One of the popular children’s stories Takako told my brother and me was about Momo Taro, the Peach Boy. Momo Taro sprang out of a giant peach that came floating down the river where an old woman was washing her laundry. The old woman and her husband, who had no children, raised him as their own in their humble cottage. When he grew up, Momo Taro went to an island where the horned monsters called oni were living. He subdued the oni, brought back their treasure hoard and presented it to the local lord, and became a hero.
My brother and I wondered how Momo Taro had recruited his helpers—a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant—by offering them the millet dumplings the old woman had made for his lunch. The pale green dumplings, sold at the train station in Momo Taro’s legendary hometown, glittered from the sugar sprinkled on top. They were so sweet, probably no dog or pheasant would eat them, though maybe a monkey would. After a neighbor’s dog bit me for trying to feed him the peanut butter sandwich from my lunch, Jumpei and I became skeptical about the dumpling story, but we didn’t think it was odd for Momo Taro to be born from a peach. In the pictures from before our birth, Takako’s stomach looked like a giant peach, so we imagined ourselves curled up inside, waiting to be born. What Hiroshi had to do with any of this, we never thought to question. As far as we were concerned, everyone was born from a peach.
As a child, my brother played with the kids in our neighborhood while I rode the city bus to visit friends across town. I took English lessons from our American neighbor, but Jumpei was too timid to come along. I was four years older than he, so it was only natural for me to be more confident. Still, our relatives, teachers, and neighbors remarked on how shy he was compared to me, and instead of defending him, I made fun of him and ran away. After our mother’s death, we seldom talked even though we lived in the same house for eight more years. He was 16 when I left.
We didn’t write to each other or speak on the phone till a month before he came to visit Chuck and me in Green Bay. By then, at 27, Jumpei was a world traveler. He had worked as a movie extra in Australia, hitchhiked through the Middle East, waited tables at a Japanese restaurant in New York, guided tour groups in Los Angeles, and started an import company in Tokyo. He was in South America buying rugs, sweaters, jewelry, and knickknacks for his business partner to sell in Japan. He sent a postcard from Ecuador asking if he could stop in Green Bay to see me before flying back to Kobe to spend a few months with Hiroshi and Michiko.
“All I want,” he told Chuck and me a few hours after his arrival, “is to make enough money so I can keep traveling. I don’t like staying too long in one place.” Because the technical college he’d attended didn’t have a good language program, he had learned English and Spanish from language tapes and private lessons.
Jumpei showed us the slides of his travels: pink flamingos in South America, a woman in a chador in Saudi Arabia, his friends in a desert in Australia. He laughed about how lax the American immigration laws were. The last time he was in the States, he had entered on a tourist visa, worked illegally on both coasts, stayed several months after the visa expired, and yet he was allowed back a year later with no questions asked. I’d had nightmares my last year in graduate school about the visa problems I would have if I didn’t find a teaching job. My brother had worked at a sushi place in the East Village and chatted freely with the customers, any of whom could have been an immigration officer. A person who didn’t care to stay in one place had nothing to lose. How he became this carefree lawbreaker and I a small-town homeowner and English teacher, I didn’t understand—until he started talking about our father and stepmother.
“After I graduated from college, my father got me a job in Tokyo through his connections, but I quit in three months,” Jumpei said to Chuck and me as we sat drinking coffee in our living room. “I had to give up the apartment I was renting and go home. Every night, my father threatened to kick me out if I didn’t find another job soon. After a month, he stopped speaking to me. I didn’t want to talk to him either, so that was fine. But my mother couldn’t stand being in the middle. She told my father that I was going to do whatever I wanted to anyway so he might as well accept it.” Jumpei tipped his head back and laughed. “My mother persuaded him to give me money to go to Australia because she knew how much I wanted to travel.”
My mother, Okasan, he said over and over in two languages, referring to Michiko.
“Do you remember our mother at all?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “Okasan is the only mother I remember. I wouldn’t know what to do without her. I owe her everything.”
“That’s not what Kyoko thinks about your stepmother,” Chuck said.
“I know my sister didn’t get along with my mother,” Jumpei answered. “But my mother was good to me. I’m closer to her than I am to anyone.” After a few seconds of awkward silence, Jumpei changed the subject. He was careful to look only at Chuck when he declared how much he loved Michiko.
