Sansei and Sensibility Read online

  The woman next to her kneels with her baby. She washes the baby gently. Leaning forward, the child rests in the curve of her arms, its head supported in her hands. Her breasts hang swollen with milk. The baby’s stubby arms and legs flap and kick.

  Yae is now at her place squatting and scrubbing vigorously. She and other elderly women kneel and squat easily, without the brittle quality that would seem to signify age. Old women, small and folded, scrub their skin, rich luster lost to a worn toughness, thin, loose folds once fat and swollen, now useless.

  A young woman rises from the water. Her steaming, flushed body waddles forward, full and round with child.

  Yae crouches behind her niece and offers to wash her back. She scrubs with a vigor the girl hasn’t felt since her mother did so. Finally spreading the damp tenugui over a well-polished back, Yae sends hot water in a smooth stream that, penetrating the cloth, clings. Yae peels the tenugui carefully up from the bottom edge to the shoulders; old skin falls away.

  She turns to wash Yae’s back. She’s embarrassed, not being able to wash Yae in the same way. Yae turns, squinting and laughing, saying it doesn’t matter, taking the tenugui from her niece and turning to continue her own washing. Yae is brusque in a way that doesn’t indulge in matters that can’t change or sentimentality that forfeits honesty or pride. She’s frank but with a wry humor that can’t make one take offense.

  There are children in the bath. There is a beautiful girl child, her feet padding across the wet tile from the tub to her mother, then to another woman who must be her grandmother. She follows the girl’s small protruding stomach and thin shoulders and dark eyes.

  * * *

  Before arriving in Kyoto, she had been to Ise, alone, carrying a small blue backpack with all the necessities for a month and a half of travel. The days on the Ise-Shima were cold and crisp and the sky a deep blue. She found herself traveling in silence, listening to the noises and conversations of her surroundings, attempting to remain an unnoticed observer, another Japanese youth fading into the background and comfort of nondescription. In her attempt to melt into scenic obscurity, she found herself a sensitive observer as to whether others were indeed aware of her and what they might have to say about it. She wanted to be alone and an observer and yet constantly felt the paranoia of her situation: acting the part of a traveling Japanese student, yet beset by an anxious desire to know if she had succeeded in her disguise and anger at any evidence of failure. So she came on pilgrimage alone to the great Shinto shrines of Ise, walking in silence through the ancient woods of hinoki cedar, pausing as others did to wash in the clear waters of the Isuzu River.

  Leaving the shrines, she found a small Buddhist temple that had recently opened its rooms for traveling youth. She was the only one to stop there that evening.

  Two small children, a boy and a girl, beautiful with dark eyes, leaned into her window. They scuttled around in the back and stood shyly leaning against the edge of the door. Slowly their voices eased into her room, filling silent travels with a warmth she had forgotten. They watched her unpack with curiosity, standing or sitting, leaning elbows and faces against the low table.

  “Are you really from America? Really?”

  “No, you don’t look like one.”

  “No, it’s a lie. Really?”

  “Teach us English, please. My older sister learns English in school.”

  “Hurry, teach us English!”

  “Say something.”

  Then as if some other curiosity had aroused their attention, the two children were drawn away. She heard them running with excited voices.

  She sat a long time in the doorway, like a cat warming herself under the last rays of evening sun. Below her balcony, a young pregnant woman was hanging clothes to dry, sliding the damp pieces along a bamboo pole, reaching to expose her full, blooming bag. The woman was the proprietress of the hostel. She said the two children were not her own but a neighbor’s. She scolded them gently for bothering her guest.

  But when the woman left, they came again, this time with a friend and more aggressively, stepping inside the room to examine any recent changes.

  “Are you really from America? Really?”

  “Speak English! Hurry, hurry. Teach us English. Hurry!”

  The young woman’s voice called from a distance. Only the girl child lingered at the door. The child had been munching from a small bag of potato chips. “These are potato chips,” the child informed her, leaving her with the small bag, calling after the others.

