Chapter One
The chest arrived on a grey afternoon in late January, three
weeks after Michi-san’s death. Barbara sat huddled at the
electric table in her six-mat room, eating peanut butter
washed down with green tea and reading student quizzes on original
sin. It had just begun to snow, white petals floating haphazardly up
and down, as if the direction of the sky were somehow in question.
She kept glancing out the window, thinking of Rie’s refusal to turn
in a paper. Michi-san would have consoled her about Rie, and advised
her what to do. If only Michi were here: a thought that had
lately become a mantra.
As she took another spoonful of peanut butter, there was a knock
at the door. She extracted her legs from beneath the warm table and
jumped up. Junko, Hiroko, and Sumi, the students who shared a
room downstairs, had talked about dropping by. Barbara’s apartment
was a mess-she hadn’t cleaned in days-but it was too late
now.
On the kitchen radio, Mick Jagger was lamenting at low volume
his lack of satisfaction. She left the radio on; the girls were “becoming
groovy,” as Sumi put it, about Western culture.
Outside the door, instead of the three bright student faces, was a
small, formal delegation. Miss Fujizawa, president of Kodaira College,
gazed at her beneath hooded eyelids. Beside her was Mrs. Nakano,
the English department head who had hired her last year in
Chapel Hill. Behind the women were two of the college workmen,
Sato and Murai. They all bowed and said good afternoon, the
women in English, the men in Japanese.
Clearly they intended to come in. Barbara mentally scanned her
rooms; she could ask them to wait just a minute while she scooped
up the dirty clothes.
“We are sorry to disturb you,” Miss Fujizawa said. “Professor
Nakamoto has made you a bequeathal.”
“A bequeathal?” Barbara glanced at Michi-san’s apartment, cater-cornered
from hers across the hall; for the first time since Michi’s
death, the apartment door stood open.
“A sort of tansu chest. Not a particularly fine one, I’m afraid.”
Miss Fujizawa nodded toward the small chest that stood between the
two workmen. “This note was appended to it,” she said, handing
Barbara a slender envelope. Inside, on a sheet of rice paper, was one
sentence, in English, “This should be given to Miss Barbara Jefferson,
Apartment # 6 Sango-kan, with best wishes for your discovery
of Japan. Sincerely, Michiko Nakamoto.”
Barbara stared down at the precise, familiar handwriting. It was
almost like hearing her speak.
“Apparently you were held in high favor,” Miss Fujizawa said.
“There were few individual recipients of her effects. May we enter?”
“Yes, of course. Please. Dozo.” Barbara backed down the hall to
the kitchen, where she turned off the radio. Miss Fujizawa, leaning
on her cane, led the procession to the back of the apartment. Mrs.
Nakano, ruddy-cheeked with a cap of shiny black hair, was next, followed
by the two men who carried the tansu chest between them.
The chest was small, three-drawered, a third the size of Barbara’s
clothes tansu. She recognized the plum blossom designs on the tansu’s
hardware, the dark metal plates to which the drawer pulls were
attached.
“It’s the wine chest!” she called out, following them down the hall
to the tatami sitting room. The workmen had placed the tansu between
her kotatsu table and chest of drawers.
“Wine?” Miss Fujizawa and Mrs. Nakano said in unison. The
women bent to pull open the top drawer. Miss Fujizawa began an
intense consultation in Japanese with Mrs. Nakano. Barbara did
not understand a word, but the tone of dismay was clear. Michi-san
had told her that while Japanese men may drink a great deal, it
was frowned upon for women of a certain class, and especially the
women of Kodaira College. A little plum wine-umeshu-was acceptable,
however, considered beneficial for ladies’ digestion.
“It’s just umeshu,” Barbara said.
Over Mrs. Nakano’s shoulder, she could see the row of bottles.
Each one was wrapped in heavy rice paper that was tied with a cord
and sealed with a large dot of red wax. On the front of each bottle was
a date, written in ink with a brush and below it, a vertical line of
calligraphy, perhaps the date in Japanese. One night when she and
Michi had been drinking umeshu, Michi had showed her the vintage
wines, but Barbara hadn’t noticed the dates. She leaned closer, looking
at the numbers. A bottle of last year’s wine, 1965, was in the right
corner of the drawer; next to it was 1964.
Miss Fujizawa closed the top drawer and opened the next, still
talking nonstop to Mrs. Nakano. Barbara wanted to reach past the
women and touch the wines. She couldn’t wait for them to leave.
Miss Fujizawa turned to her. “We are sorry, Miss Jefferson. We
were under the impression that the chest contained pottery, or some
such. Professor Nakamoto would not have meant to trouble you
with these bottles. I will have them removed for you at once.”
“But she meant …” She thrust Michi’s note at Miss Fujizawa. “It
says right here, this should be given …”
“The bequeathal letter refers to the tansu, not its contents,” Miss
Fujizawa said, with a dismissive wave at the note. “Doubtless she realized
you needed another article of furniture into which to place
your things.” She glanced about the room, at the stacks of books and
papers on the tatami matting, and on the low table, in the midst of
student papers, the jar of peanut butter with the spoon handle rising
from it like an exclamation point. Sweaters and underwear were
heaped on the tokonoma-the alcove where objects of beauty were
supposed to be displayed-obscuring the bottom half of the fox-woman
scroll that hung above it.
