We were scheduled to leave for firefly weekend the following Saturday morning. Mr. Sugiyama’s family farm was three hours northeast of Kyoto and a half hour from the nearest railroad station. Mr. Sugiyama’s nephew, the caretaker of the farm, would shuttle us back and forth from the station in his van all that day.
I had stayed out of sight during the week, so I’d have less chance meeting anyone and getting involved with their troubles. Even that morning I left Sunny Hive as late as possible, but when I ran into Emi and her grandfather on the street, Emi grabbed my arm, excited and asking me to share a taxi to the station while her grandfather said, in English, “I think you know that things have gotten out of hand.”
“Mom and I just finished making my costume for tonight!” said Emi. “Every year I get to choose what I want to be, but Mom says this is the final time. She says that next year I have to go as an adult.”
“Your costume better be good, then,” I said. “What are you going as, Emi?”
I loved the weight of her on my arm, the outright dangle of a child.
“Last year I went as Obake no Q-taro but this year I’ll be a samurai. An adult samurai, I tried to tell mom, but she wasn’t in the mood for jokes.”
She paused to stare at her grandfather, before looking back at me. “You both think I don’t understand things when you speak English, but my English is excellent now,” she said. “One foreign language is enough, though. I’m not interested in learning German.”
So there it was. Emi knew what changes would likely befall her.
When a taxi stopped for us she insisted on riding with the driver, so her grandfather and I slid into the back with her bag between us, her samurai costume visible at its top. Old Mr. Sugiyama pointed at it, saying, “These days costumes are all we have left. We wear wigs, we dress in old clothes, we practice kendo like it means something… But we lost a lot more than two million souls during the war, Cornelius. It’s true what Fritz says, that history is written by the winners, but the losers write it, too, by changing course when the war is over.”
That surprised me, both because we hadn’t been talking about the war, and because it reminded me of his behavior in that Zero park, going off to sit in that swing by himself. Here was a man the tip of whose iceberg showed even less above the surface of his sea than my own.
—
Since we were taking a local train, the three hour ride to the farm represented the distance a car could travel in about an hour. When we got to Kyoto station and I bought my ticket, I also bought two cups of coffee and a sumo magazine. The American wrestler, Takamiyama, whom I’d seen on Sumo Digest in the bar where I met Kikuya that night, had won the tournament championship - the first foreigner ever to do so - and the magazine was dedicated to his victory and to his earlier life in Hawaii. So I thought I’d spend a part of the journey looking at its pictures and trying to work out what the captions said. Emi and her grandfather were in a reserved-seat car at the front of the train with her mother and father, if her mother and father were even onboard.
Since that horrible visit to Fritz’s room, I had either stayed in my own room or taken an early bus to the mountains outside Kyoto for day-long hikes. During that time I’d seen only Junichiro and Melinda; the former when he asked to come hiking with me, the latter when she arrived back in Kyoto to pack her bags and move home for good. She came to see me late on the evening of her return to give me Emi’s sweatpants and talk about how her grandfather’s death had made her reevaluate her life, which really meant talking about Bill’s fecklessness. Same old subject, but it told me why Bill and I had such a difficult time - he was often loved and couldn’t return it, while I tried to love whomever might love me in return. It made us pitiful in opposite ways.
Once inside a nearly empty railroad carriage, I looked out the window as the station receded, the train moving slowly while the terrain turned quickly rural. I saw a woman emerge from a farmhouse to throw a pan of water on the ground, scaring up a brood of frantic chicks, but otherwise it was the sort of morning that allowed for a gentle arrival from sleep for everyone, with rows of ready-to-harvest rice waving at us while farmers in black boots stood nearby, ignoring the passing train. I saw houses with lovely old thatched roofs, but most were tiled in a ubiquitous red, the color of the sun on the Japanese flag.
The air in my carriage was stale, so I stood to lower the top of my window a couple of inches, and when someone said “please” in Japanese, I turned to find Kaori standing in the seat behind me, wrestling with her window, also. She was alone, as I think she had been since her exhibition. Junichiro had told me he was irritated because she hadn’t come to Mountain Cabin to see the pictures he had taken of her dolls, which hung in makeshift frames around the walls. He also told me that he was thinking of selling his bar - almost surely to Bill! - and returning to America to see his wife, whom he hadn’t divorced, but had simply left one day, when she drove off to her cocktail waitress shift at Caesar’s Palace. He said that, far from thinking about his father or the war, images of his wife had come to him when he was sitting in the Zero, that only then did he realize that his own suicide mission had been leaving her in the first place.
As for Kaori, this was the second time she’d appeared out of nowhere, first to sit beside me on that river bench, now to sit behind me in this railroad carriage. But she had never before spoken to me in Japanese, and I noticed right away, even with the single word “please,” that changing languages altered her. There was a different look to her, a different poise or affect, as if a recalibration had taken place in her body and her mind. I remembered her phrase from the river… “These languages of ours do have their constraints…” when saying she could only ask if we knew what it was like to be dead when we were dead, in English. Was she no longer worried about such things, then, or simply no longer constrained by them?
