Ayumi lives vertically, measuring every experience in terms of its placement in time, in her life; she feels it retrospectively from the future, as if the present were already a memory. The girl is poised to make a move, to leave home. A similar vertigo came over me with my brush with death, and so I am keenly aware of her perspective on things, as if the two of us were moving now in tandem, but on separate courses, cognizant that soon our paths will diverge.
Time was, not long ago, that a woman who remained unmarried past her twenty-fifth birthday was called a Christmas cake, having exceeded her best before date. In aging Japan, marriages are getting later, but, now on the verge of her third decade, Ayumi is feeling the clock ticking.
On Saturday morning she made a trip to granny’s grave at “Ōtani-san,” the vast cemetery and mausoleum next door to Kiyomizu Temple. When she returned, she quickly showered and changed for a date. Her little black dress, Mitchan remarked, made her look like she was going to a funeral, so she changed her blouse underneath to something gold. She fussed over what accessories to wear. These earrings with that necklace? Who was this man we’d scarcely met? The night we arrived from Canada we went for a bite to eat at the local bar, and when Ayumi returned from the concert she’d gone to, someone took a photo of us. In the photo popped a young guy in a surfer’s T-shirt making the peace sign. This was, it turned out, “Naka-chan,” an intern at the local hospital. He’d met Ayumi one night in our local pub; they had just started to go out a week or so before we came back from Canada.
He rolled up in a sky-blue BMW Z4 M Roadster. “You got to see this!” said Mitsuko, even though I’d just come straight out of the bath and was wearing nothing more than a towel. So ludicrously attired, I saw them off. Ayumi informed us she would be pulling an all-nighter.
That evening her brother came with wife and baby. Shizuka was bowled over when she heard about Ayumi’s date. “Wow! Nice catch! You don’t think he’s going to propose to her, do you?” Ryū showed an unusually fraternal concern over his little sister, wondering when she would come home and what was going on. Mitchan texted Ayumi, who replied that she had big news to tell when she got home, a report that sent Shizuka into even greater paroxysms of anticipation. Next morning no sign of Ayumi. More text messages. She had another party to go to that night and would go straight there rather than stop off home first. It appeared she had taken a change of clothing.
I didn’t see the girl till Monday morning, and the news was big. They had proceeded from an exhibition at MOMAK straight to a suite in the Granvia Hotel at Kyoto Station. Over dinner at the French restaurant there, Naka-chan proposed. No engagement ring, but an expensive pair of earrings in white and yellow gold from Tiffany for her birthday. The suitor was finishing his internship in Kyoto at the end of September, at which time he’d be returning to Tokyo. Ayumi was ready to close up the coffee shop and go with him.
“Who is this guy, anyway?” demanded Mitchan. Some bonbon, a spoiled elder son who’s never had to suffer or support himself a day in his life. He can’t be much of a doctor; everyone at Wabisuke said he drank too much. The Kakimoto aunty said he’d just broken off an engagement with another girl in Tokyo. Obviously, he hasn’t the patience for long-distance relationships, that’s why he’s trying to drag Ayumi along with him. And it’s been no time since Ayumi herself broke up with that other boy. Everything’s happening too fast! This Naka-chan was too calculating. The Tiffany earrings, the expensive hotel suite, the fancy meal—all this has turned the girl’s head.
It seems every time we return to Japan, Ayumi seizes the opportunity to make a break for it. As well she might, because her mother’s presence is both an immense strain on her as well as a chance to drop the coffee shop in Mitchan’s lap. Ayumi’s rebelliousness marks a protracted adolescence. The café is an albatross, she wants to explore other options, most usually involving a romantic interest. These plans fall like bombshells around her mother. If Ayumi leaves, what about the business? The house? We can’t leave it empty. I must return to Japan, Mitchan says.
“What about Canada? Our life together?” I ask.
“This is much too important,” says Ayumi’s mother.
The following weekend I was away at a theatre festival in the mountains in Toyama. On the way home, I got a call from Mitsuko. “Where are you? You’d better hurry home. There’s a typhoon coming,” she said. I sensed she wasn’t talking about the weather.
The next day, being the first day of the month, Ayumi had left little piles of purificatory salt at the four corners of the house and, like her brother before her during his own machinations to leave home and marry, she burns not one, but three sticks of incense before her grandmother’s makeshift altar to ensure her prayers are answered. On our way out, Mitchan reminds me to stay in good humour. The first day is an augur for the rest of the month. But between Japan’s bureaucracy and the domestic turmoil, my patience was sorely tried. Stonewalled with my application for health insurance at the ward office, finally I luck out across town at Immigration, where I am granted a three-year spousal visa.
