The Dream of Water Read online

  For one thing, nobody in my family knows that I am coming. I have prepared letters to mail to my father and to my maternal grandmother from the airport this morning. All I say in the letters is that I am arriving in Japan soon as part of my sabbatical project, that I will travel around the country first on my four-week rail pass, and that I will contact them before the end of June. I know the letters are abrupt, even rude; anyone else who grew up in Japan would have contacted his or her family months ago. But I could never get on the plane this morning if I had to see my family first thing upon arrival. I need an interval, a transition period. I want to see the Japan I have never seen before—the Japan that is truly a foreign country—before I can deal with my hometown, my family, the Japan that has become foreign to me.

  As I turn the corner by the river and head back, the shadows overhead are changing back into maples and oaks. It will be midsummer here when I return from Japan. Back in April, when the maples were shedding their red flowers on the sidewalks, I began to think that I might not see many more springs and summers here in Green Bay—that I would like to move on, start over someplace else, with my husband or even alone. There isn’t anything wrong, in particular, with my life in Green Bay. I have been here for seven years now. I have finally gotten used to my job so I can teach and write at the same time and not agonize over the lack of time and energy. I no longer feel the sort of urgent but unspecific anxiety I felt in graduate school or even in the early years of my job. Still, some mornings, I sit on my couch at home or in my office at school and feel that the walls and furniture could simply dissolve around me. It seems strange, unlikely even, that I am living this stable life—tenured and married though childless—in a small Wisconsin town where the old women in diners don’t look anything like my grandmother and the children playing in front of the ranch houses at the edge of town do not resemble any children I could possibly have. The life I am leading cannot really be my life, I think from time to time, especially while I am running or driving through the city.

  I sprint the last block and stop in front of our house, its door painted a dark red. Going up the steps into the house, I am sorry that my run is over. I need to hurry now. There is just enough time to shower, pack the last-minute things. The flight ahead seems like a long time to sit still, to be stuck in one place against my will. I tell myself that I can sleep through most of it, I won’t even notice the hours passing.

  * * *

  By the time the plane lands in Narita, it’s late afternoon. I have already lost the day in the middle. Though I fell asleep shortly after Seattle and only got up in the last hour to put in my contact lenses, I am tired and groggy. I collect my overnight bag and follow the other passengers toward the door. We step outside into the humid heat and then get on a shuttle bus that takes us from the plane to the terminal building, where we disperse to our various gates.

  My plane to Osaka won’t leave for another hour. The windows of the waiting area where I sit overlook an endless stretch of green rice paddies. Flat and rural, the view is nothing like the Japan I know. If anything, it’s more like the American Midwest I have just left. Still, looking away from the window and surveying the waiting area, I know that I am in Japan. Most of the people waiting for the Osaka flight are businessmen in black or blue suits: sarariman, Japanese people would call them—men who work to earn their salary. Every trashcan and bench around me is painted with advertisements. “Pokkari Sweat,” the nearest one says, with a picture of what looks like a bottle of soda. This is the kind of English used only in Japan, by advertisers who think that foreign names make their products sound more sophisticated, even though often the names make no sense. A few seats away from me, a woman dressed in a mustard-colored two-piece suit is carrying her belongings in a paper shopping bag from the Seibu Department Store instead of in a suitcase. The shopping bag is immaculately white and uncreased; the name, Seibu, is printed in English, in a fancy italic script. I look away, overwhelmed.

  The man in the next seat looks at me and smiles. One of the few non-Japanese waiting for the Osaka flight, he is wearing a red T-shirt and blue jeans. Like many of my friends, he is slightly overweight but not fat. I smile back at him. Everyone else in the waiting area is staring straight ahead, trying to avoid eye contact. In Japan, one does not smile at or talk to total strangers.

  “Are you visiting someone in Osaka?” I ask the man.

  “No,” he says. “I’m going on to Singapore.”

  For a moment, I wish I were going to some exotic-sounding location as well. “That’s great,” I say. “Have you ever been there?”

  “No. This is my first time.”

  I am envious of him because he is going to a place where he has never been. “Is this your vacation?” I ask him, “or is it work?”

  “Both,” he replies. “How about you? Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to Kobe, twenty minutes from Osaka. I used to live there, a long time ago.” I want to explain that I am not really going back, that I will be leaving on a four-week trip right away rather than staying to see family, but suddenly I feel too tired for the more complicated conversation it would take to explain that, so I turn away from him toward the window. Maybe the view doesn’t look exactly like the Midwest after all. The paddies are a deeper green than the wheat- and cornfields of Wisconsin and Iowa. Water shines in jagged slivers beneath the deep green. In the distance, the air has that luminous quality it gets from being near water. I stare at the horizon to see if what is beyond is just the sky or perhaps a distant sea, but my eyes tear from the hazy light, and I can’t tell.

  Suddenly, there is a lot of commotion at the next gate. Three men in navy blue uniforms enter the gate, their big white name tags identifying them as immigration officers. Two East Indian women walk by, squeezed between these officers. The women look about thirty; they are dressed in saris, one in pink, the other in blue. Neither of them speaks; their faces are serious but blank. A fourth officer, a woman, stands slightly apart from them, talking into a walkie-talkie. I can’t hear what she is saying. When the gate opens and the flight to Montreal is announced, the three men take the women by the arms and go on board. Nobody comes back. The woman officer stands by watching until the plane has taken off.

