Sunday, September 26, 1999 (H11.9.26)
On Friday afternoon I went to the Board of Ed and told Kimura-san I want to stay a third year.
The form doesn't even come until January. But I wanted to say it out loud to somebody who'd write it down. He wiped his neck with the towel and said "Yokatta" just like last time, and then, in English, "Three years is the most. You know?" I know. After the third year, JET sends you home. So this will be the last one.
Why. I made a list again, because I'm me, but the list isn't really why. Mrs. Fukuda will be seventy-nine in November. Saori, who graduated in March, wrote me a letter from high school in August, a whole page in English, with four mistakes. I know which days the burnables go out without looking at the binder. The rice harvest is happening outside my window right now, the fields gone gold, rice hanging to dry on wooden racks along every road, and I want to see it one more time, and then one more after that.
And yes. Partly him. Nakagawa-sensei asked me on Thursday if I would like to help with the rice harvest at his parents' farm next Sunday. "With Oda-sensei's family also," he said, very clearly, twice. Also. I said yes. It might be nothing. It might just be a man who explains things to me with napkins. I'm going to need to borrow boots.
I called home this morning (7 a.m. here, 4 p.m. yesterday there; I still have to count it out on my fingers). Mom said, "Then we're coming in the spring." Dad hasn't been on an airplane since 1980. He said, "Then I guess we're coming in the spring."
| Today's word: yoroshiku onegai shimasu. It doesn't translate. You say it when you start something with someone: a new job, a new class, a new year. Something like "Please take care of me. I'm in your hands. Let's do this well together." I said it to Kimura-san on Friday. He said it back. |
Thursday, September 23, 1999 (H11.9.23)
A holiday in the middle of the week, just because the day and the night are the same length. I love this country.
It's also ohigan, the week when you visit the family graves, so I went up the hill with Mrs. Fukuda again, like at Obon, with the bucket and the ladle and the brush. Along the edges of all the rice fields, the red spider lilies have come up. They're called higanbana, the equinox flower, and they really do bloom right at the equinox, like they read the calendar: a bare stalk and a firework of red on top. Mrs. Fukuda says you don't bring them into the house. I didn't ask why.
The earthquake in Taiwan has been on NHK every night since Tuesday morning. Rescue teams from Japan went. The teachers who remember the Kobe earthquake go quiet when it comes on. Oda-sensei's sister was living in Kobe then. She told me today, at the copy machine, that for two days in 1995 she couldn't reach her, and then she stopped talking and made forty copies of a vocabulary quiz.
| Today's word: higan. It means "the other shore." The far side of the river, where the dead are. At the equinox, the two shores are supposed to be closest together. |
Saturday, September 11, 1999 (H11.9.11)
Mom's package came. Inside: green chile salsa, blue cornmeal, piñon coffee, a card from Grandma with a five-dollar bill in it (what am I supposed to do with five dollars, Grandma, I love you), and a Ziploc bag with a folded paper towel inside. On the paper towel, in Mom's handwriting: "Roasted chile Saturday. Smell this."
It did. Faintly. Across the Pacific Ocean and through Japanese customs, a paper towel that smelled like the parking lot outside the grocery store in September, when the big wire drums are turning over the propane flames and the whole city smells like roasting chile and everybody's buying it by the sack.
I sat on my tatami with a paper towel on my face for a while. Next month is Balloon Fiesta. That'll be two I've missed, and before this I'd never missed one in my life. I tried to explain it to my first-years, drew a hot-air balloon on the board, and a boy asked if it was a bomb.
Homesickness here comes in waves. Mostly I'm fine. Then a paper towel.
Wednesday, September 8, 1999 (H11.9.8)
Before summer vacation I asked the third-years to write me a letter in English over the break. Today I finished reading all ninety-four. Some favorites, copied exactly:
"Dear Molly-sensei. How are you? I am fine. I went to the sea with my family. I ate watermelon. It was very delicious. Do you like watermelon? I like." (Eleven of the ninety-four letters involve watermelon.)
