The Kanzaki River

CREATIVE NONFICTION

by Yuko Iida Frost

          Our street in Osaka was still unpaved. The dust stirred up when the donkey strolled past, wheeling its three-layered glass case, displaying freshly baked bread like yellow sponge cake with raisins, rolled bread, black sugar buns, chocolate-covered pastries, and the buns stuffed with sweet red azuki beans. The merchant rang the bell announcing the arrival of the Roba-no-panya, Donkey’s Bakery. I dashed to the street at the first sound of the donkey’s hoofbeats, which had been recorded and amplified through a speaker. When a girl’s high-pitched voice singing about the tasty bread grew louder, I knew it was coming in our direction.
         “Okaachan, the Donkey’s Bakery is coming.” I hurried back to the house, calling for my mother as if I would never see another pastry if I missed this one. “The donkey’s here.”
         “We are not going to buy that bread,” my mother called from inside.
         She did not let me eat anything that wasn’t prepared by her, though I tried. It wasn’t that she believed the bread had donkey droppings in it as Nobuko, the girl next door, had told me. My mother was strict about what we ate and how we spent our money. I went back to the street and watched the donkey pass and disappear behind the dust. When the sand settled, the street was quiet again and remained so for a long time.
         An old man on a bicycle stopped at the end of our street, carrying a large box. He set up a paper panel with colorful pictures from children’s stories and for those kids who bought his sweets, he would read the stories. He brushed away the kids who could not afford to buy any, so I had to leave and stay at home, sitting by the window squinting my eyes, trying to see the paper theater show in vain.
         “You can read those same stories in your books,” my mother told me while mending a shirt, but it wasn’t the same. Besides, I didn’t have many books, but I didn’t dare ask her as I knew she did not have much money. I kept silent, wishing that Grandma Hanako would come soon and hand me some secret coins.
         Across from our house, an old woman sat on a zabuton cushion like a Buddha statue in an altar, selling candies inside the dark entrance of her house.
         “That’s a bad place to step into,” my mother told me whenever I was tempted to even look in that direction. “The sugar’s bad for you. If you eat any, the bugs would come out and eat up all your teeth till they rot.”
         I couldn’t sneak into the candy store and buy anything for I was only four, too young to have any money of my own. Until my father’s mother, Grandma Hanako, visited us and gave me some change. Hanako was a large woman with a loud voice. The mother of six children after the first two died from malnourishment during the war, according to my mother. Grandma Hanako loved to feed me with oily, salty, and sweet food. She was the total opposite of my careful mother who seemed obsessed with nutritious diet.
         “Your okaachan’s so strict. You can ask me for anything, my dear. You don’t even have to tell your mother about it.” Hanako whispered in my ear, letting me hold some coins in my tiny palm.
         I tiptoed into the candy store feeling a tinge of guilt mixed with excitement twirled in my head. Inside the dark store, small candies lined up neatly, all looking like hidden gems of different shapes and colors. I selected a small bag of thin sugar-coated rice cookies and gave the old lady a couple of coins. Later, I developed a severe toothache that made me cry and I had to tell my mother how I got the pain.
         “What did I tell you?” She made me open my mouth and asked where the pain was.
         “Here,” I said pointing with my finger somewhere inside my mouth but she couldn’t see “the bugs” that she had warned me about. In my dream the white sugar slowly ate me up, eroding my teeth, deforming my face, as termites would do to a house. That was the last time I wanted to eat any sugar-coated rice cookie.
         While growing up during the war, as my mother told me, she was malnourished, scrawny, and sickly. When I was born in 1956, she was determined to raise a healthier child, better nourished, and better educated. She wasn’t going to spend any money on sweet pastries or candies, but on a special occasion she did allow me to eat Ohagi, the sticky mochi rice balls entirely covered with sweet red azuki bean paste. I was only allowed to eat a couple.
         My father also loved red azuki beans, but he was not to eat anything that wasn’t soft and easily digestible, and the beans were hard to digest. Just around the time I was born, he had an ulcer surgery and almost one third of his stomach was removed. Ever since then, my mother would prepare only soft food for him, using simple ingredients like silky tofu, steamed spinach, half boiled eggs, steamed baby anchovies, and rice porridge. And that was what I ate too except my mother gave me spinach sautéed with salty butter and an egg omelet with a million pieces of chives.
         After dinner, my father stretched his long thin body on a bamboo reclining chair and quietly read a book, or the newspaper, while listening to Maria Callas singing on the radio with a dreamy expression on his chiseled face. I was allowed to sit on his lap only when he had no stomach ache and that was rare.
         My mother never rested on that reclining chair or anywhere. In her small thin body, she had the energy of a busy ant, moving from cooking to cleaning, washing clothes to drying them outside, calculating and taking notes from her abacus. I liked the sound of the wooden pellets as her fingers snapped and cleared across the long calculator.
         In the morning, she put on light blue sunglasses, her hair tied in the back and covered with a silky scarf, waving goodbye to me, pedaling away on a bicycle, smiling. I wondered why she looked so happy leaving me. I was left with my maternal grandmother, Sadako. Even though I liked her and her soft voice, I wished my mother were home.

