I fell in love with Kimiko because she was a happy person. It was easy. Happy is contagious, especially to me, after a lifetime of too little pleasure. Kimiko was not what I would ordinarily have considered attractive, but joy makes the plain beautiful, as their aura of cheerfulness expands to encompass all around it.
I met Kimiko at the plant nursery she operated. I had recently taken up gardening; I asked her advice; she was very helpful. I found myself returning again and again, telling myself that the trips were necessary. Asking questions just to interact with her, leaving each time with my station wagon crammed with new acquisitions.
I was one of those 50-something men, recently divorced after a long unhappy marriage, on my own in an ancient Victorian home in an older area of the city. I have no money worries having practised law for over 30 years. My ex-wife lives alone in what was our million-dollar home. She was and is a terribly unhappy person, something I should have realized immediately on meeting her, had I not been blinded by her beauty, her model’s figure, her honey-colored hair, her large, brilliant blue eyes. If I had not been so enthralled I would have noticed her lack of passion, her critical tongue, her negative attitude toward everything and everyone except me. A concept that changed dramatically after a few months of marriage. My business success that allowed me to provide the best of everything including world travel was never a consolation. I watched beauty become bitter.
What could I have done differently? I tried for most of thirty years, experimenting, failing, blaming myself for failing.
Finally, I asked Kimiko out. I did it badly because I was truly scared. I had been on my own for a year. My friends were eager to find me a new partner; I tired quickly of the frail women in expensive clothes, swathed in clouds of perfume, birdlike, anxious, talking too much about their ex-husbands. Kimiko was not like other women who I would ask for a casual date to dinner, the theater, or a charity function.
Kimiko was totally different, probably no more than five feet tall, muscular from wrestling tubs of plants and saplings about the nursery every day. Her father, who had started the business, was dead. Her mother, who appeared to speak no English manned the cash register. There were no employees, it was a summer business that closed from November to April. Her nose was wide, flat as a baby’s, her eyes a hazel blur, behind rimless, Coke-bottle glasses.
She smiled up at me. If she was surprised she didn’t show it. “So, you like Japanese chicks?”
“Uh, no,” I stammered. She wore her usual work clothes, black jeans and a flowered smock, today one decorated with pink geraniums.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice I was Japanese?” She laughed prettily, the sound like the burbling of a meadowlark.
“What I’m saying badly is that I’ve known a number of Japanese women but have never asked one for a date, until now.”
Everything about Kimiko was joyful. She smelled tangy, like lemons. Our first date was at a Greek restaurant. Kimiko ate like what she was, a hard-working woman. It was such a pleasure to watch her devour a fried cheese appetizer, moussaka, a rice pudding, then a baklava with our coffee. I was used to women who ordered salad, then pushed it around their plate, pretending to eat.
“What you see is what you get,” said Kimiko, her eyes sparkling behind the thick lenses, as she finished an after-dinner drink. “I’m a big girl, I eat like a stevedore, and I’ve never watched my weight. Most men find that a problem.”
“No me,” I said. “I’m successful enough that I can afford to feed you.” Kimiko laughed. “I asked you out because you’re funny, and happy, and not the least pretentious. All night I’ve been longing to put my arms around you.”
“Well, let’s take care of that right now,” said Kimiko. She stood up, walked around the table, and as I stood up, she put her arms around me, stood on her tip toes and kissed me. She was warm, and soft, and tasted lemony.
We never looked back. In the car we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. She spent the night with me at my place. My bed was in a spacious upstairs room, a brisk wind rubbed birch limbs against the side of the house. The blind was up, tines of moonlight spangled the bed. She was everything I dreamed of, sexual, sensual, loving, anxious to please and be pleased.
“You’re a very passionate woman,” I said, breathless, as we rested, her head on my shoulder.
Kimiko laughed her wonderful laugh. “When people do something that on the surface appears so ridiculous, it would be a terrible shame if everyone involved didn’t enjoy a great deal of pleasure.”
That was Kimiko; she felt that everything in life should provide a great deal of pleasure, even work. Particularly work. I had a weakness for annual flowers, brilliant begonias, pansies. Marigolds, which reminded me of a trip to India where in some rural areas, rivers of marigolds ran beside the roads, their spicy odor masking the unpleasantness of poverty. It was Kimiko who wrestled the tubs of pampas grass, the potted roses, the flats of brilliants, to my station wagon. “I love customers like you,” she said. “Everything but the roses and pampas grass will die in the fall, then you have to replace it all in the spring. You’re like a trust fund for my business.”
I had guessed I was twenty years older than Kimiko. I was fifty-two.
A few months later I suggested that since I essentially had more money than I knew what to do with that she could sell the nursery if she wanted to, we could travel a lot, do whatever we wanted. She wouldn’t hear of it.
“I love my job,” she said. “I’d go to fat if I didn’t work. I wrestle hundred-pound bales of peat moss, huge tubs of trees and plants. I’m 190 pounds of solid muscle. So if you don’t treat me right you better live in fear.” And she laughed as she threw her arms around me, and pushed me back onto our sofa. I never again mentioned selling the plant nursery. It was about that time that Kimiko first suggested I carry her. She was being facetious, but there was a certain longing I sensed. “I’m 58 years old, I’m 6’ tall and weigh 150 lbs. Do the math,” I said in a jocular tone.
