I WOULD HAVE BEEN THE LAST PERSON TO THINK THAT I WOULD END UP IN Tokyo. Growing up in San Jose, I’d never traveled outside of California, let alone abroad. Dirk and I had always talked about going to the New Age Music Festival in Switzerland, but, like getting married, it was something we never got around to.
This all began when I received a phone message saying that Michiko Taniguchi was dead.
“I’m calling for Celeste Duncan. This is Patricia Brinker, the administrator from the Sheltering Oaks Convalescent Hospital in Carlmont, Iowa. We have your name on our contact list for Michiko Taniguchi. I’m sorry to say that she has passed away and we would like to get your current address so that we may send you her personal effects. . . .”
I had never heard of anyone named Michiko Taniguchi and concluded that this must have been a mistake. Still, something stopped me from simply deleting the message and flopping into bed. With a death involved, even someone you didn’t know, it seemed prudent to not just discount it.
I’d been frantic all day at work to meet my deadline for the final edit of the scintillating Real Guide to IP Layer Network Administration with Linux computer manual. Then I’d gone straight to Dirk’s for a rehearsal, and we had another fight, an increasingly common occurrence. Instead of spending the night at his place as I normally would, I came home. It was nearly eleven thirty, too late to return the administrator’s call.
Yet I was certain they had the wrong Celeste Duncan. I thought hard but came up with nothing: I didn’t know any Michiko Taniguchi. I even searched the name on the Internet, but only found a research chemistry professor in Philadelphia, a masseuse in Oxnard, California, and an obscure Hollywood bit player from the 1930s.
Dirk would have been my first choice to call to help me figure this out, but I was still mad at him. My next thought was to phone Zoe, but it was too late, though she could have been awake on a late-night feeding for Amelia. But I didn’t want to disturb her. Yet after I pondered further, it finally hit me: Michiko Taniguchi had to be Aunt Mitch, or Aunt Mitch the witch, as my mother Barbara had called her.
Her name was actually Michiko Morgenstern. Taniguchi must have been her maiden name—it was no wonder it didn’t register. A war bride, Aunt Mitch married my mother’s uncle Melvin after they fell in love while he was in the army during the American occupation of Japan in the early 1950s. Aunt Mitch and Uncle Melvin lived in Saratoga, a town about fifteen miles north of San Jose. What a treat it had been to visit their ranch-style house with the lawn, the oak tree, and the yellow rosebushes in the front yard. To me it was a fairy-tale castle in comparison to the cramped one-bedroom apartment surrounded by concrete, where Barbara and I lived in the Alum Rock neighborhood of San Jose.
Once, in Aunt Mitch’s house, it was as if I’d been transported into a magical foreign land. First, I had to take off my shoes and leave them at the front door. And when I sat on the little wooden bench in the entryway to put on my slippers—children’s slippers she said were bought especially for me—the sweet incense wafting through the air gave off a fragrance that smelled like exotic candy. It was a welcome scent from the permanent odor of marijuana saturating my mother’s apartment. In Aunt Mitch’s living room elegant dolls sporting elaborate hairdos and wrapped in kimonos gazed down from shelves filled with books, books with incomprehensible writing that could only be deciphered if you knew the secret code.
Aunt Mitch hadn’t crossed my mind for ages. It seemed that she’d always been so nice to my mother and me, always accommodating when I was dropped off at the last minute at that Saratoga refuge when one of the babysitters flaked out. So it was puzzling why Barbara sometimes made a face when her name came up and referred to her as a witch.
I now recalled that Aunt Mitch and Uncle Melvin moved to Texas when I was around seven, but I’d heard nothing further after that. I didn’t know if my mother had kept in touch with them, but of course I couldn’t ask her—she was long gone.
When I phoned the Sheltering Oaks Convalescent Hospital the next day, the administrator told me what little she knew about Michiko Taniguchi. She passed away at the age of eighty-three and her husband had died eleven years ago. They had no children and I was the only living relative they could track down.
I arranged to have the box containing Aunt Mitch’s personal effects sent to my office at TextTrans, the technical document company where I’d been working for the past seven years as chief editor.
I received a call from reception when the package arrived. Upon retrieving it, I couldn’t help but notice the pale-skinned young woman behind the desk decked out in the inappropriate halter top. Kylie, our new receptionist, looked no older than a high school sophomore, though I’d heard she was actually twenty. Lately it seemed that everyone was looking extremely young to me—the gynecologist at the clinic, the new apartment manager at my complex, the news anchor on Channel 11. My age obsession was most likely because I was currently two years shy of thirty-five; not old enough to be Kylie’s mother but easily qualifying as a very elder sister. It was rather mystifying how I’d become this old when I could have sworn I was twenty myself only a few short years ago.
“Present from your boyfriend?” Kylie chirped, pulling at a chunk of her blond-and-black streaked hair, checking for split ends.
