Kitahara Faces

My grandmother’s home is located within a small fold of the Nagano Prefecture in a city called Ina. There are lines of restaurants where bald-headed men wear light blue button-downs with too many of the buttons undone. Women, adorning their feet with dark green stilettos, clutch onto the arms of the businessmen and whisper into their ears. The couples pour into the streets together in their sleepy, sweet sake haze. The alleyways mold from the humid air, and the tangy scent of soy sauce sticks to the town’s skin. There is a large bookshop, a handful of supermarkets, a candy store that smells of dust, and a train station that takes the lonely tourist into neighboring prefectures. My mother used to hold my hand and walk me to the big bookstore. The fluorescent lights and glass paneled walls made the shop an oddly futuristic-looking entity in a seemingly antiquated town. She would drop me off at the shop for hours at a time, and I collected dozens of books and magazines, piling them into the woven basket of my fingers. As soon as my knuckles faded into a disturbing white, I moved towards the corner of the store and sat on a stubby stool to further examine my findings. My tired eyes would notice that the sky outside had become a light purple, and so I made my way out into the lantern-lit streets. I would immediately be bathed by the calming energy of water coming from the Tenryu River. It flows through the center of Ina, underpassing rickety bridges and dodging the heavy boots of tired fishermen. No matter where you are in Ina, you can always hear the Tenryu River giggle and gurgle. As my grandmother’s home stands no more than twenty feet away from the edge of the river, with only a white picket fence separating us from the water’s dance, the laughter of the water is a familiar melody within our household. Even the monarch butterflies that waltz outside the window recognize the sound, tracing circles in the humid air and floating to the steady rhythm of the water.   

My grandmother’s home struggled through the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, the Second-Sino Japanese War and World War II, and the firm foundation of the house remains the same. The house was originally my great-grandfather’s. He was a successful businessman, owning a pastry shop, a silk-making factory, a farm and a rice field. His plump, friendly face was unfit for the fraudulent industry he prospered in. The businesses were passed down to his son, my grandfather, yet they all began to fail as soon as they reached my grandfather's fingertips. Instead, my grandparents turned the home into a ryokan (a traditional Japanese hotel) that used to host businessmen passing through the town, the occasional celebrity, and a couple of foreigners. My mother, now a permanent citizen of the United States, told me she was sitting in her bedroom when she first saw a foreigner. She spotted two men outside the window, with perfectly perpendicular noses and pearly pale skin. She was instantly starstruck by their foreignness. My mother grabbed a paper napkin and a pen and ran outside, her tennis shoes slapping the concrete. Doe-eyed and breathless, she managed to produce the words: “Oto-graf pu-leese.” 

There have been some changes in and around the home. A guitar factory sat beside the house, but in the blazing summer of 1968, a sudden fire burnt it down, and the establishment is now replaced by a fire department. There are no longer horses or dogs or chickens that used to run around the backyard and amuse the neighbors’ children. Instead, there is a pebble-covered community parking lot that my grandmother manages, a small, tender garden, and the same two-storied house. We don’t have doors in the house; instead, the rooms are divided by fusuma screens, which are rectangular panels, made from thick paper and wood, which can slide from left to right, manually. One room can turn into two or three, just through a creaky shift of the screen. In actuality, the dining room is not much of a dining room. There are no cushioned chairs with wooden curvatures and no glass-bead, overhead chandelier that requires specific light fixtures; there is only a stubby, wooden table covered by plastic lace, floor cushions, and a boxy TV. The floors are plastered with tatami, a mat made of woven hay and rice straw, which can keep your feet cool even when it is the most humid day of the year. Beside the dining room is the bedroom. My grandparents used to share the bed. However, after my grandfather passed away, the bed seemed to expand in size. Every summer that I visited the home, I left traces of my existence on the bed—a neon blue, fish-bowl shaped pillow with an image of Flounder from The Little Mermaid, a 100 Grand Bar pillow, and a stuffed animal sheep all lined up against the backboard of the bed. I used to lean against the backboard, clutching onto my pillows, and listen to the violent wind rattle the fragile windows of the bedroom. I believe and still believe that the wind was my dead relatives and that whenever the windows rattled, it was just my grandfather trying to talk to me.

From the bedroom, I used to watch my mother and grandmother apply their makeup in the mirror of the dining room. They always assumed that I was still drowning in my slumber, so they would open the door an inch or two to let the sun pour onto my face. Every time they left the room, I reached my short arms out and pushed the screen an inch or two to the left. Eventually, the fusuma screen shifted enough  to let me see most of the dining room. I was pleasantly surprised at the sight of my uncle Hirohiko’s toes wiggling under the table, with his mountain toenails and callus-coated heels. A floor-to-ceiling window that stood beside the mirror in the dining room projected halos of sunlight across the creamy, mustard skin of my mother and grandmother and onto the straw tatami floor. I watched my grandmother’s fingers guide the lipstick across her lips, and the paint softening into the thin  cracks. Her lips took on the color of dried roses. As soon as I saw the tip of the lipstick tube, I pretended to wake up and begged to have their magical crayons color my lips. More often than not, my mother responded with a shake of the head and told me to “wait a couple more years, June-chan. Otonaninatara. Until you become an adult.” 

