Obaachan's Story: Journey in the Land of Strangers

By Junko Geddes

In my recurring nightmare... unfathomable monster chases after me, trying to squeeze the air out of me with its giant hands. Desperately, I try to escape without knowing where to run. It lives in my dreams, freezes my blood, and pounds my soul down to the pulp. During the daylight, I do my chores, fulfill my obligations as a mother, wife, a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781641115254

Book preview

PROLOGUE

O

ne day, when I was playing cards with my five-year-old grandson, Davon, surprised me by saying, "Obaachan. You came from Japan, right?" His handsome face wore a big question mark. His chubby little fingers spread, barely holding a fan of cards against his face, his hazel eyes were twinkling with curiosity.

That’s right, a long time ago, before either your daddy or your aunt Miyo was born, I had lived in Japan.

It struck me then that not only Davon but neither my daughter nor my son hardly knew about my life in Japan when I was a young girl of spirit and dreams.

It had been a long time since I had buried in my mind my childhood, my family, my friends and my teachers. From the moment my feet touched North American soil, I became just a pretty Oriental young woman, quiet, and modest with no identity and with no character.

My grandson made me realize what I had been missing, the memories of my past, the foundation of what I am, and the very reason of my profound loneliness.

PART ONE

MOTHER

M

other, Motoko Ishido, came from Yamagata city in Yamagata prefecture, on the North Western coast of Japan’s main island. Her father, Tokubei Ishido, was wealthy and influential in the city. Mother often said, When you get off the train at Yamagata train station, all you need to do is to mention the name of ‘Ishido’. They would tell you where we lived.

Tokubei and his wife, Kiku, owned the huge property that included mountains behind it. The family was one of the four founders of the construction of a temple in Yamagata.

Tokubei and Kiku had ten children and my mother, Motoko, was the middle of ten siblings. Kiku had never had to nurse any of her ten children. They all were nursed and cared for by their nursemaids.

Mother, who was well known by her beauty, was Tokubei and Kiku’s favorite child. She graduated from Yamagata Women’s School at a time when educated women were scolded; she was athletic, artistic and intelligent. She often told us how she commuted to and from school in the winter. Instead of taking a regular road that wrapped around their hill, she took a short cut by simply going straight up the snow-covered hill with skis, using a single bamboo pole, and skied down the hill to the back yard of her school. Tokubei spent many long winter nights rubbing wax on his children’s skis.

They lived in a large two-story house that had many rooms, not only for their ten children but also for several servants. Their daily conduct and exchange of conversation were formal. They rarely demonstrated their affection toward the children.

FATHER

M

y grandfather, Kichinoshin Kudo, was the police chief of Ibaraki city in Osaka prefecture, married to Ishi Hashimoto from Yamagata city, Yamagata prefecture on the northwestern seacoast of Japanese main island. They had six children and Father was their youngest and was born late in their marriage, in 1908. Before Father was born, a train with the emperor on board made a brief stop at Ibaraki station in Osaka. All of a sudden, a man with a dagger dashed out of the crowd, attempting to approach the emperor’s train, but he was quickly subdued and was arrested. Unaware of the commotion, the emperor left the station in his train and resumed the journey.

However, Kichinoshin was gravely disturbed by this incident, took it as the direct result of his failure as the chief commander of the police force, and assumed full responsibility. He not only resigned but also refused to receive any government compensations that he was rightly entitled to.

After his resignation, for a short period of the time, he served Osaka Mint Bureau as the Director of the Mint Bureau. In January 1908 Father was born in the official residence of the Mint Bureau. When Father was four years old, Kichinoshin succumbed to pneumonia triggered by the complications from influenza.

After her husband’s death, my grandmother, Ishi, was left alone to support her three children (daughter, Fusako, son, Osamu, and youngest son, Yutaka, all still at home). Her late husband’s fortune steadily dwindled.

When my father, Yutaka, was ten, Ishi gave up her three children to her wealthy childless brother, Tokubei Nakamura, a renowned architect, and his wife who lived in Mino in Osaka prefecture, an exclusive mountainside resort famous for Mino no taki (Mino waterfalls), the cherry blossoms and fall colors.

However, Father missed his mother so much that he ran away from the Nakamura family, and begged his mother to take him back, promising her that he would do anything to help her. Ishi did not have the heart to send her youngest son back to the Nakamura family. Thus, Father helped his mother doing chores and dropped out of school to earn money by selling coal for fuel.

