The Favorites (15 page)

They placed one of the rice balls on the Kobayashi gravestone, in between the fresh flower bouquets. Considering the occupants, umeboshi seemed the proper choice. Salmon and mayonnaise was too new; that combination had become popular only in the last decade.

“Well,” Mr. Kobayashi remarked as everyone sat eating hungrily and drinking cold tea from a thermos, “It’s too late for the cherry viewing, but it’s still very nice.”

“Yes, isn’t it lovely?” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Yo-chan loved eating here. She used to say it gave her quite an appetite.”

T
he
homebound train was almost empty, so they had their pick of seats. Mrs. Asaki and Mrs. Kobayashi settled into the “silver” section. Everyone else took ordinary seats farther back.

The two women were silent as the scenery slid past. Their airy cheer fell away. Today’s events, casual as they were, had taken a toll that was only now beginning to make itself felt.

Mrs. Asaki was remembering an incident when she had been a young wife, raking leaves in the garden. A scrawny alley cat was stalking its way across the top of the fence and she had stopped to watch it. The cat, too, came to a wary halt. Ueno cats, which had survived for generations by stealing fish out of open-air kitchens, were alert to mistreatment by irate housewives.

Resting both hands on the rake handle, she gazed into its slit-pupiled eyes. The cat stared back, unblinking.

She had pretended it was a creature of prey, a big cat from Africa. She imagined herself shrinking down in size, becoming more and more at its mercy, until the experiment began to feel real. Suddenly she was afraid. Quickly, roughly, she shooed it away with her rake.

That experience had stayed with her. Maybe she recognized in it some germ of prophecy, the way one does with powerful dreams. She now thought of the exasperated way Momoko had snatched the rice ball out of her hand. Once she would have thought nothing of reprimanding the child, but more and more she regarded her with a kind of fear that was new. This momentum would continue, she knew. It would soon extend to Yashiko, to her own daughter, to her son-in-law…

On the seat beside her, Mrs. Kobayashi was absently stroking the folded silk
furoshiki
on her lap. Earlier that day it had been wrapped around her daughter’s boxed remains.

“I looked at Sarah-chan’s thumb,” Mrs. Asaki told her, although in truth she had forgotten all about it until now. “And I do see what you mean.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “Yes,” she said simply.

Mrs. Asaki felt a wistful envy for those two, for the closeness and promise still lying in wait for them. How did her sister-in-law manage to go through life never at a loss for a close, passionate relationship to sustain her?

Turning her head, she looked out the window. The hills were close, invigoratingly close. Rice paddies spread out before her; here and there, dirt paths wound away into the hilly terrain. In the corridors of her memory she saw similar roads stretching away: through rice paddies, through canopies of trees. Many times, after a long day in the fields, the locals had ridden home on a wooden cart, facing backward with their feet dangling over the edge. It struck her now, at eighty-three years of age, that this image—a dirt road stretching away behind her—was the most evocative and defining memory of her childhood. She had one early memory—perhaps it had been her first—of such a road stretching away into a blurry sort of greenery. She had seen it from her mother’s lap, the back of her head resting securely
against her mother’s breast. It was so long ago it no longer felt like her own memory but a scene from some nostalgic television drama.

And here she was decades later, a success in life. She knew what her fellow train passengers saw: a well-dressed elderly woman surrounded by a devoted brood. A woman with a secure old age ahead of her. And yet…

She tried to remember how it had felt to sit in her mother’s lap. She tried to picture herself being held close, being coddled and cared for, and something stirred deep in her core. She felt her eyes blur over with tears.

“Would you like a throat drop?” she heard Mrs. Kobayashi say. She must have noticed something, for her voice was gentle.

Mrs. Asaki nodded her head with a little bow of thanks, not because she wanted one but because it was the easiest thing to do. The candy was an old-fashioned flavor she hadn’t tasted in years, brown sugar, and it spread out in her mouth with surprising and comforting sweetness. This, coupled with the unexpected tenderness from her sister-in-law, filled her with a tremulous sense of gratitude.

