To my surprise and slight horror, Keiko, Michi and I were asked, when shopping for our school graduation party, if we were sisters. Keiko had stopped growing when she was relatively young. Michi was no longer the fat weevil my father jokingly used to refer to her as (in a nod to the insects my mother occasionally found in the flour she bought from Michi’s parents) but, to use Takumi-san’s phrase, a Bambi doe. I gazed at our many shop window reflections on our walk home and had to concede that we had grown more alike than not over the years, at least as far as external appearances were concerned. Keiko had stopped growing up and Michi had actually grown in; our bodies had unconsciously obeyed the national imperative to conform. Internally, however, I believed strongly that we had remained as different as the kimonos in our carrier bags.
We had been fitted for our kimonos four months ago. We all three carried furisode kimonos, but Keiko and I had chosen a ko-furisode each with sleeves that were as short as an unmarried woman’s kimono could be, and shorter than Michi’s chu-furisode, the sleeves of which were as long as an unmarried woman’s kimono could be outside extremely formal occasions. It was ironic that the pupils whose parents I considered better off than mine thought nothing of hiring the graduation kimonos they would need for only one day and that my parents, who while not poor were not particularly rich, had wanted me to own my own, to leave this chrysalis’s shell for them to remember their daughter by.
I had put my foot down, however, and declined a hakama, the full-length apron one traditionally wears over the kimono on graduation day, and was pleasantly surprised when Keiko declined one too. For me, refusal was a major step in the process of separation and withdrawal from my native country. As far as rebellions go, it was minor, I admit, but a hakama would have been one more tie to home, one more ritual to bind me, one more item to leave in a trunk for my mother to pull out and feel from time to time once I had fled.