The Favorites (14 page)

A
few
days later, Mrs. Izumi came visiting alone. “Auntie!” she greeted Mrs. Asaki, who was out in the front garden, feeding the turtles in the mossy stone vats. “I’ve come for a girls’ chat.” She held out a package of roasted miso dumplings, still hot from a local tearoom and smelling of wood smoke.

“What a treat!” said Mrs. Asaki. “Go right on up. Ma-chan’ll make us some tea.”

The Izumis were here for only a few days. They would not be coming back for the burial. For one thing, it was a non-Christian ceremony; for another, the Izumis lived too far away to make a second trip. They had left Tokyo several years ago, abandoning the main island altogether and relocating to the southernmost tip of the country. Mrs. Asaki knew very little about that region, only that it was tropical and people there had extremely brown skin.

She followed Mrs. Izumi into the informal dining area. After four years, it still offended her that her niece wouldn’t stop at the parlor to pay respects to Mr. Asaki in the family altar. It just wasn’t right. Her late husband had been especially kind to the Kobayashi children. When they were small, he would take them
to a special restaurant on Christmas Eve for American hotcakes and syrup. Didn’t Tama remember? If Mrs. Asaki were younger she would have made some acidic remark. But in her old age, she was increasingly careful to ingratiate herself with her family. So she merely sang out, like the agreeable granny that she was, “
Maa!
Those dumplings smell wonderful!”

With the kettle on the stove, the three women sat down at the low table.

Mrs. Nishimura emptied the contents of the package onto a large plate. “Tama-chan, you’ve brought so much!” she said. “We can’t possibly eat this all. I’ll save some for the children.” She transferred a couple of skewers onto a smaller plate and slipped away behind her sister’s back—not to the kitchen, but out into the hall. Mrs. Asaki knew she was headed for the family altar, where she would deftly, discreetly offer the dumplings on her sister’s behalf. She felt a warm rush of gratitude.

She felt sorry for Mrs. Kobayashi, whose daughter refused to pray at her own sister’s funerary table. The Izumis had their own brand of prayer, which was invisible to others as it required neither chanting nor kneeling nor going anywhere near the funerary table.

But as the tea progressed, Mrs. Izumi didn’t mention religion at all. Her new, quiet maturity was more disturbing than her earlier fervor. Back then, in her childlike way, she had needed their attention. Now this gracious “outside” face reminded Mrs. Asaki of her own daughter.

“You know, after I heard the news,” Mrs. Izumi said, “that very same night, a snake appeared in my dream.”

“
Maa,
how auspicious!” said Mrs. Asaki with warm approval. “Snakes bring good luck.” Her late husband had carried a snakeskin wallet for many years, as a traditional way of attracting wealth and good fortune.

“Big Sister was born in the year of the snake,” added Mrs. Nishimura.

Mrs. Izumi nodded. “It’s surely a sign,” she said, “that she’s doing well on the other side.”

The women fell silent, nodding at the truth of this statement.

Mrs. Izumi and Mrs. Nishimura were not particularly close. Even as children, they were too far apart in age, in temperament, in social interests. All they had in common was their big sister.

Under their placid expressions Mrs. Asaki sensed deep emotional currents, revealing themselves in a twist of the mouth or a look in the eye. Their relationships with their big sister had been complex and personal—perhaps even painful?—and they would hold it close to their chests.

She steered the conversation toward happier ground. “When Yo-chan was young, she simply refused to wear ribbons,” she told them. “She was a stubborn one. Quiet, but stubborn.” The women laughed indulgently as she trotted out reminiscences from Mrs. Rexford’s childhood.

“It was a simpler time,” said Mrs. Izumi.

Mrs. Asaki remembered those days as anything but simple. But each generation, she knew, viewed its childhood with blind nostalgia.

The last of their laughter faded into the midday stillness of the house. They sipped their tea.

“How’s life in your new place?” Mrs. Nishimura asked.

“It’s nice out in the country. There’s a big community of church members. It’s so cheap to live there, we can work part-time.”

“How nice. We’re envious.”

“There are orchards too. Last year, I pickled my own umeboshi.”