“Not exactly.” I gave her a twisted smile. Of course she had no way of knowing about my ongoing issues with Dirk. (And for reasons I couldn’t quite explain to myself I still hadn’t told him about the call regarding Aunt Mitch.) But wasn’t it kind of weird for someone you really didn’t know to make such a personal comment? Not to mention an underage coworker.
“Looks like you’ll need a box cutter,” Kylie said, rummaging through a drawer. She followed me into the empty conference room, where I set the box on the table.
Kylie handed me the tool. As I began to drag it along the tight packing tape, I was surprised to see that instead of leaving me alone and getting back to her desk, Kylie had plopped herself in the chair across from me, eager to watch the birthday girl open her gifts.
It wasn’t that I necessarily wanted privacy. Zoe would normally have been here in the cubicle next to mine, and I could imagine her in the conference room with me, bringing along her bouncy enthusiasm and all-encompassing optimism. But she was on maternity leave.
So before I realized it, and like some lonely senior citizen foisting herself on potential conversation partners at the bus stop, I found myself explaining to Kylie about the call from the convalescent hospital, and how it had been a long time since I’d thought of Aunt Mitch.
“I can’t imagine what they would send,” I said, yanking off the last bit of tape.
Kylie’s eyes widened. “Did you see Instant Millionaire last night? Maybe there’s a check for a million dollars.”
I shook my head, the corner of my eye blinded by a sparkling glint that I finally deduced was emanating from her crystal nose stud as it reflected from the fluorescent ceiling light.
“This guy found out that he had this half brother he, like, didn’t even know he had, who died in a demolition derby. He left him all the money he won from the lottery in Florida or something.’ ”
“Things like that don’t happen to me.”
“He was so psyched.” She paused. “So they didn’t even tell you what they were sending?”
“They hardly told me anything. I got the impression they just wanted to get rid of it.”
“Well, that’s really, like, kind of sad.”
“I know.” It was. I pulled at the box flaps.
“And you don’t have any other relatives who knew her, your aunt?”
“I don’t have any relatives period.”
“You don’t?” Kylie looked surprised.
“Barbara died when I was ten.”
“Barbara?”
“My mom.” My mother had always insisted I call her Barbara—never Mommy, Mom, or Mother. This fit, since she always seemed more of an exciting coconspirator than responsible maternal figure. “And I never knew who my father was and Barbara didn’t seem to know either.”
I stopped myself. Didn’t I understand the meaning of “too much information”? And wasn’t it rather pathetic to be blabbing on about one’s personal life history to the new receptionist? The details, or lack of them, on my father were rather sordid. Whenever I asked who he was, Barbara would smile and shrug, saying that she didn’t know because she was just really, really popular. I was too young to understand what that meant, but later it clicked: likely endless one-night stands with guys she didn’t know—her groupies. The common question I got asked was “Have you searched for your father?” Of course I’d always wanted to, but there wasn’t much you could do with no name, no face, no nothing. But I wasn’t about to get into this conversation with Kylie.
“My mom was a singer in a rock band—the Barbara Duncan Band,” was the next thing I said. “She was always playing somewhere. She actually supported the two of us on the money she made from her gigs.”
“Wow.”
“She wanted to be the next Stevie Nicks,” I said, removing the plastic bubble packing material. Kylie grabbed a sheet and began squeezing the bubbles with her fingers as if she were popping zits.
“Stevie who?” she asked, looking blank. No surprise there.
Barbara had been a pretty good performer, and I figured she would become famous because she always said she was going to make it. There was no doubt in her mind; it was a given. But then she had the bad luck of dying when she was thirty-three. Leave it to my mother to pass away in a rather spectacular manner.
She had played a big outdoor concert in Napa Valley one weekend. Afterward she and her band members had all gotten high on mushrooms and spontaneously decided to get higher by taking a hot air balloon ride. The pi lot was apparently high too. When a massive, sudden gust of wind drove the balloon into a power line, the basket was severed and fell hundreds of feet. Barbara, the band, and the pi lot were all killed instantly.
With no family to speak of, I became a ward of the court, and then was put into the foster care system in San Jose. Although I’d told the authorities about Aunt Mitch, they said they were unable to track her down, though I had no way of knowing the extent of their search. How ironic that now somehow I’d been found, albeit twenty-three years too late.
Instead, I was sentenced to three foster homes. The first lasted six months with a family whose name I quickly forgot. Then it was the Kruikshanks for two and a half years and, lastly, five years with the Cavanaughs, until I “aged out” of the system at eighteen. I wasn’t as unlucky as some of the kids I’d heard about who seemed to switch families every half a year and suffered all kinds of abuse. I experienced a measure of stability with these two families and they did not treat me badly, though I never felt close to either one of them and they never encouraged any intimacy.
