The Paper Artist
If that was the case, she wasn’t to come back to them again. Muneo made this clear to his daughter in the front room of his parents’ house, just north of Shimogamo Shrine. It was the house he’d been born in fifty-four years earlier; the house he’d lived in with his wife, Masako, for the past twenty-four years. His father and mother, no longer alive, were framed in pictures above the altar—large photographs, the black ink turned to a faded purple from years of exposure. Their expressions were unsmiling, severe.
She had shamed them, he continued. She had not only gotten herself pregnant, she had done it with a foreigner, a foolish one, by the looks of it, low-class and without prospects.
He did not look at the man his daughter had brought to them, who kept saying, in English, “What’s going on, Mana?” and imploring her to interpret. He did not look at his daughter. When Masako had brought them in, he’d been gazing out at the garden, and he hadn’t turned around to face them when they knelt down on the tatami in the formal seiza position. It was June, the rainy season. Since morning, water had drizzled from the low, stifling skies onto the rocks and pine and moss, turning everything darker and more vibrant. The hydrangeas were in bloom. Heavy raindrops slipped off bright blue clusters of flowers the size of human heads. Beneath the rain and heat, they bowed.
“If you don’t take care of the baby and get rid of this man, don’t think that you are welcome to show your face here again.”
Mana looked at her father’s erect back as he stared out into the garden. He was a small man but powerfully built, with a strong jaw and thick, black hair threaded with gray. His shoulders were still; she knew that if he had turned to meet them, she wouldn’t have seen anger flashing in his eyes, his face contorted with rage. Her father was the master of control. He could sit seiza for hours. Once, when she was in elementary school and still in the habit of trying to please him, she had worked all day on a watercolor picture of an iron wind bell shaped like a frog. She had eagerly taken it to her father, who was in his studio at the back of the house. In their neighborhood and throughout Japan, even in countries she’d only read about in picture books, he was known as the paper artist. He was famous. By the time she was ten, she’d gleaned this, though it was mysterious how his many hours sequestered in solitude in the back room translated into recognition around the world.
“Father, look at what I made,” she had said, bringing the watercolor picture to his desk, where he sat hunched over his work. She presented it to him gravely, but inside there was more than a little bit of excitement as he studied it beneath the lamplight. Instead of offering a comment, though, he had lifted the blade that was already in his hand and began to rapidly slice slivers and strips of paper until the wind chime was almost completely cut away. He’d created a bird, she saw when he handed it back, its wings outstretched and flapping, tiny feathers scattered across the page. It looked alive. Its body seemed to move as it swiped at the bell with its wings and tugged with its thin, bony feet at the paper strip attached to the string dangling from the clapper. Her father had held the picture out without bothering to look at her. The message was clear: her work had been unworthy; she was dismissed; she was not to disturb her father with such insignificant attempts again. Compared to the dramatic fury of the bird, her wind bell had seemed dull, heavy with unconvincing lines.
In the low, dim room, Mana raised her voice in protest, but hurling words at her father was as satisfying as throwing stones at water. He didn’t turn around. He continued to stare out at the garden. When she started weeping and her words were choked up with tears, he asked her if she was done. Though he couldn’t see her, she nodded. Is it true that she didn’t want to get rid of the baby? Yes. Is it true that she purported love for this man? The man she’d brought to present to her father was looking in alarm at her tear-streaked face and tried to hold her hand, but Mana shrugged him off and wiped at her eyes with a piece of balled-up tissue. Already, the love and the passion she’d felt just the night before were fading beneath her father’s derision. For as long as she could remember, he’d had that kind of power: whatever delight she found shriveled beneath his dismissive eyes. She hated him for it. This time, though, she wouldn’t capitulate. This time, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of turning her weaknesses into a pitiable parade. “Yes,” she said, in answer to his question.
“Then we have nothing more to discuss.”
“You were too hard on her,” Masako said quietly after they had gone. She was clearing up the half-drunk cups of tea, the untouched sweets left behind on the lacquer tray she’d brought out for Mana and her boyfriend. Her husband was exacting. The precision that turned into a gift in his hands every time he created a sculpture out of paper and light and air was eviscerating in relationships. He was a proud man, pleased with nothing short of excellence in his own work and, by extension, his family. When he was young and not yet famous, he had made her an intricate paper necklace that she still had in one of her drawers, safeguarded in a glass box lined with velvet. Strands of delicate leafy vines and curled tendrils as fine as baby’s hair were woven together, along with impossibly perfect passion flowers and hummingbirds that had made her smile in surprise when she first saw them. He had painted every single leaf and petal, and the hummingbirds had ruby throats, green wings flecked with real gold. Everything gleamed, preserved under a layer of clear varnish, so delicate that Masako, after placing it in the glass box, was afraid of ever lifting it out to touch it.
