not yet perfected that peculiar air vendors have, the bland unthinking cheerfulness which attracts customers.

“Filled with pain,” I say to my students, “and sorrow.”

“Hai, Teacher,” the girls murmur in their high-pitched voices.

On that long-ago morning I pulled out my coin purse from my apron pocket—my hands, too, were trembling now—but before I could speak, Nishitani-san shook his head no. It was quick, a mere jerk—the imperceptible warning one gives in the presence of a third party. I slipped the purse back in my pocket.

“Those aristocrats, influenced by Buddha’s teachings,” I tell my students, “felt that nobility of spirit was the grace—or ability—to move through this world voluntarily, as a game or dance. And they passed down their ideal through the rituals of etiquette, ne? Polite speech, for example. Even today we refer to an honorable person not as having been killed, but as having condescended to play at dying.”

The girls nod politely, blankly.

Today, what strikes me most about that morning—for memory will always shift focus—is our wordless farewell as Nishitani-san and I bowed to each other. It would be many years before I linked the essence of our bow with that of Kenryu’s famous poem about a rice plant:
weighed down with grain / making graceful bows / in the wind
. How lovely our bows would have seemed to a casual onlooker: stately, seasoned, like movements in a sacred dance.

I
N
I
MAMIYAI
P
ARK
the boys are playing dodge-ball, a new American game. Their voices float indistinctly on the soft summer evening. Behind them tall poplars rise up through the low-lying dusk, intercepting the last of the sun’s rays, which dazzle the leaves with white and gold.

Makiko can hardly believe her son, Toshi, belongs with these older boys. Seven years old! Once his growth had seemed commensurate with the passage of time. These last few years, however, with the war and surrender, the changes have come too fast, skimming her consciousness like skipped pebbles over water.

Makiko is grateful the war is over. But she cannot ignore a niggling sense that Japan’s surrender has spawned a new threat more subtle, more diffuse. She can barely articulate it, even to herself; feels unmoored, buffeted among invisible forces that surge up all around her. Her son’s thin body, as if caught up in these energies, is rapidly lengthening. Look! Within that circle in the dirt he is dodging, he is feinting; his body twists with an unfamiliar grace, foreshadowing that of a young man.

Toshi’s growth is abetted by a new lunch program at school, subsidized by the American government, which has switched, with dizzying speed, from enemy to ally. Each day now, her son comes home with alien food in his stomach: bread, cheese, bottled milk. Last week, in the pocket of his shorts, Makiko found a cube of condensed peanut butter (an American dessert, Toshi explained) that he had meant to save for later. It was coated with lint from his pocket, which he brushed off, ignoring her plea to “get rid of that filthy thing.”

Each day now, Toshi comes home with questions she cannot answer: Who was Magellan? How do you say “my name is Toshi” in English? How do you play baseball?

Makiko shows him the ball games her own mother taught her. She bounces an imaginary ball, chanting a ditty passed down from the Edo Period:

In the old days, she tells him, they used to put something inside the rubber balls—maybe a scrap of iron, she wasn’t sure—that made a rattling noise. Toshi, too old now for this sort of amusement, sighs with impatience.

Just four years ago, Toshi’s head had been too big for his body—endearingly out of proportion, like the head of a stuffed animal. Even then he had a manly, square-jawed face, not unlike that of a certain city council candidate displayed on election posters at the time. “Mr. Magistrate,” her husband, Yoshitsune, nicknamed the boy. Before he went off to war, Yoshitsune and their son had developed a little routine. “Oyi, Toshi! Are you a man?” Yoshitsune would prompt in his droll tone, using the word
otoko,
with its connotations of male bravery, strength, and honor. He asked this question several times a day, often before neighbors and friends.

“Hai, Father! I am a man!” little Toshi would cry, stiffening at soldierly attention as he had been coached, trembling with eagerness to please. His short legs, splayed out from the knees as if buckling under the weight of his head, were still dimpled with baby fat.

“Maaa! An excellent, manly answer!” the grown-ups praised, through peals of laughter.

