Previous story : Like a Prayer - I couldn't even pray because I kept crying. -
Page of Swords & The High Priestess, vol.16
The morning after spending two enjoyable days at the "Peace of Mind Workshop" with Hiroshi Ohuchi and Janet, Masato and I checked out of the "Hotel Mt. Fuji".
Yes, of course! Of We were already up at 6:00 the next morning and prayed using "The Gift of Life Prayers". Then we had breakfast. When I observed the process of praying with "The Gift of Life Prayers" and learning "A Course In Miracles", I realized that he is indeed a man who is very good at making habits. Such a strong point of his is certainly useful for invoking "Miracles".
Now, back to the topic.
Masato called his stepmother at his parents' house in Kyoto while I was in the middle of settling the bill for our stay. I am now at a hotel near Lake Yamanakako and will be heading back there. That naturally surprised his stepmother. Hmmm? Lake Yamanakako? Aren't you in New York?
We took a cab to "Mishima" station on the Shinkansen/bullet train. When I asked the front desk of "Hotel Mt. Fuji", I found out that "Mishima" station is one station farther east than "Shin-Fuji" station, which means it is further away from "Kyoto" station, but because the Shinkansen "Hikari" stops there, locals who go to Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, and other Kansai regions usually go to "Mishima" station. If it's "Hikari", we don't need to change trains. If we go to "Shin-Fuji" station, we need to take the Shinkansen "Kodama" and then transfer to "Hikari" at "Shizuoka" station. So, we took the Shinkansen/bullet train" Hikari" from "Mishima" station to "Kyoto", and while we were there, he gave us a lot of information to supplement his confession from the "Peace of Mind Workshop".
When his father had a stroke on December 18, 1977 and underwent an emergency craniotomy, he was in his third year of junior high school and was about to take the high school entrance exam, but he decided not to go to high school. This was because the neurosurgeon who performed the craniotomy assured them that Masato's father would have a recurrent stroke within three years. At that time, the Shiraishi family was in debt for over 8 million yen. This was because they had remodeled their home the previous year.
In 1977, one dollar was ¥285. In today's value, based on the Consumer Price Index, let's see.... Well, let's not do that. LOL. LOL. LOL. Anyway, the Shiraishi family was in the process of paying off most of their debt for the cost of the renovation. His sister, six years older than him, was attending university, so tuition was also a burden on them. His sister worked at a bookstore as a part-timer in the evenings while attending university to help pay for part of the tuition.
His father was a salesman for a car dealership and had achieved quite excellent sales results. He was also a director of the company. So, the company did not fire his father, who was left paralyzed from the effects of the stroke. In fact, he continued to work, despite being in and out of the hospital repeatedly. He passed away just after paying off his debts with his retirement allowance at the age of 60. Even if that was the result, there is no doubt that as of December 1977, the Shiraishi family was very likely to lose their workers. Masato believed that the debt should be paid off as soon as possible, so he graduated from junior high school, did not go on to high school, and took a sales job at a local medium-sized general contractor.
The topic then shifted to a comparison of Masato's two mothers. He said that his birth mother often scolded him for his poor grades in school. He was the student with the lowest grades. His sister, however, was not. She excelled in school and graduated from one of the top private universities in Kyoto. His birth mother was very proud of his sister. I could not believe that Masato's grades were not good. First of all, he was a radio DJ, a very language-intensive profession, and his understanding of music and its cultural background was so deep that I had assumed he was a man who loved to learn. However, Masato himself told me that he did not understand any of his schoolwork, which was another reason for the abuse he received from his classmates. I was very surprised to hear this.
Now, what about his stepmother? She rarely gave him any attention or scolding when it came to his studies. Even when his grades were poor, his stepmother was never particularly angry with him. His stepmother was more concerned about his ability to do household chores such as cleaning and laundry, and about his manners, such as holding chopsticks properly. She valued the acquisition of practical life wisdom and skill development more than academic study. He also encouraged the development of cultural activities. Masato was initially confused by his stepmother, whose policies were the opposite of those of his birth mother, and did not always have good communication with her, but after about three years, they began to get along well. In other words, his sister was strongly influenced by his birth mother, while Masato himself was brought up under the strong influence of his stepmother. Masato is a popular music fanatic, but his sister, who is six years older than him, apparently has no taste for music, or any taste at all. Such seems to reflect the difference between their two mothers. So communication between his sister and their stepmother was not smooth. That is why Masato's older sister left home to get a job and live alone. Therefore, Therefore, Masato's father was cared for by only two people, Masato and Masato's stepmother.