After a while, still sucking on the throat drop, she turned to the woman sitting beside her. So many times during the war they had come home like this on the train, tired and spent. Once again she had the sensation, as she had at the open grave, of blinking once to find the grieving young woman beside her transformed into a grieving old woman. Who knew Mrs. Kobayashi would lose yet another daughter? Mrs. Asaki, knowing her own guilt in the matter, felt a rush of sorrow.

She said, “Yo-chan was a good child.”

“Yes.”

“She was happy,” Mrs. Asaki persisted. “She loved passionately all her life.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded her thanks. The corners of her mouth wobbled involuntarily, for it had been a long day. This was a dangerous time for both of them; they were old women and they had been holding things together for a very long time.

“She was a good child,” Mrs. Asaki repeated. Reaching out timidly, she patted her sister-in-law’s hand. Mrs. Kobayashi did not draw it away. Instead she turned up her palm to meet Mrs. Asaki’s hand with her own. At this surprising gesture, long denied her and coming from such an unlikely source, the old woman felt her throat constrict.

“The way you raised that child,” she said finally, “was a success.” In this heightened moment of compassion and remorse and gratitude, she was moved to offer up the most private, painful part of herself. It was the first time she would admit this to another living being. It would also be the last.

“I could never get Masako to come close to me,” she said.

O
nly
during the June rainy season did one notice how many hydrangea bushes there were in the Ueno neighborhood. Normally they were invisible, tucked into corners or overshadowed by more imposing greenery. But now, against the backdrop of wooden houses sodden black from the rain and the vibrant green of surrounding foliage, the clusters of pink and blue and lavender glowed with an eerie intensity. Their litmus hues leapt out at Mrs. Nishimura’s eye as she walked through the lanes beneath her umbrella.

She was coming home from choir practice. Choir always left her with a euphoric afterglow. It was only when she sang, her voice cleaving the air in powerful arcs of sound, that she felt something rising up within her that was equal to any glory the world could offer. Today they had practiced “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” for an upcoming concert, and its inspired strains had echoed through her head during the bus ride home.

Now that melody faded as she attuned herself to the outdoor world: the intimate hush of the lanes, the somnolent drip, drip, drip as light rain made pinpricks of sound on the umbrella and on the surrounding foliage. Bach’s grand surges didn’t fit, some
how, with the peaceful domesticity of these lanes. Mrs. Nishimura was content to leave him behind in the practice hall.

As she breathed in the warm, earthy smells of wet wood and moss, a more fitting melody stole through her head—a child’s ditty synonymous with rainy days. It was about your mother waiting for you after school with an extra umbrella because it was unexpectedly raining. She hummed it under her breath:
pichi pichi chapu chapu
(that was the sound of splashing water),
lan lan lan.

It was a catchy tune in its own way, and just as hard to get out of her head. It was from a past time, a past generation. The lyrics mentioned
janome
—traditional umbrellas made of heavy oiled paper—which conjured up old-fashioned images of mother and child walking home past frogs croaking in the rice paddies. But certain things never changed: even in Mrs. Nishimura’s youth, whenever it rained unexpectedly there had been a cluster of Ueno mothers standing outside the school gate, holding plastic umbrellas for their children. She remembered that split-second moment of concern, shared by all her classmates: Did my mother come? But she had never truly worried, for her mother was there each and every time.

When her own daughters were small, Mrs. Nishimura, too, had waited outside their school gate (umbrellas with pictures of Ultraman and Lion Man were popular with the boys; for the girls, manga heroines such as ballerinas or stewardesses). As they walked home she had sung the rainy-day song to them, just as her own mother had sung it to her. They paused often to inspect the hydrangea bushes: as small children all knew, their broad leaves attracted snails when it rained.