She was the daughter of a Tokyo government official. A slim woman with smooth skin and ink-black hair swept into a French twist, who managed to look cool and unperturbed despite the dreary heat of the rain. She had the subtle, self-effacing kind of elegance that was best perceived in retrospect, through the lens of accumulated events, like an aurora borealis flowing through the vast silences of photographs; toward her, Muneo rarely had a censorious word. He could be gentle, kind. But her daughter suffered: it pained Masako to think of what she’d endured all these years, and there were times when she wondered if it was her fault because she hadn’t interfered.
“It had to be said. She’s throwing away her life; she doesn’t have time for a relationship or for a child; she’s on her way to becoming a famous cellist.”
“‘The other cellist in the orchestra had more depth.’ That’s what you told her the last time you heard her play in the orchestra.” Masako’s hands tightened on the tray as she lifted it. She was upset, but the cups didn’t rattle and give her away.
“She needed to practice more. She has talent, but because of a lack of diligence, it’s not brought out.”
“You could have told her that.”
“What?”
“That she has talent. You could have at least looked at them, acknowledged the man who will be the father of your grandchild.”
“She’s being foolish. It’s clear that she doesn’t love him.”
Masako shook her head. In the days leading up to the confrontation, Mana had talked about her boyfriend, pleading for her mother to intercede on their behalf. The man had been her English tutor at the conservatory. He was thoughtful and intelligent, a writer with some success already in the States, considering his young age.
“You don’t know that.”
“She’ll realize it soon enough.”
“Do you think you know the twists and turns of a woman’s heart?”
“She’ll be back.”
In the mornings, Muneo paid homage to his parents. He got up early, at 6:00 a.m.—the same time every morning—and went downstairs to the altar, where he lit a stick of incense, rang the brass bell, clapped his hands. His father, too, had been famous: a well-known heart surgeon in Kyoto. In the Mizukami family, talent ran through the hands, which were nimble and decisive, capable of indefatigable precision long after others were exhausted. Mana, too, had been blessed with the gift. Even before she had learned how to talk, one day she’d gotten ahold of a pair of scissors and began cutting shapes out of the tablecloth. A square, a triangle. They were almost perfect. Masako had been angry, but while she scolded Mana, Muneo had slipped the cut-out shapes into his pocket. Later, in his studio, he had taken them out again and studied them beneath the lamplight with growing excitement. He did not know, then, that though his daughter had the capability, she lacked the character to match it.
In front of the altar, a curl of smoke rose from the lit incense stick toward the framed pictures of his parents. His father had expected him to become a surgeon, not an artist. Because of that, Muneo, too, had endured his share of confrontations. But he was grateful for that now. He pressed his palms together and bowed. His father’s disapproval had sharpened him, whetting his appetite for excellence. In art school, he had stayed in while all the other students drank and partied. He went to bed later and was up before dawn, working on his various creations, and not even a year after graduating, he already had an exhibit in a major Tokyo gallery. “A paragon of precision,” was what a critic had written: “Mizukami Muneo’s art captures the great yearning of the human spirit to shed its earthly shell: the gorgeous sensation of mystery and liberation the moment flesh expires.” He’d sent the pamphlet to his father, who did not reply and did not go. Years later, though, as his father lay dying in the upstairs bedroom, he had found that pamphlet, along with one for every single exhibit he’d ever showed, in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk. They were filed away neatly in folders that corresponded to different years. There were newspaper clippings as well, he saw, glued to card stock so they wouldn’t get crumpled or lost. To his astonishment, he even discovered a handful of ticket stubs.
Without his father, he wouldn’t be the man that he was today. Muneo thought of this as he and Masako ate breakfast. As usual, they ate in silence while they listened to music, Frank Sinatra crooning about love and the moon. It was the same breakfast they’d eaten together every day for at least a decade: a slice of toasted milk bread, a cup of salad drizzled with Pietro dressing, plain yogurt flavored with a spoonful of blueberry jam, boiled sausage. The rude sounds of their chewing were obfuscated by the music, which also liberated them from talking so early in the day. Muneo had instituted this routine at the beginning of their marriage. In the first hours after waking, when his mind was most lucid and creative, he desired the freedom to leisurely tease out ideas that had flirted with him in dreams throughout the night. He loved the mornings. He loved the light that flowed between the eyelet curtains and refracted playfully upon crystal cups and bowls and plates in the display cases lining the wall. The rest of the house was perpetually in shadow; here alone, for an hour every morning, the light poured across the table, clear and translucent and warm, alighting upon the silver spoons in a flurry of effulgence, the curve of a plate, the copper tint of the jam jar lid, before finally settling in the depths of the blueberry jam. Numerous creations were born in these moments—if not, in some way or another, all of them—which was why his family had learned long ago not to disrupt him with mundane comments.
