CORRESPONDING MEMORIES

Dear Laura,

You will be surprised to hear from me, I think. It has been at least ten years, hasn’t it?  I got on the bus yesterday, coming home from work (I’m a translator at an import-export company here in San Francisco) and there was Cindy Lovelett, sitting in the front seat! We knew each other right away, even after ten years. Anyway, we talked about a lot of things, including you, and she said you were in New York. I have thought of you so often, Laura. I know that my mother kept in touch with your parents for some years. Cindy gave me your e-mail address, I hope that was okay. Please write to me if you have the time.

Yours,

Momoko

Momoko,

What a blast from the past!  Of course I remember you!! Of course I have the time! I came home from work last night and checked my e-mails, not really expecting anything, and there you were! How long have you been in San Francisco? Weren’t you in London at some point? When did you leave Tokyo? Mom said you were going to go to university here. Did you? I’ve been in New York for five years now, ever since graduating from Columbia. I don’t know if you’ve ever been here, but I live in a tiny apartment just outside Gramercy Park, in a neighborhood that is only just a cut above ‘okay.’ I’m lucky to have this place, because it’s rent controlled and I don’t make all that much money.

So tell me everything! What do you do in your spare time? Are you seeing anyone?  I’m a part-time technical writer, and also a part-time medical secretary. The latter job is to help with the rent until the former one takes off. Sometimes I get a lot of writing, but there are times I don’t too, and that can be a problem. I’m not seeing anyone at present. Was going out with a really nice guy, and we were starting to get serious and then – I’m not sure why – we both broke it off. I still see him from time to time.

Here is a memory I have of you, Momoko, one that comes back to me every so often and never fails to cheer me up. We are sitting together in algebra. Mr Wells – remember him? – is at the blackboard, droning away, and at the same precise moment you and I realize that his fly is open. Do you remember this? We look at each other, then back at him and his hilariously open fly, and then back at each other –  and nothing in the world can hold in our laughter. I can’t remember who started it, but I do know that the two of us were rolling in the aisles finally. We’d try to stop, then you’d look at me or I’d look at you, and it was like we were feeding off each other’s hysteria. We couldn’t stop. It got so bad that I very nearly wet my pants. I know that I have never laughed so hard in all my life. What happened to us afterwards? What did Mr Wells do? Did either of us manage to tell him that his fly was open? I can’t remember! Can you?

Love,

Laura

Laura,

We got detention – do you really not remember?  Mr Wells, if I remember correctly, had a chip on his shoulder: he thought that we were laughing at him. And I suppose we were, really. My father was so angry he wouldn’t let me go out for a month. I think your Mom had to call my Mom and tell her detention wasn’t such a big deal in America. Then Mom had to try and convince my dad. He took everything so seriously. I think in Japan getting a detention would have been a big deal, but because my dad’s English wasn’t so hot, he didn’t really understand. Also he was afraid that I was growing up a foreigner – becoming ‘uncivilized,’ without manners at all. For him nothing was worse than the thought of taking me back to Japan a yabanjin (‘barbarian’). He used to come storming into my room when I was listening to music and had it turned up really loud and accuse me of behaving like a yabanjin. Or when we were eating, if I blew my nose at the table or laughed out loud or did anything he thought was really un-Japanese, he’d use similar expressions. He was kind of a tyrant. And Mom would always defend me -- ‘Oh Kazuo, all the kids here do that, you know.’

Do you remember the time you and I found that sex manual in the old shed behind your house? That was shocking! I think that was only the third or fourth time I had been to your house on my own, without any parents around. We were looking for old boxes to do something with, what I cannot remember. I just remember both of us sitting and reading that book, looking at each other and saying ‘No!’ Nowadays, I don’t think any kids would get a shock, looking at such a book. But we were rather innocent, I think, so we were just astounded.

I am not seeing anyone either – I’m kind of picky about men, I’m afraid. I do have some friends here, including a few people at work who are nice. Most of my friends seem to be gay men (well, this is San Francisco!) and we do things like go for coffee, visit book stores, take long walks in the park and play Frisbee. It sounds rather pathetic, but it is a nice life for me. Yes, I was in London for a short time (eight months). Part of the time I was there was spent taking a course in business English, the rest of the time I was involved with someone who ‘didn’t work out.’ I did go to college here: Berkeley. Despite my parents’ best efforts, my Japanese wasn’t good enough for me to go to university in Japan.