While he was telling me about his history, the Shinkansen "Hikari" arrived at Kyoto Station.
I told Masato that I would stay at the "Hotel Granvia Kyoto", which is directly connected to Kyoto Station. Perhaps there would be room in the suites. If there is no vacancy, I will stay at "Kyoto Hotel Okura".
But he asked me, "Why don't you come with me to the Shiraishi family's house?"
You are my wife, right?
Uh, yes. Maybe since last week.
I was afraid that his stepmother would be shocked to the point of fainting when she heard how he and I had become acquainted.
Oh, our encounter was on the 19th of last month. It was at a "TAO Shiatsu/Acupressure" workshop at "The New York Buddhist Church" that I first met him, and when I pushed his back to assist in the "Seated forward bend stretch," a preparatory exercise, it dawned on me that he had esophageal cancer! So, I forced him into a cab and took him to the doctor. That's how I met him. And then, at the beginning of last week, the moment I saw this little church in Honolulu, I wanted to marry him. Because I thought that if I married him, he would not kill himself without telling me so easily. So, I pulled his hand, forced him to go to the church, and asked the priest to perform the ceremony for 10 minutes! And I forcibly kissed him on the lips and we took our vows as husband and wife!
No way, hey, would you have said that? You wouldn't, would you?
I did not want to disturb the reunion of Masato and his stepmother by my crazy words and actions. But he is trying to introduce me to his stepmother. As his own wife. Thus, I was to meet his stepmother, or rather my "mother-in-law".
Masato's house is not in the center of Kyoto City as everyone in the world imagines when the ancient capital "Kyoto" is mentioned, but in an area called Yamashina-ku, which borders on the neighboring prefecture of Shiga. As for historical remains, there is the tomb of Emperor Tenchi, but in general, however, it is a residential area. In the cab he said in a dark, somber voice, as if embarrassed, "You will be surprised at how small and dirty the house is".
In fact, their house was not as surprisingly awful as the tone of his voice would suggest. My father is an ordinary civil servant working for Yokohama City Hall. We were not poor in the sense that my father was paid enough to meet our needs on a regular basis without having to worry, but we were not very rich either. In other words, his parents' home was not much different than my parents' home. But the house was small and dirty for very different reasons….
When he rang the doorbell, his stepmother, namely my mother-in-law, Hideko Shiraishi, came out. She was, of course, surprised and flustered to see me.
I didn't expect your friend to come with you.
She is not my friend. She is Yukiko. I married her.
Eh? What did you just say?
Her reaction was obvious. She is the one who knows the most about Masato's sexual trauma as his stepmother, so it is only natural that she is surprised that her son came home with a woman.
I entered his parents' home with him. The inside of his parents' house was small and cluttered for reasons quite different from what I had expected. My mother-in-law, Hideko Shiraishi, was in the middle of making clothes. She was making haute couture. So there were several torsos for sewing, fabrics and dress patterns were spread out on a large cutting desk, and the top of the desk and the floor were littered with lint and scraps of fabric. A shelf by the wall held many hat wood patterns. She used a one-pound iron, and there was a "SINGER" industrial sewing machine and a "babylock" lockstitch machine "Itotori-Monogatari" similar to the one my mother used and I used often! Sales of the mail-order hat site that Hideko launched were quite strong. She was also taking orders for dresses, including wedding dresses, which kept her quite busy. So, Masato's parents' house was a messy mess. My mother-in-law, who thought Masato would come home alone, did not clean the house in terms of work efficiency. I was working until just now! The Masato's parents' house was in such a state. She was born on July 3, 1934, so she was 71 years old at that time. From Masato's confession at the "Peace of Mind Workshop," I had assumed she was an insurance diplomat. However, she finished that job after a few years and opened an atelier dealing in haute couture with the money she saved. Masato knew that his stepmother was doing dressmaking, but he did not think it was so full-scale, and he himself was very surprised. Not surprising since they had not seen each other since the mid-90s.