And yet, a few weeks after Mana’s visit, one morning Masako broke into his reverie before they were even halfway done with breakfast. Mana and her boyfriend were moving to New York, she told him. She picked up a piece of lettuce and lifted it daintily to her lips with chopsticks. The light streamed through the window; it struck the crystal glasses on the table and cast a delicate, phosphorescent script across her face, which, Muneo knew without even looking up, would be expressionless, no matter how her emotions writhed below the surface. Unlike Mana, who had never learned to contain her feelings, Masako could control what she felt beautifully, shaping it the way monks raked sand into flawless ripples around rocks in temple gardens.
“They’re leaving tomorrow.”
The yogurt in his mouth went sour.
“She said they don’t know when they’re coming back. They want to get married. Her boyfriend is going to graduate school.”
Muneo’s hand kept moving his spoon from the bowl to his mouth until it scraped the last few streaks of yogurt off the bottom, then he set it aside without comment. So. This was what his daughter had chosen. He was disappointed. But he was a man of his word, and decisions had their consequences; it was a lesson she would learn now.
At the kitchen table, Masako didn’t say anything else. Her husband was a stubborn man. She knew better than to suggest that they go to the wedding: they would not visit America, and they would not see their grandchild; her husband would never relax his pronouncement, even if he were tempted to revise it. For it was his pride on the line now, and it stung him that he had been disregarded. She could see the future unfolding clearly: the silence that would pour out of the daughter-shaped hole in the middle of their household; the grimness with which her husband would set his face toward his work, how he’d assiduously cut out Mana from every conversation with relative, friend, and acquaintance. It reminded her of the first time they’d gone to his father in order to make amends. They’d been married two years, and Masako still hadn’t met his family. She’d been terribly nervous; she could still remember how her stomach had clenched when they stepped onto the stone path leading to the doorway. In front of her, Muneo had carefully held a large box wrapped in dark blue chirimen cloth. It was a peace offering for his father: a lampshade he’d worked on for months that revolved slowly on a little pedestal around a light bulb. The shape of a dragon had been cut out of the creamy mulberry paper. In a darkened room, the dragon slid across the walls, each carefully crafted scale a dazzle of light, its head and fiery eyes wreathed in glowing arabesques that had taken hours to painstakingly design. One slip of the hand and the whole thing had to be scrapped. When he’d shown it to her the week before, Masako had been delighted. The dragon undulated around their small studio apartment, and she’d pressed herself against the wall right where the dragon’s jaw gaped wide, shrieking and laughing as Muneo staged exaggerated heroics to save her. She’d been six months pregnant then. When they had knelt in front of Muneo’s father in the same front room in which they’d received Mana and her boyfriend, baby Mana, still in her womb, had kicked, and she’d felt nauseous enough with fear to vomit.
“It is not much, but I hope that in this gift you will see the first fruits of my meager talent,” Muneo had said in formal Japanese, stiff with the requisite self-abnegation even though Masako knew that he was intensely proud of what he had created. Muneo had taken out the lamp and turned it on to demonstrate the moving lampshade, but the room was too big and the lamp too far away for the dragon to spring to life on the walls, its limbs liquid gold and elongated. As they watched it, Masako had remembered the way they had played with such childish glee just the week before in their apartment. Now, though, Muneo’s face was tense and somber. Unease moved deep down, stirring the baby in her womb, until it rose, and she could feel the molten heat of it just beneath her skin. In the large front room, so austere and spotless, the dragon had seemed subdued, much smaller and meeker than it had appeared in their apartment. After a few more revolutions, Muneo reached down and turned the lamp off, and the silence stretched and reverberated with unspoken emotion.
“Never in my life,” began his father finally, in the low, controlled voice that Muneo would one day use with his own daughter, “did I think that a son of mine would become the maker of toys for children.”
Masako kept in touch with Mana.
In October, she received a picture of Mana dressed in a lovely white dress with a satin skirt, a beaded and lacy sweetheart bodice. “It was a small wedding,” Mana wrote. “Only Charlie’s mom and stepdad came from Connecticut. A few of his college friends who live in the city attended as well.” She described the lemon-raspberry wedding cake, drizzled with lemon syrup, each layer interspersed with buttercream, raspberries, or lemon curd (so sour, Masako thought, so rich), and she told Masako of her first visit to the home of Charlie’s mom. “There were pictures of the family on all the bookcases and on the refrigerator and all over the walls!” she wrote, noting how different that was from Japan, where most households didn’t put anything on the walls, except, perhaps, a calendar; family pictures were often formal portraits taken under the bright lights of a studio, touched up later so that everyone had perfectly glowing complexions. But in America, people tacked up photos of everything—a kid eating an ice cream cone with chocolate smeared all over his face; toddlers rolling around on the grass in their diapers with the family dog; people with wide open mouths and blurry bodies as they guffawed.
“Charlie’s mom gave us a set of pots and pans,” Mana continued, and Masako could almost hear her smile: “It was a shock for his mom to see him come back from Japan with a pregnant girlfriend who is now suddenly his wife, but she was kind to me. During dinner, Charlie’s stepdad stood up and made a toast and teared up so much, he had to bring out a handkerchief to blow his nose.”
