The Laws of Evening: Stories

by Mary Yukari Waters

In this dazzling and critically acclaimed debut collection, Mary Yukari Waters provides a rare glimpse into the heart and humanity of a society in the midst of immense change. These graceful, expertly crafted stories, set in Japan, explore the gray areas between the long shadow of World War II and the rapid advance of Westernization. The women and children who inhabit this terrain have lost husbands and fathers to the war, and ancient traditions to American pop culture. Parents are mystified by the future of forks and knives, hairspray and hip-hop; children embrace it.
With these stories of upheaval and renewal, estrangement and reconciliation, Waters provides keen insight into the experience and sensibility of different generations as they confront an altered world. A virtuoso collection infused with warmth, The Laws of Evening announces a stunning new voice in fiction.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Japan, Historical Fiction, Asia, Asian Literature, Japanese Literature

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of short stories, for the most part set in post-war Japan as an ancient culture is left trying to re-establish customs and traditions which are rapidly being usurped by Western, particularly American influences during the occupation.

Each story is well written, if not finely crafted and Waters seems to have a real strength in describing elements of the landscape, particularly anything relating to water. Is this some sort of super power attributable to her surname? Maybe. It did make me wonder if she felt some sort of personal affinity with her namesake.

Many of the stories are sad, touching or regretful. An almost universal theme of the mourning of change is woven into each story, be it the change in health, change in pace of life or change in tradition. It's the sort of book which reminds you that you can only really appreciate your progress through life, if you can mourn a little of what is left behind.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful meditations on life and loss. I don't think I would have appreciated this book had I read it in my 20s but I loved these stories.

[Shawna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this slim volume from Powell's in Portland while visiting Maggie on Lia and my road trip. What an incredible find! This goes up there with Tobias Wolff for me - beautiful, elegant kernels of story all wrapped up like origami.

The stories are sad in a contemplative way - they stayed with me all day (I read one each morning on the bus). They depict Japan in the post-war period, straddling old traditions and learning how to adapt to a Western-dominated globe.

Highly, highly recommended.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book of short stories from my auntie, who was incarcerated by the Japanese during WWII. Like many of the stories’ protagonists, her life was uprooted and her fortune changed during this war, and she rebuilt her life in a different world afterwards. Her enjoyment of this book and empathy with people of the nation that held her captive reflect a major theme of the book: elders who’ve seen much change often develop a broader, more compassionate outlook.

These are tales of Japanese people during and after the Japanese invasion of China and WWII: a Japanese civilian family in occupied China near a prison camp, grandmothers who object to post-war Westernization of Japan (but whose children embrace it and grandchildren live it), a father who survives the war and rebuilding but loses the ability to connect with family, women who lose soldier husbands and remarry men with various post-traumatic stress symptoms. Most of these stories are told from the perspective of women in midlife or later. The stories are all about change, both as the results of natural aging and political and social upheaval.

One of the most haunting stories is about a family with three daughters, one of whom is similar to her mother, extremely shy and passive. Like her mother, she is considered for an arranged marriage. Though a personality match to her mother, the daughter’s possible marriage is bound to be different. Western influences have caused arranged marriages to be less popular, and have changed the circumstances under which men consider such marriages.

A major theme is aging, and how people view life differently throughout their lives. In some stories, they age with grace, keeping themselves healthy and enjoying each day that comes. In other stories, they judge the younger generation as disrespectful and long for the past. One of my favorite stories combines both aspects, as the elder becomes increasingly forgetful but resents interference from her solicitous daughter-in-law. This story ends with the mother making some peace with her situation and her stage of life, in an unexpected way.

It’s refreshing to read a collection of short stories that flow so smoothly from one to the other and reach a conclusion that ties the stories together in a subtle but positive way. The last story, about a man who needs to scale back his life’s work in field biology due to health reasons, shows that a person can choose whether or not to see the silver lining in unexpected and unwanted change.

[Sarah Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, poetic writing. Loved learning about Japanese culture through her short stories.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graceful, slow, with space to breathe. 


