
I am often mistaken for somebody else. Just the other day, for example, a man approached me, smiling, in the cafe (see my Powells.com essay) where I go daily to write. "Kyoko," he said, "is that you?" Another time a woman came up to me to tell me how much she had enjoyed my recent recital at Alice Tully Hall. I was, she told me, her idol (I think she had confused me with the pianist, Mitsuko Uchida). And once, a man who had struck up a conversation with me on the subway refused to believe, when I told him I had gone to Yale, that I was not the famous architect, Maya Lin. And two very different people a blond flight attendant on a Delta Air Lines flight out of Minneapolis and a gay black neighbor in my building have told me that I bear a strong resemblance to the bridal designer, Vera Wang.
I have also been told, on more than one occasion, that I look like Yoko. A young man gathering signatures for Greenpeace in front of Starbucks told me this. The man who always comes into the café, high as a kite, to use the restroom told me this. An older woman walking her dog one morning down Broadway told me this. We were heading in opposite directions, so I just smiled and kept on walking. But then she called out, "Turn around," and, although I am not normally a person who follows orders shouted out to me by strangers on the street, I turned around. "It's the way she walks, lowers her head," she said. I nodded, then lowered my head and kept on walking.
Even my own mother has told me that I remind her of somebody else. One evening, after supper, we were sitting at the kitchen table when she looked at me and said, "You have the same nose as the first girl." "What first girl?" I asked. "The first girl who was born before you," she said. My mother, who was then in the early stages of Alzheimers, had never mentioned a first girl to me before. When I asked my father about this, he explained that there had been a daughter born before me who had lived for a few hours and then died. So, really, even though I had always thought I was the first (and only) girl, I had been the second girl all along, which probably explains why I am never surprised when I am mistaken for somebody else. I expect to remind people of the person they want to see. It's coded somewhere deep down in my DNA. And mostly, I am happy to oblige.