"Dear teacher. This summer I practiced baseball every day. I am very tired and very sunburn. My dream is Hiroshima Carp."
"Dear Molly. Your hair is very nice. Is it perm? Please tell me the secret." (It's not a perm. There's no secret. She won't believe me.)
"Dear teacher. My grandmother died in July. I was very sad. But at Obon she came home, so I was a little happy. I think you are lonely because your family is far away. Please come to my house. My mother can cook very well."
I read that one three times, at my desk, and then I went and stood in the hallway by the window for a while. Nakagawa-sensei walked by carrying a box of test tubes and didn't say anything, just walked a little slower.
I'm answering every one, in red pen, with a sticker. Ninety-four stickers. Yes, I like watermelon.
| Today's word: ganbatte. Do your best, hang in there, go for it. The kids write it at the bottom of every letter. Every single one. Molly-sensei, ganbatte! |
Wednesday, September 1, 1999 (H11.9.1)
Second term. Opening ceremony in a gym that must have been 35 degrees, three hundred kids standing in straight lines, browner and taller than in July. One boy had dyed his hair brown over the summer and was sent home to dye it back. The principal's speech: 22 minutes. I understood most of it. It was about effort. They're all about effort.
Saturday, August 28, 1999 (H11.8.28) -- 1:30 in the morning
End-of-summer party for the teachers of the big school tonight, at the inn by the river. The teachers here will have a party for anything: start of term, end of term, the weather.
Last December I promised to tell the story of why I don't drink, and I never did. Here it is. It's short.
My dad drank. Most of my childhood. He wasn't mean. He was sad and gone and late, and then sorry, and then sad again. When I was thirteen he stopped. He'll have twelve years in October. He still goes to his meeting on Tuesday nights, in the basement of a church on Lomas, and he makes the coffee. When I was about fifteen I decided I would just skip it. Not because I think I'd turn into him. Because I never wanted to have to wonder. That's all. It's not a big deal at home.
Here it's a big deal, because the drinking is how people talk to each other. Teachers who barely say three words to me at school tell me their whole lives at the enkai: their bad knees, their sons in Tokyo who don't call. The beer is permission. And I'm sitting there with my oolong tea, being told things, without the permission.
Tonight Nakagawa-sensei was the driver for our end of the table, so he drank oolong tea too, and when the P.E. teacher yelled "Oolong-sensei! Kanpai!" he raised his glass of tea and clinked it with mine, very seriously, like a toast at a wedding.
In the parking lot afterward, while everybody else said goodbye for twenty minutes, he stopped and looked up. He pointed at the bright star nearly straight overhead and said "Orihime," the weaver princess, and then at another bright one lower down toward the south, "Hikoboshi," the cowherd. They're the lovers from the Tanabata story in July, who can only meet once a year, across the River of Heaven, which is what they call the Milky Way. I said, "In English, Vega. And Altair." He said them back to me, carefully, like vocabulary. And then, I don't know why, because it was dark and nobody was drinking, I told him about my dad. In my bad Japanese and simple English and hands.
He listened to all of it. Then he said, in English, "Your father is strong man." And then something in Japanese I didn't catch all of, with daijoubu in it: it's all right. Then he drove me home and bowed at my door and left.
That's it. That's the whole thing. I've been sitting at the kotatsu for an hour (in summer it's just a table) looking at the wall.
| Today's word: enryo. Holding back so as not to be a bother. Not taking the last piece. Not saying the thing. People say "Enryo shinaide" to you: don't hold back. I have been in this country for thirteen months, holding back. |
Sunday, August 15, 1999 (H11.8.15)
Last year I spent Obon alone on my floor. This year, at six on Friday morning, there was a knock, and Mrs. Fukuda said "Mori-chan. Oide." Come. (She calls me Mori-chan. "Molly" comes out "Mori" in Japanese, which means forest. I'm the forest.)