         My day was busy. A little way down the street was a house with a garden of large colorful strange flowers, loud yellow and red birds, and tall leafy trees. A bald old man with a wrinkled face and a white-haired woman with no teeth lived there. I had seen them yell at older children, but luckily when my friends and I sneaked in to explore their jungle, they did not notice us. We walked right through the dense bushes and came to a small pond at the center of the garden where large pink petals floated on the surface. Then a yellow and red bird flew from nowhere and screeched above us; it scared the other birds away, broke the silence, and sent us into a panic. Once when that happened, I wet my pants and hid in the bushes.
         “Come on, Yuko. Let’s get outta here,” a boy whispered loudly, and with that the rest of the kids ran away. I stayed in the bush hiding, frightened and embarrassed, until it was calm again. Then I tiptoed out of the garden through the spooky flowers with the strong smell of lush green leaves, experiencing what must feel like a foreign island, pretending to be a brave pirate unafraid of any birds.
         The Kanzaki River was only a block away from our house. It was deep and the current slow. Children were told not to play near the shore, but we did anyway. On the soft sand of the riverbed, we made bamboo leaf boats and let them float on the water.
         The day my neighborhood friend, Kitaro, slipped into the river and began to be pulled away, crying “Help, help,” we ran back to get one of our mothers. His mother happened to be nearby. She ran to the shore and dashed into the water with all her clothes on. She caught him and towed his wet chubby body out of the current.
         On the riverbank she and Kitaro sat trying to catch a breath. Soon she began to yell. “I told you not to play by the river.” She spanked him on his wet bottom. “Don’t you ever do this again,” she continued. Kitaro cried hard but it was not until his mother started to cry that I became frightened, imagining what might have happened if we hadn’t found her in time.
         The night of Kitaro’s incident, my father told us the story of a man who used to come to that river to catch fish. He speared them, then dried and smoked the fish right there. One day, the fisherman fell into the river from the bank and impaled himself on one of the sharp wooden poles sticking out from the riverbed. The man, dead, looked just like those very fish he used to catch. My father, who had heard that story from someone else, relayed it to us at dinner. “It’s karma. The man was punished for what he did,” he said. It was confirmation of the Buddhist teaching that one shall not kill any living creatures, he told me as he picked up his piece of fish with a pair of chopsticks and put it into his mouth, and washed it down with a sip of warm sake.
         I looked on my plate at the poor fish I was about to eat. I was not going to play around the riverside anymore, I told myself, not to mention ever killing the fish myself. But I was still drawn to the water.
         On the seventh day of July, from a shallow shore of the Kanzaki River, my mother and I released a bamboo tree branch decorated with colorful paper ornaments and banners on which I wrote my wishes. It was the day of Tanabata when a mythical weaving princess, who made clothes for Gods, and a cowboy met across the Milky Way when the sky was clear. If it rained the Milky Way was invisible so the two lovers could not find each other and they would have to wait another year for their rendezvous. My wishes were all about eating those azuki bean-filled pastries from the Donkey’s Bakery. My mother helped me decorate the bamboo and let it float on the blue river with many other branches holding the wishes of my neighborhood’s children. They traveled underneath the bridge, meandered, merged, and disappeared into the distant blur.
         That night, after dinner, my father took me back to the riverbank for a walk. A man with a large brown horse carrying saddlebags walked by us. I stiffened my body with fear. I was more frightened when a huge ox came next, walking slowly, pulling a heavy wooden carrier with lots of farming tools. Its enormous body looked as if it were about to swallow me in the darkening sky but my father held my hand more tightly as if to protect me from the beast. Then there was no one else strolling on the path along the grassy riverbank.
         The night fell dark quietly, as there were no streetlights, nor any television in the neighborhood. Not even a telephone. The only sound came from the gargling frogs echoing in the summer nights. When the sky was full of crystal stars, the big golden moon sparkled, casting the shadow of a fig tree in our front yard. Then our street fell as silent as the row of ginkgo trees lined up like night guards.
         At the end of her long day, my mother sat in front of a black lacquered vanity—one of the wedding gifts from her biological father whom I never met because he had disappeared from her life before I was born. She flipped back the velvet drapery covering the mirror and untied her wavy black hair, as black as the lacquered vanity itself, letting it drop around her fair cheeks. She combed her hair quickly before she put the drapery back, and moved on to another task.
         By the time she sat by my bed to tell me a children’s story or two, and sing one of the few lullabies about the good baby who falls asleep, I was already dozing off.  
         Once I fell asleep, I had the same terrifying dream about falling off a cliff. The nightmare began with the scene of my body floating like a kite in the zero-gravity atmosphere for a second before I suddenly plunged full force. My hair was pulled straight up, my body feeling the full effect of the rapid fall. My mouth was wide open, gasping for air, unable to scream. I nearly died or fainted before I woke up exhausted, all sweaty, and out of breath. Gradually I regained a sense of myself, feeling my breath, aware of my heart’s fast rhythm. My eyes examined every single item in the tiny bedroom: the wooden ceiling panels, the shoji screen doors, the translucent glass panes, my cotton futon comforter and buckwheat pillow. Relieved that I was still alive, I took a deep breath, still too scared of closing my eyes and returning to the horror, trying to calm my heart until the sun came back.
