Read The Samurai's Daughter Online
Authors: Sujata Massey
The Samurai's Daughter
Sujata Massey
“Way too salty. I bet the chef used instant dashiâ¦
San Francisco International Airport always gives me a bad feeling.
“Oh, you're just in time for lunch,” my mother calledâ¦
Just after three, my mother interrupted me in a half-dozeâ¦
When we'd escaped the sad, beaten-down building, I turned toâ¦
“I'd laugh if it didn't hurt so much,” Hugh said.
Christmas morning. It was six, the hour I always awokeâ¦
Two new locks and four keys to match cost aâ¦
Project Manami got off to a weak start the nextâ¦
I was so preoccupied by the Hirohito development that Iâ¦
“What makes you think that?” Officer Ali demanded.
My father made me a Japanese breakfast the next morning:â¦
Monday morning, I was at the post office right asâ¦
I spent about half an hour listening to Mr. Endoâ¦
“Happy New Year!” Richard Randall screamed in my ear. Theâ¦
When I woke up New Year's morning, I was naked,â¦
Before, the overwhelming aura of Ramon Espinosa's apartment had beenâ¦
The next morning, I still had no answer to theâ¦
I made it home by late afternoon. Walking along theâ¦
“Argh!” Hugh said, just before he started choking.
When life gets chaotic, sometimes the best escape is work.
Kiku is the rare kind of restaurant that gets terrificâ¦
The shadows seemed longer in my room later that nightâ¦
The Imperial Hotel is considered by most people to beâ¦
I was home an hour later. It was twilight, andâ¦
As Hugh had said, Morita's corporate headquarters were not inâ¦
As soon as Hugh was gone, I started making phoneâ¦
I opened my mouth, then closed it. At the moment,â¦
After getting off the telephone, I used the small amountâ¦
I'd been home for days, but nothing was the same.
The next day, Hugh worked. I was on the phoneâ¦
On my final night in Tokyo, Richard Randall threw aâ¦
As I waited in line for the luggage lying onâ¦
I'd never arrived at the San Francisco Airport without beingâ¦
Back in Charles Sharp's house, Mr. Ikehata pulled up aâ¦
As I walked around to the back of the house,â¦
“Oh, I'm sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn't mean toâ¦
A week later, I was at a cafe on Unionâ¦
R
EI
S
HIMURA
American-born but Tokyo-based collector and scholar of Japanese antiques.
T
OSHIRO
S
HIMURA
Rei's Japanese father, who practices psychiatry in San Francisco.
C
ATHERINE
S
HIMURA
Rei's American mother, who decorates with a vengeance.
M
ANAMI
O
KADA
Japanese boarder in the Shimura household.
H
UGH
G
LENDINNING
On-again, off-again beau who practices international law.
C
HARLES
S
HARP
Principal in the San Francisco law firm Sharp, Witter and Rowe.
E
RIC
G
AN
Asian-American translator and old flame of Rei's.
R
OSA
M
UNOZ
Now living in poverty in San Francisco, having suffered even worse horrors under Japanese hands during the war.
T
HE
Y
OKOHAMA
S
HIMURAS
Rei's family branch in Yokohama is headed by her father's younger brother, Hiroshi Shimura, a salaryman; his homemaker wife, Norie, is like a mother to Rei. Their son, Tsutomu “Tom” Shimura, is an emergency room doctor, and daughter Chika is an undergraduate at Kyoto University.
S
HOU
I
DABASHI
Private detective based in Tokyo.
R
AMON
E
SPINOSA
Rosa's friend from the bad old days in the Philippines.
M
R
. I
SHIDA
Tokyo antiques dealer who is a mentor to Rei.
M
R
. H
AMAZAKI
Managing director for Morita Incorporated.
D
R
. N
IGAWA
Internal medicine doctor at Kanda General Hospital.
M
R
. H
ARADA
Tokyo lawyer and friend of Hugh Glendinning's.
Plus an assortment of students, teachers, assistants, policemen, and friends on both sides of the Pacific.
