Toyo: A Memoir

By Lily Chan

Toyo learned to ask nothing, to wait and count the days. But they passed and passed and still the doorway remained empty of his deep voice, calling out her name.

Blending the intimacy of memoir with an artist’s vision, Toyo is the story of a remarkable woman, a vivid picture of Japan before and after war, and an unpredictable tale of courage and change in today’s Australia.

Born into the traditional world of pre-war Osaka, Toyo must always protect the secret of her parents’ true relationship. Her father lives in China with his wife; her unmarried mother runs a café. Toyo and her mother are beautiful and polite, keeping themselves in society’s good graces.

Then comes the rain of American bombs. Toyo’s life is uprooted again and again. With each sharp change and painful loss, she becomes more herself and more aware of where she has come from. She finds family and belief, but still clings to her parents’ secret.

In Toyo, Lily Chan has pieced together the unconventional shape of her grandmother’s story. Vibrant and ultimately heart-rending, Toyo is the chronicle of an extraordinary life, infused with a granddaughter’s love.

Winner of the 2013 Dobbie Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2013 Colin Roderick Award

‘[Chan’s] tender voice is remarkably consistent and filled with indelible images of her grandmother's other world.’ —The Age

‘You can see why Chan … won the Peter Blazey Fellowship for manuscript-in-progress for this book.’ —The Australian

‘This is a beautifully lyrical and compelling voice, infused with deep insight and love’ —Alice Pung

‘Colourful, astonishing and intelligent.’ —Courier Mail

‘Vivid and surprising at every turn’ —Amanda Lohrey

‘An exquisite memoir’ —Manly Daily

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781921870736

Lily Chan

Lily Chan was born in Kyoto, raised in Narrogin and now resides in Melbourne. Toyo was the recipient of the 2010 Peter Blazey Fellowship for a manuscript-in-progress.

Book preview

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

37–39 Langridge Street

Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

email: [e-mail]

http://www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright © Lily Chan 2012

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photo copying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Chan, Lily.

Toyo : a memoir / Lily Chan.

ISBN for eBook edition: 9781921870736

ISBN for print edition: 9781863955737 (pbk.)

Chan, Toyo. Japanese--Australia--Biography. Women immigrants--Australia--Biography. Osaka (Japan)--Social conditions--20th century. Osaka (Japan)--Social life and customs.

920.720994

Cover: Toyo as a child, family photograph, circa 1937.

contents

the apple doesn’t say a thing but the apple’s feeling is clear

the never repeated encyclopaedia

that effulgent light

epilogue

family tree

acknowledgements

the girl from gotoretto

When Toyo was a pre-embryo floating in metaphysical space

her future mother Kayoko, a fisherman’s daughter, was running barefoot on one of the islands of Gotoretto. Gotoretto was a cluster of islands trailing the sinuous land mass of southern Japan.

The villagers noted Kayoko’s strange blue-green eyes and murmured about ghosts and demons and possession, but she grew up just like the other girls, tending rows of sweet potatoes and cabbages and mending fishing nets till her palms grew coarse with rope burn and sea salt, and dirt crusted her fingernails.

The men fished in round wooden boats using long sticks as oars, and from a distance Kayoko saw them bobbing up and down on the waves like little people in giant bowls. The women helped unload the fish and coiled the nets, repairing them when they tore. The men dived into the sea for pink coral. The women crafted the pink coral into jewellery to sell in Nagasaki. Customers delighted in the luminous pieces, tying them around obis and pinning clusters to their hair to match the cherry blossoms.

Kayoko wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to work in a white uniform with her hair pinned under a cap, her hands firm but gentle. She wanted doctors to rely on her without a second glance at the patient’s clipboard or dosage of medicine.

On a trip to Nagasaki she bought books on human anatomy, physiology, disease and treatment.

You will not be a nurse, you will not study, her father shouted. You will be married just like your sisters.

Her mother stood silently at the door and patted Kayoko’s hair when he left. Kayoko shied away. She studied at night on her thick futon, a small lamp by her side as she scratched notes on common colds and infections. Her father caught her studying a diagram of the lungs. He burned the books and beat her. Kayoko wept tears of anger and plotted her escape.