Walking from Marutamachi along the Kamo River, I am in good spirits. People along the river are playing music, here a guitar, there a saxophone; a couple of gentlemen are engaged in a game of boules, as you might see in some French provincial town. The teahouses on Pontochō have put out their decks over the river to enjoy the cool of the evening, and in the window of one place there is the Brazilian flag—soccer fans, no doubt. I encounter a group of high school students and am struck by their beauty in those blue serge uniforms. The girls menstruate, the boys masturbate, no doubt they smell of sweat and hormones, they play the meanest tricks on one other, but on this late summer afternoon in the breeze off the river, they are the epitome of innocence and purity.
That evening we had a rather riotous party with Ayumi’s fiancé. For me it was the first chance to have a real talk with him. I cooked some steaks and the four of us put away four bottles of red wine, a nice Bordeaux followed by a fruitier Minervois, then an even heavier Sirah that Ayumi had picked out, a parting gift to her from some coworkers at a restaurant a couple of years ago. All this was capped off with a light Pinot Noir with dessert.
Naka-chan is a cardiologist, a fourth-generation doctor in his family. (It seems that doctors in Japan, like priests and actors, rule in dynasties.) He wants to pursue his studies at Columbia, Pittsburgh or Milan, all good people there in the kind of surgery he does. That night, I thought of saying to him: You’re in the business of mending hearts, but if you break Ayumi’s, I’ll break your fingers, so you won’t mend any hearts again. Then I thought better of that, and we talked about research and study abroad, while I gently probed him on his commitment to our daughter.
Late in the evening, there was a call from the boy’s parents. It seems he had mentioned that he was going to see Ayumi’s folks. “What does this girl do?” they asked him. Kissaten no mama-san: a café proprietress, he replied. Why, that’s mizu-shōbai! The “water trade,” Japan’s demi-monde, stretches all the way from the innocent coffee shop to the bar and cabaret, and other more louche and illegal haunts. “Water? Well, cold and hot water too, I guess,” Naka-chan said ingenuously to his father. He related this conversation to us later.
“You certainly were putting your foot in it,” I said. “For all he knew, you might have met your girlfriend in a soapland.” More laughter.
Ayumi is obviously smitten with her doctor, who held his own against his feisty future mother-in-law. It annoyed Mitchan how her daughter glommed onto the boy for the better part of the evening, two fawning lovebirds. That sort of thing may be okay in Canada, but public displays of affection are frowned on in Japan, said the mother. “Let the girl go,” I said to my wife. “She’s clearly champing at the bit.” But it’s Mitchan who can’t let go.
I was reminded of a story I was told about when Ayumi was born. Mitsuko was thirty-three and it was a yakudoshi, an inauspicious year, to give birth to a girl (though all right for a boy), so the Kyoto trick to wipe that bad luck away was to give away the child, even if only temporarily. Ayumi was accordingly abandoned on the doorstep of a neighbour, who then returned the girl soon after. Time to give the girl away again—for good this time—I thought.
At dinner Mitchan was wearing a T-shirt with the words A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM in large letters across her chest. There was some tiny lettering I couldn’t make out, but the following day she was wearing the shirt again, so I made a point of reading it. It’s always important to read the fine print in Japan, especially if it’s in English and across a woman’s breasts. They were the first lines from Shakespeare’s play and were peculiarly relevant to our meeting with Ayumi’s suitor the night before:
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace; four happy days bring in
Another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.
This across the right breast. And across the left:
This man hath bewitch’d the bosom of my child.
Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,
And interchanged love-tokens with my child;
Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,
With feigning voice, verses of feigning love,
And stolen the impression of her fantasy
With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits
Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats, messengers
Of strong prevailment in unharden’d youth;
With cunning hast thou filch’d my daughter’s heart;
Turn’d her obedience, which is due to me,
To stubborn harshness.
Those who spoke these lines in the play were not identified on Mitchan’s T-shirt. This could have been Naka-chan’s address to Ayumi, on the one hand (or rather, breast), and her jealous, judgemental mother’s speech on the other. The boy was Lysander; Ayumi was both Hippolyta and Hermia; Mitsuko was Hermia’s jealous dad Egeus.
The following day, after the successful acquittal of our business at the ward office, Mitchan and I, still nursing hangovers, went to visit granny’s grave. We buy some flowers and incense and some candied sweet potatoes, granny’s favourite snack, which we lay in a box by the offertory. “Obaachan’s in there,” pointed Mitchan past the offertory and the altar, the bamboo screens, to the inner sanctum. (Actually, she seems to be everywhere, in her altars in both the Kyoto and Victoria houses.) We then went back to the little shop outside to buy more flowers and incense for the Ohara grave. The ex’s ancestors have their own family plot not far away. We also borrowed a bucket to wash the headstone. The better families all have their own incense burners and buckets, which hung suspended from the flower shop’s ceiling. Some of the burners, I was told, date back to Edo times and have handles made from whale beards. The oldest buckets are from Meiji, good tin that still holds water.
