Chapter 6

Fumiko, while playing the role of a dutiful, submissive, Japanese wife, was not stupid. She had married Hiroto when she was seventeen, and he was twenty-five. She had Suki ten months later. She was also quite beautiful, and Hiroto didn’t like her going out in public without him. As a result, she spent almost every waking minute taking care of Suki, exercising and doing yoga to keep fit, or doing whatever her husband required of her. Since she didn’t go out with friends, like many American women do, she had plenty of time to learn about the world via the internet, something Hiroto was unaware she even knew how to use. When Hiroto had said they would not be traveling to America to see her daughter and grandbaby, she promptly began her research, so that when an opportunity presented itself, she could take one of the most outrageous and, frankly, dangerous actions she’d ever made. That was, of course, defying her husband.

Applying for a B2 visitor’s visa was easy. It could all be done online. Going to the interview wasn’t a problem, either. While she wasn’t encouraged to go out and run around town, she wasn’t cloistered, either. The wait time for an interview was only two days, in Tokyo. Once she knew Hiroto was going away, she made the appointment. Then, using “house funds” she bought her ticket and openly defied her husband for the first time in their marriage.

By the time Hiroto found out his wife was gone, and where she had gone, she was sitting in a rocking chair, gazing raptly into the eyes of her granddaughter.

To avoid Hiroto finding out about her plans before she could employ them, Fumiko told no one of them, other than the Americans at the embassy in Tokyo. So the first knowledge Suki had of it was when the phone rang and her mother excitedly said, “Konnichiwa!” It was a moment or two before Suki could get her mother calmed down enough to learn that she was at the Will Rogers World Airport, in Oklahoma City, and was asking Suki to come get her.

The uproar was instantaneous, but short-lived. Suki still didn’t have her driver’s license. Rather than hustling things together to take babies along, Bob just said, “I’ll go get her. Make me a sign so she’ll recognize me.”

Thus it was that Fumiko Nakioto had an experience very much like her daughter had, some eighteen months previously. She found herself in a strange place in a strange land, among people whose language she wasn’t comfortable trying to use, though she spoke it better than Hiroto did. She was the one who helped Suki practice English. She was nervous. Her terror at what Hiroto would do - later - had been stuffed into a tightly closed box in her mind, but that box had cracks in it.

Basically, she was a mess when she saw a tall American coming toward the waiting room her daughter had told her to sit in, with a placard that had her name on it in Japanese characters.

Bob’s experience was also very much like his previous greeting of a Japanese woman. She looked like an older, more mature version of her daughter, poised but nervous. She was pretty, and Bob noticed that, but his primary interest was in making her comfortable. He knew she had helped Suki practice English, and Suki had taught them all a few phrases in Japanese. He used one of greeting to try to put Fumikio at ease and bowed. He smiled at her when she stood, timidly, tears threatening to spill from her eyes.

“Hi,” he said, warmly, switching to English. “I’m Bob. I guess I’m your in-law.”

“In-law?” said Fumiko, softly.

“Suki is married to my son,” explained Bob. “That makes her my daughter-in-law ... or daughter by law.” His eyebrows raised and he smiled. “Welcome to America.”

Fumiko had been strong for as long as she could be. There were only two other people in the waiting room and both were reading. This man was related to her. She could cry in front of him.

She rushed into his arms and did so.

Bob found himself holding a slightly shorter version of Suki in his arms. She was sobbing softly and trembling, and he knew she had to be scared half to death. So he just held her and patted her on her back. Eventually she calmed, and he moved his hands so she could pull away from him when she was ready. When she did so, she looked down at his shoes.

“I have dishonored you,” she whispered.

“Suki felt the same way when she got here,” said Bob, smiling. He reached to gently lift Fumiko’s chin, until her dark eyes were exposed. “By American custom, you have not dishonored either yourself or me. You have simply been honest about how you felt. Would you like to go see Suki and Kei?”

“Very much so,” said Fumiko, who was steeling her emotions in the same way she did when she knew Hiroto was going to punish her. It was the only method she knew of to bring her passions under control. She’d understood what Bob had said, but could not comprehend how such a thing could be true. The only thing she could do was keep going, until Suki could explain things to her.

Bob tried to chat on the ride to the house, which took an hour. Fumiko wasn’t used to chatting, especially with strange men. Still, his demeanor was warm and friendly in a way that made her feel safe. Slowly, she began to reply to his questions.

By the time they got to the house, she was astonished to find that she liked this strange, American man, the first man with a full, bushy beard she’d ever met.

