Looking Forward

When I first visited Keiko, I didn't see her picture of the Pope. It was small; it hadn't been given pride of place. I only spotted it on my second visit to her house and even then I didn't recognize the great man. He was in the middle of a group of bashfully smiling Japanese housewives, including Keiko, and at first I thought it was a photograph from some sort of pantomime.

"This guy looks like the Pope!" I said, with typical gaucherie. I don't know what it is about famous people, but I never do recognize them in pictures, especially when they happen to be in the snapshots of friends.

Keiko ducked her head. "Well, that is the Pope. A few of us met him when he came to Nagasaki." She looked embarrassed. "I helped interpret."

I stared at her; we were speaking in Japanese, and I had no idea that Keiko could speak any other language. "Interpret? What language...?"

"English," she replied shyly, in beautifully enunciated English.

I was thunderstruck. Although the Japanese are famous for being modest and unforthcoming about personal accomplishments, when it comes to speaking English, this reticence goes right out the window. On an almost daily basis, I met countless people with very little English who were anxious to show off how much they could say.

"So, you speak English?" I said now, redundantly.

Keiko nodded. "To some degree." Her pronunciation and intonation were completely natural. I'd had any number of conversations with her in Japanese, but there was no doubt about it: her linguistic skill trumped mine.

"But -- you've only spoken Japanese to me!"

She looked embarrassed. "Shizue told me how much you hated it when people started speaking to you in English."

Now it was my turn to look embarrassed. I had bent the ear of Shizue, our mutual friend, on this subject. There were few non-Japanese in our area, and even fewer Caucasians. People saw me as someone who would be willing, even eager, to listen to their halting attempts at English -- or worse still, to their children's. At first this had been something of a novelty, but in very little time it wore thin. I'd been approached by strangers whose lack of ability in English never stopped them from trying to engage me in conversation -- in the supermarket, in restaurants, on my way to take out the trash, and once, memorably, when on my way to the doctor's, dizzy with a fever, I was commanded to listen to the virtually incomprehensible recited poem of a high school student. After a while, I developed zero tolerance and feigned incomprehension -- Excuse me, no English, I am Russian! -- or I simply told them in Japanese that I was in a hurry and could not chat.

But Keiko was obviously a different case. I found out that she had studied in Sweden for several years, living on her own away from other Japanese speakers. The more of her story I heard, the more impressed I was. Her stock rose even higher when a neighbor dropped by and she quickly flicked back into Japanese. Keiko didn't just have impeccable linguistic skills, she had impeccable manners and a real sense of humility despite her impressive accomplishments.

She was also patient. While I was visiting once, I met her only child, Hiroko, a girl in her teens. From what I'd heard about her, she was undoubtedly a handful, and I couldn't help but feel that Keiko and her husband must have spoiled her. A pretty girl, Hiroko had a typical adolescent girl temperament: she flounced, she pouted, she sighed, and she had a good line in eye-rolling. Even in those unenlightened pre-kid days, I recognized Keiko's gentle tolerance and wondered that she could keep her temper so well.

I moved away from Kyushu just before Hiroko went away to college. As it turned out, it also happened to be the year Keiko had her second baby.

"She's thrilled," Shizue told me. "After all those years, they'd given up, and now Hiroko is going to have a baby sister or brother!"

Shizue and I agreed that Keiko's situation was unusual, but also ideal: Hiroko was just the right age to help! In retrospect, my own ignorance, though nothing to be proud of, still wasn't as bad as Shizue's naivete. She was a mother, after all; I wasn't.

To make a long story short, Hiroko didn't help her mother at all. On her brief visits home, she declined to change diapers or do any other housework. She saw her baby sister as an interloper who had come along and spoiled her first visit home as a college student. And no wonder: Her mother, instead of listening breathlessly to her stories and cooking her favorite meals, was suddenly preoccupied with a baby.

Keiko took it with her typical patience. "Hiroko tells me that when she becomes a mother, she'll do it the right way," she sighed. "She says that she'll make sure to have her kids when she's still young."

"I hope you set her straight!" I said, thinking that if I had a daughter like that I'd show her who was boss.

Keiko sighed. "I just tell her I look forward to her becoming a mother. She paused as a slow smile transformed her tired face. "Which I do."

I thought about Keiko the other day when my eldest, so similar to her Hiroko, made an interesting statement.

"I hope I have twins someday," she claimed breezily. "It just seems so cool."

"I'll look forward to that," I said.