Polite Lies Read online

  I didn’t keep that promise, even though I had been trained all my life to do just that. When I was in kindergarten and my brother was a baby learning to crawl, my family lived in a two-story house with a steep stairway. My mother asked one of her brothers to come and put in a wooden gate at the top of the staircase to keep Jumpei from tumbling down. It was a swinging gate that snapped shut and could be locked. She showed me what I should do every time I came upstairs, where my brother’s nursery and my own room were: I should make sure that the gate was locked.

  “Pay attention,” she said. “I want you to be careful so your brother doesn’t get hurt.”

  She kept shutting and locking the gate, then making me do it on my own until I got it right. When I slid the metal into its proper place, the lock made such a satisfying sound: a little sigh of sliding metal and then the decisive click. My mother was trying to teach me to be careful. She wanted me to know the sound that meant safety.

  I can still picture her, a woman younger than I am now, standing on the landing at that house. As she looked down on the steps, she must have imagined her son tumbling down headfirst. For her, love meant worry—she was always imagining us falling down, getting lost, getting hurt. She was constantly thinking of ways to prevent these catastrophes.

  Now that my brother and I are the only members of our family, I wish I had worried more about him when we lived together. I should have imagined the worst for him and tried to prevent it, the way our mother wanted me to.

  It’s years too late. My brother doesn’t need me. The last time we saw each other, in Japan, I was staying at my aunt’s house, and he was at our stepmother’s. We only got together twice, never just by ourselves. We parted after a few days, exchanging polite invitations neither of us would follow up on. He was going back to Tokyo to work, even though I was staying in the country for another week.

  After he was gone, I realized that my brother and I do have a few things in common. Neither of us ever felt really related to our father, and his death has left us more puzzled than sad. Hiroshi will always be a mystery to us, a man whose behavior seemed only bizarre and annoying, never loving or fatherly. During our visit, Jumpei and I shared a few bitter laughs over anecdotes about our father’s impatience and insensitivity. “Remember when he used to yell at people at train stations for bumping into him or skipping in front of him in the ticket lines?” Jumpei asked me. “I always walked a few steps away and looked the other way, hoping that no one would think I was with him.” I had similar stories, too. But Jumpei and I could only talk about our father with sarcasm, emphasizing what an odd person he was—we never told each other how hurt we used to feel by his indifference, how scared we were of his bad temper. Unable to mention our feelings, we talked on as if the whole thing was a joke, each of us trying to sound ironic and detached.

  Jumpei and I don’t have a real home country, just as we didn’t have a “real” father. But our talk about feeling homeless is always ironic and cheerful. When Jumpei says he feels more comfortable in Colombia or Ecuador than he does in Japan, he doesn’t show any regret; he dreams of settling in South America someday, visiting Japan for only a week every year to take care of his wholesale business and to say hello to his “mother.” We laugh, exchanging stories about how relieved we are the moment the plane leaves Tokyo or Osaka for overseas. “The rat race of Japan,” we say to each other, “it gives me the creeps.” I have never told him that I sometimes envy people who seem perfectly content to belong where they were born, or about the pitiful tone I try to keep out of my voice when I have to tell people, “I don’t really have a family.” If Jumpei feels similar regret or sadness, I will never know it. My brother and I can talk only about what we don’t have—father, country, a close family—and laugh with calculated detachment. We never mention the feelings we might share and console each other about.

  In Milwaukee, I used to live near a church that had a sculpture on the front lawn. The sculpture was made of two identical concrete blocks, each with a notch in the middle, placed about a foot apart on the grass. The arrangement looked abstract and industrial. I never could understand the significance of the sculpture until a friend pointed out that the negative space between the two blocks formed a cross. My brother and I are like the two parts of that sculpture. Whatever we share is in the negative space between us. We mirror each other from a distance; we can never touch or connect.

  A few of my friends in Wisconsin are very close to their brothers or sisters. I saw one of them, Mary, at a party last March. It was a dreary evening with gray snow coming down. Everyone was depressed by the weather.

  “I turned forty last weekend,” Mary said. “I’m divorced, the weather’s terrible, and I just broke up with the man I was seeing for two years.”

  Mary was there with her sister, who looks so much like her that they are often mistaken for twins.

  “My sister’s taking care of me,” Mary continued. “I didn’t even want to come here tonight, but she dragged me out. She tells me that it’s good to get out. She doesn’t want me to sit around feeling depressed. She’s been bringing me food every day.”

  While Mary was talking to me, her sister was getting coffee for the two of them. Watching her walk across the floor toward us, two cups and saucers balanced in her hands, I felt completely envious. All their lives, they will be sisters. Divorces and break-ups and bad weather don’t mean the same thing if you can count on family.

  Mary is a lucky exception. Most people don’t feel as close to their siblings as they wish they did. Like me, they’ll say, “My brother (or sister) is a very nice person, but we don’t really understand each other. We have very little in common.”

  My friend Jim, a photographer, has a younger brother who is a businessman. When Jim told him that he was going to Nevada to take landscape photographs, his brother said, “Why are you going there? There’s nothing out there.”