It was only the first of many things that would transform Fumiko Nakioto’s life in a way she could never, in her wildest dreams, have imagined.

The reunion of mother and daughter, and the introduction of granddaughter to grandmother, was also emotional. When Suki cried happily - and more importantly, openly and unashamed - Fumiko worried less about her own response. She knew of Emma and Tim, of course, having been told of them in letters and phone calls. That they were there, grinning, Emma holding her own baby, made the woman feel less constrained by her own cultural norms.

“This is all so strange,” she said, in Japanese, to her daughter. “America is so strange!”

“I know,” commiserated her daughter. “But it’s also wonderful. You can do anything you want, here, Mamma.”

Fumiko raised her granddaughter in her arms slightly.

“That much is obvious,” she said.

Suki blushed, and dipped her head.

“I love him very much,” she said.

“Is he good to you?” asked Fumiko. “Does he beat you?”

“Never!” said Suki, her eyes wide. “He would never touch me in anger, Mamma. That is against custom, here.”

“Good,” sighed Fumiko. “Your father will beat me severely when he finds out what I have done.”

That’s how Suki found out that her mother had a maverick side she would never have suspected was there.

Everything was strange for Fumiko. The first meal she had in America was odd, both because of the food she was served, and because they perched her on a chair to eat it. She was used to sitting on the floor. She was also used to serving, rather than being served. When Bob picked up a plate of something called meatloaf, and handed it to her, she felt giddy. He was serving her! And he was serving her first, as if she were an honored guest!

The house these people lived in ... that her daughter lived in ... was huge, by Japanese standards. The room she was shown, and told she would sleep in, was large, with a soft bed and window that looked out into what seemed like an immense stretch of grass. Large trees were everywhere. And there were hundreds of other houses, just as big, on the streets Bob had driven her through. Most impressive, though, was the fact that these houses did not adjoin each other. There was open space between them all. She knew Hiroto would have said that was wasteful, but she loved it.

Her first night in America was spent in exhausted slumber. She didn’t even dream about Hiroto, or how she knew he would react when he returned home to find her gone. When she woke in the morning, it was to be pampered, and fed pancakes just like they had in Japan, though much thinner than the ones she prepared sometimes.

She got to hold little Kei as much as she wanted to. The rocking chair in the living room, that gave her a view through a big picture window to the street outside, was her favorite place. It was February, and snow covered everything. To her, it was a fairyland.

She soon got to know Emma, who was used to taking care of both babies while Suki was at classes. Tim’s work schedule was strange, and he slept until nine or ten in the morning. With Bob working, either at his business or in his home office, that left only Emma and the babies. It was quiet. Kei’s neck muscles were firming up, and her head wobbled only a little when she sat up. If placed on her stomach, she raised her head and kicked her legs, looking around. Anything she could grasp with her hand went straight to her mouth. She loved to be placed in a battery-assisted swing, which she would happily stay in for half an hour or more.

Ethan was still an infant. Fumiko didn’t care whose baby he was. If Emma needed to do something, Fumiko would happily hold Ethan, tickling his nose, or toes, chattering to him in a language he would later grow up hearing, learning, and speaking.

Much of what Fumiko learned about America came from her budding relationship with Emma. Fumiko’s arrival had been so unexpected, there hadn’t been time to formulate a plan for what to do about where Emma would sleep. The spare bedroom had been turned into a nursery, with two cribs in it. Emma slept with Bob, but hadn’t gotten around to moving all her “stuff” out of her old room into the master bedroom. Fumiko could be given Emma’s bed, but Emma had to sleep somewhere, too. Moving the cribs, to re-open that room as a guest room was hastily discussed while Suki was welcoming her mother to America, but they didn’t want to do that. Tim’s job required that he have a few hours in a quiet room to sleep, and putting both cribs in the master bedroom wasn’t a palatable idea, either.

The fact that Fumiko, exhausted from both stress and the trip, crashed early gave them some breathing time, and there was a relatively short discussion about what to do.

“It is no problem,” said Suki, discussing all this for the first time. “For Emma to give up her room to a guest shows respect. If we tell my mother that she moved into Bob’s room to give my mother a place to stay, she will feel honored.”

“So I can still sleep with him while she’s here?”

“My mother will not think that is unusual,” said Suki. “Just don’t let her know you are having sex.” She covered her mouth with both hands and then removed them, grinning. Bob was so preoccupied that he missed her joke about how loud Emma could be during sex. Emma merely stuck her tongue out at her sister.

