Mary Waters - The Favorites

“This bread’s for Mother,” Mrs. Nishimura explained. “She tears off little pieces and dips them in sugar. She calls it a nostalgic craving.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “That’s right. She told me a long time ago that it used to be a special treat when she was growing up in the country.” She opened her own string bag for inspection. “All I have so far is pickled seaweed.”

They were suddenly approached by a middle-aged woman from Mrs. Nishimura’s choir. “Nishimura-san!” The woman gave two half-bows of greeting, one for each person. “Do you live in this area too?”

Mrs. Nishimura and her mother automatically jerked away from each other, embarrassed to be caught peering into each other’s shopping baskets.

“Maa, Kimura-san, good morning! This is my…” But aunt felt wrong somehow, after all that had happened. She had a sudden impulse: How would it feel to stand here on this street, in the bright light of day, and tell the truth? It would make no difference to her choir mate.

“This,” she said, “is my mother, Haruko Kobayashi. And this is Mrs. Aki Kimura, who sings with me in the choir.” For a brief moment, time stood still.

“How do you do?” The choir woman bowed, unaware that anything was out of the ordinary.

Mrs. Kobayashi, usually such a fluent conversationalist, could not speak. She was deeply moved; it showed plainly on her face. But she had enough social presence to bow deeply, more deeply than the occasion required, in order to make up for her muteness.

Seeing her mother’s tremulous mouth, Mrs. Nishimura felt a piercing joy. And a sort of wonder: with a single word, she had turned all her years of yearning into a benediction for her mother.

The first day back in her grandmother’s house gave Sarah a sense of wavering in time. Her American self dropped away. In its place, long-forgotten former selves came swimming up from the depths: the little girl who had attended school in Japan, the fourteen-year-old who had lived here one summer, the various older selves she had been on subsequent visits. She was twenty-four years old. She had passed the CPA exam and joined the tax department of a multinational corporation.

“This soup is delicious,” she said. “Creamy. Very delicate.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “I changed the ratio of white miso to red. That way it won’t interfere with the flavor of the squash.”

“Look at these colors.” Sarah held out her bowl at arm’s length, admiring the overall effect. “So nice and autumnal. The orange of the squash, the speckled brown of the mountain potato…”

“Against the red lacquer of the bowl,” said her grandmother proudly.

“A perfect combination.”

Sarah returned the bowl to its proper position in the palm of her left hand.

“No one makes breakfasts like this anymore,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. She nodded at the array of side dishes: eel omelette, umeboshi, glazed kelp and beans. “Over at Granny’s house, they sometimes eat their rice with nothing but miso soup and fried eggs. Momoko told me.”

“Not very satisfying,” said Sarah, forgetting that her usual breakfast in America was nothing but cereal and a banana.

They ate contentedly.

Sarah gazed about at the wooden posts and fusuma panels of her childhood. She still half expected to hear her grandfather’s hammer tap-tapping in the workroom.

“It’s quiet with him gone, ne,” she said. Mr. Kobayashi had died of a heart attack two years ago. Although his loss paled in comparison with that of her parents, Sarah had loved her grandfather and his death had been a shock.

“Yes, it’s hard to get used to. It’s strange living alone.”

Sarah remembered his affectionate, if clumsy, presents: boxes of caramels for her, packets of Japanese radish seeds for her mother, a bottle of processed seaweed paste (“to put on your bread when you get home”) or some other impractical thing for them to take home to America.

“Granny Asaki visited me the week he died-did I ever tell you? You’d gone home by then.”

Sarah shook her head.

“She rang the bell at the visitor gate. I’m thinking, what’s all this? Then she seats herself in the parlor and bows her head to the floor, over and over. She says, ‘You were a fine wife. He didn’t deserve you. It’s humbled me all these years, the way you worked so hard without complaining.’”

“How lovely,” said Sarah. “I adore Japanese formality.”

Mrs. Kobayashi snorted. “Well, it’s true. I gave him decades of exemplary service. It was for my own self-respect.” Then her voice softened. “He appreciated it near the end, though. He used to look up from his plate and say, all gruff and embarrassed, ‘You were always good to me. Thank you.’”

Sarah nodded.

“I did more than enough for the man,” her grandmother said briskly. “I have no regrets.”

“Do you ever dream about him?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“No. I still dream about my parents, though. I keep forgetting they’re dead. You’d think after six years, it would soak through to my subconscious.”

Her grandmother, chewing, nodded with interest and encouragement.

“It’s odd,” said Sarah, “that they’re so fresh in my dreams. It’s like that part of my brain is frozen in time.”

“Yes, the human brain is very mysterious.”

Sarah had thought the same thing ten years ago, when the burbling of pigeons brought back her eight-year-old self.

“Where are the pigeons?” she said now. “I don’t hear any.”

“Aaa, they’re all gone. The temple ban finally had its effect.”

They ate silently. Sarah’s thoughts returned to her grandfather. It was a pity that as she grew into womanhood, the scrim separating adult and child had never lifted between them as it had with her grandmother. Now he was gone, and his inner life would always be a mystery. He must have been lonely, she thought. He must have had love to give, though much of it had gone unclaimed.

Sarah and her grandmother were walking to the open-air market. The morning was hushed and gray, absorbing sound and turning the lanes into a silent movie.

“Oh, that smell!” she cried, breathing in the long-forgotten aroma of burning leaves. Back home in California, backyard fires were against the law.

“Soh, it’s that time of year,” agreed her grandmother, as if humoring a child.

This was the first time Sarah had visited in November. The pungent smell took her far back in time, to her kindergarten days in the Kyoto hills. During recess their teacher had tended a small fire in the center of the playground and raked out indigenous sweet potatoes, blistered and blackened, for the children’s afternoon snack.

They approached Murasaki Boulevard and crossed the intersection. “A! A!” Mrs. Kobayashi exclaimed. “Good thing I remembered! Remind me, if I forget, to buy shiso leaves. You know, to wrap the sashimi in.”

The open-air market had changed since the seventies. There was a new supermarket, where they bought a small bundle of shiso leaves. The store wasn’t as big as the supermarkets in California; the aisles were too narrow for shopping carts. But it was just as well, for once-a-week shopping was still an alien concept for Ueno women. The supermarket was popular for its cheap produce, mass-farmed and shipped in from distant places. Women had stopped buying locally grown vegetables; they were too expensive during the economic recession. Vendor carts were a pleasant rarity. The sun-browned farmers in their old-fashioned garb seemed like relics from another era.

“This street’s so quiet!” said Sarah. Vendors no longer hawked their wares with loud, exuberant bellows. Cash registers had replaced abacuses and jingling money bags.