I moved to Japan because my husband's father and elder brother Jiro had died in an early morning fire that destroyed the family house. A nephew, two years old, whom I had never met, had also perished, virtually wiping out the male line of the Tanaka family. The day after we had received the news, my husband woke me before the sun had risen. "Ellen," he said, "I must return to Kasama." I knew he meant for good, though he was afraid to say it. For six generations, his family had been making pottery in their sloping kiln built up the side of a hill; without him, the dynasty would end. His mother feared losing the business to a distant relative, one who did not understand that her husband lived on in his clay.
        "We must return," I told him.
        Relief unfurled his dark eyebrows, and I kissed them. I had come to think of a life as a series of little string pieces knotted together, one at a time, to form a misshapen doll. This journey, I knew, could be another bit of string attached to myself, or it could be the first piece of a new doll, one that perhaps would not end up as deformed.
        Kasama, my husband once told me, is the word for the hat worn by rice paddy workers, that conical umbrella fastened under the chin with string. They call the village this because of the shape of the mountain. The villagers see the mountain as a benevolent spirit looking over them, calling it Kasama-san because in the Japanese language, the title san shows respect and affection for people--and mountains. When I learned this, I encountered the first inaccessible door to Koji's culture: how could I, even as someone who believed in protecting the environment, comprehend how my husband could genuinely regard a mountain as a grandfather? But I had come to hate who I was--a woman who jarred other people by always saying the wrong thing, who had few friends, who loved a husband she could not fully understand. To be born of mountain stone seemed like the greatest gift one could receive. As I settled my affairs in New Jersey, I envisioned myself as a Japanese woman, someone who could bow to the authority of a mountain and have no qualms. Someone who could find peace in the order of a rock garden, the way a leaf lays on the water, or the transformation of clay into a bowl.
        I could have refused to go. I could have demanded that Koji choose between his family and me. We had careers: Koji his electrical engineering and me, my accounting. But perhaps because of the love between us, we knew that we had to go to Kasama, and we had to do it together. As Koji waved to our house as we drove off, I realized that this leaving was more difficult for him than for me. For me, the ground beneath the house had shifted and softened, unsteady ground to swallow me whole.
        Koji did not know it, but inside of me voices cried out, mental demons, the sounds of the children who had been washed from my womb, our children, defective or conceived of a mother unable to nurture them. They haunted me day in and day out. I hoped to leave them in their sewer-graves. But I could feel my abandonment as real as if they were still alive. I did not look back for fear that I would see their tiny faces peering out of the darkened windows.
        By the time we arrived in Japan, the Tanaka clan had rebuilt the family house with its wood and stucco sides and its tile roof, its paper windows stretched over wooden grids, amber pebbled plastic to cover the windows in the winter. The new home appeared to be the same house I had visited twice before; it perched on the side of a hill above a valley of rice paddies. Only a faint smell of charred ground and deep lines around the mouths of the women betrayed the tragedy. Slipping out of my shoes in the vestibule, I waited. Okiasan, as we called Koji's mother, petite and stone-faced, welcomed us with her hands clasped at her stomach. Our sister-in-law Reiko bowed quickly and turned away. Her loss of both husband and son visible only in the downward slope of her shoulders, she scurried out, followed by her two shy daughters. Only Koji's sixteen-year-old sister, Michiko, met me with eager eyes. Pretty and enthusiastic, her hair shiny and perfect in a neat bob, her eyes quick but surprisingly direct, her voice lilting: she was the one who charmed me.
        Michiko found herself on the verge of womanhood in the midst of societal changes that suggested that she might have a freer life than her mother. She wanted to escape, she confided, and not in the arms of a man. She wished for a much more modern path: education in the United States. For Koji, it had been easy, she whispered to me, because he was a man, and he was expected to seek out the best. Especially there, in Kasama, outside of the cities, women did not follow their own dreams. Michiko wanted Westernization, so that she could return to her homeland on her own terms, as an actress and not as a translator and eventual wife, as her schools told her she should be. Following me through the house, she asked questions in her sing-song voice. I did not want to remember the United States; however, I had goals of my own, not dissimilar to Michiko's. These goals required that I respond to Michiko with all the patience of a wise-woman and give her the courtesy of an honorable answer.