“Please,” Barbara said. “I’d like to keep the wine, for sentimental
reasons. It’s only umeshu. Michi … Nakamoto sensei … made it
herself, from the plum trees on the campus and at her childhood
home.”
“You are mistaken, I believe. Umeshu is made in large jars, not in
bottles of foreign manufacture. These must contain stronger spirits.”
“But I saw these bottles-I’m sure this is umeshu. Please, it
would be a comfort …”
Miss Fujizawa was silent, fixing upon her a basilisk gaze, her expression
the same as the day she’d paid an unannounced visit to
Barbara’s conversation class and found her demonstrating American
dances-the twist, the monkey, and the swim-for her giggling students.
Barbara’s predecessor, Carol Sutherland, would never have exhibited
such behavior. There was a picture of her in the college catalogue,
lecturing from her desk on the raised teaching platform.
“We can store the wine in the cellar of the hall,” Miss Fujizawa
was saying. “It will only be in your way, I think. A trouble to you.”
She laughed suddenly. “I do not think you are a drunkard.”
Mrs. Nakano laughed politely, covering her mouth with one
hand.
Sato and Murai bobbed up and down, grinning. Though they
didn’t understand English, they were used to humorous incidents at
the gaijin’s apartment.
“I believe she feels quite sad in consequence of Nakamoto sensei’s
death,” Mrs. Nakano said.
“Yes, exactly,” Barbara said. She had a wrenchingly clear memory
of Michi-san, wren-like in her brown skirt and sweater as she stood
at Barbara’s door, a plate of freshly cooked tempura in her hands. “I
just wanted to see your face this evening-how are you doing?”
“We are all saddened by Professor Nakamoto’s unfortunate
demise,” Miss Fujizawa said. “Miss Jefferson, if you would kindly
wait in the Western-style room we will see to the arrangement of
the chest for you.” She spoke in Japanese to the workmen, gesturing
toward the open drawer of bottles. They came to attention and
stepped forward. “Hai,” they said, bowing energetically. “Hai, hai.”
“I want the wine,” Barbara shouted. “Michi-san gave it to me-you
can’t take it.”
For a moment they studied her gravely. Then all but Miss Fujizawa
tactfully lowered their eyes. “We are sorry we have upset you
too much,” Miss Fujizawa said. “We will leave you to your rest.”
They turned and filed down the hall past the kitchen and
Western-style parlor, Miss Fujizawa pausing at each room to take in
its condition. The door closed.
Barbara listened to the footsteps going down the stairs, then sat
beside the tansu, inhaling its dark, tangy odor. Michi had told her
the chest was unusual in that it had been made entirely of camphor
wood. The bottles of wine were stocky, the papers tight around
them. She laid her hand on one of the wines, feeling the coolness of
the glass beneath the paper. The coolness rose up her arm, and
gooseflesh prickled her skin.
Michi-san had known she was going to die, otherwise she
wouldn’t have thought of leaving her the chest.
She looked at the note again. There was a date: 1.1.1966. New
Year’s Day, just a few weeks ago. She’d been in Michi’s apartment
that night. Had she written this before the New Year’s dinner or afterwards?
She imagined Michi sitting at her table, the dishes cleared
away, the pen moving across the page. Four days later, she had died.
Barbara leapt up and went across the hall to Michi’s apartment.
The door was closed, but not locked. She stepped inside and walked
to the large sitting room. There was nothing but tatami matting and
bare walls. Gone were the crowded bookshelves, the woodblock
prints, the collection of bonsai, and the low table below the window.
Michi had served the New Year’s day meal there, all the foods prepared
just for Barbara: the chewy rice cakes called mochi and bream
wrapped in bamboo leaves and served with carrots cut in the shape
of turtles “for good luck and longevity.” Had she said for your good
luck and longevity? She thought of Michi’s face, her sympathetic but
penetrating gaze, her full lips; perhaps there had been a melancholy
smile.
Miss Fujizawa had said Michi died of a “heartstroke.” She must
have had symptoms-angina-and sensed it coming.
Circling the room, Barbara touched the walls, which were cold
and smooth except for one crooked nail.
The tatami still showed the imprint of the table legs. She and
Michi had spent many evenings there, often with a cup of plum
wine: “a night hat,” Michi had called it.
“Why did you come to Japan, Barbara-san?” Michi had asked her.
“My mother,” she’d said, going on to explain about her having
been a foreign correspondent here in the 1930s, before the war, and
how her mother had been talking about Japan for as long as Barbara
could remember. That was why she’d taken Mrs. Nakano’s graduate
seminar, modern Japanese literature in translation, and one day
impulsively asked if there might be an opening at her college. And
she’d been at loose ends, she told her, a love affair over, her dissertation
stalled.