Ara ara,
the song went,
see that poor child soaking wet, crying under the willow tree. I’ll give her my umbrella, Mother, and you can shield me under yours…

Ever since learning of her own adoption, she had identified strongly with that abandoned child under the willow tree. But oddly, it hadn’t taken away from her memories of early childhood. That feeling of being safe and cared for was still clear in her mind—of walking beside her mother and looking out at a wet, dreary world from beneath the tinted shade of a red umbrella. She still had a child’s distorted image of the rainy lanes, surreally barren of anything but the pink and blue hydrangea blooms that had pierced her young mind with the beauty of their colors.

She approached the snack shop. Mrs. Yagi, clad in her work apron, was standing under the awning and counting out change to a tall man pocketing a pack of cigarettes. The shopkeeper gave a quarter-bow in her direction, and Mrs. Nishimura returned it with a smile without breaking stride.

Before turning into the lane, she passed the Kobayashis’ long wooden wall with the hinged vendor door that opened out onto the street. Nowadays no one used these doors, with their uncomfortably low lintels, except to put out trash on collection days.

Behind this wall was the Kobayashis’ kitchen. Every so often, if Mrs. Nishimura walked very close along the narrow cement ditch, she could hear the faint thuds of a cleaver against the cutting board. As a child, playing here on the street, she and her playmates had sniffed appreciatively as unfamiliar smells wafted out into the lane: Chinese aromas of garlic or ground peanuts, a whiff of Western tomato sauce. Back then, before the modernization of Kyoto, such dishes had been redolent of the exotic. Mrs. Kobayashi’s ingredients were common enough—she shopped at the open-air market just like everyone else—but she combined them in unusual ways. “She grew up in a port city,” the neighbor women said. “She has high-level tastes, that one.”

Mrs. Nishimura turned the corner into the narrow lane, feeling instinctive relief at the familiar crunch of gravel under her feet. For as long as she could remember, this
k’sha k’sha
sound had signaled home.

She paused before the Kobayashis’ kitchen door. She had been planning to ask Mrs. Kobayashi a question. The Asaki household was replacing their hallway lights; would Mrs. Kobayashi like to add her order to theirs and save herself the hassle of carrying those long, unwieldy tubes? Mr. Nishimura could install them at the same time, and then old Mr. Kobayashi wouldn’t have to use a stepladder.

But on this overcast day there was no glow of electricity behind the frosted glass panels. This meant Mrs. Kobayashi wasn’t in the kitchen or even the dining room. She must be in one of the formal rooms beyond.

Mrs. Nishimura hesitated. There was an unwritten rule among Ueno housewives: it was permissible to drop in briefly, unannounced, if the lady of the house was in the kitchen. Domestic chores did not count as private time. But if the housewife had climbed up into the house proper, it would be inconsiderate to barge in.

She would go home, then, and telephone instead.

Almost three years had passed since Mrs. Rexford’s death, and life on this lane was back to normal. Mrs. Kobayashi’s health was greatly improved. It had taken time, but those skittering lights in her eyes had disappeared and she no longer sat down at odd times to rest. “Sometimes,” she told people, “it feels like she’s still alive in America somewhere.”

Mrs. Nishimura, too, was back to normal. She occasionally recalled, with a cringe of embarrassment, her botched overture
in the vestibule. But mostly it was as if it had never happened. After all, the older woman didn’t seem to remember; there had been no hint of awkwardness, not even a slight distance. Maybe she hadn’t heard it. So, while Mrs. Nishimura hadn’t exactly forgotten, the hurt and resentment had faded from her day-to-day thoughts.

After all, such feelings were nothing new. For much of her life they had slid in and out of her mind like slow, dark fish, often disappearing for months at a time. But they never broke the surface; they were nothing like those hungry koi one saw in traditional restaurant gardens, the kind that erupted from the water with mouths gaping and hard bodies sticking straight up into the air. No, her fish were a quieter sort. They were bottom dwellers; they made no sudden moves. In rare moments, when things were slow, she let them rise up and circle about. But most of the time, there were better things to do and she went on about her business.

“Do you ever get angry?” her best friend in college had asked. She was the only person outside her family with whom she had discussed her adoption.

“Yes…,” young Masako had replied thoughtfully, “but not in the way you think. Not in a way that’s really
personal.
”

“Not personal? Against the mother who gave you up?”

