These were such honest, heartfelt tears that I had no idea how to react, and so I pretended not to notice, I stepped up into the house. Without turning around, I called out, “Hurry on in. I’m ready for some cake!”
Yōko hurriedly wiped away her tears and nodded. “Okay, I’ll be right in,” she said, in a voice that made it clear her nose was clogged. She was lovely, wonderfully pure. I bet she thought no one knew how easily she cried.
For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they’ve emerged. You don’t even notice that you’ve been inside until it’s too late for you ever to go back—that’s how perfect the temperature of that blanket is. For me it was the ocean, the whole town, the Yamamoto family, my mother, and a father who lived far away. All this embraced me back then, ever so softly. Now I’m having lots of fun, and I’m really happy here in Tokyo, but every once in a while the memory of my life in that town hits me so hard that I can hardly stand it, and I start feeling sad. At times like that the very first memories that are resurrected in my mind are these two scenes: Tsugumi playing with Pooch on the beach and Yōko smiling as she walks down the path that night, pushing her bicycle beside her.
Life
Now that the three of us were all living together, my father seemed to get such a kick out of coming home every evening that he hardly knew what to do with himself. He was so buoyant that just looking at him made you smile. Night after night he brought home sushi or cakes or some other little treat, and when he yanked open the door and called out, “I’m home! Hey, I’m home!” he would have such a soppy grin on his face and his expression would be so totally relaxed that I would start to feel slightly uneasy, wondering if he was really managing to focus on his work at the office. On Saturdays and Sundays he would insist on driving my mother and me around to all these nice stores and good restaurants he knew, carting us all over the city, or maybe he would cook up something for us himself, and then he’d become a carpenter for the day and put up a bunch of shelves over my desk that I’d told him again and again I didn’t particularly need, and then . . . let me tell you, it got to be pretty crazy. He was The Dad Who Came Late. But it’s true that his eagerness succeeded in skimming away the fine particles of unease that had continued to circulate among us. All the little knots that the years had put in our lives came undone, and we began to function as a proper family.
One evening my father called home from work and told us sadly that he was going to have to stay late that night. My mother popped off to bed pretty early, but I stayed up at the table in the combined dining room and kitchen, writing up an essay for school while watching TV, and I was still working there when my father came home. He smiled when he saw me, looking pleased.
“Still up?” he said. “I guess your mother has gone to bed?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Fish and miso soup is all there is, but if you want some dinner I can warm it up for you . . .”
“Sounds great.”
My father dragged his chair back a little from the table and sat down, then took off his blazer. I set the pot of soup on the stove and put the plate of broiled fish into the microwave. All at once a wave of energy sparked into the kitchen, electrifying the night. The murmur of the TV kept flowing on quietly through the room.
Suddenly my father spoke. “Hey Maria, want a senbei?”
“Huh?” I said, looking back over my shoulder.
My father was just removing two rice crackers wrapped in paper from his briefcase, making a sort of bumbling, crumply paper noise but handling them extremely carefully. He put them down on the table.
“One is for your mother.”
“I’m confused. Why do you have only two?” I asked, puzzled.
“Someone from another company came in today and he brought a box of these along as a little present,” explained my father. “I had one and it was so delicious that, well, you know, I kind of snuck these out for the two of you. Trust me, these senbei are really, really good.”
The man wasn’t even blushing.
“God, Dad, didn’t anyone catch on? You’re like a little boy with a dog hidden behind the house or something,” I said, laughing. I mean, picture a grown man waiting around until the coast is clear so that he can slip two senbei into his briefcase and take them home! Give me a break!
“The vegetables in Tokyo are awful, right, and the seafood is so gross you can hardly stand to eat it. But it turns out that the senbei here are great—it’s the one food this city can really be proud of,” said my father, speaking between mouthfuls of the rice and miso soup I had served him. I took his fish out of the microwave and set it down on the table in front of him.
“Well then, perhaps I’ll indulge myself,” I said, sitting down at the table and picking up one of the two packages. I felt the way non-Japanese must feel when they encounter senbei for the first time. With the very first bite I took, the intense flavor of the soy sauce in the coating flooded my mouth. It really was delicious. I told my father this, and he nodded contentedly.
I remember a time, soon after my mother and I came to Tokyo, when I caught sight of my father on his way home from work. I had just been to see a movie, and I was waiting for a traffic light at the corner of two streets lined with office buildings. The sky was brilliant with rays from the setting sun, and the subtle wash of its colors was reflected with infinite clarity in the rows of windows that covered the buildings, as vividly as if they were mirrors. It was right around the time when people get out of work, and a crowd of men dressed in suits and office ladies who had changed out of their uniforms into the livelier variety of their everyday clothes had gathered at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. The breeze that was blowing and the expressions on people’s faces seemed slightly tired, tired in precisely the same way. The workers kept chatting back and forth, and they all had these really ambiguous smiles on their faces that made it hard to tell whether or not they had places to go from here. The faces of the few men and women who were standing silently on their own seemed slightly severe.
