Michael Copperman: YAKU • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Michael Copperman
YAKU

Grandma Betty never arrived from Hawaii empty-handed. Bringing herself was enough: though she was four-foot-ten at best, she carried herself gracefully, with an air of self-assurance and ease. She wore designer clothes from Japan with flowy sleeves and layered necklines pinned with gold broaches inlaid with mother of pearl, ornate jade necklaces and earrings, and a handbag worth as much as a modest motor vehicle. In the baggage claim, my mother, brother, and I waited with a cart for her suitcases, plural, leatherbound and heavy, and at least two and sometimes three large cardboard boxes packed full of loot from the grocery store she and my grandfather owned and ran—all the good stuff you couldn’t easily get in Oregon. Rice-wrapped candies and Arare with Furikake and white rabbit candies in yellow netting formed into leis. Mochi with black bean and red bean and kinako–mochi for the oven and bright pink logs of fish cakes packed beside logs of pickled daikon in Styrofoam coolers with blocks of dry ice. Mangoes and papayas and sometimes even jabon (Hawaiian pomelos), and once even a roasted duck meant especially because the last time I’d visited, I’d eaten three servings—the whole bird just for me. Grandma Betty brought the islands to us in dreary, cold Oregon, and my brother and I loved her for it.

We couldn’t wait to get home to the unboxing, to the piles of goodies that would last us months. She did insist that we learn our manners: with each new wonder, we exclaimed, did our little-boy dances, and then came up to grandma and gave a little bow and said, “Thank you, Grandma Betty!”

“It’s nothing,” she would say, which we understood meant the opposite of the way she smiled: our joy was everything, while her appreciation of our joy was a pleasure heightened by restraint. I understand this now to be particularly Japanese—the way Grandma Betty was with thanks and compliments, and the way we learned from her to always downplay what was most precious because the naming of it put it at risk from the jealous spirits, which is to say, the hungry and insatiable world. I do not know how long the ritual of unboxing lasted—perhaps it was only half an hour?—of all us there in my mother’s bright kitchen, unearthing treasure, celebrating it and then declaring it nothing.

Grandma Betty always stayed in the guest bedroom, which was the tv room the rest of the year, and so suddenly the usually dead Toshiba was always on, Days of Our Lives and The Price is Right playing for anyone who declared they were spending time with Grandma. When Grandma visited, we did things her way: we went to the movies and the mall, got sushi from the Japanese restaurant in Oakway Plaza run by the Japanese-speaking lady who was dying for a native speaker to gossip with, and got dessert every night (this was before her diabetes diagnosis). Grandma Betty liked to live it up, to be out and about the town, and when she was there, she made a point of picking up the checks, which meant my austere father could offer no complaint. I liked life her way, perhaps because there was always a treat in it meant just for me: every day grandma came along to pick me up from school was a mint chip ice cream cone day, unless it was a chocolate croissant day, or a day to hurry home where the kinako mochi was waiting hot in the oven.

Grandma was never Oba-chan to her face—her generation of Hawaiian Nissei held on hard to the traditions of the Japan their parents brought with them but also embraced America with a fervor. My grandpa was David; he married Betty, and after their oldest, Shichan, was unluckily born with her umbilical cord about her neck, they named their children Gail, Ken, Janis and Lynne. She’d worked hard for her money, the daughter of a picture-bride who came to the islands to meet her sugarcane plantation working husband, labored through her twenties and thirties in the store in Waianae, out where Farrington Highway ended and haoles went to die (so they told my haole father when he first came to dinner to meet the family). She worked at the store, raised five children, and kept food on the table. As the store flourished, and my grandfather opened a second location in Nanakuli and spent more and more time in town, where he had an apartment and a mistress, Betty had money and time to enjoy herself, and she did, always staying active with family and friends in the large local Japanese community.

Grandma Betty spoke pidgin so heavy it was hard to understand her in English, and her Japanese was always her best language. And so this raised a barrier between her and me, a precociously verbal child prone to talk: perhaps she admired my fluency, but she wasn’t going to connect with me through conversation. My brother was by then a student in the first Japanese bilingual programs in the United States, and so he talked with her in Japanese, which delighted and impressed her. They exchanged words every time they passed, and I was deadly jealous—my brother was surely more Japanese and was closer to being a good Japanese boy, while I had no idea what being Japanese meant beyond birthright. And so perhaps I might not have had a real relationship with my Grandmother were it not for the cards.

