The Favorites (17 page)

T
he
rainy season drew to a close, and each day the sun shone with ever-increasing strength. The intimate, sodden hush of the Ueno lanes gave way to a bright, bustling energy, a quickening. Sound traveled swiftly and clearly. Children whizzed past on bicycles; alley cats darted through the long, lush weeds.

One sunny morning, Mrs. Nishimura ran into Mrs. Kobayashi at the open-air market. Mrs. Nishimura was coming out of Shinsendo Bakery, a new establishment with Parisian awnings of red, white, and blue. Mrs. Kobayashi was approaching from the direction of the pickle store. She noticed her daughter and her face brightened in recognition. Mrs. Nishimura waited, admiring the older woman’s firm, pleasing stride as well as the peach gauze scarf tucked into the neckline of her blouse.

Stepping away from the bicycles and pedestrians, they exchanged small domestic updates. Momoko was still studying hard for her entrance exams. Sarah was interning at a financial consulting firm over the summer.

“In a week or so,” Mrs. Kobayashi said, “it’ll be hot enough to carry a parasol.” She tilted back her head to look at the sun.
Mrs. Nishimura, too, lifted her face to the sky: a strong blue, with the classic cumulus clouds of early summer. They lingered, savoring the bright warmth and the communal lightheartedness of fellow shoppers stepping past in summer clothes.

Mrs. Kobayashi looked over at Mrs. Nishimura’s woven straw basket. “So,” she said in a playful tone, “what did you buy?” She had never asked such an intimate question before.

“
Saa,
let’s see…” Shyly, Mrs. Nishimura parted the handles of her basket. The action felt oddly familiar; she had watched her big sister do it many times. She peered into her own basket, just as her sister used to do.

With friendly curiosity, Mrs. Kobayashi leaned in to look. Among the usual items—garlic shoots, ginger, dried whitebait, fried tofu skin—were two loaves of Shinsendo bread and a kimono fashion magazine. Kimonos were Mrs. Nishimura’s weakness. In her free time she pored over the fat quarterly glossies, in which elegant women modeled seasonal kimonos with expressions of gentle tranquility.

“This bread’s for Mother,” Mrs. Nishimura explained. “She tears off little pieces and dips them in sugar. She calls it a nostalgic craving.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “That’s right. She told me a long time ago that it used to be a special treat when she was growing up in the country.” She opened her own string bag for inspection. “All I have so far is pickled seaweed.”

They were suddenly approached by a middle-aged woman from Mrs. Nishimura’s choir. “Nishimura-san!” The woman gave two half-bows of greeting, one for each person. “Do you live in this area too?”

Mrs. Nishimura and her mother automatically jerked away from each other, embarrassed to be caught peering into each other’s shopping baskets.

“
Maa,
Kimura-san, good morning! This is my…” But
aunt
felt wrong somehow, after all that had happened. She had a sudden impulse: How would it feel to stand here on this street, in the bright light of day, and tell the truth? It would make no difference to her choir mate.

“This,” she said, “is my mother, Haruko Kobayashi. And this is Mrs. Aki Kimura, who sings with me in the choir.” For a brief moment, time stood still.

“How do you do?” The choir woman bowed, unaware that anything was out of the ordinary.

Mrs. Kobayashi, usually such a fluent conversationalist, could not speak. She was deeply moved; it showed plainly on her face. But she had enough social presence to bow deeply, more deeply than the occasion required, in order to make up for her muteness.

Seeing her mother’s tremulous mouth, Mrs. Nishimura felt a piercing joy. And a sort of wonder: with a single word, she had turned all her years of yearning into a benediction for her mother.

T
he
first day back in her grandmother’s house gave Sarah a sense of wavering in time. Her American self dropped away. In its place, long-forgotten former selves came swimming up from the depths: the little girl who had attended school in Japan, the fourteen-year-old who had lived here one summer, the various older selves she had been on subsequent visits. She was twenty-four years old. She had passed the CPA exam and joined the tax department of a multinational corporation.

“This soup is delicious,” she said. “Creamy. Very delicate.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “I changed the ratio of white miso to red. That way it won’t interfere with the flavor of the squash.”

“Look at these colors.” Sarah held out her bowl at arm’s length, admiring the overall effect. “So nice and autumnal. The orange of the squash, the speckled brown of the mountain potato…”

“Against the red lacquer of the bowl,” said her grandmother proudly.

“A perfect combination.”

Sarah returned the bowl to its proper position in the palm of her left hand.

“No one makes breakfasts like this anymore,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. She nodded at the array of side dishes: eel omelette, umeboshi, glazed kelp and beans. “Over at Granny’s house, they sometimes eat their rice with nothing but miso soup and fried eggs. Momoko told me.”

“Not very satisfying,” said Sarah, forgetting that her usual breakfast in America was nothing but cereal and a banana.

They ate contentedly.

Sarah gazed about at the wooden posts and
fusuma
panels of her childhood. She still half expected to hear her grandfather’s hammer tap-tapping in the workroom.