As a well-read and proud woman, the widow of the man of distinction who came from the line of bushi (samurai), Ishi, in the name of her late husband, was determined to educate her youngest son by herself. There were abandoned books in the house that belonged to her late husband. She did not have to coax her son to learn–he was famished for knowledge. He absorbed everything he read as a dry sponge soaks up water.

One day, on his route to sell coals, Father came across a group of men and women in navy blue uniforms with golden front buttons. They were playing trumpets and a large drum and handing out fliers to the people on the street. An unfamiliar word caught his attention; salvation. We are all brothers and sisters. Let us help, support each other. Come and join us in salvation of all mankind, the printed words said.

In the society where family troubles were kept within; where the dust rose, and settled inside closed doors; the Christian teachings of ‘salvation’, ‘benevolence’, and ‘unconditional love’ were the rays of hope for him, for his mother—for all the poor. He had been witnessing how alone his mother had been with the endless struggles to survive, having no one to turn to and nowhere to escape. A dormant pride pushed through stumped out earth—he might be poor, but never a savage.

He began studying Christian philosophy and later he became a believer.

When he was 20, he joined the military in Aomori, his only recourse to further schooling without formal education. His interest was philosophy and law. He studied earnestly, passed several exams. In 1929 at the age of twenty-two, he became the Private First Officer of the Military Police Corps in Yamagata.

He rented a room on the second floor of a wealthy family, Ishido.

Mother hardly ever revealed her emotion, was always composed and serene but had a burning desire to become an artist. After she graduated from Yamagata Women’s School, she expressed her passion for pursuing fine art and of moving in with her married eldest sister’s, Kimiko’s, family in Tokyo.

Alarmed by their favorite child’s announcement of leaving the family to live in Tokyo, and without getting married, become an artist. Tokubei and Kiku quickly sought after a suitable husband for her. They found him right in their house: their boarder from Osaka, Yutaka Kudo. Since Yutaka lived in their house, he and Mother had more or less seen each other. Their marriage arrangement proceeded swiftly and smoothly. They were married on May 14, 1931, in Yamagata city.

In 1932, at the age of twenty-five, Father was deployed to Shinkyo, the capital city of Manchuria Empire, and joined the Japanese military police force that patrolled and protected the city from horseback bandits that ambushed the city, killed, stole and kidnapped.

I was born on the 15th of April, 1944, in Shinkyo Tokubetsu (special) City. Shinkyo was a unique city that the Japanese government established in Manchuria. The city stood in the midst of a vast continent. It had the Japanese military base, as well as a hospital, schools, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, shops, movie theaters, factories, restaurants and so on; all owned and operated by Japanese citizens. The schools taught subjects following the Japanese academic calendar and curriculum, using the textbooks that were shipped from Japan.

By an act of fate, Father was appointed to form and lead a team of Japan’s first counter espionage called "Kudo Han (Kudo squad)". The top Japanese military and the government officials cautiously concealed the existence of Kudo Han; they dubbed it Kudo shitsu (Kudo room). It had no sign on its door. From then on, father was excused from regular military duties and wore civilian clothes. In other words, he was given a free hand in order to succeed in his mission.

My eldest brother, Susumu, remembers the day when he discovered that his father was indeed a soldier, how he jumped with joy and how he felt proud of Father. It was the day when a top-ranking Japanese government dignitary paid a rare visit to Shinkyo military base, and when the entire base dressed in full military gear to welcome him and his convoy with martial ceremonies. For the first time since he became the chief of Kudo Han, Father put on a full military uniform. Until then, Susumu had thought that his father was one of the Japanese civilians who worked in Shinkyo while almost all of his friends’ fathers were soldiers and wore uniforms. He had been secretly feeling ashamed of his civilian-clothed father.

Until toward the end of World War II, Father captured Russian spies, successfully converted them, sent them back into Russian territory, and obtained crucial military information from them.

When he was in his late sixties, Father began writing his wartime experience, the story hardly anyone knew about, the secret information gathered by the brave and loyal men whom Father hand-picked, and the episodes that were etched deep in his heart.

As the leader and a sole survivor of the secret operation, he feared that the time was running out on him fast. The facts that were kept concealed by the military and the government would remain hidden and would, soon, fade into oblivion along with those brilliant, courageous men, some Japanese some outstanding sharp locals who, when the war ended, were captured by Russians and had perished on Russian land.