When I stepped back to help her pull her window down, she said, “Sit with me, Cornelius. Did you notice those thatched roofs back there?” also in Japanese.
When I said I had noticed them, she told me that the hair on her more traditional dolls, like those Emi believed looked like her, reminded her of the thatched roofs, while the hair of the sexy adult replicas, never mind the color, made her think of the red tiled roofs that we had also passed. She spoke slowly enough for me to understand, so I said something bold in reply: that I thought the hair of the sexy dolls, far from reminding me of red tiled roofs, looked soft, as if ready to accept the intrusion of a lover’s hands. I said it in English, but again she responded in Japanese, telling me she didn’t want to be a red tiled roof anymore, that she was tired of fighting against her true nature. She also said that she had sold all the dolls from her exhibition - the sexy ones for exorbitant prices - and would soon give up doll making. When I asked what she would do next, she said she had no idea, but that it didn’t matter much as long as she stayed within herself, which meant not only giving up dolls and English, but leaving Kyoto, the town that had led her astray in the first place.
Was this real? Was Kaori deciding to leave her current life at the same time Ichikawa Yuki was, and perhaps even Junichiro? I reached over and took her hand in order to feel the answer to my questions by gauging its warmth toward me.
After that, we sat together for the rest of the trip, not holding hands, but gazing out the window and looking at the pictures in my sumo magazine.
Kaori read the captions for me, dumbing them down into elementary Japanese.
—
Mr. Sugiyama’s nephew had just left the station with a van full of firefly weekenders when Kaori and I stepped from our carriage. Emi and her family caught the van - many from the front of the train did - so we stood watching it go, along with Mrs. Suzuki from my Takashimaya class, and my Mitsubishi instigator, Mr. Sato.
“Good morning!” said Mrs. Suzuki. “I guess we have to wait.”
Mr. Sato didn’t say anything, but he bowed and tipped his bowler to each of us.
The others who joined us included Bill and Melinda, who’d apparently ridden together but now stood apart, as if the train ride had given them whatever last moments they needed with each other. Kaori greeted them in the same easy Japanese she used with me, and with no sense of anything but politeness.
By the time the van came back some forty minutes later, fifteen people stood outside the station, not including Ichikawa Yuki or Miss Arai. There would be another train in an hour, but the one after that didn’t leave Kyoto until four, meaning those who took it would not arrive at the farmhouse until after the fireflies came out.
The van had twelve seats with no room for standing, but when I tried to stay back, Mr. Sugiyama’s nephew said that Bill and Melinda and I were special guests, and ordered us into the thing. Mrs. Suzuki and Mr. Sato came, too, while Kaori said that she would wait. She bowed over the top of her bag until the van was out of sight.
The family farmhouse had a thatched roof like those we passed on the train, with shoji that opened onto fields of flowers at both sides, and with a thick bamboo forest in the rear. The house was mansard-shaped, cavernous, and cold inside despite the warmth of the day. Old Mr. Sugiyama told us upon our arrival that it hadn’t been a working farm for a generation, but served the family well, not only as a retreat for the school, but for company picnics and the gatherings of clubs. A star gazing club had left the previous Monday and a management team from Kewpie mayonnaise was coming next week. He sang a little of the Kewpie mayonnaise theme song.
The house had a half dozen twelve-mat tatami rooms where we would apparently sleep, dormitory style. I tried to wait until Bill and Melinda chose theirs, but they were waiting, too, perhaps to be sure to stay away from each other. So I found a room that was empty of anyone’s belongings and put my bag in its farthest corner. The shoji beside me opened to a wooden walkway that ran under the lip of the building’s roof, not six feet away from the bamboo forest, whose trees bent toward me like a gathering of giant praying mantises. When I turned away from the forest I found Emi standing in the room’s doorway, already dressed in her samurai costume, with a sword in a sheath at her back. Did she not realize that now she looked far more like the doll Kaori gave me than the dolls she’d accused Kaori of modeling after her? She came in, dropped her bag down next to mine, then said emphatically, “Mama’s sleeping here, too, and I don’t want to hear a word about it.”
When I asked if her dad would also sleep here, she said, “Papa and Mama are fighting. If Mama doesn’t come to her senses he says he’s going home on the last train tonight. But he won’t. Mama’s too important to him, and so is firefly weekend. And Mama can’t come to her senses quickly. With senses it always takes Mama a lot more time than that.”
When I said that she was certainly too important to both of them for anything bad to happen, she stepped outside to plop down on that wooden walkway, her legs dangling off of it. I went out and sat beside her. “Your mama just has some thinking to do,” I said, “and slowness when coming to your senses isn’t such a bad thing. I’m that way, also, most of the time.”