        As a child, I did not belong well to groups. The children taunted me and played tricks on me until the hurt cut so deep that I cried. My shell was not hard enough, my demeanor not aggressive enough, my looks so average as to be invisible. For those reasons, I became an instant target wherever we moved. My mother always told me that I simply did not try hard enough to fit in. Start over, she would say as we pulled into the driveway of a new house, this time you can do it, if you just put your mind to it.
        Even as an adult, I failed. My co-workers disliked me. I had chosen accounting simply because numbers and columns posed little challenge and because there always seemed to be a glut of accountant want ads in the newspaper. My colleagues, on the other hand, approached accounting with true appreciation. They hated my easy rise through the ranks. They hated that I did not love my profession. They hated that I did not get flustered over deadlines and other people's mistakes. They shunned me by not inviting me out after work. Japan-bashing had become the rage, and they saw my marriage to Koji as dangerous, even traitorous. I could not understand why they would believe this, why they would not tolerate a different culture among them, why they seemed to fear me.
        I spoke to Koji about this only once. We had just moved into our New Jersey house, and he was installing a gas dryer himself using the imprecise directions on the manual.
        "Does your family hate that you married an American?"
        "My family doesn't hate."
        "Were they upset? Disappointed?"
        "They didn't say." He looked up at me, his hair fallen a little onto his forehead. "Now, quiet. I've got to figure this out or we'll be gassed to death in our sleep."
        I understood that indeed, they had been disappointed, but that he would not hurt me by telling me this. I wanted his family to love me, to give them a reason to admit they had been wrong about me. "My mother uses us as an example of how she raised me in the spirit of tolerance." I sighed. "People are sometimes uncomfortable here, you know. With mixed marriages."
        "Not as bad as in Japan. In Japan, everyone must fit in. Here, we are free to get other people angry."
        I wished desperately to be Koji, not to hate, not to be angry, not to fear. If I could not be him, then I wanted to think like him. "Tell me what you're thinking."
        "I'm thinking that this dryer is a pain-in-the-ass."
        I cringed. Koji, my gentle husband, had learned yet another vulgar phrase.
        Okasan kept a traditional Japanese house even as some of her neighbors, not as well-to-do, bought chairs and tall tables, Western-style beds. We ate food that Okasan's mother had taught her how to cook. Although I saw her wear a kimono only once, at my wedding, she kept an ornate red silk one in a special trunk. She and Reiko forbade television, because Michiko and the two little girls needed to study, even though most others in Kasama owned small sets. The family had enough money to install glass windows on the rebuilt house, but Okasan disliked curtains. She said they harbored dust and germs, unknown living things. The plastic panels were acceptable only because they stopped the winter wind better than paper. The family owned a car, but only her late husband had driven it. Now it was declared for emergencies only, perhaps for a family outing, but not for every day.
        I felt as though I had stepped back into another century.
        Koji and I received the honor of inheriting his parents' tiny room. His mother scurried across the tatami mats with her meager belongings into Reiko and the girls' room. This move clearly pleased Koji, although he said nothing. I found it difficult to know that I had displaced his mother.
        "In the cities," Koji explained as he undressed for his evening bath and knotted his yukata deftly at the waist, "couples save their money so that they can afford an apartment of their own. Sometimes, if the man has a good position, this can be done. Less fortunate couples find themselves locked into the family home. But they hope not for long."
        "But what about sex?" I whispered.
        He shrugged. "As you like to say, when there's a will, there's a way."
        He had once tried to make love to me in my parents' home, but I had pushed him away. I couldn't--the very thought of my parents discovering us terrified me. I felt like a teenager doing something illicit.
        Okasan moved through the rooms as if a ballet dancer: fluid, careful, light on her feet, concentrated in her expression. My own mother was much bigger and less purposeful. Koji told me that the marriage of his parents had been arranged, as was still sometimes the custom, by a matchmaker who knew the two families. Okasan was the youngest daughter of a once-successful merchant from Mito who had lost much of his fortune before being able to marry off his youngest, and hence, Okasan married beneath her station. Since the age of six, she had practiced the art of the tea ceremony and knew the intricacies of high breeding. Koji's father, on the other hand, came from a well-to-do family but one that worked with clay that made cracks in the skin of their hands. Although he was not coarse, he lacked the refinement of Okasan's family.