Father and our family’s lives were spared by an un-foreseeable circumstance.

Just before the end of the war when I was still an infant, Father was summoned to Japan to become an instructor at Nakano Kenpei Gakko (Nakano Military Police Academy) in Tokyo.

TOKYO AIR RAID

When I was four months old, and soon after my family moved to Tokyo, the US air raid began. Overnight, the city of Tokyo was transformed into an inferno; there was the booming sound of bombs exploding, the hot tongues of flames threatening to lick everything on the ground instantly, the people spilling out onto the streets like a mad current rushing through narrow valleys.

The siren filled the midnight air. The flames from the burning buildings brightly lit the streets like the midsummer sun.

My eldest brother, Susumu, for the first time, witnessed a grown man cry from sheer fright. Mother strapped me on her back, gathered my four-year-old brother, Takashi, and rushed to the bookuugo (bomb shelter). We spent hours in the blackness of the overcrowded bookuugo where there was no room even to turn.

GENERAL MACARTHUR

Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. The war ended abruptly. The United States, led by General MacArthur, occupied Japan. Soon after the United States’ occupation of Japan, Russia demanded MacArthur turn my father over to Russia. MacArthur flatly rejected stating that Japan and Russia were not enemies and there was no ground for surrendering Father to them.

General MacArthur saved our father.

MINO

W

e moved into a house in the popular resort village of Mino in Osaka Prefecture. This two-story house belonged to Father’s uncle on his mother’s side, Sozaemon Nakamura; he was a well-known architect who built and restored temples in the Kyoto and Nara areas. He built the house we moved into using the same material used to build the temples.

The house stood on a hillside near the famous mino no taki (Mino Waterfall), a clear stream from a mountain above the hill that ran through its back yard. This house was a large two-story Japanese construction with a wraparound balcony on the second floor. The stone hedge bordered the property and ended at the dirt road below. Its interior resembled that of a temple, with several large tatami rooms, a long wide roka (a long wooden corridor) faced a deep sloping garden. At its center, between two large tatami rooms, was a huge smooth and shiny daikoku bashiraa (a central pillar that supports floor, walls, and roof), the circumference of which was longer than that of two adults’ stretched arms.

By the time our family moved in, Sozaemon had passed away, and Father’s older sister, Fusako, who was never married, was living alone with her elderly adoptive mother.

My memories started from this house like disjointed fragments of a dream with no sound: an old woman with a shock of white hair in a futon in the tatami room, a doctor examined her, men and women in black mourning hakama (traditional men’s trousers) and kimono. One by one, they bowed deeply to a woman in a white kimono in a white rectangular wooden box, and the traffic of women in white aprons carried food and sake to the crowded room. At night, I lay on a futon next to a man who wore a pair of eyeglasses in the room where the woman in white in the white box lay at our heads.

The woman in the white kimono in the white box float in ebony.

Even now, I am afraid to be alone in a room with a doll or anything white in the darkness. Years later I told Mother about this. She looked stricken, and in a barely audible voice said, Do you really remember that? My sister, Miyoko, who was two years younger, wasn’t born yet.

The woman was my aunt Fusako’s adoptive mother and the man was Mother’s younger brother, Masutaka.

I also remember "Hotaru Ga Ike (pond of fireflies)" near my house. It was shaped like a disk.

When the sun’s rays hit its surface from a certain angle, it looked like a golden disk. In the summer nights, the fireflies transformed the shore into a ring of flashing neon lights, reflecting on the inky surface—a universe beneath my feet.

Wearing a yukata (summer kimono), I went there with my aunt, Fusako, to catch the fireflies. I carried a fine bamboo insect cage and an uchiwa (a fan). Here and there around the pond, I saw the silhouettes of adults and children. They came to catch the fireflies. I chased after the dancing lights in the shadow holding the uchiwa up high. When the light came close to me, I gently swatted down my uchiwa. It fell on the grass. The light blinked at my feet. I bent over, gently scooped up the twinkling orange with my hand and put it in a bamboo insect cage.

When I got home, I put the cage on a shelf in the room where I slept alone. Inside the mosquito tent, I lay on my stomach on the futon, and I watched the amber specks wink in the darkness. They were like tiny fairies.

