Smiles with Miss Mary Elizabeth Mohler or Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Holter
"Alice in Nara"
（Originally written in English）

奈良女子大付属中学校時代に英語を教えていただいたモーラ先生の思い出.
I am looking for Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Holter. Her maiden name is Miss Mary Elizabeth Mohler.
Any information about her is greatly appreciated! Thank you! Fumiko Tachibana, owner of this web site.

Appeared in Four Seasons, City Press, Kyoto, Japan 1984,1988,...

Fumiko Tachibana


"Hi, my name is Alice, Alice in Nara, in a wonderland! "

 

Yoko Nishimura was a student at the junior high school attached to Nara Women's College.

One day in early April, several days after the first semester had started, she hurried home as soon as her classes were over. She walked briskly along the meandering path through Nara Park, whistling at a couple of tamed deer as they poked their noses into the fallen blossoms and faint green leaves of the cherry tress that lined the moss-covered sides of the paths. It was cold, but the sky was bright and there wasn't a cloud to be seen. She nodded at the deer as she skipped along and hummed a tune.

Turning into the last path, which ran through a rice field, she heard a fish-seller's voice shouting. "Maidoariiiii! Thank you for your patronage. Everyone, come and have a look at today's fresh fish! Izumi-chan! Maegawa-chan! Nishimura-chan! Irasshai, irasshai! Come on everyone!" Yoko liked Mr. Hirata's wild, playful, and mischievous shouting and name-calling.

"Mackerel, octopus, squid and flying fish! Everyone, please come and look!" His powerful voice penetrated through the hedges and pine trees to the rows of antiquated wooden houses. And in an instant housewives in white aprons were making their way out of their houses with metal bowls in their hands and gathering around Mr. Hirata's rusty bicycle which had stopped in front of Nishimura's garden.

"Konnichiwa! Hello!" Yoko said, making a quick bow as she passed by the bicycle and the crowd of middle-aged women whom she knew so well. Hirata chopped up a squid and its smell began to fill the air. Yoko took a deep, long breath and hoped there might be squid for supper.

She ran to the garden gate, opened it, then pulled the sliding front door of the house and went in. The hallway was full of the aroma of roasting rice-crackers. Yoko took off her white canvas shoes and made her way to the dining room. Mrs. Nishimura, wearing her white apron, was waiting there for the children to return and preparing their 3-o'clock snack. She was roasting the crackers over a slow fire in the round ceramic hibachi.

"Ah, Yoko, hello," Mrs. Nishimura said, her cheeks tinted a little red by the heat of the cooker.

"Mom, I'm hungry," Yoko said as she put her school bag down on the tatami mat and sat down beside her mother. She put her hands and chin on the warm rim of the hibachi like a wistful puppy might do. Mrs. Nishimura felt there was something a little odd about her daughter's behavior.

"There seems to be something on your mind..." She asked.

"I was very excited today." Yoko said staring at the ashes in the hibachi.

"Why? What happened?" Mrs. Nishimura turned a cracker over.

"Well, Mr. Maeshita, our English teacher, introduced a new teacher to us in class today. You can't imagine how surprised and excited we were."

"Why?"

"She's a real American! Her name is Miss Mora."

"Missu Mora?" Mrs Nishimura repeated what she thought she had heard.

"Yes, Miss Mora. She's going to teach us English once a week," Yoko said, holding the warm hibachi in her arms.

"Well, that's very nice. You are lucky!" Mrs Nishimura said, turning the smoking crackers with a pair of wooden chopsticks.

"Yes, and Mom, I have an American name now," Yoko said, and wrote a capital letter "A" in the ashes of the hibachi with one of the iron tongs.

"American name?" Mrs Nishimura couldn't make out what Yoko meant.

"Yes, she's going to call us by English names. Mom, it's exciting to have another name and not a Japanese one, like Yoko, or Machiko, or Fumiko.

"Alice! Alice! Alice is my name. I chose it from all the English name-cards she had scattered on the desks. When she called me Alice for the first time, I was thrilled and felt as if I were an American. Now I feel as if I were "Alice in Wonderland," she said smiling.

Mrs Nishimura smiled too, nodding at her daughter as she turned the rice crackers over one by one. "Now then eat up!" she said.

Yoko gazed at the food, but that was all she did.

"Mom, our class really is a Wonderland."

She stretched her hand at last to a cracker that had been roasted and popped it into her mouth.

"Wonderland?" Mrs Nishimura asked, raising both eyebrows.

"Well, my seat is in front of the teacher's desk, facing the teacher, you know."

"Then you have to pay attention..."