Jumpei had brought a suitcase full of hand-knitted sweaters from Bolivia, dark pullovers with bright geometric designs in the yoke. He spread them on our living room floor and asked Chuck and me to choose one each to keep. The zigzag patterns—red, green, blue, yellow—ran from one sweater to the next like the mazes in our childhood board games. In all the years we played together before our mother’s death, I hadn’t purposely lost one game of strategy just to humor him. I was pleased when people seemed disappointed in him for not being as smart as I was. Later, on the nights Hiroshi came up to my room and dragged me downstairs to apologize to Michiko, Jumpei must have been terrified. His room was across the hallway from mine. Maybe he was standing with his ear pressed to the wall, trying to be ready for whatever happened next. Hiroshi and I didn’t consider how Jumpei might have felt when he heard us yelling and crying. We cared only about our own anger.
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The sweaters Jumpei gave Chuck and me were made from coarse hand-spun yarns that hadn’t been thoroughly washed. The particles of vegetation embedded in them irritated our skin so much that, a few months after Jumpei’s visit, I filled our bathtub with lukewarm water and dunked the sweaters in. Broken leaves, stems, and loose seeds floated up from between the stitches, and the water turned darker and darker as I rolled and swished the sweaters around. If this were a fairy tale, I would have been brewing a magic potion to bring back my brother, to make him forget the past, and to give him a different childhood in which I had guided him out of the woods where we were lost together, abandoned by our parents. But it was much too late for that fairy tale. Jumpei didn’t need me. He was more comfortable talking to my cat, who bit him, than to me. The sweaters took days to dry, and even afterward, they turned our wrists and necks pink. Chuck and I put them away and never wore them again.
Takako had been the oldest of six children in a landowning family living very comfortably on the rent their tenant farmers paid every year. She grew up in their city house and planned to attend medical school after the war, but when the government bought her family’s land at a reduced rate and redistributed it to their tenant farmers in the postwar Farm Reform, she had to go to work as a secretary to support her younger siblings. Her sisters did the same when they graduated from high school, while two of their brothers went to college. The boys had scholarships, part-time jobs, and whatever money the family could scrape together for the tuition. Shiro became a college professor, and Kenichi a high school teacher. My middle uncle, Yasuo, didn’t attend college, only because he hated school. Shiro said my mother and her sister Keiko were smarter than he or Kenichi so they should have gone to college, but there had been no scholarships or campus jobs for women.
Although my mother often reminded me to be patient with Jumpei, she only scolded me halfheartedly when I wasn’t. She knew my advantage over Jumpei was temporary. That’s why she sent me to private lessons—English, calligraphy, piano, modern dance, water color—by myself. “Your brother will have plenty of opportunities later,” she explained. If I had stayed in Japan, my father wouldn’t have gotten a job for me in Tokyo or paid for me to travel alone to Australia. Instead, he would have gone to see an omiai broker and found me a husband from “a good family.” My wedding would have taken place a few months after my college graduation, before I had time to find my own apartment or a job to support myself. For a woman from an upper-middle-class family, education only proved that we had good, intelligent genes to pass on to our children.
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No one in our family was surprised by how adventurous my brother had grown up to be. He was a modern-day Momo Taro. He traveled all over the world speaking three languages and collecting treasures, while I stayed home with my writing and knitting. I wouldn’t have lasted a day in the places where Jumpei traveled, sleeping on the dirt floor of strangers’ houses or in a hammock pitched on crowded ships. My brother could tough it out in the world, because he had a home to go back to and a “mother” who supported him no matter what. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had gotten along better with Hiroshi and Michiko. I was only a daughter; he was the son.
Early professional knitters were mostly men. In medieval cities, only men were allowed into the guilds that controlled the licensing of handcrafts. In the countryside, men as well as women made mittens, hats, and socks to sell during the winter months when farm work became scarce. Sailors and fishermen knitted their own sweaters during their long voyages. But today, amateur and professional knitters are predominantly female.
One well-known exception is Kaffe Fassett, who studied painting at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston in the 1960s before moving to England. He shied away from needlework until he was 28, not because he was a man, but because he believed that serious artists did not dabble in the crafts. Then he “finally succumbed” to the colorful yarn he found at a fabric mill he visited with friends: he bought 20 skeins of yarn and a pair of needles. His first sweater, a striped cardigan he started on the train ride home (one of his friends gave him a quick lesson), used all 20 colors including peach, aqua, black, and turquoise. His books are organized around motifs (stripes, diamonds, stars, flowers, etc.) rather than garment types. He favors unisex pullovers, cardigans, jackets, and vests—simple, squared-off garments like canvases—that he can “paint with wool.”
Fassett’s first book, Glorious Knits, was published in 1985. Every serious knitter I met in the late 1980s had a copy. Far more esoteric is the 1972 pamphlet by Dave Fougner, The Manly Art of Knitting, with a cover photograph of a young cowboy knitting on horseback. The flyleaf shows a bare arm grasping a needle that looks more like a barbecue skewer. The patterns are for a dog blanket (“Start by knitting something for someone uncritical”), a ribbed cap, a wall hanging, a horse blanket, and a hammock made from rope, using shovel handles or pool cues for needles. According to the pamphlet’s author biography, Fougner lived on a ranch in California and bred horses, flew an airplane, sold real estate, played tennis, and “relaxed in the evening with a pair of wooden knitting needles and a skein of yarn.”