        I tried to help Okasan with the house work, but every time she gently pushed me away. "Never mind. I will do it. You go rest." Still, I watched and learned, studied the movement of each finger, each gesture, so that one day she would accept me as she did Reiko, who bustled behind her in a great show of helpfulness.
        After I had been in Kasama nearly a year, I finally had the courage to ask a personal question of Okasan. As she rolled up the futons in the morning, my eyes rested on the gentle, yielding curve of her back. "Forgive me, Okasan, if I ask too much," I said in my hesitant Japanese. "What did you think of Otosan when you first met?"
        She regarded me with a light smile on her lips, the most I had ever seen. "I thought him handsome and strong. I liked the way he held himself." For a moment, her eyes looked inside of herself, to the memory, and the dreaminess in her expression filled me with my own love for Koji. Breaking away from her memories, Okasan leveled her eyes at me. "And you, Ellen-san. What do you think of gracing this family with another heir?"
        I stared at her, horrified that my deficiency might be revealed. Taking a moment to compose myself, I said, in the softest, most even voice possible, "If Koji and I are so blessed, we would be as happy as you."
        Reiko, our sister-in-law, hated me, perhaps because she believed that I had taken her place as the wife of the eldest son. She was a dull, silent, brooding woman, but I could not tell if this was because she had lost her son and husband, or if this was a natural tendency. In the beginning, she corrected my Japanese so stringently that I could not complete a thought. However, I soon learned so well that she could find little fault. I followed her on her daily shopping trips, not because I wanted to be with her, but because I could learn much from her. We went into the stores, Reiko always first, and while she selected her items, I conversed with the shopkeepers.
        One day, as we trudged back up the hill to the house, Reiko said to me, "They talk with you because they do not wish to be rude."
        I knew her meaning well enough to reply, "I talk with them because I do not wish to be rude."
        My shoes with ties had no place in Kasama, for I had not mastered the art of slipping them on and off quickly, without undoing the knots. I bought loafers, fashionably Western but practical for a budding Japanese. Okasan nodded with approval when she saw me slip them off onto the mat in the vestibule, but later, when I asked for her to teach me how to prepare sushi, she smiled. "It's okay. You go rest."
        She did not know that I had only to touch the sushi mat and the ingredients to make it, for I had memorized the technique. I had seen the look of satisfaction on her face when she rolled the sushi, and I wanted it for myself. I could only imagine the pleasure of perfectly cooked udon noodles, or tsukemono with the right, pickled bite. Be patient, Ellen-san, I told myself as I bowed to my mother-in-law, she will let you in time. For hours, I sat in the well-tended garden next to the house to find the strength in the angles of branches and in the raked coarseness of sand.
        In the dark of the house, Koji and I whispered to each other beneath the heavy quilts; voices carried too easily through the thin cardboard walls.
        "Your step is becoming very light," Koji told me as he entwined his fingers in mine. "And your voice has become like that of a bird."
        "You sound sad. Why?"
        He did not say anything for a long time. I could not see his face, only the vague outline of his head. Finally, he took a deep breath. "I like hiking boots," he said.
        I cupped our two pairs of hands and laughed into them. "And loud American voices?"
        "Maybe not the voices. But brashness. So un-Japanese."
        "But Koji, I want to be Japanese. Here you have such a spiritual society. What do we have in America?"
        He withdrew his hands. "Much more than you know."
        "Are we two expatriates of different countries?"
        "Expatriates," he said carefully. "Yes. Perhaps we love each other as much for our countries as for ourselves." He sighed. "If only my mother would have accepted one of my cousins to oversee the business. I am an electrical engineer, not a potter."
        I was already Japanese enough to imagine myself a mountain that refused to be worn down by the rain--enough stone to withstand anything. As Koji told me of his restlessness, I smiled and said yes, I understood how he could be unhappy. It was a very difficult problem. By the way I said it, I had refused to return to America. He looked away from me with such sad eyes that I wanted to cry. But still, it did not dissuade me from my goal.
