The broad planes of color in Mary Cassatt's The Bath (1890) shout out the influence of Japanese prints which were all the rage in Paris at the turn of the century. I’ve no idea if the woman pictured is the child's mother or a servant, but it makes no nevermind. Although the pair are European, they remind me of my narrator and the child Mariko (or Mari-chan) at the end of Miss Gone-overseas. A small copy of this print has traveled with me for the past 40 years, yet I do not recall having it consciously in mind while writing Mieko’s (if I may call her that) story.

Studying the print, I’m taken with how the arrangement of the figures -- facing away from each other -- suggests a distance, as though each is in its own world, which is quite common with adults and tiny children who are pre-language. The communication of the pair is entirely physical. I see the daily chore of bathing and toweling the child as giving the woman time for her own thoughts or daydreams, and I suspect she relishes that respite. I know as a woman that such solitude is a not an unwelcome gift when it happens in either motherhood or marriage.

Japanese medieval literature is filled with romance, an Eastern version of Western literature’s medieval courtly love -- the Eastern being a bit more colorful and erotic. One also finds stories in both East and West of women condemned to nunneries, and of those running off on their own to become nuns, as if wanting to trade a disappointing life for one of serene contemplation. In Miss Gone-overseas Mrs Okata’s terrible dream drives her (for a time) over the edge, and she mimics joining a nunnery by cutting off all her hair and locking the doors of the brothel. Running to a nunnery at any age or time or in any culture is an extreme method of seeking solace from a life that has become unbearable.

How many readers have picked up my book expecting a romance, and have been thoroughly disappointed? Mieko (my narrator) recalls with wistfulness a favored client during her days in Tokyo, and she finds a sisterly closeness with Kimiko, another brothel worker. But Mieko displays no real longing for intimacy, no real desire to share her thoughts with anyone except her pillow book. A romance would intrude on the independence of her mental life, would be an interference into her private enthusiasm for life’s small pleasures -- such as the uncomplicated task of bathing a child.