“This is for Ohara-san,” said Mitsuko, taking one. “Now, which Ohara would that be?” asked the lady. “There are rather a lot of them, you know.”
Mitsuko mentioned where her ex used to live and what he did for a living.
“Oh, you mean the Karasuma Oharas,” said the lady. “They own a lot of property downtown.” One who is a gatekeeper for Kyoto’s dead will know the real worth of the living.
Mitchan looks after her ex’s family grave because his grandfather was a powerful man. In death, as far as Mitchan was concerned, he was still powerful—maybe even more so—and so she seeks his protection, her children, after all, also being Oharas too.
There was one last bureaucratic item I needed to do before I left Kyoto for Tokyo, and that was get a bank account. We went, armed with our pile of documents, to the bank where my wife does her business. There, the manager was obliging, but the paperwork nonetheless took more than an hour.
As we waited, Mitchan and I killed the time reading magazines, I an interview by a popular novelist with a professor of French literature, who claimed that, while the women were still game, Japanese men had more or less given up on sex—or at least on relationships—because it was all too much of a bother for them. Unlike their forebears, men here today are loath to do anything that requires effort, and relations with the opposite sex are a lot of effort. They were getting their rocks off with downloadable porn or prostitutes.
At a symposium on Japan’s future at the theatre festival in Toyama the previous week, I’d heard one young woman tell a plaintive fable about the end of the Japanese race. It went something like this: fewer and fewer people were making babies, until finally there were only two Japanese left. Their names were Izanagi and Izanami, the same as those of the creator gods of Japan. Now Izanami was a typical Japanese male: an otaku (nerd) and a hikikomori (shut-in), who couldn’t even bring himself to talk to Izanami, let alone have sex with her. Finally, Izanami got fed up and took off with some rich foreign guy. When I heard this stupid tale, I wanted to say to the audience (who were all Japanese) that I might look like one of those guys diluting the precious Japanese bloodline, but fear not! I’m sure my stepdaughter and her besotted beau will have no problems keeping the Japanese race alive. Besides, her brother has a boy and the other has a third one on the way. That’ll make four grandchildren: two girls and two boys. You can’t ask for a better balance. And, truth be told, they’re 100% Japanese, the lot of them, thanks to the ex! In fact, you’re all in luck, because my tubes are tied! But I kept my mouth shut.
For her part, Mitchan was reading an item, complete with diagrams, on how to tell a person’s character and fortune by the shape of their ears. Our reading was interrupted by the announcement that the bank had finally opened my account. There, before the tellers’ wicket and ranks of bankers’ desks, my wife summarily ripped her article out of the magazine, folded it, and put it in her purse. I was reminded of a scene in The Sopranos where Tony is caught by his psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi in the act of ripping an appealing steak recipe out of a magazine in the waiting room.
That afternoon, exhausted from our labours, we both took naps before another evening of dinner guests. My slumbers were disturbed by a bloodcurdling cry from Mitsuko. I got up to discover her tottering up the steep stairs to the second floor. “Get my panties off the laundry line,” she said. “I’m feeling dizzy. You might have to call an ambulance.” She didn’t want to be caught at the hospital in an old pair of underwear. Not long after, the Kakimotos showed up with a manometer. Mitchan was sure her blood pressure had gone through the roof—or plummeted, one or the other—but no, it was normal: 120/80. “A change into those nice lace panties clearly restored me,” Mitsuko declared.
This was a good time for me to take my leave of the Ohara girls for a while. I went to Tokyo; Ayumi herself had gone to Tokyo to be with her boyfriend. All week I’d heard an earful from the wife about her daughter’s foolishness, how sex has made her gaga, how even more disapproving Naka-chan’s parents will be of this fling, how it has thrown Mitchan’s own plans for herself, the business, the house, her children’s future, all into disarray. In Tokyo Mitchan continued to call me at all hours with something fresh to gripe about.
One night I gave her an earful myself. “What do you want me to do about it? Just shut up and listen to your complaints? You won’t even let me talk to Ayumi or any of the other kids about this. It’s like it had nothing to do with me, but you keep dragging me into it anyway,” I said. Then, against Mitchan’s express wishes, I texted Ayumi to warn her that a tempest and not a midsummer night’s dream would be waiting for her when she got home.