Beyond the child’s age, which was exactly right, and the strong resemblance between their features and builds, Mr. Y.’s reasons for supposing the boy was his own included three fragmentary memories that the boy had held on to despite losing the rest of his past, and each of them was quite persuasive. First, he remembered that there had been train tracks near the house he lived in when he was small; second, he recalled being on a boat that capsized, though he couldn’t say when or where; and third, he knew his father’s uniform had a black hat with a visor.
The father had facts to back up each of the boy’s little memories. The house in Gunma prefecture where they had lived during the war had indeed been close to train tracks, and once, when they were riding a water chute during a picnic at Toshimaen, their toboggan had flipped over. And at one time in his life, when he was chief of the local station in the Shitaya Fire Brigade, Mr. Y. had worn a black hat with a visor.
Evidently Mr. Y. felt this slight amount of information was insufficient to prove that N. was really his child, but the article concluded with a quote to the effect that he planned to take charge of the boy and raise him from now on, whether or not he was the right child.
As I read this article, a scene rose up in my mind’s eye of a father and a boy sitting together in a room in a temple lit by soft winter sunlight, each holding a fan of cards, concentrating on a game of picture-matching.
The boy had lost most of his cards somewhere—he had only three. He picked out one of them and laid it on the table. The father stared at the card for a long moment, then plucked a card from his own full hand and laid it down beside the boy’s. For a few seconds, four eyes lingered on the faces of the two cards, trying to determine whether they made up part of the same picture.
Soon, the boy took another card from his hand. And the father began searching his hand for the card that matched it.
They wanted to create a picture of events in a past they had shared, but the fact that the boy had only three cards made this tricky. The boy’s cards might show a large elephant ear—maybe not even the whole ear, but just a part; or the very bottom of the animal’s foot. Picture-matching is supposed to be a game, but for Mr. Y. and N. it was a good deal more serious than that. They had to figure out, in this manner, whether or not they were father and son, related by blood.
In N.’s case, an extraordinary disruption of his life had stolen his memory, leaving him only those three cards, but to some extent we are all in this position: each of us holds one or two cards that have been in our hands for years, who knows why, while the cards that should be paired with them have disappeared, instilling in us the desire to try and learn, through our own games of picture-matching, which particular section of what larger design they might make up.
I myself have forgotten the greater part of my childhood memories in the course of living, and yet a few small, fragmentary recollections remain vividly etched in my mind. They all date from the years before I entered elementary school, and it is impossible for me to say now which part of what picture they compose.
I must have been about five or six when this happened. My grandmother Kano and I were on the beach of a little fishing village near Shimoda, at the tip of the Izu peninsula, watching a ceremony for the launching of a newly built boat.
I’m sure it was autumn—September or October. I was neither hot nor cold, not even sitting there on the sand with my legs stretched out in front of me. Before us there was a small inlet the shape of a drawstring pouch, in the dead center of which a boat with perhaps a ten-horsepower motor floated, completely covered with flags. Years later I saw a launching ceremony for another small fishing boat at a fishing village in Wakasa where I had gone to swim: the flags had vertical stripes in five colors—white, red, purple, pink and yellow—and were hung in close succession not only from two bamboo poles, one each at the bow and stern, but also from cords strung between the poles. The ceremony for the boat my grandmother and I saw was undoubtedly more or less the same.
I stared and stared at that little boat decked out with all the flags as my grandmother watched beside me. There were crowds of men on board, but either the drinking had already ended or they were so worn out from celebrating that they were taking a break, because the fully dressed boat simply stayed where it was, bobbing there in the middle of the inlet, exuding an oddly quiet atmosphere.
We must have been waiting for someone. The village was my grandmother Kano’s hometown—though of course I am basing this on knowledge I acquired later. Kano was a geisha in Shimoda when my great-grandfather took her as his mistress; after his death she was entered into our family registry as my grandmother, and I grew up in her care, but since she had been his mistress, and was inherently strong-willed, neither my family, nor the villagers, nor her relatives in her hometown liked her.
My grandmother must have been past sixty then. What had prompted that visit to the fishing village where she was born and raised, on the other side of Mt. Amagi? I’m unable to say, because I know nothing of her life in those days—but in any event there we were on the beach, facing the inlet where the newly launched boat floated, waiting for whoever was supposed to come and meet us.
Maybe my grandmother was expecting a childhood friend, now an old woman, or a niece or nephew. All I remember is us sitting on the sand, and the time we passed there, undoubtedly waiting for someone.