Love,

Momoko

Momoko,

My God, I had totally forgotten that sex manual! Wonder who it belonged to? It was really, really old, as I recall. Wasn’t the language hilarious, though – and terribly stilted?  ‘The male’s member,’ ‘the female’s vagina…’ And we wanted shoeboxes to make into dolls’ houses for paper dolls. That I remember. You had those really neat paper dolls someone had sent you from England, I think, and we cobbled together bits of furniture from cardboard and pebbles and things. I remember it was really weird, having our paper dolls, which were all stiff and flat, sitting down on pebble and cardboard furniture. We had to fold them, as I recall, and it kind of ruined them. Then we left them in the shed one night and John and his friends came along and totally destroyed them. Do you remember that?

I can sympathize with you about your love life, and your social life doesn’t sound pathetic at all. I have a gay friend, too, Bernard. We’re both hopelessly unfashionable, and we have many other things in common too. (I always find myself irritated by women who say that they just love gay ‘boyfriends’ because they can shop together and do girlie things.) I like Bernard because, like me, he is an unrepentant slob who will happily wear the same sweatshirt for a week. We go to flea markets and eat things like tuna fish and beans straight from cans. Our apartments aren’t full of trendy furniture and we both hate cooking!

Love,  Laura

Laura,

I do remember John and his friends and the wet, crumpled ruins of our paper doll house. We cried bitterly, you and I. Wasn’t one of his friends called Barry, with red hair? Really obnoxious? And another kid that was always with them called Simon that I remember I had a sort of crush on for a while. And surely there were twins, as well, with Irish names?

Laura, my Mom wrote to me about John, after the accident.  I wanted to write to you after I had heard the news, but we had drifted apart then, and I didn’t really know what to write. I felt very sorry then and I feel very sorry now that I never wrote anything to you about it. I never had brothers or sisters and I really envied you your family, all the noise and bustle and liveliness. I used to go home, after visiting you, and it was like night and day, the difference. In your house there was laughter and music and always some lively, vigorous dispute between siblings, whereas back in my house, there was the silence of the tomb. My father was almost never at home and my mother seemed to be out a lot, too, doing various things, volunteering, fundraising, speaking to women’s groups, art classes, pottery. My mother needed a lot more in her life I think; I know that some of the people in my father’s company used to joke that she should have been the executive and my father should have had her job.

As for John, I can only imagine how sad it must have been for all of you, losing him so young.  I remember one time when John stuck up for me – did he ever tell you, I wonder? It was when I was sixteen, so he must have been nineteen or so. I was walking back from a piano lesson (Mrs Hubert with the purple sweater dresses and triple chins – remember her?) and some of the rowdies that used to hang out in front of the donut place started taunting me. John had been hanging out with some of his friends nearby, but when they started on me with their ‘Chinky-chink slant eyes’ routine, he caught up with me and took my arm and started walking along, all the while chatting away like we were best pals. So one of them, a really nasty kid – remember him, the one they called Seth? – he started yelling something at John about his ‘chink friend,’ and John suddenly turned around and put his fists up and was ready to fight!  It was just wonderful, really. I never knew him very well, but I always sensed he was special, worth knowing.

When I was still trying to get into university in Tokyo, there was a boy in one of my preparatory school classes who contracted leukaemia. He was very studious, very conscientious. Most of the other kids were rowdy and superficial, but he was different, always thinking about things. Many of his friends were foreign –  Chinese, Indians, not just white westerners, not that there is anything wrong with them, but a lot of  Japanese young people tend to look to the west and ignore eastern peoples like Koreans, Chinese, etc. He and those friends used to have great discussions about how World War II could have been avoided, what young people could do in this day and age to help promote world peace, etc. He started a group to educate us about Japan’s POW camps and comfort women, too – you probably have to live in Japan to know how unusual it is for a Japanese boy his age to be so genuinely interested in social issues, especially controversial ones like that. Most Japanese kids today only want to amuse themselves and could hardly care less about things like POW camps and comfort women, or the terrible things Japan did during the war. He could be funny and light-hearted too, though: he laughed a lot and did whimsical things, like giving all the girls in the class a white rose each on Valentine’s day (in Japan, it’s the men who receive chocolate on Valentine’s day, so what Hiroshi did was quite remarkable for a Japanese). He was just so unusual, so sensitive and good. It seemed so wrong that someone so special should die so young. For some time after he died, I would dream of him and halfway through the dream he would become John, but still be Hiroshi – hard to explain, but it was as if they were one and the same.  

