Free The Mask Carver's Son by Alyson Richman Page B

to be muzzled.
    Grandmother looked at me and then at the room where mother lay, her womb ripped to shreds. She remembered the four tortoiseshell hairpins with a shiver. She recalled her last words to her daughter on the day of her
o-miai
: “When you give your husband a son, you will be free . . . I hope you know a freedom that I have been denied.” And the pain inside her was overwhelming.
    Her daughter lay in the same room where Grandmother had given birth to her stillborn son years before. The room was dark and rank with death, “a cursed room,” as she would later describe it to me. It was there within the claws of the timber that she had first lost her son and now her daughter. She crumpled to the floor.
    But now, crying in the arms of the man my mother was forced to marry, was I, the grandson. The much anticipated heir who had arrived under the greatest sacrifice.
    Father held me in his arms, but no warmth could be detected in his embrace. He looked at my newborn head: my features shriveled, my skin a mottled mixture of pink and blue, my eyes and mouth oozing with newborn wetness, and at that moment, all his fears and anxieties were confirmed. He believed that all he touched and hoped to love was cursed, for even my image in infancy echoed his haunting memories; I was another poison plum.
    He should have given me up. I am sure he thought that often during the earlier years of my childhood. He should have left me to my grandparents. They had wanted a son so desperately that they had taken my father as their own. He slept in their house, ate at their table, and adopted their name. But, later, it was I who they considered their own. To my grandfather I was a true Yamamoto; the blood that flowed through my veins was his, red and strong.
    But, to everyone’s surprise, Father insisted on raising me.
    “Let us take him,” Grandfather implored. “You are still young enough to remarry.”
    “I will never remarry,” he replied, almost taking offense at Grandfather’s suggestion.
    Father had taught himself to carve on the
ume-ki
, the very plum wood whose fruit had killed his parents. The fruit had brought him misery; the wood had brought him fame. He did not know what his son would bring him. But he believed that I was his burden to bear.
    Perhaps my father’s actions were admirable; perhaps they were plainly selfish. Of this, I am still unsure. I am, however, certain of this: it was
I
who fought for eighteen hours not to be born, not to be given to a father whose expectations I could never fulfill. For my birth coincided with the birth of a new era, and as I would later discover, my artistic calling was in sharp contrast to those of my ancestors.
    *   *   *
    I have heard that my mother’s death nearly destroyed my father. Grandmother once told me: “Had your father not had the support of the wood, he surely would have died. It was the only thing that could heal his wounds. The only thing that could absorb his silent, bleeding heart.”
    But much like a tourniquet, it stopped all feeling.
    After Mother’s burial, he walked up to his studio and shut the door. No longer did he sleep in the room he had shared with her; now he slept on the sawdust floor, beside the masks he carved by blade. He refused to eat his meals with his in-laws, requesting that they leave only a bowl of rice and a jug of water outside his door.
    They did not know what faces he carved. They did not know how many masks cluttered his shelves. They only knew that he carved from dawn to dusk. I, the newborn babe, was put to sleep in the room where my grandparents slept, and according to Grandmother the hum of my father’s saw was the only sound that lulled me to sleep.
    *   *   *
    Nearly fourteen days after my mother’s death, my father walked down the stairs.
    “Forgive me,” he muttered. “I am in need of a cup of tea.”
    Grandmother stood in shock for what seemed like minutes, she told me. The man who stood before her now was