Yarn Read online

  Praise for YARN

  “ ‘. . . knitting only appears to be a docile activity,” writes Kyoko Mori in Yarn. While it is knitting that literally and metaphorically weaves together the disparate elements of Mori’s life—her travels, her marriage and separation, her coming to knowledge of herself through tragedy and joy—it is the sheer beauty of her writing, at once elegantly restrained and emotionally unflinching, that so highly recommends this stunning memoir. Kyoko Mori is one of the world’s most inimitable writers.”

  —Howard Norman, The Bird Artist and

  What Is Left The Daughter

  “Kyoko Mori’s books are like red dragonflies at sunset. Afterwards, I’m not sure if I really experienced them or if it was a dream.

  Writing as a woman caught between cultures, Mori is a marvelous hybrid of Western realism and Eastern sublimity.

  Whether she is remembering her young mother’s suicide, a visit with an estranged father, or the return to solitude after marriage, Mori writes with deftness and penetration.

  There is no sentimentality in her thoughts, hopes, and memories. Experience seems to fly into the room, like a wounded bird that is nursed diligently.

  Even when Mori writes about seemingly banal activities, like a jog along the sea or knitting a sweater, she is trenchant and memorable.”

  —Henri Cole, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize author of

  Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf

  “Kyoko Mori writes about loss so quietly and wisely, and in a way no other memoirist I’ve read has ever managed. She recasts her mother’s suicide and her father’s coldness—two terrible childhood absences—into possibilities for herself rather than limitations, openings instead of endings. But this beautiful book isn’t about acceptance so much as it’s about resourcefulness and creativity. There’s no advice here, only the moving example of Mori herself, knitting together her past and present into something coherent and useful, like a shawl, or a cardigan, or a pair of mittens, a way to keep warm in a world that can often be cold, a way to stay focused and engaged in a world that sometimes makes no sense at all.”

  —Suzanne Berne, The Ghost at the Table,

  A Perfect Arrangement, A Crime in the Neighbourhood

  (Orange Prize for Fiction), and the forthcoming memoir Lucile:

  My Grandmother in History, and Vice Versa.

  “Sit with Kyoko Mori as she artfully takes in hand needles and fiber, and also the realities of her life story, to knit this gorgeous memoir of loss, emigration, grief, identity and the work of her hands. The perfectly titled Yarn recounts the author’s most formative experiences, including losing her mother through suicide; emigrating from Japan; finding a life and a love in America’s frigid Midwest; discovering joy as a single person; and leaning on the healing power of creating both stories and knitted garments. Scenes and stories become stitches forming a shawl of stories that have draped the author’s life, and that will rest so memorably on the shoulders of readers fortunate enough to encounter this book.”

  —Suzanne Strempek Shea, Sundays in America:

  A Year-Long Roadtrip in Search of Christian Faith

  “In Yarn, Kyoko Mori employs the metaphor of knitting to devastating effect: strands are wound together seamlessly into a single garment, which is used to keep the wearer/reader/author warm”

  —David Shields, The Thing about Life

  is that One Day You’ll be Dead

  “Save reading Kyoko Mori’s Yarn for a day when your imagination needs a journey into enchantment. A dreamy weave of memoir and story that is also a droll cross-cultural history of knitting, spinning and weaving, this enthralling, utterly original book is a small masterpiece. I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter

  yarn

  Remembering

  the Way Home

  KYOKO MORI

  First published by GemmaMedia in 2010.

