The Happy Days
“Starting tomorrow, we’re having bananas every morning!” Daddy declared one day.
He had heard somewhere that bananas were good for the body. While they are easy to come by these days, bananas were an expensive luxury when Totto was a young girl. For years after the war, children were only given the fruit if they fell ill. Totto couldn’t remember another time when she greeted one of Daddy’s declarations with such delight.
Along with their gentle, charmingly curved shape, bananas are a sunny color that brings a smile to your face. Easy to peel, the fruit inside is creamy and, best of all, sweet. From that day onward, bananas appeared on the breakfast table every morning.
Meals at Totto’s house, she came to understand, were slightly different from those at other households. Before the war cast a significant shadow over their lives, back when food was still plentiful, Totto’s family enjoyed mainly Western-style dishes. Breakfast always consisted of bread and coffee. Each morning, Daddy placed coffee beans inside a square wooden box and turned the metal handle around and around to grind them with a loud crrrrunch. Afterwards, the beans gave off the most wonderful aroma of coffee. As a rule, fresh-baked bread was delivered daily to their home from a bakery by Senzoku Station. Daddy’s favorite was the round French bread that was crunchy on the outside and shaped like a rotund bottom.
Meat dishes were served on nights when the whole family gathered around the dinner table. Daddy loved beef most of all, so Mother seared it in a frying pan or grilled it on the stove, preparing the cuts of meat in a variety of ways so they never tired of it. Meals in most Japanese households at the time typically centered around broiled or simmered fish, but thanks to Daddy, Totto was able to relish tasty meat suppers every day. It was too bad, though, for Mother and Totto’s brother, who was younger than Totto by two years; they preferred fish.
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Daddy was a violinist and concertmaster for the New Symphony Orchestra (now the NHK Symphony Orchestra). Nicknamed “the Japanese Heifetz” after the great Russian violinist Jascha Heifetz, he was busy all year long playing in regular concerts, regional performances around the country, and studio recording sessions. He once even earned the distinction of “Japan’s top performing musician.”
Totto was astounded to learn that it was none other than the legendary composer Beethoven who first brought her parents together.
One year, as December drew to a close, Daddy and his orchestra friends planned an end-of-year performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at Hibiya Public Hall. They had to sell tickets to fill the venue themselves, which made the Ninth Symphony the perfect choice. The final movement of the symphony features a chorus, and it was common at the time to cast local music school students as the singers. That saved the organizers from having to pay professional choralists, which they appreciated, and since the students raced against each other to sell the most tickets, the house was filled in no time.
One of the chorus members for that performance was Mother. She was a student at Toyo Conservatory of Music (now Tokyo College of Music), and this concert was how she and Daddy met. Daddy was instantly drawn to the radiant figure Mother cut in her green knit jacket and skirt and her matching beret, all of which she’d made by hand. He invited her for tea at the Nogizaka Club, a café on the ground floor of his apartment building. The two hit it off and talked about a great number of things. Fortunately for Daddy, he was also quite handsome.
Into the wee hours they chatted, forgetting all about the time. Before they knew it, the trains and buses had stopped running for the night, so Daddy invited Mother to his apartment upstairs. She was living a few miles away at her uncle’s house in Kojimachi, from which she commuted to the conservatory, but it was too late to call home. Everyone in the house would be asleep. There was nothing for it. Mother followed Daddy to his apartment.
Later, Mother talked about how silly she’d been to go with him—at twenty, she should have known better—but perhaps she had been a bit pleased that this handsome concertmaster was expressing an interest in her. Either way, if Beethoven had never composed Symphony No. 9, Mother and Daddy may never have met, and Totto may never have been born. The world works in wondrous ways.
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Mother and Daddy began their life as newlyweds in Nogizaka, and Totto was born in a hospital nearby. But because Daddy’s orchestra rehearsed near Senzokuike (currently in Ota Ward), they decided to move to a house in Kitasenzoku, a neighborhood directly to the north, so that he could walk to work. Before the war, Totto lived there with Daddy, Mother, her younger brother, and Rocky. It was during their years at this house that Totto’s second younger brother and younger sister were born.
Their house had a modern design with a red roof, white walls, a patio, and hardwood floors, and the family slept on beds instead of the more traditional futon mattresses. They also had a little pond in the yard with floating water lilies and a grape trellis over the patio. Every autumn, the vines would produce an abundance of sweet, delicious fruit. Once the war began to escalate and food supplies grew scarce, Daddy used the trellis to grow kabocha squash. He was quite successful, and the family cheered the results.
The house also had a greenhouse where Daddy kept orchids and roses that he tended meticulously every morning. “Totsky, come here,” he would sometimes call out, and Totto would trot over to help. Her job was to pluck the small rose beetles, with their snouts like little elephant trunks, from the sprouts and buds.
Totto’s clothes were all hand-sewn by Mother. Their designs were original and innovative, nothing like the clothes found in shops. Mother said she referred to sewing books that had been imported from overseas to make them, but her creation process was like no other. Whenever she came across a bolt of fabric that she thought would make a nice garment, she would throw a length of it over Totto’s head and snip, snip, snip away with scissors to cut it down to size. She then swiftly stitched the pieces of fabric together and in no time flat, a new outfit would be completed.
“You’re a magician!” Totto exclaimed whenever Mother presented her with a new garment. Totto wasn’t sure what that method was called—draping, perhaps? Whatever it was, it left her in awe every time.
Mother had a knack for such creative tasks, whether it was sewing or cooking, and she seemed to enjoy the process. At Totto’s school, Tomoe Gakuen, the children went through a phase where, instead of simply opening the lids to their lunch boxes at lunchtime, they took to flipping them over and eating their lunches upside-down. While it lasted, all the children asked their mothers for lunches that looked like pictures from the bottom up.
Mother excelled at making these “picture lunches.” She’d fill Totto’s lunch box so that when it was flipped over, the colors and shapes of the rice and side dishes transformed into a little girl’s face, for example. The results enthralled Totto’s schoolmates, who would cluster around her at lunchtime and squeal, “Let us see! Show us!” While seemingly modern, lunches with character designs in the food, now called kyaraben, actually trace back to before the war.