Red Rice for Celebration

Red Rice for Celebration

Yu Kizawa

Creative Nonfiction

On a brittle, yellowing page of a notebook, side by side with a pattern chart for a cable sweater, my mother jotted down the recipe for osekihan, red rice, as her grandmother recited it from memory. My parents had just gotten married and soon my mother would be preparing this traditional celebratory meal for New Year’s Day by herself. Maybe she was excited to have her own kitchen where she would cook for her yet unfamiliar husband. Maybe she was weary of the prospect of cooking three meals a day, 365 days a year, for the rest of her life. But in any case, she jotted down her grandmother’s recipe in the notebook:

Soak ten cups of glutinous rice in water overnight. Drain. Soak half a cup of azuki beans in water for an hour. Remove any that floats on the surface. They’re the ones eaten hollow by bean bugs, her grandmother said. Keep one cup of the soaking water, pale burgundy with the beans’ anthocyanin. Drape a steamer with a piece of thin cloth, the kind ancient prostitutes draped their faces with in the light of dusk, and evenly spread the rice over the cloth. Cover the rice with another piece of cloth and steam for 40 minutes on high heat. Dissolve one tablespoon of salt in the soaking water. Take the rice off the heat and pour the salted water, mix well, add azuki beans on top and place everything back on the steamer. Steam for twelve more minutes. It might not be twelve minutes, I don’t time it, her grandmother shook her head slight smile of confidence in her cooking spreading over her papery skin. Sprinkle some black sesame and salt on top before serving.

My great-grandmother, whom I only know through a photograph whose muted colors seem as if I were looking at her through a thick membrane of time, might or might not have told her granddaughter, who is my mother, that the white of the glutinous rice stood for purity and the red of the azuki beans longevity, all in all a fortunate combination–she didn’t believe in good charms and bad omens, I heard. Nonetheless, she always steamed osekihan for New Year’s Day, weddings of her children, graduations of her grandchildren, in place of her daughter-in-law, who was too busy running a rice store with her husband. Through the red rice my mother cooks according to the old recipe in her notebook, I know my great-grandmother.

When I first saw a chocolate-colored stain on my underwear, my mother followed the direction on her notebook, now barely bound together by the brittle old glue along its spine. I carried the still steaming red rice to the table, feeling the papery rubs between my legs. The warm vapor carried the smell of steamed rice up to my nose, sickening me. I remembered that my mother, when pregnant with me, couldn’t stand the smell of rice being steamed. I had inherited her odd hatred of the smell of the steamed rice, as if the sickening smell had traveled from her nostrils, through the umbilical cord, eventually reaching me, eyeless and amphibious in the hot, saline sea within my mother. I placed the bowl of red rice on the table, averting my eyes from my father, who just came home and placed his briefcase on a chair.
“What’s to celebrate?” he asked, taking off his gray suit jacket.
“It’s for Yu,” said my mother, probably eyeing at me but not for sure, for I fixed my eyes on the small red beans scattered among the sticky rice, which reminded me of the bloody dots on my white panties. “Yu’s adult now,” my mother said, knowingly. There was a perplexed silence for a moment, and my father understood. His face contorted into a smile, the familiar one on his face that betrayed his hesitance and embarrassment underneath.
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. Glad for what, I thought. Menstruation was something everyone got sooner or later. I didn’t, or wouldn’t, understand their jubilation. I hated the bulky, papery mass, pressed against the part of my body I had managed to ignore until then. Dealing with this mess for the next thirty years when reproduction was not a part of my plans for the future, seemed more of an unavoidable annoyance than a cause for celebration. I chewed the resilient rice, silent.

Mothers shed their secret tears on the steaming red rice as they prepared the last meal with their teenage sons sent for battlefields. Their very last meal with their sons in this world. Red rice to celebrate their sons’ ultimate sacrifice for the patria, for the divine emperor of Japan, a contribution that would consecrate their mothers as well, for they made an ultimate sacrifice as well, in dutifully birthing and raising the soldiers of the empire, only to send them to the fields of bloated corpses and severed limbs.
Mothers shed their tears in their kitchens as they steamed black-market glutinous rice with black-market azuki beans, for these were a rarity under the war-time ration that seemed to thin away day by day, month by month. The falling tears on rice–did they make the rice just a hair saltier, more bitter? The next day their sons would hop on the train, with all the neighbors waving national flags and cheering for their young men destined to starvation, malaria, army boots too large or too small for their feet, and maybe a final suicide attack on the American encampment in a distant tropical jungle. “Good luck in your battle,” “congratulations for your service,” the banners would trail in the breeze.
I wonder if my great-grandmother, so shriveled and frail in the photograph next to the family altar in the perpetually cold corner of my grandmother’s old house, cooked the red rice for each of her five sons, who, one by one, received the red slip that summoned them to the military recruitment office in Tokyo. Two would never return. Their painfully young portraits, in their Imperial Navy uniforms, hang beside that of their mother, aged and ailing over thirty years after their last meal of red rice with her. She wouldn’t have had to beg farmers in black markets to exchange her wedding kimono with a meager sack of glutinous rice, for her family’s rice store had been turned into a neighborhood ration headquarter. She wouldn’t have had to cut back on the sweet potatoes to save ration coupons for the red beans. But I wonder. Did she cook red rice for each of her five sons, some of whom, she must have known, would never return.

Many years after the red rice to celebrate my biological adulthood, my mother cooked red rice again. I’d come home from the distant metropolis of Tokyo to spend the winter break from the university, after which I was planned to graduate. It was an occasion to celebrate and pray for good luck in the independent life that awaited her only child. I had secured a job as a research librarian in a government institution, but not at all excited at the prospect of becoming one. I was regretting every decision I’d made since when I eschewed literature for what seemed to be a better prospect in life two years before. The regret and the sense of irrevocable mistake were collapsing on me, hindering the graduation thesis I had to complete in a few months. Ragging behind on the research and growing depressed day by day, I was becoming someone completely different from the reliable daughter my parents thought they knew.
My parents had many questions about my future. I answered them as vaguely as possible so they wouldn’t be an outright lie. That much decency I had left. I picked at the azuki beans in the glutinous rice. Black sesame seeds looked like dead ants, white grains of coarse salt like ash. The resilient rice never seemed to diminish, as fast as I chewed on them till my jaws hurt.
Three days later, I went back to my tiny studio apartment in Tokyo, just a few blocks from my great-grandmother’s old rice store distributed the Japanese staple to the neighborhood customers. As I stood on the platform of a major rail hub of the all-engulfing metropolis, where I would spend two years working tentatively at a bookstore while summoning up the courage to tell my parents that I wasn’t the reliable daughter they’d known and I wasn’t ever going to become a government employee with a degree from a prestigious university, I felt relieved. With a backpack on my back and two hands dangling free, I walked back to my apartment where I didn’t have to celebrate anything and didn’t have anything to celebrate anyway.