  “You think those women were being deported?” I ask the man who is going to Singapore.

  “Sure looks like it,” he says.

  I get a sudden tight knot in my stomach as I lean toward the window. The green of the rice paddies looks too lush. I wish I had not come so far from home, that I could take the next plane and head back. But as soon as I think that, I’m not sure what I mean by home. My blue American passport is tucked in the outside pocket of my overnight bag. I am no longer a citizen of the country in which I was born; I have been thinking of moving to another city, another state. After seven weeks here in this foreign country that was once my home, perhaps I will not feel that returning to Green Bay is going home, either. I might feel more as if I am going from one foreign place to another.

  * * *

  A few hours later, the last plane I am to ride begins its descent toward the Osaka airport. As we break through the cloud cover, the plane tilts sideways toward the dense foliage below. This is Rokko, the mountain ridge that borders the Kobe-Osaka metropolis. The green of the trees here is completely different from the green of rice paddies or the green of midwestern corn. It’s dark and lush at once, textured. The plane rights itself and continues to lose altitude. Whatever city is directly below us now—either Osaka or its suburb Itami—glitters like a rock split open next to the moss-colored mountain ridge. The city is a jagged sprawl of concrete, metal, and glass, with sharp teeth like those of quartz. The plane tilts again, this time to the other side. Across the aisle, out the window, the Seto Inland Sea stretches dark blue. The water is wrinkled where the waves are rough, like the globe I made in a grade-school geography class and did not paste very well. The Bay of Osaka curves in the bow shape I learned back then. My ears are ringing from
the air pressure. I take a deep breath and swallow hard as we descend toward the landscape of my childhood.

  Minnows

  A few minutes away from the airport, the taxi begins climbing a steep ramp onto a raised highway. Tilted back in my seat in the air-conditioned cab, I can see nothing for a few seconds except the sky, violet with the glow of neon. Next to me, my friend Vince is silently watching the other cars. The cab picks up speed as we merge into heavy traffic and rush toward a tangle of intersecting ramps and concrete high-rises. I don’t know what happened to the familiar shapes of land and water I saw from the airplane. Now that I am on the ground, the scenery reminds me not of my childhood, but of the science fiction movies I have seen in the past few years. I could be the Harrison Ford character in the opening sequence of Blade Runner, cruising a strange future city, on the hunt for killer androids. The cab zooms into the farthest right lane to pass. Every move of the traffic is the reverse of what I am used to, driving in the States. The digital clock on the dashboard says it’s 9:00 P.M. I have no idea what time it is back in Green Bay.

  “Are you tired?” Vince asks me, craning his neck to look into my face. In the thirteen years I have not seen him, his dark brown hair has gone gray in the front and along his temples, but his eyes look the same. They are narrow, sharp eyes—dark green with a brown glint.

  “I’m all right,” I assure him. “I slept on the plane.”

  “I’m sorry my house is such a mess you can’t stay there,” he apologizes. “But Sylvia has a lot of room, and you’ll like her. She’ll enjoy having company. Her husband is away for the summer.”

  “Thanks for finding me a place to stay.” I put my hand on his wrist, just above his watchband. His skirt feels cold from the air-conditioning in the cab.

  Vince is one of the few people I still know from my time in Japan. He came to teach in Kobe in the early 1970s, after finishing graduate school, and has not gone back to the States except for brief visits. Our lives mirror each other’s. He has spent all of his adult life in Japan; I have spent all of mine in the American Midwest. In 1976, when I was nineteen and he was thirty-one, he was my writing teacher at the Japanese college I attended for two years. Now I am two years older than he was back then; I teach writing in Wisconsin. The way our lives intersected seems suddenly terribly weird, but I am too exhausted to think about it. I press my forehead against the window, watching the buildings and neon signs whip by.

  In a few minutes we get off the freeway and head north through streets that get narrower as we drive uphill. Past a station of the commuter trains, there is a park with a pond, then a high-rise condominium. What I see out the window is no longer like a movie. I know exactly where we are. Around the next bend in the road there will be a hospital. “Konan Hospital,” the sign in front will read. This is Mikage, an eastern Kobe neighborhood where I used to visit my friends in high school. My best friend, Machiko Imazu, lived in one of the new subdivisions near the top of this hill, in a house with a big paper lantern hanging over the stairway. Last I heard, Machiko had married and moved to Tokyo. She has two sons. In the dreams I still have about her, we are both teenagers, even though we might be walking in my garden in Green Bay or sitting down to dinner at a restaurant in Chicago. I twist back in my seat. Through the back window, down the hill, I see the lights of the train station and of the small stores where Machiko and I used to buy bread or flowers or sweets. The cab clears the bend and is passing the hospital with its sign. I face forward. I can’t quite believe that I am really here: riding up the hill with Vince, suspended between memory and dreams.