All of a sudden my attention shifted to this guy who was walking along on the other side of the street. For a moment it seemed kind of strange that he should draw my eye so much, but then I realized that there was a very good reason—the guy was my father. My dad was marching along with the same severe expression on his face as the people I’d just been looking at, which felt really strange. The only time he wore this kind of expression at home was when he was watching TV and he lay down to get more comfortable and then started nodding off: His faced always assumed an expression like that the instant before he finally zonked out. I gazed at my father’s “public face,” utterly fascinated. And then this office lady came running out of the building where my father worked, shouting his name. He stopped walking. From where I stood on the other side of the street I was able to see everything that happened. The woman had an envelope in her hands that looked like it must be full of papers. My father’s eyes darted back and forth for a moment or two until he located her. Then he was smiling and moving his lips, probably saying something like God, what an idiot I am! Sorry to put you to so much trouble! and the woman hurried over to where he was standing, panting slightly, and handed him the envelope. She gave him a little smile and bowed lightly, he said goodbye to her, and then she went back into the building and my father started walking on briskly toward the subway, holding the envelope in both hands. Just then the light changed and crowds of people spilled out into the street. I deliberated for a few moments about whether to chase after him or not, but decided that it was too late now, he was too far away, and gave up. I remained standing there a little while with the dusky city around me, letting my thoughts wander . . .
As brief as this episode was, and though it was just an ordinary instance of ordinary forgetfulness, it gave me an unintended glimpse of the life my father had been living before we joined him.
A life he had lived for a very, very long time. For every single month and year that my mother and I had lived in that town near the sea my father had passed a month and a year here, breathing this city air—he had made his way through just as many days as we had. Arguing with his former wife, working at his job, making a name for himself, eating meals, forgetting things like he had just now, pausing every so often to think of my mother and me living in that town, so far away . . . And while for the two of us the town had been a home, the scene of our everyday lives, in my father’s mind it was probably just a place you visited on the weekends, somewhere you went to relax. Perhaps there had even been times when he felt like giving up on us, just chucking my mother and me away and being done with the whole thing? You know, I thought, I bet there were. Of course he would probably never mention any of this to the two of us, but sometimes deep down inside he must have felt that the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth. We had been in such a bizarre situation that we ended up acting like characters in just the opposite scenario, as gentle and good as the members of some Typical Happy Family. Though we weren’t aware of it, we were all struggling to conceal the murky snarl of emotions that must actually have slept deep inside each one of us. Life is a performance, I thought. Perhaps the word “illusion” would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me “performance” seemed closer to the truth. Standing there in the midst of the crowd that evening, I felt this realization swirl dizzily through my body in a dazzling splendor of light, if only for an instant. Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we’ve ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.
“Dad, don’t push yourself so much that you burn out, okay?” I said.
My father looked up at me, his face blank with surprise.
“What do you mean? Push myself at what?”
“You know, coming home early and buying little presents for us and going around buying me new clothes and things like that. If you do that stuff too much, eventually it’s going to wear you down.”
“What’s that last example? I haven’t bought you any clothes.”
My father was grinning. I grinned back at him.
“No, but I’m still hoping,” I said.
“What do you mean when you say that I’ll burn out?”
“Oh, you know. All of a sudden you’ll get bored with family life, and then you’ll start an affair with someone or go around getting drunk all the time, or maybe just start taking your frustration out on us, that kind of thing.”
“It’s true, eventually something like that might even happen.” Once again a smile drifted across his face. “But you know, right now I’m using every ounce of my energy to try to put together a new life with you and your mother. After all these years of waiting, we’re finally living the way I’ve always wanted to, and let me tell you, I’m really having a ball. I know there are some men out there who enjoy living on their own, who actually do prefer that kind of life, but that’s not the way I am. I’ve always been more of the comfy stay-at-home type. To tell the truth, that’s the reason things didn’t work out with my first wife. She didn’t like children, but she loved to go out. Keeping house wasn’t really her thing, either. Of course it’s only natural that there are people like her, and there’s no problem with that, but I wanted the sort of family where you all sit down and watch TV together every night and, even though it’s a pain in the butt, the whole family goes out together on Sundays. You know what I mean, right? The sort of family where you all feel really close to one another. Ultimately it was just a mistake for the two of us to fall in love. And so now when I think back over all the years I had to live here apart from you and your mother, when I think about all the different shades of loneliness I got to know during those years, I can really understand how crucial friends and family and people like that are. Of course it’s possible that I’ll come to see things in a different light later on, and maybe I will end up doing some really hurtful things to the two of you, but when you get right down to it stuff like that is part of life too. Maybe one day our inner workings will get out of sync, it’s true—but even if that’s going to happen, precisely because that might happen, it’s better for us to make lots of good memories for ourselves now, while we can.”