“Way too salty. I bet the chef used instant dashi powder.”
My judgment delivered, I laid down the chopsticks I'd used to spear a slippery cube of tofu from the unfortunate miso soup. The Asian-American waitress who'd served us passed by with a smile; apparently, she didn't understand Japanese. Well, this was San Francisco, packed full of people with faces that mirrored the world's races, but who often spoke only English. I guessed that I'd been saved.
“But this soup is so tasty!” Toshiro Shimura, my father, raked a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. It was cut in a slightly shaggy style typical for a San Francisco psychiatristâbut was distinctly odd for a Japanese-born, fifty-something man. “Rei-chan, you don't realize how hard it is to find pure Japanese ingredients here. Anyway, I hear that in Japan a lot of the cooks now use bonito powder.”
“Not
real
cooks. I grate bonito fishâyou know, the kind that's so hard that it feels like a piece of wood.” I closed my eyes for a minute, feeling nostalgic for the petrified hunk of fish resting in a wooden box in my tiny kitchenette in North Tokyo. “It's worth the extra effort because then the soup tastes like it comes from the sea, not the convenience store. Now, Dad, where were we? The ten grave precepts of Buddhism. The ones your grandfather felt were
so important to live by. I thought it was interesting that he had them on display.”
“Yes, they were recorded on a calligraphy scroll. I think it originally came from a monastery, but it hung in the office where he worked. Unfortunately, I don't know where it is now.”
“Do you recall, approximately, what it said?”
“The precepts. You know them, don't you?”
I rolled my eyes. “I know some of them, but not all. You didn't raise me Buddhist, remember?”
“But you did take an Eastern religions class at Berkeley, yes?”
“It was so long ago, Dad. Just tell me. This is an oral history project, not a go-to-the-library project. I remember the first one: Don't kill. The next: Don't steal. And then the one about not lyingâ”
“Well, the precept against lying is actually the fourth, not the third, if I remember correctly. And in Japan, it's always been considered allowable to tell certain kinds of lies out of compassion, or because that lie serves a greater good.”
“Well, I'd agree with that,” I said. “What was the third one, then?”
“It's a precept against sex. Misusing sex, to be exact. That would cover situations such as rape and extramarital sex andâ”
“Fine. Ah, what's number five?” I wasn't going to pursue the subtleties of the Buddhist rule governing sexâthat was just a little too up-close and personal. It had been two years since I'd last come home to San Francisco, and I wanted to leave on as good terms as I'd arrived.
“That, if I remember correctly, is not to give or take drugs.”
“But priests drink sake all the time!” I pointed out.
“Well, a person may take sake, but not in an amount to cause intoxication. My grandfather drank sake at supper, but only a single glass.”
“Would you say in general that laypeople's interpretations of these rules were looser than that of priests? I mean, Zen priests don't eat meat, but most people in Japan do. But how is it that people are allowed to eat meat, when the first precept is against killing?”
“That's the rule I
thought
my vegetarian daughter would jump
on.” My father laughed. “The answer is that killing animals in self-defense, or to eat them, is permitted. It's just not right to kill them for sport.”
“Aha. So the basis of the rule is that an animal's life is valued only when it might be threatened with involvement in a game, say hunting or cockfighting,” I said. “I'm not sure I agree with that. A death is a death, to me. But the rule certainly provides an interesting look at the Japanese mind.”
“The Buddhist mind,” my father corrected me. “And as you know, Buddhism has its origins in India, and these laws are known to Buddhists in all nations. They are universal.”
I put my notebook aside for a break, because as much as I'd complained about the noodles, I was hungry for them. Actually, my feelings about food, my hometown, and my father were about as mixed up as the Buddhist rules.
San Francisco was a typical tourist's dream, but in my mind it was a far second to Tokyo, my adopted home. Sure, the architecture in San Francisco was superb. But how could you enjoy it with all the rolling power blackouts? My parents' lifestyles had changed dramatically since California had faced its energy crisisâtheir huge Victorian home was no longer lit up welcomingly in the evenings, not even now, at Christmas, when my mother once had routinely lit electric candles in all sixty windows.