I tried to say it all in Japanese.
“‘Thinking to do’ is what Mama said, too, but it isn’t a matter of thinking. Sometimes a person has to stop thinking and act, or in this case not act, and come to her senses later on. And if Mama does that, if she stays put without thinking, and without doing anything stupid, then maybe things will be okay. Except that Papa might not understand that that’s what she’s doing, and do something stupid himself. Does it make any sense to you?”
When she saw my perplexed look she burst out laughing. And when we heard the call for lunch a few minutes later, and stood to walk around the exterior of the house to where a cauldron sat in the clearing, we were both smiling broadly. But the others in the clearing looked about as serious as jury members at a murder trial. Mr. Sugiyama stood beside the cauldron, passing out bowls of his special stew - special because, he said in English, “It cures what ails you.”
“I hope it does,” I said, while Emi ran out into a field of wildflowers, her samurai sword bouncing on her back like an impossibly skinny rider. Her father watched her go. I wanted to tell him what Emi had said about letting her mother have some time, but before I could decide what words to use, the van returned from the station. Twenty of us were already there, standing around the cauldron. I knew some of them, but my Takashimaya class was represented solely by Mrs. Suzuki, and the only members of my Mitsubishi group to arrive as yet were Mr. Sato and Mr. Nomura. The latter had come out earlier and stood quite near me, seemingly oblivious to the trouble he had caused.
Kaori was the first to step down from the van, followed by Miss Arai, in jeans and a brightly sequined cowboy shirt, followed by Ichikawa Yuki in a white kimono with a swoop of faint yellow cranes taking flight from her shoulders.
“Who dresses so beautifully when coming to a place like this?” asked Mr. Nomura.
“Leave her alone,” I said. “‘A place like this’ shouldn’t give you hope.”
I hadn’t expected to scold him but he seemed to take my point, for when Ichikawa Yuki came toward us he stepped away, while she kept her eyes on me.
“I am here and you are here,” she said.
As always, she spoke English, but I felt the same closeness to her that I felt with Kaori when she spoke Japanese. I said, “I knew I’d be here, but I wasn’t so sure about you.”
“Ichikawa Yuki is a woman of her word,” said Miss Arai. “She’s been getting ready since early this morning. How do you think she looks?”
Ichikawa Yuki’s stare would have withered anyone save Miss Arai. I said I thought they both looked fabulous.
“I will leave for Tokyo next week,” said Ichikawa Yuki. “From there I will visit Hokkaido before settling into my new life. I have never been to Hokkaido. I think it will be interesting now that the Olympic Games are over and I can see where they took place with nobody else around. Do you like the idea of visiting crowded places once the crowds have disappeared, or do you agree with Miss Arai, that such a thing is an absurdity that no one could find a liking for except myself?”
“I love visiting such places,” I said, “but everyone’s eating stew. Would you like some? I’m told it makes our troubles go away.”
“Every year we are told this, and every year it’s true,” said Miss Arai. “Though once we return to our regular lives we find our troubles waiting for us.”
When she laughed the cowboys on her shirt reared back on their horses, her breasts the shining silver hills they rode across.
The agenda for the day, Mr. Sugiyama announced, was for us to fill up on stew and beer, retreat to our rooms for an hour of napping, arise for some solitary walking in the forest, then gather again to venture into the wildflower fields after dark.
Miss Arai said she would like a bowl of stew, while Ichikawa Yuki said would not.
The beer, however, seemed a welcome idea to them both.
Endnotes…
I appear to be appropriating the agency of Takashi Shimura, the great Kurosawa film actor, in my various descriptions and depictions of the elder Mr. Sugiyama. Having him sit in that swing at the Zero park, and mentioning it again now, in their taxi ride to Kyoto Station, is meant to echo the final scene in Ikiru, a scene (and a film) that has moved me for fifty years.
During my years in Japan I had little to do with country life, except that I sometimes visited an old family home in Chiba Prefecture that a dear American friend of mine (and reader of these episodes) rented and lived in. As I was trying to write a decent description of the Sugiyama family’s farmhouse, that place came to mind, though it wasn’t so much a ‘model’ as a prototype, an idea.
As I work on these episodes each week, I find myself cutting, cutting, cutting… trying to sculpt, as it were, a thin scene out of a fat one, a smaller truth out of a larger one, all while adhering to a rhythmic sense that isn’t so much in the meaning of the words as in their beat and tonality, in their very syllables as they land on the page. This episode, for example, lost nearly 20% of its original heft… Episodic writing is a weight loss program for the literary arts, I guess!
A fetching passage: "[Bill] was often loved and couldn't return it, while I tried to love whoever might return it. It made us pitiful in opposite ways."
Wish I could see one of Kaori's dolls and hear the kewpi doll mayonnaise song!
The house is still there, metal roof. The snake is not. I touched its skin and it glared at me.