Makiko had laughed too, a faint constriction in her throat, for recently Yoshitsune had remarked to her, “When I’m out fighting in the Pacific, that’s how I’m going to remember him.” After that she began watching their child closely, trying to memorize what Yoshitsune was memorizing. Later, when her husband was gone, it comforted her to think that the same images swam into both their minds at night. Even today, Toshi’s three-year-old figure is vivid in her mind. On the other hand, she has not fully absorbed the war years, still shrinks from those memories and all that has followed.

Foreigners, for instance, are now a familiar sight. American Army jeeps with beefy red arms dangling out the windows roar down Kagane Boulevard, the main thoroughfare just east of Toshi’s school. “Keep your young women indoors,” the neighbors say. Makiko has watched an occasional soldier offering chocolates or peanuts to little children, squatting down to their level, holding out the treat—it seems to her they all have hairy arms—as if to a timid cat. Just yesterday Toshi came home, smiling broadly and carrying chocolates—not one square but three. Bile had surged up in Makiko’s throat, and before she knew it, she had struck them right out of his hand and onto the kitchen floor. “How could you!” she choked as Toshi, stunned, burst into sobs. “How could you?! Your father, those men killed your
father
!”

This evening Makiko has come to the park with a small box of caramels, bought on the black market with some of the money she was hoarding to buy winter yarn. “In the future,” she will tell him, “if you want something so badly, you come to me. Ne? Not to them.”

On a bench in the toddlers’ section, now deserted, she waits for her son to finish his game with the other boys. All the other mothers have gone home to cook dinner. The playground equipment has not been maintained since the beginning of the war. The swing set is peeling with rust; the free-standing animals—the ram, the pig, the rooster—rest on broken-down springs, and their carnival paint has washed away, exposing more rusted steel.

Ara maaa! Her Toshi has finally been hit! Makiko feels a mother’s pang. He is crossing the line to the other side now, carrying the ball. Makiko notes the ease with which the fallen one seems to switch roles in this game, heaving the ball at his former teammates without the slightest trace of allegiance.

This year, Makiko is allowing Toshi to light the incense each evening before the family altar. He seems to enjoy prayer time much more now that he can use matches. She also regularly changes which photograph of her husband is displayed beside the miniature gong. This month’s photograph shows Yoshitsune in a long cotton
yukata,
smoking under the ginkgo tree in the garden. Sometimes, in place of a photograph, she displays an old letter or one of his silk scent bags, still fragrant after a bit of massaging. The trick is to keep Toshi interested, to present his father in the light of constant renewal.

“Just talk to him inside your mind,” she tells her son. “He wants to know what you’re learning in school, what games you’re playing. Just like any other father, ne? Don’t leave him behind, don’t ignore him, just because he’s dead.” She wonders if Toshi secretly considers his father a burden, making demands from the altar, like a cripple from a wheelchair.

“Your father’s very handsome in this picture, ne?” she says tonight. Within the lacquered frame, her son’s father glances up from lighting a cigarette, a bemused half smile on his face, as if he is waiting to make a wry comment.

Toshi nods absently. Frowning, he slashes at the matchbox with the expert flourish of a second-grade boy. The match rips into flames.

“Answer properly! You’re not a little baby anymore.”

“Hai, Mother.” Toshi sighs with a weary, accommodating air, squaring his shoulders in a semblance of respectful attention. Makiko remembers with sorrow the big head, the splayed legs of her baby boy.

It amazes her that Toshi has no memory of the routine he once performed with his father. “What
do
you remember of him?” she prods every so often, hoping to dislodge some new memory. But all that Toshi remembers of his father is being carried on one arm before a sunny window.

“Maaa, what a wonderful memory!” Makiko encourages him each time. “It must have been a very happy moment!”

When would this have taken place: which year, which month? Would even Yoshitsune have remembered it, this throwaway moment that, inexplicably, has outlasted all the others in their son’s mind? She tries conjuring it up, as if the memory is her own. For some reason she imagines autumn, the season Yoshitsune sailed away: October 1942. How the afternoon sun would seep in through the nursery window, golden, almost amber, advancing with the slow, viscous quality of Tendai honey, overtaking sluggish dust motes and even sound. She wishes Toshi could remember the old view from that upstairs window: a sea of gray-tiled roofs drowsing in the autumn haze, as yet unravaged by the fires of war.

“I’m done,” Toshi says.

“What! Already? Are you sure?”

