Marilyn Kiku

Watch Your Language

In sixth grade, for the first time since I fell in love with reading, a certain story failed to transport me to another world and reflect me back to myself. I was going to have my first-ever long chat with my Tokyo-born mother when I interviewed her for a social studies presentation. Japan was going to dazzle my classmates when I told them about her childhood, modeled a kimono, and showed them how to fold an origami crane. I thought she would tell me about my late grandmother’s miso soup and eggplant pickles, or what she enjoyed about gym classes—kendo and basketball. And where did she learn how to juggle four oranges at a time? She surprised us kids with that spontaneous revelation, especially because she was neither playful nor spontaneous.

But she brushed off my questions about herself, with the stubborn privacy I shared with her. I’d started wearing a training bra I fished from a drawer of my five older sisters’ outgrown clothing. I’d started shaving my legs even though when I worked up the nerve beforehand to ask Mom, she said no. As I noticed who I wanted and didn’t want to become, I also realized my mother had a story before I existed, so I asked her about herself as a mirror for me.

Even before middle school, I sensed that my grasping neediness pushed her away. I was the youngest of her seven children born in a ten-year span and fought for her attention well into high school with my two-year-older sister, crocodile tears my weapon.  She rarely sat still, much less with me, until after dinner when she finished her endless day of cleaning and cooking and finally collapsed on the sofa to escape into her TV detective shows. Sometimes she let me rest my cheek on her chest for a while and stare at the screen with her, as long as I didn’t break the spell with any kid chitchat. Ironsides and McMillan & Wife bored me, but I had her so close to me on the sofa for those moments, filled with the steady calm of her inhales and exhales.

“I don’t have kimono!” she snapped when I requested—for the millionth time—something Japanese to show my classmates. It wasn’t until I first experienced her Tokyo childhood home the summer I was twenty that I tasted the eggplant pickles and miso soup. Her childless sisters and my uncle by marriage invited me to live with them while I commuted to beginner Japanese classes. Tokyo’s compact, tidy energy captivated me as I walked and trained everywhere. My Obachan spoiled me: washing and hanging out my laundry to dry; taking me to Hokkaido and a shopping spree at a multistory department store. I made plans to return to their house as soon as I graduated college and stay at least a year, which turned into three over the next decade.

But watching myself speak Japanese felt like I was being judged by my mother. Not because she demanded I be bilingual like her, but because she deliberately raised me in a Southern California English-speaking household, and sent me to twelve years of Catholic school and Sunday mass at the parish she joined with my dad. Both of them were converts. I couldn’t forget her reaction to my first questions about her Japanese self, but as a college student, then a Ph.D. student of her native language she’d never spoken with me, I thought I could “decode” her.

It wasn’t very smart of me.

As a self-righteous twenty-something, I imagined Miyoko would appreciate my wish to know who she was other than “just” Mom.  The dismayed feminist in me assumed she felt silenced and overshadowed by Dad. She was baptized in his church, lived in the house that once belonged to his parents, and raised us with only his native language in his hometown.  She likely danced a jig when I was the last to leave the nest for college, only to see me veer toward her past and abandon the Church of Jesus, her savior. The story she claimed for herself as future-oriented toward eternal life in heaven, clashed with mine that unburied our Japanese family’s past of suffering and abandonment. Storytime with Mom failed because the one I sought in Japan reflected me through my Obachan and grandparents—family compelled to go to war for their divine emperor— and not the redemption of God the Father she raised me with.

As I read and wrote about authors jailed for resisting imperial Japan, I longed to make her and her family’s story in Japan visible and audible. But trying to speak Japanese with her made me feel like that sixth grader asking her those nosy questions. Her one-sentence replies would shut me up. She regularly corrected me (don’t say “wa,” say “ga”) and hurried through her sentences as if to leave me behind. More syllables seemed to shoot out of her mouth that only opened half as wide as when she spoke English. Don’t say “wa,” say “ga” had the same chilling effect on me as We were told in school that we had to be ready to die for the emperor, and my father had multiple strokes and was bedridden the last seven years of his life. Even her school kendo and basketball were nonstarters. Though too dense to stop asking altogether, I finally stopped asking for any follow-up. I didn’t confront her resistance to being known, because along with the sense that knowledge was forbidden, was a dimmer sense that I was entitled to my own heritage.