Love, Momoko

Momoko,

Thank you for writing that about John. We all miss him so much, you know. He would be 30 years old now, something I can hardly believe. No, he never did tell me about the incident with Seth and his buddies, but I can just picture John with his fists up. He was so funny, you know. Always threatening to fight, but then always managing not to, it was a kind of talent of his. Barry, the obnoxious boy with the red hair graduated with honors from Harvard Medical School – honest! I had a crush on Simon too, by the way! He is now a cellist, happily married (sigh), and lives in Chicago. And yes, there were twins, Seamus and Shawn. The last I heard of them they were off to be chefs on a cruise ship.  (Your memory is amazing!)  Don’t know what happened to Seth, but the last I heard, he was involved in some sort of trouble with stolen property . . .

I’m glad you have happy memories of visiting us. But I have happy memories of visiting your house!  It was like a haven for me, so peaceful and quiet. And I remember that whenever your parents were there, they were very kind to me. Your mother always brought us snacks:  fruit beautifully peeled, cheese sliced perfectly, biscuits laid out just so on the plate, no broken ones or crumbs! In our house, you got what you foraged for yourself and you were lucky if it hadn’t already been well pawed over by others. And your father taught me how to fire a rubber band off one hand – I can still do it to this day – remember? I couldn’t get it at first and wanted to give up, but he insisted:  no, no, I would learn, it just took patience, try again. Until I was shooting off my own rubber bands, perfectly. He was thrilled that I could do it too, laughed uproariously. And those beautiful dolls you called your hinaningyo -- remember? I longed for something that nice that would be mine alone, no greedy sisters or brothers getting in and sullying it. You had your own room, so clean, so pretty and quiet. (I used to think that the reason my room was such a mess was because I had to share it with my two younger sisters, but then I moved away from home and found out the truth:  I’m just a born slob.)

How is your mother, by the way? I know that my mother corresponded with your Mom for a few years after you went back to Japan. Mom said that your mother found it very hard at first, but then rallied and, as Mom put it, ‘took out a new lease on life.’

Love,  Laura

Laura,

Actually, my mother died two years ago. She had been very depressed about a lot of things – going back to Japan was very hard for her – and whether it was an accident or intentional, we’ll never know, but she took an overdose of sleeping pills. I was in London then, and my cousin, who was staying with my mother at the time, didn’t get to her fast enough to save her. She was only forty-eight. Mom had the knack of looking a lot stronger than she really was. My dad was a pain most of the time, but oddly enough, Mom really depended on him. I say ‘oddly enough’ because my mother was very self-sufficient; for instance, she could speak English much better than he, and she could do many other things he couldn’t do. And she hadn’t had more or better education than my dad had, either. Her family didn’t believe that women needed college and fought her every inch of the way when she decided that she wanted to go, so Mom had to push to get the little education she got. And she had so many talents and skills – she could make almost anything. The lady next door to us taught her to crochet, I remember, and Mom got really good at it, then she got bored and stopped doing it. After that she took up pottery and pretty soon we had mugs and bowls and even plates all over the house. I had a potter friend in Tokyo and I told him that my mother had made pottery. She had a couple of pieces left from her time in America, and he happened to see them, and he was just amazed. ‘How long did she study? Only a year?!’  At first, he had just assumed that she was just dabbling in it – which she was, really – but he had not realized the extent of her talent.