I remember when I first saw white men. Two huge golden-headed giants in khaki military uniforms with eyes so pale that they looked like holes in their faces came roaring up our hill on motorbikes. A Japanese man in a dark suit and a tie was with them. Terrified, I ran into my house. To my horror, they followed me and came through the entrance. I hid in an oshiire (closet) and listened to my mother’s calm polite exchange with the Japanese man who, in turn, communicated with the monsters in a strange tongue.

Father piled some wood in our back yard and started a fire. The white smoke rose and drifted toward the pine at the corner of our yard. Using a short stick, he poked and blew on the fire until the yellow flame started.

He squatted by a pile of papers, and in a mechanical motion, tossed the papers one by one into the fire. Each time when he put the paper into the fire, the flame grew. He watched it until it completely disappeared, then fed the fire, one by one.

Years later, I learned about the papers that he had burned that day. They were the records of his wartime activities including the commendation received from the Emperor written by his own hand.

After the war, the entire nation turned against the military. The father’s documents weighed no historical significance. The years, the best time of his life seemed to be lost, the risks he and his team had taken during the numerous dangerous missions left no significant marks. Father became despondent about his war-time efforts. He needed to free himself from the haunting vivid memories that pulsed and stabbed him from within. He had to sever the tie to the past. He destroyed everything that triggered his memories that brought him nothing but the bitterness and the despair.

He wished that he had saved at least two letters, one from a political prisoner and the other from his lawyer. The man was tried for his communist political activities. At the time of his trial, my father was the military prosecutor. He spent many hours with the prisoner in his cell. They exchanged their political philosophies and came to respect each other. Father requested the court for leniency. The man escaped the execution. Later, Father received the letters from both the lawyer and the prisoner.

The first food I remember eating was hard biscuits and potatoes that came in burlap sacks distributed by American GIs. We ate a lot of those. Mother peeled and boiled the potatoes, and then Father pounded them with a long-handled mallet used to make mochi until they turned into sticky goo. We ate it with Worcestershire sauce. I rather liked its taste, but Takashi did not. One day when he saw another sticky potato served at the dinner table, he complained, What?! Potatoes, again? To this, Father stood up, grabbed him by his shirt, and dragged him up the staircase.

Not a sound came from upstairs. They were up there for some time. Under the heavy silence, I sensed something was going on. After a while Father came down. His breathing was irregular.

I sneaked upstairs to see what had happened to Takashi. There was no light. The rooms were dark. I found him in one of large tatami rooms. He was tightly wrapped up with a long black sash from his chest to ankles and was wiggling like a black caterpillar. Though his mouth was not covered, not a sound was coming out. I stood at the entrance. Our eyes locked. His huge black eyes that reflected the light from somewhere and made them look like those of a trapped animal, glistening, and pleading.

I was shocked by what I saw. The violent act executed in silence was so chilling that my legs started to shake.

To this day, I had never witnessed Takashi cry.

When I was in nursery school, Father carried home a lifeless Takashi on his back. His arms and legs were wrapped in white bandages. He looked like a white ragdoll. Apparently, the doctor had extracted benign tumors from the muscles in his buttock, thighs and legs. The lumps were caused by some lack of nutrients in his diet. If they found more of it in his body, he could die.

I remember the day we sold aunt Fusako’s house and left Mino with a large open truck. I was sitting among the padded furniture on the back. When our truck passed by my nursery school, I saw my friends and teachers out in the back yard. They waved and shouted, "Jun-chan, sayonara, ogenkide ne, sayonara. (Jun-chan, good bye, take care, good bye.)" I waved back until my friends, teachers, the slide, swings, and sand box disappeared behind the tall trees.

I had no idea where we were heading or why and that I would never see them again.

OSTRACIZED

After Japan lost the War, the entire country repented the war efforts. They pointed fingers at military veterans, and treated them more or less like criminals. The society was particularly harsh toward high-ranking ex-officers, like Father.

For a brief time, after our family moved to Osaka, Father became the chief of the Osaka City police department. However, by the newly passed act of prohibiting ex-military officers from holding any public or government posts, Father was ousted. Father was more or less shunned from the society–nobody was willing to hire him. He had no business experience. He was an intellect and idealist, had never worked to make money.

He bought a small two-story house in Sakura Dori (Sakura Street) in Osaka.