The picture of the baby came in December. “Rina is her name,” Mana wrote. “In America, babies are bundled up tightly in a cloth—‘swaddled’ they call it. They come out of the hospital like that with a little cotton cap. I think it looks terribly hot, and it seems Rina thinks so as well. Whenever I go to check on her, she has always managed to free one, if not both, of her arms.”
Rina was an easy baby; she slept often. Mana, in contrast, had been fussy from the very beginning. Masako remembered how she would rock her daughter throughout the night. Every time it seemed as if it would be possible to lay Mana down, the moment Masako moved just a little bit, Mana would start crying. All she ever wanted was to be held and held.
“The baby’s name is Rina,” Masako reported to Muneo. The pucker around his mouth deepened, as if drawn tight as a drawstring bag around its contents. He made a sound in his throat as a substitute for acknowledgement, then pushed back his chair and cleared his plates from the breakfast table. He had work to do; he was preparing a new sculpture for a museum in London.
In his studio, it was hard for Muneo to concentrate. The work was delicate, demanding. He knelt on the floor, cutting out a tiger from a giant piece of washi paper. At the museum, the tiger would prowl above the museum guests, suspended from transparent nylon threads. Its body was extremely fine, made out of swirling gold and black wisps and swells, graceful as ink seeping through water. It was his most ambitious work yet. Like his father, he used scalpel blades, which were thinner and sharper than razors, but they blunted so quickly that he had to change them every few minutes.
“Otto,” Muneo said, the second time he nearly accidentally sliced through a connecting segment. He sat back on his haunches. His hands were shaking with frustration. The bud of pressure in his chest that had materialized when Masako told him about the baby had been steadily inflating all morning. Muneo closed his eyes. For a few minutes, he focused on regulating his breathing. When his father was in the middle of a surgery, to be distracted was not an option. And so it was with him as well. Muneo lifted his scalpel and bent down.
In the beginning, Masako received messages and emails with pictures of the baby almost daily. Gradually, though, the communication from Mana started to taper off. By the time Rina was four, a month could pass without Masako hearing a word.
The messages that did come concerned Masako, even though the content was lighthearted, punctuated with exclamation points and playful emojis, funny anecdotes about Rina. Her daughter’s address had changed three times since she had moved to New York, and after each move, the frequency in her communication dropped a little more. She had talked about Charlie and his mom and stepdad often in their first year of marriage, but after a while, Masako noticed that she didn’t mention them. The insouciant tone of her daughter’s emails felt forced: curated, Masako thought to herself when she’d finally asked after Charlie and had received a lengthy email back about a trip to the beach and how Rina had found a crab. Charlie, it seemed, had not gone on the trip, but Masako couldn’t be sure because he simply was not mentioned.
After the sixth year, though, a melancholy note began to creep into Mana’s stories and observations. Sometimes, she could see rats scuttling along the train tracks in the subways. In the winters, the snowbank next to their apartment got filthy if it didn’t melt because it was next to a bar and accumulated the ash and cigarette butts from all the people smoking. The public bathrooms were sticky, and her upstairs neighbors sounded as if they were constantly dropping dishes and moving furniture across their floor. For the first time, Masako learned that when Rina was born, they’d lived down the street from the fire department. Though Rina was a good baby, the sirens woke her up almost every hour.
“Remember the wind bell you used to have in the garden?” Mana reminisced at the end of one particularly morose email. “The one made out of iron, shaped like a frog? Remember how you used to take it down at night so that it wouldn’t wake up the neighbors? It seems outlandish to think of that now. In America, everyone and everything is so loud. The thing I remember most about home is the quiet.”
“Please, come home and visit,” Masako wrote back. “It’s been over six years. I’d like to see you and my granddaughter.”
“You know I can’t,” came Mana’s reply, via LINE. “Father won’t like it.”
“Don’t worry about him.”
“He hasn’t emailed or called me once.”
“You don’t have to see him.”
“I’ve quit playing the cello. I’ve disappointed him.”
“He’ll be in London for two weeks at the end of March. I’ll buy you and Rina a ticket. It’ll be our secret.” Masako’s heart beat quickly against her chest, her fingers hesitating just a moment before she pressed send.
A day passed without a reply. Then another and another. Then finally, on Friday, she saw Mana had sent a message.
“Okay,” it read. “We will come.”
It felt like an affair, this meeting with Mana and Rina—a lover’s assignation.