Tokyo didn't have such problems yet. And when there, it was easy for me to live simply, keeping my appreciation low to the ground, for things like the miniature Shinto shrines decorated with good luck fox statues, and the gracious rows of persimmon trees that line the ugly train tracks. And then, there were the Japanese people: the serene older generation moving through their own private dances of tai chi in the city's small parks, and the serious kindergarten students striding off to school wearing the kind of saucer-shaped hat and tidy uniform that hadn't changed since the 1920s. Not to mention my father's brother, Uncle Hiroshi, Aunt Norie, and my cousin Tom, who had become an important part of my life: so important that I planned to hightail it out of America before December 31 so I wouldn't miss New Year's Day with them. The sad truth was that I found staying in an eight-bedroom
house with just my parents depressing. Even though there was one more person with usâManami Okada.
Manami was a thirty-year-old pathology fellow from Kobe. She had been living with my parents for about a month, following a desperate call from a University of California at San Francisco administrator to my father, the unofficial godfather of the school's Japanese community. My father had explained to me that Manami was what the Japanese called a “girl in a box”âsomeone whose family had sheltered her too long. Not surprisingly, her housing situation in San Francisco was a bit too open for her tastes. One of her apartment-mates was a lesbian, the other a Hostess cupcake junkie; these were the reasons, anyway, that my mother offered me for why my father and she had taken pity on the unworldly young doctor and offered her one of the third-floor bedrooms for the token payment of $100 a monthâwhich was one-eighth of what Manami had been paying for her previous apartment share.
Well, I knew that junk food could lead to murderâSan Francisco was where the famous Hostess Twinkie legal defense had originatedâbut I didn't have any biases against gays. I'd viewed Manami with a great deal of skepticism when I'd met her about a week ago, but I had to admit she seemed pleasant. She was quiet, polite, studiousâall those Japanese daughter qualities that I lacked.
She was serving her first year of residency, so she was usually gone all day, and often worked late at night. When she was home she joined us for meals, but chose to spend her quiet time behind the closed door to her room on the third floor. Her room was next to the big storage room where among the many boxes and trunks there was one holding items from my father's old life in Japan. I'd gone through the papers slowly one evening, hearing an odd splashing sound on the other sound of the wall; it took me a while to realize that Manami was trying to bathe in the traditional Japanese way, pouring buckets of water over herself rather than using the shower.
“What are you thinking about?” my father asked.
“Manami. I wonder if she's any happier with us than with her old roommates.”
“Perhaps you should ask her.”
I shook my head. “I don't want to be so direct. Maybe I'll just try to see if she perks up at the chance to help me with some ideas for my project. After all, since she's so old-fashioned, she might very well have lived a life in Kobe where they're still using traditional objects in the home.”
My line of work is Japanese antiques. I buy them for people living in Japan who still care about old things, as well as for some American clients. I also do some writing and speaking on the topic; that's what had brought me to the U.S. on this trip. Since I'd made enough from my recent work in Washington, D.C., to pay a few months' rent on my tiny apartment in an unfashionable section of North Tokyo, I'd decided to take a sabbatical from antiquing to engage in a personal history project. I hoped to make a record of the style in which the Shimuras had lived before the massive modernization that came in the 1960s. I was interested in such things as the way the Buddhist precepts were followed in the normal daily routine, and also in the artifacts of that life: the cooking pots my grandmother used, the quilt designs, the landscape design of the camellia garden that had surrounded the old house in West Tokyo.
As I ruminated about the project, the restaurant seemed to vanish. Since we were sitting on
zabuton
cushions at a low table, we could just as soon be father and child in old Japanâan eager, boisterous child with a reserved father. Though of course in old Japan, the likelihood was next to none that a twenty-nine-year-old daughter would have the luxury of a gossipy restaurant lunch with her father. I would be taking care of my familyâand perhaps sewing the quilts and cooking the dishes that my descendants would nostalgically admire.