“You?! Pickling?!” cried Mrs. Asaki in astonishment.

“Did you do it from scratch?” Mrs. Nishimura wanted to know.

“Yes, I did,” said her sister proudly. Then her expression turned sheepish. “But I messed up the vinegar or something,” she confessed, and giggled. “They turned out so hard and bitter, nobody would eat them.”

Now
that’s
the Tama we used to know, thought Mrs. Asaki. It saddened her that these flashes would appear less and less often, then one day fade out altogether.

On the morning after Sarah’s arrival, Mrs. Asaki and her daughter visited the Kobayashi house to pay respects to Mrs. Rexford’s ashes. The house was crowded and noisy, for the Izumis were still there. Stepping up onto the tatami floor, Mrs. Asaki felt rather festive.

“The girls will be coming by after school,” she announced. “And their father, after work.”

“Granny!” cried Sarah. “Auntie Masako!” She was eighteen now. Her body reminded Mrs. Asaki of Mrs. Kobayashi’s when she had been young. It was in the slope of the shoulders, the straight set of her neck…When Sarah walked away to fetch some extra floor cushions, the old woman recognized the outline of her sister-in-law’s long waist.

“She’s grown!” she whispered to Mrs. Kobayashi.

“Yes. But she’s still the same little girl she always was,” Mrs. Kobayashi whispered back.

“She seems to be doing well.” The loss did not show on Sarah’s face as starkly as it did on her grandmother’s. Young people were resilient. But in the days to come, Mrs. Asaki would notice that sometimes, when the girl thought no one was look
ing, her eyes would take on the same unfocused glaze that Mrs. Kobayashi’s did.

“She has good restraint,” she added. She expected nothing less from a member of her own family, but one never knew with Americans.

It was time to move to the parlor. “Let’s welcome your mother home,” said Mrs. Asaki. She and Mrs. Kobayashi, fellow matriarchs, led the way into the incense-clouded parlor. The others trooped in after them, filling up the small room.

Mrs. Asaki was taken aback by the urn on the funerary table. She was expecting the usual: a ceramic container small enough to cup in the palm of her hand. But this was a wooden box of some sort—varnished, lacquered, handsome enough in its own way, but big enough to hold a potted plant.

“Americans don’t pick out the symbolic bones,” Sarah explained. “They keep all the ashes. That’s why it’s so big.”

“Ara maa,”
Mrs. Nishimura said weakly.

“Granny, look! Auntie, look!” Eight-year-old Jun pointed to a red Japanese passport lying on the table among the flowers and fruits. “Big Sister had this taped right on the side of the box! Just like they pin notes on little kids in kindergarten.” He was clearly tickled by this comparison.

“I thought there’d be trouble getting her through customs,” Sarah said. “But the man at the airport was really, really nice about it.”

Everyone stood staring at the sturdy, outsized box.

“That’s a lot of ashes!” said Mr. Kobayashi from the back of the room.

Mrs. Nishimura turned to Mrs. Kobayashi. “Would you prefer to have the bones picked out properly? And placed in a more…ehh,
fitting
receptacle?”

“No, no.” Mrs. Kobayashi reached out and touched the box,
as if to reassure her daughter within. “I don’t want her disturbed any further.”

“Maybe the Americans are right,” Mrs. Nishimura said softly. “The more we have of her, the better.”

Mrs. Asaki kept staring at the box, packed full of ashes by the gram. It was a stark reminder of the physicality of death. Her own time was drawing near.

“It’s somehow fitting, don’t you think?” said Mrs. Izumi. “It’s just like Big Sister.”

“Soh,”
said Mrs. Nishimura. “She had such a presence, bigger and bolder than anyone else…” She laughed, her voice catching a little as she did so, and everyone laughed along with her. But the break in her voice had caught them unawares, and Mr. Kobayashi was heard to clear his throat.

M
rs.
Rexford’s burial was a quiet affair, attended by only the two households.

“Let’s not bother telling anyone,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “I simply haven’t the strength to deal with them all.” Normally such an attitude would have been self-indulgent and improper, but the circumstances were so unorthodox that it felt natural—and quite freeing—to make up rules as they went along. “Yo-chan wasn’t one for convention anyway,” she added.

