Excerpts from "Woman's Work"

By: Emily Okamoto-Green

      In another life, my grandmother would have been a hairstylist. My mother told me the story once as she grew up hearing it, and it felt like legend, embedded itself in my consciousness like a bit of grit in an oyster.

     I guess I’ve always mythologized my mother and her mother. Their lives as women in Japan in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s seemed to follow a Joseph Campbell-esque hero cycle with one or two major deviations, and over the years in the mantle of my brain their stories grew, nacre covered and shining.  

     My grandmother grew up on a tea farm in the mountains of Japan’s green tea capital, Shizuoka-ken. She was the second youngest of eight surviving siblings: six sisters, two brothers, and two “water children”, or stillbirths. The oldest brother would of course inherit the tea farm, and each of the sisters left the nest in turn to make their own way in the world. Women in those days didn’t want to be a “burden” on their families my mother says, and she uses the word again when she describes why she left home at eighteen. 

But my grandmother left that house in the mountains at sixteen to find work in the city by the sea— not so much a call to adventure as the once understood path that daughters in Japan must take. This is where Campbell and the tales of Japanese women diverge. I think now of all the old stories with children born out of peaches or bamboo shoots. The female protagonists leave their earthly homes and forget all the joy they knew there, while the boys get to come home with gold and jewels to smiling elderly parents who know their beloved boy will always return to care for them. In this way, I think our fairy tales prepared us for reality: we women were to become the property of another family, and it might be best, easiest, to forget the carefree life of a girl in order to soften the responsibility of being a wife/mother/daughter-in-law. For us, there is no return.

     I have never asked my grandmother why she wanted to become a hairdresser, but when I look at photos of her when she was young, I think I begin to understand. Her own hair was always styled and coiffed impeccably, in a beehive, or in a style that echoed traditional Japanese hairstyles while still being a woman of a modern, western Japan.  

     But, so the legend goes, my grandmother tries to make it as a hairstylist in the city, but she soon finds in that in beauty school the chemicals used in all the hair care methods of the day burn her incredibly sensitive nose. I like to imagine it was a lifetime of quiet mountain air, all that playing in the yuzu trees and along the banks of the Tenryu, that did my grandmother’s dream in. I don’t even know if she would even call it a dream, to her it was a life choice. My grandmother and mother have always been practical women. They work in the here and now and say they never remember their dreams when they wake. I wallow in their pasts and my own and dream so vividly I wake exhausted.  

     My grandmother wanted to make a living and Hamamatsu was the nearest city with a beauty school that did the kind of hair she was interested in. After realizing this dream was at its end, she briefly returned to her family and that mountain home, regrouped, and then returned to the city to start work in a fabric factory. There she heard through a friend of a friend about my grandfather, and his parents arranged an omiai, or a formal meeting with the intention of marriage. 

She married, had two children, and raised them both in Hamamatsu, close to her in-laws. If my grandfather had been the oldest son, she would have lived with them and cared for them. He wasn’t, but she soon became their favorite daughter-in-law. 

     If my mother hadn’t had a brother, she might have stayed in her parent’s household and cared for her mother and father in their old age, but she did have younger brother, and he lives with them and his wife and children to this day. My mother says she knew her place, that she had to leave, and the sooner the better to not be a burden.  

     I ask my mother over the phone why she wanted to become a hairstylist. I have some inklings, but I couldn’t confirm them without seeming rude.  

     My mother pauses for a second, says, “I guess there was an element of wanting to beat my mother at something...”   

     I laugh. I knew it. I say, “Baba can do anything, so you wanted to do the one thing you grew up hearing she couldn’t. And if you moved out of the house to go to beauty school and failed, it would’ve been fine. It would have just confirmed how much like her you were.”  

     My mother murmurs her agreement. In both of our minds, her mother, my baba, is a woman made of something else, something stronger than the average. When I ask my mother if she’s ever heard the popular Japanese saying “women are weak, mothers are strong,” my mother replies that she’s only ever heard the second part. Mothers are strong, and her mother must be the strongest one, must have always been. There is no other way to describe the grace and humbleness with which my grandmother makes her way through this world. My mother and I both depend on it. My mother will take her mother’s word as gospel, and more often than not, it turns out to be. My uncle tells his children, “If you just do what the old woman says, you’ll never lose the path.” And he’s one of many who have learned by experience.   

