I know that I am lucky. My childhood was safe. All through my life my grandfather has supported and guided me. His mistake was in thinking that the world lay within his control, that his version of events could be read as law. The law itself does not protect; it is often inadequate in the world we face today. What matters most is knowledge – of ourselves and others. What I learned from my mother changed my life.
Grandpa did not understand. He sat in our home and looked at the house as though in his absence it had betrayed him. Gone were our evenings in the low light of his study; he no longer cut out newspaper articles and handed them to me each morning. Not only had I defied his judgement; I had changed his reality, his present and his future, and that he could not forgive.
As the summer drew on, moving closer to the date of Kaitarō’s release, I came downstairs early each morning to check if his letters and photographs had arrived. I wondered if he had changed his mind and decided not to send them. I wondered if he had been indiscreet in his composition, criticising the prison or its guards, causing the letters to be withheld. And all the while, the contract from Nomura & Higashino remained in the study. I still had not signed it, and each day I grew more uncertain about what to do. Finally, I visited my mother.
The road twisted ahead of me, rising with the terrain, each curve revealing a new facet of our neighbourhood – a shrine, a park where children played, a tea shop, a hairdresser, a funeral parlour where the dead could be prepared and revered in peace. White houses crouched low on the slopes with miniature topiaries in the front gardens, potted persimmon trees or bushes of natsumikan, and all the while telephone wires wove between the houses with crows perched upon them, as though threaded through the neighbourhood. They were always watching and waiting for a fresh rubbish bin or a small child with treats.
I stopped by the florist, where there were several traditional bouquets of chrysanthemums standing in blue buckets of water, but I chose a bunch of hydrangeas instead, for the flowers that would be blooming on the hills of Shimoda.
The road crested a rise and then sloped down, leading to a steep set of stairs where the gradient proved too much even for the locals to walk unaided. At the base of the staircase was a playground my mother used to bring me to. The swings and seesaws there were much more colourful than the ones I used to play on, and there was a sandpit with a panda on springs embedded in the middle. All was deserted and quiet as I passed through. There was no trace of the busy expressways, offices and tower blocks in central Meguro. There was only the light slanting across the telephone wires and shining through the trees and, at the end of the street, the temple where I had been given my name and where my mother was buried, our local temple, the site of our family tomb.
Inside the complex, I did not climb the steps to the main hall, but instead followed a path that led around the building to the small cemetery at the back. My grandfather and I had been there together only weeks before, when we both lived in a different world.
It was during the festival of Obon when the dead are said to return home and the chanting from the temples can be heard long into the night. Grandpa and I had brought dishes of ohagi, rice balls covered in red bean paste and wrapped in cellophane. I knew that soon the temple guardians would clear away the food before it began to rot or draw the urban foxes in the night, but when I visited that morning our offerings were still there, and so were those of other families, the beribboned boxes placed neatly before each grave.
At the far end of the cemetery were the family water pails, our crests painted black on the pale bamboo. I looked for the Sarashima symbol: three balls suspended in the centre of a pentagon. Then I filled the pail with water and lifted the smooth weight of it in my hands.
There were many generations of tombs. Some were old, with lichen creeping over the stone; others were new granite, which gleamed in the morning light. But there were no monks that day, nor worshippers to pay their respects, only the crunch of the leaves as they crumbled beneath my feet.
Plots like these were hard to find. They became available only when a family was forced to move farther out of the city. Then they took their dead with them and their land was sold on. These ‘new’ plots were seized as soon as possible. When my mother was young, with the strength of the Japanese yen and the influx of foreigners into Tokyo, the value of land had risen with intoxicating speed. Pressure was put on temples to release their burial grounds, and so mausoleums emerged, buildings several storeys high with floors filled with private altars and a cupboard for your family ashes. It was the modern way: skyscrapers filled with the dead, while the living longed for the past.
My mother once told me a story about Grandpa and this graveyard, how as a boy during the Second World War he had been caught stealing rice cakes from tombs, seeking refuge amid the bombed-out streets and starvation. She wanted to remind me of how lucky I was, and she succeeded. But I also remember being stunned. It was so hard to imagine my grandfather in that position. He was so upright and dignified, comfortable and well fed, and in his hands the story morphed into a humorous tale of a greedy boy with no respect for his ancestors, even though his desperate reality was clear to see.
Looking at our history through the prism of his, I saw that my grandfather had witnessed the collapse of his nation and the legal system. He had lived through the American occupation and the change it had brought. What then must he have thought of the mad prosperity, the bubble era that had occurred when my mother was still alive and when I was just a child? What did he think of the rising stock markets, the property speculation, that brief period when Tokyo was the wealthiest city in the world, and the crash that followed? What did he think of the world we lived in now?
He must believe as I do that whenever a haven presents itself it should be treasured, for we humans are consistent in our desires, and because of this we are never safe for long. It was not lost on me that the rise and fall of the markets that had so captivated my father caused a crash that lasted for twenty years following my mother’s death and is known, even today, as ‘the lost decades’.