I was allowed to call the Kruikshank couple by their first names—Kenneth and Irma. But with the next family, it had to be Mr. and Mrs. Cavanaugh. I wasn’t sure why this was their preference, but I had discovered over the years that it was best not to ask any unnecessary questions and to simply follow orders. Although there were many unpleasant things I’d blocked from my memory, I never forgot the heaviness weighing down my shoulders when Mrs. Cavanaugh would say to someone, “These are our daughters, Jennifer and Amanda, and this is our foster daughter, Celeste.”
My heart thumped as I began to remove the contents from the box sent from the convalescent home; I didn’t anticipate feeling so excited. The first thing I found was a photo album embossed with a pattern of yellow daisies and monarch butterflies on its white plastic cover.
“Oh! There’s Aunt Mitch. They both look so young,” I murmured.
There were pictures of Aunt Mitch and Uncle Melvin in Japan, probably at the time when they first met. Underneath the photos were captions written in Japanese, some with the years indicated. Uncle Melvin, dressed in his army uniform, and Aunt Mitch, with her fashionable permed hair and dark lipstick, elegant in a kimono, posed in front of a train station in one. Another showed Aunt Mitch in a portrait with a Japanese girl who looked around twelve, dated 1949. Both wore kimonos and solemn, dignified expressions, so different from Aunt Mitch’s lively demeanor in the pictures with her soon-to-be husband. Their round jawlines and pert noses were similar—could the little girl have been a sister?
“Your aunt was so pretty,” Kylie said.
“Oh, yeah. Even when she was in her fifties she was just gorgeous.” I paged through photos of their modest wedding and the couple standing in front of their house in Saratoga. A color picture showed my mother alongside Uncle Melvin, and Aunt Mitch standing next to a young Japanese man. I didn’t recognize him but wondered if he was a relative of Aunt Mitch’s.
“That’s Barbara,” I said, pointing to my mom who was even younger than Kylie in this photo, taken before I was born. Her straight butter-colored hair was so long that it covered her breasts, and her bright paisley orange-and-green empire-waisted dress reached down to her chunky sandals.
“You really look like her.”
I stared at the photo, a chill covering my neck. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
Kylie pointed to another picture below it. “Who’s that?”
This was a Caucasian girl with blondish-red hair, about six years old, wearing a pink-and-gold kimono. She stood in front of a tree, her hands folded demurely at her waist. Her hair was done up in a bun, an elegant ornament peeking out from behind her ear.
I sat straight up. “That’s me.”
The catch in my throat only intensified when Kylie responded to the picture with, “Oh . . . my . . . God! How adorable!”
“I don’t even remember that,” I finally said in a quiet voice. Why had I never seen this photograph before?
Kylie jumped when she heard the phone ring and rushed out of the room. Yes, it was time for her to actually do some work.
I gazed a few moments longer at my six-year-old self, then reached for one of two manila envelopes sitting in the box. Inside the first one I found three pieces of thin, delicate paper, handwritten in Japanese. Each character I could discern looked like its own work of art, and the overall feeling was more of a painting than words. I immediately thought of Zoe. She’d studied Japanese in high school and college. Maybe she could translate them.
The other manila envelope was bulky, its brown color more faded, and the soft, worn fibers of the paper showed its age. I pulled out a reel of film, eight millimeter, I guessed, most likely a home movie. Was it a film of Aunt Mitch’s and Uncle Melvin’s wedding? A travelogue of Japan? Someone at work had his childhood home movies transferred from film to DVD so I knew it was possible to actually watch it without having to track down an old projector.
I seemed to be in my own film, moving in slow motion, and only halfway came out of my trance when Kylie returned.
“Find anything else?”
I opened a small black box. “Look. This is the hair ornament I was wearing in that photo.”
Kylie peered over my shoulder. “It’s beautiful. Old. Like an antique.”
I ran my fingertips over the smooth lacquer of the hair comb, noticing the design of a white crane balancing on its long, thin legs next to a lake, a cherry tree in full bloom in the background. What would my life have been like, I wondered, if I could have lived with Aunt Mitch after my mother died?
There were two more items left to open, both wooden boxes. The smaller one, shaped like a rectangle, was painted with a picture of an old-fashioned geisha, her face long, her narrow eyes focusing on a mirror as she sat primping herself, a short-tailed cat curled up at her feet. I opened the lid but found the box empty, though I could smell the fragrance of cedar. Maybe the written documents would explain the significance.
But the other wooden box definitely housed something. This one was about six inches high and four inches wide, and inside was what looked like a ceramic vase. Painted a robin’s-egg blue, the small black top was tightly secured. I shook it. It felt heavy but nothing rattled, though I could tell there was something inside. I pried off the top with difficulty but couldn’t see much of anything. When I sniffed the inside, there was no odor, but once I tipped it over, out poured a sprinkling of whitish-gray dust.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Ewww!” was Kylie’s reaction.
I looked at her. “This must be Aunt Mitch.”