Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction

Twentieth Century Short Fiction

Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Kyoko Iriye Selden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317466932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection includes translated works by Japanese women writers that deal with the experiences of modern women. The work of these women represents current feminist perception, imagination and thought. "Here are Japanese women in infinite and fascinating variety -- ardent lovers, lonely single women, political activists, betrayed wives, loyal wives, protective mothers, embittered mothers, devoted daughters.... a new sense of the richness of Japanese women's experience, a new appreciation for feelings too long submerged". -- The New York Times Book Review

14 In the Pot

Murata Kiyoko

DOI: 10.4324/9781315703138-14

Nabe no naka (1987). Translated by Kyoko Iriye Seiden. This story has benefited from the translation assistance of Hiroaki Sato and L.

I

It was evening, when it was still light outside.

As I sliced vegetables in the kitchen, Grandmother came in through the back door with the things she had picked from the garden.

Grandmother’s garden was small, and so was everything produced there—strawberries, cherry tomatoes, black corn…. She would pick those dainty things, and at that just a little at a time.

“Take a look, Tami.”

In her palm were four or five deep green, thin peppers.

“If you slice these thin, real thin, and scatter them when the pot is just about ready, it’ll add color to the soup.”

I took the green peppers from Grandmother’s hand. They were warm, probably from the heat they had absorbed all day under the summer sun. I put them on the cutting board and started to slice them.

As I moved the kitchen knife, music from the tape deck in a distant room reached my ear. My cousin Minako had the bad habit of playing the stereo while studying—although she never played it when she was lying on the floor reading comics and magazines.

Near me a big black iron pot was on the fire. In it, vegetables were boiling, trembling in the many little bubbles that surrounded them. A white vapor with the aroma of chicken began to rise, and a look into the pot somehow reminded me of the hot spring I had visited long ago on the sixth-graders’ field trip.

The stereo wasn’t the only sound that reached the kitchen. I could hear something else, too: the old pedal organ from the gloomy room behind Minako’s. It was the organ Grandmother had used when she taught elementary school long ago. Damaged by moisture, a few keys had stopped playing. So “Wild Rose” came wafting through, missing notes here and there—a wild rose with holes.

At the organ was my cousin Tateo.

It was an uncommon name—Ta-te-o; it meant “vertical man.” While listening to his organ, I dropped the sliced green peppers into the pot. Coinciding with the final section of “Wild Rose,” played as it was on an organ missing some keys, the green peppers fell onto the pieces of chicken in the pot as if full of sadness.

My brother Shinjirō returned through the kitchen door. Every day he took his school books and ran away from the strange noises of the house to the yard of a nearby shrine, where he took a nap.

“Did you study?” I asked as I removed the pot from the fire.

“Yeah,” he answered innocently.

He must have gotten a good sleep today. There were traces of grass on one cheek; that must have been the cheek he had slept on.

“I can study outdoors best,” he said, disappearing into a corner room.

This was at Grandmother’s house in the country.

The four of us, her grandchildren, came here in the last week of July when school was out for summer vacation. My little brother Shinjirō, myself, and our cousins Minako and Tateo.

Our grandmother was eighty. She was all skin and bones, but still very healthy.

Swaying in the green rice paddies that early afternoon, her small, white parasol immediately impressed us. Grandmother had waited a long time for us to come, standing on the path between the paddies. Wearing a skirt and shoes, she held the parasol that had been stored for years at the bottom of her chest of drawers.

Grandmother led us through the rice fields to her house. Once we entered, she scurried back and forth for a while between the kitchen and the dining room, now slicing cool watermelon, now offering cold wheat tea. Then she handed us an airmail letter.

It was a foreign letter to Grandmother from Hawaii. To begin with, this was the reason for our stay with her out in the country. Assuming an important air as if he were our representative, Tateo took the envelope with its bright blue and orange edges. The moment he glanced at it, Tateo must have felt as excited as Shinjirō, Minako, and I did. Contents aside, the blue and orange stripes alone thrilled us.

Opening the airletter, we saw a Japanese handwritten script that was even slightly clumsier than my brother Shinjirō’s:

Greetings

Mrs. Hanayama Sanae

I am the son of your younger brother Haruno Suzujirō

My father came to Hawaii from Japan in 1920 with a big dream he lived with pineapples and he will give me a big farm and will die soon the runaway wishes to see you please come see my father I beg of you

Sincerely

Clark

Thanks to Grandmother’s long life, Clark’s letter had reached her as he had hoped.

Hanayama is Grandmother’s married name, Sanae her given name.

She was not particularly pleased to find her younger brother alive, or that he was probably a millionaire on a pineapple farm. He belonged more than sixty years in the past.

Grandmother and Suzujirō might have been at odds, Tateo suggested. “Women are vengeful. They won’t visit an enemy even if he’s dead.”

She was even less excited about discovering her brother’s whereabouts, than she was about the outcome of this discovery: our parents, Minako’s parents, and Tateo’s parents had gone to Hawaii to see Suzujirō and Clark, leaving Grandmother to care for us in their absence.

Our parents had already exchanged many phone calls all through July, talking long and hard about this Hawaii thing; then they called Clark in Hawaii to establish their relationship as cousins. Our fathers told their employers that a relative was ill in order to take vacations from work, and probably also added the ensuing funeral and all kinds of other excuses, while our mothers asked neighbors and friends to keep an eye on our homes before they sent us off to Grandmother’s.