        I visited the pottery workshop on Thursdays when I arrived with two bento boxes of sushi for Koji's and my lunch. Sometimes Koji's cousin Hideo ate with us. Hideo was the third son of Otosan's brother, and he had come to the Tanaka workshop to escape the shadows of his elders. Koji treated him more as a brother than as a worker, and I often wondered if Hideo reminded him of Jiro. We often squatted in a corner on the kiln shed and ate quickly. The kiln itself, tiered and sloping upward on the steep hill, dominated these lunches, for it was impossible to ignore, with its 40,000 pieces of pottery loaded into it, some each day, until ready to fire. Whenever Koji lit the oven, six times a year, I stayed home.
        "What do you think of the pottery?" Koji asked me, holding up a newly fired vase and rotating it on his palm.
        "It is very Japanese."
        He smiled. "You don't have to talk like that with me. Remember, I'm practically American. And I never liked this much myself."
        The pottery was plain and primitive, somber with its dark glazes, almost rough on the surface. Many vases were adorned with a sash of clay, simply knotted, permanently fixed, and I did not like this pretense of fabric. I wanted to like the pieces, to feel a connection with the hardened soil of the Tanaka family, but could not.
        "But is has a strong character," he said. "Simple. A foundation for good luck."
        "I'm not fond of the ties," I finally told him. "It isn't right with stone."
        Most days, Michiko arrived home from school early in the evening, and still in her navy blue uniform, she would take my hand and lead me into the bamboo grove across the street from the house, walking, talking, asking. I patiently explained America to Michiko, and, in exchange, she told me about Japan. As we wove our way through the bamboo, both caught up in our excitement, I touched trunks rising shiny and smooth to the canopy of narrow leaves; the trees seemed unreal, plastic, not living, growing plants. For this otherworldliness, I loved them. Koji once told me to run into this grove in the event of an earthquake. Bamboo roots are invasive and hold the ground together, he said. The trunks give and bend instead of falling like heavy maples. Here, he had said, you will be safe.
        We had three earthquakes in as many years, not severe ones, but I never ran into the grove. I was afraid of being the only one.
        In secret, Michiko and I pored over her college application forms. Her mother would not have approved of her dreams, but she would accept her daughter's flight once the details had been settled. I instructed her on what I thought the universities wanted to know, what points she should stress in her essays, to exploit her foreignness instead of trying to disguise it. She so feared the anger of her mother that I mailed the applications myself to hide Michiko's embryonic ties to the United States.
        Michiko, a true child of the Shinto religion, delighted in pointing out the serenity of certain rocks, of the undulating call of a bird, of the precision with which Koji and her mother raked the sand in the garden. She taught me to love shapes and harmony, to find the place within myself that felt still and calm. Soon, I could meditate on a single tree for an hour without becoming bored.
        For the first two years, before she turned eighteen, Michiko and I rode our bicycles into town on Sundays to do the shopping. Reiko was always given the day to spend with her girls, who were seldom home during the week, and Michiko and I were trusted to carry out her duties. In that way I learned the language and the bearing, the solicitudes, and the proper way to present oneself. I witnessed the attention to detail and appearance, the carefully smoothed exteriors as hard as the local Inada granite. Michiko did not rebuff my efforts as her mother and Reiko did. The townspeople called me gaijin-san, foreigner, with apparent affection. When I spoke Japanese, even haltingly, they beamed with pride, as if I were their child learning her first words. "Our gaijin speaks Japanese," they told their visiting countrymen.
        I mimicked Michiko and other women until my gestures became automatic and an integral part of who I was. By this careful study, I became a person of great standing in Kasama, a celebrity of sorts, someone with whom many people wished to associate. At the Inari shrine, sometimes Westerners would arrive with their cameras and loud, laughing voices, but they did not belong to Kasama. I could tell that the townspeople regarded them with amusement. Me, they took seriously. They spent much time trying to teach me the ways of the Japanese. By the time Michiko left for the United States, I could feel my new strength.
        It would have been fine, to be a mountain under Koji's rain, to withstand his sadness with only a measure of erosion.
        This time, the baby within me stayed. I had awaited the blood for so long that I had forgotten about the time that had passed. At first, Koji did not notice. Every night he returned tired and wan, barely able to eat. Sometimes we did not make love for almost two weeks; perhaps he assumed that he had missed my menstruation. When I realized that the pregnancy had progressed beyond six weeks, I went about my chores with lightheadedness, almost as if I were ill.
