... all mixed up ...

Doesn't she realize that I can't understand much of anything she says? Bobbing my head, trying to rest on torturously bent knees with a smile iced onto my face, I wonder why she is so desperate to get in all of those words. They don't really sound like words, but they are.

The usual frustration of "blab, blab, blab, bob, bob, bob" sometimes plunges me into hopeless silence, or even whirls me around until my throat gurgles, making me feel as if I am about to be washed up at the base of Sensei's altar.

Sensei: my teacher. I should be able to understand more. I have been in Japan for a few years, and spent many long Saturdays in language classes at the Y, so why can't I?

Sensei and I face each other in the wide tatami room with its scroll of irises hanging behind her. A stagnant-seeming dish of sake lies next to the incense of the shrine dedicated to the father who had long since died, slowly, when Sensei was a child.

"Oh, what a nice painting," I had said when the scroll appeared on seasonal cue.

Those irises still look as if they'd been flattened under a stone and then pasted onto the paper. Such misshapen, disconcertingly beautiful irises surely could only have been created under unnatural pressures.

Yet, as I stare at them now and am lulled by the babble of Sensei's words, I somehow get the sense of sinking into water, those iris flowers wavering above me as if I am viewing them from the vantage point of a carp in a temple pond. It is quite relaxing, this kind of sensation of being in the water, with both sounds and sights from above so softened. It often happens when I get tired from concentrating on Japanese that is beyond my level.

I settle further into the cushion under my legs. In Sensei's guest room, thick knotty beams hold up a ceiling made from woven bamboo strips. The straw mats on the floor are decorated with blue fabric trim. A rivulet of gold embroidery courses along the trim, dragging my eyes along with it, from a blooming wisteria bonsai to cups of steaming green tea to a dictionary lying open, but face down, beside me.

Sensei's words are barely audible now, but the swish of her orange kimono sleeve causes me to glance back towards her.

". . . blab, blab, bob, blab, blab."

I begin to rise to the surface.

From her kneeled position behind her harp, Sensei points at the koto strings, ". . . ichi . . . ichi o hiite kudasai . . ."

"One, . . . one, . . . one" begins to resonate louder and louder in my ears. Sensei is smiling, her left hand now opened towards me as if in invitation. I stretch out my right thumb to stroke the furthermost string so that my "one" responds to hers with that familiar low hum.

I have been floundering my way through these lessons on the Japanese horizontal harp for a few months now. It is still all so odd to me. The koto "nails" I wear have red leather bands so tight as to almost cut off circulation, with long white picks jutting past my fingertips. What a perverse image my hand has become in these bizarre nails. At home I had tried plucking a few tunes without them, but the resulting blisters made me realize how necessary they are.

When we'd gone to buy the nails, I made a bit of a fuss about the traditional ivory -- surely it was now illegal to harvest that, wasn't it? I didn't want the tusks of dead elephants on my hands (the leather bands were unpleasant enough), so I tried to tell a story I'd read about a mother elephant who had not abandoned her lame newborn but continually lifted it to its feet with her trunk. When the baby's knees finally stood firm on their own, the mother shed a few tears of relief and joy. Trunks entwined, mother and baby trotted over to the waiting herd which then headed off across the savanna together.

Of course I still didn't know how to say the Japanese words for "lame," "relief," "herd" or "joy," but I tried my best. Sensei and the store-owner had looked at me slack-jawed; because they couldn't understand the story itself, or because they were confused by my kindergarten- level Japanese-language rendering of it. I wasn't sure. I did, however, get my plastic-tipped koto nails.

Or so they said, I think.

Now I sigh happily into the tone of "one" resounding ever more deeply in my chest.

Then Sensei says, "two," and "three," and I realize that we are adjusting our harps so that they are in tune with each other.

"Four." She'll continue all the way up the scale until the notes from our koto strings harmonize completely.

Then we'll be ready to make music.

Were we really so racist back then, in the so-called melting pot of America?

"My father was Chinese," my first-grade friend had lifted the skin at the corners of her eyelids with her fingertips. "My mother was Japanese," she said as she pulled the corners down sharply. "And I'm all mixed up." She pulled her lids this way and that, up and down.

Our laughter chimed together across the expanse of the elementary school playground, but then I wondered if it were really true, "Did mixed babies have mixed-up eyelids?" And if so, was I really supposed to be standing there cackling over their deformity?

When home alone in the bathroom before bed that night, my eyes reflected low in the mirror. Pressing my fingertips onto the edge of my lids and wiggling, they slanted this way and that. My shoulders hunched, I giggled, and then dove into the depths of my pupils to see what I might see.

Now some 20 years later, when I think about that moment in the playground, I bow my head in penance.

But whenever I stare into my own eyes in the mirror, I feel afloat in a space, a space just like the one I enter whenever I am buoyant in the wake of the koto.

I haven't got a good look at my teacher's eyes, but they seem quite round. My boyfriend, however, has the eyes of Asians that I had imitated as a child -- not mixed up, of course -- but thin, with a wide, smooth expanse of lid between his lashes and eyebrows.