In 1959, Pierre Cardin came to Japan and the Parisian haute couture boom started in Japan. August 5, 1964 was a memorable day when Teijin and RENOWN Look, a ready-to-wear company, held a catwalk show for GIVENCHY at the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo. My mother-in-law is truly of the Audrey Hepburn generation, and GIVENCHY, which had created many of Audrey's outfits since "Sabrina" in 1954, was the envy of Japan as well, attracting young Hideko. Remember "Breakfast at Tiffany's"? The black Givenchy dress of Audrey Hepburn.
In 1965, Hanae Mori participated in "New York Fashion Week" for the first time and was called "Madame Butterfly" for her butterfly motif dresses. In 1965, Issey Miyake went to Paris, but success was yet to come. Kenzo Takada had arrived in Paris the previous year, in 1964, but his success with KENZO was yet to come. Rei Kawakubo launched "Comme des Garçons" in 1969, based in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo, and created a foothold for the rapid success that followed. Her name was still Hideko Yukawa, and she spent her youth in such an era. As of March 22, 1972, the day Masato's birth mother passed away, she had opened a haute couture atelier called "atelier Hideko" in the center of Kyoto City. And on September 12, 2005, when I met her for the first time, she was living a fulfilling life, receiving numerous orders for her reopened "atelier Hideko".
Now, without my explanation, Masato explained to her in detail about how we got together. What surprised me was that she was not surprised at all. Explaining our very short history meant explaining that he was suffering from terminal cancer and was likely to die soon. Hideko Shiraishi had guts. She was not surprised by that either.
Well, that's tough…. But anyway, you just have to do what you can, one by one.
When Masato took a sip of tea after her stepmother calmly said so, he fainted, slid off the chair he was sitting in, and fell to the floor!
Yikes! I screamed.
But my mother-in-law did not panic. He must have been tired both mentally and physically. She said so. And it seemed that she was right, and he regained consciousness a few seconds later. Anyway, go to sleep. You must be tired. Masato slept on the Japanese futon that his stepmother had laid out in the room Masato used to occupy….
So I had to talk to my mother-in-law alone. I am probably rarely nervous, but at this time, I was very nervous. But "SINGER" and "Itotori-Monogatari" helped me. I told her how in junior high school I used to buy old clothes in Harajuku, take them apart, and sew them back together using "SINGER" and "Itotori-Monogatari".
When my classmates were wearing all black and black with a "Comme des Garçons" obsession, I was wearing interesting clothes that I had DIY'd myself. Toko Akazawa, a product designer who studied at the "SETSU MODE SEMINAR", is a classmate of mine. She admired Vivienne Westwood, so we showed our Punk Spirit and dismantled the clothes into pieces.
She was so delighted to hear it and explained to me the details of the wedding dress she was making at the time.
There used to be a wedding dress company in Kyoto called "Tsujitai". It is known that Yumi Katsura, the most famous wedding dress designer in Japan today, used to be an advisory designer, and Hideko used to work there. She saw Yumi Katsura's work up close and personal.
We started talking about each other, using haute couture as a springboard. I had a question I wanted to ask her. Don't you find it creepy that I discovered his cancer just by touching his back, or that I suddenly asked your son to marry me?
Then my mother-in-law first said the following:
Ah, well, you're right. But I didn't think you were crazy at first glance, because you certainly wear fine and elegant things. They say it's not good to judge people by their looks, but inevitably, given my profession, I do care what people are wearing. The wine-red loafers you were wearing, those are "J. M. WESTON", right?
Indeed, I was wearing loafers by J. M. Weston, a French shoe manufacturer known as the "Rolls-Royce of Shoes".
She then began to talk about how she married Masato's father, Masanao Shiraishi.
My brother introduced me to his father at the end of April 1972, and I was surprised that a man who had just lost his wife on March 22 was about to enter into an arranged marriage. However, I could understand his father's thoughts on being at a loss and trying to be practical with a junior high school girl and an elementary school boy, so I decided to meet with him once. Then in May, Masato, his father, his sister, and I went to the zoo in Kyoto City. A few days later, I had a chance to have dinner with his father alone. He told me then the following:
Masato says he will call you "O-Ka-A-San".
"O-Ka-A-San" could be translated as "MOM". I explained what "San" means last time, didn't I? Masato, in essence, was trying to ease his father's emotional burden by teaming up with his father's intentions and showing a positive attitude toward welcoming a new mother. Now, my mother-in-law's explanation continued.
I realized for the first time the gravity of the position I was in. My brother wanted me to get married because he was worried about how much trouble I would be in when I got old, being a bachelor and sewing all the time.