“Hai, Mother.” Already heading for the dining room, where supper lies waiting on the low table, he slides back the shoji door in such a hurry that it grates on its grooves. Makiko considers calling him back—his prayers are getting shorter and shorter—but the incident with the chocolates is still too recent for another reprimand.

She follows him into the dining room. “A man who forgets his past,” she quotes as she scoops rice into his bowl, “stays at the level of an animal.” Toshi meets her eyes with a guilty, resentful glance. “Go on,” she says blandly, “eat it while it’s hot.”

Toshi falls to. In order to supplement their meager rice ration, Makiko continues to mix in chopped
kabura
radishes—which at least resemble rice in color—as she did during the war. Sometimes she switches to chopped turnips. At first, before the rationing became strict, Toshi would hunch over his rice bowl with his chopsticks, fastidiously picking out one bit of vegetable after another and discarding it onto another plate. Now, he eats with gusto. It cuts her, the things he has grown used to. As a grown man he will reminisce over all the wrong things, things that should never have been a part of his childhood: this shameful pauper food; blocks of peanut paste covered with lint; enemy soldiers amusing themselves by tossing chocolate and peanuts to children.

Later, Toshi ventures a question. Makiko has noticed that nighttime—the black emptiness outside, the hovering silence—still cows him a little, stripping him of his daytime cockiness. After his good-night bow, Toshi remains kneeling in bowing position on the tatami floor. He says, “I was thinking, Mama, about how I’m seven—and how I only remember things that happened after I was three. So that means I’ve forgotten a whole half of my life. Right?”

“That’s right,” Makiko says. He is looking up at her, his brows puckered in a look of doleful concentration that reminds her of his younger days. “But it’s perfectly normal, Toshi-kun. It’s to be expected.”

He is still thinking. “So when I get older,” he says, “am I going to keep on forgetting? Am I going to forget you, too?”

Makiko reaches out and strokes his prickly crew cut. “From this age on,” she says, “you’re going to remember everything, Toshi-kun. Nothing more will ever be lost.”

In the middle of the night, Makiko awakes from a dream in which her husband, Yoshitsune, is hitting her with a flyswatter. She lies paralyzed under her futon, outrage buzzing in her chest. Details from the dream wash back into her mind: Yoshitsune’s smile, distant and amused; the insolent way he wielded the swatter, as if she were hardly worth the effort.

A blue sheet of moonlight slips in through the space between two sliding panels.

In the first year or two after Yoshitsune’s death, this sort of thing would happen often, and not always in the form of dreams. There were times—but hardly ever anymore; why tonight?—when, in the middle of washing the dishes or sweeping the alley, some small injustice from her past, long forgotten, would rise up in Makiko’s mind, blotting out all else till her heart beat hard and fast. Like that time, scarcely a month after their wedding, when Yoshitsune had run into his old girlfriend at Nanjin Station and made such a fuss: his absurd, rapt gaze; the intimate timbre of his voice as he inquired after her welfare.

And there was the time—the only time in their entire marriage—when Yoshitsune had grabbed Makiko by the shoulders and shaken her hard. He’d let go immediately, but not before she felt the anger in his powerful hands and her throat had choked up with fear. That, too, was early on in the marriage, before Makiko learned to tolerate his sending sizable sums of money home to his mother each month.

What is to be done with such memories?

They get scattered, left behind. Over these past few years, more pleasant recollections have taken the lead, informing all the rest, like a flock of birds, heading as one body along an altered course of nostalgia.

She has tried so hard to remain true to the past. But the weight of her need must have been too great: her need to be comforted, her need to provide a legacy for a small, fatherless boy. Tonight she senses how far beneath the surface her own past has sunk, its outline distorted by deceptively clear waters.

Toshi has been counting the days till Tanabata Day. A small festival is being held at the riverbank—the first one since the war. It will be a meager affair, of course, nothing like it used to be: no goldfish scooping, no soba noodles, no fancy fireworks. However, according to the housewives at the open-air market, there will be a limited number of sparklers (the nicest kind anyway, Makiko tells her son) and traditional corn grilled with soy sauce, which can be purchased out of each family’s ration allowance.

Because of a recent after-dark incident near Kubota Temple involving an American soldier and a young girl, Makiko’s younger brother has come by this evening to accompany them to the festival. Noboru is a second-year student at the local university.