        Sitting on his heels, Koji noticed as he ate his supper. He stared at me with his penetrating gaze, a shrewdness I had only seen directed towards me, and I knew he sensed something. Not until we were alone in our room, did he ask, "What is it, Ellen?"
        "I'm pregnant," I whispered in his ear. I did not want the rest of the family to hear.
        He hugged me so tightly that it brought tears to both our eyes.
        "We can't tell anyone yet," I said. For the first time, I told him about all our children who had stayed briefly, sometimes for only a few days, and who had been washed away. A flicker of sadness passed through his eyes.
        "We have time," he said. "Another month maybe, before we have to buy you new clothes. Then we must tell."
        I nodded. Part of me wanted to shout the news on the doorstep, but another, darker part, full of superstition and dread, kept me silent. We finished dressing for bed.
        Koji, about to climb under the quilts, froze, one knee on the floor, one on the futon. "The baby will be a gaijin, you know. His eyes will be rounder, his hair perhaps not so dark and straight, his skin lighter, his bones bigger. Maybe he will even have green eyes. One look at him, and everyone will know. The Japanese are as racist as Americans. They don't trust foreigners."
        "They trust me."
        He shook his head. "They trust you as a foreigner. They don't trust you as a Japanese. Our son--or daughter--will not belong."
        "Nonsense. He will be Japanese." And I will, I finished mentally, be a Japanese mother.
        Michiko wrote short, factual letters to the family, which Okasan read to me since I could not read kanji characters. Every once in a while, Michiko sent me a letter written in English chattering about her studies, her friends, her successes and failures in the plays she acted, the wonders she saw. She told me about a boy that she dated; he taught her to sail and to make sandwiches. I withheld these letters from everyone, including Koji, because I did not want to further wound this family that was bleeding into America. Clearly, Michiko would not return to Kasama. I missed her deeply, not understanding how she felt more like a sister than the women with whom I lived.
        "I miss the food," she wrote. "I find too much bread and not enough rice. I make Japanese food in my dorm room even though this is not allowed. People scare me when they look for so long into my eyes. But I become bold. Almost American."
        I sent Michiko money to buy a rice cooker and warned her to keep it well-hidden.
        Why was it that this family, in the countryside of Japan, a hundred kilometers from Tokyo, could not resist Westernization? I could not, cannot, answer. I had visited Tokyo and Kyoto; those cities were more progressive than Kasama, the children more exposed to gaijin, the ideas of the world flew more freely there--I could understand their leaving. But here, people depended on pottery and rice and granite. Their lives were proscribed from birth. So why did the Tanakas flee not only their home but their country? I could not understand anyone leaving the serenity this countryside offered. Was it the way the Tanaka children had been raised?
        Their mother had quick, knowing eyes. She hid her intelligence not with a pretense of stupidity but with her reticence. Okasan knew a finer life than this; perhaps the children had picked up, as Japanese do, on unspoken cues that they did not have to settle for this. That they should aspire for more. I did not know Otoson well. I had visited with him only three times, once before the wedding, once at the wedding, and once afterwards. From what Koji told me, I gathered he was a man dedicated to his career, hard-working but fair, scrupulous in his attention to quality, unyielding. Koji's parents did not seem like the types to drive their children from them. I could only guess that their children's clear intelligence hungered for the unknown, and in this way, they sought out America. I wondered how long it would take Michiko to discover violence, prejudice, and apathy.
        I wrote to Michiko, "When are you coming back? I'm glad that you're having such a great time, but Kasama is not the same without you."
        She wrote back: "If Kasama is not the same, come here. I carry myself wherever I go." I could almost hear her high-pitched giggle as she covered her mouth with her hand.
        In the spring when my belly had grown round and hard, the Tanakas begged me not to go out in public. Okasan even let me put the rice in the cooker, roll the futons in the morning, unroll them at night, anything to keep me busy in the house. She said, "Now that you will be a mother, you must learn how to keep a Japanese house." Slowly, finally, she began to instruct me. The Japanese baby within me had finally brought me to my destination. I accepted the honor of these duties with goosebumps running the length of my arms.