When Muneo was home, he and Masako had a set routine. They hardly went out to eat because he was always working. Also, he thought that eating outside was a frivolous waste of money when you could eat at home exactly what you wanted. He didn’t cook. He didn’t wash the dishes. He held the traditional convictions in their marriage that the woman was supposed to manage the household, freeing the man up to work and think. For her part, Masako was an excellent housekeeper, committed to cleanliness, a simple and elegant aesthetic, and an avoidance of excess. She herself had raised objections on occasion if they were visiting another city and Muneo wanted to take her to a fancy restaurant. Her family, though wealthy once, had fallen on hard times when she was a child. Since then, frugality had become her prevailing reflex, fueled by the understanding that all you have could be stripped away in an instant, so it was a good idea to be prepared. Still, she would have liked to eat out once in a while at the teahouses in Gion, to enjoy the grilled sweet eel at Kane-yo downtown.
In the weeks before Mana and Rina’s visit, it occurred to her that finally, here was an occasion that made it permissible to do so. It was Rina’s first time in Japan—how much there was to show her in Kyoto! As Masako vacuumed the first floor and took the comforters up to the balcony to beat out the dust, she felt flutters of excitement. When Mana was growing up, Masako had been careful not to spoil her. It was different with Rina, though. Who knew when she would be able to come back to Japan again? Who knew when Masako would get another chance to show her everything she loved?
That spring, when Muneo returned from London, he sensed that something had changed, but he couldn’t put a finger on what it was. They took their meals and their mid-morning tea at the same time as always. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Masako held a flower arranging class in the front room on the first floor. She went to the grocery store every other morning, and on Fridays, she volunteered at the neighborhood senior center, where the gathered elderly sang songs and heard presentations on safety from policemen. He could always tell when it was Masako coming home; there was the sound of her feet touching the ground as she dismounted from her bicycle; the strained exhalation, yokkoisho, as she lifted it onto the front step and placed it neatly next to his at the side of the entryway; the rattle of the door opening and closing; her feet shuffling into slippers; the creaking of the wooden floors as she moved through the hallway, and her voice carried to the back room where he worked, announcing that she was home.
Life continued on as before, and yet there was something ever so slightly off. Sometimes, if he came out of his studio unexpectedly, he found her in the living room, sitting on the floor, the glossy spread of a magazine open on the coffee table in front of her, although she wasn’t looking at it. Instead, she gazed out the window, her features soft and dreamy in the muted glow of the light. If he made his presence known, she’d start and hurriedly gather up the magazine, saying brightly that here she was caught in a daydream when there was so much work to be done. Then she’d disappear upstairs, and he’d hear the balcony door open so that she could take in the washing.
Was he imagining it, or had her face been slightly pink when she’d stashed away the magazine? As if she were about to cry or had had a sip of alcohol. Muneo had never seen Masako drunk, and only once had he seen her cry. Years ago, her mother had gone to bed early one night, complaining of stomach problems, and died in her sleep from a heart attack. Masako and her mother had been close. When the news came, though, startling them in the early morning, she had not immediately given herself over to emotion. Instead, she had traveled over three hours by train to Chiba to make the necessary funeral arrangements; she had gone through the address book and called her relatives and her mother’s friends. It was only after the funeral, when the new gravestone had been erected on a sunny slope that brought out its polish, that she allowed herself to grieve—silently, discreetly; she stood next to windows, staring outside, back turned to the people around her so as to disguise her tears until they dried. She did not convulse or give herself over to wailing like other women; not even her shoulders shook, Muneo remembered. There were just a few trickles, like stray raindrops. That was all.
“Whatever happened to that hanten I gave you?” Masako asked him out of the blue one night, and it took him a minute to figure out what she was talking about. It had been her gift to him before they’d even gotten married. They had met in Tokyo, at a gallery displaying his art. She had not known that he was the artist, and so when he approached her and asked her what she thought, she’d spoken candidly about how she could feel the yearning in the work, the great longing that the artist had encapsulated, but that it swept through the mind, brushed the soul, and couldn’t quite penetrate the heart. Though that was to be expected, she supposed: she’d heard the artist was quite young. Then she’d asked him, jokingly, if paper artists got a lot of paper cuts. Muneo had held up his hands. For a long moment, she simply stared, then her eyes had widened, and he saw the bright gleam of surprise before she bowed with a laugh.
They had met up almost weekly after that, for tea or dinner, or to walk in the park. Masako worked at a department store. For Muneo’s birthday that first December together, she had bought him a hanten, and he wore the short cloth coat throughout the winter for years, until the fabric was soft and pilled and there were a few cigarette-sized holes in the sleeves from the days when they used to read and smoke in bed together. Some nights, Masako would fix them monjayaki, and while the cabbage and noodles and corn fried in a batter, they would turn on the radio and listen to jazz and drink beer—Masako only a few sips; Muneo downed one bottle after another until every centimeter of his body, from his toes to his eyelids and the tips of his ears, turned bright red, as if he’d been slapped or boiled alive.
Remembering this, it struck Muneo that those handful of years in his twenties had been an aberration; separated from his parents and intoxicated with his first professional success, the jittery excitement of his new relationship, he had given himself over to whimsy and excess in a way he hadn’t before or since.