“Sorry. I've just been paged.” My father gave me a rueful look and unclipped the phone at his waist. In the years that I'd been gone, he'd become a total technophile; the only problem was he rarely remembered the importance of recharging his combined phone/pager. “It's your mother, as usual.”
“I bet she has a shopping errand for you.” I knew my mother was on the verge of running out of votive candles. She'd made
especially elaborate holiday decorations this year because she and my father were hosting a party for ALL, the Asian Language League, on December 26.
As my father punched in our home number, I watched his fingers, stockier than mine, but the identical light golden color. Many children of Japanese and Caucasian unions turn out to have milky coloring, but I had the same complexion as my father and Uncle Hiroshi and my cousin Tom. My hair was more brown-black than black, though, and I couldn't say my nose was Japanese. In the United States, I was often assumed to be foreign-born; in Japan, I was assumed to be Japanese until people realized I couldn't read.
I stopped pondering my weaknesses, because my father had gotten through. He greeted my mother by name. Then, after a long pause, he spoke. “How soon? And she doesn't know yet?” My father listened a bit more, shook his head, and then handed the phone to me. “Here. The news is really meant for you.”
I felt my stomach drop. Perhaps the emergency meant that she'd gotten a call that something terrible had happened back at my Tokyo apartmentâa water pipe had burst, or the electricity had been turned off. I'd been away from home too long.
“Are you sitting down?” my mother asked with an odd mixture of breathlessness and pain, as if she'd run up Fillmore Street in her favorite Bally heels.
“Yes. Just tell meâ”
“He's coming!”
“What?” For a minute, I was puzzled, until I figured out He might mean Jesus. To hear this kind of talk coming from my mother was a surpriseâshe had always been a typically low-key Episcopalian. Carefully, I asked, “Is this about Christmas Eve?”
“Yes! And he'll be here, and so we must prepare.”
I saw my father watching me intently, waiting for my reaction. What was his issue? “Mom, you know I've never been that comfortable at the cathedral. Spirituality, for me, is more privateâ”
“
He
doesn't mind goingâit turns out he grew up in the Church of Scotland! I'm so pleased he's coming that I've already put in a call to Williams-Sonoma to get a plum pudding. It's traditional in Scotland as well as England, apparently.”
“Oh!” At last I understood the identity of the being in question: Hugh Glendinning, my on-again, off-again beau. We'd just said good-bye in Washington a few weeks earlier, when he flew off to China on business and I went back to my parents. “Are you talking about Hugh? Did he call from China?”
“Yes, and he said his cell phone was stolen so that's why he hadn't contacted you. He was calling from a hotel in Shanghai to say that he should reach San Francisco around noon tomorrow. He's got about a week's worth of work here, and his firm had booked him into the Mark Hopkins.”
“The Mark Hopkins,” I moaned, imagining what a great escape it would be for both of usâa beautiful room with a view of Nob Hill, room service, and a king-sized bed.
“Don't worry, sweetie. After I invited him to stay with us, he agreed to cancel the reservation. I also canceled the UPS man who was coming to pick up the box you were sending to his office in Washingtonâyou can just give him the present while he's here, and I've already put flowers in the guest room on the third floor.”
“That was very kind of you.” Now that I understood he'd be sleeping directly over my parents, and within spitting distance of Manami, I stowed away all my fantasies about trysts.
“It's my pleasure, darling. I'm so pleased that he'd rather stay with us. Some of your old beaux were nervous about spending time with us, Rei. Not this one. He said he couldn't imagine a more wonderful invitation, and he understood
completely
about Daddy's being conservative enough that he'd have to sleep apart from youâ”
So she was going to blame it on my father, I thought wryly. A good-cop, bad-cop practice. Whatever. After another minute of hysterical exuberance from my mother, I managed to make my good-bye. I'd noticed that my father was looking at his watch.
“Happy?” he asked after I'd handed back his phone.