Freedom came in the form of Mrs Takahashi, who was making a nostalgic trip around her childhood home on a brief holiday. Mrs Takahashi’s family formed the fishing stronghold of Fukue Port, the largest town on the island of Fukue. They owned many boats and nets, and had sometimes loaned a number to the Fukuyamas, who were the equivalent fishing stronghold in the smaller town of Tomi-ye Bay, across the other side of the island. The two families had weathered the mercurial seas and winds over decades.

Mrs Takahashi came to the Fukuyama family with a proposal they were obliged to accept. She needed a maid. They had an unmarried daughter. Kayoko was prompted to introduce herself.

My name is Fukuyama Kayoko, I’m sixteen years old. I can learn quickly, I’m smart, I’m tough.

Mrs Takahashi was moon-faced and placid. She was also childless. She looked kindly at the young girl with the almost-European blue eyes and saw how the ocean gnawed at her, made her restless.

My husband Kouzo-san works in China. Are you prepared to –

I want to go to China.

Mr Takahashi had a wide girth, thick thumbs and a voice resonant as a temple bell. Thirty years Kayoko’s senior, he worked in the Japanese-occupied city of Qingdao.

Kayoko quietly folded herself into the Takahashi household. She brimmed with intuition. The tea was brewed before Mr Takahashi asked for it; the accounts were paid and noted in a neat hand on the register before they fell due; his getas cleaned and lined in the entranceway before he departed; his kimono folded just so; his rice cooked to a certain softness. The shutters captured the light, shades of sunset caught and flung across his room like a rosy shawl.

When a kimono-clad Kayoko attempted to go to the market to buy vegetables, the rickshaw driver choked. Madam, do you think you can get away with that? Speaking in broken Japanese, he was incredulous. Wearing a kimono into the war zone!

She motioned for him to proceed.

He motioned at her kimono. I warned you!

Kayoko hid her face behind a fan to protect herself from the occasional pebble thrown by locals. Their contorted faces frightened and excited her. Her blood pumped furiously as the rickshaw ran through the streets.

You’re either brave or foolish, madam, and I can’t tell which, the driver shouted over his shoulder.

Some mornings he refused to take her. If you go today, I’m telling you, you’ll get killed out there.

The Takahashi household sat near a tract of land used for farming. The farmers’ flat faces were weathered and the earth pressed its thumb into their backs, marking them at birth. They traced the inclines of the land daily, following set patterns like lines of ants.

Kayoko noticed an old woman bending over and coughing along the road, carrying a straw basket of laundry and a cloth parcel of yams. Kayoko watched her climb a slope and disappear into a nearby house.

The next day she brought the old woman a tin of wheat flour. The woman’s suspicion gave way to a surprised gratitude. She invited Kayoko into her small house. The rooms smelled of ginger and freshly cut spring onions. Two boys looked up, startled, as she stepped into the kitchen, then curled in their knees and watched her silently.

Kayoko stopped by every few days. She picked up phrases and used them on the boys and their grandmother, studying reactions. From a combination of sharp, high-pitched syllables and gestures, Kayoko gathered that the boys’ parents were further inland, working the farms.

She liked the Chinese. She liked their pragmatism, their sly humour and the multi-layered intonations of their language. A subtle flick of the voice, like a whip, was the difference between the words mother and horse. The children’s faces were impenetrable, but as the months passed Kayoko began to detect the emotions flickering at the edges of their lips and eyes and shoulders.

Mr Takahashi caught her wrist as she bent near him to pick up a fallen cloth. Her wrist was white and slender. The eyes that met his were not those of a timid girl; they met his gaze without flinching. She let him touch her shoulders, her back, her breasts. She lay on the futon and watched his thick fingers unwrap layers of clothing. She understood, without being told, that her place in the Takahashi household had been designed with this in mind; that perhaps Mrs Takahashi had even been complicit in her selection.

When Kayoko’s belly swelled with his child, she boarded the ship back to Japan. She moved to a two-storey apartment in Osaka and began to convert the ground floor into a small café. She was determined to invade the dreams of men and women with the heady smell of coffee.

Her desire to become a nurse seemed as faint and far away as her life in Tomi-ye Bay. She dreamed of running from a maelstrom, a monster composed of her family members, but longing, still, to join them: running towards them in longing and then bounding away from them in anguish. In another dream, people ran around her, babbling in Mandarin. She implored them to stop and speak slowly so she could understand.