“It’s quiet with him gone,
ne,
” she said. Mr. Kobayashi had died of a heart attack two years ago. Although his loss paled in comparison with that of her parents, Sarah had loved her grandfather and his death had been a shock.

“Yes, it’s hard to get used to. It’s strange living alone.”

Sarah remembered his affectionate, if clumsy, presents: boxes of caramels for her, packets of Japanese radish seeds for her mother, a bottle of processed seaweed paste (“to put on your bread when you get home”) or some other impractical thing for them to take home to America.

“Granny Asaki visited me the week he died—did I ever tell you? You’d gone home by then.”

Sarah shook her head.

“She rang the bell at the visitor gate. I’m thinking, what’s all this? Then she seats herself in the parlor and bows her head to the floor, over and over. She says, ‘You were a fine wife. He didn’t deserve you. It’s humbled me all these years, the way you worked so hard without complaining.’”

“How lovely,” said Sarah. “I adore Japanese formality.”

Mrs. Kobayashi snorted. “Well, it’s true. I gave him decades of exemplary service. It was for my own self-respect.” Then her
voice softened. “He appreciated it near the end, though. He used to look up from his plate and say, all gruff and embarrassed, ‘You were always good to me. Thank you.’”

Sarah nodded.

“I did more than enough for the man,” her grandmother said briskly. “I have no regrets.”

“Do you ever dream about him?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“No. I still dream about my parents, though. I keep forgetting they’re dead. You’d think after six years, it would soak through to my subconscious.”

Her grandmother, chewing, nodded with interest and encouragement.

“It’s odd,” said Sarah, “that they’re so
fresh
in my dreams. It’s like that part of my brain is frozen in time.”

“Yes, the human brain is very mysterious.”

Sarah had thought the same thing ten years ago, when the burbling of pigeons brought back her eight-year-old self.

“Where are the pigeons?” she said now. “I don’t hear any.”

“
Aaa,
they’re all gone. The temple ban finally had its effect.”

They ate silently. Sarah’s thoughts returned to her grandfather. It was a pity that as she grew into womanhood, the scrim separating adult and child had never lifted between them as it had with her grandmother. Now he was gone, and his inner life would always be a mystery. He must have been lonely, she thought. He must have had love to give, though much of it had gone unclaimed.

S
arah
and her grandmother were walking to the open-air market. The morning was hushed and gray, absorbing sound and turning the lanes into a silent movie.

“Oh, that
smell
!” she cried, breathing in the long-forgotten aroma of burning leaves. Back home in California, backyard fires were against the law.

“
Soh,
it’s that time of year,” agreed her grandmother, as if humoring a child.

This was the first time Sarah had visited in November. The pungent smell took her far back in time, to her kindergarten days in the Kyoto hills. During recess their teacher had tended a small fire in the center of the playground and raked out indigenous sweet potatoes, blistered and blackened, for the children’s afternoon snack.

They approached Murasaki Boulevard and crossed the intersection.
“A! A!”
Mrs. Kobayashi exclaimed. “Good thing I remembered! Remind me, if I forget, to buy
shiso
leaves. You know, to wrap the sashimi in.”

The open-air market had changed since the seventies. There was a new supermarket, where they bought a small bundle of
shiso
leaves. The store wasn’t as big as the supermarkets in California; the aisles were too narrow for shopping carts. But it was just as well, for once-a-week shopping was still an alien concept for Ueno women. The supermarket was popular for its cheap produce, mass-farmed and shipped in from distant places. Women had stopped buying locally grown vegetables; they were too expensive during the economic recession. Vendor carts were a pleasant rarity. The sun-browned farmers in their old-fashioned garb seemed like relics from another era.

“This street’s so quiet!” said Sarah. Vendors no longer hawked their wares with loud, exuberant bellows. Cash registers had replaced abacuses and jingling money bags.

“Remember how quiet the weavers’ alley was just now?” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “That’s the way it was in wartime, when I was a young woman.”

Sarah remembered her mother’s comment about looms moving in tandem with the stock market. “It’s odd,” she said, “that even in this bad economy, there’re all these new buildings. So many things changing.”

“Not everyone’s hurting, I guess.”

They approached the “expensive” fish store. The open-air market had two seafood stores: the expensive place with the good-quality seafood, and the cheap place with affordable seafood, mostly imported.

“You’re visiting at the perfect time,” her grandmother told her. “The fish right now, the big heavy cold-current ones, they’re at their fattiest this time of year. Sashimi is at its prime!”

Sarah noticed there were no customers in line. Plenty of people were bending over the crushed-ice display, but no one was buying.

One of the vendors, a shrewd older woman, came out from behind the counter to show Mrs. Kobayashi her most expensive
items. “Madam!” she said by way of greeting. “After your granddaughter goes home to America you’ll be kicking yourself, with all due respect, for not letting her taste this highest-quality roe! At its absolute prime, madam, this time of year!” She waited, with a complacent smile, as Mrs. Kobayashi wavered. Reaching out a hand, she let it hover dramatically over a display of enormous scallops. “Sashimi grade,” she said simply. “Flown in a few hours ago from Hokkaido.”

It occurred to Sarah that she hadn’t heard her grandmother bargain in a long time. That practice must have gone out of style.

