Silent Stone: A Novel by Yuko Grover

“Silent Stone” follows the adventures of Emi, a young Japanese woman, and her struggle for self-realization in postmodern Japan. “Silent Stone” explores the challenge of ever-changing social and cultural values, and the generation battle of East vs. West.

Excerpt: Chapter 7: The Past as a Foreign Country

It was two weeks after the staff party that I heard the news of Noriko’s engagement to someone whose name no one had heard of.  The news immediately spread as if it were a long-waited special event stirring our neighborhood; it generated such energetic pulse among our neighbors, who normally would keep friendly distance from one another.  It was far more than noticeable, and caused almost paranormally surreal experience for me whenever I saw my neighbors actually talking to one another.  Despite this overwhelming phenomena, Noriko’s family kept themselves unaffected, and rather seemed quite happy, with the wedding plan undergoing in quite hasting pace.  Since there was no way of communication between Noriko and I, the arrival of the news struck me with the feelings of both sheer surprise and bitter-sweet sadness: the jolly image of her at the staff party, dancing along with her ‘gaijin’ boyfriend, quickly vanished as an unwanted memory, obsolete now, in a nostalgic sepia color.

“She made it on time,” Mrs. Sato, one of our neighbors, announced to a small group of neighbors, whom all huddling like school children at a field trip, curious and inquisitive look on their faces.  Auntie, standing at the edge of the circle, moved her head dubiously, its tilted angle suggested her position was unclear: whether she was agreeing with her neighbor’s opinion, or not.     

“I may sound old-fashioned, but a woman should marry at a right age.  It’s not just a woman would become older and undesirable; but simply, there is a serious problem of scarcity in nice, healthy, committed men as we age.  So naturally, if she missed this timing, then it’d be ‘never or forever’—it just becomes impossible to find someone proper.”

Auntie’s face increasingly turned uncomfortable.  Obviously, Mrs. Sato didn’t know that Auntie was one of those who missed the timing—she married to a sick man in her late forty’s, filling the role of his 24 hour-shift caretaker until his death two years later.  As soon as he died, his family all turned against her, as they basically didn’t want to share their only son’s inheritance with her.  She returned home soon after, but kept her new surname, a proof that she was at least once married.  The idea of marriage often muddled me: marrying someone I don’t know at the prime time of my youth, or marrying someone just for the formality so that the public would acknowledge me as a socially acceptable citizen.

“They are moving to America, right after the wedding.  Her husband-to-be is a senior engineer at Honda, you know?  He just received the transfer notice four months ago.  No wonder the wedding is happening so quickly…  His parents must be so relieved to send him off with a wife.  It’ll be hard on him if he lived alone in an unfamiliar place!”  Mrs. Sato’s impassioned speech caused a stir in the small crowd, as many of them nodded their heads in a strange unison. Except Auntie.  She rather staunchly removed herself from the rest and said,

“Well, sorry to interrupt, but we must go now.  I have to take my mother to a doctor this afternoon.  But, thank you for letting us informed, anyway.  We’ll be quite prepared for attending their wedding reception in three weeks.”

Auntie turned around and grabbed my arm, urging to leave the circle of our neighbors, whose bewildered eyes followed our every movement, as if they were bewitched foolishly, didn’t realize till this moment that someone standing next to them were actually a mega-lottery winner to attend this much talked about wedding.

“So, are we invited to…?”  I looked into Auntie’s face and whispered, while trying hard to catch up with her brisk march off to our building.  I felt quite fool as I couldn’t still figure out exactly what she had just said.

“Actually…” stopped Auntie for a moment, gathering her thoughts together, and continued, “your grandmother was the one who received the invitation for the wedding reception, but she immediately declined it, saying that she wouldn’t want to go alone as she might need a physical assistance.  Then, they added my name on the invitation out of consideration for your grandmother’s concern, but your grandmother still doesn’t want to go.  So, most likely, you and I will be ended up attending the reception, just to keep a good neighborly relationship of past twenty years.  Do you mind?”

“I, I don’t mind…”

Or was I given any choice?  I had to swallow the second thought.

I did, in fact, mind it very much, I corrected myself.  The surge of regret welled up every time I took a deep breath.  I couldn’t possibly imagine myself facing Noriko, pretending not to know all about her recent love affair, which was still fully alive a few weeks ago, as far as I observed.  What happened to Anthony, anyway?

“Noriko surely made a good decision.  It is time for her to settle; she’s twenty-seven years old, you know?  She can’t go on living so wild any longer…”  Auntie locked my gaze with her imploring eyes, while her hand was busily reaching for the house key in her purse.