It wasn’t until I attempted to teach my sons Japanese that I realized the psyche and emotions are built-in components of language learning. The Bilingual Edge, written by two linguists who are also mothers, explained the inner voice that scolded me, “Don’t you remember the word for that, or do you have to say it like a preschooler? Are you even making any sense?”  

According to the Billingual Edge, “Children who are sensitive or more emotional…have fewer cognitive resources for processing language if they’re using up a lot of mental energy being anxious…[T]hey can be supported by providing pressure-free situations to experience and enjoy the second language.” Their advice sounds obvious now, but for decades I flogged myself toward fluency with the idea that it required strictly intellectual effort.  

With everyone else, my mind relaxed and the words flowed, when shopping or eating noodles with my Tokyo neighbor Naoko, debating the merits of the imperial family with Obachan (they in favor, I dubious), or wondering aloud with Ojichan about employee burnout at his Nissan corporate job. But with Mom, my mind scrambled to find the correct word for that moment like a hungry mouse dashing everywhere for that lifesaving crumb, and I despaired I would ever be smart or disciplined enough for Japanese.

I tried to tell myself it felt awkward because Mom had her reasons for leaving her Tokyo past behind: her entire childhood consumed by wartime; her father’s dismissal of her for not being the son he always wanted; his untimely death from the stress of keeping his family alive; and as it turned out, a destructive sibling rivalry with her sisters.

A wary distance was always stretched between us, and even when she visited from California during the years I lived in her childhood home with Obachan, the companionable family chats I imagined around the dining room table devolved into louder and louder debates between the four sisters, who forgot I was even in the room. Yet I clung to a fantasy like the American daughter and Japanese mother portrayed by Mary Yukari Waters in her short story “The Way Love Works:”

“The language cast its spell over me. I was fluent in Japanese—it was my first language—but since our move to America, my vocabulary had stayed at a fourth-grade level. In Japan my speech, even my thoughts, reverted from those of a cocky teenager to those of the more innocent, dependent child I had been five years ago. My mother took advantage of my weakened state. She slipped her hand into mine, a big girl like me, right in public.”

My agenda as a perfectionist dreamer was to make my mother fall in love with me through her sisters and her native language. My years in Tokyo were a wish to fetch back another home with my late grandparents and Obachan for us to share.

Obachan spoke only Japanese and could split the burden between them of tolerating the toddler’s babble that dribbled from my mouth that first summer with them. My picture of us together always has us seated on the tatami mat floor in the TV dining room just large enough to fit Obachan, Ojichan, and me. It was a hearth and a casual classroom, the pendant light above the table shining down on us. Sometimes one of my obachan reclined on the tatami on one side of the table while the rest of us warmed our legs with the kotatsu heater attached underneath the table.

Their TV shows filled in conversational pauses with listening practice for me. We laughed at the host of the newlywed interview show who would fall off his chair in surprise, and never missed the weekly family drama about an elderly couple and their five daughters who helped run their restaurant business. When we chatted, the youngest Miwako Obachan would sometimes fetch a notepad and pencil to scribble new words for me. Once she reached out to tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear as I talked, and I felt like her cherished child.

With Obachan as the three mothers who made me feel seen and heard, my feminist agenda to “uncover Mom’s story” changed to smug self-righteousness when she showed no enthusiasm for my closeness with them. One day when I asked Mieko Obachan if there were more family pictures, we sat together on the loveseat in their light-filled living room with an old photo album on my lap. A surge of wonder and privilege filled me as she named the people in the black and white photos. None of my siblings had ever seen my grandfather’s face, our grandmother as a young woman with her mother or even our own mother as a little girl.

