The Favorites (19 page)

F
or
the next two days it rained continuously: sometimes a downpour, sometimes an invisible mist. According to the weather report, a typhoon was blustering up near Hokkaido and affecting the main island.

Today the rain had stopped, but it was still overcast. Sarah and her grandmother were walking home from the open-air market. The air was damp and warm and hushed.

“Let’s cut through So-Zen Temple,” Sarah suggested.

“Good idea,” said her grandmother. “The pines will smell nice.”

The lanes near the temple had hardly changed. Prewar wooden houses still stood behind their rustic fences, the same fences Sarah had admired as a teenager. “Thank god for zoning laws,” the neighbors said. After all, So-Zen Temple was an important historical attraction.

They entered the temple grounds through an unassuming back entrance. So-Zen had multiple entrances because it was such a sprawling complex, one of the largest in the country. They walked down a path so narrow they could feel the clammy moisture of the stone walls on either side. Above them towered
a profusion of trees—bamboos, flaming red maples, gnarled pines that housed the largest crows Sarah had seen anywhere. Their guttural
cah-cah
s broke through the cheeping of smaller birds.

“You know what Mama told me once?” Sarah gestured up at the trees with her free hand. “She said when she was little, some boy climbed all the way up one of these pine trees to get a nest of eggs. And the mother crow swooped in and pecked at his head…”

“
Soh soh!
And he fell and broke his leg,” supplied Mrs. Kobayashi with relish. “I do remember that.”

It was odd to think of neighborhood children having free rein in what were now official grounds. But when her mother was little, children had pattered up and down the wooden verandas of temple buildings that were now fenced and roped off and labeled like museum exhibits. On this hushed autumn morning, with the grounds empty now that the autumn tourist season had drawn to a close, Sarah sensed for the first time what So-Zen must have been like when Japan was a poor country. The temple buildings seemed to deflate, receding into the foliage and taking second place to the living creatures emboldened at having the grounds to themselves: crows flapping heavily from branch to branch; smaller birds bursting into the air in groups of two or three, their wings sounding like a deck of cards being shuffled.

“This is where Mama used to catch snakes when it rained.” Sarah gestured to a ditch running alongside the lane. It was a ditch from a bygone century: narrow and deep, lined with granite blocks. “She said she once found a white one, but she put it back because, you know, white snakes are supposed to be holy.”

“Really, she caught snakes? She never brought any home…” Mrs. Kobayashi peered down into the mossy ditch. Leaves and
rainwater flowed swiftly past. “She was always a thoughtful child,” she said, “thinking ahead to spare me trouble.”

The pathway dead-ended. They could turn left toward the main part of the complex or else go right, down a long cobbled walkway shaded year-round by the overhanging branches of
donguri
trees. They always took the latter path because it led toward home. The walkway was strewn with small black
donguri
—indigenous acorns that generations of small children had picked off these cobblestones and brought home for their mothers to roast as snacks.

They passed more temples, their wood weathered to a velvety aged brown that was almost black. They were unadorned and timeless. Their simple lines sank into her soul in a way the cathedrals of Europe never could, reminding her of the eternity that lay beneath temporal emotions.

“I wonder if it’s going to rain,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. The sky seemed grayer now than it had an hour ago. A
donguri
dropped down onto the walkway behind them. This part of the path was always less crowded, since the temples petered out here and there was nothing to see. Today it was utterly deserted. The only other person they had seen all morning was a shaven priest clopping by in the opposite direction, dignified and austere in his dark robes with tan-colored tassels. Above high wooden geta, his
tabi
-clad feet gleamed white. But now he was nowhere in sight.

“Grandma, let’s sneak in and see the baby Jizo,” Sarah said impulsively. “I didn’t get a chance last time, it was summer and there were tourists all over the place…”

“Baby Jizo, where? What are you talking about?”

Sarah felt a catch of surprise, for the baby Jizo had been important to her mother. She wondered if she had just made some sort of blunder.

But it was too late now. “Mama used to come here all the time,” she explained. “I’ll show you. See, you go over this fence…” She quickly straddled the low iron tourist railing, looking back and laughing at her grandmother’s shocked expression. “Quick!” she said. “There’s nobody around. Quick!”