Reading all that, it sounds as though I am praising my mother, bragging about her – something you mustn’t do if you are Japanese. Even nowadays you aren’t supposed to praise a family member openly in Japan, to do so is rude and pompous. But I believe that I can now look back on my mother’s life, with a clear, reasonably unbiased eye. And the truth is, she was such a talented woman. She had many faults, too, of course:  she was an impatient mother, distant and always in her own world. I spent half my early years trying to get her attention: Mom look at this,  Mom listen to me, Mom come play with me, and she really couldn’t be bothered. I cannot remember her ever genuinely praising anything that I did. She took good care of me and I know that she loved me in her own way, but ironically it was my dad – who blustered and yelled and threw his weight around – that praised or encouraged me. I think she should never have become a mother. If life were fair, my mother would have been the executive. She was political, knew how to scheme to get people to do what she wanted them to do – rather effortlessly, too – and her organizational and creative skills were just astonishing. She was good at things like logic, mathematics, bridge – remember the bridge parties? But it was her skill with people that really stood out. If, say, you wanted to plan a picnic for a large group of people who had completely different tastes in food, some of whom did not get on with each other, well, my mother would manage it. She would get the food prepared perfectly, plan the activities, get everyone grouped just right – and after it was over, everyone would have had a good time. Maybe you would even find that the two warring groups were getting along better. Oh dear, it sounds as though I am bragging about her again. And yet, I know that I am not simply eager to emphasize the good points of someone who could have – should have – been a better parent to me. I know she could have been a better mother, but nevertheless she really did have some amazing skills and talents.

Love, Momoko

Momoko –  I am so sorry! I had absolutely no idea, no one told me! I know that Mom wrote your mother and heard back from her for at least three years after you left; I remember a Christmas card that she’d done herself, with beautiful greens and silver on a black background, but I did not know that she had died. I’ve just re-read my last e-mail to you and, in light of what you told me, it looks terribly insensitive. I am so sorry.

Here is the memory I have of your mother, the one that comes back to me with the most clarity. It must have been the first time we met; we were six years old, I think. My mother had organized a bridge party, and both your parents came as well as two or three other couples. It was a pain in the neck, I remember, because we kids had to get all the little tables together, out of our own rooms in some cases, and cover them all and put out bowls of peanuts and such. (My Mom’s organizational skills were legendary, too, but in quite the opposite way your mother’s were!)  The boys were going to my cousins’ place, but Sally, Yvonne and I were to stay at home. We were grilled on that:  you will stay in the family room, you will not come into the living room while our guests are here except in the case of an emergency. A REAL emergency!  

Anyway, your parents arrived with you, I remember. I think they had tried to get a babysitter for you at first, but she cancelled pretty much at the last minute, because none of us were expecting you. Oddly, the only thing I remember about you from that day is that you did not want to watch television, you wanted to look at our books. We kids hardly ever got the chance to watch television, so we were filled with resentment that you kept interrupting Scooby-doo to ask us things. You kept asking Yvonne what certain words meant, and the funny thing was, sometimes we didn’t really know the meaning any better than you did! I think we had felt a little superior to you at first because we assumed that as you were a foreigner, your English would be somehow lacking. I think you’d only been in America a year or so and you still had a little bit of an accent, but already you were reading Beatrix Potter and Dr Seuss and understanding it! Anyway, the word that you – and we – didn’t know (and it drove all of us crazy, for different reasons) was ‘soporific.’ Remember? When Peter Rabbit eats the lettuce and it has a soporific effect on him? You wouldn’t believe that we really didn’t know what it meant and weren’t just holding out on you, and we were humiliated to find a word we didn’t know and to realize that you were easily our equal in reading, even though Yvonne was all of a year older than you…