Since he knew that he would not be able to find any employment, he opened a small candy shop in front of our house. His shop had a large display of candies in rectangular shallow wooden boxes covered with clear glass. A few people stopped to buy. The problem was that when a child watched enviously other kids getting some candies from their parents, Father always took out a small paper bag, put some candies in and handed it to the child. I must say that I was guilty, too, because, I brought my friends and asked Father to give them some candies. He never turned away any children who stood by his shop. Simply, he was not capable of grasping the fundamental principles of business. Candy lost was money lost.

Father made no profit from his candy shop. Within a year, he had to sell the house and move us to another location, Tachibana Dori (Tachibana Street) in Osaka.

Once again, having no prospect of finding any employment, he acquired a one-story run-down structure that stood in the vacant block and opened a noodle shop that also sold some bread. The only standing structure in the neighborhood was a public bath across from it. Charred abandoned homes occupied most of the neighborhood and the pungent air smelled of smoke. He had hoped that the people who came to bathe in the public bath would also stop at his noodle shop on their way home. Since he had never lived in a house without a bath, it did not dawn on him that there were many who lived in the houses with no baths, they came to the public bath solely to bathe, and they carried no extra change.

In those days, Father often brought home the bags full of unsold moldy bread which we ate for supper. I still remember the taste of the mold.

The money from the sale of my aunt’s mansion, without any new income, steadily evaporated. His unsuccessful business ventures took a big chunk of it, and the remainder went for supporting the family of eight. Father’s world was closing in on him.

TYPHOON JANE

The radio news said that Typhoon Jane, the strongest typhoon in recent history that hit Kansai region in the central part of Japan, was heading directly toward Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto. Father begun boarding up the windows and put a long heavy board against the front door so that it wouldn’t be blown away. Then, Father and Aunt Fusako left our house in order to protect his noodle shop. The rest of us all huddled in a room that was the middle section of the first floor and the largest room, and waited for the arrival of Typhoon Jane.

In the early afternoon of 3rd of September 1950, when I was six years old, the sky turned black like midnight. Typhoon Jane arrived with the sound of a heavy locomotive plowing through the atmosphere. Our house shook violently when the gust of wind hit. As the inside air pressure fractured, the cavity of our house heaved like a giant whale’s lungs. Boom. Whoosh. Boom. Whoosh. Windows and furniture rattled like toys. Gripped by an unfathomable terror, I screamed, then, curled up on a zabuton (a square cushion) and fell asleep.

When I woke up, the typhoon had passed, and the wind died down. When I went outside, white cotton clouds were floating in the clear blue sky, and I saw roof tiles piled high on the ground and the skeletons of houses stood here and there. Fortunately, our house, being in the center of nagaya (a block long townhouse), other than missing roof tiles, escaped from serious damage. The typhoon left a trail of large debris, fallen trees, dead animals, and even dead people.

Late in that evening, we heard that the force of the wind pushed back the seawater from Osaka Bay into Yodo River causing the river to swell at an alarming rate, and it was on the verge of overflow.

Father and my fourteen-year-old brother, Susumu, joined other volunteers in the effort of reinforcing the dyke with sandbags. Past midnight, the scream of a siren echoed in the still night signaling the bank had given in. The floodwater reached to our house. Our geta (wooden footwear) and shoes floated in the entranceway. We scuffled up the stairs to the second floor. Luckily, the floodwater did not come up to the tatami.

Shortly after Typhoon Jane, Father gave up on the noodle shop and began searching for a job. Every morning, father left home on a bicycle and came home late in the evening as though he had gone to work. As soon as we heard the front door open and Father came through the door, Miyoko jumped on his back, I went up to him, and we asked Did you find a job? He only shook his head. The size of our meals got increasingly smaller. On some days, the school lunches were the only meals Miyoko and I ate. I was too young to worry about whether Mother, Father, Aunt, Fusako, Susumu, Kumiko and Takashi ate any meals or not.

At night, I often watched Mother add more holes in Father’s leather belt or take in his trousers at the waist seams.

On those days, Mother frequently visited pawnshops. She wrapped her best gold embroidered silk kimono or beautiful abalone hair ornaments with gold and silver inlets in a furoshiki (wrapping cloth), carried them to a pawnshop, and came home with some groceries in her hands. The drawers of her tall dresser were getting empty, hardly anything left anymore.