“And, please don’t tell any neighbors about who’s attending the wedding reception from our family.  I don’t want us to be any kind of gossip subjects, okay?”  I nodded slightly, desperately waited for the front door to be opened.

 

Grandma’s weak voice greeted us once we entered inside.  Both Auntie and I were more than ready to settle in our own nest; yet the inquisitive tone of Grandma’s voice somehow suggested that one of us should elaborate our daily report for her, whether it’s being weather or special sales at a local grocery store.  She’s been sick and resting in her futon for past a few days.

“Everyone is talking about the big wedding.  They even seem to know every detail of its plan, Mother.  Are you sure you really want to miss it?  There’s still time to change your mind, you know?”   Auntie made sure to articulate each word, so that she would not give Grandma any chance to ignore her, using a senior excuse of weak and selective hearing ability.  “Mother, are you listening?”  Auntie pressed her cheek against Grandma’s sliding door in order to deliver her message more directly.  Her voice vibrated against delicate silk-screen, as if it were drilling.

“No…”  Grandma’s voice sounded still weak, yet her answer was definite.  “As I said before, I’m not going.  I’m too old for that sort of thing…”

“Oh yes, that old age!  It sounds quite deathly to me, indeed…”

I lingered around the foyer a little longer, aghast.  I could not think of any physical space at all for hiding my existence so that I did not have to know what would happen next.  Would it be cruel to imagine how Auntie’s mannerism was like when she was much younger?  Did she behave to Grandma in this questionable way I witnessed now?

“I’ll be joining into the ‘past’ population, sooner or later!”

Grandma was already in her late eighty’s.  She survived three wars, extreme poverty after those wars, loss of two of her six children, and on top of them, an alcoholic husband, who was often abusive to her.  And now, could she possibly resolve this perpetual conflict with her own daughter at this late age?  The situation seemed awfully unfair, given how much she went through.  It seemed as if something never changed for her for quite a long time: only if I could learn what exactly was its root cause so that I would better understand the origin of such unhappiness.

“Wasn’t it Buddha who said, ‘kill the will to kill’?”  To my surprise, those words slipped out from my mouth, not even quite sure, whether or not, it was appropriate to the context of what I was facing in front of me.  And yet, there followed a significant amount of silence from both rooms—I then took it as a cease-fire, at least for now.

Contained quietness lasted quite a while in our small apartment, each of us cautiously guarding our own territory.  None of us seemed to know what kind of action was needed next; somehow I didn’t feel quite right to be the first one to break this silence.  It appeared to me that we all should just surrender to tomorrow, at one o’clock in the afternoon.  Tomorrow would be another day, as if nothing happened, I would hope.  Or even, tomorrow everything might change: Grandma and Auntie sitting at a table and having some tea together.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

The silence, which was about to grow into irreplaceable comfort for all of us, was suddenly disrupted, when a cacophonic sound of doorbell screeched like an air-raid siren.

“Who could that be?”  Auntie rushed out from her room, and swiftly unlocked the door.

I deliberately stayed in my room for extra minutes, unwilling to join the battlefield again so quickly.  Grandma probably felt the same way, as she didn’t make any motions for this unexpected visitor.

“Oh?  What a surprise…”  Auntie’s voice didn’t reveal her state of surprise as much, yet rather it suggested the tone of yielding into a circumstance.  

“I hope you don’t mind that I’m stopping by.  I  just happened to be in this neighborhood.”  The unexpected visitor had well-controlled manner of speech that didn’t give us any clues for his intention of this surprise visit.

“Mother, it’s Takao…  He’s JUST stopping by!”

Whether or not Grandma heard the initial exchange between Auntie and Uncle Takao, Grandma didn’t respond to their hastiness; she, instead, made a slow, dignified entrance to the scene, as I witnessed just in time, coming out from my own room.

“Well, Takao san, you should’ve called us before you decided simply to show up without asking us—you shouldn’t assume that we are always available to you.  In fact, I have to leave for my doctor’s appointment in very short time.”

“Oh, I didn’t know…  Sorry for the intrusion.  I just…”  Uncle Takao’s body stiffened as he tried to shield himself from this oppressive atmosphere we were all in.  His aged face made a meek, apologetic smile, which made me wonder if he ever aged at all in Grandma’s eyes.

“You may stay for some tea; and maybe assist me to the doctor’s office afterwards, if you can.  Come just right in for now.”  The verdict was bestowed; and we all followed her into Auntie’s room, squeezing ourselves into the space, which was only one large enough to accommodate all of us.

