"Step out of your pants," she said.
Satsu's face was more confused than I'd seen it in a long while, but she stepped out of her pants and left them on the slimy stone floor. Mrs. Fidget took her by the shoulders and seated her on the platform. Satsu was completely naked; I'm sure she had no more idea why she should be sitting there than I did. But she had no time to wonder about it either, for in an instant Mrs. Fidget had put her hands on Satsu's knees and spread them apart. And without a moment's hesitation she reached her hand between Satsu's legs. After this I could no longer bring myself to watch. I think Satsu must have resisted, for Mrs. Fidget gave a shout, and at the same moment I heard a loud slap, which was Mrs. Fidget smacking Satsu on the leg-as I could tell later from the red mark there. In a moment Mrs. Fidget was done and told Satsu to put her clothes back on. While she was dressing, Satsu gave a big sniff. She may have been crying, but I didn't dare look at her.
Next, Mrs. Fidget came straight at me, and in a moment my own pants were down around my knees, and my shirt was taken off me just as Satsu's had been. I had no bosoms for the old woman to move around, but she looked under my arms just as she'd done with my sister, and turned me around too, before seating me on the platform and pulling my pants off my legs. I was terribly frightened of what she would do, and when she tried to spread my knees apart, she had to slap me on the leg just as she'd slapped Satsu, which made my throat begin to burn from holding back my tears. She put a finger between my legs and gave what felt to me like a pinch, in such a way that I cried out. When she told me to dress again, I felt as a dam must feel when it's holding back an entire river. But I was afraid if Satsu or I began to sob like little children, we might look bad in Mr. Tanaka's eyes.
"The girls are healthy," she said to Mr. Tanaka when he came back into the room, "and very suitable. Both of them are intact. The older one has far too much wood, but the younger one has a good deal of water. Pretty too, don't you think? Her older sister looks like a peasant beside her!"
"I'm sure they're both attractive girls in their way," he said. "Why don't we talk about it while I walk you out? The girls will wait here for me."
When Mr. Tanaka had closed the door behind them, I turned to see Satsu sitting on the edge of the platform, gazing upward toward the ceiling. Because of the shape of her face, tears were pooled along the tops of her nostrils, and I burst into tears myself the moment I saw her upset. I felt myself to blame for what had happened, and wiped her face with the corner of my peasant shirt.
"Who was that horrible woman?" she said to me.
"She must be a fortune-teller. Probably Mr. Tanaka wants to learn as much about us as he can..."
"But why should she look at us in that horrible way!"
"Satsu-san, don't you understand?" I said. "Mr. Tanaka is planning to adopt us."
When she heard this, Satsu began to blink as if a bug had crawled into her eye. "What are you talking about?" she said. "Mr. Tanaka can't adopt us."
"Father is so old... and now that our mother is sick, I think Mr. Tanaka is worried about our future. There won't be anyone to take care of us."
Satsu stood, she was so agitated to hear this. In a moment her eyes had begun to squint, and I could see she was hard at work willing herself to believe that nothing was going to take us from our tipsy house. She was squeezing out the things I'd told her in the same way you might squeeze water from a sponge. Slowly her face began to relax again, and she sat down once more on the edge of the platform. In a moment she was gazing around the room as if we'd never had the conversation at all.
*
Mr. Tanaka's house lay at the end of a lane just outside the town. The glade of pine trees surrounding it smelled as richly as the ocean back on the seacliffs at our house; and when I thought of the ocean and how I would be trading one smell for another, I felt a terrible emptiness I had to pull myself away from, just as you might step back from a cliff after peering over it. The house was grander than anything in Yoroido, with enormous eaves like our village shrine. And when Mr. Tanaka stepped up into his entryway, he left his shoes right where he walked out of them, because a maid came and stowed them on a shelf for him. Satsu and I had no shoes to put away, but just as I was about to walk into the house, I felt something strike me softly on my backside, and a pine cone fell onto the wood floor between my feet. I turned to see a young girl about my age, with very short hair, running to hide behind a tree. She peered out to smile at me with a triangle of empty space between her front teeth and then ran away, looking back over her shoulder so I'd be certain to chase her. It may sound peculiar, but I'd never had the experience of actually meeting another little girl. Of course I knew the girls in my village, but we'd grown up together and had never done anything that might be called "meeting." But Kuniko-for that was the name of Mr. Tanaka's little daughter-was so friendly from the first instant I saw her, I thought it might be easy for me to move from one world into another.