  “How do you know?” Jim asked him. “Have you ever been to Nevada?”

  “No,” his brother said, “but I’ve flown over it many times. Believe me. I know. There’s nothing out there.”

  Though Jim laughed about the conversation, I think he was saddened a little, too, by how different he and his brother had grown up to be. What was most important to Jim—his photography, the beauty of almost empty spaces—didn’t mean anything to his brother.

  When I feel sad about not having a family, I tell myself that all kinds of people feel disconnected from their families. The only thing that makes my brother and me different is that we scarcely share a past. While my friends recall growing up in the same family with their siblings and wonder how they turned out to be so different, my brother and I don’t recall the same people as our family: he has his mother, I have mine.

  Some of my relatives feel more like immediate family to me than my brother does. My cousin, Kazumi, and I have always been close. On our last visit, while we were having tea in her sitting room, I noticed a boat-shaped vase in which she had arranged five roses. Each rose was fully open—the pale gold of the outer petals gradually darkening toward the salmon-pink center. “What color are these roses?” I asked. “The color is called champagne. It’s a new hybrid,” Kazumi said. The flowers reminded me of the dresses of the dolls we played with as children.

  When Kazumi and I were two or three, someone gave us identical dolls, larger than we were. My doll, Emi, had a red dress and Kazumi’s doll, Eri, had a pink dress. For years, I brought my doll to her house when my mother, brother, and I visited Akiko and Kazumi. While our mothers drank tea in the kitchen and Jumpei played on the floor at their feet, Kazumi and I went to her room upstairs, carrying the dolls. We set them down side by side against the wall, carefully smoothing out their long hair and ruffled dresses. When the dolls were properly seated, Kazumi would place her ceramic tea set in front of them. It was an old but real set her mother had given her. Because Kazumi was careful and gentle, she could play with a real ceramic tea set. If the same set had been given to me, I wo
uld have broken every single cup in a week and cried about it, trying to blame someone else for my own carelessness.

  While the dolls were having tea, Kazumi and I sat at her desk, cutting out photographs of people, furniture, and food from the women’s magazines Aunt Akiko subscribed to. We kept the pictures in flat, square cardboard boxes, which we pretended were apartment complexes. We had to make sure that each box had the right number of people and enough furniture and food. When any box became too crowded, we had to start a new one. I would never have played this paper-families game with anyone else, so patiently cutting out the photographs without amputating people’s legs or arms or decapitating them, on purpose or by accident.

  Kazumi was the only girl I knew who wanted to play like a girl. My other close friends were boys who lived in the neighborhood or girls who wanted to play dodgeball and catch grasshoppers. On the rare occasions these girls and I played with dolls, we snapped off the arms and legs and traded them so each doll looked ridiculous with someone else’s leg or arm. Posing the dolls so they looked like a group of mutants, my friends and I would cackle, pretending to be queens of freaks and witches.

  Kazumi was entirely different. She wanted our two dolls to have tea and enjoy a nice quiet visit—the kind of visit our mothers wanted us to have together—while we cut out paper families, making sure that every household was comfortably provided for. Kazumi and I would never have been friends if we hadn’t been cousins: we were too different to have chosen each other. But that’s precisely what family is—a connection that links Jim and his brother even if one travels hundreds of miles to photograph the landscape the other dismisses as “nothing.” What makes us family has nothing to do with similar interests, compatibility, or choice. Kazumi and I have come to love each other out of habit, out of our long association. I worry about her, as my mother used to worry about my brother and me. Now that her mother is gone, I imagine her living alone with her flowers and I worry about her loneliness; I wake up some nights dreaming about her and think, “What if she got sick? What if there was another earthquake in Kobe and her house was damaged?” I wish that I could be there to grow old with her as old friends and family are meant to.

  What I miss most from not having family close by is a sense that the past is an open and growing manuscript, expansive and forgiving. When we talk about the past with family, we often find that each of us remembers different aspects of the same experience. Though the difference in memory can sometimes lead to bickering, it’s a relief to know that none of us has the sole responsibility for remembering—what we forget will be recalled by someone else. We occasionally learn details we didn’t know because we were too young at the time or lived too far away. Family stories can shed a new light on the events we think we know. After the conversation, we add the new pieces to our memory. In this way, the past can expand rather than shrink. I look forward to seeing my mother’s family on my short visits to Japan because that’s one of the few times I can experience memory expanding.

  The last time I saw my uncle, Kenichi, he had just finished reading my first novel, Shizuko’s Daughter, in the Japanese translation. Many of the details in the novel’s setting come from my grandparents’ house in the country—the house where Kenichi had grown up. He was glad that I had included the child’s wooden slide my grandfather built when my mother was born, the purple lantern flowers my grandmother used to grow, the cicadas that were always buzzing in the trees in the yard.

  “I was amazed by how much you could remember,” he said.