My father had stopped eating while he talked. His tone of voice had a cool, matter-of-fact feel to it, and I found myself impressed that he’d managed to hit exactly the right note. This dad of mine sometimes says some pretty good stuff! A kind of tenderness spread slowly through my chest—a feeling that I hadn’t yet experienced since we’d moved to Tokyo.
“I’m sure your mother has all kinds of things on her mind, too,” said my father gently. “She doesn’t talk about it, but after all it’s only natural to hurt a bit when you’ve left a place where you lived for so long, right?”
“What makes you think she’s hurting?”
“Take this, for instance.” My father tapped the slice of mackerel with his chopsticks. “Lately we’ve been having fish every night.”
Once he’d pointed it out, I realized it was true. An image of my mother halting in her tracks when she came to the fish store drifted up into my mind, and I fell silent.
“Hey, I thought you were supposed to be a college student,” said my father suddenly. “Don’t you have any parties to go to or a job or anything like that? You always seem to be at home in the evenings.”
“What are you talking about, Dad? It’s not like there are that many parties for me to be going to in the first place—I’m not in any clubs or anything. And no, I don’t have a job. What makes you come out with all this straight-from-TV-stereotype stuff all of a sudden?” I said, laughing.
“Oh, you know . . . at least once in my life I want to try out that ‘concerned dad’ thing: ‘Listen here, you’ve been staying out a little bit too late recently, haven’t you!’ and all that.” My father laughed with me.
The senbei for my mother remained on the table after everything else had been cleared away, an unobtrusive symbol of our family’s happiness.
Still, every once in a while I would find myself gripped by a longing for the ocean so intense that I couldn’t get to sleep. And no way to escape the feeling.
Sometimes when the wind changes in Ginza—a part of Tokyo I often walk around—all of a sudden you find yourself bobbing in the salty scent of the tide. During the few moments that the scent remains, I always feel as if I’m about to burst out screaming. This isn’t a lie, and I’m not exaggerating. Suddenly my whole body is drawn into the swirl of this fragrance, and I ache so fiercely that I can’t even make myself move. I feel like bursting into tears. Usually when this happens the weather is lovely, and the clear sky stretches on and on into the distance, and I feel like hurling away the bags I’m carrying from Yamano Records or Printemps or wherever, and dashing off to stand on that dirty concrete embankment beneath which the tide is forever dawdling, and just keep drinking in the aroma of the sea until my heart is full. It occurs to me that perhaps this is what people mean by “nostalgia”: the pain of knowing that this powerful yearning will eventually fade.
This happened again just a few days ago when I was out walking with my mother. It was near noon on a weekday, and there weren’t very many people out and about on the broad avenue. My mother and I had just emerged from a department store when a powerful gust of wind crashed down on top of us, bringing with it the scent of the ocean. We both recognized it immediately.
“What is that? It smells like salt water,” said my mother.
“It must be from over that way, you know . . . from Harumi Wharf,” I said, pointing in the general direction of the wharf. I felt like one of those people who like to lick their fingers and check which way the wind is blowing.
“I guess you’re right,” replied my mother. She gave me a
little smile.
She had been saying she wanted to go buy some flowers from the florist by the entrance to the park, so we headed in that direction. Way off down the street we could see the leaves of the trees, looking as if they had soaked up tons of water, dazzlingly green. Their color stood out beautifully against the blue of the sky, which was itself very precious—weather this nice is rare in the rainy season. A bus drove by, headed, as it happened, toward Harumi Wharf. The rumble of its massive form lingered in my ear.
“Should we stop for some tea before we go home?” I asked.
“No, we’d better hurry back. I’m going to my ikebana class this afternoon, and you know how your father is. He’s leaving tomorrow for that business trip, you know. If I don’t get something ready ahead of time so we can all sit down and have dinner together, he’ll get all mopey again. I swear, he’s just like a child, isn’t he? It’s just crazy.” I glanced at my mother’s profile as she said this, and saw that she was smiling.
“It’s only temporary,” I said. “He’ll settle down.”
Since she’d stepped into her role as a wife, my mother’s face had started to look more round, and that roundness stayed with her even when she smiled. As the corners of her mouth rose, the outline of her face seemed to send slow ripples circling out into the soft rays of sunlight that fell around her.
“So Maria, have you made some friends at school? I guess you must have, since people are always calling. But are you enjoying college?”
“Sure I’m enjoying it. Why?”
“Oh, you know. Before we came here you always had Yōko and Tsugumi to talk to, right? They were like sisters to you. So I thought maybe you would feel a little lonely in Tokyo. I mean, it’s so quiet in our house here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true, it is pretty quiet.”
The busy sound of footsteps rushing back and forth in the halls of the inn. The commotion in the kitchen, the echoing moan of the big vacuum cleaner, the ringing of the phone in the lobby. There were always crowds of people in the house making all different noises, and at five and nine o’clock the Town Association would broadcast a message from the speakers that hung here and there around the town telling kids that it was time for them to head home. The thundering of waves, whistles of trains, the chirping of birds.