“Proximity,” quoted Mrs. Asaki, “is the truest intimacy of all.”

They caught the JR—the Japan Railways train—at Nijo Station, next to Nijo Castle. It was the second stop on the route, so the platform was crowded. Mrs. Asaki and Mrs. Kobayashi, veterans of public transportation, scurried to the “silver seats” reserved for the elderly. The rest of the party, including Mr. Kobayashi, who was too proud to take advantage of his age, fended for themselves. They were soon lost to view in the crush of bodies swaying from overhead hand straps.

As the train wound its leisurely way through the city, discharging smartly dressed professionals along the way, the seats
emptied and everyone could sit down. The stops grew increasingly obscure as the city limit gave way to open fields, bright yellow with rape flowers. The passengers changed as well: plainly dressed folk on errands, students in navy uniforms commuting to school. The atmosphere in the train was peaceful now, almost timeless, like the wartime trains they used to take out to the country for black-market rations.

Now, as then, Mrs. Asaki sat by the window. She gazed out at the open fields and rice paddies, at the encroaching foothills. The decades had left their mark. There were more roads now, more houses dotting the landscape—newer, smaller tract houses such as one saw in certain parts of the city. Every so often they passed an old-style farmhouse, the kind she remembered from her childhood: ponderous structures with steeply pitched, top-heavy roofs in the tradition of temple architecture.

“Have you noticed,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “that Sarah’s hand—the place where her thumb attaches—is the spitting image of her mother’s?”

“Is that so?” said Mrs. Asaki sympathetically.

“Take a look when you get a chance. It’s uncanny.”

Mrs. Asaki was reminded of the years after Shohei’s death, when her sister-in-law would point out such traits in little Yoko: a certain crook of the arm, the curve of a brow. She hoped this meant Sarah would be replacing her mother in Mrs. Kobayashi’s heart. She was the natural choice, the one least disruptive to the status quo. But the girl lived so far away, and she was of the wrong generation. Who knew what unpredictable turns a mother’s heart might take?

They took two separate taxis to the temple. Mrs. Asaki sat by the window, her fatigue temporarily forgotten, clutching the
sill with both hands and glancing about with eager eyes. She hadn’t been here in decades, not since the black-market days. There were no relatives left; they had died or scattered into oblivion.

“
That
wasn’t there before!” she exclaimed as they passed a snack shop on the corner. Her fellow passengers did not respond. Mrs. Nishimura was unfamiliar with the area, having grown up tending the Asaki gravesite in the city. Momoko and Yashiko were too young to care.

They rode on in silence. “I wonder if Sato-san’s place is still there…,” she said. Mr. Sato was the farmer who had bartered rice in exchange for their silks and family jewelry. After the transactions were completed, he always invited the Asakis to stay for lunch. His wife served sushi made with freshly killed raw chicken from their farm, for ocean fish was scarce in wartime. Squeamish at first, they eventually warmed to it and, in later years, even referred to it fondly.

Mrs. Asaki wished she had ridden in the same taxi as the Kobayashis. She and Mrs. Kobayashi could have reminisced together.
We’re the only ones left,
she thought.

“This place has completely changed!” she mourned.

“What did you expect, Grandma?” said Momoko. “This is the twentieth century.”

“Momoko,” admonished her mother in a low voice.

Mrs. Asaki’s excitement deflated before the girl’s withering tone. Over the last few years, a subtle change had come over Momoko. Her insolence had an underground quality; it never rose cleanly to the surface but would insinuate itself into some innocent remark. Her own Masako had never been this way, even in adolescence. Was it a modern thing? Sometimes Mrs. Asaki suspected it was indeed personal, that it stemmed from some deep-seated resentment she was at a loss to account for. She
was baffled. In traditional families it was usually the parent who bore the brunt of such behavior.

The sting of it stayed with her while they greeted the priest and seated themselves for the formal ceremony.