In no time at all, the woman was wrapping up their fatty sashimi plus several other unplanned purchases. She rang up the total on a cash register. “It’ll be good for the young miss,” she reassured Mrs. Kobayashi, “to eat good-quality seafood prepared properly in her granny’s kitchen. In America”—her eyes slid over in Sarah’s direction—“those people eat their fish cooked in
vegetable oil
.”

Sarah laughed, tickled by her expert salesmanship. The vendor responded with a homey smile, revealing a gold tooth.

“You have your mother’s laugh, don’t you,” she said wonderingly. “Startles me every time, miss, coming from that American face.”

Sarah, who had long ago outgrown her insecurity over her Caucasian features, could appreciate this paradox. “She’s right, you know,” she told her grandmother as they walked away. “I don’t resemble anyone on my Japanese side.”

“You have
lots
of family characteristics,” Mrs. Kobayashi said firmly. She counted them on her fingers: a widow’s peak, a thumb that joined her hand at exactly the same angle that her grandfather Shohei’s had, a floating cyst on her neck that had been passed down through several generations of Kobayashis.

“And let’s not forget your voice.” Sarah’s voice was identical to her mother’s. In the early days, whenever Sarah said
“moshi moshi”
over the telephone, Mrs. Kobayashi had felt a wild lurch of hope that her daughter’s death had all been a big mistake.

“And on top of all that,” the old woman concluded, “you have the same open presence your mother and your grandfather had.”

Sarah pondered this as they turned homeward. She wondered what her grandfather Shohei would think if he could see them now: an unlikely pair! She imagined his shock and bewilderment at seeing his own wife walking alongside an American, channeling to her all the love that had once gone to him.

Walking abreast, they turned off the main street. They passed the Kinjin-ya teahouse and entered a narrow residential lane that headed west toward So-Zen Temple. On Sarah’s last visit this lane had been gravel; now it was paved. Their shoes made flat slapping sounds against the blacktop, and Sarah missed the gentle
k’sha k’sha
that had so often reminded her of walking on new-fallen snow.

The sun broke through briefly, its pale light slanting tentatively into the lane. Many of the rickety doors had been replaced by sturdier models with slats of brown plastic instead of traditional wood. One corner house had been torn down altogether and replaced with a Western-style model home, complete with white aluminum siding and a door that opened with a knob. Hanging from the knocker was a painted wooden cutout of a puppy, holding in its smiling mouth a nameplate spelling out
THE MATSUDAS
in English letters.

A bicycle bell tinged behind them. They backed off to the side, careful not to bump into a motor scooter parked beside one of the doors. A straight-backed housewife rode past with a bow of thanks, her wire basket filled with newspaper-wrapped groceries.

“We’ll have this sashimi for lunch, with hot rice,” Mrs. Kobayashi said as they resumed walking abreast. “You’re not here for very long, so we need to plan the menu carefully. We can’t afford to let a single meal go to waste.” Energized by this task before her, she walked briskly. “Do you have any cravings?” she said. “If you do, tell me now.”

“Grandma?” Sarah asked. “Whatever happened to the little lane that hadn’t changed in generations?” That summer day, when she and her mother had strolled home after eating azuki ice, already belonged to a different lifetime. “You know, the lane with the thatched roofs?”

Mrs. Kobayashi gave a short, puzzled laugh as Sarah described it to her.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “They’ve torn a lot of those down.” Then she suddenly stopped short. “Sarah-chan,” she said, “do you remember if we locked the kitchen door when we left?”

A few more years, Sarah thought, and these lanes would be unrecognizable. She imagined a day in the future, perhaps when her grandmother was gone, when she might walk through these lanes with her own daughter—a child with even less Japanese blood than she. And a certain quality of reproach in the slant of sunlight would remind her with a pang, as it did now, of her mother’s confident voice saying, “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”

“Once, when I was a girl,” Sarah would tell her daughter, gripping her hand tightly, “I walked these lanes just like you, with my own mother.” Saying these inadequate words, she would sense keenly how much fell away with time, how lives intersected but only briefly.

“Thank goodness I remembered the
shiso
leaves,” Mrs. Kobayashi said now, leaning over and peering into Sarah’s string bag.
“When you were little you refused to eat your sashimi and rice without it, remember?
Maa,
I never saw such a particular child!”

“That wasn’t me, Grandma,” Sarah said. “That was Mama.”

“Oh…” Mrs. Kobayashi was silent for a moment. “Well, that would make more sense,
ne,
” she said finally. “Poor thing. Autumn
hiramasa
was her favorite. But we couldn’t afford it during the postwar years. Then just when things got better and she could have eaten her fill, she moved away…”

Sarah looked over at the old woman beside her. Mixed in with her sympathy was a certain satisfaction: here was someone who still mourned, who still hurt deeply and had not forgotten.

“Grandma,” she said, in the gentle tone she had often heard her mother use. “There’s no use thinking like that. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Mrs. Kobayashi quickened her pace, as she sometimes did when she was feeling emotional. “People don’t always get the luxury of timing,” she said.