Some of my favorites

Shibusa, 25

Aftermath, 39


Rationing

...he was conscious now, as he had been then, of his utter useless. From now on, it was the nurses and doctors who would do everything, to whom his father would turn for help. 87


If only he could have broken the news to his father. If only he could have caught the spontaneous reaction, however minute! He saw ahead to how his father would die, as courteous and restrained in his final hours as he had been in his life. Saburo had expected more: a brushfire that would drive some vague, crouching thing out of hiding. He had dreaded an onset of naked emotion, had pushed it off to the future when he would be better prepared, but never, he realized now, had he considered the possibility of it not happening. 87


Saburo had made the best decisions he could, as his father had, surely, with all his careful ways. But warped by circumstance and changing worlds, compounded by time and habit the results had come up short. It was inevitable. The longer one's life, the more room it left for errors of calculation. 90


The Laws of Evening 

There were many new diseases in Japan  now. Wounded soldiers were coming home after being exposed to bacteria from strange, unsanitary lands: Burma, mainland China, the Philippine Islands. In addition this was June, rainy season-_when such bacteria would be most rampant, when the air lay on your skin like damp laundry all month long and mildew bloomed overnight, black and green and ashy pink: between ceramic tiles, on the edges of dish towels wrung out to dry, inside day-old clumps of dearly gotten rice. 96


Sono was not, in her own view, a religious woman. However, each morning and evening she placed rice and water before the family altar, burning half a stick of incense each time and chanting sutras in a practiced, efficient voice. The flowers at the altar she changed once a week. Whatever her own doubts might be of the afterlife, it was not her place to impose them upon her loved ones and deprive them of sutras that might make all the difterence to them, wherever they were. The altar tablets-miniature bronze headstones with four tiny clawed feet, consecrated each September by a monk-had taken on increasing significance over the years, as the essence of her husband and children faded from the surrounding alleys and even from these very rooms. 96


Maybe so, Sono thought, and as she was brooding about it July rolled along, and with it the fiftieth anniversary of her husband's death. At two o'clock on Tuesday the twenty-first she attended an official thirty-minute sutra chant at a temple on the other side of town. The twins' fiftieth had been taken care of month earlier. Now no more anniversaries were a required. Sono rode home on the bus that afternoon feeling curiously devoid of emotion, the gong's aftermath still wavering in her ears. She had done them all: first, third, seventh, thirteenth, thirty-third, fftieth; each anniversary breaking yet another link binding the spirits to this earth, until they rose up and away like helium balloons. She had done her duty. Now they were far away in a safe place, out of danger beyond any possible doubt. 98


What now? Croquet at the senior citizens' center? At the thought, a flash of protest rose within her. This final period of her life should be more than a pitiful appendage to middle age. Surely it had a significance of its own. If she carried into evening the laws of afternoon-more activities, more people

more duties, beyond all bounds of reason-something crucial would pass her by. Sono did not articulate these ideas but she sensed them, and she sat musing till the ground before her became crisscrossed with the jizo's long shadows. 100


Birth. Fraught with danger, this transition from one world to the next. Amazing that it succeeded at all So much could go wrong: women dying in childbirth, fetuses shifting into wrong alignment inside the womb, accidents of cell division-or of social error-growing unchecked for months, only to be destroyed after a pointless waste of hope and energy. And sometimes, for no comprehensible reason, newborns just did not survive; the qualities that had sustained them in the womb proved to be inadequate for the outside world. 

Sono thought of those little lives, doomed in their infancy. If she were younger, the very thought of those poor peasant mothers and their babies crying out for each other, understanding nothing, would have twisted her insides with terrible pain. Now, it merely moved her with a vague tender sorrow that was almost pleasurable. Aaa, life... so sad, Sono thought, fanning herself with a round paper ucbiwa as crows cawed their lonely way home over the dark treetops. She felt quite removed from it all. Having little left to lose, little left to desire, had lifted her onto a halcyon mountaintop from which she saw all the sufferings of mankind blending beautifully, like tiny trees, into the landscape below.

And now a new dimension, heavy with infinities of time and space, hung just above reach in the failing light, straining against the glowing membrane of the evening sky. Sono wanted to cup this sky in her palm and gauge the temperature of what lay beyond: cool, surely like a clear mountain lake. If she could prick the sky with a pin . .. 

Did babies in the womb also have premonitions of an outside world? Vibrations, growing stronger as the time approached; then that final period of limbo when familiar walls shrank in places and opened up in others, subtly disturbing the ordered space; amniotic fluid gently shifting in preparation for something incomprehensible. Did babies feel it too-vague anticipations, to be confirmed beyond measure in the shock of birth: chilled air, sounds scraping across a virgin eardrum, hot skin on skin? 103


Egg-face

Mrs. Nakajima had never had a boyfriend before her marriage. Mr. Nakajima had dated sporadically, his crowning achievement being a one-night sexual encounter with a barmaid at the establishment he and his co-workers frequented after work. They had no advice to pass on to Ritsuko. They did not fully comprehend how they themselves had become linked together; they merely hoped Ritsuko would grow into marriage as they had--in the same mysterious way she had learned to crawl, then later to walk. 115


The Way Love Works

But my behavior had changed since our arrival; the language also cast its spell over me. I was fluent in Japanese--it was my first language-but since our move to America, my vocabulary had stayed at a fourth-grade level. So in Japan my speech, even my thoughts, reverted from those of a cocky teenager to those of the more innocent, dependent child I had been five years ago. Here I was no longer capable of arguing with the contemptuous finesse I used back home. Here I was at a loss. 130


Where was that little alley that never changed?" I ask Grandma as we resume walking abreast. She gives a short, puzzled laugh as I describe the alley to her. "I have no idea what you're calking about," she says.