Eventually, calmed by the priest’s sonorous drone, she turned her attention to her surroundings. A wall of shoji doors, drawn shut against the morning sun, glowed with a fierce yellow light that lit up the wide room, with its empty expanse of tatami matting meant for funerary parties larger than their own. A mahogany altar, decked out in ornate gold-and-brown brocade, held an assortment of bronze lotus blossoms rising up toward the ceiling on tall stems. Shielded from the sun’s glare, the bronze glowed softly as if radiating light from within.

In the row directly ahead, Sarah and her grandparents sat quietly on black floor cushions. Mrs. Asaki noted the odd way Sarah sat: on folded legs so her backside rested directly on her heels, placing pressure on the tops of her feet. This was no way to sit for extended periods. Mrs. Asaki sat pigeon-footed so that the outsides of her feet, not the tops, bore directly on the mats. She had faint calluses on the sides of her feet from decades of contact with the floor. Modern children—those raised in Western-style houses—could no longer sit for hours as their predecessors had. But that was in the newer districts; in the Ueno neighborhood, Sarah was still the only exception. Mrs. Asaki remembered watching with surprise and disapproval as the little girl hauled herself away from the table after an unusually long sitting session, dragging her paralyzed legs behind her like a seal and gasping, “Pins and needles…,” between bursts of uncontrollable laughter. She hoped there would be none of that today.

Her worries were unfounded. Partway through the ceremony, when it was time for each person to rise, approach the altar, and transfer a pinch of incense from a small bowl to a large
smoldering urn, Sarah acquitted herself well. She bowed nicely, with an elegance of line unexpected in a foreigner. That’s Yo-chan’s doing, Mrs. Asaki thought, and she felt a surge of affection for this girl who would stand between Masako and her biological mother.

Finally the priest brought out an antiquated brush-writing set and began grinding ink and water on the stone. With a flourish of calligraphy, he wrote Mrs. Rexford’s name on a long wooden tablet. Bowing deeply, he presented it with both hands to Mr. Kobayashi, who bowed back and received it with both hands.

“Are you sure,” the priest asked afterward, “that you wouldn’t like a cup of tea before you go?”

No, no, they laughed, bowing copiously and talking all at once, thank you so much, but we couldn’t possibly rest till this is done! They left the temple and headed down a short road toward the gravesite, with Mr. Kobayashi carrying the long, narrow tablet before him like an upright spear.

The road skirted the edge of a rice paddy. The day was growing warm. A faint mist rose up from the young green shoots, and with it a long-lost smell from Mrs. Asaki’s childhood, that brackish tang of paddy water. It brought back the past so strongly that her breath caught in her throat. She turned to her brother, wanting to share this moment, but she realized it was nothing new for him; he came here every year to tend these graves.

A small boy was crouching on the embankment of the paddy with a plastic pail at his side, peering into the murky water in search of frog eggs. Or would it be tadpoles at this stage in the season? Mrs. Asaki couldn’t remember.

“Remember when you used to do that?” she asked, turning to her brother. “I can see it so clear in my mind—you and
Shohei coming home at sunset, with ropes of frog eggs slung over your shoulders.”

Mr. Kobayashi’s handsome face creased into a warm grin. “That’s right,” he said. “What fun that was!”

“When we lived in the Kyoto hills,” said Sarah, “Mama would show me how to find them.”

“We kept ours in that big stone vat,” said Yashiko, “before we got the turtle. Remember, Big Sister?”

Momoko nodded. “When the tadpoles grew legs, they all hopped out.”

They slowed their steps, gazing nostalgically at this tableau of Japanese childhood. Unnerved by their scrutiny, the little boy rose to his feet and slunk away, clutching his plastic pail.

The Kobayashi plot lay on a small rise, low enough for everyone to climb without too much trouble. It tired Mrs. Asaki a great deal, but she squared her shoulders and said nothing. She wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Kobayashi were feeling the physical strain as well. Single file, they climbed several meters up the short dirt trail. Lush foliage—vines and grasses and edible ferns—fringed their path in wild profusion, catching at their legs with damp, soft tendrils.

There were roughly fifteen Kobayashi gravestones, rising up haphazardly from the sea of vegetation. The oldest markers—small and moss-stained and porous—stood farther up the hill, their engravings long since rained away. They were so old the wooden tablets in the metal braces had rotted away and no one knew who the individuals had been. Nonetheless, they were family. Mrs. Nishimura, the most able-bodied adult, climbed up toward them, picking her way carefully among the damp foliage. She had brought a bag of bean cakes in her purse, and she placed one at each gravestone. Soon the faint smell of incense came drifting down to the others.

