* * *
With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have made a good balance and produced children with the proper arrangement of elements. I’m sure it was a surprise to them that they ended up with one of each. For it wasn’t just that I resembled my mother and had even inherited her unusual eyes; my sister, Satsu, was as much like my father as anyone could be. Satsu was six years older than me, and of course, being older, she could do things I couldn’t do. But Satsu had a remarkable quality of doing everything in a way that seemed like a complete accident. For example, if you asked her to pour a bowl of soup from a pot on the stove, she would get the job done, but in a way that looked like she’d spilled it into the bowl just by luck. One time she even cut herself with a fish, and I don’t mean with a knife she was using to clean a fish. She was carrying a fish wrapped in paper up the hill from the village when it slid out and fell against her leg in such a way as to cut her with one of its fins.
Our parents might have had other children besides Satsu and me, particularly since my father hoped for a boy to fish with him. But when I was seven my mother grew terribly ill with what was probably bone cancer, though at the time I had no idea what was wrong. Her only escape from discomfort was to sleep, which she began to do the way a cat does—which is to say, more or less constantly. As the months passed she slept most of the time, and soon began to groan whenever she was awake. I knew something in her was changing quickly, but because of so much water in her personality, this didn’t seem worrisome to me. Sometimes she grew thin in a matter of months but grew strong again just as quickly. But by the time I was nine, the bones in her face had begun to protrude, and she never gained weight again afterward. I didn’t realize the water was draining out of her because of her illness. Just as seaweed is naturally soggy, you see, but turns brittle as it dries, my mother was giving up more and more of her essence.
Then one afternoon I was sitting on the pitted floor of our dark front room, singing to a cricket I’d found that morning, when a voice called out at the door:
“Oi! Open up! It’s Dr. Miura!”
Dr. Miura came to our fishing village once a week, and had made a point of walking up the hill to check on my mother ever since her illness had begun. My father was at home that day because a terrible storm was coming. He sat in his usual spot on the floor, with his two big spiderlike hands tangled up in a fishing net. But he took a moment to point his eyes at me and raise one of his fingers. This meant he wanted me to answer the door.
Dr. Miura was a very important man—or so we believed in our village. He had studied in Tokyo and reportedly knew more Chinese characters than anyone. He was far too proud to notice a creature like me. When I opened the door for him, he slipped out of his shoes and stepped right past me into the house.
“Why, Sakamoto-san,” he said to my father, “I wish I had your life, out on the sea fishing all day. How glorious! And then on rough days you take a rest. I see your wife is still asleep,” he went on. “What a pity. I thought I might examine her.”
“Oh?” said my father.
“I won’t be around next week, you know. Perhaps you might wake her for me?”
My father took a while to untangle his hands from the net, but at last he stood.
“Chiyo-chan,” he said to me, “get the doctor a cup of tea.”
My name back then was Chiyo. I wouldn’t be known by my geisha name, Sayuri, until years later.
My father and the doctor went into the other room, where my mother lay sleeping. I tried to listen at the door, but I could hear only my mother groaning, and nothing of what they said. I occupied myself with making tea, and soon the doctor came back out rubbing his hands together and looking very stern. My father came to join him, and they sat together at the table in the center of the room.
“The time has come to say something to you, Sakamoto-san,” Dr. Miura began. “You need to have a talk with one of the women in the village. Mrs. Sugi, perhaps. Ask her to make a nice new robe for your wife.”
“I haven’t the money, Doctor,” my father said.
“We’ve all grown poorer lately. I understand what you’re saying. But you owe it to your wife. She shouldn’t die in that tattered robe she’s wearing.”
“So she’s going to die soon?”
“A few more weeks, perhaps. She’s in terrible pain. Death will release her.”
After this, I couldn’t hear their voices any longer; for in my ears I heard a sound like a bird’s wings flapping in panic. Perhaps it was my heart, I don’t know. But if you’ve ever seen a bird trapped inside the great hall of a temple, looking for some way out, well, that was how my mind was reacting. It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn’t simply go on being sick. I won’t say I’d never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.
“I thought I would die first,” my father was saying.
“You’re an old man, Sakamoto-san. But your health is good. You might have four or five years. I’ll leave you some more of those pills for your wife. You can give them to her two at a time, if you need to.”
They talked about the pills a bit longer, and then Dr. Miura left. My father went on sitting for a long while in silence, with his back to me. He wore no shirt but only his loose-fitting skin; the more I looked at him, the more he began to seem like just a curious collection of shapes and textures. His spine was a path of knobs. His head, with its discolored splotches, might have been a bruised fruit. His arms were sticks wrapped in old leather, dangling from two bumps. If my mother died, how could I go on living in the house with him? I didn’t want to be away from him; but whether he was there or not, the house would be just as empty when my mother had left it.
At last my father said my name in a whisper. I went and knelt beside him.
“Something very important,” he said.
His face was so much heavier than usual, with his eyes rolling around almost as though he’d lost control of them. I thought he was struggling to tell me my mother would die soon, but all he said was:
“Go down to the village. Bring back some incense for the altar.”
Our tiny Buddhist altar rested on an old crate beside the entrance to the kitchen; it was the only thing of value in our tipsy house. In front of a rough carving of Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, stood tiny black mortuary tablets bearing the Buddhist names of our dead ancestors.
“But, Father . . . wasn’t there anything else?”
I hoped he would reply, but he only made a gesture with his hand that meant for me to leave.
* * *
The path from our house followed the edge of the sea cliffs before turning inland toward the village. Walking it on a day like this was difficult, but I remember feeling grateful that the fierce wind drew my mind from the things troubling me. The sea was violent, with waves like stones chipped into blades, sharp enough to cut. It seemed to me the world itself was feeling just as I felt. Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable? I’d never had such a thought before. To escape it, I ran down the path until the village came into view below me. Yoroido was a tiny town, just at the opening of an inlet. Usually the water was spotted with fishermen, but today I could see just a few boats coming back—looking to me, as they always did, like water bugs kicking along the surface. The storm was coming in earnest now; I could hear its roar. The fishermen on the inlet began to soften as they disappeared within the curtain of rain, and then they were gone completely. I could see the storm climbing the slope toward me. The first drops hit me like quail eggs, and in a matter of seconds I was as wet as if I’d fallen into the sea.