  She sat in the doorway awhile longer, eating the remaining chips, and the cold air and shadows came slowly. Distant in America, Grandmother was dying. Mother had written, “Grandma wakes every morning and says, ‘Mada ikiteruno ne.’” Still living.

  The proprietress slid open the paper door and passed through from the hallway. Her face shone clean like a wet peach. The warmth of the bath seemed to radiate from her body and the wetness of her hair. Her stomach was round like a balloon, the weight of a child beneath her knitted dress. She said, “You may take your bath now.”

  * * *

  Naked, Yae trots toward the steaming glass doors and steps out. A billow of steam follows her, and so does she.

  III

  At a wayside inn, a young man slipped into a small bathroom. Clothed or unclothed, in Japan he was a gaijin, blue-eyed with brown hair and a bristled mustache beneath a longish nose. The sansei woman was already there bathing. She ignored him momentarily, washing in one corner with her back turned to him. She handed him a basin and soap, and he squatted in another corner. Soon he was a mass of lather and hair, spilling water from the basin over his head, sputtering. He removed the wooden boards from the steaming tub and stepped in. Only his head bobbed there above the tub.

  Droplets dribbling down his forehead and from his mustache, he squinted. He said, “You know I used to think you were like Audrey Hepburn. You know what I mean? Not the way she looks but, you know what I mean? I mean, Hepburn is simple and what you might call innocent, but she’s not stupid. Hell, she’s pretty darn intelligent. I don’t know if you understand, but, well, I’m not so sure anymore. Now I think you’re more of a coquette than she is. In fact, you’d make a pretty fair Japanese hostess.”

  The woman looked up at him from shampoo suds spilling about. He smiled curiously. He looked blind without his glasses. She rinsed her hair and sent water splashing around the room. He rose from the tub, dried himself with the tenugui, and slouched out.

  The woman stayed to continue her bathing. They had been traveling together for the weekend. He had wanted to fish in one of the lakes surrounding Fujisan, but it had rained continuously since their arrival. Instead they had played cards and read inside the six-mat room at the inn. When sun seemed promised, they had stepped out for walks and returned muddy and soaked, or they had sat at one of the two cafés on the lake among the rubber-clad fishermen, sipping tea. Most of the people served and ignored them politely, but the innkeeper had seemed rather curt. Sometimes shopkeepers would address her first, expecting her to translate. He had tried not to be annoyed, and she had tried never to answer for him.

  The woman stepped in the tub. He had continued throughout to elaborate on his various and evolving impressions of her. He had discovered in her mysteries and attractions he continued to muddle over. Over the weekend he had at various times become moody and confused. Simply, he was in love but didn’t want to admit it, knowing she was not. There was something threatening and cynical beneath her affections.

  One could not be sure of the reasons people came to foreign countries; perhaps to search out exotic peoples or beautiful visions of the distant past. Maybe he had come to Japan to find Audrey Hepburn—something respectable, innocent, and elegant. It wasn’t fair to make fun of him, for the woman too had come for similar reasons, and it was pleasing to think that another might perceive in her these same traits. He had created an illusion she longed to step into, but finding his elaborations ultimately trite, she could trust neit
her his observations nor his sensitivity. Even the simplicity she felt natural to herself cast doubt at his innocent world.

  He had bought her a small white clay cat, a four-inch replica of the larger maneki-neko that beckons customers into shops and restaurants in Japan. The white cat sat on its haunches with wide eyes and one beckoning paw. It had a red string collar with a small bell. He put the cat on the tokonoma. He had bought the white cat because it reminded him of her.

  She slipped her damp body into the yukata robe provided by the inn. In the room he seemed asleep. She turned the lights out and slipped beneath the quilts near the floor. There was a stirring. He went out to brush his teeth.

