and stared and stared. At her, mostly. That a human being could look like that. That a visage so foreign had anything to do with me. The only thing competing for my attention in the small, plain house was a Japanese doll, maybe eighteen inches high, that lived in a glass display box on the buffet in the dining room, a gift from my uncle. Her face bore the same elegant, drawn-on expression my aunt’s did. Her ebony hair was arranged with the same battalion of ivory and silk. The square sleeve of her brocade kimono dangled as she held out her arms just so, one hand displaying a fan shot through with silver, one thin white finger of the other kissing the thumb. She posed with a slight bend at her waist, an accommodating posture. I was doll crazy, and I desperately wanted to take her out of the box—I could see the small black hook where the door to the case was fastened. But I was never allowed.
I equated the doll with the bride in the picture. I equate the bride with Toshi’s mother Chiyo, who Morris married in Japan and then brought back with him to New York City, where he was studying. But I could be wrong. Why would my grandparents keep portraits of the deposed wife? Perhaps, like me, they were captivated, proud to be associated with something so far away, so different.
“Were your parents upset when you married a goy?” someone asked my father once. I listened intently, always interested in lines of difference, in what it meant to be Jewish, in how adults explained themselves to each other.
“My brother had already married a Japanese woman,” my dad said in a cocksure tone I didn’t recognize. No one asked whether his parents were upset about that, but there was no sign that they resisted acceptance by the time I was studying for clues. Morris and Chiyo married in the 1950s when memories of World War II were fresh, when many Americans viewed the Japanese with suspicion and abhorrence. My grandparents had both been born in Eastern Europe, had lost relatives in Hitler’s camps. Did they have some capacity for accepting difference that contributed to the intellectual curiosity and upward mobility of all three of their living children? As I struggle to get my own kids to try hard at anything, I’ve wondered at the past generation’s secret. But if my grandparents were particularly open-minded, the doll and the portrait were the only evidence of it I noticed in their sunless lives.
MORRIS LEFT CHIYO. He ended the marriage when the children were young, and he claimed Toshi and Haruna entirely. There was the sense that he had snatched them. I asked my father how he could do this. I don’t recall how old I was at the time, whether I was closer to being a child or an adult. My father’s face clouded with concern when he answered. He chose his words carefully; they came with difficulty. Were there things he believed I couldn’t understand, or didn’t want me to have to?
What I remember of his response was this: “She couldn’t speak English well. She was very vulnerable.”
WHEN MORRIS REMARRIED, it was to the Japanese babysitter he had hired to look after Toshi and Haruna. She had cared for these children of the previous marriage for years, but living with Toshi became untenable to her. He had to go. If not to our house, then to some kind of institution.
IN PENNSYLVANIA, we told the story of the wicked stepmother. She’s mean to him, were the whispers. We needed to explain how Toshi would cease to be a problem once he was ensconced in another home with young children. Otherwise, how could he be invited to live with us?
“She forces him to make everyone’s beds.”
“She yells at him all the time.”
“She’s mean to him now that she has her own.”
FROM WHERE I STAND NOW, simultaneously a parent, daughter, sister, wife, a child, my heart goes out to everyone in this scenario. To my uncle, a disciplined man facing an uncontrollable adolescent and a frustrated second wife. To the wife, Yoshiko, birthing and caring for a string of babies in a house ruled by a controlling patriarch. I imagine the tide of prenatal and postpartum hormones rushing, the footsteps of the angry teenager rocking the floorboards, the heart thumping in martyred fury as the yelling wakes the baby again. And my heart goes out to my own mother, raising two very little children without much outside support in a home that must have already seemed cramped. And to my father, a deeply kind and generous man who likes to soothe all passages. He was being asked to give a home to his nephew or watch the boy go without, even though taking him would likely displease his already frustrated wife and disrupt his own fledgling family. A no-win situation.
And certainly my heart goes out to teenaged Toshi, banished from his home. Seen as a burden, the bearing of which had to be pleaded and compensated for. There are few takers for stray teenagers, those monsters of mood, oil, limbs, sex, and stink. What a time to be thrust out to stalk the earth. It’s even more painful to consider the plight of young Toshi and his sister. For the two young children taken from their mother, gone. To not be mother-loved.
But my empathy flows most fully when it comes to the one person in the scenario about whom I know the least: Chiyo, a Japanese immigrant alone in the United States in the early 1960s. Stripped of her children. Abandoned. Beautiful. Foreign. Each of her weaknesses turned against her. In any game of moral relativity it’s the children who demand our greatest sympathies. They’re always entirely guiltless, absolutely vulnerable—at what age is this no longer true? But Chiyo’s loss taps into some of my most anxious fears as a mother—that I will make the wrong decision, that my character will be found wanting, that some consequences are irrevocable, and the life-long well-being of my child is constantly on the line.
My heart goes out. To the mothers. To the fathers. To the children. To that mother. To that child. It’s a complicated knot.
AND SO TOSHI CAME TO US, the threads entwining us, and we were knotted, too. But first came some cash. My uncle and aunt forked something over so we could make the necessary accommodations, and perhaps this money was as much of a factor in my parent’s acceptance as was familial generosity, filial loyalty, and avuncular concern. Despite my dad’s steady academic job and our modest lifestyle, finances were always tight. My parents hired workers to build a room in the basement, laid orange indoor-outdoor carpeting, and bought a dehumidifier. When Toshi came, my mom took him shopping and let him pick out his own sheets, wild ones that lived in our family for years—rain slicker yellow with a pattern of sketched-on black octagons. My mother disapproved of the choice. She disapproved of him almost immediately.
“He acts like the kids aren’t even here,” she told my father repeatedly.
I remember arranging army men on a playroom battlefield with a boy from the neighborhood when Toshi walked past in a whoosh, a wash of black hair, a big belt buckle.
“He acts like we’re just not here,” I parroted to my friend.
BUT I KNEW he knew I was there. I shared a small bedroom with my younger brother on one end of the narrow, slant-ceilinged second floor. My parents’ room was at the other end of the hall. The enclosed staircase—separated from the first-floor hallway by a door—ran up the middle of the house and let out right in front of my threshold. Soon after he moved in, Toshi began slipping into my room and getting into bed with me at night, asking in a whisper if I wanted to play a game. “It’s a secret game I play with Haruna. Don’t tell your mom and dad.” I had never met Haruna, but I’d seen pictures. She was a big girl. She was beautiful.
I’ve always been a poor sleeper. I find it difficult to fall asleep; when I do, the smallest thing can wake me up, and letting go of consciousness again is hard. My father complains of this, too, but if I play the game of clear-cut causality, I wonder if my fight with sleep stems from being awoken so often at four and five years old. A pattern revealed itself. Recognizing it was my first conscious acquaintance with my own intelligence.
I grew to expect Toshi’s entry if my parents were out. He’d slip in shortly after my brother and I went to bed. If my parents were home, as they usually were, he might come or he might not, and if he did it’d be later, his increased furtiveness obvious to me even back then, the door cracking open just far enough for a body to fit through sideways, the almost inaudible click as he slowly released the knob. Most nights I waited to see what would happen, silent and vigilant, grimly pleased with my forecasting abilities if the door opened when I thought it might. But if he didn’t visit soon enough, nervousness or anticipation would