My grandfather valued peace and I had disturbed his. But I also wondered if his anger stemmed from the fact that I was not taking advantage of current prosperity, that I was veering from my career path as my mother had done. That morning, standing by my family tomb, I waited for the cycle to repeat itself, knowing that it would, and knowing too that now the question of how to live was up to me.
Setting my flowers on the ground, I knelt and pulled the withered stems of weeks ago from the metal vases and refilled them with fresh water from the pail. Then I arranged the hydrangeas on each side of the tomb, ensuring they were symmetrical. For a while, I lost myself in the work, ladling fresh water over the stone, washing away the dust and wiping the granite clean with a cloth from my bag. Our plot had been paved over entirely so that no weeds or detritus would mar the memorial. It was practical but also strange since my grandparents had loved nature and the natural order, had known every flower on the Izu Peninsula. This was even represented on the tomb itself, for when his wife died Grandpa had her favourite sketches etched onto the granite – the strawberry plants from the winter hothouse in Shimoda, an azalea in full bloom – her most treasured memories carved in stone.
My mother had also contributed to our tomb; she supplied our name. By the time she reached adulthood my mother was an accomplished calligrapher, skilled enough to merit her own artist’s title, but as a child she had only her enthusiasm and fledgling skill. She had drawn the name ‘Sarashima’ on a sheet of rice paper in Meguro, and Grandpa had that transferred to the granite. Now I read those same characters carved vertically before me. Her own artwork on the tomb beneath which her ashes lay.
Wiping away a last trace of dust, I settled my fingers into the deep grooves and slashes of our name, tracing the strokes of each character, following the path of my mother’s brush. The Buddhist names of my ancestors were farther up, but that day I
was only interested in our mortal name, our family name, the name my mother loved, that I have now chosen to keep.
Sitting beside her in her final resting place, I thought of the contract I had neither signed nor returned to Nomura & Higashino, the path that had been laid out for me. I had been fully prepared to take it: to do an apprenticeship of sorts in corporate law and then to use the experience and contacts I made to grow my grandfather’s business. He deserved the rest and to have the burden lifted from him. Still, that morning I realised that I had changed my mind. When I thought over all I had uncovered, I wondered if my life and the knowledge I had so painfully acquired could be put to better use.
The law has moved on a great deal since my mother died and my grandfather became a forgotten party – a role he fought against, going to extraordinary lengths to be heard. There is greater support for the families of victims now. They can sit next to the prosecutor in court and give testimony. They can even question the perpetrator and perhaps move towards some form of closure. But there will always be crimes, and the law will have to evolve with them, for the question of what we can do to each other will never be settled.
My grandfather distrusted humanity. He strictly controlled what was allowed into his life, and had retreated to corporate law where he himself could be private, protected. I could do the same, or I could apply to my tutors from the Supreme Court and find a position working with the victims of crime.
Drawing some sticks of incense from my bag, I lit them and placed them in the burner before the grave. Then I stood to pray. At my naming ceremony, my father had insisted that I was called Sumiko Satō. But my real name, the one I bear now, that my mother first compiled so that the strokes of each character would add up to an optimal number, combines the characters of my given name – celebration, beauty, child – with our surname – absolute island. There are several combinations that form the name Sumiko Sarashima, but those were mine. My grandfather had been so pleased when he’d first seen it. He said it was everything he hoped I would be, a fortress, a bastion of strength. I love my name and my family, but I did not want to be an island any more.
At home, as I opened the gate and walked up the tiled drive, I saw my grandfather’s bicycle leaning against the house. I swallowed and braced myself for a confrontation within, even if it was only that he would see me and turn away. I unlocked the front door and peered into the front hall, but all was quiet and still. It was almost as though a sense of peace had settled upon the house. Grandpa had opened the window shutters wide and light poured into the rooms and over the desk in his study. As always, when I entered my home, I went there first. My grandfather was nowhere to be seen, but for a second my heart lightened as I saw he had left something for me on his desk. A large brown-paper parcel, pristine and unopened, that had come that morning in the mail: the letters from Kaitarō.
What I Know
In the end I followed them to Hokkaido. I don’t know what I’d expected when I got there, certainly not the heat. I had always thought that summer so far north would be cool, perhaps even cold to the touch. My skin was moist with sweat as I wound down the windows of my rental car and drove up the coast. I passed several kombu farms with their bamboo poles and ropes of kelp submerged beneath the waves and the rocky shoreline stacked with produce, laid out to dry in the sun. The breeze was rich and salty, the air infused with the scent of the sea.
I stopped to read the directions I had been given and struggled with the Ainu place names on the road signs, the last remnants of a native people who had been colonised and killed. I listened to the language in the ports, noting the muscular consonants of the Tōhoku and Hokuriku regions, the influence of settlers from the mainland. I ate fried oysters and corn on the cob and watched the fishing boats sail out into the bay with names painted on their sterns in both Japanese and Cyrillic.
I had read Kaitarō’s letters, but they had not prepared me for the tiny hamlet where he had grown up, the single street by the bay and the run-down family store in the centre, next to the café with the broken neon é that might never be fixed. I parked my car at the edge of town and walked along the sea front. People stared at me, surprised to see someone new. Some of them waved, but when they tried to speak to me I turned away, uneasy in this land that had meant so much to Kaitarō and my mother and yet was foreign to me.
