Stories of My Life

A couple of months later the pastor told me that Eiko had approached him and asked for baptism. I was shocked. “I don’t want her to feel she has to become a Christian just because we’re friends,” I said.

He gave me what was very close to a withering look. “I think you can trust Eiko to make her own decision,” he said. “She is quite ready to be baptized.”

But baptism was only the first step for Eiko. She wanted to truly follow Jesus and she felt she could only do that by giving her life to serve others. She thought she needed more education to do that. So she studied for what would be the equivalent of a high school diploma and went on to get a degree in social work. It took her six or seven years, but she never gave up. And then after graduation, she went to a leper colony set on a tiny island in the Japan Sea and spent the rest of her life ministering to those despised by their families and their society. Like Maud Henderson, she has been one of the heroes of my life.

While I was in language school I had the chance to travel around Japan. The city of Nagoya is famous for its pottery. In a shop there I was looking at an array of truly elegant teacups. In the display was a misshapen cup about the color of mud. It seemed totally out of place in the shop, much less on that particular shelf. I couldn’t resist lifting the lid, and gasped. The bottom of the lid was inlaid with gold. It was an experience that found its way into Of Nightingales That Weep. If you’ve read the book, you’ll recall that Takiko sees a similar cup in a pottery shop and is puzzled until she lifts the lid. It reminds her of her stepfather, the potter, whose misshapen body repulsed her as a child.

In Osaka I got my first taste of Bunraku, Japanese puppetry that inspired The Master Puppeteer, and later, while I lived in Tokushima Province, I was able to meet the old artist who made puppet heads for the theater in Osaka.

I went to the island of Shikoku in the fall of 1959. My “bosses” were eleven Japanese pastors working in the mostly rural Tokushima Province. Over the course of a month or two I visited each church, staying in the pastors’ homes, or if they were single, in the home of a parishioner. My own home was in the town of Komatsushima, right on the coast of the Japan Sea where the ferries from the main island of Honshu would dock and the nearby wharfs were crowded with the boats of fishermen. I lived in two rooms in a house on the edge of a huge rice paddy, going to sleep in spring and summer to the songs of thousands of frogs. My landlords belonged to Soka Gakkai, a radical Buddhist sect, well known for its intolerance of Christianity, but, as Mrs. Kuroda said, “Renting and religion are two different things.” We lived together quite happily for two years. They never tried to convert me, but as I was leaving to return to the States, they did suggest that if I followed their example and chanted namyo horenge kyo morning, noon, and night, I might just find myself a husband in America.

There were no other Caucasians in my town, and if I really wanted to speak English, I needed to drive my little motorcycle ten miles down the road to Tokushima City, where there were two families from the Southern Presbyterian mission. There were English missionaries and a couple of American Roman Catholic priests in the area as well, but not many white faces.

In Komatsushima, Pastor Kosumi and his wife were my home away from home. Years later when my wonderful Japanese translator met Mrs. Kosumi, she said: “Kosumi San is your Japanese Maime Trotter, isn’t she?” I’d never thought of Mrs. Kosumi, who hardly scraped my shoulder and weighed a few pounds more than my golden retriever, as Maime Trotter from The Great Gilly Hopkins, but when Hamae Okamoto said this, I realized how close she had come to the truth. Fusae Kosumi was also the kind of mother every child should have.

The nights I was in Komatsushima I nearly always ate dinner with the Kosumis. She was an amazing cook—the kind of cook that could go to anyone else’s house, Japanese or foreign, and without asking for a recipe, go home and reproduce what she had tasted. On more than one occasion when I was watching her prepare a meal, she would gasp: “Ara! Aka no!” Which loosely translated means “Eek! No red!” and slip on her geta to race to the market to buy a carrot or red pepper to make the meal perfect. It was always important for the meal to look beautiful as well as taste good.

Eiko Takahashi.

Rev. and Mrs. Kosumi, who were my dearest friends in Komatsushima. She was the one my translator called my Japanese Maime Trotter.

A visit to the craftsman who made puppet heads for Bunraku. I didn’t dream in 1960 I would be writing about Bunraku someday.

One night as she watched me happily devouring another delicious meal, she remarked that I used chopsticks much better than her four children did. “But, then,” she said, “when they were growing up during the war there was so little food for them to practice on.” Bit by bit over the two years I was there, I learned about the war years when Christians were enemies of the state and merchants were told not to sell them food. Not that the Kosumis had money for food. Once, she said, she had sold her wedding kimono for two tomatoes.

