Karl Taro Greenfeld
Year One
Meiji
My memory begins before time, before the Emperor was restored and the Gregorian calendar introduced. We measured the year in five 73-day phases: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. We measured the day by when we ate and slept, or, more precisely, waiting to eat and longing for sleep. The longest, hardest duration was spent standing in wet paddy, hungry before our first meal of millet and grain and, if we were lucky, a pickled plum or some cabbage. Then a man arrived in our village on a palanquin, wearing a kimono with a black coat atop it—a foreign coat, we were told, of the type worn by the men who had come on the black ships. He announced there would be a new calendar and a new division of the days.
Our new Era is called Meiji, for our Emperor.
There were clocks, we knew, watercourse calibrations in palaces and temples so monks knew when to pray. Now there were mechanical instruments, gears interlocking and weights urging their movement, that divided the day into precise increments so that we would wake up not with the first pink flush of the day but when the gears arrived at a specific place on a circle divided into twelve parts.
And this man in his black coat, sent by the newly restored Emperor, told us this was necessary or we would continue to be a backward people.
My memory begins before we wondered at such notions: the comparison of one or another group of people to a rival group across the Sea. In my memory, there is the great father, the Daimyo; there is our father, Yoshimatsu; and there is a woman, his wife, my mother, Hanako. But even more vivid is the sense of a nest, a crowded, hot, dirty straw mat upon which there are arms, legs, bellies, hair, ribs, feet, a half-dozen of us, children, intertwined and clinging to life. We were woken with that first light and then slapped and prodded and pushed into rags and sent out to the fields. Those of us too small to work would sit in the dirt or run or play or catch grasshoppers or lizards or gather pine needles, ginkgo berries and anything else plausibly edible, but this gathering was also playing, idling, running, splashing, until we were old enough to take our place standing in the wet paddy, planting, tending and then harvesting. I was at one point a bundle on my mother’s back as she bent over to collect the precious rice. My memory begins with this motion, swaying up and down, until I am put on my feet and can stand. I don’t yet know that to stand is a mistake, for I am then expected to stand for the rest of my life.
At times there were more of us, intertwined on that straw mat; after a cold winter or a fever, there might be one or two fewer. During one water phase my mother disappeared. A new woman appeared and more to the brood on the straw mat. In my mind’s eye she is distant, her round, stern face visible only over the begging hands and upstretched arms of my siblings.
That man who came to our village on the palanquin never left. He built a large house on a south-facing slope of pine trees cleared by the men of the village by order of the Emperor. He would build another structure, long and squat with a roof of wood instead of straw. He announced that any who were interested could work inside this factory according to the wheels of the mechanical clock and would be paid in currency instead of rice. We worked there turning bamboo, paint and tin into any of a half-dozen animals we were told would be sent from our village across the Ocean to other children who, instead of working in factories, apparently played with the turtle, the ox, the horse, the crab, the lion.
The factory took all the time that had been divided. The factory made you stand, but it saved your back, so I stood straighter while my older siblings were bent. The man who came in the palanquin brought in teachers who taught us to read and count, so that we could become better workers. Soon, in our village, there were a half-dozen such factories, and there were noodle shops where the men could spend their currency, and taverns where they could drink it, and brothels where they could fuck it.
For a girl, I was told, I had no choice but to save it. Every sen. And I was told I was lucky I could do so, for it meant I could have a dowry, and so become a wife instead of a woman in one of those brothels.
My marriage is arranged over a bottle of grain alcohol and results in his father being able to purchase a new rayon jacket, which he wears every day until it frays and he then bemoans the terrible deal he has made. Our wedding is a hasty affair, my husband dressed in his winter uniform, the two of us at the temple, my father paying the priest a fee to inscribe our names into the log to be carried by runner back to the ward office, where our names take their place in the registry under my husband’s family’s name. We have only our little hovel on a corner of Kinrokuro’s father’s land, which he has been selling off parcel by parcel since the arrival in our village of the Imperial governor. Kinrokuro, for his part, is simple. He has a lick of hair that stands up, aswirl around his crown, like a few tiny moths perpetually aflutter just above his head. When I ask after his dreams he tells me this, this is his dream. In those months before he is called up to service, we live hungry but happy on a tatami mat atop a raised dirt floor, the two of us intertwined and soon joined by our children, and he earns enough in a factory making mulberry paste so that we eat fish once a week. Three births, two surviving children: a boy and a girl, all born in the cold of winter, our shoji pulled shut against the northern wind, the midwife boiling water in a pot over our dirt-floored kitchen fire. Our hut flimsy and rattling in the wind, our babies’ sputters and cries moist-sounding where our eaves and shutters and curtains are dry and shuffling, the entire structure kept standing only by my husband’s scrounging of bent nails from the construction sites springing up around us.
