Master Yoshi

Master Yoshi

Copyright June 2023 by Fit529 Dotcom

Started 19 March 2023

[Note to reader: Several sections with predictable prurient content start about 3-4ths through the story, these add clarity but can be skipped]

"Your Suffering will Equal Your Joy, Master Yoshi."

My nightmare images faded even as the words again echoed through my head.

In the distant past, that phrase had been indistinct and indecipherable, but in the past few months it had both risen to clarity and sounded profoundly both right and wrong.

I opened my eyes to stabbing but cool morning sunlight, a disadvantage of an east facing bedroom. My head was clearing quickly despite knowing I had not slept well.

That headache went with a body ache of being up too late - and yet, I knew I'd gone to bed at a decent hour. The nightmare must have tormented me longer than just right-near-morning.

What the hell was that repeating dream about, anyway? I'd had it forever. I even remember having it when we were in Japan.

My entire experience in Japan was of it being a life-changingly awful place, foreign and weird and crazy and not at all where I wanted to be. All my friends were back home, my neighborhood where I knew everywhere and everything and maybe not everyone, but close.

It wasn't just the language. My mother had spoken Japanese with my sister and I from a young age, we knew Japanese just as well as anyone, but it was out of context. Japanese was something we ONLY spoke at home, and now there were people speaking it out In Public, where everyone could hear them, like it was normal or something.

Backing up, it wasn't always horrible. In the first few days, it was fine, if not pretty cool, to see people doing this stuff, but after we got used to being there a little and the newness and novelty wore off, it just got to be a GIANT pain in the ass.

I found that my language skills were good - but NOT perfect, and there were plenty of words that I just didn't know at all, to hear for sure, or even when I said what I thought they'd said, it turned out to be wrong and mispronounced in odd ways they could hear but I couldn't.

Most of the street signs were easy.

Most of the writing on packages and on TV was easy.

I could even speak with other KIDS who spoke Japanese! It was soooooo cool, I'd never been able to do that. The only people that spoke "our way" were my sister, mom, and dad.

Now, on a practical level, I was really smart, I knew that, and I knew how to read in English, and somewhat how to read in Japanese, but... it went by very fast. As much fun as I had reading street signs out loud, knowing I was right and being confident, there was reading on candy wrappers, or in restaurants or on walls, or even in kids' books they got me, that was a lot harder and I didn't just know it right off.

My success had been balanced out. I knew I had work to do. The joy of feeling the sounds coming out of my mouth and having people understand? That balanced out with me saying the wrong thing and seeing their eyes go hard, trying to understand and not getting me.

And, some of the kids I met didn't seem to like me, either, just because I didn't LOOK Japanese enough. It was like I was trying to steal something from them by being there, or trying to butt into their business, and they resented me for it.

I didn't know for sure. I was confused by the culture and the behavior patterns, the attitudes, the not showing emotions, the formal way of talking and acting and holding my body that I wasn't doing but should be doing?

I was six years old, so it's understandable. If I'd have been older, or not known any Japanese, it might have been simpler, they would have accepted me as a foreigner. I wouldn't have thought I had a chance to understand them, to fit in with them, to be a part of the play groups on the playgrounds near where we were staying.

Trying to fit in, and Almost Being There, that was WAY harder.

Mom's business (accountancy) had needed her to be in her native Japan for six months, so she'd gotten a small apartment and we came along - my dad, sister (1 year older), and I.

The town, so near her hometown, was small and rural, with farms nearby, but tall steep hills and apartment buildings and buses and a city-wide tram that everyone waited patiently for.

We drove by my mother's childhood home, though since her parents were long deceased we didn't get to meet them.

About 5 months into our "6 to 12 month" stay there, tragedy struck: My sister's persistent pains turned into a doctor's visit where my mother screamed so loud I heard her in the waiting room.

My sister had an aggressive type of cancer.

My parents were crying a lot, and my sister was just sleeping it off most of the time, though she did have good days.

Mom and dad decided to "risk" a day-long trip to a Shinto shrine she knew, and a longtime family friend who was a priest there. We met him. He was incredibly dour - I learned the word, 'Yoo-tsena' - and disapproving and not-fun. We'd had to walk up an incredibly long staircase, up an entire mountain, and when we got there, the 'they'll probably have ice cream' turned into some kind of dried octopus on a stick and NOTHING resembling ice cream.