In language school we had been urged to immerse ourselves in Japanese culture, so a friend and I went to a tea ceremony set up for tourists in a public park. We stood in line for some time b

efore we were ushered into the tea house. All I remember about that experience was that the green tea was too bitter and the bean cakes too sweet. I was trying to understand the culture, but my reaction that day was “What’s the big deal?” I didn’t get the meaning, much less the value of the rite.

I was often on the road when I lived in Komatsushima, and after a longer than usual trip away, Mrs. Kosumi said to me, almost shyly: “I’d like to do tea for you to welcome you home.” And in that humble house attached to a one-room tatami church, Mrs. Kosumi prepared the bitter green tea and sweet bean cakes. Lovingly and with enormous dignity, she went through the ancient ritual for which I was the only guest, and at last I understood.

The spring of my second year at language school I had been asked to come to the island of Shikoku and meet the pastors who were inviting me to join them in their work. As I stood in the long line waiting to buy my ticket to the ferry, I noticed an elderly woman with the milky white eyes of the blind. Before I could wonder how she could manage such a trip, a distinguished-looking older gentleman that I took to be her husband came back from where he’d gone to buy a box lunch and joined her in the line. I watched the couple for a long time, as the evident love and caring of the man for his wife was something I hadn’t seen before in Japan, where women, especially wives, seemed to be second- or third-class citizens.

Once on the boat and almost before I could sit down, a group of very loud, very obnoxious, very drunk young men came rushing over to where I sat. In this society with a great tradition of the rules of etiquette, there were no rules in those days for how men should approach a young foreign woman traveling alone. It was assumed, somehow, that she was looking for adventure and these young men were determined to provide it for me.

I moved to another seat. They followed. This continued as I went up on deck, where, over the noise of the young men, I thought I heard singing. I moved toward the sound. To my amazement the music was that of a familiar hymn. I kept moving toward the music, my little band of drunken admirers surrounding me like a hoop skirt. When I got to the scene of the singing, I realized it was being led by the husband of the blind woman I’d seen in line. At the end of the next song, still surrounded by my unwelcome entourage, I went up to him. “I thought I heard you singing a Christian hymn,” I said. He smiled and said they were. He was a pastor in Wakimachi and he and some members of his church had gone to a meeting in Kobe and were now on the way home. “Wakimachi?” I exclaimed. “You are one of the pastors I’m on the way to meet.”

I and my drunken crew joined the hymn sing. Me singing, my buddies looking on openmouthed. Before we got off the boat, one of the young men had cornered Pastor Iwaii to get the scoop on what he was all about.

Needless to say, over the next two years, Pastor Iwaii and I grew to be close friends. I went to Wakimachi every other month to teach a class on the Bible ostensibly to young people, but it proved to be the local entertainment for villagers of every age for whom a white face speaking Japanese was something of a marvel or perhaps a feature in a freak show.

When it was time for me to return to America, for what I thought would be a one-year leave, all eleven churches gave me a farewell party, but it is the party in Wakimachi that I remember the best.

In his message, Pastor Iwaii first read a verse in the Book of Ephesians that reads: “For [Christ] is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility.” And the verse in Galatians in which the Apostle Paul says to the church: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.”

“Katherine,” he said, “is young. I am old. She is a woman. I am a man. She is an American. I am Japanese. When she was the child of missionaries in China, I was a colonel in the occupying army in Manchuria. She comes from the Presbyterian tradition, I come from the Pentecostal. The world would think it impossible that she and I should love each other. But Christ has broken down all the barriers that should divide us. We are one in Christ Jesus.”

If only all of us could hear that word. And I don’t believe this oneness is for Christians alone. God loves the whole world. We all belong to one another whatever our belief or non-belief.

The influence of Japan is evident in my work. My first three novels are set there, as well as the beautiful picture book The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, whose illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon garnered a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. I even had the chance to translate two Japanese folktales illustrated by the Hans Christian Andersen Medal–winning illustrator Suekichi Akaba, The Crane Wife, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and The Tongue-Cut Sparrow.

I’ve been back to Japan only twice since I left there, and my Japanese is so rusty I hardly dare open my mouth when I have a chance to speak it, but I couldn’t be the writer I became without those four years spent there. To be loved by people you thought you hated is an experience I wish everyone could have.

Newly married John and me.

Another Courtship

When our older son, John Jr., announced his engagement, his younger brother said to me, “I’m afraid John is rushing into marriage.”