I envied the exuberance with which Fassett and Fougner tackled every project. Like my brother, they did what they wanted and reveled in their eccentricity. No woman who defied conventions ever seemed so happy-go-lucky.
In the diary my mother began in October 1967, she described how dark and drafty our house was. She wrote once or twice every week, noting the gloomy winter landscape—the bare trees stabbing at the sky, the shadows angling across the road, our neighbors’ houses with their windows shut tight. In every entry, her dread of the cold seemed inseparable from her belief that she had wasted her life. Then in mid-March, she suddenly stopped writing. For the next seven months, there was only one short paragraph in July about the flowers and the vegetables in the garden, how the lettuce was growing faster than we could eat it. She must have thought her mood had lifted for good. When she began writing again in October 1968, however, her misery had returned worse than ever, and she anticipated that every year from then on would be the same. The following March, she only felt strong enough to kill herself rather than wait helplessly for the whole cycle to begin again. She left the diary on the kitchen table, next to the letters she’d written to my father, grandparents, and me.
Nine years later, in Rockford, Illinois, where I was attending college, we had so much snow the city was declared a federal disaster area. As I sat in my dorm room with the windows buried in the snow banks, I remembered my mother shivering at the kitchen table. She had stayed wrapped in her quilted bathrobe all day, too depressed to step outside or move around the house. My dorm room was dark at 4 P.M. I got up from my chair, put on my swimsuit and then practically all the warm clothes I owned on top of it, and trekked across campus. “Swim at your own risk,” the ID checker at the door warned. “The lifeguard didn’t show up. You’re the only person in the building.” I was a mediocre swimmer and my eyes burned from the chlorine, but I was so grateful to be moving through that murky, barely heated water.
Takako had written in her diary only in the winter. In the summer when she was happy and active, she had nothing to record. In college and then graduate school, rereading her diary and then reading Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—women my mother’s age, each leaving behind two children when she chose to die—I remembered a Japanese fairy tale Takako had told me about a desolate village in deep snow. Once upon a time, it went, a young farmer in the north country found a small crane shot down on the side of the road. He pulled out the arrow, nursed the bird back to life, and set it free. A few days later, in the middle of the season’s first blizzard, a beautiful young woman appeared at his door. She said she’d grown up in a faraway village, and her parents, like his, were dead. The young farmer fell in love with her and married her. That winter was one of the harshest. After the couple had eaten their last handful of millet, the wife set up a loom in the shed and wove a beautiful white cloth for her husband to sell in the nearby castle town. Once the food he bought with that money was gone, she wove another cloth, and shortly after, spring arrived. The villagers, out planting their rice paddies, noticed that the young farmer had gotten married and that he was not as destitute as before. When a neighbor asked him about it, the farmer told him about his wife’s weaving. The neighbor promised to get a better price for him, if only he could come up with another cloth.
The wife, who had grown weaker with each weaving, had warned him that the second cloth was the last she could weave. But the husband begged till she reluctantly agreed. She made him promise—as before—that he would not come near the shed where she was working. She stayed secluded for two days and two nights. When the loom fell silent toward dawn, the husband went to the shed and cracked open the door. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he spied a small, sickly crane tearing out her feathers with her beak and adding them to the cloth. The crane turned back into his wife and told him he had once saved her life. She had hoped to remain with him forever, but the third cloth had taken too many of her feathers. She flew away to die while the husband cried in remorse.
I used to think my mother, with her sewing and embroidery, was the crane wife. Unlike most couples of their generation, my parents had married for love. They’d met at the company where she was working as a secretary and he as an engineer. Hiroshi was hospitalized with tuberculosis shortly after their engagement. Every day for a year, she sat by his bedside with the sewing she took in so that she could send money to her family back home, only to be betrayed by him after they were married. Later my mother’s diary, more than her needlework, became the crane’s weaving. Neither a single entry she made in her diary nor a single poem of Plath’s or Sexton’s released them from their suffering. Their desire for death increased the more they wrote about it: they were tearing out their feathers and weaving them into the cloth, trading their chance for happiness for the words on the page. Plath and Sexton were accomplished writers and my mother wrote only out of her despair, but the results—for their lives—were the same. If my mother had gone to see her friends instead of sitting alone with her diary, she might have survived long enough for one of them to get her the help she needed. Becoming a writer seemed like the worst choice I could possibly make if I didn’t want to repeat her mistake, but I didn’t know how to stop. All I could do was take care of myself while I wrote, even if it meant having less time for other people.