“Is this one of ours?” Mrs. Nishimura occasionally called down to Mrs. Kobayashi, for these family plots had no clear dividing lines.

When she came down to join the others, Mr. Kobayashi was kneeling down before the biggest and newest of the gravestones. Gripping a small garden trowel in one hand, he struggled to wedge it under the flat stone slab lying in front of the gravestone.

“Can you do it, Father-san?” said Mrs. Kobayashi worriedly. “Is it safe for your back?”

“May I help, sir?” asked Mr. Nishimura, starting to step forward.

“I’m fine,” the old man replied, a little brusque at these affronts to his masculinity.

“Of course he’s fine,” Mrs. Asaki told the others. “Let the man do his work.”

He lifted one end of the stone slab. With both hands, he dragged it to the side. And there it was—a small, granite-lined space that had lain undisturbed these fifty years. Lined up in one corner were three small porcelain urns bearing old-fashioned designs of their time. Mrs. Asaki’s mother was on the far left, then her father, then her brother Shohei.

Everyone was silent: the children, for whom burial was a new experience; Mrs. Nishimura, beholding her biological father’s urn for the first time; the older generation, whose memories stretched far back in time.

Mrs. Asaki was transported to when she had first stood here as a child, peering down into this small space. It was as if nothing of consequence had changed in the interim; she had come back full circle to this green-filtered light, this same sharp
pyoo-pyoo
of woodland birds. It was like blinking once, then finding three urns instead of one.

“Hai,”
said Mr. Kobayashi, still in kneeling position, and
reached out his hand for the box. His wife gripped it one last time, then handed it over.

It stuck in the opening. Mr. Kobayashi turned the box sideways, but it stuck again. No one spoke, no one breathed—but after a firm push it went in, no worse for wear except for a long scratch down the side.

Mrs. Kobayashi gave an audible gasp of relief. Everyone else, just as relieved, began laughing weakly.

“It sure was big,” Sarah said after the stone slab was back in place.

“It took up the space of ten people,” Yashiko said wonderingly.

Momoko wanted to know if they would need a new gravestone after this.

“I shouldn’t think so. There’s space for one more, at least,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

“Well,” cackled Mrs. Asaki happily, “if that wasn’t just like Yo-chan, all the way to the end!”

On this note, the burial was over.

They ate their lunch a few meters from the gravestone, on blankets spread under a cherry tree. They were famished. Mrs. Nishimura had brought a simple snack of rice balls to tide them over until they reached a restaurant in the city. A modern woman in her own way, she had bought them at a convenience store. They were huge, containing as much rice as four normal rice balls, and triangular in the Tokyo style. They were individually wrapped in an ingenious system of plastic wrapping. One tab broke apart the outer wrapping; another tab removed an inner plastic sheet that separated the crisp, dry sheet of seaweed from the moist rice.

“Which filling would you all like?” Mrs. Nishimura said. “Umeboshi? Or salmon with mayonnaise?”

“It’s amazing,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “what they can do nowadays!” She still molded her husband’s rice balls by hand when he went off with his friends for a morning of golf.

“Here, I’ll show you how it works,” Mrs. Asaki told the couple. She was proud of her familiarity with modern techniques. “First you pull this,” she told them, demonstrating.

But nothing happened.

“Areh?”
She turned over the rice ball in confusion.

“Let me do it, Granny,” said Momoko. She snatched it out of the old woman’s hands and deftly pulled the correct tabs.

“Ara maa,”
cried Mrs. Kobayashi, “how clever!”

Mrs. Asaki sat quietly. She was suddenly very, very tired.

Mr. Kobayashi took a hearty bite. “Not bad!” he said, surprised.

“Not bad at all,” agreed his wife. “The rice tastes quite fresh. Soft and chewy, and salted just right.”

“Oh, it’s fresh all right,” Mrs. Nishimura assured her. “They make them fresh every morning.”