We walk along the stream in the meadow behind our parcel, our son holding my husband’s hand, my daughter in a bundle on my back. We watch the farmers trap eels in bamboo cages and one morning we buy a snapping turtle that I make into a stew with miso, sake and beat roots. These memories seem to recede each time I reach back for them. We lost the photograph of Kinrokuro in the fire bombing. I now have trouble recalling his face.
Our village now has a school where children begin when the new calendar says they have lived five revolutions around the Sun. The rice fields are drained, the trees harvested for their wood. I don’t remember when they are chopped down, just that one morning, I open our shoji to walk to the market and notice that instead of trees there are now black cables descending from straight wooden poles. At the corner, an electric street light now stands, where in evening boys and girls in black uniforms study their textbooks. Where our village ends and the next begins is now impossible to discern—unbroken rows of huts and shacks, and behind them, down narrower alleys, more flimsy wooden shanties, hastily built from cheap materials. Time is measured in weeks and months and years. These structures are not built to last.
* * *
My memory begins before there was an army, when instead there was a sheriff and it was his responsibility when the Daimyo ordered him to raise a ten-man levee to go and serve the Shogunate in the unlikely event of invasion by Mongolians or Chinese. But when the foreigners did arrive, they came from the East, and they came in castles upon the water with great, round pipes puffing out clouds. I remember a merchant who visited our village, his donkey burdened with news illustrations, among them a woodblock of the black ships and the demonic-nosed foreigners in shiny buttoned coats. The woodblock print was pasted to the temple door until the rains washed it away, and we thought no more of this until the Imperial official arrived in his palanquin.
Now, instead of a levee of ten men for the Daimyo, the village would give every young man to the Emperor, including my husband, Kinrokuro, who was married in his uniform and would serve our Emperor in the first Chinese War.
My memory begins before the restored Emperor could take our men away with red slips delivered by an Imperial postman, who used the new railroad built by foreign engineers to connect our far-flung cities. The red slip came and away my husband went, our children attached to me by furoshiki wraps so that they might glimpse their father as we stood among the hundreds of wives waving solemn-faced goodbyes.
My memory begins before the black slip was received informing me of my great honor. Our son and daughter grew up knowing only their father’s black-and-white photograph on the lintel, our marriage photo.
Taisho
When the first restored Emperor passes away he is succeeded by his son, bespectacled, beribboned, bemedaled, uniformed, reputed to speak like a child and have a mind similarly unformed. Instead of reading Imperial edicts from parchment he rolls the proclamations into tubes and gazes out at his subjects. My children attend school and in the evening, while they are studying, I pour drinks and light cigarettes for local men at a tea house, where there is hardly any tea served at all. Those of us whose husbands never returned take up such postings, sliding our screens shut after dark and padding down the electricity-lit streets to take our places beside the men who did return while their women are safely at home. The village pretends not to notice my nocturnal business, but when I make my rounds, purchasing food for my children, there is a snubbing and shunning, a less polite version of our nuanced language that reminds me by one pronoun that I am beneath them all.
My son and I visit the department store in the city. There are restaurants on the ground floor where regional dishes are served, bean curd from the North, noodles made from squid from the coast, hot radish paste from the mountains. There are also restaurants serving the foods of foreign lands. Noodles with a bright red sauce. Soft bread battered and cooked in oil and then dusted with fine white sugar. I buy my son these delicacies and as he eats we sit by a pond where for a sen you can rent a net and try to catch red-bellied salamanders. We watch as customers try and fail. They are too fast for the heavy nets. Nobody catches anything.
I’m not proud of saying my children eat rather than starve, as some widows’ families did, but I state it as fact: My children eat. My son grows strong. My daughter attends school. We keep to our little patch on the corner of my husband’s family’s land, tolerated but never welcomed. A daughter-inlaw’s position is always fraught, but a widowed daughter-in-law should hurl herself and her children onto the pyre after her husband. But there was no funeral. Just the report in the black notice of the village in China where he died in action. I will never hear of the place again.