Mrs. Kobayashi’s face darkened with disapproval, but curiosity made her follow. Holding down her skirt with one hand, she cautiously straddled the low fence, lifting one wool-stockinged leg after the other. They slipped between the trees, squeezed through an opening in a wall of shrubbery, and there it was: a small clearing with twenty or so crumbling statues of tiny smiling bodhisattvas. They had been rescued after the war from remote country roads up in the Kyoto hills.

Mrs. Kobayashi stood in the clearing and gazed about her with a look of dawning dismay. “You realize, don’t you,” she said finally, “these aren’t ordinary Jizo. They’re markers for real-life babies that died in bad circumstances.”

Sarah knew. In past centuries, illegitimate babies had been drowned. Orphans had starved during famines. There was even an ancient tradition of putting twins to death if they were born of opposite sexes. Some of the stone markers—so old and weathered they looked like lumps of rock—had two figures etched side by side. None of these children had had a proper burial. Since there was no family to chant sutras and push the children safely into the next world, little Jizo were created in their memory. The sadder the circumstances, it was said, the sweeter the smile a stoneworker would carve. The Jizo would stand on roadsides and protect travelers from harm.

“When Mama was sad or upset as a girl, and even when she was in college,” Sarah told her grandmother, “she’d come and sit here. She made up stories about who they were and what their families were like.”

To her dismay, her grandmother gave a little shudder.

“When she brought me here,” Sarah continued, “she’d say a prayer for them, and she made me say a prayer too.” She had a flash of memory: standing here next to her mother, eyes closed and palms pressed together. For a moment she could almost smell the sun-warmed stone and hear the comforting rattle of summer leaves overhead.

“If I’d known about this when she was a girl, I would have forbidden it,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “These souls are lost and hungry, like stray dogs. If they sense a susceptible spirit, they latch on, poor things. And they drag down the living.”

It was hard to know how to respond. Mrs. Kobayashi was a practical woman with progressive views. But every so often, like now, Sarah was reminded that they came from different generations and different cultures.

“You must think I’m silly,” said her grandmother.

“No,” said Sarah. “I think it was a different time. A much scarier time.” The crumbling stones, with their aura of tragedy, did look rather sinister in the still gloom of November.

“I told her to stay away from these sorts of things.” Mrs. Kobayashi sounded hurt. “I made her promise.”

“Well,” said Sarah helplessly, “I guess it turned out all right in the end.”

“
Soh.
I suppose it did.”

L
ater
that afternoon, someone tapped on the kitchen door. It was Mrs. Ichiyoshi, who lived four houses away.

Sarah hadn’t seen the old woman in years. She never came outdoors anymore. Once she had been a common sight, hovering over a vendor’s pushcart or sweeping the doorstep of her visitor gate. When Sarah and her cousins were small, she would give them green-tea candies from her apron pocket. They accepted politely but unenthusiastically; green tea was an old person’s flavor.

Mrs. Ichiyoshi bowed and stepped into the cement vestibule. Waving aside Mrs. Kobayashi’s invitation to come up, she perched informally on the raised ledge of the tatami floor, not bothering to take off her shoes: the classic posture of a neighborhood gossip.

“And who might this be?” She looked curiously at Sarah, who had knelt down beside her grandmother on the tatami matting. Mrs. Ichiyoshi had a deep, masculine voice.

“This,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her, “is Yoko’s girl, all grown up.”

“
Aaa,
Yo-chan, of course…” The old woman’s face brightened with fond recognition. Then she leaned in closer. “Have you heard?” she whispered in her gravelly voice.

Sarah wondered what news about her mother could possibly be so urgent, since she had been dead six years now.

“She’s marrying a gaijin!” Mrs. Ichiyoshi told them. “The girl’s lost her mind! A gaijin!
Maa,
can you imagine the to-do over at the Kobayashi house!” Her face contorted with a look of scandalous glee that Sarah had never seen. It reminded her of the time she was fourteen, when she had looked up at the Asaki balcony and seen a stranger staring at her through Mrs. Asaki’s eyes.

It was the first time she had encountered a senile person. But the greater shock was seeing her mother’s past come alive with such ugliness.

Before anyone could respond, Mrs. Ichiyoshi’s daughter-in-law came scurrying to the open door. She steered the old woman back toward home, periodically looking back over her shoulder and making jerky bows of apology. Sarah and her grandmother followed them out into the lane, bowing back in polite reassurance and staring after their retreating figures.