  * * *

  The cab lets us off in the subdivision north of Machiko’s old house, as close as you can get to the mountain ridge. I follow Vince up the steps to the front door. A woman with long reddish hair lets us in. After we take off our shoes, we go into the kitchen where a young girl is sitting at the table. Red, blue, and purple balloons are taped to the kitchen door; colored tissue paper and paper rings hang from the ceiling.

  “Was it someone’s birthday?” I ask the girl.

  “Mine,” she says, brushing back her long brown hair with her hand. “Yesterday.”

  “This is my daughter, Cadine,” the woman with the red hair says to me. “I’m Sylvia. Please sit down.”

  “So how old are you now?” I ask Cadine, making small talk in the way I always do at people’s houses.

  “Twelve,” she says.

  “Are you guys hungry?” Sylvia asks Vince and me. “I can offer you some soup.” She’s already getting up.

  “Don’t go to any trouble for us,” Vince says.

  “It’s no trouble. The soup’s already made. We just had supper.”

  “Actually,” I say, “I should tell you now. I don’t eat meat.” It’s my policy to be up-front about my vegetarianism, though I have been worried about how to handle that in Japan. When people offer you food here, you decline it twice out of politeness, and then, when it is offered the third time, you accept it and give great compliments while the host says it was nothing. The ritual leaves no room for the possibility that you might really want to decline the food.

  Sylvia smiles. “We are vegetarians, too,” she says. “One of our cats eats fish cake. That’s about the only meat we ever buy.” She goes to the stove and brings bowls of cream of cabbage soup.

  We talk about my flight, my plans to travel around the country. Vince and Sylvia both suggest places I should visit. When I’m done with the soup, I bring the bowl back to the sink and rinse it out—almost as if I had eaten here many times already. Soon I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. I follow Sylvia upstairs with my suitcases.

  “Here,” she says, opening the paper fusuma doors to a Japanese-style room with tatami mats and cypress-wood pillars. The paper shade is drawn over the large windows to one side. Sylvia goes to the closet and brings out the bedding—an odd mixture of Japanese-style futon and stiff linen sheets, a big feather pillow, and a Hudson Bay blanket. I start laughing.

  “This must be your culturally diverse bedding,” I say.

  “Quite a mishmash, isn’t it?” Sylvia laughs, too.

  “It’s great.”

  “Do you think you’ll be warm enough? It could get cool here in the mornings yet. We’re up on the hill.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  We say good night, and Sylvia goes downstairs, closing the fusuma doors behind her. I am relieved that she is casual about putting me up—giving me whatever bedding she has, not standing on ceremony or apologizing about things. I can feel at home and sleep well in any house so long as my host is not endlessly apologizing and giving me the “I’m sorry the house isn’t as clean as it should be” line. I change, turn off the light, lie down under the Hudson Bay blanket, and close my eyes. I even drift off for a while. But ten minutes later, I am wide awake and staring at the ceiling.

  Getting out of bed, I walk to the windows and pull up the paper shades. Outside the windows, which face south, a wooden porch juts out over the front of the house. I go out there through the small door to my right. Below, my hometown is outlined in the white and orange lights of the streetlamps and houses, the bright blue and purple neons clustered near downtown. “The million-dollar night view,” the tourism bureau called it. For all I know, people here still say that. It’s the view I saw almost every night of my life in Japan. Right now I am standing only two or three miles west of my mother’s last house. The condominium where my father lives must be about four miles east of here. I go back inside, close the shades, and lie down again. Still, I stay awake for a long time, feeling stranded, somehow, on a mountaintop.

  * * *

  A week after my mother’s funeral, in March 1969, the school year was over, leaving Jumpei and me on vacation till early April. My mother’s youngest brother, Kenichi, was a high school chemistry teacher. Since he was off when we were, he came to stay at our house. He was thirty and single; we called him Ken Nichan—Nichan means “Big Brother”—rather than Ojichan
, “Uncle.” Every morning and evening, Ken Nichan burned incense at the Buddhist altar for my mother’s soul. The three of us sat in front of the altar thinking about her and asking the spirits of our ancestors to watch over her. My father, Hiroshi, had gone back to work the day after the funeral. He left the house before we got up and came home past midnight, just as he had done during my mother’s life. Sometimes he was gone for days on business trips.

  A few nights before school started again in April, Hiroshi came into my room at midnight and woke me up. Kenichi and Jumpei were already asleep in the next room. Hiroshi sat down by my futon and said that Jumpei and I would be moving to the house of his widowed father, Tatsuo, in Ashiya, the closest suburb of Kobe to the east. Tatsuo lived with my aunt Akiko and her daughter, Kazumi, who was my age. Akiko’s husband worked for a shipping company and was seldom home. My brother and I must move there, my father stated, so that Akiko could take care of us. I sat up while he was talking.

  “It’s not very far away,” Hiroshi said at the end. “It’s walking distance.”

  That was true. Our houses were only about two miles apart.

  “What about our things?” I asked him.

  “A truck is coming in the morning to move them,” he answered. He meant the next morning.

  “How about Ken Nichan?”

  “He won’t be staying here for long now.”

  “Why not? He doesn’t have a family. Maybe he can stay on with us, and then Jumpei and I won’t have to move.”