Though indifferent to the fuss around her, Grandmother came to meet us in the rice field wearing a skirt and shoes.

“Because things are this way,” she said, looking into our faces, “you should stay here through the summer. Now’s the only chance for you all. When you grow up, you’ll be going separate ways. Enjoy living together for now.”

Since our arrival at her house, that was the only thing Grandmother ever said concerning her younger brother in Hawaii. But more important, she was now very busy.

In the late afternoon of the day we arrived, Grandmother started a major search for something, opening all the cabinet doors in her spacious kitchen. She placed large, old pots in a row on the wooden floor. It seemed that there was a pot that she could not find, no matter where she looked. She turned her neck and tilted her head, trying to recall the time when she had used it every day.

“One big pot …, one, two, three middle-size pots, and one, two woks … and …”

I sat on the floor next to those pitch black iron pots. The wooden floor was cool and damp as always.

“The steamer pot’s here, but, well, where’s its lid?”

She lifted every one of the piled-up pots and looked inside. She won’t find the steamer lid, I thought. That’s because it—a substitute lid for an old miso vat—was on top of the cupboard where she had looked a while ago. As long as I did not tell, that lid would not come down from there. I should not tell her, I thought, that her grandchildren, already sixteen or seventeen, no longer cared for steamed sweet potatoes and pumpkin cakes.

“Well, I have my work cut out for me from today on,” said Grandmother, giving up her search. She stretched her back. “The pots are here. The grandchildren are here. It’s time to begin.”

Grandmother carried one of the old pots to the sink. The small pot she had been using until yesterday was stored away. Just then, the sound of the organ came from the inner room. Her hand still on the tap, Grandmother sighed. Following the old pot, the old organ had begun to play.

Tateo was fooling around, playing with only his right hand. He was nineteen, the oldest of us four. Having just passed into college this spring, he was absolutely determined not to study for the rest of the year. So he had been walking around the house just looking at things in a laid-back manner. The discovery of the organ seemed to bring a feeling of contentment to both Tateo and Grandmother.

“Try playing ‘Wild Rose,’” Grandmother had asked.

But … but the food that she prepared to the sound of Tateo’s organ music was absolutely dreadful.

It was a dish of pumpkin, Kōya-style tofu, and chicken, cooked together. The chicken and tofu were so black that they were indistinguishable in the pot. As for the pumpkin, it was no longer to be seen. Melted out of shape, it had served the unintended purpose of thickening the sauce.

Our tongues shriveled up from the saltiness of Grandmother’s overuse of soy sauce. In total silence, we moved our mouths. Having carelessly thrown a big morsel into my mouth, I had nowhere else to put it.

With the awful-tasting food on it, my tongue seemed to wander around, lost.

Grandmother alone chewed busily.

“Delicious, delicious. It’s so special when we eat together, isn’t it?” she said, and quickly finished two small bowls of rice.

Already on the first day of our stay out in the country, we despaired of Grandmother’s cooking. The second day was worse; the third even more serious. The cause of the poor quality of Grandmother’s cooking, I thought, was most certainly her false teeth. Probably she had always cooked soft food for herself and eaten it alone. And since her false teeth covered as far as the roof of her upper jaw, she had no doubt lost the ability to sense even half the taste.

In the middle of supper on the third day, Shinjirō suddenly faced her.

“Grandmother,” he said. “Let Tami do the cooking from tomorrow. I think that’ll be better for everyone. You’ll be less busy, too.”

Minako, Tateo, and I lowered our heads and closed our eyes, holding onto our rice bowls. Grandmother looked sad, her eyes falling on the pitch-black fish, overcooked and shapeless, on her plate.

And that was why, while I felt so sorry for her, Grandmother gave the kitchen over to me.

Grandmother loved stewed dishes flavored with soy sauce.

The menu I prepared in her place the following day was shrimp cooked with lotus root. With Shinjirō as my porter, I went down to the town at the foot of the mountain to get the ingredients.

Holding the serving bowl containing my stewed shrimp in both her hands, Grandmother was pleased to tears.

“Look what Tami made,” she said, lowering her head toward the bowl as if in prayer.

The next day I fixed eggplant stewed with beef and konnyaku. The day after that was fried leek and pork, and the day after that I prepared chicken liver with scallions and green peppers. The pot was emptied every day.

Tateo, who had passed the entrance exam hurdle in the spring, spent his time playing the organ, reading books, and usually took a nap. Minako, a high school junior, was unable to study seriously; she spent her time curling her hair, polishing her nails, or reading comics.

My younger brother Shinjirō, a junior high student, kept going out. At home, my parents always sent me to the road at dusk to meet him when he was out later than he was supposed to be, but this was a rural area with nothing but a temple, a pond, and bamboo groves and there was no need to worr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction—Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden
• The Family of Koiwai—Miyamoto Yuriko
• The Full Moon—Nogami Yaeko
• Blind Chinese Soldiers—Hirabayashi Taiko
• Narcissus—Hayashi Fumiko
• Residues of Squalor—Ōta Yōko
• Memory of a Night—Sata Ineko
• Love in Two Lives: The Remnant—Enchi Fumiko
• Ants Swarm—Kōno Taeko
• To Stab—Uno Chiyo
• Facing the Hills They Stand—Tomioka Taeko
• Congruent Figures—Takahashi Takako
• The Smile of a Mountain Witch—Ohba Minako
• Yellow Sand—Hayashi Kyōko
• In the Pot—Murata Kiyoko
• Glossary
• About the Authors
• About the Translators