She wrote to him:

I have called her Toyo.

the mole

Every morning in the pre-dawn, Kayoko greeted the gods. She prayed in front of the small wooden shrine: a carved box anointed with flowers, incense and a ceramic cup of water. Toyo usually awoke at the sound of her mother’s hands clapping twice.

Some cold winter mornings Toyo snuggled deeper into her futon and tried to return to sleep, but Mother was adamant. She would call her daughter’s name and if there was no patter of footsteps, proceed to Toyo’s room and pull back the covers.

Time to honour the gods, she would say.

In front of the shrine Toyo sleepily murmured kyo mo yoroshiku onegaishimasu and clapped her hands twice in perfect imitation.

Mother would throw out the day-old water in the cup and fill it up again. She told Toyo the water was an offering to the gods, being pure and clear, but by the end of the day it was tainted with impure thoughts, ghosts and evil spirits, and should be discarded.

A man came to Toyo’s home. Toyo peered at him from the hallway. His voice was deep and he was as huge as a sumo wrestler.

This is your father, Mother whispered in Toyo’s ear. Her eyes shone and she pushed Toyo forward.

Toyo did not need prompting; she ran to him and shouted "Otosan!" with the smile she had held inside for so long. He leaned down, caught her flying body and swooped her into the air in one motion. She was a pebble in his hands lifted up and up towards his face.

As he talked to Mother she fiddled with his kimono and it fell open at his chest. She spotted a large brown mole. She poked it. It wobbled. She twisted it. When she let go, the mole turned like a spinning top, phlip phlip phlip phlip. Father laughed and his body jiggled, an earthquake tremor.

She heard Mother say, She’s full of mischief.

Father murmured, Don’t twist it too much or the mole will fall off!

Wrapped in his kimono, twisting his mole, Toyo giggled. "Can I do it again? Can I, Otosan?" She loved to say that word. Otosan. Father. She couldn’t say it often enough.

He told her about his two big white dogs. They shared a kennel and raced each other across the garden, their tongues hanging out. Toyo was usually afraid of dogs, but she would make an exception for Father’s.

The next morning Toyo danced out of her room to greet him, but Mother grabbed her by the arm. Toyo! Don’t twist his mole anymore. When Father says it hurts, it really does hurt!

Toyo peered around Mother’s arms and saw Father sitting on a chair. He looked tired. He would not laugh today. She could not crawl inside his clothing and twist his mole. She tiptoed back to her room. By noon he was gone.

The next time Father visited the house, he told Toyo, Put on your shoes; we’re going to meet your stepbrother.

She rolled on her socks, then put on her black shoes with the shoelaces tied in a double knot and reached up to grasp Father’s hand and he walked her to a shopping emporium.

The white sun made the shopping emporium glow through its tall windows. People towered over her, benign and featureless. Out of this sea of shoppers stepped a handsome young man. He bent down on one knee and smiled at Toyo and asked if she liked to dance. Without waiting for an answer he began to tap across the white tiles, his black leather shoes flying in a restless tip-tap. He whirled her around the floor.

Years later she remembered his broad, unguarded grin, his hands holding her upright and Father clapping from the periphery of her vision. The white walls folded and enclosed her in a swirl of breathless joy. Toyo treasured these moments with Father; she held them in her mind and rotated them like origami sculptures, folding and unfolding.

"When will Otosan visit again?" Toyo often asked. Mother always ignored this question or curtly told her to complete a chore. Toyo learned to ask nothing, to wait and count the days. But they passed and passed and still the doorway remained empty of his deep voice, calling out her name.

the café

Toyo lived with Kayoko on the floor above the café. By the time Toyo was six years old she was packing coffee beans in handkerchiefs and distributing the parcels to curious school friends. The scent of cinnamon and cocoa infused her clothes and she floated to school and back, unaware of her friends’ rapturous sniffs as she came within their scent orbit.

Kayoko served coconut cake, chocolate raspberry fingers, roasted beans ground into coffee brew. She swept gracefully between tables in the narrow room, mopping up a spill, distributing sugar cubes, chatting to regulars. The café was a retreat for the upper crust of Osaka society in the late 1930s. She deftly knitted her regular customers into a network of artists, government ministers, police officials, traders and their wives.