Her son's family came from Osaka on Thursday night, with two boys, nine and six, who stared at me for a day and then decided I was a climbing structure. Friday we went up the hill behind the temple to clean the family grave: scrub the stone, pull the weeds, pour water over the top with a wooden ladle, fresh flowers, incense, and then crouch there a minute with your hands together. Mr. Fukuda has been there nine years. Mrs. Fukuda talked to him out loud while she scrubbed. She told him about me. I understood "American," "teacher," "cucumbers," and "doesn't eat enough."
Friday evening she lit a tiny fire of dry stalks at her gate, the welcome fire, so the ancestors can find their way home in the dark. On the family altar inside, next to the photographs, there was a cucumber with four disposable-chopstick legs stuck in it, and an eggplant with four legs. The cucumber is a horse, so the ancestors can hurry home. The eggplant is a cow, so they go back slowly. The cucumber came from her garden. Of course it did.
Saturday night was fireworks over the river and the dance at the elementary school, and this year I didn't stand at the edge. Mrs. Fukuda dressed me in a summer kimono of her own from when she was young, indigo with white morning glories, and the boys pulled me into the circle. The little girl who yelled "HARO!" at me last year is a first-year at the big school now. She danced right behind me and corrected my hands.
Tonight Mrs. Fukuda lit the fire again at the gate, the sending-off fire. I stood there with her and the boys and watched it burn down, and I realized I was thinking about my Grandpa Pryor, who died when I was in college, and I sent him off too. Just in case he'd followed me all the way here to see how I was doing.
| Today's word: natsukashii. The warm ache of missing something from before. An old song, your grandmother's kitchen, the smell of a summer. People say it all the time here, happily. There's no good word for it in English, which may say something about us. |
Thursday, August 5, 1999 (H11.8.5)
Two days in Matsue helping with the orientation for the new JETs. A year ago I was the one getting off the little plane, sweating through my good blouse. Yesterday I stood in a hotel lobby holding a sign.
Three new ones for our area: a guy from Leeds, a guy from Auckland, and a girl from Oregon, twenty-two, who looked exactly how I felt last August, like somebody had turned up the gravity. At dinner she asked me, very quietly, "Does it get easier?" I said yes. Then I thought about it and said, "It gets different." Then I told her about the kerosene truck and the slippers, and she laughed. I hope it helped.
Siobhan went home to Galway last week. Two years and done. We cried at the airport like idiots in front of a school group. She left me her rice cooker and a note: "Don't you dare get sensible." I have two rice cookers now and one fewer person within an hour who knows what a burrito is.
Monday, July 26, 1999 (H11.7.26)
One year ago today I landed at Narita. One year!
The cicadas started up like somebody plugged them in. During vacation I sit at the Board of Ed and study kanji with a towel around my neck like Kimura-san. I used to think the towel was a funny habit of his. The towel is wisdom.
And Mrs. Fukuda's garden has gone into overdrive. Every morning on my doorstep: cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, shiso leaves, once a watermelon the size of a toddler. She's taught me quick cucumber pickles in a plastic bag with salt and kelp, and my refrigerator is full of containers in neat rows, labeled with the date. It is the tidiest refrigerator in Shimane. Rachel would be proud.
| Today's word: mushiatsui. Hot and humid. Literally, "steamed-hot." Like a dumpling. Like me. |
Saturday, July 17, 1999 (H11.7.17)
The weather people on TV say the rainy season is officially over, and the heat came in the next morning like it had been standing outside the door waiting. The closet mold and I have agreed to a truce.
E-mail from Sean, subject line WORLD CUP!!!!!!!!, entirely in capital letters, about the U.S. women beating China on penalty kicks at the Rose Bowl last Saturday. They showed it on the news here too, and the P.E. teacher reenacted the last kick for me in the teachers' room with a crumpled-up worksheet.
First term's almost done. I'm not complaining about the heat. I'm writing it down. There's a difference.
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