        But after I shook off the first trimester exhaustion, I grew inexplicably restless. I paced the small rooms after completing my chores, voraciously read Eastern philosophy, tried to teach myself kanji by pouring over the girls' school books, went out for walks and bicycle rides into the town, out to the country, although I never felt as though I had gone far enough. The veins in my arms ached almost as if they craved some opiate. Although I ate enough to nurture the growing life within me, I felt hungry, though for something more than food. I was no longer satisfied with a little work here and there, but wanted everything. I wanted to know how to run the house, how to clean, cook, how to bargain with shopkeepers, how to tend the garden, how to manage a child's education: all that the women did. Okasan only taught me a fraction of what I wanted to know.
        When I told Koji of my frustration, he said with a small laugh, "You're not only eating for two."
        He must have spoken to his mother, because she gave me many more time-consuming chores. Even then, as I stepped completely into my role as Japanese wife and mother, my mind ran wild. I refused to be invisible. When I was no longer able to keep my balance on a bicycle, I waddled the two miles into town every day. Okasan and Reiko were mortified. Koji, though his skin had acquired a sickly cast, seemed secretly pleased.
        I worried endlessly about Koji, who seemed to smile only at night when he splayed his fingers across my taut belly to feel the prod of a fist, a foot, a knee, an elbow. We whispered to the baby. Koji told him jokes and riddles, and I sang to him in my imperfect voice. Invariably, one of us ended up saying or doing something so ridiculous that we would laugh, yanking the comforter over our heads so that we would not wake the others. Every morning I awoke with the hope that the merriment of the night before had cured my Koji, but his feet got out of bed with the same heavy shuffle of the day before.
        On one of our Thursdays, I asked him, "What is it, Koji? Are you sick?"
        "I would tell you that."
        "Then what is it? You don't love me anymore?"
        He reached out to touch my cheek, but his fingers seemed to have no strength. "I will always love you."
        I thought for a minute. "Is it the workshop? Is it making money?"
        He frowned, shifted his weight on the balls of his feet. He broke his chopsticks in two and placed them inside the bento box. He had only eaten half of his sushi. "I don't know."
        "You don't know? How can that be?"
        He would not look at me. When he spoke, his voice was so low that I could barely hear him. "An old man, the father of one of our craftsman, records everything. But I can't decipher any of it."
        "Did you ask him?"
        "He says we have enough money. But he's a very old man. It's very difficult to question him further."
        In my other life, I might have yelled at him for being so timid. Or for trusting someone with his family's fortune. Or for not learning the intricacies of finances. But now, I merely said, "Show me the books."
        Hidden away in Koji's tiny office, I poured over the old man's accounting until I made some sense of it. Unfortunately, Koji's bookkeeper had no talent for math, nor had he been trained in accounting. He used a measure of common sense which was the only thing between what I found and complete disaster.
        "I will help," I assured Koji. "I won't let the workshop go to ruins." And I began to tear through the figures.
        Of course, I knew by then that something more than the accounting books consumed Koji from the inside out. The same country that had given us the miracle of a baby was destroying my husband. I began to wonder why Koji's older brother, Jiro, stayed in Kasama and what he found there to fill his short life and whether Koji could do the same.
        One day I started out on a walk to town before realizing that I had forgotten my purse. When I returned to the house, I found Reiko re-rolling the futons I had put away earlier. She rose, clearly surprised at seeing me, bowed a little. "Ellen-san," she said.
        "What are you doing?"
        "Oh," she said, "the ends were not meeting well today, and I thought I would save you the trouble of doing it again." Her eyes met mine. We understood each other perfectly. Every day, she had been going over my work and fixing it.
        "Forgive me," I told her. "I know I have much to learn."
        "That's all right. You are not Japanese. There is nothing to forgive." She was sincere in this. To my surprise, I saw that she did not hate me but merely found my gaijin ways clumsy and disruptive. For this, she could not blame me because it came from within, not from any laziness or lack of respect.
        I bowed slightly. "Thank you." But inside I felt as pale and as wan as Koji's face. As I watched Reiko expertly roll the futons, I thought: there are two kinds of birds--those that sing beautifully in captivity and those that cannot. But I had no idea which of us was caged.
        During the last months of my pregnancy I spent hours trying to rectify Koji's accounting books. Painstakingly, I copied entries into a new book so that we had at the very least a legible copy. As the baby in me jumped, I found myself thrilled with the order I was creating out of a numerical jungle. I had forgotten the part of me that relished regimentation and precision, the using of my mind to decipher the meaning of numbers and their consequences. I began to wonder if my success in accounting was not a fluke after all and if what I sought in Japan was nothing more than a lifestyle akin to neat columns of black and red numbers. As I worked side by side with Koji, I felt the baby settle into the last inch of space in my womb.