My son marries Motoko, a bride with paltry dowry but the best match he can make. It is our family’s good fortune that he gives her a son, and then another. As males there is a sense of possibility in the world. They are free from the bonds of the land and the many obligations of poverty, of debts taken on before they were even born, of the obligation to pay for their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ graves and shrines. I made sure of that, lighting cigarettes and pouring drinks and serving skewered chicken to men whose breath smelled of fish and garlic and smoke.
Next to the tea house, on a plot of land where just a few decades ago had been a cucumber patch, I direct two laborers who assemble wood and straw and scrap into a tiny snack bar with a charcoal brazier. In the back I grill chicken on skewers behind a counter where three or four men sit at a plank bar. It doesn’t even have a name, my little snack, just the character for “snack” in black paint on a white field hanging by a rope from a wooden peg next to the door. The men leave coins for a tip and at the end of each month come to clear their tabs. By each ten-sen coin with a hole in the middle, I am able to pay for my grandsons’ school clothes and books, to pay for a coin box installed in our house where we deposit money for the miracle of electricity giving light so that my grandsons can study at the kitchen table, the floor now sturdy white oak instead of dirt, a bamboo pipe with a faucet at the end bringing water from the cistern at the edge of the property. I give Kinkoroko’s family money so that they can continue to live beside me, rather than sell off their land. Though they still pretend not to know me when we pass in the street, my little business being the source of official shame and unofficial sustenance for the entire clan. The public face of my husband’s land-owning, dissolute family is underpinned by my industriousness. If I were a more cynical woman, I would say the entire nation’s uniformed, truculent display is trussed up only by the women working diligently within.
My younger grandson passes away from tetanus. He burned his hands on a teapot and then played in the mud of our backyard, the fever coming on and taking him. The doctor wraps his hands in cool bandages and says we should pray to our ancestors. My surviving grandson doesn’t dwell on losing his older brother. His father says I shouldn’t take him out in public while we are still mourning—what will the neighbors say about us? I want to tell him I don’t care. My grandson is the first in our line without the scent of poverty and hunger. He can see the world secure in the knowledge that no one already has a claim on all his waking hours.
We visit one of the new city parks when there is a kite-flying festival and I buy him a wooden kite with a blue cat chasing a butterfly. He runs with it behind him all the way home, and by the time we return it has a torn corner and I have to repair it with rice glue.
Showa
That ludicrous Emperor with his medals and ribbons and mustache dies of pneumonia and is succeeded by his more serious-looking son, though my patrons gossip that he is actually the son of one of the generals who impregnated the Imperial consort out of loyalty to the Emperor. Such logic becomes common, flights of fantastic thought explaining ever more magical loyalty to the Emperor, a game my customers play of finding how every topic pertains to the Emperor. It is possible, by sheer mental acuity and drunken blather, to make the most discordant and unpatriotic sentiments into a pledge to die for this Emperor. We go through such elaborate oaths of loyalty that soon we no longer recognize where the game ends and our true feelings begin. Soon, we are making such oaths to the Emperor with no hint of the irony with which the journey to loyalty began.
My memory begins before this confused and perverted language, when we spoke our urges simply and bluntly. Before every sentence and word was weighed for its patriotism.
My memory begins before Emperors, when the Emperor was a spectral, priestly effete housed in some Kyoto palace, presiding over ceremonial incense burnings and conferring with his ancestors in complex, incomprehensible language.
This new Emperor, I can see from the equine photos appearing in newspapers, is eager and unsure of himself, the kind of man who comes into the snack and can be easily convinced to order more expensive shochu because he fears what other patrons might say about him if he orders anything else. Better the Emperor feeble-minded who understands the world as a child gazing through rolled-up parchment than this young, eager, insecure Godman who dares to dream that glory and victory and war mean something other than the taking away of our husbands and sons.
My son is drafted to suppress Chinese bandits in Manchukuo, and again I go to the train station, and I know before it even arrives that the black letter will come and my daughter-in-law will be given the gift of sacrificing her husband for the Emperor. Such honors become frequent among the women, but it is a secondary gift, not as esteemed or valued as that which men can offer. We can only offer other’s lives, those most valuable to us, but not our own. This great honor is reserved for the men of our village.
The streetcar tracks are laid and the final stop is at the end of the road, where the first street lights were and now, instead of rickshaws and donkey carts, customers can arrive by the dozen on train. My little snack is on the road connecting the factories and workshops to the streetcar stop. My memory begins when it was the path from our village past the cucumber patch to the rice fields, but the village, patch, and fields are all gone.