I looked in at the café but it was closed. There was no hostel or inn, so I would have to drive to the nearest town by nightfall or sleep in the car. I walked down to the beach and paused by a ledge of rocks that jutted out into the sea. Beyond them the curve of the bay continued, ending in a series of caves. Their cave would be there, I thought, looking out to the water that ebbed and flowed in front of me, water that would travel all the way down the coast to Shimoda. For just as people in this world do not pause or even exist for long, so the water before me was not the water that had been.
I turned my back on the beach and walked up the sea road until I found Kaitarō’s bungalow. This too surprised me. It was like all the others with their bleached walls, chipped paint and flapping outer doors, each one separated only by a tiny alley filled with cracks where lilac wildflowers grew and shivered in the blowing wind.
Kaitarō’s mother was long dead and a new family lived there. In the backyard was a small trampoline wet with rain, and the windows of the living room had been left open, revealing a young woman inside. She caught me snooping and although she smiled and gestured for me to come over and talk, I shook my head, suddenly shy. There was no trace of Kaitarō or my mother there, but perhaps I could still find the small shed where once they had taken photographs of each other.
On the night my mother died, Kaitarō had piled these pictures into a duffel bag. Now I held them in my hands. Although these pictures were not part of the investigation for long and were Kaitarō’s property by right, he had not been allowed to see them while serving his sentence. Inmates are not permitted to have keepsakes in their cells. When the photographs reached me they arrived in their own sealed police pack, so I wondered if I was perhaps the first person to actually look at them in twenty years.
Our word for memory is kioku; a record or document is kiroku. These words are so close to each other that only one sound divides them. Just so, a photograph is not merely a means of documentation but also the creation of a memory – a place where the human spirit and the physical world can combine.
At the edge of the settlement, beyond the cluster of outbuildings, sheds and a few straggling vegetable gardens, was a field of wildflowers that led to a forest. The trees before me were verdant and full, bristling with greenery. There was only a trace of yellow at their edges, a tiny sign that soon they would turn gold, red and brown. When my mother was here it had been late in the year and the momijigari, the wave of autumn leaf viewing, had already swept through the islands. Still, there had been some leaves on the trees amid the black branches, patches of umber and vermilion.
The view before me was familiar as I walked towards the trees and took the pictures from my bag. In the first one she was wearing boots in the long grass and looking towards the forest. The collar of her shirt had been pulled up to cover her neck, protecting her from the cold, and her face was in profile. She was slender and still as one of the trees. The photograph had been shot in colour but underexposed so that the figure of my mother blended into the landscape – elemental in a northern frontier land.
In the next photograph she glanced back at Kaitarō, and the mood of this one was completely different from the last. She was facing the camera, looking into the sun, and the late afternoon light was soft as it touched her face, illuminating her features, her large dark eyes and the glow of her skin against the shadows of the forest. She was smiling, and she looked young and free. Alive.
The following pair of photographs were clearly taken on the outskirts of town, near the outbuildings, one of which might be the shed Kaitarō and his uncle had used as their darkroom. In
the first shot my mother was inside the shed. She had opened the shutters of the single window, and the winter light glanced off her profile. The picture was in black and white, emphasising the clean lines of her face, the elegance of her form. The accompanying one was much more playful as she turned in the room, touching the vats and an ancient hand pump that drew water from a well. The slow shutter speed had blurred and enhanced the twirling speed in her motion, the joy in her face.
In the last photograph he had joined her. They had set the timer on the camera and placed it within the darkroom, looking out towards the entrance, so that the two of them were framed in the doorway. She was teasing him, her hands messing with his hair, and he had lifted her off her feet so that her fur-lined boots were just clear of the grass. She was laughing, her eyes shut, but he was looking at the camera and he too was smiling; one of his last photographs as a free man.
These are not family portraits of relatives in a row smiling stiffly, where no one moves beyond formality. These photographs were like a conversation, a dialogue between the two of them, from a time only they knew.
I turned with the pictures in my hands and walked through the long grass, trying not to crush the wild orchids as I went, looking for the spot where she had stood. But in the late summer sunshine the birds in the forest, the wild herbs and the tiny flowers told me nothing. There was only the sound of the leaves rustling in the trees.
I thought for a time that I would stay in Hokkaido and seek them further. Perhaps in the following days I could walk into the town again and talk to the people there, but as I reached my car and sat within the muggy stillness, I knew I would not.
In the package I received there was one more photograph and it was of me. I was standing on a rocky shore, perhaps near our home in Shimoda, perhaps up the coast in Atami. My mother was shooting into the light so that the rocks and I, even my white T-shirt and red shorts, were in shadow, silhouetted against the indigo of the sea. I was standing in profile so that only part of my face was visible. Still, she had caught the moment when the breeze lifted my hair and the light touched my face as I looked out over the waves, and in that look was a world of possibility.
What's Left of Me is Yours Page 29