"Ginkgo tree? Cicadas? What kind of clue is chat to go on?"

"There was an old-fashioned adobe wall," I say.

Grandma shakes her head, baffled. "They've torn lot of those down." She stops short. "Meri-chan," she says, "did we remember to lock the back door when we left?"

Perhaps in the future when Grandma is gone, I will walk with my small daughter-who may have even less Japanese blood than I do through these same neighborhood alleys.

And a certain quality of reproach in the late-afternoon sunlight will remind me with a pang, as it does now, of my mother's confident voice saying, I'm irreplaceable.

"Once, when I was a girl," I will tell my daughter, gripping her hand tightly, "I walked these alleys just like you, with my own mother." Saying these inadequate words, I will sense keenly how much falls away with time; how lives intersect but only briefly.

142


"Grandma,"' I interrupt gently. "It's too late for that now. It doesn't matter."

Grandma quickens her pace, as she sometimes does when she is annoyed. ""One doesn't always get the luxury of timing, she says. 143


Mirror Studies 

From nowhere, a familiar tiredness hit Kenji. The shock and disappointment of it paralyzed him; he had put so much faith in this comeback. He sat still, feeling himself descending in slow motion beneath the bright surface of the dinner conversation, as if to the bottom of a sea.

With this underwater sensation, which so often accompanied his fluctuations in blood flow, he gazed dully at his wife sitting before him. She was eating slowly, pensively, deep in a world of her own. He recalled her saying once at a dinner party that her own mother, who had died when Sumiko was in middle school, used to reminisce about eating yam rice while she was pregnant with Sumiko. He wondered if his wife was remembering this now. It was strange how these small shifts in blood flow could open him up to the sadness of things, like a receding tide exposing sea creatures crumpled on the sand. His wife's way of eating this dish struck him as profound, an acknowledgment of all the loss and longing chat had created it. 166

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Laws of Evening mean't new rules of writing for me. Mary Yokura Waters gives us special access to a secret world we know nothing about. I think it's her eye for detail that famaliarizes us with a scene; and then it's her ability to develop true to life characters that teach us everything we don't know. Her portrayal of post World War II gives us a unique perspective from the other side. I love "Aftermath"! Here the young mother does her best to bring up her child the best way she can, but emotion runs deep as she sees the way her child is growing. She hates peanut butter, baseball and American Soldiers. "How could you.." she says when her son turns his back on his own culture. "Your father. those men killed your father!"

In "Mirrored Studies", she gives us an arrogant character who I would tend to hate and mistrust - he's a scholar and a gasbag. But here again, Waters has developed a story line that shows what happens to everyday people when their world is turned upside down by forces beyond their control . With change, everyone has a tendency to clings to important events out of the past that make them what they are. In this case, in a short amount of space, Waters is able to take the most advanced of academics to his humblest beginnings. She lets the reader see not who her characters are now , but where they came from.

"Isn't life a resiliant force?" states one of her scientists in the story.

Inn my opinion, the writing of Mary Yukari Waters definitely is.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a delightful collection of short stories by a Japanese American woman, Mary Yukari Waters. The stories are mostly delicate and very Japanese (or what I consider Japanese) and so lightly flavored that they just give you a breeze of scent and taste. I loved them.

My favorite stories are "The Way Love Works," "Seed," "Rationing" and "Circling the Hondo."

I first heard about Mary Yukari Waters on this terrific radio program on Sunday evenings called Selected Shorts from Symphony Space, on which different mildly well-known people read short stories. I heard "The Way Love Works" read aloud from Waters collection and it was one of those totally lost in the story times. A book to own.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories is phenomenal. All of the stories are from the point of view of Japanese characters, most of them living in Japan. These stories investigate how people were affected by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you're familiar with the simple beauty of Japanese haiku, you'll love Waters' use of language throughout the book. She uses words carefully and precisely and these stories leave you feeling like you lived these people's experiences. It's a wonderful book.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book came up when i searched for books similar to wild swans, which i had read a whiles back. i thought that the title and the summary inferred that it would be short romantic stories about post war japan, but it just ended up to be a sad twisted version of aesop’s fabels with incoherent asian similies. i liked it in the beginning, when there was still hope for sex to emerge inthe book, but after a while, i skimmed, and quickly finished the book when it was apparent that it would keep telling the same stories over with different names and settings. Nice try, but no.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book of short stories that are lyrical enough to be poetry for me while sitting on the floor of the bookstore, during my breaks, at a time in my life when it was the closest thing to freedom I ever experienced.