I was six. I remember these things.

Of course, my sister being about to die made my mind focus more, and many of my later nightmares centering on that shrine had something to do with how I can recall the visit, too.

My dad carried my sister in a backpack-sling arrangement a pharmacist had sold us. I wanted to help but dad said it was important not to drop her. Duh. Like I didn't know that.

Mom did some talking and praying at the shrine, but Jane and I just sat in a rest area with padded mats where old and sick people could meditate.

Meditation, to me, was a Giant Waste of Time. I brought a backpack with books of birds and copied the pictures into my notebook, carefully, with crayons.

(I looked at it, years later. This was not great artwork, but it kept me busy).

I don't know what they expected would happen, but when we were done, we just had to walk down the mountain again and make a long drive home. I'd gotten to see interesting things, for sure, and my mom was trying to be happy for us but her mood came through, desperate and in abject despair.

We got home and 'unpacked'. We had dinner. Mom went out for some medicine at the corner pharmacy about a mile away (everyone walked).

On the way back, after she had the medicine, she crossed the street and looked the "wrong way" (Japan drives on the left), right in front of a car.

She was killed instantly.

My uncle (my mom's brother) was in another city; he and his wife came immediately to the hospital with us, but her death had been instant. I think he and my dad didn't get along well, but it was over my head and frankly I couldn't understand half of what they said anyway since they were whispering strongly.

Dad did lean on them, like actually lean, standing there.

I think they helped us, somehow, but in the end it didn't matter. My mom was gone. A core part of my life was _missing_. It was supposed to be there, every morning, every day, smiling and hugging and scolding, sure, and encouraging and praising.

Instead there was... a hole.

The doctor that had received my mother's body, trying to do something, anything to save her, met with us in the hospital. He spoke English passably well and switched between Japanese and English since my dad was only marginally proficient. Oddly, my sister and I spoke far better Japanese than my dad did. Honestly, we'd done it a larger percentage of our lives.

The doctor was obviously emotional about my mom's passing. This is apparently highly unusual in Japan, though I didn't know it at that age. Most Japanese people tend to strictly avoid being emotional in public, or at least in openly expressive ways, it's just not done.

That said, I could tell he didn't want to be emotional - he was trying to keep it together - but even at six years old I had a feeling about people sometimes and his emotions had some reflection of ours.

We buried our mother, which is to say we buried an urn of her ashes, in a cemetery near my grandparent's village. Despite her family being Shinto, her brother and his family were very angry with my father about something and we had to leave Japan quickly after that.

One less seat on the airplane coming back than when we had so hopefully arrived.

On top of there being just the three of us, my sister was a shadow of her former self. She was gaunt and not looking strong - I hadn't known what 'sick' looked like before that, but I had learned.

Back to My Waking Up Morning

I mention this history in the context of my dream because they were linked, inextricably bound and twisted and maybe it was that the dream captured all my loss and pain in one place, and then wrapped it up with odd words. Waking up that to sunlight and nightmare-echoes always made my emotions fly around fast and distracted me horribly.

When you wake up from a nightmare, you're in two places at once: the nightmare place, and wherever your body is.

The reason I'd woken up was my sister was getting in the shower, in the room right behind my headboard, banging away and sliding the shower curtains over with a scraping sound that carried through our small house.

Now, since I was irritated with my sister's bathroom noise, it should be plain that the cancer diagnosis turned out to be false, or at least, temporary.

When we'd landed in Chicago my dad had a follow up visit with her "normal" pediatrician / doctor, but beside the weight loss, she could find nothing wrong with Jane at all.

Jane's problems were all better, but my dad's job was not.

My dad's job had given him a leave of absence but in reality they'd not wanted him to return, pretty much ever, by his telling of it. I was too small to know what was happening, but we suddenly had to move, putting our stuff in a minivan and driving far away, west, across vast amounts of FlatBoringLand.

Dad never was much good at jobs. He was an alcoholic.