"Can you see through your lashes?" I query with a faint voice in bed one night. Hiro's lashes hang so low over his irises that I wonder if he views the world through vertically angled blinds.

"Can you see when you laugh?" I continue while stroking his bare forearm. When he laughs hard, his eyes almost squeeze shut into little wavy lines with smiles on their upturned ends.

"Sure," he yawns in response to both of my silly questions.

I guess that the pupil is vast enough in its perceptions that we all can see through it no matter what the shape of our eyes.

Hiro's irises are a rich brown that somehow seems to glow golden in the sunlight. How I love to look into his eyes, so close that his breath warms my cheek and my chest begins to hum. If I dare to enter past the wavering edges of the pupils, we sail along the same limitless space until one of us gets so agitated that we titter, glance away, and then turn back to land a kiss on the other.

"Can you breathe better since your nose is so long and the nostrils are so huge?" Hiro pokes an exploratory finger towards my face.

I jerk back in discomfort, then jab a fingertip into his ribs.

His body contracts into guffaws as his eyes grin along with him.

Now it is a few days before my first koto concert, and despite my nervousness, I'm lost in the joy of plucking. We're bad, we all know it, because we haven't practiced enough, but I reason that even an imperfect procession of notes will lull the listeners on the waves of its reverberations.

Yet my head aches so that I have to clutch it with both hands as I lay it on the pillow. I can only offer a few sputtered syllables in response to the questions Hiro poses from his position beside my futon. His brow twists as he leans in, attempting to get a hold on my answers. But as my face swells, he actually has to turn his head and gaze out the window to keep himself from laughing.

The people in the clinic too; patients, doctors, and nurses, cannot meet the puffed slits my eyes have become. They instead stare at my slippered feet when they quiz me about the details of my affliction.

"One of those strange tropical diseases?" my mother questions over the line when I make a long-distance call for sympathy. "You didn't eat any of that raw fish, did you?"

"No, no," I answer, "it's just the measles."

"Orientals get measles, too? I bet you got it from that . . . boy." My mother soon hangs up the phone.

"You have to drop out of the show, it's better to be safe than sorry," Hiro says as he holds my hand between his palms.

"But . . . I was depending on you!" Sensei's voice is loud, her tone chastising.

"Uh . . . not so well . . . blab blab bob . . . byoki ni naru to omou . . . blab blab bob bob." I thought I'd told her at the last practice session that I had some kind of tiring infection.

"Blab, blab, blab, bob, bob, bob." Our sentences had clashed out of tune but I hoped she'd got the gist of my gurgles anyway.

"I had no idea you were sick . . ." Sensei's shock continues to ring out over the buzz of the receiver in my hand.

I slam down the phone, then whine to Hiro, "Even when I think I'm saying things right, no one understands me at all."

It's the day of the concert, but I lie alone from morning until night with sweat on the brow of my spotty red head. The others are harping their way through sweet melodies for the crowd, yet on my sick bed, I am too feeble to even lift a nail-clad finger. All for the best, I suppose.

I imagine the community center concert where I would have debuted: me, the humongous, awkward, big-nosed foreigner bowing obsequiously and excusing herself for not speaking the language well, and plucking and pounding the wrong notes, searching the score breathlessly, then waiting with her hand poised over strings, quivering in anticipation, until she could find a place to join in again, obediently.

They would have murmured about how well the gaijin could play. But would they secretly have been pleased by her clumsiness -- which proved that she could never get anything Japanese quite right?

Those stupid perky melodies in my brain, God, I wish I could just switch them off completely, but they always come back.

Especially the famous tune about going home to mother who waits by the hearth with rice cakes and a loving smile: Even before I learned the meaning of its lyrics, I knew the song was a tearjerker from the way its notes rocked my body until waves of bittersweet emotion washed up towards my rapidly blinking eyes. Sensei always shed a few tears when she played the song, too, but she said it was her father she wished for: that he hadn't died of TB so long ago and would still be there by the hearth waiting for her.

Today? Today the audience is singing along with the koto players, dabbing at their teardrops with flowery designer hankies.

I pick up a wad of soggy tissues and honk into it. When I pinch my eyes closed, I can't help but see Hiro's parents, at their house during last year's summer vacation. They had knelt in front of their own altar, bowing their heads. Mother pressed her tiny hands together as Father banged a mallet against a singing brass bowl. Now I know all too well what they were praying for.

During O-Bon in Japan, ancestors' spirits are said to return to Earth for a temporary visit. "So we have to decorate the family altar with sugar cakes," Hiro explained. It was the duty of the living to pray with offerings and thereby assist the visitors' journey between the worlds.

"And if we do that?" I asked.

"The ancestors will smile upon us," he responded.

It seemed to me that we had spent a pleasant O-Bon at his mother and father's house. As usual during our visit, they were full of smiles, and little presents in lovely wrapping, and light words.

Before our departure, Father called Hiro into the study for the obligatory "What are you doing with your life?" lecture. I sat in the next room sipping tea Mother had served the traditional way; on her knees, with a bow, and both hands extended.

Hiro, however, had burst into the room minutes later, grabbed our baggage and growled, "Let's go!"