         My mother decided to send me to a daycare. It provided lunch that was tea and bread with sweet azuki bean paste in it. “That’s a dessert,” she said and prepared a lunchbox full of colorful food every morning and told me not to eat the sweet bread. My obento box was huge, packed with white rice, chicken liver paste, sautéed spinach, and a sliced egg omelet with tiny shrimp and so many pieces of chives in it that the omelet was more green than yellow.
         “Your lunchbox is a monster.” A chubby boy sniffed my food, leaning over me, trying to poke his dirty finger into my rice, his runny nose about to drip on my obento. I pushed him away, telling him to stay back, but he came back with his large face, trying to kiss me.
         “You’re stinky.” I pulled my face away but he wouldn’t give up until we got into a fistfight and the teacher had to separate us.
         My mother told me to ignore kids like the boy. She didn’t understand how I had to defend myself from him or no one would and he would steal my lunch.
         As if my monstrous lunch was not nutritious enough, my mother arranged with the daycare so that cow’s milk was provided for me. Just me. Drinking milk, which was a foreign concept, made my lunch even more scandalous.
         My being a head taller than any other kids made me stand out even further. This was all thanks to my mother’s zeal for raising a big healthy child and feeding me as if trying to realize her dream of becoming a nutritionist, the dream she once had as a young student that was “destroyed by the war.”
         The teachers wondered if I was still in my preschool age. They told me to oversee the “younger” kids during the naptime by sitting straight up in the middle of the room where small children lay trying to take a nap. I did not mind that job but I did wonder why I was treated differently.
         The day my mother did not show up on time to pick me up at the daycare, instead of waiting for her, I decided to walk home by myself. I knew how. The teachers did not stop me. I walked briskly down the main street. Motorcycles and buses zoomed by and the car exhaust and dust blew on my face. I marched straight up to our bridge over the Kanzaki River. When I reached the top of the arch, my father, who was sitting in one of the buses passing by, saw a toddler strolling alone. Suddenly realizing it was his own daughter, he jumped off the bus and brought me home to safety.
         I didn’t feel like going to the daycare anymore, but my mother physically forced me to get on the bus as I tried to wiggle and run away. My grandma Sadako was much kinder. She would let me hide inside her long apron and pretend she hadn’t seen me. I tried to stay still, not even breathing, so my mother wouldn’t find me. But she found me and pulled me out.
         I wondered why my mother was so strict about everything. I wondered if I were an orphan dropped off from a ship in Kobe port. I had heard about foreign children being bought and sold to a circus in broad daylight. The girls usually wore red shoes.
         I decided to find out. If my mother saw me leave the house and stopped me to take me back to my bed gently, then I must be her real child. I climbed out of my futon in my pajamas and walked slowly out of my room down the wooden hallway outside their bedroom. She could have heard my footsteps and seen my shadow behind the door. I stepped down toward the entryway, preparing to put on my slippers and walk out of the house.
         “Yuko, where are you going?” She sounded gentle.
         “I must go now. I must leave this house.”
         “Really?”
         “Yes, I’m leaving,” I said.
         She did not respond.
         “Sayounara.” I went to the door, slid it open slightly, and peeked into my parents’ room. My father was invisible in the dark. My mother seemed to be falling asleep. I couldn’t tell if she was indeed sleeping or pretending to ignore me.
         “I’m leaving, Okaachan. I’m really leaving.” Aren’t you going to come after me?
         She turned her face toward me, her eyes half open, a faint smile on her face. “Don’t be silly. Go back to your bed.”
         She did not get up. She was not going to bring me back to my room and tuck me in. I turned around, and stepped outside into the darkness. No one’s following me. The soft moist air touched my cheeks and made me shiver. I looked up. The sky was dark, but as I kept looking, I began to see that it was full of stars moving about to form different shapes. The moon lay flat upon the bridge over the Kanzaki River, away from the numerous stars. Suddenly, I was overcome by sadness. I was leaving home. At the sound of a wind chime tinkling, I hurried back to my bed and covered myself with a cotton quilt. The moon followed me and brightened my room. On its face, I saw the shadow of two rabbits—one standing with a long hammer and the other crouching by a large bowl, both kneading mochi rice dough in the bowl. They were making rice cakes on the moon. My mother did not come to see me, to make sure I was back and all right, to sing a song and to put me to sleep.
         I must have been a child dropped off at Kobe port. I wondered what I was wearing and if I had come from a much colder place with many tall people. But why then did I have two loving grandmothers, one who gave me candy money and the other who let me hide behind her apron? Soon the wind chime faded and the full moon grew blurry as the rabbits kept pounding the mochi rice dough.