Kuniko's clothing was much more refined than mine, and she wore zori; but being the village girl I was, I chased her out into the woods barefoot until I caught up to her at a sort of playhouse made from the sawed-off branches of a dead tree. She'd laid out rocks and pine cones to make rooms. In one she pretended to serve me tea out of a cracked cup; in another we took turns nursing her baby doll, a little boy named Taro who was really nothing more than a canvas bag stuffed with dirt. Taro loved strangers, said Kuniko, but he was very frightened of earthworms; and by a most peculiar coincidence, so was Kuniko. When we encountered one, Kuniko made sure I carried it outside in my fingers before poor Taro should burst into tears.
I was delighted at the prospect of having Kuniko for a sister. In fact, the majestic trees and the pine smell-even Mr. Tanaka-all began to seem almost insignificant to me in comparison. The difference between life here at the Tanakas' house and life in Yoroido was as great as the difference between the odor of something cooking and a mouthful of delicious food.
As it grew dark, we washed our hands and feet at the well, and went inside to take our seats on the floor around a square table. I was amazed to see steam from the meal we were about to eat rising up into the rafters of a ceiling high above me, with electric lights hanging down over our heads. The brightness of the room was startling; I'd never seen such a thing before. Soon the servants brought our dinner-grilled salted sea bass, pickles, soup, and steamed rice-but the moment we began to eat, the lights went out. Mr. Tanaka laughed; this happened quite often, apparently. The servants went around lighting lanterns that hung on wooden tripods.
No one spoke very much as we ate. I'd expected Mrs. Tanaka to be glamorous, but she looked like an older version of Satsu, except that she smiled a good deal. After dinner she and Satsu began playing a game of go, and Mr. Tanaka stood and called a maid to bring his kimono jacket. In a moment Mr. Tanaka was gone, and after a short delay, Kuniko gestured to me to follow her out the door. She put on straw zori and lent me an extra pair. I asked her where we were going.
"Quietly!" she said. "We're following my daddy. I do it every time he goes out. It's a secret."
We headed up the lane and turned on the main street toward the town of Senzuru, following some distance behind Mr. Tanaka. In a few minutes we were walking among the houses of the town, and then Kuniko took my arm and pulled me down a side street. At the end of a stone walkway between two houses, we came to a window covered with paper screens that shone with the light inside. Kuniko put her eye to a hole torn just at eye level in one of the screens. While she peered in, I heard the sounds of laughter and talking, and someone singing to the accompaniment of a shamisen. At length she stepped aside so I could put my own eye to the hole. Half the room inside was blocked from my view by a folding screen, but I could see Mr. Tanaka seated on the mats with a group of three or four men. An old man beside him was telling a story about holding a ladder for a young woman and peering up her robe; everyone was laughing except Mr. Tanaka, who gazed straight ahead toward the part of the room blocked from my view.
An older woman in kimono came with a glass for him, which he held while she poured beer. Mr. Tanaka struck me as an island in the midst of the sea, because although everyone else was enjoying the story-even the elderly woman pouring the beer-Mr. Tanaka just went on staring at the other end of the table. I took my eye from the hole to ask Kuniko what sort of place this was.
"It's a teahouse," she told me, "where geisha entertain. My daddy comes here almost every night. I don't know why he likes it so. The women pour drinks, and the men tell stories-except when they sing songs. Everybody ends up drunk."