“The hanten?” Muneo said in response to her question. It was night and they were sitting in the living room, watching television. Muneo had already taken a bath, and his skin was clean and warm beneath his cotton pajamas. “Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen it for years. Why do you ask?”
Masako absentmindedly patted at her flushed cheeks and forehead with the thin, damp towel that hung around her neck. Her eyes were on the television. They were watching a program about the food in foreign countries. Tonight, the feature was on poutine, a concoction of french fries and cheese curd and gravy enjoyed in Canada. “Just wondering,” said Masako. “That’s all.”
Later that week, when Muneo was working in his studio, the memory of what had happened to the hanten suddenly came floating back to him. He’d gotten rid of it when they had moved into his parents’ house. By then, his mother had already passed away, and his father, quite ill, was nearing the point where it was possible that he would join her.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Masako when he told her he was thinking that they should go back to Kyoto. It was one of the few times in their marriage when she’d questioned his decision, but he explained that it was only a matter of course that he, the only son, should take up the responsibility of caring for his father. He believed in duty, in filial piety, in regarding his father with respect and honor, no matter what was said and done. Masako nodded quietly. She felt a twinge of trepidation but also admiration for Muneo and the strength of his conviction to do what was right no matter what the cost. Though it was thought of, Muneo’s dragon lamp was not brought up between them. For years, Muneo didn’t know what had happened to it. Then one day, he bumped into a woman from the neighborhood whom he knew by sight but had never talked with. She bowed politely and smiled, and they chatted about inconsequential topics. “I could never properly thank you,” she said as they were about to part, “but the lamp you made was spectacular. Your father gave it to us as a gift when my son Taro was a boy. It helped him through many nights.” Muneo looked at her in surprise. Her words blew through him, conjuring the sudden static of emotion. So this is what had happened. He’d wondered. For a little while, even, he’d had the fantasy that his father had secreted it away, only to take it out once in a while and view it privately at night. Up close, the workmanship was stunning. His father would have seen that.
The woman explained that as a child Taro had frequently suffered from nightmares, but having the dragon in his room was like having a personal guardian. His father was a great man, she added: they missed him. She shook her head sadly. He waited for her to say more. What had his father said when he’d given her the lamp? Did he say anything about his son? Muneo found these questions filling him with yearning, the way the wind fills a sail and carries it over unfathomable depths. Later, in his studio, he had remembered the way the woman’s eyes changed as she looked at him. How the pleasantries had faded from her lips and she had taken him in, the barely suppressed emotion in his face, the way he had stuttered as he tried—and failed—to ask his questions, overcome by too much eagerness and longing and fear. He was not like his father: he had seen this understanding sink into her demeanor as the softness in her initial greeting dissipated and was replaced by the shiny, deflective kind of cheerfulness presented to strangers. He was not dignified like his father, the doctor—Muneo had read the thought that went through her mind: no, there was something wild about him, loose. But what did she expect after all? Of an artist?
In October, Masako was diagnosed with cancer. For a few months, she’d suffered from a persistent cough that worsened as time went on, and when she went to the doctor to get an x-ray, it revealed that the cancer was not only in her lungs but had spread to the rest of her body.
It was a strange autumn. In the garden, their Yoshino cherry tree was blooming, the first time it had ever done so out of season. Masako called it lovely, a gift in this time of suffering. Muneo thought otherwise. That it would bloom at this time of the year was unnatural and unnerving, and, according to the news, the phenomenon was being replicated elsewhere throughout Japan. Because the end-of-summer typhoons had stripped off all the leaves and the weeks that followed were unusually warm, the trees had been tricked into thinking it was spring; but the buds were few and sickly looking, as if there was something deep down that resisted the delusion.
Masako declined quickly. Her body wasted away, her smooth complexion growing rugged around her nostrils and mouth, her eyes sinking into shadowy sockets. Muneo learned to read the level of her discomfort in the corners of her lips, the furrows between her brows. From time to time, he patted her face with a cool towel or fed her ice chips with a spoon.
The prospect of losing her frightened him. Sometimes, in the shadowy hour of early evening, he felt terror run its icy fingers up his arms and tap on his heart like a pianist playing scales, toying with his emotions. It had been Masako who had urged him to keep going after his father’s rejection. Masako had held him steady all these years; she alone knew how to read the minute vibrations that a subtle smile, a turn of the head, a pressed-thin lip generated in the warp and weft of a long marriage. There was no one as sensitive and incisive as Masako, no one as elegant or calm or tactful.
“Your mother is dying,” he began the email to his daughter one morning after he found Masako coughing up blood. But then he stopped, perplexed and angry. He didn’t know how to go on. The silence between them had built up like scar tissue over the years, and it was hard to cut through it now. It was important for his daughter to see her mother, though. He sensed this, no matter how much it grated against his pride, and time was running out. For Masako’s sake, then, he set his face toward his objections, the way he’d done with exhaustion and disappointment and his father’s censure before that, and grimly, he shouldered through them to the other side. “Come home,” he wrote at last. “Your mother needs you. It’s been long enough.”