But what an impression your mother made on us! All the other ladies were comfy-looking mid-western moms in ironed blouses and slacks and pumps, whereas your Mom was like some beautiful bird that had landed in a duck pond. Her hair was positively a confection, all curled and whirled and effortlessly pinned up, she had on pale, pastel colors for spring:  soft lavender and lime green. She was wearing a cream-colored blouse too, of some silky material, and a dove-grey skirt and pale pink heels. How we stared! Anyway, her appearance alone would have been more than enough, but on top of that she was such a live wire! I remember the adults were making jokes about ‘east’ and ‘west’ – bridge terms, aren’t they? – because I think your Mom and my dad were partners, so of course he was ‘west’ and she was ‘east.’ But here was this vivid, exotic woman in our midst – exotic not because she was Japanese, really, or not only because of that – exotic because she was so beautifully, stylishly dressed and had such wit and verve. Yvonne, Sally and I went around afterwards trying to talk the way she did, so mixing up L and R – she did that, didn’t she!? – and pronouncing ‘th’ like ‘s,’ and my Mom got angry and thought we were making fun of her. Which we weren’t in the least!  We just loved the way she sounded and wanted to sound the same.

Your mother was special, Momoko, no doubt about it. There was actually a time in there I thought that my father had a bit of a crush on her. Did you ever get that impression? I don’t know if Cindy told you, but my Mom and he split up a couple of years ago, for lots of complicated reasons. She is actually much happier on her own, though I think she misses him sometimes, especially at holidays when we all get together. James (who is a dentist – remember his gruesome collection of teeth from rats, cats, dogs, etc.?) sees her almost every week and they do things together, and Yvonne gets to see a lot of her too, as they both live close by. I almost never see my father, sad to say. In fact, none of us do. When he and Mom split up, we all realized that he was just sort of superfluous. Kind of a shame, but there it is. He was a little like your Dad in that he was often away from home, but until he was out of our lives we never really realized how little he did for us or thought of us. Mom had a way of making it seem as though it was the both of them caring about us and doing things for us, but in fact she was the one who did it all: she remembered our birthdays, knew about our love affairs, hurts, talents, secret desires, you name it. Most of the time Dad just couldn’t be bothered with us.  Still, I think he’s happier now too. He has a ‘partner,’ or so he calls her, a flashy lady of Greek extraction who seems nice enough but puts on enough perfume to choke a goat. She is, rather predictably, far younger than he is and they live in Florida and breed Irish Setters.

Love, Laura

Momoko,

I haven’t heard from you in some time and wonder if everything is okay…? I’ve been busy at work, doing a long rewriting job about cavitation. I won’t even bother to explain what it means to you, it’s that dull. Still, it’s lucrative too, which is a good thing, as I sure can use the money. No more peanut butter sandwiches and Cup Noodle for at least the next two weeks! Please let me know if everything is okay with you, what you have been doing, etc. What are you doing for the holidays, by the way?! (Mom has asked me to ask you this.) Write me!

Love, Laura

Momoko,

Finally finished the long, tiresome thing on cavitation and what did I get straight away but yet another long, tiresome thing, this one on mineral assemblages. Written by someone who doesn’t have any business writing English and even more boring than the thing on cavitation, though I would have thought that anything more boring was hardly possible. I haven’t heard from you in ages – what gives? Are you okay? Please let me know what your plans for the holidays are, if any. It would be so nice to see you after all these years, and Mom keeps asking me to find out for sure what you are doing so she can invite you to Cleveland. We’ll all be there, and I know that everyone would love to see you, Momoko. So write to me!

Love, Laura

Dear Momoko,

I am now almost positive that I either managed to write something that offended you or – God forbid! – something has happened to you!  I am getting more and more worried. Do let me know! Or maybe you’re terribly busy at work too?

Love, Laura

Dear Momoko,

????? !!!!! Write to me!   Please!

Love, Laura

Laura,

I am of two minds about writing this. No, what you wrote did not offend me. I don’t think you could ever offend me, Laura – you have always been the best, kindest friend I ever had, and the most honest too. But I have not always been so honest with you:  there has been something that I’ve never been able to tell you. That is why we drifted apart, Laura, no other reason. I know that you’ve wondered about this, and I always felt so bad about it. When it first happened, I remember thinking that I would never, ever tell you, that the secret would die with me. But I found it very hard not telling you, so it was easier to pull away from you, to gradually let our friendship get cooler. Then my father died and Mom and I had to go back to Japan, and I remember thinking that the situation – of phasing out our friendship because of what I knew –  had taken care of itself. All these years and I have wondered about you, longed to find out how you were doing. Then I ran into Cindy and I just couldn’t resist writing to you. I always wondered if maybe you knew, too, or if perhaps your mother or one of your sisters or brothers had a suspicion. Anyway, I have been thinking about this for a month now:  do I tell you or do I not tell you? And now I know that I must tell you, however upsetting you will find it.