I suspect the reason I have never forgotten this picture, in which I myself appear, is that it seems so cheerful and relaxed, and yet at the same time feels oddly empty.
Even now, when I think of my grandmother, something in my memory of her then troubles me. Why did she make that trip to her hometown, which she had visited so infrequently before, and go out to the beach, of all places, and sit on the sand?
If there is anyone out there who can furnish some other part of this picture, I would love to place that person’s card beside my own. But I doubt anyone like that is still alive.
I incorporated this little fragment of memory into a story of mine. In the story, my grandmother decides on a whim to visit the village of her birth, and she goes there, stopping by the temple on the mountainside to request prayers for the dead of the family into which she was born, and then she takes the road straight through the village, where no one recognizes her, and for the first time in ages goes out to the beach where she played every day as a child. On the strand, she sees a newly launched boat floating in the center of the inlet. This, more or less, was how I presented the episode.
Naturally, having no basis for imagining whom my grandmother might have been waiting for there on the beach, I passed over that point in silence. And so my grandmother comes across in the story as a solitary old woman, afflicted with the prosaic loneliness of the old.
In my memory, though, my grandmother does not seem at all lonely or sad. The only feeling she evokes as she sits on the sand gazing out at the ocean is an inexplicable emptiness. She sits there even now in my memory, a look on her face that seems to be saying that the place to which old age carries us is neither a loneliness nor a sadness, but an inlet where a motorized boat in full dress floats quietly on the water.
*
I remember another fragment. This one is of a summer night. Stars were scattered across the sky. My mother and I had been standing for quite some time in a secluded, dark spot behind the train station. A wooden fence stretched on and on beside us; from time to time, we heard trains sending up puffs of steam.
My mother hadn’t said a word to me the whole evening. She stood clutching a sizable bundle, tied up in a furoshiki, and seemed not to be thinking of me at all. I hated having to stay this long in such a dark and desolate place; I would hover for a while near my mother, then crouch down on the ground. Whenever I made to walk away, my mother would give my head a poke. She was a gentle person, and the harshness of the gesture was unlike her.
At some point, as we were standing there, my father turned up. He stood talking in a hushed tone with my mother without casting a glance
in my direction. Eventually he noticed that I was there and came over, suddenly sweeping me up in his arms and hoisting me high into the air. He set me down again after that, giving my head a perfunctory rub, and then went back to my mother.
My parents talked again for a while in an undertone, and then, as though they had forgotten that I even existed, started walking together, just the two of them, down the dark road bordered by the fence. I hurried after so I wouldn’t be left behind… And there the memory ends.
Years later, I told my parents all this and asked them to think where the station might have been, but neither of them could recall such a night. They couldn’t identify the location for certain, because as a young army doctor my father had always been moving from one small city to the next, wherever his regiment was stationed. He said it had probably been Chikamatsu, since we lived near the station there; my mother said it was probably Toyohashi, where she often took the road behind the station.
In any event, I get a sense from this small memory that my parents were in the grip of some terrible sadness when it happened. Seeing as neither one of them remembers that night, however, whatever it was that had occurred must have been easy enough to forget once it had passed—too trivial, even, to merit description as an “incident.”
I worked this little fragment, too, into a story, making it one of the main character’s memories of her childhood. I had her interpret that evening as an embodiment of some secret her parents had shared, something they hid from everyone—a sort of hard core that they held in common, that could never be expunged from their shared past, no matter how hard they tried.
Here, too, I can’t say I succeeded in capturing the meaning of that tiny memory. Without knowing where my father had been, where he had just come from, I will never be able to elucidate the sadness inherent in this isolated picture. Maybe he had left my mother and me to wait while he stopped by the pawn shop, or went to a friend’s house to try and borrow some money, only to be refused. Or maybe, letting my imagination run, he had just come from a visit to someone about some unpleasant business involving him and my mother.
I can’t help feeling that there was something about my parents then, as they exist in that fragment of memory, that veered far enough away from the ordinary to inscribe itself forcefully into my childish heart, even if it lasted only for the briefest of moments, and even if they themselves have forgotten it. In this instance I hold one card in my hand, but my parents have lost its pair.
Nearly all these broken-off memories of my childhood involve my parents or my grandmother, but there is one—just one—that revolves around someone who, for the longest time, I could not identify, in some situation at whose nature I could not even guess.
