Polite Lies Page 5

  The paragraph, written in the very formal Japanese used only for official documents, was difficult to read. After going over it a few times in silence, I understood the gist of it:

  “We, the undersigned, are the sole immediate family members of Hiroshi Mori. The balance remaining in his account, we understand, will be dispersed to only one of us, whom we choose to be our representative. If we come to any dispute later about how this money is to be divided among us, we will not hold the bank legally responsible.”

  The paragraph did not specify my father’s account number or the remaining balance. There was no mention about which one of us we would choose as our “representative.” With the signed letter, any of us—but only one of us—could withdraw the entire balance left in his account.

  Michiko had finished clearing away the dishes and sat back down across the table from me. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a teddy bear printed on the front. I wondered if she didn’t understand how ridiculous she looked or if she had dressed this way to pretend that we were having a casual family visit. She leaned forward and started off with a false, light laugh. “Stupid paper work,” she said, waving her hand. “The bank won’t give me any cash until the account’s changed over into my name. Isn’t that ridiculous? While your father was alive, I was the one who went to the bank to make deposits and withdrawals. They knew who I was and never gave me trouble. But now that he is gone, they froze the account. They won’t let me withdraw any money until you’ve signed this statement. I can’t even go to the store to buy groceries until I get more money.”

  I did not understand exactly how important the document was. By signing it, was I giving up my rights to a small amount of money in one of the many accounts my father had, or was all his money in this account? Would I have to sign a similar statement about everything he ever owned? What did he own anyway? I could not ask these questions without being rude and embarrassing Akiko and Jumpei.

  “As soon as I get some cash,” Michiko continued, “I’d like to pay for your plane fare.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I came because I wanted to, not because I thought you would give me money.”

  I glanced over at Akiko, who was sitting next to Michiko, and at Jumpei, who was next to me. Neither of them said anything. Their faces had almost no expression at all. I read over the document again, thinking that maybe I had overlooked something. It wasn’t any clearer. The document seemed bizarre. True, I was prepared to sign anything, especially if it meant making things easier for Akiko, Kazumi, and Jumpei. But how could I sign away my rights to an unspecified amount of money? Had I been naive to think that at least a bank, a place of business, would be forthright and frank? The document was as secretive and vague as everything else in Japan. It was as though even the bank thought it was rude to mention specific sums of money.

  Michiko kept smiling, showing her big yellow teeth. “I’m so angry at the people at the bank,” she said. “They shouldn’t trouble us with paperwork at a time like this. They called only a day after your father passed away and wanted me to pick up the papers. I was so mad I couldn’t go. Your poor brother had to go for me.”

  Looking at his signature, I suddenly understood why my brother had wanted me to come to Japan. He didn’t care about seeing me. He needed me there for Michiko: he wanted my signature so that the woman he called mother could withdraw and spend our father’s money. I glanced sideways at him. He didn’t seem embarrassed or pained. I wanted to tell him that I felt betrayed, but I knew I would never say anything.

  Instead, I picked up the pen and signed all the copies. Akiko was frowning across the table, but she didn’t say anything. I had to trust that if she didn’t want me to sign the papers, she would say something to stop me. Her silence meant that it was all right for me to go ahead. I pushed the signed papers across the table to my stepmother and got up to leave.

  Walking away from Michiko’s house, I was furious. My mother, had she lived, would have inherited my father’s money. I was giving up what should have been hers and letting Michiko have it. There was no way I could get information, much less help, about what my rights were. I couldn’t take my stepmother to court anyway without mortifying everyone in my family. We were supposed to be a “nice” Japanese family. None of us could take our personal or family problems to strangers like lawyers, accountants, social workers, or psychologists in Japan. Even if we lived in another city, people would find out, and our whole family would be humiliated.

  The need for polite secrecy was what had made me leave the country in the first place. After my mother’s death, I had lived for eight years in silence and misery. Just as I couldn’t seek legal help about my inheritance now, I wasn’t able, back then, to tell anyone about how my father beat me, how my stepmother made me feel like I was nothing, how I worried about my safety in their house. I didn’t know any social workers, school counselors, or children’s rights advocates who would interfere in the private life of our family to save me. To me, my house was like a room without doors or windows. Locked inside, I couldn’t call for help or even look outside to see what help was available. Walking away from my stepmother’s condominium decades later, I tried to console myself: I had been lucky enough to escape that prison, all I cared about was not going back in. The money, I told myself, was nothing.

  In the week I stayed at Akiko’s house and for several months afterward in Green Bay, I signed numerous forms stating my intention to renounce my rights to my father’s property. None of the forms gave me specific descriptions of what I was giving up. Akiko and I had several vague and polite talks from which I gathered that Michiko would sign similar papers for Akiko and Kazumi so the two of them could have my grandfather Tatsuo’s property.

  In Japan—as I learned from American friends who live there—individuals don’t leave wills; they express their wishes in vague and polite terms, but nothing is written down. The property laws specify how the estate should be divided among the family, strictly proportioned according to their relationship to the deceased—fifty percent for the spouse, ten percent for each child, and so forth. The law is used only when families have disputes. Otherwise, all the property goes to one person chosen by family consensus—everyone else signs forms to give up his or her legal claims, as I did. Inheritance is another example of how things are done in Japan: the public law is clear and mathematical; in private practice, families reach consensus without any open discussion.

