“THIS FOR YOU,” MRS. KUBOTA SAID TO ME, BOWING HER HEAD SLIGHTLY.
“Dozo. Please.”
We were sitting at the kitchen table and I was eating the breakfast she always served me: a slice of toast cut thick as an English-Japanese dictionary, a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and a cup of Fortnum and Mason English Breakfast Tea with a splash of milk. In my direction she gently pushed a small square package wrapped in light pink paper tied with brown straw ribbon.
Inside I found a CD with a picture of Maki Kanda, the singer of “Nozomi no Hoshi.” The cover was completely white with a close-up of her face, so pale it almost blended in with the background. Only her dark eyes and red lips were visible. Her hand was outstretched and her mouth puckered as she blew on a dandelion she held between her fingertips.
“It is Maki Kanda songs,” Mrs. Kubota said. “Also ‘Nozomi no Hoshi’ on television we saw. You like that song.”
“Arigato!” I replied, thanking her, also bowing my head in return.
She removed the booklet from the CD case where the lyrics were printed. “I write ‘Nozomi no Hoshi’ for you. In romaji.” She grabbed pen and paper and began to write the words in roman letters, pausing now and then to consider the spelling. Handing the paper to me, she said, “Now . . . you . . . can . . . sing!”
“Sing?” She had read my mind. I’d never told her that I sang. “Yes. You learn. Then we go together—karaoke box!”
With the CD player in Rika’s room I began to learn “Nozomi no Hoshi.” I had never sung a song in anything other than English, and with my minuscule knowledge of Japanese, it seemed daunting. But I did not want to just learn this song phonetically; I wanted to know its meaning. As I listened to Maki Kanda’s emotion in her voice, it was clear how moving this song must be. But it was not easy to find all the words in the dictionary from looking at Mrs. Kubota’s romaji sheet. The most I could get out of it was that a woman was looking at the sky, wishing on a star. I wished I could understand what she was wishing for.
I listened to the song and read along, first with the roman letters Mrs. Kubota transcribed, then with the kanji on the lyric sheet, alternating between the two.
Then I began to sing.
It was plain that I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop singing “Nozomi no Hoshi.” I sang it over and over until I was able to sing along while reading the kanji, without relying on the romaji. I was not truly reading it since by now I had just about memorized the words, but a few of the connections began to sink in, and sometimes a kanji reminded me of a word, and vice versa.
The more I sang, the more I became transformed, as if someone else were singing the song, someone fluent in Japanese. I didn’t bumble with pronunciation like when I tried to speak. Instead, it was smooth, natural. But although I put in a lot of time to learn this song, I wasn’t sure if the Japanese I could now sing so well was the kind that would help me find Hiromi Taniguchi.
The area around the Asahidai train station bustled with shoppers. “Sale,” Mrs. Kubota explained, and shopkeepers announced bargains by shouting into bright orange bullhorns. Shrill voices sang over canned music, bleating from loudspeakers, adding to the cacophony. After Mrs. Kubota made her purchases, she scurried through the crowds to make her escape. By now my ears were ringing, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with her; I had no idea as to our next destination.
After only a few blocks, the difference in atmosphere was striking. Instead of shopping chaos, an oasis of trees and benches lay ahead. Farther on was a big orange gate, which Mrs. Kubota called a torii. The shrine I could make out beyond it seemed to beckon to us. Already I was calm, my head cleared.
Our footsteps made a crunching noise as we walked along the gravel path. I took in the scent of sandalwood incense snaking through the air, blending with the sulfur smell emanating from the candles, which glowed golden in the shrine’s altar.
Mrs. Kubota gathered four 100-yen coins from her purse and handed two to me. “First, pray for Takuya safe airplane. He come home soon.” She walked up three steep steps to the altar and tossed the coins into a large wooden offering box that sat in front of it, the crisscrossing slats leaving room for the money to be deposited. She clapped her hands twice, closed her eyes, and bowed her head. “Dozo, please,” she said to me.
I imitated what she had done.
Mrs. Kubota then took out a few more coins from her wallet. “Now pray to finding Hiromi Taniguchi-san.”
My heart lifted to hear that she had remembered Aunt Mitch’s sister’s name and the reason why I’d come to Japan. And I knew there was no way she would tell me that searching for Hiromi Taniguchi was like looking for a goddamned haystack in a needle.
After the second prayer, we stood in silence, the only sounds the chirping of birds and their flapping wings as they flitted from tree to tree, picking at berries. I thought hard but concluded that these were my only prayers for now. Still, I didn’t want to let go of the serenity so I closed my eyes again, taking in the peacefulness. I could have stayed at the shrine forever wrapped in such quiet calm, letting go of my concerns, living only for the moment.
But Mrs. Kubota broke the tranquility with her cheery, excited voice. “Now! Hysteric Echo!”
After walking a few short blocks toward a different shopping area, we reached the Hysteric Echo karaoke box, a bright yellow building topped with an oversized sign of a red parrot holding a microphone, sitting alongside the Joyful family restaurant.