“It’s like I have two versions of her,” she had said. “There’s the one in my head and there’s the actual woman who lives down the lane. The one in my head is who I get mad at or sentimental about. I talk to her in my head sometimes. But it doesn’t really count, because it’s almost like she’s imaginary.”

The truth was that Mrs. Nishimura felt physically incapable of the kind of anger she had seen in her big sister. She had seen Yoko stand up to bullies and back them down. Where did that intensity come from, that overpowering rage that blotted out
everything else? It simply wasn’t in her. Besides, her own situation didn’t warrant it. Or did it? She was too close to have perspective. She sometimes wondered if her reactions were normal; this was another dark secret that she kept to herself.

But today, such thoughts were the last thing on her mind. Still humming—
pichi pichi chapu chapu
—she reached her own house and rolled open the slatted gate.

The mind is mysterious. Sometimes, when people feel buoyant and their insecurities are farthest from their minds, their guard goes down and they are even more susceptible.

In Mrs. Nishimura’s case, singing had a lot to do with it. She had joined this municipal choir only a few months ago. She had a rich, strong alto—all the Kobayashi daughters were blessed with good voices—but she had never done much with it. For a year or two, when her girls were small, she had sung in a short-lived choir consisting of fellow mothers on the PTA committee. Lately, with Momoko about to leave for college and Yashiko not far behind, she had felt a nameless yearning to sing again. On a whim she auditioned for Akimichi, a female choir known for its high standards. She told no one; she was embarrassed by her own audacity. But luckily there was an opening for a second alto and she was accepted—on the condition that she work hard to catch up.

The practices were rigorous, nothing like the PTA chorus in which the housewives had pleasantly passed the time. This choir director made them repeat, and repeat, and repeat a note until they got it right. Such intensity of effort did not allow for holding back, for being self-conscious. Soon Mrs. Nishimura forgot herself in the process of becoming a conduit for something larger than herself, something pure and exhilarating and rich and joyful that surged through her and dislodged tiny fragments that stayed swirling in suspension for hours afterward.
With this constant outpouring of emotion, something within her began to shift. There was an imperceptible loosening of that airtight seal that had surrounded her feelings.

It was a subtle disequilibrium of which she was unaware. Now, still dressed in her outdoor clothes, Mrs. Nishimura stood before the telephone alcove in the dim hallway. Her lungs still enlarged from singing, she dialed the Kobayashis’ number.

“We’re all set for lights,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her. “We just replaced them a few months back. But thank you, it’s kind of you to ask.”

“
Soh?
You already replaced them?”

“We had Teinosuke do it while he was here.”

“Ah, well, that’s fine then,” said Mrs. Nishimura. “I just thought I’d ask.”

And it
was
fine. Truly…although there was just the slightest disappointment that Mrs. Kobayashi hadn’t made a similar offer to them. But that was silly. Mrs. Nishimura preferred not to indulge in petty thoughts.

But this little pang—which should have been no more than a pinprick, or at worst a vague sadness soon muffled on impact—shot past its proper stopping point with a force that alarmed her.

“I thought I heard your footsteps on the gravel a minute ago,” said the older woman. “Did you just get back from somewhere?”

“I was at choir practice. Remember? I have choir every Tuesday.” That pang was building in her chest, fierce and forlorn and extravagant. She vaguely recognized this sensation from choir: the gathering, the escalating, in preparation for a sublime launch of sound. But it had never happened in real life, and certainly not in anger.

“I tried to catch you, but you’d already turned the corner,”
the older woman said. “
Ne,
I have a good cut of snapper I’ve been meaning to give you. The two of us can’t eat it all, and with this rainy season it won’t keep long.”

“You don’t have to bother,” Mrs. Nishimura said.

“What’s that?”

A small part of her mourned what she was about to say even before she said it.

“You never wanted me,” she whispered. No sooner had she said it than she was gripped with fear. Fumbling, she hung up the receiver before her mother could respond.