His daughter never replied.
In the aftermath of Masako’s death, he threw himself into his work, pouring everything into his most ambitious sculpture yet: a muscular curve sweeping through the air like a smooth twist of metal, only it was made out of paper—millions of tiny granules that looked like sand. The middle of it was unbroken, solid, but at each end, the pale white grains of paper began to disperse, as if flung into the air, the way the ocean flings froth every time it flounces its heavy blue skirt. It was grueling, painstaking work. For hours nonstop, Muneo worked in his studio, wearing a surgical mask so that his breath wouldn’t scatter each individually rolled particle of paper.
The sculpture debuted to great acclaim in New York in May. It was the height of Muneo’s success. At the opening, he drank wine with the guests, maintaining the stoic silence he was famous for. “Stately,” he had once been described in a newspaper in London, and ever after, he had cultivated this persona, though in reality, he often felt ill at ease at these events, was afraid of speaking and betraying his awkward English.
The sculpture truly was sublime, though. As he stood in front of it before the opening of the show, he wished Masako were there to see it. Was this not finally a work of art that embodied the soul—the heart’s swift-flowing and ecstatic but transient passions?
He thought of her often.
Though Muneo had always despised maudlin displays of emotion, he was beginning to understand how it was possible now. Thoughts of Masako always brought the tears close to the surface until his face felt puffy; although, after the initial wave of grief, he never cried. She had been a wonderful wife, a necessary companion to a stubborn and difficult husband. He knew that now. In the mornings before the altar, immense gratitude and respect welled up within him when he gazed at her calm and lovely countenance in the photograph that had been set up next to his parents’, the ink still deep and fresh, and the feeling lingered with him as he went about his day.
His daughter he did not think of. His daughter he deemed unworthy of his attention.
And then—the letter came.
Dear Mr. Mizukami, it began in formal Japanese. I apologize for my impertinence in sending you this letter even though you do not know me. I know it is the height of presumption to ask you such a personal question as this, but are you by any chance Mana Mizukami’s father?
The letter, written by a woman named Sayoko, went on to say that she had seen a brochure for his exhibit in New York (which she had attended and thoroughly enjoyed), and it occurred to her that he and Mana Mizukami might be related. If so, she felt it incumbent on her to notify him that Mana had been killed in a car accident the previous fall. Sayoko was the owner of a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, and Mana had worked for her for the past three years, over the course of which they had become friends. When the accident happened, Sayoko did not know whom to contact, for Mana had spoken rarely of her family, and Sayoko did not have her family’s contact information. Also, Mana had already divorced her husband when she had started working at the restaurant, and he was proving difficult to find. It had been a conundrum that Sayoko had agonized over for months, until she saw the brochure for Mr. Mizukami’s exhibit and dared to believe that it was a miraculous answer to her prayer, for she remembered a conversation in which Mana had mentioned that her father was a paper artist. If he and Mana Mizukami were not related, she hoped that he would forgive her thoughtless intrusion into his life. She knew that he was a famous man, and very busy, and she did not want to burden him with the tragic incidents of other people’s lives. If, however, they were related, she expressed her heartfelt condolences. She also desired to ask him what his wishes were pertaining to Mana’s daughter, Rina. For the time being, Sayoko and her husband had guardianship of her. The girl was very sweet and quiet, and while they would very much like to continue to care for her in memory of her dear mother, both their time and their means were limited, as they had their business to attend to and two other children to raise, and it was also her belief that children flourished best when they were with family.
If it is true that you are Mana’s father, please forgive me for the extended delay in relaying this unfortunate news, the letter concluded. During Mana’s time in New York, I have witnessed her persevere through many hardships with grace and courage; it is not easy to be a single mother in a foreign country. I was honored by her friendship and am grieved that a light like hers was snuffed out so early from this world. With utmost respect, Sayoko.
In June, the child arrived. Her hair was light brown, slightly curled and frizzy around the temples; her cheeks were pink, but the rest of her face was very pale, and her eyes were slanted and dark and somber.
Their first night together, Muneo boiled instant noodles and flavored them from a packet that came in the package.
Across from him, the girl ate diligently. He was relieved that she knew how to use chopsticks, although she sucked up one noodle at a time, pausing in the middle to take a bite and chew before continuing on.
“In Japan, it’s good to make noises when you eat noodles,” Muneo told her, trying to make conversation, and he lifted a bundle of noodles from his bowl with his chopsticks and slurped them down whole in demonstration. He made a satisfied sound. “Like that,” he said. “You don’t even have to chew them. They just slide all the way down your throat into your stomach.”
She stared at him. Then turned back to her bowl and continued progressing through her meal, noodle by noddle, in silence.
Was this how it was going to be from now on? The prospect of seeing Rina daily—of figuring out how to feed her and entertain her and take care of her when she was sick—made him tired and frightened. He had not been successful with Mana; did he dare think he could be so with her daughter?
