“You could get a divorce. You could go to marriage counseling.”
“That’s the American way. I am not American.” Here we go again. She continues, “Americans think that the divorce will solve all kind of problem. But divorce will not make me happier. I don’t think it will make you happier. It only disappoints everyone. Think of my parents—they will have two divorced daughters.”
“Mom. Who cares who you disappoint?”
“I care.”
“Well, what about counseling?”
But she won’t budge. “It’s a same thing. Americans think that talking about the problems will solve them, but it doesn’t. Not always. Some things cannot be changed with talking.”
“Like what? What are you talking about?”
She looks at me carefully. “You are still so young,” she says. “But maybe you can understand. Let me tell you a story of how your father and I got married.”
“I know it,” I say. “Baba told me the whole thing once. And Dad’s told me, too.”
“That is why I sent him away this morning. I’m going to tell it differently.” She puts her hand on my head and strokes my hair gently, like she used to do when I was a little girl. “Love marriages are normal in Japan now, but sometimes they are still difficult, especially in the countryside, where your father and I grew up,” she begins in Japanese. “Your father’s family is an old one, and proud. They have been samurai, farmers, scholars, and priests in the same area for many generations. My family, too, is old. My great-great-grandfather was a tea farmer, and he became very wealthy that way.”
I nod. I’ve heard this part before. When we visited her in Japan, Dad’s mom, Baba, showed me the family’s collection of netsuke, button-like charms that samurai once used to fasten their purses to their sashes. There’s even an ancient sword resting in a place of honor in the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse where Dad grew up. And I’ve seen and smelled the boxes and jars that my mother’s family used to store and transport the tea they sold. Baba told me how Mom and Dad were good friends since toddlerhood because their families had known each other for generations. For generations, both families had only sons; the women were all daughters-in-law from other families. Mom was the first girl in four generations in both families, and everyone wanted her and Dad to get married one day. But neither of them wanted to. Both of them had relationships with people they met in college—in fact, Mom was even engaged. But then Dad’s girlfriend broke up with him and he got all depressed and sick, and Mom basically whipped him back into shape. Here, Baba chuckled and said, “You are her daughter. You can imagine how she was.” In the process, they fell in love, Mom broke off her engagement with the other guy, and now they’re living happily ever after.
“But you had a love marriage, right? You and Dad were lucky because you loved each other.”
“That’s the story that Baba and Dad have told you. Baba has told it so many times, she probably believes it’s true. But it’s only partly true. Your father and I were each in love with other people. My fiancé was a medical student from Tokyo. I met him at college. That much is the same as Baba’s story. The woman your father loved, though, was different.
“Her name was Yūko-san, and she was a college student, too, at the same school as your father. She was from the city of Kobe. She was smart and pretty, a good girl. But her family was dōwa, the class of people who used to handle dead things in the old days of Japan, hundreds of years ago. Butchers and undertakers. Leatherworkers. They are the lowest class, the untouchables, and many of them hide their backgrounds out of shame. But there are practical reasons, too. It can be difficult to get hired or promoted if you are dōwa—many companies do background checks before they hire their workers. And it is difficult to get married, especially into old families like your father’s and mine. Yūko-san did not tell anyone about her family background, not even your father.
“When your father and Yūko-san’s relationship became serious, his family hired a private investigator to research her family background—yes, people still do that. If you marry into the wrong kind of family, it can hurt everyone: you, your children, the rest of your own family. It’s important to protect your children, especially. If we lived in Japan, I would hire someone to investigate anyone who wanted to marry you—ah! Don’t interrupt. And don’t look so shocked. I know you think it’s old-fashioned and wrong, and maybe you’re right. But that is the way things are. Stop complaining, and listen.
“Your father did not want to break things off with Yūko-san. He loved her, no matter what. He had a terrible fight with Jiji and Baba, your grandparents. Eventually, though, it was Yūko-san who left, so that she wouldn’t cause any more pain. She knew that your father would cut himself off from his family for her, and she didn’t want to be the reason for such an old family to fall apart. She didn’t want your father’s children to suffer discrimination like she did—it would have been even worse for them, since he would have lost his family connections. Can you imagine having no family at all? It was the honorable thing to do, and I admired her for it.
“The next part of the story, the one that Baba has told so many times that she thinks it’s true, really did happen. I helped your father get better from his sadness. I called him every day and bothered him until he got out of bed. I brought him his favorite foods. I made him study for his graduate school classes. But I didn’t leave my fiancé, like Baba says. He grew tired of waiting for me to give him my attention. He left me, which broke my heart. Your father helped me through that time, and eventually we decided to marry each other.”
“So you fell in love with each other?”
Mom frowns. “We were not in love. But we loved each other. We had suffered together, and survived together, and we knew that we could make a good marriage.”
“But—”
“Would you prefer that we had not married? Would you prefer not to have been born?” I don’t have an answer for that. “Yūko-san was an English major, and she eventually moved to America. We moved to Wisconsin, and after a few years, your father found her. She was here, in California. He visited her over and over.”
“Did you know about her? Did you know what he was doing?”
“He told me soon after he found her. At first, I was angry. Of course I was. I was sad. I didn’t want my husband to go with another woman, after I had worked so hard to make him happy, to make a good home for him in this country. But after a long time, after I thought and thought about it . . .” She shrugs. “I knew, when we moved to California, that he wanted to be closer to her.”
“And you let him?!”
“She suffered, and your father suffered. For years, Sana. He was in love with her. It was easier than having him gone on so many trips to California.”