    My mother says she thought that a job in something like retail, something behind a desk all day, wouldn’t be for her. When she was a little girl, she had dreams of becoming a florist. In another life, she owns her own flower shop and arranges blooms while the afternoon sun streams in from the display windows. But this is my dream, not hers. She saw the reality of owning your own shop and the hard work it takes. She wanted guidance, not to steer the ship. Beauty school to become a hairstylist seemed to fit her needs. She could just be a student, and then an apprentice, and then an employee. She didn’t have to coordinate everything or run any numbers. She just showed up and did her job, went dancing with her coworkers in the discos around Nagoya after work, made it home with aching feet, slipped under her comforter, and woke up the next morning to do it all over again.

     She worked in a salon in Nagoya after finishing beauty school there, but she had made a deal with the owner that she would be released from her contract when she turned twenty-five.  

     “My mother wants me to come back to Hamamatsu by then so that I can be married.”  

      Her voice takes on a more devious tone on the phone with me, “That was my excuse, you know?” 

    “But why did you have to make an excuse, Mama?”  

    “Because, Emi. If you work at a salon any longer than that you’ll end up working there your whole life. I couldn’t do it. So, I had my excuse.”  

    She uses the English word for “excuse” here, as though there isn’t a word for it in her Japanese vocabulary, and this “excuse” was built only on a whisper of truth. I’m sure my grandmother thought getting married at any later than twenty-five would make her daughter a bit of a spinster, but she never said that to my mother. All she had said on the subject was “You were born a woman, waste not the body and have at least one child.”  

    My mother was thirty when she had me, her firstborn. She had my little brother some six years later. She once told me if she could do it all again, she’d have us earlier, so that her body would have let her play on our level more. She’d have me at twenty-five.

     “But Mama,” I said, “if you had started having kids five years earlier, they wouldn’t have been me and Kent.”  

     She is quick to dismiss me. “Oh, well, in my version, of course it’s still you two.”  

     My mother once visited a fortune teller in Nagoya with her friends. The woman told her she would have a girl and a boy, and that she would be distant from her parents, only seeing them a few times a decade. This didn’t make sense to her, because she and her family had always been close. When she rode a roller coaster in high school for the first time, she heard a voice screaming “mother!” and then realized it was her own. When she was giving birth to me, my father says my mother needed her mother there, not him. He says it incredulously, but I understand what she means. The only person who can walk me through the fire of childbirth would be the person who walked through the fire to have me.

    I think often of being born with a womb and the responsibility that meant for my great-grandmother, having given birth ten times in the same house my grandmother grew up in, the house from which my mother’s cousin continues the tea business, and where I visit my great-grandmother’s grave. I know my grandmother felt that pressure enough to have her first child at twenty-one, her second six years later. I know my mother didn’t think she could have children until I materialized in her womb at thirty. She followed in her mother’s footsteps and bore my brother exactly six years later. I know I fainted in the gynecologist’s office when my doctor recommended an internal ultrasound for what she believed was a fibroid. I know I am twenty-nine. 

     When I ask my grandmother what she is most proud of, she says raising two good children. When I ask what she is most proud of my mom for, she says, raising two good children “in such a faraway place.” What she means without saying is this: the point A on my map is always Japan, is always with my grandmother and mother. It’s where any legend of mine must begin.  

     In another life, I stayed in Japan and am raised there. In a past life, in this world, I am an ama¹ diving for pearls to support my children and to marvel at what nature can make from nothing. The ocean is cold against my bare chest, and then my body adapts.   

      In truth, in this life, I grew up in America, filtering the stories of my mother and her mother through me like sea water.

      They grow in me like pearls.

¹ Ama, (海女, "sea women”) are historically traditionally female divers who provided for their family largely through their seafood catch but are famous for collecting pearls, and abalone for shrines. The earliest known record of an ama was in the Heian period, or around 927 AD, but tradition holds that the practice is around 2000 years old.   

Emily Okamoto-Green is a half-Japanese poet, essayist, editor, educator, and animal lover. Her life highlights include Arthur Sze once saying her poem had a sense of wonder, and any time a cat or dog has come up to her without her first initiating the interaction. She teaches creative writing and embroidery at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and tries to spend as much time as possible with her feet in the Atlantic or dreaming of them in the Pacific once more. You can find some of her latest work in the inaugural issue of The Oregon Hill Review.