In truth, I had always known how to save myself from my mother’s depression. The selfishness I’d inherited from my father was a protection as well as a curse. If my husband had cheated on me and lied to me, I would have considered him—not myself—a failure. After 13 years of marriage, I would end up divorcing Chuck for much less: he didn’t know what to do with his future. The alternative school where he taught was becoming more traditional every year. He talked about pursuing a master’s degree in art or music, but he never applied to any school. Instead, he started one house renovation project after another, none of which he finished. When every room in our house looked like a construction site, I moved out and hired a mediator to file our divorce papers. Where my mother blamed herself for my father’s affairs, I took no responsibility for Chuck—after doing nothing to help him sort out his future, I decided his problems weren’t mine.
I had forsaken the country of my birth, leaving my brother to fend for himself. I only knew how to keep moving. My father had played rugby till a year before his death. I, too, was an athlete, constitutionally incapable of sitting still long enough to feel bad about myself. I discovered that I loved living alone, and after nearly 20 years in the Midwest, harsh winters no longer scared me. I learned to run even when it was too cold for my car to start. Snow crunched under my feet and tiny crystals of ice formed on my eye lashes, magnifying the weak winter light. I was my own heat source; I imagined myself as a meteor blazing through space. The physical exercise was only a fringe benefit and not the main point. I had to be moving even while I was sitting at my desk.
Knitting had taught me to plunge into color and swim through it, each row of stitches like a long lap across the pool. Though the motion seemed repetitive, the rows were shaping themselves into a larger design, just as the laps were adding to the actual distance I had traveled. My writing, too, had to be a movement and not a repetition. If I could match the perfect knitting tension in my head—holding on and letting go at once—then the words and the sentences sometimes veered away from where they were going and guided me to a new thought that surprised me. I found myself suddenly on the other side of the muddled, tangled syntax, with words for what I didn’t know before. Those were the moments to write for. I didn’t need to record the same thoughts over and over, no matter how true they had once been. My mother would have written something else in her diary if she had been able. The crane wife wove three pieces of the most beautiful cloth and nothing else, but that hadn’t been her intention: she had meant to stay with the farmer for a long life of happiness. If Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton had survived their 30s and 40s, they would have left a larger body of uneven work instead of a few nearly perfect books. I wanted to write the way I’d been knitting, by trial and error, aiming for endurance. Some projects would turn out better than others, but each would teach me what I didn’t know before and prepare me for the next. That’s how my life was going to be different from my mother’s, how I meant to redeem my father’s selfishness into a strength.
Because I was too young to wear my mother’s clothes when she died, Aunt Akiko boxed them for storage, saying that I could have them when I grew up. Takako’s red and black mohair sweater had fallen on the floor under her makeup stand, where she must have draped it over her chair. I found it while my aunt was packing and hid it in my dresser. After Michiko threw out the boxes, it was the only garment of my mother’s that I got to keep.
The sweater, a hand-knitted pullover, has braided cables around the waist and the cuffs. The red yarn and the black yarn were held together and worked as one, blending the colors. There is no label though I remember it came from a boutique called Mimosa. Of all her sweaters, this was my favorite because the fuzzy yarn brushed against my cheek when she hugged me. I imagined us turning into bears hibernating in a snow-covered cave where no one would bother us all winter long.
Though I had carried the sweater from Kobe to Rockford, Milwaukee, then Green Bay, it remained in the trunk I used as a bedside table. The day I received news of my father’s death, I pulled it out of the trunk, thinking I would take it to Japan and wear it in honor of my mother’s memory. I had grown up to be only an inch taller than Takako; we were almost the same size. But as I laid the sweater on my bed with the sleeves spread out, I saw how exquisitely fitted it was—curving in at the waist, rounding out at the bust. My mother’s pullover was nothing like the sweaters I made for myself. Takako had been pretty and feminine, a woman who dressed to look small and shapely. She had sat at her mirror every morning, outlining her mouth to resemble a tiny heart, shading her cheeks with the slightest blush.
My mother wouldn’t have appreciated my baggy jeans and big sweaters, my plain face without makeup, my refusal to look pretty. If she had lived, we would have argued, like any mother and daughter, about my clothes, face, and hair. We would have suffered through the agony of my separating from her to become who I was. With her gone, I could only imagine the pain and the exhilaration of my rebellion. I was 36. By now, if we had been together, we might have become more like friends or equals finally able to accept our differences. I folded the sweater and slid it back into the trunk. In five years, I would be older than my mother had ever been. I couldn’t put myself inside her form. I had to let her be.