Mrs. Kubota paid the young woman at the reception desk, who then led us down a hallway consisting of small cubicles with doors that could be mistaken for the entry to some cramped rabbit warren of an office space like Milky Way Text. The attempts at singing from behind the closed doors could only be described as the groaning of cows in heat.
The young woman brought us to a room marked “17.” The lighting was dim, and the “box” was about the size of the bathroom in my studio apartment back home. The minute I walked in, I was overcome by the smell of old beer and stale cigarette smoke. There were two small couches placed perpendicular to each other, a large TV screen attached to the wall, and what looked like a DVD player in the corner. A forlorn disco ball, some of its tiny mirrors either chipped or missing, hung from the ceiling. Three binders, two remote controls, and three microphones sat on a low black table.
Mrs. Kubota was quick to take off her jacket and placed her purse on one of the sofas. As we sat together on the other couch, I could sense her excitement. Paging through one of the binders—thick with lists of song titles, artists’ names, and selection numbers—she pointed to an entry, then took one of the remote controls and pressed a few buttons. Seconds later I jumped when I heard a big booming sound: the opening introduction to “Nozomi no Hoshi.” A video of a young woman began to play, her expression wistful as she gazed at the sky.
Once Mrs. Kubota handed me the microphone I became aware of my nerves. Just the thought of singing in a foreign language in front of someone who had never heard me before gave me an adrenaline rush. This felt like a performance, despite its being only the two of us in a box, and I suddenly heard Dirk’s voice in my head: Can’t you hear that, Celeste? You’re off. You’re off by a half step. I tried to shut it out.
Once I began singing, my voice seemed much too loud. I followed the kanji on the screen, as I did during my practice sessions in my room. My nervousness did not waver and I attempted to block out the sight of Mrs. Kubota whom I could see from the corner of my eye. Finally the instrumental interlude came on and I stopped. Mrs. Kubota broke into furious applause and by the end of the song was giving me a standing ovation. Her reaction stunned me.
“So nice!” she said. “So nice! I do not believe.”
I had never enjoyed singing a song so much, and it was both overwhelming and a welcome change to receive such encouragement. But I figured Mrs. Kubota’s reaction, in addition to the usual praise that was forthcoming, must have been due to the power of the unusual spectacle of a Caucasian strawberry blonde singing in Japanese. It was one of the attributes that constituted a hen na gaijin, which must have both bewildered and fascinated at the same time.
Mrs. Kubota’s song choices were all in English. First she sang about having only just begun, with white lace and promises, kissing for luck, and being on her way. Then she moved on to tomorrow; she loved tomorrow, and it was only a day away. After her warbly rendition of what I first mistook as “Moon Liver,” Mrs. Kubota asked, “What mean ‘huckleberry friend-o’?” I told her I had no clue.
She convinced me to sing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “My Way,” both of which I could fake only so far. I foolishly glanced for the names of the tunes that I’d been practicing with Dirk. Instead, I picked “Walk Like an Egyptian,” a song popular when I was in high school, and then I was encouraged to give an encore performance of “Nozomi no Hoshi.” I was glad to have another chance to sing it: how freeing it was to perform without any pressure or criticism.
Mrs. Kubota was just as enthusiastic. “Nice feeling,” she gushed. “Nice feeling. Your singing Japanese.”
“Will you sing a Japanese song?”
It seemed odd that such a request would give Mrs. Kubota pause, but it did. She ended up choosing a song even I could partly sing along to since it had a fair amount of English lyrics mixed with Japanese, an insipid disco number called “Cinderella Boogie-Woogie.”
Next up was “Yokohama Twilight,” or rather, “Yokohama Twilight-o.” “This song comes when Takuya is baby,” Mrs. Kubota said, smiling. While performing her other songs, she had been sitting down, but now she was suddenly possessed to stand. I watched, fascinated, as she started to make intricate movements with her left hand, then her right, which went along with the rhythm of the song—a Japanese version of “The Hokey Pokey.”
I jumped up and, standing next to her, tried to copy her gestures. Soon we were roughly in synch, as though giving a performance—perhaps an act that could have gotten booked at the Miyamae Cultural Center’s annual talent show. I couldn’t help but snap my fingers and sway my hips. All of these songs had been absolutely infectious, and when the bouncy tune faded, we looked at each other and flopped on the couch, laughing uncontrollably, our shoulders touching. Mrs. Kubota dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief, as our laughter died down.
“Kubota-san, wa jozu desu ne,” I said slowly, remembering a phrase Mariko taught me, which was how to say someone was good at something.
Mrs. Kubota blushed. “Not good, Kubota-san,” she said.
I didn’t understand. “Not good, Kubota-san?”
She pointed to her nose. “Call me Okaasan.”
“Okaasan?”
Mrs. Kubota smiled. “Mother.”
“Oh!”
I didn’t want to make a scene but wondered if the catch in my throat, the moistness in my eyes, were noticeable.
“Okaasan,” I said softly.
We sang and danced for the rest of the afternoon.