I hire laborers from Keijo to expand my snack so that the drinking room now takes up what used to be the entire space and there’s a new kitchen in the back, with a grill and a stove and metal skewers instead of bamboo for chicken, liver, tongue, and onion. Motoko, my daughter-in-law, now assists me, as one mama-san can no longer pour enough drinks or light enough cigarettes or make enough praise for the Emperor. She has grown up with this strange language and so knows how to twist it with particular talent, thanking the Emperor for accepting the offering of her husband’s life with such gratitude that some of the older patrons can’t help but smile. You have to listen closely, and only a few are able to pick out precisely where she has made too much of her loyalty and gratitude. But for others, there is instead a sense that she has gone too far. They are not sure why, but they will leave the snack early and never come back, and I thank them and wish them a safe return.
My grandson is secondary school-age now, and sturdy, well-fed. Our house has been expanded, the Keijo laborers building a new eight-mat sitting and six-mat dining room, digging a narrow pond from which we can watch the carp swim. My property now takes up nearly half of my late husband’s ancestors’ land. I no longer know exactly who lives next door, as his parents passed away long ago and one of Kinkoroko’s surviving sister-inlaws took over their portion. She erects a sturdy fence and, as is the custom now, we pass each other without acknowledgement. If asked, my grandson would be unable to give the name of this family next door. They do not seem sure of their kinship.
Our village exists now only as the name of the streetcar stop, the last on the long, bending line that starts near the center of our city, and the vast majority of those who hurriedly board and exit that tram would be surprised that name represents anything more than the whim of some urban planner. The conversation among my customers is full of praise for the Emperor and satisfaction at such progress, the streetcar line and the electricity and the running water, the Western style of clothes now preferred, the moving pictures now shown in cinemas in town, and the sense that somehow, these are all linked to our great Emperor and his wars. I’m an old woman now, and easy to ignore as I pour drinks and light cigarettes. They speak of the future as if it is full of possibility. They have purchased bicycles and dream of purchasing automobiles. Their factories move their wares to the station by diesel-powered trucks, and from there their products are delivered to the great port in Kobe and from there, to the great powers of the world. Imagine Japan as the factory of the world, my customers boast. Our laborers are among the cheapest and best, educated, diligent, but willing to work for a fraction of what greedy, lazy, socialist workers demand in the decadent democracies of the West. We can lead the rest of Asia, such men say, under our suzerainty we can guide our Chinese and Vietnamese and Malaysian brothKarl ers and sisters into the future, so that they too can join the global economy. Our factories need raw materials; our workers need food. The rest of Asia has this in abundance. We need merely to take it.
My grandson has a good head for figures and is able to win a place at University. If there is a better life to be had in this new Japan, then I am not ashamed of wanting it for my grandson. In his simple, innocent, good nature, he reminds me of what was best about our life before the Emperor was restored. He fails to win a place at University and goes to trade school, where he learns how to maintain tractors and soon has a job as an associate engineer at a shop where diesel trucks are repaired. He is an apprentice to the owner, but the work is steady and safe, and in the evening, he has the use of a small, square bed truck and when there is sufficient fuel he drives back home. On Sundays, if the weather is fair, he takes wooden basins full of water from our cistern and fills them with tallow and ash soap and whips the water so there that it foams, and he removes his shirt and lathers and cleans the truck so that it shines in the afternoon light. He’s a proud, simple young man, and in the afternoon I bring him cold barley water that he drinks in one gulp, though I warn him that to drink such a cold beverage too quickly can bring on a draught.
Of course, he attracts the attention of a young woman who passes this way from the street car to her shamisen master who lives down the road, and I notice that my grandson now makes sure to wash the truck every Sunday, even when rain rinses off the lather as he applies it.
Their marriage banquet is at a local restaurant. I know the owner because we send clients each other’s way. It is a lavish affair, with half a dozen courses and well-attended by some of my best customers, who are too polite to comment on the bride already appearing quite a few months pregnant. And when the red letter arrives for my grandson, I can no longer bring myself to go to the train station downtown. That is my daughter’s duty. We pass this burden on to each other as we pass on the grief we feel at each departure. My grandson assures me he will be safe, as his talent at repairing internal combustion engines makes him far too valuable for the army to expose him to any great risks.