This is something I found out later, of course. I didn't know there was a name for it. For us, it just meant he had problems staying awake sometimes, and yelling at the walls or the TV or falling down over things, or sleeping in odd places around the house.

He tried to be good for us, of course, at least I think he did, I have no way of knowing the reality. He had always had a lot to drink, mixed drinks, and was always tipsy-dad, even when that was a bad thing. Even before Japan, he'd always had a tough time of it. But, after Mom passed, he bellowed even more and stayed out until late and life was complicated.

Our "home" was a mobile home parked near his "cousin's" place.

The cousins were not related to us. The husband, Hank, was an Army buddy of my dad's and they were alcoholics together. That friendship lasted their whole lives.

When I say that, I mean it literally: About 2 years after we moved there, Dad plowed into a light pole at 80 mph, killing himself and Hank instantly.

Jane and I were orphans.

Still, Hank's wife, Marta, kept food on our plates and a roof over our heads, moving two of her kids into our mobile home to free up space in their tiny ranch-style farmhouse.

Brenda, a girl five years older than me and just about as mean a psychopathic bitch as ever walked the planet, got the master bedroom.

I stayed in the room I'd been in, bedroom two.

My sister, she got a 'bedroom' that really was a walk-in-closet sized utility room that opened into the same hall bathroom I was next to. Technically that bathroom was a jack-and-jill type between us, and her hallway door was permanently barricaded since my sister was paranoid or private or something.

The other of Hank and Marta's kids was Zeke. He lived behind a blanket-wall in the former living room, which made his room much bigger but less private.

Zeke may have been manipulated by Brenda into doing the things he did, but he certainly delighted in causing both Jane and I pain, for a long time using an old cane with a brass handle he constantly carried around inside the house. He used it upside down to whack into my shins if he didn't like what I was doing, or if he thought I looked at him funny.

Zeke didn't need a cane. He just liked hitting people.

I learned to stay well out of range, but it didn't work very well.

That cane went away mysteriously at one point, and I got blamed, then Jane, but I think we all knew that it was Brenda that made it disappear. If Zeke liked something, she'd find a way to fuck him over by stealing it, temporarily or permanently.

Brenda covered for him, and made me and Jane out to be holy terrors, doing all sorts of imagined things. Even Luke, their next older brother, was tricked into agreeing with them and seeing me as careless, vindictive, and hurtful. I had none of that in me. I was a victim, and a cautious one at that.

So, you have some idea, my life wasn't glamorous growing up.

Their mom kind of kept things together, though there was never enough money and always too much gardening and farmwork to do. We were just outside the city limits on the outskirts, on 5 acres, so we had a barn and a shop (garage big enough for some trucks and tools) and a big garden.

With all that, and lots and lots of weeding by Jane and myself, Marta managed to keep food on the table for us.

Brenda and Zeke were equally responsible for the garden with us, but they ensured by various bruising and yelling and threats to get us to do their parts as well as our own. Even then, they'd come out and "help" when Marta was around or was about to come home, and a rake end or a hoe, or some implement would hit Jane's or my shins just about the time the car pulled in, putting us on the ground to make it look like the only ones actually working were Brenda and Jake.

Yeah, it was very calculated.

In fact, I don't think there were many times when I was unbruised. Nor, really, was Jane.

Our shoulders got a lot of punches, HARD, painful and jarring, or slaps that felt equally painful if not purple-skin creating.

My shins got a lot of sideways kicks from their cowboy boots. It was a cowboy boots kind of town: Beaver was 6,000 people in mountainous Southern Utah who probably wanted to live somewhere else but somehow got stuck there instead.

The tractor parts factory, and a separate adjoining tractor repair shop were the town's big business, along with a smaller place that made types of wire out of raw copper strands, somehow. Those and the railroad transshipment point were just barely enough reason to keep Beaver's population in place, but not many people I listened to ever said that Beaver was a "better" town than any other town, it was just a town, plain and simple.

Backing up to that morning, again.

I had just woken from that nightmare with those words in my head. The shower going meant my sister, a year older and a firestorm of 'do-this' or 'do-that' for me as well, would soon get done with her shower, shout about my not having done the dishes, or laundry, or fixed some broken thing.