While Grandma was changing into outing clothes in her room, Auntie and Uncle Takao relaxed themselves and started to discuss about some issues in the manner only familiar to them, which immediately excluded my presence.  I constantly heard “the thing we talked the other day’ and “the thing that we need to deal with right away.”  As the conversation grew increasingly abstract, I became uneasy, slowly and finally catching the signal toward me that I should just leave them alone.  Not sensing the signal earlier was embarrassing enough, making me appear like an unwanted object in the room.  Thus, by the time they poured their third cups of tea, I decided to politely excuse myself, feeling awfully awkward, and trotted into my room.

“I’ll let you know when we’re leaving,” Auntie’s assuring voice followed me behind as I closed the sliding door to my room.  The door bounced back defiantly, though, letting itself ajar.

Eavesdropping in this house was equivalent with listening to a radio talk show: I could hear quite easily what’s been said, though I was not a part of conversing.  I didn’t mind to be an audience, since it would give me different perspectives on Grandma and Auntie—the way they normally conducted their manner of talking, what they seemed to emphasize on or value most.  Just to learn a little better of whom they were, that were different from what I observed when they were in public.    

But that day, Auntie and Uncle Takao were discussing something rather alarming, I didn’t even know if Grandma could hear them uttering the words such as ‘relocation,’ ‘demolition,’ and ‘loss of home again.’  The way they talked, without Grandma, didn’t sound secretive, considering the subject matter, but it was rather protective.  They didn’t want Grandma to know the possibility of losing her home now, which she has resided since she moved to Tokyo area from Kyushu, the Southern part of Japan, soon after the end of WW II.

“I must say, the war did make sense much more than this non-sense!  Who would want to cause such a trouble of rebuilding old subsidizing housings, if not absolutely necessary?  Waste of money and time, I would say.”  Auntie’s voice grew one scale higher, hitting the most dramatic note I’d ever heard from her.

“I wouldn’t go that far…  I mean, they said that this building is quite getting old, reaching the considerable level of life-threatening danger.  Who could argue with that?”  Uncle Takao, a professor of Engineering, argued quietly, in a self-asserting manner.

“Oh, you sound quite blindfolded,” snapped Auntie, with a slight bang on the table.  “That’s what ‘they’ said, you see?  You shouldn’t be so naïve.  If they are going to shut this building for a while, they should find us a replacement.  They can’t just say sorry and kick us out!”

“Well actually, they can certainly do that, you know?”

The conversation was interrupted when Grandma’s sliding door slid open effortlessly, allowing her to announce that she was ready to leave the house.  The quick locomotion of Auntie and Uncle Takao busily shifted from where they sat to the doorway, ready to follow Grandma’s order with such impeccable readiness.

I chose not to come out from my room (who would care?), while they all exited out to the door.  For the moment, I refrained myself to say any good-byes from where I was, hoping they would think I was sleeping.  Auntie said something like, ‘make sure the door is locked,’ toward my room, but really, nothing more.  Grandma and Auntie both reminded each other if they had everything they needed; while Uncle Takao quietly waiting, probably holding the door for them.  Soon the noise traveled to the other side of the door, which, in turn, let the quietness come inside.

 

The house Grandma’s family lived didn’t exist anymore, my father had once told me.   They had to leave it behind during the war as the blood-shedding battle spread into the town they lived.  They couldn’t even keep a photo of it either, he said, because they had to bury all their valuable belongings underground in order to avoid the troop officers who would snatch those away and, most likely, destroy them with sadistic pleasure.  All his family hoped to go back to Manchuria and retrieve them one day; but they never set their foot on the land again, just as a colony of Manchuria vanished from a map after the war ended. As he spoke, his eyes sank into the darkest part of his memory, like those of a little boy whose most favorite toys were stolen away.

What do you remember about the house?  I had to ask.  It was a part of my school assignment, after all.

He didn’t remember the exact image of the whole house, to be honest, he said.  Most of the memories of the house remained in him rather fragmented, mosaic like discontinuous harmony, each glued together in an accidental order.  He couldn’t even recall whether he had his own desk or not, but he surely remembered that he always fought with his two older sisters whom he shared a room with, for the window side futon to sleep in at night, as he was fond of looking for the moon in the blackest sky. He would tell his own father next morning whenever he saw the clearest moon the night before.  He liked to do that a lot, because that was one of very few topics that his father seemed to have liked to share with him.  He said his father often lamented a lot about utterly monotonous moon in the in-land sky, as he preferred the moon over the calm ocean, which would reflect the moon’s bright silvery face on the billows encompassing further out, its shape constantly changing with the rhythm of ebb and flow, accompanied by the crash of sleepy waves— a lullaby he grew up with.

My father could never figure out whether or not his father ever liked the life in an unfamiliar place.