One day, I had woken up before my mother and grandmother started getting ready. My legs and arms were longer, so I didn’t have to reach that much in order to crack open the screen. My hair was down to my collarbones, and I had shed the sliver of baby fat that used to rest between my jaw and cheekbones. Instead of pretending to be asleep, I decided to sneak into the shrine room. It was a room dedicated to a Buddhist altar, which was coated in a rich gold and was made of thick, black slabs of wood. The gold was embroidered onto the black wood with images of butterflies and clouds and bonsai trees. It looked like an enlarged Christmas ornament. The altar represented, at least in my grandmother’s home, an honoring of those who have passed. Sitting on the pedestals within the altar were usually candles, food offerings (like white rice, apples, Hi-Chew candies) and a shot of sake that my grandmother snuck in for my grandfather. Above the altar hung portraits of my passed family members. There were two black and white photos of my great-grandparents, who died of old age, my aunt whom I’ve never met, who died in a car crash right across the street, and my grandfather and uncle, who both died from smoke loving their lungs a little too much. All of their faces bore the same smirk. I crawled into the room and shut the screen door, trapping the chilly air inside the rectangular cubicle. It felt as though someone’s hands had covered my ears; it was always eerily silent in the shrine room. I scanned the altar, checking if there were any bites in the food or sips of sake taken. Nothing. I looked up at the photos and focused my eyes on my uncle Hirohiko. 

“Ohayo ojichan, Good morning, Uncle,” I whispered, careful not to wake up my other dead relatives . I continued to stare at his picture. We share the same jaw, I thought. All of my family members tell me I look like him. His square-ish, round-ish, cheekbone-lacking face is indistinguishable from my own; a true Kitahara face shape, as my family calls it. 

I returned to the dining room and sat on a floor cushion, resting my head on the dining table. I heard the soft crescendo of competing footsteps in the hallway and almost immediately, the two faces emerged at the door. My mother, with wisps of peppered hair falling into her eyelashes, stood motionless. To the right of her, my grandmother gripped a kettle tightly with her fingertips, so as not to spill any of the matcha on the tatami. My mother demanded that I make room for the tea,  so I immediately moved away from the table as instructed. I took a deep whiff of the burnt matcha scent that followed the two women into the room. My grandmother leaned towards the table, placing the kettle by my toes. Her eyes gazed upwards and pierced into mine. The thin skin at the corner of her lips turned upwards into a softened smile. She wore a loose, beige dress that extended past her calves and traced her curves. Even through the thin fabric, I noticed an anatomical change. Her shoulder blades jolted out and faced one another, beginning to resemble the crooked wings of codling moths. The early morning sunlight glazed over her skin and gave her flesh a soft, blue hue. She looked more like a butterfly.

My grandmother planted herself onto a floor cushion in front of the mirror and quickly folded her feet underneath herself. I heard the dance of glass foundation bottles and blush as my grandmother’s fingers searched for her particular lipstick. My mother sat next to her, pressing a stained makeup sponge against her thin skin. I strained my eyes to see bits of skin tugging at the corner of my mother's mouth, hinting at the birth of smile lines, and I observed the flesh stretch tautly over my grandmother’s forehead. My grandmother’s fingers grasped the lipstick tube, and I heard the familiar click of the cap. She pressed the slanted edge of the lipstick onto the fattest part of her bottom lip and swiped the lipstick from side to side. Then she pressed her lips together, making a smacking sound, and blotted her lips with a thin tissue paper. My mother drew out another lipstick tube, a darker shade of pink, from the drawer and mimicked my grandmother’s movements. Suddenly my mother’s torso turned towards me. 

“You can sit right here June-chan,” she smiled. I crawled towards the mirror, my knees scraping the tatami, and sat to the right of my mother. Click, twist, swipe, smack, I repeated in my head. My hand followed the commands of the words. I felt the smoothness of the lipstick across my thin lips and continued applying more. I finally looked up at the mirror. My lips were smeared with a ruby red paint that extended past my lip line. 

“Otonaninatane,” my grandmother whispered with a smirk. “You’ve become an adult.”  My mother and grandmother began to laugh, the richness of their cackles melting into the high-pitched echo of mine. I glanced at the mirror and watched as three pairs of lips opened and closed, gasping for air with delight. My grandma’s artificially-colored brown bob bounced up and down simultaneously with her laughter. Our smiles widened and our faces became seemingly indistinguishable from one another. Square-ish, round-ish, cheekbone-lacking faces, Kitahara faces. I looked closer, and I noticed that the flickering halos of sunlight moving across our faces had become distorted and were instead taking the shape of hourglasses.