“Maybe you should take up weight lifting?” said Kimiko.
As lovers do, we exchanged life stories in monologues. Mine was very short, and as I told my story, I realized I had spent a small lifetime, repeating the same mistakes, expecting different results, trying unsuccessfully to please a woman who couldn’t be pleased, though I didn’t realize my mistakes until I was distanced by divorce from the situation.
Kimiko’s story was much more interesting.
“My father grew up in Hawaii, the island of Maui. But he was the youngest son, their farm was small, there was no life for him there, so he married my mother when she was sixteen, and they had the bad luck to immigrate to Canada a year before Pearl Harbor. They were interned, my father’s recently purchased land, in Richmond, outside Vancouver, where he was establishing a market garden, was seized and sold without compensation. It was part racism, part fear of the unknown. Japanese Americans were treated equally badly, but in Hawaii things went on as normal, because a third of the residents of Hawaii were of Japanese descent, there were just too many of them.
“Virtually all Japanese immigrants were loyal Americans or Canadians, the way they were treated was so unfair. That unfair treatment made many of the Hawaii Japanese choose sides. In all of the Hawaiian Islands there was not one act of sabotage during World War Two, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t great resentment, but they were too subtle for sabotage.
“They realized any resistance would be small and futile, and put everyone in danger, so they established an underground. The Japanese Victory Society. Mama says it started with my father’s family, and some members of her family, and other neighbors on Maui. Eventually, there were cells on every island; they believed without reservation that Japan would win the war. They decided to wait and watch and be prepared. They established a shadow government, had it all in place, ready to take over as soon as the Japanese took control of the islands. They believed that as soon as Japan won there would be a massive exchange of prisoners. On that rationale my father, Hiro, was to be Secretary of Agriculture in the occupation government.
“Mama said he joked that he would be Secretary of Pineapples, for they communicated through pineapples. Incoming mail to the internment camps was censored, outgoing letters too. But a crate of pineapples could be shipped from Hawaii. The paperwork was always immaculate, the attached letters innocuous in the extreme, but inside the pineapples lay sedition.
“I had a brother, Norbu, born in the internment camp in Alberta. After the war when my father came back to B. C. and started over, my brother was known as Knobby, and was rebellious, hating what had been done to him and his family but not quite knowing how to take revenge. He hung out with rough white boys in East Vancouver. When he was sixteen he drove his first car into a lamppost and died, at a time when my mother was pregnant with me.
“Mother’s small revenge was to refuse to learn English. My father spoke fluent English with just a trace of an accent. Mother claimed her refusal was so I would have to speak Japanese, and would not forget it as many teenagers did when they assimilated in white society. I taught her the only word she knows in English. Ask. When my father was alive, no matter what anyone said to her as she tended the cash register, she replied, ‘Ask Hiro.’ After my father died it became ‘Ask Kimiko.’ She may not speak English but don’t ever try to cheat her at the cash register, she makes change better than a bank teller.
“The Japanese Victory Society did not die with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“They could not believe that Japan lost the war.
“The secret meetings continued, at least on Maui, at least within my father’s family. Japanese society was highly patriarchal, but because she was a prisoner, mother was considered a member of the Japanese Victory Society. At the camp, the crates of pineapples came addressed to her—what harm could a teenage wife, with a tiny baby, do with a box of pineapples?
“Once, when I was a teenager, mother went back to Maui for a visit. She was guest of honor at a meeting of the Japanese Victory Society. ‘Aging men,’ she said, ‘with unrealistic dreams of Japan ascending to power again, and a box stuffed full of rising sun flags, folded politely, stored in a dry place, sleeping until insurrection or conquest called.’
“My uncles are all dead now, and I’m not far from middle age. Mother must be the only surviving member of the Japanese Victory Society.”
Her mother was another story. Kimiko introduced us. I bowed clumsily, called her Mrs. Shibayama, tried to smile a lot. The old lady stared stonily at me, with small black eyes, glaring as if I was attempting to shortchange her.
“Mother is hard to get to know,” Kimiko said, smiling. “We’ll just play around her, as if she’s a tree in our yard. By the way, she refers to you as ‘White Devil,’ not a white devil, but THE white devil. She advises me not to play with you.”
“How can I win her over?”
“You can’t. But I’m a big girl, I can choose my own friends.”
We were married in the winter, at city hall on a day of alternating squalls and sun showers. Her mother, who pretended I didn’t exist, refused to attend. We went to Hawaii for three glorious weeks. Kimiko found some cousins on Maui, but though they were hospitable I sensed they weren’t comfortable with me, and when Kimiko brought up the Japanese Victory Society, her cousins politely changed the subject.
Kimiko moved in with me in my spacious Victorian home, once again suggesting that I should carry her over the threshold. “And if I put my back out, what good would I be as a husband?”
On another occasion I said, “Your mother is welcome to live with us. She can have the back bedroom on the ground floor; she’ll scarcely have to see me. There’s even a Japanese market two streets over.”