  Suddenly she was under a mass of quilts, trapped by the heavy darkness and his body, which hugged and enfolded. Laughing, she squirmed, groping to find the surface, to find air beyond the tossing quilts; they rolled. Her hand reached for the dry scrap of matting, and elbows squeezed and pushed away the billowing robes. Escaped, she knelt on the matting, watching. He threw the pile of quilts, dumping it over her. “I used to do that to my little sister.”

  He stood, shaking the quilts and fanning them out over the bedding. “You know, when I saw you in the bath, sitting there with your back to me and your hair wrapped up over your head, you know what you looked like? You looked like an ukiyo-e print, like an ukiyo-e woman in the bath—”

  IV

  In late September, the twins were together again in Japan. After a year, one was about to leave, and the other had just arrived for a year of study and travel.

  She came downstairs to the bath initiating her sister to the various buckets and faucets that had by now become quite commonplace. A long time since childhood baths together, they found themselves in the warmth of the small bath, talking.

  Her sister, shaped more as Mother, was full-breasted and thin-legged, reminding her of how beautiful Mother’s figure must have been. And too, her sister and mother were alike in their realism or practicality of outlook. They moved forward with an eye on the minimal expectation, her sister with a saucy flamboyance defying, Mother with a stark energy accepting, the time and the people and the circumstances that came to change their lives. They seemed to experience the events surrounding them more immediately, more honestly, because their peripheral vision was wider, more encompassing. Their reactions, whether silent or expressed, were the mire of sensibilities and possibilities thought of in the past tense.

  To meet again after a year was to meet themselves at a new juncture. She saw herself in her twin at some former time, although she couldn’t fully see what the time or change had come to. Now perhaps she could say she had gone to Japan in search of something uncomplicated even as her own sensitivity and those around her were complicated in a way she hadn’t reckoned and couldn’t so easily abandon or disregard. Then, too, she had thought of coming to Japan as a ritual to be performed and observed in its symbolic nuances, a return to the past, not simply as a time in life to be lived. In part, she had wanted to recapture a sensibility about life that her grandmothers had known.

  She told her sister of a young man she had met while traveling in Nara. His name was Moto, and he had a car and had offered to drive them to Karuizawa for the weekend.

  * * *

  Arriving in Nara by train after solitary wandering on the Ise-Shima, she had stood in front of the station with backpack on her back and pink scarf bag in hand, trying to decipher the map. A swaggering, skinny Kubo Moto threw his pack at her feet and, assuming her to be a lost young sixteen-year-old, proceeded to give directions and to handle telephone reservations with a brusque self-assertion. She was disgusted, yet resigned to his aid. Besides, he didn’t guess her identity, and this game pleased her. Likewise, she assumed him to be an eighteen-year-old high school traveler with a small knowledge of English he bandied about when he discovered her seeming inadequacy at Japanese.

  A state of confused identities continued for a portion of the day until they finally decided to abandon a game of bantering for confessions that were more startling than the game itself. Moto was a twenty-four-year-old college graduate who had spent the previous year traveling in Europe and had returned ready to enter the business world, the company.

  To explain herself was difficult and unconvincing for all the suggestions implied in their game. It wasn’t simply that she was American-born. She had yet to concede to herself that her general dress and appearance were indeed quite young. Sacrificing style for practicality and any conspicuous foreign quality for nondescription, she had also succeeded in becoming by some standards rather childish, devoid of any sophisticated flair or manner. Sophistication of a sort in Japan would have called for cutting her long hair and wearing makeup, and that she found repugnant. There was a need to preserve a basic philosophy about being natural. But moreover, there was a curious pressing need to be the same. When that sameness was seemingly recognized, she felt the comfort of acceptance and for the time being escaped the humiliation of being thought of as Chinese or Korean, a child of mixed blood or a copier after American tastes. It shouldn’t have been humiliating, except for the crude manner and exploitative attitudes that often accompanied these assumptions.