  What I hated most about my dealings with Michiko was that I was forced to act as though I trusted her. To keep the family peace, I had to sign all the papers she gave me without asking any questions or demanding to know any details. The way I was forced to act was no different from the way my relatives refrain from asking their doctors about their own health: by my silence, I was consenting not to know the truth. I had volunteered to be part of a polite lie.

  Months after I returned from Japan, I kept thinking about the question of trust. Every time I went to see my doctor with a sore throat or a slight fever, I wondered if I, too, might be falling into the trap of trusting too much in doctors.

  Most of my American friends think that I do. My friends in the Midwest are very skeptical about what they call Western medicine. When they have sore throats or fevers, they tend to stay home and try a combination of self-cures: vitamins or herbal medicine from health food stores, old home remedies and hot compresses. They read Andrew Weil’s books and follow his advice, except for giving up coffee. Scarcely able to breathe, they still insist, “I’m sure there’s nothing a doctor can do for me that I can’t do for myself.” If their condition does not improve in a few weeks, they finally consider looking for help, but they prefer to visit herbalists and acupuncturists rather than family-practice physicians who, they think, are rich Republicans corrupted by money and competition. One of my friends has a bumper sticker that says, I USE HERBS INSTEAD.

  My American friends prefer using Eastern traditions and philosophies to prevent illnesses in the fi
rst place. They think they can stay healthy by “being in the right balance” through yoga, tai chi, Zen meditation, macrobiotic diets. They talk about the importance of breathing in a certain way to open up spiritual as well as nasal pathways. Coming from Japan, where almost nobody in my family used Eastern cures (except for a very few older relatives who took Chinese herbal supplements, but always in addition to what the medical doctors prescribed, never instead of), I do have more faith in antibiotics, flu shots, and aspirin than my American friends. The sports I learned in Japan to stay healthy were “Western” sports—running, swimming, weight lifting, basketball, volleyball. None of my twelve cousins in Japan has ever practiced tai chi, yoga, or meditation. They have no idea what macrobiotic diets are; they think only poor people eat brown rice or millet. Like me, my cousins rely on prescription drugs instead of meditation or biofeedback to get rid of migraines.

  In spite of our different preferences, though, my American friends and I have something in common. We all think that trust is a matter of individual choice. My friends rebel against Western medicine just as they rebel against other Western, American, or patriotic ideas they’ve been taught to respect: singing the national anthem and saluting the flag, going to church, working hard to get rich. My friends don’t trust these ideals or practices because they have not freely chosen them. They trust yoga and Chinese herbs because, by their own choice, they have read books and attended lectures about them. Choice and knowledge are important elements in trust.

  I trust my doctor for the same reasons. I go to a doctor whose office is twenty miles away because I like the way she answers my questions—she is always clear and enthusiastic. She doesn’t think that, as a doctor, she has special knowledge that I won’t be able to understand, or that I should just accept her advice regardless of my feelings. I trust her, in the end, because I know she will always tell me the truth.

  That’s how I differ from my Japanese relatives. To me, knowledge is essential to trust. The more I know, the more I can trust. The more I can trust someone, the more I want to know their opinion. My Japanese relatives believe the opposite. The less they know, the more they rely on trust. The more they trust someone, the less they need to know. They want to trust their doctors because they think they themselves know nothing and can find out nothing. In matters of health or money, they don’t ask questions because to do so is rude—it indicates that they don’t trust the other person. They are willing to have no control over the two things—good health and prosperity—that are considered essential to the Japanese definition of happiness and luck.

  I don’t understand where my relatives’ initial trust comes from. For me, trust is something that has to be earned, something that can be lost. If I find out that someone has lied to me or kept a secret to hurt me, I will never trust that person again. With any new acquaintance, there is a period of mutual waiting—we give each other the benefit of the doubt until we can decide whether to really trust each other.

  There is a clear difference between trust and faith: faith is a blind leap into the unknown, while trust has to be earned or proven over time. In Japan, every personal or professional relationship seems to require faith rather than trust. You believe in your doctor because he knows things you will never understand. You don’t question your family because they know what’s best for you, more than you will ever know yourself. Maybe there is something liberating about being able to assume this kind of faith—maybe it would be wonderful not to have to be guarded and skeptical all the time—but it would never work for me. I simply do not have enough faith to go around.

  Japanese people place more faith in one another than in any deity. Even though almost every family visits a shrine together on New Year’s Day to pray for health and prosperity, most of them admit, “I don’t really believe in the gods, but it certainly won’t hurt to pray.” They are giving the gods the benefit of the doubt, the same way I would place tentative and probational trust in someone I don’t know well.

  My relatives are no exception. They wish for prosperity at Shinto shrines, pray to our ancestors at the Buddhist altar, and even celebrate Christmas—making little distinction among the deities, placing probational and lukewarm trust in all of them. The only really religious people in my family were my grandmother and my Aunt Keiko, my mother’s younger sister. When I saw Keiko a few years ago, she was dying of cancer and she knew it. She talked about her condition very calmly—as Akiko did, too—but her calmness seemed clear and frank rather than polite and indifferent.

