Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [48]
They confront heat with dignity. The paddle-shaped fans scattered throughout the house are blue, splotched with white. As fast as it pulses, my grandmother’s fan cannot disturb hair pulled taut as a tatami mat. My grandfather wields his fan more equably. We have cups of hot tea in front of us, which will make us feel cooler if we can bear to drink them. My grandparents drink.
Each chime passes through the house as if it is the last. My grandmother eats silver mints from a stoppered glass bottle. I have tried to acquire a taste for these but have not—they taste as metallic as they look.
Her tongue is made of quicksilver. She speaks of how our neighbor has belied his name of “All Riches,” of how his long-lashed daughters grow portly and unmarriageable, coming home like switched cows in the hungering nightfall. She speaks of how her friend’s Akita died in the summer floods because the dog knew only one way home and followed it into the floodwaters. Hearing the bells continue, she speaks of how my father spent hours of his youth scaling the roof of the temple. At the slip of his knee, a fish green tile rattled the monks at their brooms.
Someone must be counting the chimes, and carefully. Yet it seems they will never end. My mind begins to swing like the monkey my grandmother says I am, from toll to toll, to the counterfeit last one. The lulls between the chimes begin to ring.
Later that afternoon, my grandmother gives me a calligraphy lesson. I fold a sheet of rice paper into quadrants, a beginner’s trick that crafts a trellis on which the characters can hang. I pour water into a trough and rub a new inkstone against its slick downward slope. The edge of the stone squeaks against the trough before surrendering to its surface, what is hard being taken by what is harder. The water darkens to jet. I dip the horsehair brush, and the ink rises into it.
The moment before the brush descends is a long moment. In the centuries of peace that followed the unification of Japan in the seventeenth century, the samurai traded their swords for calligraphy brushes. Now, as then, the character on the page is thought to reveal that of the calligrapher.
My grandmother’s script represents her well. When she writes me in Japanese cursive, I find her all but incomprehensible. From what I can make of these cards and the etiquette they follow, these are conventional words of weather, of cherry blossoms. So I have never asked her to untangle that thread. Her characters are artifacts I can see without seeing through—I cherish my ignorance of them as I cherish my ignorance of constellations.
My grandmother tells me to think of rain as I form the character for “rain”; she tells me to envision the dashes I must make under a line as raindrops leaking through a roof. I get the stroke order right. I am full of information about these characters—how the bottom of the character for “fish” splays out like a fish’s tail, how the character for “flight” is difficult to balance. Yet these ideas do not survive their executions. My brush clumps with too much ink, then the hairs separate because they are too dry. The creases that should have guided my characters now rebuke them.
Does my grandmother sigh as she rubs a red stone in a smaller trough? This ink is cinnabar, the color of Shinto gates, the color of the emperor’s rescripts. With a smaller brush, she begins each stroke where I began it, to show the path I missed. How can she produce, time after time, these thinning strokes that end in nubs or swishes of fire? She circles particular mistakes. As I watch her brush, it seems to travel over my entire summer—circling the honorifics I have misused, the bows I have failed to make.
I have come to my grandparents’ house in the country after two months in a Tokyo junior high school. My parents have been heroic in their quest to preserve