Moving out to Manchuria from his native Japan itself seemed quite unconventional decision at the first place.  My father said his father (my grandfather), being extraordinarily ambitious and visionary, launched off to the new land to start out a trading business—the huge risk, it must have been, to venture out to the unknown.  My father still looked proud of his father’s bravery, even after he himself turned sixty.  The details of his family’s adventure were, however, not much shared among the rest of us, including my generation, long after they settled back in Japan.  No one seemed to talk about them.  My uncles, aunt, and even grandma almost intentionally concealed this part of their lives, as if they left them behind with their treasured memories buried underneath of foreign soil.

 

That night, Grandma and Auntie came home later than I expected, though I had no clue what exact time they did.  I had gone already to get something to eat, which surely made them a little unsettling, as they didn’t find me when they arrived home.  I desperately needed a fresh air to cast off some disturbing thoughts: Noriko san’s express-wedding engagement, Grandma’s possible loss of her home,…  I felt rather profoundly muddled, not knowing where to stand.

“So tell me, what did you have for dinner?”

Auntie’s interrogating voice greeted me at the door when I got home.  I had suspected this would happen—they would get home earlier than I—but, foolishly enough I didn’t think of how to handle the case, if it would actually happen.

“Well, I just bought some rice balls from Seven Eleven…”  Which was true; and they were exactly what I wanted for dinner tonight.

“That’s not enough!  Why didn’t you fix something from the fridge?  We have plenty of supply,” snapped Auntie, razor-sharply, never allowing me even a slight chance of defending myself in any ways.  She went on, “Don’t waste your money to buy things we already have!  Rice balls?  You can make your own so easily!  You’re being such a fool!”  And she dropped a deep sigh—a blow that could throw me into the whirlpool of gushing guilt.

“You should think twice, or even three or four times for your case, before you decide to spend your money.  Not even just that, you should reflect what you are doing NOW; you are not in college, or working with a real job—what are you going to do with that?  How long are you planning to live like a moron at your young age?  You should be doing something more constructive.  Don’t be a fool!”

This ‘should’ word would not allow me to have moments of a third or fourth thinking as Auntie preached; it would rather confine me instantly in a place where I had no choice but to obey what the word would insinuate.  I would be chained to something other than my own thinking, deflated into nothing, until it made me believe that having one’s own original thinking, after all, would be a waste of time and money.

“I, I have my own plan.  It’s just that I can’t afford it right now.”  As I said so, I felt infinitely being fool.

“Well it sounds, now is the good time for you to reflect on it very seriously.”

Auntie’s firmness was impossible to break through, after all.  She would still live up to her reputation she earned as a military head nurse during WW II.  How come a woman like her was not regarded as a good female model, rather than a tragic figure?  Why do a woman need to marry, anyway?  Would that be because of her biological feature, which was intended to procreate off springs?  That wouldn’t guarantee her happiness, necessarily.  But having choices also made women in general become more confused about their own value, I would say, since we always have to place ourselves in a position where ‘as supposed to,’ constantly reflecting the choices we made a day ago, and almost never completely satisfied with our own decisions, feeling as if we missed something by choosing one.  Is this what I expect in my future?

“You must plan ahead…never know what’ll happen in your future.  You just have to be prepared, that is all you can do.”  

“That is…all I can…?”

And that would be quite unfortunate, if she was right.  She made it, all in all, sound as if it were a prepackaged deal targeted to those who were amateurs in life (like myself, I guess).  But it didn’t sound resonate with me—this idea of my future promisingly secured, if I set myself in the path of ‘life planning,’ so called.  It sounded dreadfully equivalent with a tale of salary man, who would seek nothing, but pre-made security in his life, placing himself in the orbit of routine and the predictable.  It would be such a living death, if you let a twenty-year-old girl fall into the trap!!  If I ever desperately need to plan something, then, I would rather choose a life, which Noriko san just did—to marry someone, who could, at least, take me somewhere unknown.

“Do you hear what I said?  You look confused, or probably don’t believe me at all.  But, this is the very important lesson I learned from my life so far.  So bear it in your mind,” said Auntie, shifting her attention to her ledger book, which she entered every single expense, every single day.  My father used to joke about this almost religious belief of her meticulous planning, pointing out that she may be secretly saving up to operate an ‘alternative retirement plan,’ which no one in her family should know.  I started to wonder if I was witnessing a piece of such scheme.

“You have to learn from history,” exclaimed Auntie, her attention unaltered with determination, ”Otherwise, it repeats itself!”  Her voice quivered a little, but her fingers reassuringly hit the numbers on her calculator.

“I guess so…”  I stopped for a moment to figure out what she exactly meant.  But soon enough, my eyes caught the invitation card rested on top of the bookshelf; then my mind slowly drifted to the thought of what I should wear at Noriko san’s wedding, which would take place in three weeks.