I put my eye back to the hole in time to see a shadow crossing the wall, and then a woman came into view. Her hair was ornamented with the dangling green bloom of a willow, and she wore a soft pink kimono with white flowers like cutouts all over it. The broad obi tied around her middle was orange and yellow. I'd never seen such elegant clothing. None of the women in Yoroido owned anything more sophisticated than a cotton robe, or perhaps linen, with a simple pattern in indigo. But unlike her clothing, the woman herself wasn't lovely at all. Her teeth protruded so badly that her lips didn't quite cover them, and the narrowness of her head made me wonder if she'd been pressed between two boards as a baby. You may think me cruel to describe her so harshly; but it struck me as odd that even though no one could have called her a beauty, Mr. Tanaka's eyes were fixed on her like a rag on a hook. He went on watching her while everyone else laughed, and when she knelt beside him to pour a few more drops of beer into his glass, she looked up at him in a way that suggested they knew each other very well.
Kuniko took another turn peeking through the hole; and then we went back to her house and sat together in the bath at the edge of the pine forest. The sky was extravagant with stars, except for the half blocked by limbs above me. I could have sat much longer trying to understand all I'd seen that day and the changes confronting me... but Kuniko had grown so sleepy in the hot water that the servants soon came to help us out.
Satsu was snoring already when Kuniko and I lay down on our futons beside her, with our bodies pressed together and our arms intertwined. A warm feeling of gladness began to swell inside me, and I whispered to Kuniko, "Did you know I'm going to come and live with you?" I thought the news would shock her into opening her eyes, or maybe even sitting up. But it didn't rouse her from her slumber. She let out a groan, and then a moment later her breath was warm and moist, with the rattle of sleep in it.
chapter three
Back at home my mother seemed to have grown sicker in the day I'd been away. Or perhaps it was just that I'd managed to forget how ill she really was. Mr. Tanaka's house had smelled of smoke and pine, but ours smelled of her illness in a way I can't even bear to describe. Satsu was working in the village during the afternoon, so Mrs. Sugi came to help me bathe my mother. When we carried her out of the house, her rib cage was broader than her shoulders, and even the whites of her eyes were cloudy. I could only endure seeing her this way by remembering how I'd once felt stepping out of the bath with her while she was strong and healthy, when the steam had risen from our pale skin as if we were two pieces of boiled radish. I found it hard to imagine that this woman, whose back I'd so often scraped with a stone, and whose flesh had always seemed firmer and smoother to me than Satsu's, might be dead before even the end of summer.
That night while lying on my futon, I tried to picture the whole confusing situation from every angle to persuade myself that things would somehow be all right. To begin with, I wondered, how could we go on living without my mother? Even if we did survive and Mr. Tanaka adopted us, would my own family cease to exist? Finally I decided Mr. Tanaka wouldn't adopt just my sister and me, but my father as well. He couldn't expect my father to live alone, after all. Usually I couldn't fall asleep until I'd managed to convince myself this was true, with the result that I didn't sleep much during those weeks, and mornings were a blur.
On one of these mornings during the heat of the summer, I was on my way back from fetching a packet of tea in the village when I heard a crunching noise behind me. It turned out to be Mr. Sugi-Mr. Tanaka's assistant-running up the path. When he reached me, he took a long while to catch his breath, huffing and holding his side as if he'd just run all the way from Senzuru. He was red and shiny like a snapper, though the day hadn't grown hot yet. Finally he said:
"Mr. Tanaka wants you and your sister... to come down to the village... as soon as you can."
I'd thought it odd that my father hadn't gone out fishing that morning. Now I knew why: Today was the day.
"And my father?" I asked. "Did Mr. Tanaka say anything about him?"
"Just get along, Chiyo-chan," he told me. "Go and fetch your sister."
I didn't like this, but I ran up to the house and found my father sitting at the table, digging grime out of a rut in the wood with one of his fingernails. Satsu was putting slivers of charcoal into the stove. It seemed as though the two of them were waiting for something horrible to happen.
I said, "Father, Mr. Tanaka wants Satsu-san and me to go down to the village."
Satsu took off her apron, hung it on a peg, and walked out the door. My father didn't answer, but blinked a few times, staring at the point where Satsu had been. Then he turned his eyes heavily toward the floor and gave a nod. I heard my mother cry out in her sleep from the back room.