The café operated to a soundtrack of jazz and blues and concertos by Vivaldi, Handel and Bach. The melodies soaked through the floor of Toyo’s bedroom and into her feet until she felt compelled to whirl around the room. Her legs grew long and slender. Her futon became a stage from which she waved gracefully at her fans as she strode up and down. She practised different expressions in the mirror: from a rictus of anguish to a demure pout, from radiance to panic.

Why are you wriggling your bum? demanded Mother. The door was open.

Toyo spun on one heel and flailed in mid-air. Uh, no reason, Mother!

Gyrating your hips is not lady-like.

Yes, Mother.

Sometimes Toyo addressed her reflection in the mirror, asking questions and answering them in a mono-dialogue.

You’re an odd child, Toyoko, Mother said, and laughed.

Given how rarely it happened, Toyo was pleased when she made Mother laugh.

War was already in the air. When the police made rounds to confiscate Western music and literature, a chocolate-and-coffee-plied official leaked the news to Mother. Mother gathered up the forbidden records and handed them to Toyo, who scampered upstairs and hid them under a tatami mat.

Mother slid a record of folk music under the needle and the strident, husky voices of Hokkaido women threaded through the resonant strings of the shamisen. As the police knocked on doors and made their way down the street, the women sang of winter, spring blossoms, lost love and tragedy.

One day each week Mother strapped a wooden ruler to Toyo’s back against her undershirt to prevent her slouching. Toyo felt the ruler press against her and shifted uncomfortably.

It’s good for you, Mother said. Good posture is import­ant.

She crafted her daughter into fine lines of feminine poise. She taught her how to walk, talk and sip tea. She taught her how to laugh without baring her teeth. She taught her how to greet people – men and women, customers and shop owners – and phrases of respect to use for the elderly. She also instructed Toyo on how to respond to the range of questions that might be raised by a wall of angry mouths and demanding eyes, wanting to know where she hailed from, what she did.

When they ask you where your father is, tell them he is away on business in China and he will come to visit soon.

If they ask you why your father is not yet here, tell them that he is delayed on an important business trip assisting government ministers.

If they ask you why your mother moved here, tell them that she came here to study but was unable to finish her studies and began working, which is when she met your father.

If they ask where you come from, tell them you were born here and grew up in Osaka, and your mother’s family live faraway in the countryside, on a farm.

Toyo repeated these statements after her, one by one, and as she did, she began to see them form in her mind, the farm faraway in the countryside with rice paddies and her grandmother bending down with a cloth wrapped around her head, placing the seedlings in the knee-deep trenches. She could see Father on a ship sailing home from China, his arms full of gifts for her and her mother.

Every time Toyo repeated these statements to the customers or her friends’ mothers, the images grew stronger. Then Mother’s niece, Yoshino, came to live with them and help out at the café. Yoshino told Toyo about the island where her family lived, and the image of rice paddies was replaced by fishermen plunging into the ocean in their little boats.

One of Mother’s four brothers visited too, but only overnight. He had moved, with his family, to the port town of Akashi, and conducted a trade as a craftsman: fashioning jewellery, collar pins and brooches from pink coral. He said to Mother, I was going to bring some takoyaki, but I was afraid they wouldn’t keep.

Toyo went into her room while they talked. When she emerged, they were kneeling on the tatami mat, crying, and he was holding Mother’s hands. Behind a rice-paper screen, Toyo shifted from foot to foot, then hid in her room again.

Write down a list of your good and bad points, Mother told Toyo. Try to eliminate the bad ones and improve the good ones every day.

Toyo half-heartedly scribbled:

My good points. Helping Mother in the café. Being kind to others.

My bad points. Being lazy. Sometimes I lie and hide things from Mother.

I eat the cakes in the café.

Toyo’s favourite place was the pantry: it was packed with white boxes of cakes, of truffle

apricot

gingernut

peach

raspberry almond

plum nectarine

white black brown chocolate

scrolled cream sponges lined with fresh jam and honey syrup glaze. The white boxes opened like flowers, the lids folding back like petals to reveal the sweet centres underneath. Toyo could not resist. She cut a slice of each new cake.

Yoshi, have you noticed a mouse nosing about the pantry? Mother asked her niece.

A mouse with long black hair, Yoshino laughed.

It nibbles at all the cakes but very neatly, so that it only takes one slice from each.

It must be a clever mouse.

Unfortunately I’ve never caught it.

Neither have I.

Toyo licked the cream from her lips behind the closed door. She was relieved they did