Shizuko's Daughter | Asian American Bookview

Shizuko's Daughter
Kyoko Mori
Fawcett Juniper, New York, 1993, 213pp, $3.99 (paperback)
A 12-year-old Japanese girl struggles to come to terms with her mother's suicide and its aftermath.

EXCERPT:

he village carpenter was standing on the bare rafters and throwing pink and white rice cakes to the crowd below. Shizuko lay on the couch in her living room in Kobe and dreamed that she was among the village children in red and blue kimonoes chasing the hard, dry rice cakes that came down, like colored pebbles, from the sky. In the village where she was born, that was how people had celebrated the building of a new house. It was difficult to catch the cakes in midair. Shizuko stopped. She picked the cakes off the ground before the others trampled on them and wrapped them in her white handkerchief to take home for her mother to wash and toast over the fire. The other children were still running around. Shizuko noticed that they were not the children she had played with before the War, but her daughter Yuki's school friends. But where is Yuki? Shizuko wondered. She is not here because I am. She can't come until I am gone. The next moment, the house and the children had vanished. Shizuko was in the park. She was watching Yuki chasing the white cherry blossom petals that were blowing about in the wind. They were coming down like confetti. Yuki ran around and around the tree in her pink spring dress and caught the petals in midair. If she's not careful, Shizuko thought, she will fall. Shizuko tried to call her, but her voice would not come. Yuki continued to run in circles around the cherry tree.

     The telephone was ringing in the hallway. Shizuko woke up and pushed aside her blanket. As she got up from the couch and walked slowly toward the noise, she thought: In a month, the cherry trees will be in blossom. It was strange to think that. Spring was late this year, the first week of March had been gray and damp. I won't be here to see, she thought. I wonder if the dead can see or smell the flowers. She thought of how her mother put fresh flowers on the Buddhist altar every week in memory of her son who had been killed in the War.
     "Mama, can you hear me?" Yuki's voice sounded anxious on the other end as Shizuko picked up the receiver. In the background, a stereo was playing a symphony. "I'm calling from Miss Uozumi's house."
     "What happened to your piano lessons?" Shizuko asked. "I thought you were supposed to be taking it now." She blinked and tried to clear her head. She was still thinking of Yuki running around the cherry tree in her dream.

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