Before we married, Kimiko and her mother lived in a drafty cottage/ shed, at the back of the nursery. It was immaculate in its sparseness.
“Mother says she would rather die than live with THE white devil. She can still look after herself. Here, she’d slip around the house like a ghost, cleaning things that don’t need cleaning, putting her mark on everything like a cat spraying its territory. She’ll be happier alone.”
I was persistent. “She’s had a hard life,” I said. “I could make things easier for her.” But she continued to live behind the nursery for a number of years until she took a serious fall. Luckily it was in July when Kimiko worked every day, so she only lay unattended for a few hours. Her hip was broken, she was in hospital, then in a rehab center for several months. She could no longer live alone so, against her will, we moved her into our first-floor bedroom. I peeked in one day. The floor was covered with tatami mats, a pallet for a single bed, a wooden pillow with a thin pad for comfort. The closet door was closed. I assumed everything she owned was inside the closet. I would go weeks without seeing her. She moved about the house like a spirit, emerging to eat only when she was sure I was away or in some other part of the house.
I would sometimes hear her high-pitched voice speaking rapidly in Japanese, like bursts of gunfire and then Kimiko’s softer slower speech, but sometimes even Kimiko grew frustrated and her voice would rise, then she’d emerge from her mother’s room, shaking her head in frustration.
“She says, if something happens to me, you will throw her onto the street.”
“Can’t you reassure her? First, I’m 22 years older than you, I’ll die first. If it would comfort her, I’ll open a bank account for her. I’ll give her a pillowcase full of money that she can hide in her closet. I know the only thing we have in common is you, but there must be something that will ease her mind.”
There was not.
But the old lady was more perceptive than I. It was she who first noticed that Kimiko was losing weight and energy. I had noticed the dark circles under her eyes, the constant tiredness, but we had both been lucky health-wise, our years together had been blessed. I had gone into old age quite gracefully, scarcely noticing that I was grayer, slower moving, more forgetful. Kimiko was shrinking before my eyes and I had scarcely noticed. I simply thought she too was slowing down.
That was not the case. There were treatments, but they were stop gap. Our world was turned topsy-turvy, it was always a foregone conclusion that I would die first, but it was not to be the case.
Even Kimiko’s good nature could not forestall the foreboding that seemed to drip from the walls. The nursery was sold within days of being on the market. We waited, none of us quite knowing what to do with ourselves. Kimiko and I shared a love seat in the living room where we watched TV in the evenings. She was always cold, needed to be swathed in a blue afghan quilt, I sat close to her those evenings so she could draw from my warmth. She was still cheerful, still joked that I should carry her to bed. Now, she had to take my hand and lean on me as we walked down the hall and the stairs up to our bedroom.
Sometimes, I watched surreptitiously as the old woman moved about the kitchen, her sandals and cane clicking ominously on the tiles. What was she going through? She had lost her son, her husband, and now she was about to lose her daughter. She would be left to share a house with someone she mistrusted.
One evening after Kimiko was in bed, I made a pot of the thick green tea that Mrs. Shibayama liked. I had seen Kimiko pour it in a bowl and take it to her hundreds of times. I did what I could, I knocked lightly on her door, waited a few seconds before opening it, I cupped the heavy little bowl with both hands. She was sitting cross-legged on her pallet. How could someone so old sit that way? It would be an impossibility for me, as would sleeping on a pallet on the floor.
I bowed awkwardly, holding the bowl of tea out to her. She stared at me for several seconds. It was her chance to humiliate me as she had seemingly longed to do for all the years I had known her. Then she held out her own hands and accepted the tea. I thought there might have been something like the start of a smile on her face, but it quickly vanished. She drank the bowl of tea, while I stood by awkwardly. When she was about to return the bowl to me I motioned for her to set it on the mat by her bed. I held my hands out to her in a universal gesture. Again, she stared at me for several seconds before letting me take hold of her dry, aged hands and help her to her feet.
“I love Kimiko,” I said. “I love her so much.” I placed my hands gently on her shoulders and moved her toward me. “I love Kimiko,” I said again, my voice breaking. My body shuddered and tears dripped down my cheeks. She remained rigid, her arms at her sides, like sinewy old brooms. She smelled of tea and something like fresh cut grass. Suddenly, I felt her fingers on my back just above my waist, her old hand patted me a few times, very gently, like a cat tapping at a new toy.
As Kimiko’s time lessened, we still spent our evenings on the love seat, but several times Mrs. Shibayama joined us, sitting on an oak chair near us, though there was a large comfortable sofa across the room.
Tonight, the TV show is over. The three of us have finished our tea. I stand in front of Kimiko, offer my hand to help her up from the sofa.
“I’m so tired,” she says, “I think you’ll have to carry me.”
Our standing joke.
But this time, as I look at her strained face; I scoop her gently into my arms, afghan and all, her cheek against mine, an arm tight around my neck. She weighs scarcely more than her clothes. I carry her for the very first time, down the hall, resolutely toward the stairs, my heart so full of love, but bleeding with each step.
For Barbara Turner Kinsella
April 6, 1956–December 24, 2012
Ever Loved, Sorely Missed