  GemmaMedia

  230 Commercial Street

  Boston, MA 02109 USA

  www.gemmamedia.com

  © 2010 by Kyoko Mori

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles of reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5

  978-1-934848-63-0

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  Parts of this book first appeared in Harvard Review, The American Scholar, The Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review and The Best American Essays 2004.

  for Jane R. Thompson, Katie Lyons, and Junko Yokota

  —thank you for knitting with me over the years

  Contents

  ONE –

  Yellow Mittens

  Hats

  TWO –

  Seamless Sweaters

  Shawls

  THREE –

  Fair Isle

  Pullovers

  FOUR –

  Intarsia

  Cardigans

  FIVE –

  Flip-Flop Mittens

  Epilogue: the Knitting Notebook

  Notes for Further Reading and Knitting

  — ONE —

  Yellow Mittens

  THE YELLOW MITTENS I made in seventh-grade home economics proved that I dreamed in color. For the unit on knitting, we were supposed to turn in a perfect pair: two hands held together palm to palm with no extra stitches sticking out from the thumb, the tip of the fingers, or the cuff. Somewhere between making the fourth and the fifth mitten to fulfill this requirement, I dreamed that the ball of yarn in my bag had turned green. Chartreuse, leaf, Granny Smith, lime, neon, acid green. The brightness was electric. I woke up knowing that I was, once again, doomed for a D in home-ec.

  I don’t remember what possessed me to choose yellow, my least favorite color, for the assignment. In an all-girls school in Japan in 1970, home-ec. was a yearly requirement. Our teacher, Mrs. Amasaki, was a mousy woman with grey hair tucked behind her ears. The previous semester in her class, I had made a skirt with the zipper sewn inside-out, and our cooking team had baked a sponge cake that resembled volcanic rock. But knitting involved no sewing machine to mangle my fingers in, no gas stove to burn down the model kitchen. As I finished one misshapen mitten after another that didn’t match, I was surprised by how bad I was.

  Mittens, as it turns out, are just about the worst project possible for a beginner. Each hand must be knitted as a tube, with the stitches divided among four pointed needles that twist and slip unless you are holding them with practiced confidence. The pair won’t be the same size if you drop or pick up extra stitches along the way, skip a couple of decreases in shaping the top, or knit too tightly in your nervousness and let up in relief as you approach the end. You might make two right mittens or two lefts, because you forgot that the thumb should be placed in a different position for each hand. I ended up with two right hands of roughly the same size and three left hands that could have illustrated a fairytale:

  Once upon a time, there lived three brothers, each with only one hand—large, medium, and very small. Even though the villagers laughed at them and called them unkind names, the brothers could do anything when they put their three left hands together.

  The perfect mittens a few of my classmates had managed were folded together on Mrs. Amasaki’s desk. The girls who’d made them sat near her, working on a second pair with pretty ruffled cuffs. When Mrs. Amasaki got up and walked around the room, I kept my head down. The majority of the class eventually came up with an acceptable pair. Mrs. Amasaki lined up these mittens—not quite perfect—in a separate row on her desk and gave the students an easier project, a scarf, to complete for extra credit.

 
; On the last day of the knitting unit, I had a revelation. One of the two right hands, turned inside-out, became a left hand. I submitted my project with a note explaining the advantage of my design: even in the dark, I could tell the right mitten from the left whose inside-out stitches had tiny bumps like Braille. Mrs. Amasaki gave me a D-. At parent-teacher conference, she told my stepmother, Michiko, that I was a smart but undisciplined student. By then, my mother, Takako, had been dead for a year.

  UNLIKE MOST JAPANESE COUPLES of their generation, my parents had married for love. They met in 1954 in Kobe at Kawasaki Steel, where Takako was working as a secretary and Hiroshi as an engineer. Her parents opposed the match, because they thought Hiroshi was flashy and arrogant. His parents were lukewarm about my mother as well. Hiroshi’s father owned a paint company whose business was prospering, but Takako’s family had lost all but a small portion of their land—their main source of income—in the farm reform that followed World War II. Takako and Hiroshi got engaged anyway. Soon after, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis and spent a year in a sanatorium. Takako quit her job and sat by his bedside, working on whatever needlework she could take in to send money to her parents, younger brothers and sisters. She wove ties on a miniature loom, embroidered flowers on handkerchiefs, and knitted socks and scarves for a wholesaler. My uncles and aunts would tell me later, Takako was clever with her hands and resourceful: as a young woman, she believed that hard work could reverse any misfortune. After Hiroshi recovered, both families relented. “What choice did your grandparents have?” my uncle Shiro said. “Your mother was determined to marry your father. No one could stop her.”