During the drive back to our apartment, Hiro took one of my hands in his. "Father believes the ancestors are angry because our neighbor's son -- he's the same age as me -- is already married and growing new branches on the family tree." But Hiro was not, so he'd better find someone to marry right away.

Father would lead him in the quest for a suitable bride, of course.

I had sat heavy-lidded for a while, a cacophony of out-of-key koto notes rising up from the distance of my belly to eventually overpower the numbness in my chest. It was as if a hundred deranged musicians were scratching at the strings which popped and snapped under the pressure. I could hear the horrible noise in my ears, but surely Hiro couldn't. I didn't want him to.

And his parents? All their tinkling niceties hadn't meant a thing. They didn't care about his happiness: Our two years together didn't seem to mean much of anything to them. And obviously neither did I.

For many nights thereafter I sobbed into a pillow to muffle the sound so the neighbors couldn't hear me. I cried only when I was home alone so Hiro wouldn't know.

Probably rattled by the telephone's hush, Mother had at first written staccato-like notes claiming that they were so concerned for Hiro's future well-being, and they didn't know anything about how to deal with foreigners. I could just imagine her at the low desk, her brush swinging across the surface of museum-quality letter paper. Father would be in the next room memorizing tanka poems for his next recital.

Note after note arrived, but Hiro did not respond.

Then the ominous accompaniment appeared: Father's health was deteriorating and, really, who knew how long either of them would be around in this world?

No word from Father, ever.

After some time passed, I asked Hiro for an explanation, and for help in confronting his parents. He just shook his head. "Ma is enough," he said.

"Ma? Your mother?"

Hiro laughed so hard he fell backwards onto the tatami. After he wiped a few tears from his eyes, he sat back up and said, "Ma means 'silence.' You know about ma from learning koto, right?"

"Oh, of course, ma." I waved my hand in the air as if in full comprehension. "Yeah, I wish your ma and your pa would be quiet," I thought.

Hiro had stopped talking and was staring down at his knees. ". . . ma is the space between sound. And silent space is communication, too. My parents understand our anger and hurt through ma."

I still didn't understand much of anything, but figured it must be some cultural problem and who was I to judge another culture? So I "swallowed my pride," or whatever you call it when you sit with a false grin on your face, nauseating grumbles sunk deep in your belly. Hiro's parents couldn't hear those grumbles. Even if I decided to shout out loud, I bet they wouldn't hear.

So we meet them again, and again, and "that incident," as I call it, is never discussed. Hiro's parents sit there across the table from us; smiling, saying light words, and giving little gifts like before. I smile and offer little gifts, too, but say much less, not bothering at even broken conversation; that halting -- searching for -- missing of the right notes, but eventual striking of a few final triumphant chords in "ah hah!"-like understanding that we had occasionally achieved in the past.

It hardly seems worth the effort.

The swelling lessens, my aches calm themselves, and the feverish sweats dry up, but for a few weeks I just can't touch the koto. To play just for fun, to be buoyed by the accompanying peals in my chest, seems a selfish pleasure since I haven't performed on schedule for my Sensei and fellow students.

"I missed the koto concert because I was sick," I complain to my mother over the wires which lie below the churning sea.

"Huh?" her voice whirls back at me, "the what?"

"The Japanese harp. I've been taking lessons for a while."

I don't explain further and she doesn't ask.

What gifts can I offer my teacher to atone for my ill-timed failure?

"Boxed sweets from a reputable store would be appropriate," Mother advises. I deliver them full of apologies, but Sensei's babbles tickle me so that my shame floats away. I'll match her with the same, I decide, unless she gives me reason not to: "blab, giggle, babble, giggle, bob, babble."

"You should play for my parents the next time they visit," Hiro says over dinner one evening as his teacup thuds on the table.

"No . . . I'm too out of practice . . ." I clank my fork along the edges of a dish.

He reaches over, rubs my shoulder, and smiles at me until I smile back.

"What are you laughing at?" He lays his hand on mine on the table.

"What if we had kids, and they had one big round blue eye like me and one long thin brown one like you . . .?" I lift a hand up to cover my mouth.

"You mean black?" Hiro seems confused, "We Japanese all have black eyes."

"Well . . . yeah, I guess."

He scans the kitchen but doesn't see it because he is busy envisioning such odd offspring, then he grins, ". . . they'd be beautiful."

Today I sit in front of the koto, its body so long that it stretches out at least a meter to one side of me. When I play, I barely notice that far end which creates the richness of tone; my attention focuses on the 13 strings directly in front of me.

Yet, occasionally, I do have to reach my bare left hand out into the distance to force down a taut string. My fingertips groan for that accent note, as deliciously out-of-key as it may be.

I play those concert songs almost perfectly, but no one hears except for some passersby on the street below. In the silence between the notes, I can hear their footsteps.

We have no idea of the shape of each other's eyes.

If they'd ring the bell, I might go downstairs to invite them in for tea with koto accompaniment, but of course they won't. I hope that they at least can be buoyed by a few spacious hums of the koto as they walk by.

The front door creaks open, then swings shut with a sharp "clap."

From the bottom of the stairs Hiro calls out, "Subarashiii!," which I have learned by now means something like, "Sounds great!"