In Yasujiro Ozu's film, the father, played by Chishu Ryu, says to his daughter, played by Setsuko Hara, the following:
Well, if you don't get married now, I will be in trouble.
But in the Shiraishi family, they had lost one of their two pillars and were at their wits' end, and the fact that a nine-year-old boy was trying to overcome the grief of losing his mother for his father in order to somehow break through that situation was very heavy. If you married him for whatever reason, you know that he was severely abused by his classmates and that he had serious sexual trauma that prevented him from having close relationships with girls, right? Masato, however, is not a weak child. He is a very mentally strong child, and at that time, more than his father, he was struggling with his family's problems, and he did not run away from them.
I was very troubled. Being their mother is not easy. I talked to my mother about it.
Then my mother said the following:
The time to go and help them is when they are in the most trouble. If you don't go when you are most likely to be useful to them, there is no point.
That's what made me make up my mind.
They need help, they say, so I'm going to help.
I know you do too, don't you?
It is indeed very strange that you got married because the church was right in front of you, but you felt that you yourself were the only one in the world right now who could help Masato, right? I don't think that is strange. Isn't that a noble thing?
I was struck with awe, and with tears streaming down my face, I remembered Janet's words, "Ask the angels for anything. Let's ask the angels."
Donna-koto demo Tenshi-San ni Onegai shima-sho.
It occurred to me that everyone is guided by a Guardian Angel. A little later, when I started reading "A Course In Miracles", I would have thought this. Everyone is guided by the Holy Spirit. At that time, Guardian Angel was a more familiar term to me than Holy Spirit. I had no words to reply to my mother-in-law. She did, however, say the following to me.
Please take care of Masato.
I just nodded my head, crying. I realized that step by step I was becoming his wife. I know the world would think I was nuts, but I was feeling a rapidly growing sense inside of me that it was my destiny to live with him….
Now, I, however, decided that I could not stay the night, given the mess at his parents' house, so I moved to the "Kyoto Hotel Okura" and stayed there for three nights. The first night, after eating and bathing, I called my mother. I told her I was in Japan. But I could not tell her everything. The Shimada family is a conservative family, so I couldn't tell her that I had a husband because of my unusual behavior. So, I told her it was a business trip. But I explained that there was a man I loved and were seeing. All I wanted was to hear my mother's cheerful voice. I thought that by saying thank you to my mother, I would also be saying thank you to my Guardian Angel. Or perhaps, I thought, I would also express my gratitude to my grandfather, Tatsuo Tsukida. As usual, I had not visited my grandfather's grave. At that time, I was in Japan for the first time since my grandfather's death, but I did not have time to visit his grave. In my mind, I was talking with my mother, apologizing to my grandfather.
Most of the children from Tokyo and Yokohama must have visited Kyoto on a school trip. I am no exception, but during this period I visited various places in Kyoto that are not visited on school trips. For example, I went to "Kuramadera Temple", where legend has it that Sanat Kumāra, the "Planetary Logos," arrived from Venus 18.5 million years ago and landed. "Kuramadera Temple" is the place where Mikao Usui was enlightened in 1922. He is the founder of "Usui Reiki Therapy". I later became a Reiki healer belonging to the Usui Reiki Therapy group, but at that time, I did not know that "Kuramadera Temple" was the place where Reiki Healing was born. Now, how did Masato spend his time? I do not know what kind of conversations took place between Masato and my mother-in-law during that period. However, Masato said that he had met his sister.
On Thursday, September 15, Masato Shiraishi and I flew from "Kansai International Airport" to "Narita International Airport", where we boarded a plane for "John F. Kennedy International Airport".
So in the next issue I will tell you about the beginning of our life in New York.
But before that, there is one thing I would like to tell you. A while after I returned to New York, I received a present from my mother-in-law. It was accompanied by a message card saying that I had produced it because Masato, when he was still a little boy, had once asked me to make him a wedding dress for his partner in the future when he would have someone he loves and get married. Masato and I went to a photo studio to take wedding photos and gave them to our beloved mother Hideko.
I wore my wedding dress before Angie Kendall. Her Alexander McQueen wedding dress was lovely, but I can't think of a wedding dress that suits me better than "atelier Hideko". I am happy.
©Mitsuhiro Toda@Screenwriter Group Aquariusera