The Japanese cards, a deck of forty-eight, are called Hanafuda; they are stiffer and thicker than American cards, the backs black and plain, the cards themselves variations of plants, animals, and the occasional human: cranes and butterflies, boar and deer, chrysanthemum and willow and clover. In Hawaii, for Japanese immigrants of a certain age, the gambling game Sakura persists, wherein different combinations of cards form scoring triplets known as yaku that are worth different numbers of points. There are face-up cards, private player hands, and a discard pile, as each player tries to possess a scoring set of three cards, which can then be triumphantly smacked on the table with the declaration of “Yaku!” It is a game of patience and skill, and most of all luck—to make yaku is to secretly seek yaku, to intend and intuit it, to pounce upon chance or an opponent’s unknowing error.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when Grandma Betty taught me—perhaps seven?—but it helped that we played with a running tally of 5 cents a game (this was the 80s), and somehow over the hours, I would win bigger and bigger. Disgusted with each loss, Grandma Betty would make a great show of complaining or declare double or triple or nothing (which she would then lose). It must have taken incredible skill to seem to lose so persistently without me catching on—which perhaps explains why, to keep me interested, every fourth or fifth hand she would thoroughly trounce me, shake her head and say, “Lucky this time, I guess. You’ll get the next one, if you try.”

I always tried. I was a greedy boy for a nickel a game, for the ecstatic celebration after a yaku was slapped down and for my grandmother’s moan of disgust, which I understood even then to be a performance, when truly she was most glad to see my delight. She knew me.

One year she came and didn’t leave at all—we were told she’d had some health trouble and she was away in the hospital, a cardiac event that prevented her from flying. Her sister, my (great) Aunty Sue, came out to help tend her, which makes me recognize the seriousness of what had happened. But from my perspective, her extended stay, and even her convalescence, was a chance to extend my winnings toward impossible heights. It might have been a full month that we were playing on her bed before she was able to return to the coffee table in the living room that usually hosted our game. We played every day, for hours on end—yaku after yaku, me eagerly tallying up my burgeoning account. I’d made a year’s worth of allowance by the time she returned home.

I do not think anyone told me Grandma Betty had Parkinson’s for the first decade of her illness—she stopped coming to Oregon because of her health, but when we saw her in Hawaii each Christmas, she was much the same, just quieter—everyone told me she was tired when I trotted out the cards, and her reaction was muted, her cards slow from shaky hands. I knew this wasn’t her fault, but I was disappointed. I thought that perhaps I was no longer so good at Hanafuda—or that perhaps she no longer cared to play with me, that I had done something wrong. When we visited, she mostly just sat in her recliner in the apartment above the grocery store, soaps on in the background, and dozed. It was only much later, when she could no longer walk, when her hands shook and her head would crane side to side like a baby bird when she became agitated that she couldn’t make herself understood, that someone finally explained. I did research and was glad to hear at least that she was still present and herself in her mind—just not able to interact with us as she had.

The last year we visited before Grandma Betty passed, she hardly spoke at all most of the time—I was glad that she remembered my name when I greeted her and hugged her. My aunties had long ago stopped dying her hair, but I was struck by how white and thin it was, when all through my childhood she’d always died it pit black. She was on pain medication by then, and one day she asked my Aunty Gail, who mostly took care of her, if she could see the faces in the monkeypod trees out the window, who were beckoning to her to join them.

What I remember of that last visit is that one afternoon we received a call. One of her oldest friends wanted to bring by a gift and visit for the holidays. On hearing the name of the visitor, she straightened in her chair and demanded that my aunty help her stand. Back in her room she changed into her finest clothes, put on makeup and fixed her hair, put on her finest pearls. When she returned to the room, she straightened the recliner and took deep breaths. And when that friend arrived, she greeted her in Japanese, spoke clearly, held her head high. They exchanged pleasantries, fell into conversation, laughed. When the friend left and the door closed, she let out a great sigh and reclined her chair and sank back, and said nothing more that day. It had taken everything she had to maintain the performance.

I think of that heroic effort she made often—I would name it as both particularly Japanese and particularly Grandma Betty, which is to say, as inheritance. I remember it because for a moment, I saw that she was still there, inside the shell of her body as it betrayed her—which meant that the Grandmother who saw me and loved me persisted.

In the years since I have also imagined what it took to suffer all the hours of all the years she lived with the disease. I was a child, and I could not have known—and so I have forgiven myself for believing Grandma Betty had abandoned me by choice, or worse, for something I had done or failed to do. What I wish is that without effort or cost to her, I might have her back for one last hand of Sakura, our cards held in opposite-facing fans before our faces, shining eyes locked in anticipation of the snap of the draw. I wish for one last ecstatic cry of “Yaku!”, which meant love in a language we both understood.

Michael Copperman is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University. His work has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review, and Copper Nickel, among others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF. His next book, Seeking Eden, is about the extremes of the American subculture of wrestling as seen through the story of five-time national champion Kenny Cox’s pilgrimage deep into the wilderness of Kauai’s Na Pali Coast, and is forthcoming in the Fall of 2026 from University of Iowa Press.