This yelling and nitpicking was usually joined with kicking the bed and yelling about my needing to get my lazy ass out of bed.

I'm a morning person, mind you, I woke up very nearly instantly most days, but if I got out of bed too quickly, I'd run into Jane in the bathroom and she made that painful with poking and yelling.

Sitting up in bed and blinking, I figured I had to get up eventually. It wasn't a school day - Saturdays were free - but I had a track meet at 9 and I needed to get a move-on.

Jane's getting up at 7 on a Saturday was because she had a job at the tractor parts factory, in the office because she was wicked smart and probably because she knew how to get the truck drivers to do what she wanted. She had that kind of attitude and vocabulary when she wanted to use it.

Once she was in the shower, I was safe to get up. The pocket doors between our rooms and the bathroom were part of a jack-and-jill thing, but mine hadn't worked since we moved in (it was buried in the wall somehow) and I just lived without having much privacy from her.

On the other hand, while Jill got the much-smaller room, her door worked. We had trade-offs.

I got up and pulled on shorts over my underwear since it didn't pay to parade around near Jane. She had a way of making withering comments and increasing a price on my not following her rules. I went in to brush my teeth but carefully kept my body faced away from the shower.

My low grumble of, "Yo, sis, teeth now," was met with the typical "Yeah, fine," and I heard her singing some Berlioz thing we had sung in chorus (we both sang there, it was a fun thing to do). The piece was a favorite tune of hers, and I liked it fine, too, but I'd never sing along with her, interactions could be dangerous.

Any interactions with Jane in the morning might result in her distrust and distance from me shortening to complaints and possible strong words. I tried to avoid that.

Brushing my teeth that fateful day, my Ultra-Strong memory of that nightmare-ending phrase was running through my head, though the words sounded different to me in the daylight. The words were... wrong. I'd had that phrase in my head forever, but what was different?

I played it over in my head, but the word-shapes were off. It was like there were two phrases, both meaning the same thing, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Brushing my teeth put me into a meditative state, sorta, or maybe the sound of my sister's singing in Latin triggered it - it occurred to me that maybe I was hearing the phrase in Japanese, not in English!!

As I mentioned, Mom had spoken Japanese with us growing up. Until she passed, Sis and I were about half the time in Japanese and half in English. It was confusing, I remember, but then again, when Mom had a 'house rule, Japanese day'. She'd always say, 'Nihongo!', or 'Kyo wa nihongo de wakarimashita!'

That translated to, 'we understand in Japanese today!' so we would switch over.

This was one of my most fond memories of Mom.

My sister's shower water shut off just as I heard the echo of Mom's voice, and repeated it out loud. It wouldn't have been audible with the shower on, but with it off, my voice might have carried in the bathroom. I put the same sing-song accent that Mom used to use, "Kyo wa nihongo de wakarimashita!"

My sister screamed, a scream of horror, and I realized I might have sounded like mom just then.

I cowered and knew I'd better get out of the bathroom, when Jane was riled up, it's best to just GET OUT and worry about details later.

Going back into my room and moving the toothbrush around, I tripped and stubbed my toe on my desk, which made me fall on my side hard on the floor with a giant, "OOOOF!" As I hit the ground, my head hit, too, and I got a strong pain from behind my ear.

I was on the floor with eyes clenched shut. My toe was really hurting, my side was hurting, my back was hurting, and it was all my own stupidity that had put me there.

Like I sometimes did when I felt really stupid, I called myself by my secret name, Master Yoshi (from the phrase in my dream) - grimacing, I said, "great move, master yoshi." I was sarcastic even with myself sometimes.

Saying it out loud wasn't something that I almost ever did, maybe never before. It'd only become clear in my head what the word sounds were in the last year or so.

Thus, when I said it, it was new, but it also generated a distortion effect on my vision, a disconnected sense of where my body was, my foot/side/head pain vanished, and I was left with a kind of spinning-room feeling like I had once when I got an ear infection.

That spinning stopped when I looked up and saw my sister, wrapped in a towel, looking down at me. Her face had started out as derisive and scowling, but as I watched, it softened and her eyes flared a little, like she was focusing on me for the first time in a while.