SCHOOL LUNCH

I liked almost all the school lunches except the skim milk. They brought thin white lukewarm skim milk in a large tin bucket to the classrooms and poured it into a tin cup with a tin ladle with a long handle. As soon as the sweet smell of skim milk wafted up to nose, I started to feel weary. I knew what would come at the end of lunchtime. Our classroom teacher, Mrs. Nakanishi would tell five or six first-graders who didn’t finish the milk to stay behind. Sitting at the desk would lift her grey tin cup contained by then cold skim milk. Her eyes would scan the almost empty classroom. Then she would give us a demonstration; Lift your cup. Pinch your nose. Open your mouth. Drink it down. Like this. She would empty the cup.

I tried just that, then, as soon as I took a mouthful, started to gag. Mrs. Nakanishi looked at me and said sternly, Keep it down.

School lunch was not free. At the beginning of each month, teacher handed us brown envelopes that had 12 numbered squares on its face for us to bring lunch money in. When we returned with the envelopes with money in, the teacher would put a red stamp saying paid in one square. Most of my classmates’ envelopes were red with seals, but mine wasn’t. One day, Mrs. Nakanishi handed me a letter and said, Kudo-san, make sure to give this letter to your mother. I had no idea what the letter was for. As soon as I got home, I showed Mother the letter. She was sitting on zabuton by dinner table. After she read it, she laid the letter flat on the table and just stared it. She looked so sad that I was afraid that she might cry. The next morning, Mother handed me the envelope with some money in it.

I hardly saw either of my eldest siblings, Susumu and Kumiko, except at our dinner table. Susumu was talkative and entertained us with funny stories. On the other hand, Kumiko was very quiet. Since Kumiko was only two years younger than Susumu, and they both attended Japanese elementary school together in Manchuria, they went through similar experiences. Our family moved so many times that, robbed them of the opportunities of forming friendships. They were very close. I often saw Susumu and Kumiko together. I did not do anything with them. I only looked up to them and observed them from a distance.

It was a particularly cold winter morning. Mother gave me a worn deep orange colored winter coat that was so short that my arms stuck out and it felt very tight on the shoulders to wear to school. It had a big hole in both elbows and the threads were bare at the sleeves. I was too embarrassed to wear it. I told Mother that I would not be cold at all, that I would be fine, I left without the coat. Shivering, I curled my chest and walked on the frozen street as fast as I could. Then, someone came running from behind, and called, Jun-chan, wait. I stopped and turned. It was Kumiko. Here, put this on. She handed me her long blue winter coat, and then, ran off.

Speechless, I stood there and watched her disappear. I put on her wool coat that had many blue buttons from the neck to the bottom. The sleeves were so long that they covered my hands completely and the coat came way below my knees, but it was warm and had no holes in it. For the first time, I felt her presence acutely, as kind as a mother.

Susumu found a part-time job and started to work after school. One day, I watched him put a brown envelope in Mother’s hand, and say, I always wanted an English dictionary, so, I bought it. Here is the rest. Mother received the envelope. I could not tell whether she was happy or about to cry. She bowed her head and whispered, "arigato (thank you)."

One day when I came home from school, I saw a large truck parked in front of my house and found many men wearing dark suits and ties walk room to room sticking red tabs on our furniture. Then, they hauled the furniture with the red tags on to the truck. Excited, I went out and told the neighbors who gathered to watch the men carry the furniture out from our house and load the truck, We are moving. When the truck got full with our furniture with the red slips took off, leaving us behind, I was puzzled and went inside. Everybody was standing in the empty front room stupefied.

I had never seen my house so empty and so big. All the furniture was gone. The tall twin Japanese lacquered dressers with gold and silver flower design with intricately curved gold handles and with cloud-designed gold corner plates. The tall wide china cabinet that had three long wood framed glass doors above many drawers in which we stored our dinnerware. Gone, also, were the beautiful chinaware such as Mother’s favorite Kutani sake, tea, dinner and party sets with red and black Japanese lacquered finish, and all the artifacts. Left were only our beddings.

MIYOKO

One day, I spotted Miyoko turn into an alley with a bag full of candies in her hand—a lot of candies, eating them all by herself. We always shared our snacks. It wasn’t fair. I run into our house, saw Mother and Father facing to each other talking. Not paying any attention to their serious looks, I said out loud, Miyoko got some candies. I want some, too.

They stopped talking. Mother immediately touched her mouth with her hand. Father looked at me darkly and said in the low controlled tone, Bring her here.

A rock dropped down to my stomach. I run out to look for her. I found her in the alley where I had last seen her. I told her to come home with me. She looked alarmed but obeyed like a faithful puppy.