Laura, my mother and your father had an affair. I know this because I walked in on them one afternoon. It was when we were sixteen, but I now know that it had been going on for some time, years actually. Anyway, I found out very much by accident. I was on my period and I’d had terrible cramps. The school nurse tried to call my mother, the phone just rang and rang. (Later I found out that it had been taken off the hook.) Finally I just pretended that she was at the neighbor’s house and I insisted that their number was unlisted – they weren’t supposed to let me go without her permission, but they did. And I walked home – we lived quite near the school, after all – and right in on them, as they were on the sofa at the time.

This was only a year or so before my father died. I know that he was on one of his business trips back to Japan. I remember telling you that he’d gone back to Japan and would be away for at least a month, and you said that your dad was on a business trip too and due to come home soon. Well, he must have arrived back and gone straight to our house. I cannot tell you how shocked I was, how little I’d suspected anything like that. I know I was really naïve, my mother was very pretty and she had a lot of time on her hands, and she always said that Japanese men weren’t romantic, that western men were much more tender and affectionate.  I know that she admired your father so much, the things he could do. My father, for instance, was hopeless at sports, and your father was so athletic, and your father read and watched movies, while my father was strictly business and really, in many respects a dreadful bore. I think my father would have liked to have hobbies and interests, he just never had the time. Being a hataraki-bachi (a working bee, as they say in Japan when they want to describe a tedious, work-oriented drudge) was pretty much drilled into him.  I remember that learning to play bridge was a big deal for him: my mother had to beg and beg to get him to do it. Once he started, he just loved it, but he so seldom got the chance to play. It is very sad, when I come to think about it. My father loved my mother so much, but I doubt that she loved him in the same way.

I have kept this secret for a long time, but now that I have written this, I am almost tempted not to press the ‘send’ button. But I know that I will.

Love, Momoko

Momoko, I have started this e-mail seven times, and seven times I have erased it to start over.  I had no idea. And yet, in retrospect, it seems so obvious. I feel sick with anger and disgust when I think about my father… I don’t know how you coped then, how you managed to get up and go to school every day. At the time I just assumed that you’d outgrown me, outgrown all of us, that I in particular irritated you with my untidiness, my constant chattering. You seemed so aloof, I remember, but angry too – and it all makes perfect sense now, too, as it really did seem to happen overnight.

Momoko, I think my Mom knows. I really do. There have been little things that she’s said, little comments. I don’t think for a minute that she would have resented your mother, either – my father had lots of affairs, I am sorry to say – at least three that I know about, not counting the one with your mother – and my mother generally felt sort of sorry for the women, which is pretty sad. I do remember, too, that she was disappointed one year when she sent your Mom a Christmas card and didn’t get one back – your mother must have been gone by that time. She admired your mother so much, her wit and style. It does sound odd to say this, but I really don’t think she feels any anger at you or your mother. She was just fed up with my father, his immaturity and inability to make a commitment.

I am glad you told me. Yes, it did come as a shock, but it must have been so much worse for you, as a teenager!  I just wish that I could have helped to comfort you back then, when you first found out. At the time you must have been filled with conflicting emotions, and I could feel nothing but resentment and hurt that you didn’t want to be my friend anymore.  I am not sure that I would have coped with it as well as you did, though, so maybe what you did was the best. I think that I would probably have done the same thing in your place.

But that is in the past!  So please don’t stop writing to me!  And don’t stop being my friend.

Love, Laura

p.s.    Mom has been so happy to know that we are corresponding –  she has begged me to invite you to Cleveland for Christmas. Will you come? Please? Pleeeeaaaase?

p.p.s. Yvonne wants to know if you can show her first-graders how to do those origami cranes that you and your Mom used to make.

p.p.p.s. James, who just broke up with his girlfriend after a five-year relationship (don’t tell him I told you this!) has asked me to inform you that he no longer has his collection of animal teeth.