  Takako must have been remembering the year she’d spent by Hiroshi’s bedside with her needlework when she chose “Six Swans,” a tale about a knitting princess, for my bedtime story. By then, my parents had been married for five years. I was four, and my brother, Jumpei, a few months old. We still lived in the small house in Kobe where my parents had been newly-weds, but Hiroshi no longer came home every night. While Takako was pregnant with me, he had started seeing another woman.

  Once upon a time, the Brothers Grimm story went, a king who had lost his wife was tricked into marrying a witch. Afraid for the safety of his seven children, the king hid them in a forest, but the stepmother found them and turned his six sons into swans. His daughter escaped and wandered through the forest until she discovered the hut where her brothers rested for a few hours at night when they were able to resume their human forms. They told her that the only way to break the spell was to knit a shirt of nettles for each of them; she had to finish the task in seven years, and during that time, she was forbidden to speak or laugh.

  A king from another country saw her knitting in the forest, fell in love with her, and married her, but when his jealous mother accused her of being a witch, the girl could not speak to defend herself. The day she was to be burned at the stake was the last day of her seven years’ silence. As she was led to the public square, six swans flew out of the sky and landed at her feet. She threw the shirts over them, all but the left sleeve of the smallest one finished. Her brothers turned back into human beings, and the king learned what a devoted sister his wife had been. After a big celebration, everyone lived happily ever after.

  Everyone, that is, except the jealous mother-in-law. She was burned at the stake for her lies. Nothing remained of her except a handful of ashes.

  IN THE PICTURE BOOK Takako read to me, the princess sat on a grey stone floor in a dimly-lit jail, holding a pair of needles. The balls of yarn at her feet were the dark green of the rose bushes in our garden in winter and, like them, full of thorns. From between the bars on the high window, a sparrow reeled yarn into the room with his beak, and a mouse stood on the floor winding it into a ball. The finished shirts looked scaly, like armor.

  My mother was reading this story to keep up her own courage. Like the princess, she had only her hard work and patience to rely on. For seven years, she sat alone with her sewing and embroidery every night after putting Jumpei and me to bed. At one or two in the morning, Hiroshi would call from the bar where he’d been drinking with his friends to say that he was going on a business trip instead of coming home. By the time I was eleven, our family had moved to a large house on a hill in a quiet suburb, and Hiroshi had several girlfriends who telephoned late at night, looking for him. When my mother or I said he was away on business, the women cried and accused us of lying.

  Takako covered the walls of our new house with the tapestries on which she’d embroidered rose vines, birds, butterflies, poppies and pansies, boys and girls in red costumes dancing down a tree-lined avenue. She sewed my dresses—my favorite was black velvet with a full skirt and a white lace collar—and designed a special tote bag for each lesson I took. She came to my piano recitals, dance concerts, and watercolor exhibits in the A-line dresses she’d made, her hair cut shoulder length and parted in the middle, her face touched lightly with modest makeup. She was the envy of my friends. “Your mother is so pretty,” they said. But in the second winter in the new house, Takako started crying every night. She insisted that Jumpei and I were all she had. If Hiroshi knew how unhappy she was, he didn’t show it. On the few days he came home every month, he left early and returned late.

  “What will I do when my children are grown? I have wasted my whole life,” Takako wrote in the diary she left on the table, next to the dress she was trying to sew for my sixth-grade graduation. She had cut the pieces, pinned them on her sewing board, and then stopped. It was March, 1969, and my mother was forty-one: she couldn’t see the point in going on.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, when Michiko moved into our house, Hiroshi said he could have stayed alone with Jumpei and me if I had been more capable. “But you don’t know how to cook or clean or take care of your brother,” he said, “so I found a woman to keep house for us.” Michiko had been one of his girlfriends, of course, but she was determined to stick to his story. To anyone who came to visit, she relished describing how shocked she had been to discover that I didn’t know how to use the washer-dryer or the vacuum cleaner. “Her father had warned me,” she said with a dry laugh, “but I had no idea any twelve-year-old could be so helpless. Apparently, she’d been raised as a spoiled Ojosan.”