  “I went to see a doctor about six months ago because I had trouble eating and I was always tired,” she told me as we sat in her small living room. “I thought he was going to say there was nothing wrong with me except the normal signs of aging—after all, I am almost sixty. But the doctor kept asking me to come back for more tests, and each time I saw him, he was more vague about what the tests were for. So I knew. I knew it was something very serious, anyway.”

  “You knew right away?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Everyone knows. It’s silly to pretend.”

  My Uncle Kenichi and his wife, Mariko, were also in the room, as well as Keiko’s husband, Mr. Maeshiba. Kenichi said to me, “Your aunt is very brave.”

  Keiko laughed. “I don’t think so. If anything, I was a coward. I was afraid not to know. I made the doctor explain exactly what was wrong with me. I told him that it was no use trying to keep a secret from me since I had already made my husband promise that he would tell me everything.”

  Mr. Maeshiba nodded. “Keiko and I made a promise to each other a long time ago. If she had a terminal disease and the doctor told me, I would tell her—and she would do the same for me. We wouldn’t keep a secret from each other.”

  “The doctor told me that I had cancer and it had spread quite a lot. I made him explain the various types of surgery and medication that were available to remove or slow down the cancer. I found out that if he performed surgery—which was what he wanted to do—he would be removing a large portion of my stomach and liver. More than likely, the cancer would keep growing, so the doctor would have to remove more later. I didn’t want to be slowly chopped to death like that. I said, ‘No surgery,’ even though the doctor was shocked by my choice. My decision had nothing to do with being brave. I couldn’t stand the idea of someone cutting me up just to prolong my life by a few months.”

  She shrugged and smiled, but it took all my concentration not to burst into tears in front of her. I couldn’t say anything because I was afraid my voice would crack. Keiko went on to tell me that she had asked the doctor to give her as little medication as possible. “I don’t want to be tired and forgetful, the way most people get with pain pills,” she said. “I don’t want to be all drugged up. I want to be able to think clearly till the end.” Then she smiled again and said, “Let’s stop this depressing talk. I have said enough.”

  Her husband agreed. “Yes,” he said to Kenichi, Mariko, and me. “We don’t want you to visit our house and feel sad.”

  Mr. Maeshiba made some tea and we ate the cakes that Kenichi, Mariko, and I had brought. For the rest of the visit, we talked about my life in Wisconsin, the recent marriages or college graduations of my younger cousins, the memories we had of my grandparents’ house. We were very careful not to mention illness or death—even of other people. But it was different from the sort of pretending that usually went on in front of terminally ill people. We avoided talking about Keiko’s condition because we all knew. Enough had been said about it, especially by Keiko herself—it was no secret.

  On the way home in the car, Kenichi said, “I don’t think I could face my death so easily.” He stared ahead into the traffic, as if dazed. “Maybe I’ve been too unkind about Keiko’s religion. Her faith must give her courage—but she was always a courageous person anyway. It isn’t just the religion.”

  Keiko belonged to a religious sect called hirameki-san (a holy flash of light), one of the numerous “new religion” groups whose beliefs are base
d loosely on Buddhism and ancestor worship. Because the sect encourages its members to donate large amounts of money and try to convert others, my relatives were leery of it. They were embarrassed that Keiko often went to public places like train stations to hand out tracts and to preach. But everyone admitted—even before her illness—that her beliefs were harmless enough. Her sect did not promote violence, nor did it convert people against their will. Keiko spent most of her time burning incense and praying for the souls of all the dead people in our family, which was not that different from what more “normal” Buddhists did—only she devoted more time to it.

  Keiko’s religion must have contributed to her insistence on knowing the truth. Perhaps because she thought of faith as something sacred she devoted to hirameki-san, she did not want her doctor to play a godlike part in her life—making decisions without informing her, knowing everything while she knew nothing. She wanted to have a relationship of trust—she asked the doctor to tell her the truth so she could make decisions; once he did, she was willing to trust him to respect her wishes and not put her through unwanted surgery or medication. That is different from having faith in him. He had to earn her trust by telling the truth.

  Keiko died only three months after our visit. When I heard the news, I thought of one of my earliest memories of her, from the days when I used to call her “Neine,” big sister. Until I was four, my family lived in a small house in Kobe with Keiko, Kenichi, and another of my mother’s brothers, Shiro. Because I was born with dislocated hips and spent my first year in a cast, I did not learn to walk until I was two. When I did finally learn, my uncles began to take me on walks to strengthen my legs, and Keiko bought me red patent leather shoes. I still remember walking around our house with those shoes on—something my mother must have tolerated even though it was against convention; we lived in a Japanese house, where the rule was to take off our shoes at the door. The tatami floor squished underneath my shoes and made me laugh. I would pretend to be on an important outing, and Keiko would give me her handbag to carry from room to room. The handbag, made of red patent leather that matched my shoes, was huge. We never put anything inside it; still, we kept opening and closing the bag, pretending to admire the invisible treasures hidden in its roomy compartments.