"yes, it has disadvantages. It's sometimes the worst seat for a student to have. I do have to be alert because teachers often call on me. I hate that. But the one thing about my seat is that I can watch and secretly examine each teacher's personal habits. It's so interesting I could write a book about it," said Yoko, giggling and cracking the cracker.

"Mr Kita, for example, the math teacher, draws marvelous circles behind him without looking at the blackboard at all. I like him, but whenever he says something, his right cheek twitches a little around the mouth. I cup my hands before my eyes whenever it happens. I can't help giggling, though I try very hard not to."

"You must try to behave yourself," Mrs Nishimura reproved.

"Mom, believe me, I really do try to be a good student. I try to learn everything I can from my teachers, from what they say, and from how they behave," said Yoko.

"This American teacher," she babbled on, "I've never seen such a gigantic figure in all my life! She's taller than those GIs who gave me chewing gum at Aburasaka Station a few years ago. She's a lot taller than any of the other teachers and boys. She even has to duck when she enters the classroom. Not only that, she has blue eyes, really deep blue!" said Yoko, who could hardly see the color of her mother's eyes at all. "And she has an incredibly big nose and a huge great mouth, so that when she speaks you can see her tongue move back and forth, twisting and wrenching, right to left, left to right as if it were a living, creeping creature. I've never seen anybody's tongue move like that. I mean, no teachers have ever spoken with their mouths so wide open. It seems barbaric, graceless and indecent. Yet, it's funny!" Yoko said, giggling with her hands covering her own small thin-lipped mouth. She began to imitate the way her new English teacher laughed.

"Ha! ha! ha!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" Yoko continued laughing.

"Don't laugh like that, Yoko! It's ugly. It's not a thing a young girl should do," Mrs Nishimura said, raising one eyebrow.

"I've never felt so good, laughing out loud like this. Why don't you try it? You'll feel good," Yoko insisted; but her mother pretended not to be interested at all and said,"Yoko!"

"No, please call me Alice."

"Well, Ahrisu then."

"No, no. Alice," Yoko said, moving her tongue upward, licking her upper lip, the way she remembered she had been taught in Miss Mora's class.

"Al-lice?"

"Just one more time."

"Al-l-lice?"

"Yes, that's much better!"

They laughed together, and the sound of crackers being crushed and the loud laughter mingled together and echoed around the hibachi in the dining room.

The slanted shadows of the wooden frames of the windows, together with those of the two figures, projected themselves onto the stiff white paper doors.

Mr. Nishimura taught Japanese classics at a local college and was very popular among students for both his friendliness and strictness, his generosity and severity. At home he was both popular and unpopular with his family because of his femininity as well as his masculinity, his cowardice as well as his bravery. In fact he was a strange mixture of two extremes. He often quickly erupted in anger but then it just as quickly subsided. So before supper there was usually a panic.

"Papa will be back in a minute. Yoko, Taiji, Harukuni!" Mrs Nishimura's hysterical howl echoed from the kitchen to the dining room as the children hurriedly turned off the TV and began putting things in order and getting rid of the rubbish.

One evening the children had failed to tidy up the room in time. No sooner had they heard their father's feet shuffling on the tatami in the next room, when the shoji were pulled open and lightning flashed.

"What a mess! What a filthy mess!" Mr Nishimura roared like a tiger.

"Turn off that TV!" (terebi wo keshinasai!)

Yoko hated her father when he was angry and felt hurt, though she knew that she and the other two were to blame. Yet the next moment the three children raised their heads, trembling with fear and terror, and their father was smiling at them as if nothing had happened. He was sitting cross-legged at the table, calmly reading the evening paper and sipping green tea.

During supper, sometimes after this incident, Mr Nishimura, after closely eyeing Yoko for a while, began to talk to her.

"How is Miss Mora doing, Ahrisu?"

Yoko was astonished that he had called her Alice and felt pleased that he seemed isnterested in what was happening in her life.

"Did you hear about that from Mom?" she asked.




( To be continued)

The rest of the story will be typed and presented here sometime soon.

(c)　Fumiko　Tachibana　

About Fumiko Tachibana


副賞フィリピン旅行 Round trip tickets to Manila awarded by Phillipine Ministry of Tourism and Japalish Review, Kyoto.

この授賞式には京都精華大学教授の片桐ユズル先生が詩のセクションで受賞されていました。
ジョンペレイラさんが主催するジャパリッシュレビューに掲載されたものから選ばれています。
当時１９８２年のころ。現在の雑誌の様子は。

Dedicated to:
このページを

Ryoko Tachibana (July 22 1980) 橘亮子
Kenji Tachibana (February 8 1998)橘健二
Amazon

Taiji Tachibana (January 12 2001)橘太二
に捧げます。