The Weekly Screed, 25 January 2008

Sleeping with my mother-in-law
by David Benjamin

GREAT NECK, N.Y. — All the photos are back from our annual family pilgrimage to Japan. Since my father-in-law, Pa Yoshida, died two autumns ago, it’s obligatory to spend the big New Year holiday in Japan with Ma Yoshida, to keep her from suffering the Christmas Blues.

Ah, here’s my photo of the lobby at the Intercontinental Hotel in Yokohama, where we splurged for a couple of high-class nights in the big city, although the three of us economized by sharing two beds in the same room. You can’t tell in this photo, but the lobby was huge. For the pure wasteful sake of opulence, Japanese hotel lobbies tend toward vast emptiness. La Scala could put on “Aida” in some of Japan’s roomier hotel lobbies — elephants and all. The relevant comparison is to your average Japanese house, which — in the Sears catalog — would be listed under “Tool Sheds.”

This luxury of space makes the Intercontinental lobby a paradise for kids. There were hundreds that weekend — racing, chasing, sliding on the marble floors, throwing the odd tantrum. There was good reason for this kid boom. Faced with the ordeal of an entire school vacation in an oversized doghouse with the whole family, millions of Japanese parents annually opt to blow their year-end bonus on a hotel suite. I sat around the lobby one day just envying the kids as they streaked by, kicking, bickering and throttling one another. They had no idea their room was costing Mom and Dad enough to buy a Cadillac minivan equipped with HDTV, 38 cup-holders and an ah-ooga horn.

The Intercontinental costs a lot because of the view. Of Yokohama Harbor. Which is arresting. It spreads out below in a 40-mile crescent surrounding a wine-dark expanse of captive ocean. The harbor entrance is spanned by the Bay Bridge, whose suspension cables lend an incongruous delicacy to one of the world’s biggest industrial ports. Looking from our window at this complex of piers, cranes, derricks, smokestacks, tank farms, tankers, tugs, transports and one stark, white windmill, I wondered momentarily why the natives pay extra for this view. As far as I could see — and I could see all the way to Tokyo Tower — there was barely a hint of greenery. On second thought, however, I realized this vista offered the same strange charm as looking under the hood of a showroom Ferrari. Even if you can’t tell the manifold from the windshield fluid, you gaze with a sort of morbid wonder at what man hath wrought. You even take pictures.

I have some right here.

Here’s our hotel from the outside. The Intercontinental bills itself as having the aspect of “a sleek yacht under sail.” I didn’t get that. To me, it was more like a huge melon slice standing on end — an analogy much more “Japanese” than that yacht. The Japanese are obsessed with melons. One of the recurring themes foreign correspondents explore when they’re assigned the Tokyo beat is luxury fruit. As they venture into the labyrinthine food floors in department stores, these newshounds inevitably run across a display of cantaloupes, perfectly spherical, unblemished from navel to stem, and priced as high as $100. A hundred bucks for a muskmelon?

Each stunned reporter eventually learns that melons belong to the Japanese custom of joyless, obligatory gift-giving — which occurs several times a year, unavoidably, like mosquito season and scaly feet. Among the standard repertoire of gifts conveyed in elaborate packages to distant relatives, estranged friends and workplace enemies, the most coveted is The Melon. The esteem that applies to the gift-melon might be demonstrated by the experience of an American friend — let’s call her Missy — who one day many years ago climbed onto a train bound for the deep inaka (suburbs) of Tokyo, to meet the parents of a Japanese friend. Missy had blown her month’s rent on The Melon. However, as she boarded the express train, she stumbled, almost dropping The Melon behind her onto the platform. As she righted herself, the train door hissed shut. Missy still held the plastic bag, containing her prize, tightly in her hand. However, freakishly, The Melon had not made it through the door. Missy and the bag-handle were inside. The majority of the bag, including The Melon, were outside.

Before the express reached Missy’s station, almost an hour had elapsed. She had spent the hour watching The Melon through the window, clinging to it, shuddering when each passing train, inches away, threatened to smash the precious gift like, well, a melon.

The trains missed. The bag held. Weary but relieved, Missy bestowed upon her austere, proper hosts The Melon — although the bag was raggedy and the fruit itself a trifle sooty. Missy consoled herself, reasoning that The Melon’s weathered exterior was forgiveable because, after all, it would still taste yummy when you cut that beauty open.

Missy, after a few more years in Japan, learned her error. Nobody cuts open The Melon. Whoever does so tends to find it overripe, a little too mushy, watery and bland. You don’t eat The Melon. You re-pack it and present it, grandly, to someone else — preferably that snotty sister-in-law who always squanders more on your gift that you can afford to spend on her. This’ll show the bitch.

Ma Yoshida, however, eats The Melon. She likes melons — so much so that she hunts down cheap, ugly melons at the Yen Store. She carries them home, exposed to public view. Let people talk, she seems to be saying. I’m old, I’m hungry, I’m a widow, I survived Hiroshima.
She did, you know. A high school student in Hiroshima on August 7, 1945, she took the last train to the suburbs from Ground Zero. You know that famous photo of the city tram in central Hiroshima that was reduced to nothing but a charred steel frame by the Bomb? That was the next train.

After the Bomb, Ma Yoshida walked all the way back, through an unrecognizable Hiroshima, to Ground Zero — “through Hell,” as she puts it.

But that’s another story…