  “Of course I remember a lot,” I reassured him. His own kids, fifteen years younger than I, do not recall our grandparents in the same way—they were just babies when our grandfather died; by the time they were growing up, our grandmother was in her eighties and no longer able to take long walks with them or grow as many flowers in her garden as she used to. Kenichi was happy to have me remember and write about what his kids could not, so that the memories are kept alive.

  “There’s one thing I felt really bad about,” Kenichi confessed. “I thought about it the whole time I was reading your novel.”

  “What was that?” I asked him, leaning forward over the table where we were having dinner.

  “Remember those diaries your mother kept when she was in high school?” he asked. “There were many of them, in those glossy, yellow notebooks.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have them.” Shortly after I left for college, my grandmother had found them in the attic of her house and sent them to me.

  “But you don’t have all the volumes,” Kenichi said. “Do you know why?”

  I shook my head. There were a few months missing here and there, but I always assumed that one or two notebooks must have gotten misplaced.

  “When your mother finished high school and was in Kobe, working as a secretary, I was living in that house in the country with your grandparents and your Aunt Keiko. We were just kids.” Kenichi paused.

  I nodded, encouraging him to go on. Kenichi is sixteen years younger than my mother, who was the oldest of six children.

  “Those diaries were already in the attic then. When I was in grade school, I found them there. The notebooks had such beautiful white paper—thick and glossy. I was only eight or nine, you have to remember. I tore the pages out and made paper airplanes. Every day, I would sit on top of the stairs, tear out page after page of your mother’s diary, and fold paper airplanes. I watched them flying down the stairs. I got pretty good at folding planes. Some of them went quite a long way. That’s how a couple of those notebooks got lost. When I read your novel, I remembered that and felt so bad.” Kenichi made a face. “I can’t believe how stupid I was as a kid,” he concluded.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, feeling suddenly so happy that I was laughing. I was imagining hundreds of white paper airplanes flying. “Your telling me about it now makes up for everything.”

  I’m not sure if Kenichi was convinced. I couldn’t explain my feelings to him very well. But maybe it doesn’t matter. In the book of my past, there is now a new image of my uncle as a young boy sitting on the stairway and flying paper airplanes, made of beautiful paper, with my mother’s words in their precise creases. Kenichi might think that each plane de-prived me of a page of my mother’s writing, a page of memory, but the opposite is true. I see those planes floating down the stairway toward me, passed on from Kenichi to me because we share a past and we both loved my mother—because we belong to the same family. I cannot ask for more, except the impossible: that I had the eloquence to tell my uncle, in his language, what I can only write in mine.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SECRETS

  In seventh grade, when a friend sent me a book from the island of Kyushu, I held it in my hand, marveling at the layer of fine white dust on the clear plastic cover. I couldn’t believe that I was looking at dust from another island. I didn’t know that Kyushu was only a few hours from Kobe by train.

  In Japan, it is easy to travel from one city to another on a different island, or from a far suburb to the heart of Tokyo. The route maps and train schedules are posted on the walls of every station, as are the signs indicating the appropriate tracks and fares. Uniformed attendants are on duty to answer questions. No matter where I am going, I can buy a ticket from an automated machine, walk to the designated track, and board the right train. Everything is clear. It’s almost impossible to get lost.

  And yet, once I get off the train, I can’t travel the last few miles or blocks to my destination on my own. I will not be able to locate a particular house or apartment building from the address. Even a cab driver will get lost unless I can point out landmarks only the people in that neighborhood would know—a small tobacco shop on the corner, a bamboo fence around someone’s house. In Japanese cities, only a few major thoroughfares have names; the other streets are known as “that street where the Tanaka family lives in the big white house” or “the street that borders the park where you used to play.” No outsider would have that kind of in
formation.

  Japanese addresses look deceptively simple and logical. I used to live at 12-17 Matsugaoka-cho, Nishinomiya-shi. The address meant that ours was the seventeenth house in the twelfth section of the area (cho) called Matsugaoka in the city of Nishinomiya. But since none of the narrow, winding streets in my cho had names, there was no way to describe where the eleventh section ended and the twelfth began, or why our house was number 17 instead of number 22. Only close friends, neighbors, or relatives who had visited before could find our house. Everyone in the entire Kobe-Osaka area knew how to get to the train station near our house, but even people who lived a mile away in the next cho could not find my house unless I were to meet them at the station and show them the way.

  That is the paradox of Japan: the discrepancy between what everyone knows about public places and what almost no one knows about private ones. This isn’t only about places or addresses. The difficulty I have finding someone’s house in Japan reminds me of the difficulty I have navigating all of Japanese private life.

  In Japan, public knowledge is like public transportation: accessible, uniform, and convenient. Even in the remotest, smallest village on the southern island, you can get a newspaper that reports major world and national events on its front page rather than whether the high school baseball team won or lost. What you can’t find out, no matter where you live in the country, concerns your own health, money, or legal rights. It’s the opposite of what I experience in Green Bay, where I find the same football news repeated two or three times in the same paper and have to wait an hour for the bus if my car breaks down. Though I appreciate the better public transportation and information when I travel to Japan, I ultimately feel diminished: I’m not used to feeling so helpless about my own private life.