The stories moved me incredibly, and I wept, openly, in the store.

I push this book on everyone that I love, because I want them to feel as deeply as I felt. I want them to see the things so beautiful and true that they cut like a knife so sharp that you don't feel it until you realise you are bleeding to death. And what a pleasure it is to die for such beauty.

[zespri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sand this is a lovely little book - will pass on to you for Japan/Asian reading

Not usually partial to short stories - i loved this. Each little story was a perfect vignette written from the inner world of a different Japanese woman. The premise - they survived the war their husbands did not. They write from the perspective of an era forever changed, whilst their children embrace the new post war culture.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon reading this again, I'm changing from a 3.5 rating to a 4. Some of the short stories were quite good, but I wasn't impressed with all of them. It seemed that the stories improved as the book progressed. I appreciated reading stories pertaining to the aftermath of the war for Japanese citizens. It's a subject I haven't encountered very often. Waters writes some beautiful sentences; I believe I'd enjoy a full-length book of her's more.

[Sunflower · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually avoid short stories. This is because of a completely unreasonable dislike of the genre, but this book is exquisite. The reader is transported to post-war Japan and placed gently down into these lives, into an atmosphere of peace and reverence, but sometimes overwhelming sadness. And the smell of burning leaves....

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't actually finish reading all of these stories, but those I did read were very good. Waters' style is very Japanese influenced, with a sort of literary elegance one often finds in haiku and other Japanese poetry. What I was not so keen on is the focus on older women as protagonists. But these protagonists allowed well for the kind of reflective quality Waters seems to favor.

[Katie Thomason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories share a theme and a voice. All show amazing strength and power in language so beautiful, simple and delicate. The stories of ordinary people coping in extraordinary circumstances never cease to surprise and delight the reader--even in the experience of sadness or pain.

[Aurelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A touching book revolving around the main characters and their lives changing in Japan after World War II. The two character's stories were different, also because of their gender. The boy worried about his father becoming blind, parlayed and dying of cancer, wanting to tell him that he admired him as a father and as a man was a sad and heart breaking scene.

[Paolo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Japanese resilience is always something to admire at. Building themselves up from tattered souls from the bombings and crippling postwar debt. Which could be seen in the cracks and idiosyncrasies in these stories, woven with beautiful words and a culture no one else but someone who lived there could have made.

[Rob M · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories are short, have a sameness in tone that makes it hard for me to distinguish them from each other if I read more than one at a time. I find it best to read one and meditate on it a bit before going on to the next.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories that succinctly capture time, place and character emotion. Every image, every intonation made me homesick for Japan. Set in China and Japan during the Japanese occupation of China and WWII.

[Marilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waters easily evokes place and mood, and renders the interior life—not just of mind but of soul—with langorous and quiet confidence. She is not after the sensational but the magic of the ordinary, of the unexpected and the ordained. I’m in awe of her wisdom, and her poise.

[Adriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a small book and took me but a day to read. It's all short stories with regards to the ever turbulent times in Japan in the early 1900's and the families that lived through it. Very surprising little book!

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Beautiful and poetic. Step into the life and loves of Japan. Get to know the women, the boys, the men. Experience what life is like form their perspective, but be ready for a wave of emotion with each new story even from those who would rather die than reveal that emotion."

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of these stories are about characters facing dramatic change, having lost their entire families, coping with aging and death. These are sad but also hopeful stories about their resilience. These are worth rereading. The stories are short but full of ideas and feeling that resonate.

[Stacey Sturgis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautifully written collection of short stories about the lives of various women in Japan starting shortly before WWII and gradually moving to the present day. For a first published work this is impressive. Vivid imagery and compelling storytelling.

[Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, sometimes breathtakingly, even painfully, ethereal, a quality I often find in Japanese literature, which combined with a more American thorough tightness makes for deep reading.

She's a wonderful find and I'll try her novel next.

[natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in a long time. Beautifully written stories about the nature of grief. All with Japanese characters right before, during and after the second world war. Will definitely re-read.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted vignettes of life in Japan during and after the Second World War. Spare evocative descriptions of places and people, skillfully, but what seemed like effortlessly, done, which is my favorite kind of writing.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've realized that short story collections are not my favorite, but this book made me want to read more Japanese-themed books. I liked how she incorporated their language and culture. I was somewhat bored throughout this book, but I do like her writing style.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a foreigner living in Japan this book gave me a beautiful picture of Japan and gave words to many feelings and experiences that I've had in my interactions with this complex and vibrant culture. A very lovely book.