“If you say so,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

“Believe me,” said Suki. “Remember when I got here, and thought I was supposed to serve Emma in the shower?”

Emma grinned.

“My mother would happily do the same for you, Bob-san. If she perceives Emma as serving you, she’ll think that’s normal.”

“You’d love that,” growled Emma.

“One Japanese woman being seduced in this house is plenty,” snorted Bob.

“It won’t be a problem,” said Suki.

And, as far as anyone could tell, it wasn’t. Fumiko seemed to take no notice of the fact that Emma slept in the same room as her father. Perhaps that was a product of knowing that, in Japan, a single mother was looked down on, and economically disadvantaged. It was very difficult for a single mother to get by in Japan. Generally speaking, no one talks about them, and most people ignore them, if they can. Fumiko may have perceived that Emma’s father was ‘taking care of her’ so she would not be destitute.

It became clear to Fumiko, though, that the love between Emma and her father was extraordinary. It was warm, effusive, all the things Fumiko knew her own daughter had never experienced with her own father.

Within three days, Fumiko decided that sending Suki to America had been the best thing that could ever have happened to her.

Fumiko observed other things in this strange house. She saw the closeness with which her daughter hugged Bob. She saw Tim, sitting between Suki and Emma, watching TV, holding hands with both of them.

And once, when she got out of bed to go get a drink of water, she saw Emma, her arms around Bob’s neck, giving him a long, soulful kiss in the kitchen. Had she had time to think about these things, she might have become concerned.

But Hiroto got back home and discovered his wife had run off to America, like an errant child.

Full of outrage, he set about going to get her.

He would drag her back.

He would punish her for her temerity.

He was tired of the women in his household dishonoring him.

Hiroto Nakioto was a misunderstood man. It could also have been said that he would better have been born a hundred years earlier than he was. Or at least before 1947.

Hiroto would have fit in perfectly with his people when the predominant belief was that all Japanese descended from the gods, and that all other races were inferior. He would have made a good samurai, at least the part of samurai that was mental.

In Japan, he could get away with thinking like that. Allowances were made for ‘throwbacks’ like Hiroto, at least as long as they didn’t cause any trouble. Compare it to those in America who are still fond of saying, “Save your Confederate money, boys, the South will rise again.” Nobody takes them seriously. They aren’t really a threat to anyone.

They are tolerated as long as they don’t do something based on their outdated beliefs that affects other people. Like fly the flag of a vanquished army. Some people are “affected” by that when they choose to get offended, instead of just deciding such actions only advertise that the “offenders” have a fondness for losers.

For Hiroto, doing something about his outmoded beliefs was when he decided to punish his errant wife the instant he saw her, instead of waiting to do so in private.

To be fair, conditions were perfect for a man like Hiroto to do something foolish.

His anger was like that of a forest fire, that rages, and then smolders for days, waiting for a fresh breeze to whip it into flame again. He had never been outside Japan, and the process of getting official permission to go to America - easy as it was - infuriated him. For Fumiko, the process of getting a visa seemed unbelievably quick and easy. For Hiroto it dragged on insufferably. And who were these Americans ... who had the temerity to think they had the right to decide whether or not he was good enough to visit their stinking country?

Then, his hate festered while he endured the (non-Japanese) passengers and crew of the plane that spent much too long getting where it was going. The food was awful as well.

He went a step further than his wife, taking a commuter flight from Will Rogers to Westheimer Airport in Norman, and then proudly showed a Pakistani cab driver the return address on an envelope that had contained a letter from the girl who had caused all this pain. He seethed as the cab took him to the place where all that had ruined his life had begun, the house of Robert Livingstone. His intent was to get his wife and daughter, put them in the same cab, and take them back to Japan. As for what he thought of as the bastard child, it could starve as far as he was concerned.

It was pure coincidence that he arrived at a time when Tim was home and Bob was not. It was also coincidental that Emma was the one who went to find out who was pounding on the front door.

Hiroto ignored the young woman who ‘admitted him’ and stalked past her, into the house. He found his wife and daughter in what looked a common area, with a couch and two upholstered chairs in it. A large flat-screen TV was mounted on one wall. Fumiko gave a squeak of what was probably a mixture of surprise and consternation, before he began punishing her. He didn’t have the long, thin cherry dowel he especially liked to whip her with, so he had to use his hand instead. He slapped her so hard he broke her lower mandible and knocked her an entire body length away. Suki, who was holding Kei after having changed her diaper, screamed, something that was ironically satisfying to Hiroto, who decided to slap his daughter as well.