More than ever, he wished that Masako was there beside him.
“What did you say?” In the aftermath of Rina’s words, Muneo looked at his granddaughter, dumbfounded. They were sitting in front of the altar and Muneo had pointed out his parents’ pictures and Masako’s, who he had just told Rina was her grandma.
“I know,” Rina repeated. “I met her before.”
At the tone of her voice, the premonition of some feeling began to leak into Muneo’s body, raising the little hairs on his arms before he understood why.
“You mean you saw her? Your mother had a picture of her that you used to look at? In New York?”
The little girl shook her head. “No, I met her.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
Muneo sat up straighter, felt an ice-cold finger clicking its nail all the way down his spine. Here? It was impossible. Had the girl seen a ghost?
“When? This past week? Last night?”
Sensing the agitation in his voice, the girl shook her head and went quiet, looking at the brass bell she held in her hands. She ran a finger around its lip.
A cloud of dimly perceived questions and observations began to gather in Muneo’s thoughts, to coalesce and meld. He remembered that he had detected something different about Masako the spring before when he had come back from London, that she had seemed somehow, inexplicably, to be both grieving and happy. And then there was the girl herself. Ever since coming the week before, she had been at ease in the house, oddly so, not needing him to explain where the bathroom was and knowing where to find cups when she wanted water. At the grocery store, she had quickly found a package of azuki bean cakes that Masako had often bought, and on the way back home, she had seen a neighbor woman and waved. He had not thought much about it before, and yet now, little things accumulated and rearranged themselves into meaning in his mind. Their whole, long marriage—no, since that day he had met Masako at the museum, and she had told him exactly what she thought, and he held up his hands—they had hidden nothing from each other. Had they not?
“Is she coming back?” Rina asked, looking up again at the photograph, and he told her no, her grandmother was gone, and his granddaughter, accustomed to loss, nodded.
“Were the cherry trees blooming? When you saw Grandma?” he inquired, later, over lunch, after his emotions had stabilized. All morning, the thoughts had flickered and darted within him, but he kept them deep down beneath the surface; when he spoke, his voice was neutral, lightly inquisitive.
“Yeah,” she said.
“And your mother was here, too, in this house?” he asked, after hesitating a moment.
Rina nodded.
Do you think you know the twists and turns of a woman’s heart? His wife’s words from long ago came floating back to him, and Muneo shivered in the warm, brightly lit kitchen. He had wanted to teach his daughter a lesson; he had wanted her to make something of herself, something she could be proud of. If he’d had a son, perhaps it would have been different. But a daughter—he gazed at Rina with apprehension.
“What did you do? When you were here?”
They had gone to a park, she said, with a big slide; they had eaten strawberry parfaits and gone to a temple and had shaved ice beneath a big umbrella: he imagined the three of them laughing together, the affection rushing strong and sweet and indestructible between them. Just as he had cut out Mana, so they had cut him out—and he hadn’t even known.
You betrayed me, he accused Masako’s portrait when he went to the altar next, and it sickened him to think that she had gone behind his back, that Masako and Mana had eaten together in the kitchen and given thanks that he was not there, swapping stories of his ridiculous pride, his awful intransigence. They would have told Rina that he was an artist; they would have allowed her to take a peek into his studio and would have picked up his tools and said it was too bad that people celebrated his talent even when they didn’t know that it sprang from such a difficult, unworthy man.
Why didn’t you say anything? he implored Masako silently, after the anger had given way to confusion, and he studied his wife’s serene eyes, her gracious mouth, a face that was neither given to malice nor deception, and even as his chest grew leaden with the question, already he knew it was because he had not asked; he had not wanted to know; out of necessity as much as punishment, she had nurtured a secret life that had carried her and their daughter far away from him even before she died.
He could choose bitterness. But he would need every ounce of strength he had left to create a future that he and Rina could live in: this was the thought that went through him during the days that followed as he listened to Rina say, yes, she enjoyed going to the Golden Temple, yes, she would like to go to the bamboo forest again and to see the monkeys in Arashiyama, and that Grandma’s omelet rice was the best thing she’d ever had, that Grandma had made it for her twice and decorated it with a happy face made out of ketchup.
As she spoke, she swung her legs and nodded her head. She had Mana’s chin, Masako’s eyes. Looking at her, Muneo felt his throat go swollen, his face tight.
It was so fun, seeing the monkeys at Arashiyama! Rina said, more talkative, it seemed, with every day that went by, and Muneo nodded, calm now, as a path through the summer began unfolding before them. In the right light, this, too, could be seen as a gift, was his thought as they sat together in the kitchen, eating noodles seasoned from a packet. Next week, they would see the monkeys. The week after that, they would go to the river and eat shaved ice. Maybe, he might even try making omelet rice sometime.
Yes, he said softly, tracing the edges of all those missing days.
He bet it was fun without him.