Now I am old enough that if I venture outside, to walk in the late afternoon to seek a black-market egg or some tea or a briquette of charcoal, I am invisible, not for the shame at my trade but because there are so many of us now, so many widows and mothers who have lost sons. I recognize a face here or there, but when I try to put a name to it, I am often a generation too late, and the man or woman bows impersonally and moves on, for we are apparently a nation on the move, in a hurry, and no one has much time to talk. Not that I have anything to say. No one is interested in my memories, in my recollections of the mulberry tree that used to stand where the post box is, or the persimmon trees that used to yield such delicious fruit after the Water phase every year. Everywhere I look, I can’t help but see what used to be there. And I remember we used to laugh, make jokes, even about the Emperor.
Now the talk at the snack is somber, patriotic nonsense that passes for conversation, blandishing praise of the Emperor and the most militant of his lieutenants and aids that is now published in the newspapers. The supplies of rice, pickles, fish, meat, everything that our wars were supposed to provide us in surplus are now diminished in the name of our soldiers fighting in China. Now there is talk of war with the British and the Americans, those powers refusing to give Japan the free hand it deserves in Asia. The men who come in in the evening now always toast the Emperor before each drink. Motoko, who had been so nimble at negotiating this new language of nonsense, makes a mistake and in attempting to be funny, makes a statement that ventures too close to cynicism about our great Emperor. If in the past such double meanings were tolerated; now, nobody can risk sitting in the presence of such possibility of insult. Our clientele diminishes as we hear on the radio of the great attacks launched by our warriors in Hawaii, The Philippines, Wake, French Indochina, Java, places I had never heard of until recently.
The birth of my great-grandson serves to lift our spirits as we wait anxiously for letters home from his father, letters crossed out by the censors’ ink for all but the most superficial and general of statements. He misses his family; he loves the Emperor. But of his days? Nothing. We are left with only the worst to imagine.
My snack is closed down by the Kempei as being a nonessential business, but that is no great loss as we hardly have any alcohol to sell. We have a few cases I’ve kept in our house and these we can trade for rice and fish so that my great grandson will not know starvation just yet. My granddaughterin-law, lives with us and I know she is worried about my grandson’s fate. The war in China drags on, and yet each great victory seems to bring us no closer to the final victory.
My memory begins before I was old, and tired. When I stand up my hips hurt and I have pain down my spine. I soak cotton in mustard seed oil and apply these compresses to my back, my great-grandson complaining at the smell. I no longer make the decisions around which our family turns. Motoko is now the matriarch. I am occasionally consulted, and usually only for my purse. It will all be spent, eventually: the silver I saved, the pearls, the yen. The land beneath the snack we will trade for a few bushels of rice and a few buckets of barley. The land beneath the house will eventually be sold, I know, for I remember from my youth that one will trade anything for food.
Motoko and the other women take to scavenging, trading their marriage kimonos. There are farmers, I imagine, with farmhouses full of silk kimonos. The women trade other things, too. For what wouldn’t you give to feed your child? I don’t ask questions, but I am thankful I am too old to have to participate, for I know well that men are unafraid to ask for anything.
One afternoon, I am left to care for my 2-year-old great-grandson. I am a thoughtful babysitter. I raised four generations of boys. The routine of changing a diaper as familiar as folding an obi.
But when my granddaughter-in-law returns, she shouts in horror at what she finds. My great-grandson is screaming in pain. He cannot see. Blood streams from his left eye.
In the kitchen, there is a metal skewer, the type we used at the snack to grill chicken, liver, onion. The skewer has been heated over a flame, and where it is not blackened from the heat it is brown with blood.
The boy now doesn’t scream but is sobbing, unsure of what has happened. His mother also demands to know.
My memory begins before I had a body, when I was part of a mass of limbs on a straw mat, and then I was only a body, an oven, a womb, producing offspring. Now I am a broken body, my life force spent raising those offspring, working to feed them, years of work wearing me down so that I am bent, even though I didn’t work in the fields the many decades our mothers did. It is our curse, to have bodies that carry memories of all the generations of women who preceded us and the memories of the men we delivered to our Emperors.
I speak to my great-grandson, and I describe to him the battles he will miss, the wars he will never fight, the great opportunities to make the ultimate sacrifice for his emperor that he will never have.
It is my fault, I explain, the unsteady hand of an old lady who slipped as she prepared to skewer the meat.