        Okasan said, "Do not work so hard, Ellen-san. Let the old man and Koji take care of it. Think of your baby."
        "I am thinking of my family," I told her. "I don't want you to live out your old age in poverty."
        She looked at me in evident shock, perhaps because I had never before spoken to her so strongly.
        Koji came to my bedside after the birth of our daughter. We called her Meri, Mary. I envisioned her name as Japanese phonetics whereas Koji saw in his mind the American version. To the ears of outsiders, we used the same name.
        "She is beautiful," he said. He did not point out that her face lacked the characteristic roundness of Japanese babies, that her face was longer than that, that her eyes were wider and her hair too light. I had seen these things, felt a twinge of knowing, and fell in love with the strange creature that had not washed away and instead had come to rest in my arms. She was solid, perfectly formed, smooth-featured.
        "You aren't disappointed that she is not a son?" I asked.
        He shook his head. "In truth, I wished for a daughter." For Koji to say "wish," I knew that it had been more of a prayer.
        I looked at him. Although he had begun eating more, his face was still hollow, etched with too many lines; his voice sounded harder than it had in America. We still loved each other, still whispered under the comforters, still sought out one another's touch, but Koji had suffered. I knew why he had prayed for a daughter--she wold not be obligated to run the family business. "You're an engineer through and through. Will Meri be an engineer, too?"
        "She is a girl. It will be difficult, unless she is lucky to have teachers who see her as more than a teacher or nurse. Girls are not often encouraged that way."
        I swallowed. He knew too well the American in me that believed in free will and opportunity, in climbing to the top despite what others expected. Perhaps if I stayed the rest of my days in Kasama, I would become a real Japanese, but I no longer knew if that was what I wanted. Meri had complicated matters. I could no longer act only for myself. If I caged her, she would only flee as Michiko had, never to return. I saw that my mountain had become a mound of soft earth. My life as it was eroded. "Who will take care of the pottery workshop when we leave?"
        He blinked, surprised but clearly pleased. "My cousin Hideo has a head for business. He has learned the trade, and the artisans will trust him more than they do me. My mother will just have to accept that her nephew can keep her husband's dream alive better than her son."
        "Then we should go back to America." I closed my eyes and sank back against the hard grain-filled pillow, fearful of Meri's power now that the umbilical cord had been cut to free her.
        Michiko took a job near our new home in New Jersey after she graduated. Perky, straightforward, smart: she betrayed her origins only with her accent. Occasionally, I saw her hand instinctively twitch to cover her mouth self-deprecatingly, but she had the control to keep it at her side. Her dream of acting had been put aside, but she found a new one in radio production.
        With Meri, Koji and I resumed our lives, more or less intact, walking around with knotted shoes and eating off brightly glazed dishes, oddly happy. As I raced after Meri, who ran on fat, uncertain legs, I grew thin. The other mothers looked at me strangely and asked how I had adopted Meri, not knowing that she had adopted me.
        One stranger dared to ask, "How much did it cost to adopt her?"
        I quickly found the center in me that still lived in Kasama, the part that did not anger and that knew the power of a perfectly placed rock. I answered quietly, "She is as priceless as the gems in the earth and as free as the wind." I could almost see the nods of approval from my Japanese friends and family--even Reiko. Okasan smiled quietly as she turned back to her work.
        One night, as Koji and I, exhausted from our long day, sat with our books in our high-post bed, I was suddenly struck with an inexplicable sadness, a yearning. I tried to think of myself as that knotted doll but could not; there was nothing left to tie. As I thought about this, my sadness dissolved. Somehow, at some point in time, I had become a stone daughter, permanently tied with a ceramic sash. A foundation.
        I reached out and took Koji's warm hand in mine; the calluses from Japan had almost disappeared.
        "What is it?" he asked.
        "Let's whisper under the covers."
        He looked at me through the glasses slipping down his nose, and smiled. He slid with me under the blankets where we met nose to nose, beneath the mountains of our cultures, and whispered our darkest desires and greatest fears.