Satsu was almost to the village before I caught up with her. I'd imagined this day for weeks already, but I'd never expected to feel as frightened as I did. Satsu didn't seem to realize this trip to the village was any different from one she might have made the day before. She hadn't even bothered to clean the charcoal off her hands; while wiping her hair away she ended up with a smudge on her face. I didn't want her to meet Mr. Tanaka in this condition, so I reached up to rub off the mark as our mother might have done. Satsu knocked my hand away.
Outside the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, I bowed and said good morning to Mr. Tanaka, expecting he would be happy to see us. Instead he was strangely cold. I suppose this should have been my first clue that things weren't going to happen just the way I'd imagined. When he led us to his horse-drawn wagon, I decided he probably wanted to drive us to his house so that his wife and daughter would be in the room when he told us about our adoption.
"Mr. Sugi will be riding in the front with me," he said, "so you and Shizu-san had better get into the back." That's just what he said: "Shizu-san." I thought it very rude of him to get my sister's name wrong that way, but she didn't seem to notice. She climbed into the back of the wagon and sat down among the empty fish baskets, putting one of her hands flat onto the slimy planks. And then with that same hand, she wiped a fly from her face, leaving a shiny patch on her cheek. I didn't feel as indifferently about the slime as Satsu did. I couldn't think about anything but the smell, and about how satisfied I would feel to wash my hands and perhaps even my clothes when we reached Mr. Tanaka's house.
During the trip, Satsu and I didn't speak a word, until we topped the hill overlooking Senzuru, when all of a sudden she said:
"A train."
I looked out to see a train in the distance, making its way toward the town. The smoke rolled downwind in a way that made me think of the skin being shed from a snake. I thought this was clever and tried explaining it to Satsu, but she didn't seem to care. Mr. Tanaka would have appreciated it, I thought, and so would Kuniko. I decided to explain it to both of them when we reached the Tanakas' home.
Then suddenly I realized we weren't headed in the direction of Mr. Tanaka's home at all.
The wagon came to a stop a few minutes later on a patch of dirt beside the train tracks, just outside the town. A crowd of people stood with sacks and crates piled around them. And there, to one side of them, was Mrs. Fidget, standing beside a peculiarly narrow man wearing a stiff kimono. He had soft black hair, like a cat's, and held in one of his hands a cloth bag suspended from a string. He struck me as out of place in Senzuru, particularly there beside the farmers and the fishermen with their crates, and an old hun
ched woman wearing a rucksack of yams. Mrs. Fidget said something to him, and when he turned and peered at us, I decided at once that I was frightened of him.
Mr. Tanaka introduced us to this man, whose name was Bekku. Mr. Bekku said nothing at all, but only looked closely at me and seemed puzzled by Satsu.
Mr. Tanaka said to him, "I've brought Sugi with me from Yoroido. Would you like him to accompany you? He knows the girls, and I can spare him for a day or so."
"No, no," said Mr. Bekku, waving his hand.
I certainly hadn't expected any of this. I asked where we were going, but no one seemed to hear me, so I came up with an answer for myself. I decided Mr. Tanaka had been displeased by what Mrs. Fidget had told him about us, and that this curiously narrow man, Mr. Bekku, planned to take us somewhere to have our fortunes told more completely. Afterward we would be returned to Mr. Tanaka.
While I tried my best to soothe myself with these thoughts, Mrs. Fidget, wearing a pleasant smile, led Satsu and me some distance down the dirt platform. When we were too far away for the others to hear us, her smile vanished and she said:
"Now listen to me. You're both naughty girls!" She looked around to be sure no one was watching and then hit us on the tops of our heads. She didn't hurt me, but I cried out in surprise. "If you do something to embarrass me," she went on, "I'll make you pay for it! Mr. Bekku is a stern man; you must pay attention to what he says! If he tells you to crawl under the seat of the train, you'll do it. Understand?"
From the expression on Mrs. Fidget's face, I knew I should answer her or she might hurt me. But I was in such shock I couldn't speak. And then just as I'd feared, she reached out and began pinching me so hard on the side of my neck that I couldn't even tell which part of me hurt. I felt as if I'd fallen into a tub of creatures that were biting me everywhere, and I heard myself whimper. The next thing I knew, Mr. Tanaka was standing beside us.