this, surely the reader will excuse me for providing some information on Sayuri’s life that I did not yet have at this point of my hospital convalescence. In defense of my jump out of the timeline, I will plead that Ms. Mizumoto told me all this later in our acquaintanceship-and at least her story is true.
Sayuri was the third child, the second daughter, of Toshiaki and Ayako Mizumoto. Her birth position was most unfortunate, because it meant that as a child she was the fifth person to bathe each night. It is tradition that Japanese family members share a single tub of bathwater and, although they rinse before getting in, the water darkens with each bather. The father goes first, and then the male members from oldest to youngest. Only then will the women bathe, again from oldest to youngest. This meant that the father, the older brother, the mother, and the older sister all used the bathwater before Sayuri. Throughout her entire childhood, she was forced every night to soak in the accumulated filth of her entire family.
Toshiaki and Ayako’s union was the product of
The first son, Ichiro-a name which, incidentally, means First Son-attended a good university. Therefore, he got a good job with a good salary at a good company after graduation; that’s how these things work. In fact, Ichiro didn’t even need to apply himself to his schoolwork after he’d been accepted, because simply attending the right university was the important thing; learning, less so. After he got his good job, he worked for a few years before he married a good Japanese girl from a good family at a good age. Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty-five, because that’s when she turns into a “Christmas cake.” Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty-fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf. Ichiro’s wife was twenty-three, so she was still well before her expiration date. Toshiaki and Ayako were pleased; Ichiro would inherit the family house and would tend to the parents’ graves after they died.
Sayuri’s sister, Chinatsu-a lovely name, meaning A Thousand Summers-also went to a good university, then got a job as an office lady for a few years, and got married at the age of twenty-four and a half. Just in time. She quit her job and embarked upon babymaking. Again, the parents were pleased.
Then it was the turn of their youngest daughter, the somewhat troublesome Sayuri. (Her name means Small Lily. If nothing else, the Japanese are expert namers.)
Sayuri was some years younger than Chinatsu. Her parents would never have gone so far as to call her an accident, but they would, on occasion, let slip that she was “not planned.” Her parents would also, if pressed, admit that unplanned things can be problematic but, on the other hand, if two children were good then a third child must be one third better. So never let it be said that Sayuri’s parents regretted her birth. However, Sayuri’s math skills were advanced enough to tell her that adding one to two actually increases the amount by half, not one- third.
Ichiro and Chinatsu had both walked the appropriate path and had done what was expected. The pattern had been firmly established, folded neatly and put away like a fine kimono; this pattern of proper behavior was practically a family heirloom to be handed down. All Sayuri had to do, to continue the perfection of her parents’ lives, was imitate the examples of her older siblings. But this, unfortunately, was the very last thing she wanted to do. If she did, she reasoned, she would be doomed to spend not only her childhood but her entire life in her family’s dirty bathwater.
The problem was that Sayuri was unsure about what she
Right after her high school graduation, Sayuri visited the Australian embassy with Maggie to pick up a work visa. One week later, Sayuri called her parents long distance from the Sydney airport. Needless to say, they were less than pleased, not only with her rash and disrespectful actions but because she had not even had the courage to say goodbye before she left the country.
In truth, it was not a lack of courage that had dictated Sayuri’s actions, but an excess of it. If she’d tried to reason with her parents, they never would have let her go. It would have been an argument that Sayuri could not win but one that she was unwilling to lose, so she simply did what she had to do to start a life on her own terms. At first Sayuri’s parents thought she was joking-she couldn’t really be calling them from Australia, could she? She couldn’t really be planning to stay, could she? When they finally accepted the truth, they threatened and cajoled her. Sayuri hung up, because nothing would have changed if she’d stayed on the line.
She spent a year in Australia, moving from one job to another: waiting tables, painting houses, picking fruit, tutoring people in Japanese, and so on. All the while her tan deepened, her smile widened, and her English improved. The biggest problem with Western countries was that she often had to shop in the children’s section to find clothes that fit her, as she was small even for a Japanese woman. (This was why she was destined to spend her life abroad looking like a child’s doll.) Sayuri called her parents once a month-always from a different pay phone-to let them know that she was all right and to listen politely as they begged her to return. Sometimes, Ichiro lent the weight of his oldest-son voice to the argument. Sayuri ignored his commands as well.
When Sayuri’s visa ran out, she returned to Japan. Her mother cried and her father yelled, even though a part of him admired what she had done. Sayuri informed them that she was going to attend an American university to study for a degree. Over the next year, she worked three part-time jobs, passed the necessary English-language proficiency exams, and got accepted by the department of physical therapy at the University of Michigan. When it was time to leave once more, her mother cried another Japanese river. The father, however, had by this point accepted the ridiculous ideas of his youngest daughter. When Toshiaki offered to cover some of the tuition, Sa-yuri hugged him long and hard. He didn’t quite know what to do about that, so he stood as ramrod straight as he could.
Sayuri completed her degree with honors and accepted a job in the hospital where she would, eventually, meet me. Long before I came along, she had paid back every yen her father had given her for her education.
Dr. Hnatiuk came by my room every few days to pass along a new psychology book. I was starting to like him. It’s not easy for me to pinpoint when my feelings turned, as there was no moment of revelation in which I exclaimed: “Hey, the chipmunk’s not so bad after all.” He crept up on me. The most important thing was that he stopped trying to relate to me in a doctor-patient capacity, and simply let the conversation flow naturally. There was also the fact that he liked the gargoyle statue that Marianne Engel had given me, while Beth had called it a “horrible little thing.” What really sold me on Gregor, however, was that despite his milquetoast exterior, he was a passionate man who cared deeply about his job. One afternoon he spoke at length about how lawyers have, in his opinion, been the biggest enemy of psychiatric care over the last half century. He told me how they fought for the rights of the patient-which was good-but to the point that a patient who was eating his own excrement could no longer be held for observation. “Leave it to the lawyers to turn shit into health food.”
As the weeks passed, a physical change occurred in Gregor. He lost his tasseled loafers and ill-advised corduroys and began wearing clothes that almost seemed to fit properly. Even if they couldn’t be considered quite “stylish,” they were at least passable. He’d been exercising to the point that the glow in his cheeks no longer looked as if it came from climbing a flight of stairs too quickly, and he was losing some of the excess fat from around his midsection.
Gregor never asked why I was reading psychology books, but he was willing to answer every question I had