“Poor thing,
ne,
” Mrs. Kobayashi said lightly. “Gone funny in the head and still so young.” She avoided looking at Sarah. It was unbearably painful that her daughter’s disgrace had been witnessed by her child. Sarah would have felt the same way if her grandmother had known of her mother’s disadvantages in America.

Later that day Mrs. Kobayashi remarked, with a strange vehemence, “If her real father were alive, he would never have allowed her to marry an American.” With this cryptic comment, the subject was closed forever.

There were certain things Sarah never discussed with her grandmother. She never let on that her mother had been any
thing but a queen bee in America. And she never mentioned their fights.

In turn, she knew her grandmother kept certain things from her. When Sarah was fourteen, her aunt Tama had told her that when her mother left on her honeymoon, Mrs. Kobayashi had dropped her brave face and wept for days afterward, huddled on her knees in the parlor. “I didn’t know what to do!” Mrs. Izumi said. “I thought she was going to get sick.” At the time, Sarah had assumed this was natural behavior for two people so close. But years later, shortly before she died, her mother had said something surprising.

“It was healthier for me to go away,” she said. “We were too attached.” That surprising remark had stuck in Sarah’s memory like a shard of glass.

She wished she could ask her grandmother about it. But how could she risk hurting an old woman who had suffered so much? The very idea would have outraged her mother, with her Benkei-like protectiveness.

There was one other topic they didn’t discuss: the problem of her mother marrying an American. Until now, Sarah hadn’t grasped the full magnitude of the situation. “There was a little resistance at first,” she was told as a child, “but then you were born, and everyone’s heart just melted into a puddle.” This had seemed reasonable. In Sarah’s generation, there was nothing shocking about a mixed-race marriage.

The Ichiyoshi incident made Sarah curious about her parents’ marriage. She had grown up hearing her parents reminisce fondly about their courtship. She had been delighted by the tale of stuffy relatives—a socially prominent branch of the Sosetsu family—who had begged the Kobayashis to stop the marriage. It would impact their children’s prospects, they pleaded, referring to matchmakers who dug deeply into family histories.

“But you stood up to those silly people and made them go home, didn’t you, Mama?” young Sarah had said happily.

“Of course I did,” her mother replied. “And your grandmother backed me up, one hundred percent.”

The couple had met while Mr. Rexford was in Japan on a two-month vacation. In the fifties, Japan was still struggling to catch up with the modern world. Students were urged to practice their English on any foreigner they met. Since foreigners were scarce in inland cities, Mr. Rexford was approached by a good many college students. Faces stiff with embarrassment, they would blurt out, “Hello, I have a black pen,” or “How is the government in your country?”

One spring day he was standing in a shrine yard, in front of a wooden structure with an enormous rope hanging from the eaves. This rope was meant to be grasped with both hands and shaken, so the large bells overhead would clang and alert the spirits. Then it was customary to drop a coin into the slatted donation box, clap three times, bow, and pray.

Yoko was sitting a few yards away, a sketching board across her knees. She had recently graduated from college with a double major: one in classic Japanese literature and one in English. She was eager to display her skills to someone capable of appreciating them.

“Excuse me,” she said. “That rope at which you are gazing is made of the hair of female prisoners.”

“It was the best opening line I’d ever heard,” Mr. Rexford told his daughter years later.

Their meeting was the start of a tender friendship. After Mr. Rexford went home to America, he wrote her every week. Through their letters, they fell in love.

For many years, Yoko kept their correspondence a secret. After all, Japanese girls from good families did not consort with
Americans. She explained away the letters by telling her mother that Kyoto University had a pen pal program, designed to help alumni maintain the foreign-language skills they had learned. Sarah loved the story of her grandmother innocently saying, “Here’s another letter from your pen pal!” as she collected mail from the wooden box at the visitor gate.

“I always had a gut feeling about him,” Mrs. Rexford used to tell Sarah. “I just
knew.
There was something in his eyes.”

Sarah had never seen beyond those charming anecdotes to the true problem: Yoko had lied to her mother for years. The sense of betrayal must have been especially great because mother and daughter were best friends. Many nights after everyone went to bed, the two had stayed up late into the night, laughing, gossiping, holding philosophical debates. How hurt her grandmother must have been when she learned the truth!

It bothered Sarah that she knew nothing about the most intense and painful time in the women’s relationship. What guilt her mother must have felt! How did she reconcile that remorse? Knowing the answer might have given Sarah a vastly different understanding of her own relationship with her mother.