“Is that what he told you, Lily?”
“That’s what you told him.”
A bemused look, his expression relaxing for just a second. “Let me tell you something about being a doctor. It takes tenacity — stick-to-it-ness. Like the stickiness of good rice.”
“Kaz will come through. He’ll be the next Dr. Takemitsu.”
“You certainly are an optimist. His prospects aren’t great. He’s flunked the exam twice, and all he seems to care about is dancing and women.”
This was the first time Lily had seen the doctor let his guard down. It meant something to her that he felt comfortable talking to her so frankly. “Kaz does seem … kind of lost.”
“That’s putting it mildly. If it hadn’t been for the war, he’d have run off with that jazz singer from San Francisco. I was almost glad when the war struck, if you can believe it, because at least here I can keep an eye on him.” A soft, shuddering sigh. “He never was the same after his mother died when he was little.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Kaz’s mother was an incredible woman. She could have saved him. She was a woman so innocent and pure she never even wanted to get married.”
“How did you meet her?”
His face tensed up. Lily worried she’d overstepped, trod on too-intimate territory.
“I met her on the first trip I made back to Japan, after I’d graduated from med school. I went in order to find a wife. The baishakunin from my hometown had sent me photographs of picture brides.”
“And you selected Kaz’s mother.”
“Not exactly. I wanted to meet the women in person. I wasn’t about to just choose a wife from a photo and send her a ticket to America.”
“What was it like going to the matchmaker’s studio?”
“Horrible. All the women I’d selected were decked out in their best kimonos, their faces painted white, like geishas. Not one had a face that touched my soul.”
“Did you find another baishakunin?”
“No, I’d had it with the old ways. Figured I’d just stay a bachelor for the time being. Then the next morning, as I was walking down the street, a wisp of whiteness caught my eye: a young woman in a simple white dress. She was passing out rice cakes to homeless men and she looked at each dirty face with such gentleness, such love in her eyes. In Japan, beggars are very ashamed; they kneel with their foreheads pressed to the ground. But this girl — Fumiko, I’d later learn her name was — insisted they sit up and eat with dignity. Perhaps she took pity on them because she, too, came from a group that had been hated for centuries, the Kakure Kirishitans. Hidden Christians.”
“Christians were hated in Japan?”
“For over three hundred years. Whole communities were rounded up and their ears chopped off. They were made to repent or march hundreds of miles to their place of execution.” The doctor shook his head, like he couldn’t imagine the horrors. He talked about how this only attracted more converts as the religion was pushed underground. Fumiko’s family came from a sect of Hidden Christians who’d secretly worshipped in their homes for generations. “Of course, I didn’t discover any of this until later, after I’d gotten up the nerve to actually talk to her.”
Warmth spread across Lily’s chest as she watched the doctor’s face soften and glow. “How did you manage that?”
The doctor told Lily how the next day, he’d caught sight of the girl again. She was wearing the same white dress, this time with a veil over her head, pulled back such that he could glimpse her face. He trailed her for many blocks until they reached the edge of town, where a wooded area began. He followed her deep into the densely packed trees, clambering over rocks and boulders, and he tripped on some giant roots, nearly killing himself. Always that slip of translucent white, like a moth’s wings fluttering before him.
At last, he came to a clearing. There were rows of benches where people were seated while more people stood or perched on rocks around the edges. A small choir was gathered in front of the shrine; several priests and nuns were milling about greeting people. The girl in white was at the front with a cluster of people whom the doctor was later introduced to as her family. Several other ladies also had on white veils, including her twin sister, Haruko. As the doctor hung back, one of the priests began leading everyone in Hidden Christian prayers. “Orashio, as they call them. A soft, strange chanting in garbled Latin. The scene touched my heart and I knew that this was the woman I would marry.”
Lily thought about how the doctor must have looked that balmy morning in the glade, the sun refracting from the lush leaves, sending flecks of verdant light across his excited cheeks. The girl in white, the girl of his dreams, at the centre of all this beauty and strangeness. Even now, all these years later, his face shone at the memory. Love. Yes, this is what love looks like, Lily thought, and she wanted to draw closer to him — impulsively, desperately, like a moth to a votive.
She thought about how her own parents had met; though, their marriage couldn’t have been more different. In her earliest memories, she’d always been aware of her mother’s brittle moods and deep unhappiness: she’d never wanted to come to America as a picture bride; she’d never wanted to marry a man double her age — a dry cleaner no less. The matchmaker had duped her into it. She’d never adjusted to life away from home. Lily remembered watching her mother standing bewildered in her bedroom, her skirt falling down to her knees, as she struggled with the buttons. Clothes in Japan didn’t have buttons, and her fingers would never get used to the awkward motion. Lily had begged her to learn English and turned up the radio full blast in hopes that the English words would sink into her brain, but it hadn’t done any good. Her soul just faded away, lost in the memory of some distant koto music….
Whenever she thought about her mother, she felt herself slipping, her chest lurching, the ground loosening beneath her feet. The same feeling she’d had as a child, crouched under the kitchen table. It started gently with just a taunt — Can’t this woman get anything right? Can’t she even learn to cook pasta? — but then his hand unfurled in a slap and tightened into a fist. The thud of flesh against flesh, followed by her mother’s soft, stoic moaning. The beatings always seemed to be set off by some failure on her mother’s part to assimilate to American culture. Didn’t she realize that the porcelain plate with Eleanor Roosevelt’s picture in the centre was meant for hanging on the wall, not eating from? And was it really so difficult to learn to use a knife and fork?
Lily would curl into herself and pray that the release of violence might bring out her father’s relaxed, jovial side. Perhaps afterward her mother would clean herself up and her father would ask whether they wanted to go to the ocean for a picnic. The brisk air, the salty sting of tears. Gulls plunging and ascending across the horizon. The ocean scene somehow seemed to wash clean the situation, allowing Lily to forget what had just happened. So during the onslaught of violence, Lily learned to grasp on to these images and anticipate their purifying, lulling effect as she hid under the table and rocked on her haunches.
After her mother had left, her father’s drinking got worse, and the rumours spread by women in the community became more vicious by the day. Girls in Lily’s class were no longer allowed to associate with her. Your mother’s not coming back. She ran off with a man to Japan!
Her mother was rumoured to have met her lover on the ship that carried her back to Fukuoka. It was supposed to be just a visit to her ailing father. But that visit had turned into a lifetime of separation.
How different her mother’s life might have been if she’d married a man like Dr. Takemitsu. How different Lily’s own life could have been, too.
Things got worse. Late at night, her father would stagger around the house calling out for his wife, commanding her to fetch another bottle from the basement. Lily tried to soothe him by bringing whatever he asked for, and later she’d help him out of his clothes as he flopped