  Interestingly, a disguise had come about by a discarding of Americanisms, styles and manners that meant nothing to the Japanese. Americans and their pretensions to being more experienced looked silly in Japan. A sansei divested of these American manifestations would seem to become simply another Japanese. Yet it was necessary to take on another set of manners, and her manner had become one of a young Japanese girl with sufficient touches of innocence and certainly reticence, mostly due to difficulties with the language. At least it was the surface manner that others found approachable, or negligible. Even if it were an imitation or cover, there was a kind of comfort that exceeded pretensions or dishonesty.

  Yae had explained the meaning of daikon no hana: the daikon flower is really, she said, a nani mo nai, nothing-much flower, a tiny flower seen in a tuft of green leaves. But beneath the earth, hidden from sight, is the great white root, the daikon. She knew the daikon, a giant white radish that, when grated, garnished fish, īkagen, with a clean, pungent quality like lemon but not as sour—something more mellow, Yae said. “Long ago we used to call some girls ‘daikon no hana,’ but nowadays there are no such girls. No, daikon no hana have disappeared.”

  She knew Yae was such a flower, but as for herself, she was probably not what Yae had in mind.

  At first, she had playfully experimented with various expressions in the language of the Japanese woman. Gradually these expressions and manners became natural to most communications, and the possibility of successfully performing roles in two different cultures became a sign of advanced knowledge of both. There was, too, the secret delight of perceiving more about one’s surroundings than one’s image might suggest, of knowing one knew what was what; in other words, of being, after all, more experienced.

  Therefore, she herself, unconvincing, put aside suspicions about Moto’s maturity, confirmed by age, to see again what might come of it. His forward display seemed to allow for this maturity. In any case, they accepted each other’s company for a three-day tour of Nara.

  During the same week in Nara, a small cottage in the resort area of Karuizawa was under siege by hundreds of armed policemen. Inside the hillside cottage, members of the Red Guard, a small Marxist band, were holding a woman hostage while police sent torrents of water by firehose to batter the cottage. It was a small war waged on a snowy hillside, police crouching behind fire tanks with rifles and the husband of the hostage wailing through microphones echoing down the valley, “Please, my wife is a sick woman. Please, take me and let her go!”

  Moto sympathized with the youth in the cottage. He said they had no choice but to wait and to fight. He couldn’t explain why these events had happened, but he said the youth had no choice but to die. They would be killed by police or in the courts.

  After a long week, the police finally broke in, killing several
youths, capturing others, and saving the woman. Later stories revealed a bizarre tale that had begun in the mountain cottages elsewhere, where members of the guard fought among themselves in a game of power that led to private trials and the systemic execution and burial of their own people, one by one. A woman with child had barely escaped death. Her brothers were dead. Their bodies had been dismembered, buried on the mountainside. A young woman had led the group. Her plain, harsh face stared from newspapers everywhere. Some said it was the woman’s plain face that had made her bitter and angry.

  * * *

  Karuizawa was after all a resort area, and Moto’s family had built a small cottage there. The long five-hour drive over winding highways was tedious, exhausting. Her sister refused to sit in the front seat and finally said, “That guy doesn’t know how to drive. Shit I know—he can’t even shift gears smoothly. He’s going to get us into an accident. Where did you pick this guy up, anyway?”

  Her twin had come a long way to disturb her perspective, but something inside her jumped, an old sense of strength, even of hostility, and she realized she had met and accepted Moto because of a game of sorts, a deception, and urge to imitate. Even if she had tried to suspend judgment or allow another set of values or rules to decide, she wasn’t now sure. She didn’t know who this Moto was.

  The cottage was one of many, isolated among the trees far up on a hill. It seemed wedged into the side of the hill, overlooking a dirt road below. What she had imagined would be an extravagant two-story cabin was rather a two-room kitchenette, compact and convenient. They scrounged for supplies, and she was pleased to cook by putting foods together, īkagen, from a wide range of novel possibilities. She was pleased with her own ingenuity and the camplike self-sufficiency of the arrangement.