Michi’s Ph.D. had been in history-rare for a woman in Japan-but
Barbara didn’t know her area of specialization, or why she’d chosen
history. She wished, as she had many times since Michi’s death,
that she’d asked her more questions. She looked around the empty
room. It was too late now.
She closed Michi’s door gently behind her. In her six-mat room,
the tansu looked bereft, marooned sideways in the middle of the
room. There wasn’t space for another chest in here. She walked into
the tiny tatami bedroom, just off the sitting room. The ugly metal
bed filled most of the space. Not only was the bed too large, but
lying in it she felt too large herself, like Alice in Wonderland at her
tallest crammed inside the white rabbit’s house. If she got rid of the
bed she could sleep on a futon; Carol’s was still in the closet. Then
the tansu would fit here too.
The bed was on casters. She pushed it through the door, across
the tatami six-mat room and into the Western-style room. She’d ask
the workmen to come get it later. What a laugh they’d have; they had
delivered a series of beds the first few weeks she was here, each one
longer than the last, until one was found to accommodate her size.
Barbara settled the wine chest against the south wall of the bedroom
so that it would be near her head when she slept. She had
adopted the Japanese superstition that only the dead sleep facing
north. She thought of Michi stretched out in her coffin, then quickly
pushed back the image. Michi was ashes now, anyway. How could
ashes face north? It was like one of those impossible zen koan riddles.
Outside it was growing dark. The snow was coming down steadily
now, a blur of white flakes.
Barbara drew the curtains and sat beside the tansu. The wines
were arranged in reverse chronological order, right to left, like a
Japanese text. There were no wines for the years 1943-1948; the
gap was filled with crumpled paper. The oldest wine in the bottom
drawer was dated 1930. Michi-san had been in her early forties when
she died; she would have been quite a young girl in 1930, too young
to make wine.
She slid open the top drawer again and took out the 1965 wine,
made from last summer’s plums. She untied the cord and broke the
seal with her fingernail, then removed the heavy rice paper from the
bottle.
She caught her breath. The inside of the page was covered with
close vertical columns of Japanese characters. The calligraphy was
meticulous but delicate, written with a brush rather than a pen. Most
of the characters were intricate kanji, the literary ideograms that
took Japanese schoolchildren years to learn. Barbara didn’t know
any kanji or either of the other alphabets; even the simplest character
on this page-there was a backwards C with a deep undercurl
at the top-meant nothing to her. It was like looking at a page of
unfamiliar music and not being able to hear the melody.
She lifted out the next bottle, 1964, and unwrapped it. This
paper too was covered with writing. It was thrilling. “This is my history,”
Michi said with a bitter laugh the night she’d shown her the
tansu. She’d told Barbara of her failure to publish in her academic
field, which was almost exclusively the domain of male professors.
Barbara had thought she been referring to the wines; making wine
was a woman’s work.
Barbara chose a bottle at random from the middle drawer. She
fumbled with the knotted string, slipped it over the bottle; in her
haste to undo the seal, she made a small tear in the paper. It could be
blank. But as she unrolled it she saw more columns of Japanese characters
and at the bottom, an ink drawing of plum blossoms. Tears
sprang to her eyes. She ran her hand slowly across the surface of the
chest, her inheritance. Michi had left this to her.
Vivid with excitement, she walked through the apartment, to the
kitchen where Michi had showed her how to “tame” her stove-twin
burners that were difficult to light-through the Western-style
room that now seemed eccentric rather than cold, with its funny,
mismatched furniture, into the six-mat tatami room. The whole
place seemed altered by Michi’s gift, filled with her presence.
The fox-woman scroll hanging in the shadowy alcove should
go in the bedroom too. When Michi had first seen the painting-a
woman in kimono with flowing hair and the head of a fox-she exclaimed,
“Where have you found this?” Barbara explained that it
was given to her mother by a Japanese man who said she must be a
fox in human form, she was so bewitching with her long blond
hair.
“This is an interesting coincidence,” Michi said. “My mother
claimed an ability to comprehend the language of foxes. There are
many stories of fox women in Japan. I think this one illustrates the
fox woman leaving her child.”
Barbara took down the scroll and pulled out the nail; using her
thick Japanese tourist guide as a hammer, she hung the fox woman
in the bedroom beside the window.
It was still not quite dark, early for bed, but she wanted to be in
the futon she’d made up, under the electric blanket.
She undressed and slid into the futon. The camphor fragrance of
the chest filled the room, a subtle incense. Why would Michi have
given the tansu to her, the one person on the campus who couldn’t
read Japanese?
Barbara glanced up at the fox woman. Her image was clearer
than it had been in the recessed tokonoma. She seemed alive, glancing
back over her shoulder for a last glimpse of her half-human, half-fox
child, as she headed down a path lined with willow trees.
The fox’s profile was delicately feminine, with just a suggestion
of sharp incisors inside the slightly opened mouth. She could be
speaking, saying goodbye. Maybe it was this angle and this light, but
her face and figure had a pathos Barbara hadn’t noticed before.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Plum Wine
by Angela Davis-Gardner
Copyright © 2006 by Angela Davis-Gardner.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
The University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright © 2006
Angela Davis-Gardner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-299-21160-6