Ah! Kono shashin, I pointed and exclaimed, Is this a picture of...Okaasan to Obachan? The studio portrait is the only existing photo of my mother and her three sisters as children. They are plopped on a leaf-patterned sofa in the summer of 1940 or ‘41, posed by age from right to left, their black hair as glossy and straight as I had always wished for my dark brown wavy hair. I’m jolted by the sight of Mieko Obachan, about seven years old at the time here her face had been, an oval divot with torn, grimy edges stares out at me. Dread stirs in my gut when I recognize the frown on my mother Miyoko, slouched in the middle of the four alongside Mieko. She looks as if she were still holding the pin she used to scratch out the face of her younger sister. Mieko’s pixie haircut frames the ragged circle smudged gray from some long-ago child’s finger (hers?) tracing its edges as if it were a scab.

At first I laughed picturing the two middle sisters yanking on fistfuls of each others’ hair, screaming in hysteria just as my sister and I battled not so long before. I looked at Mieko expecting to see my grin mirrored in hers, only to smother my smile in the glare of her stone-faced expression. Your mother and I fought all the time, punching and kicking each other, yelling, she muttered. I dropped my gaze to the photo again, where it wavered back and forth between ten-year-old Miyoko’s glare and the stark blank that was Mieko’s face, surprised her resentment still lingered fifty-plus years after the fact.

Inwardly I fretted that with only Japanese to make myself known to Obachan, they would see me as only an extension of Miyoko, and my imperfect words would go unheard as they had with her. In reality, I needed to be heard by my mother because I wasn’t listening to myself. It was easier to blame her for my unmet needs when I failed to recognize my own gifts. Japanese gave me the tools to listen, if not always the vocabulary.

Storytime with Obachan arose from our chats around that low dinner table on the tatami, and though they narrated some painful events, with time they soothed me because I found what I was missing: an intimacy with Japanese, its expression tied to a shared vulnerability. When tens of thousands of American gasoline bombs destroyed sixteen square miles of Tokyo, imperial authorities ordered the evacuation of all schoolchildren to the countryside. Nine-year-old Miwako and eleven-year-old Mieko were sent away for nearly a year to a farm family who were acquaintances of my grandfather, but strangers to the little girls. Your mother and I visited with gifts to thank the farmers, Mitsuko Obachan narrated.  The tracks of our train were bombed, so we had to get off and walk, then hitch a ride on a truck. They could only visit the girls for a short time, and when they said goodbye and started down the road for home the next day, their littlest sister ran after them sobbing, “Take me with you! I want to go home!”  All we could do was say ‘Sayonara, sayonara…’ as we walked away, Mitsuko ended the narration as her voice caught, and then all four of us pressed white tissues to our eyes in sad yet companionable silence. Their sorrow lingered in the room fifty years after it wounded them, like smoke after a bomb’s explosion.

“Immigrant[s] who maintained their cultural heritage at home provided their children with the strength to face challenges,” the writers of The Bilingual Edge note. Mom survived, but evidently saw surviving the war as an event to forget because within the survivor’s story is also that of a victim who suffered. I never went hungry because my father bought food on the black market. I wasn’t scared because I knew my parents would protect me, she said. I don’t blame her for believing Americanness and Catholicism would carry her California-born family into the future. But Christian belief in resurrection can mean conquering not only death but also humiliation and victimization—even for the Japanese whose government once made them enemies of America.

During my twenties in Tokyo, I bumbled my way through adulthood and Japanese, scolding myself that I didn’t have the words for what I really wanted to say. But I didn’t know what to say because I hadn’t been listening. Trying to make myself known in a second language gave me the tools to pay attention to my words and gestures and build intimacy with my Obachan. To hear myself speak Japanese and observe myself reading and writing kana and kanji is to conjure the home I found in Tokyo and remember my elders’ stories. Beyond technical fluency, I gained a cultural literacy of understanding not just where I came from, but from whom, and how we belong to each other.

Marilyn Kiku is the pen name of Marilyn Guggenheim. Her Tokyo grandmother’s maiden name was Kikuchi, and “kiku” can mean “chrysanthemum,” “to take effect,” and “to listen.” Marilyn has published an interview with American Seoul author Helena Rho in WOW!-Women on Writing, and a “Friday Speakout!” craft essay in WOW!'s blog, The Muffin. She lives in southwest Montana, where she taught Japanese language and literature to college students for six years. She now promotes world language education with the nonprofit World Language Initiative-Montana, and raises her two sons with stories of their Tokyo relatives and lighthearted, low-stakes language lessons.