  Ojosan, a rich man’s daughter, was what my mother used to be before her family lost their land and she had to go to work as a secretary. Takako must have been relieved when my father became a successful businessman, enabling her to raise my brother and me without worrying about money. Education was more important to her than housewife training. She had read to me, taken me to museums, and signed me up for English, dance, piano, calligraphy, and watercolor lessons.

  “I’m sure your friends know how to cook and clean because their mothers showed them when they were little,” Michiko said as she smoked a cigarette at the kitchen table. “They’ll have nothing to be ashamed of when they meet their future husbands and in-laws. Your mother taught you all the wrong things.” Unlike Takako, who’d worn sweaters and slacks around the house, Michiko favored clingy polyester shirts and tight pants in colors like lime green and mustard yellow. Her hair was cut in the pixie style, and even at home, she wore heavy mascara and dark eyeliner like a stage actress.

  I didn’t bother to tell her that I had helped Takako in the kitchen. I loved separating eggs and dropping only the yolks into a white bowl, dunking tomatoes into boiling water and slipping off the skin under the faucet. For my cousin’s birthday, Takako and I had once baked a layered cake that looked like the candy house in Hansel and Gretel, complete with children and a witch cut out of sugar-cookie dough. She showed me how to embroider daisy chains and French knots on silk handkerchiefs. I sewed shirts, skirts, and dresses for my dolls with the backstitch she taught me. Everything we did together was for fun. The stories she told me about my possible future—“When you grow up and go to college,” or “If you become a famous author or artist someday,”—never included marriage.

  “Maybe you think you’
ll marry someone who’ll let you hire a housekeeper,” Michiko said as she stubbed out her cigarette and returned to her daily dusting, mopping, and vacuuming. “No respectable woman pays someone else to clean up after her own family. Too bad your mother didn’t train you better. I wish I could teach you, but it’s too late.” With a rag clenched in her bony fingers, she got down on her knees to peer at the floorboards she had wiped and polished. She was like a witch who believed herself to be Cinderella. “Your father should have disciplined you all along,” she said.

  Whenever she and Hiroshi quarreled, Michiko blamed me. If Hiroshi hadn’t allowed my mother to spoil me, she said, we would all be getting along fine now. She smashed dishes and carried on in a loud voice I could hear all across the house. Soon, she would start packing her suitcase and threatening to leave, and Hiroshi would come tramping upstairs to my room. If I said anything while he was yelling at me, he hit me. If I didn’t, he demanded, “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” He slapped me across the face as soon as I opened my mouth, grabbed me by the shoulders, and threw me against the wall. Then he dragged me downstairs to apologize to Michiko. Hiroshi had never hit me while my mother was alive. Until she died, I had only seen him for a few hours every month. I was relieved when he started staying out again.

  By April of 1970—when Michiko came to my school for the parent-teacher conference—my father was out of town half the week. Every night after our supper without him, Michiko swept and scrubbed the kitchen in a fury. Jumpei, now nine, trailed after her. In the months before her suicide, when Takako asked me what I would do if something happened to her and I had to be on my own I’d promised her that I would take good care of myself and Jumpei, that I would be respectful toward Hiroshi and whomever he married so they would treat us well. The only part of the promise I could keep was taking care of myself. Evening after evening, I bolted down my supper and ran upstairs. My bedroom was above the formal drawing room we seldom used. From the large windows next to my bed, I could see the dark reds and sulfur yellows of the sunset. Lying on the mattress above the empty room with furniture covered in white drapes, I tried to imagine my room blasting away from the rest of the house and rising into the sky.