I can’t be certain how old I was, but seeing as I had been put down on my back on the planks of the small boat we were in and covered with a short kimono of the sort women with babies wear—the baby inside, head poking out—I must have been still younger than in the other memories I described, perhaps four or five.
The boat sat at the water’s edge, a spot overgrown with reeds and silver grass and the like, and the sun beat down directly overhead, making it seem very warm and bright. It was spring, most likely.
A man and woman lay a short distance away, embracing each other, and I was watching them. The man wasn’t my father, and the woman wasn’t my mother; it was a couple I didn’t recognize. The man had stretched out on the deck; the woman, just beside him, had tucked her legs under her body and was leaning over the man, covering his upper body with her own. Their faces were touching, struck right up against each other, and I was afraid they might never come apart.
Still, from time to time the woman would turn to look at me. Each time, she would smile, stretch out a fair, uncovered arm in my direction. She would press her hand against my cheek, or lightly caress my lips, again and again, any number of times.
Then, withdrawing her arm, she would curl it around the man’s neck. And once again their faces would be stuck together, as close as could be, and they would stay like that.
Apart from the anxiety I felt about them not coming apart, I felt strangely content watching their unmoving faces; I wasn’t at all restless.
Once, I kicked off the short kimono that was covering me and got up. The woman gave a little cry, came away from the man to scoop me up, and then, either to protect me from the wind or to prevent me from moving any more, tightly wrapped me in the kimono and propped me up with my back against the side of the boat.
In that uncomfortable position, I looked out across the water and at the low hills on the far shore. A scattering of trees dotted the slopes. The lake seemed to narrow in that direction, forming a sort of channel; off to the right, the water fanned outward, stretching into the distance.
The whole shore was covered with thick-growing reeds and silver grass; several wooden platforms rose from the growth, one here, another there, jutting out over the water, a small boat tied up at each one. I didn’t see any other people—just the lake, and the reeds and grasses on its shore, and the few hills surrounding the lake, everything shining brightly in the sun.
They left me in that position, unable to move, until I could hardly endure it anymore. The man and woman stayed with their faces crushed together; I waited and waited, but they didn’t separate. This time, I felt sure their faces really had gotten stuck.
Eventually it got to be too much for me, and I burst out crying, shrieking as loudly as I could. The man got up and came and lifted me into the air. When I kept crying, he stepped down from the boat into the water, still carrying me, and began walking around the boat, splashing water into the air, presumably hoping this would amuse me. The water was quite shallow. The woman lay on her back in the boat. Once again, she stretched out her bare arms toward me.
The memory breaks off here. I have no recollection of where the two of them took me after that, or how I got home.
This fragment of memory bore no relation to anyone I knew. I had no idea where it might have taken place. For a very long time, I walked around carrying this card, having no notion of how it had found its way into my hands, without ever showing it to anyone.
For years, my memory of this time I spent with a young couple—I assume they must have been young—while they engaged in a bit of romance just sat there inside me, undisturbed; I made no attempt to look into it. I couldn’t have looked into it even if I had wanted to, and in any case the meaning of this particular picture, on this one card, seemed clear enough.
When I was a student, I regarded the passions as something gloomy and depressing, like a mass of loathsome black snakes writhing about inside our bodies, but there was nothing dark or gloomy in the romantic scene between the couple in my memory, not even a sense of furtiveness. Everything about it was bright and clear, as far as I could see. The brilliance of that memory is what enabled me, even as a student, when I looked on the passions as something foul, even as I suffered night and day on their account, alternately railing against them and becoming their prisoner, to see affairs of the heart, in my own twisted way, as an element of life that I could affirm. If it weren’t for this memory, I’m sure that during a certain period in my life I would have been more dismally scarred than I was, and suffered more, from my encounters with such feelings.
I found myself driving along the shore of the long, irregularly shaped Lake Kitakata on my way from Daishōji, in the Hokuriku region, to Fukui prefecture in the spring of Shōwa 24—or 1949, the year after the great-earthquake there. I was working for an Osaka newspaper at the time, and was making the rounds of a few cities in the region—Komatsu and Daishōji and so on—preparing a series of articles about the progression of the recovery a year after the quake.
We entered the village of Yoshizaki and turned by the temple known for an old mask a woman is said to have worn long ago to frighten her daughter-in-law, and all of a sudden Lake Kitakata lay before us, small waves glittering splendidly in the sunlight all across its surface. The car crossed over
to the other side at a point near the northern tip of the lake, where it narrowed to the width of a river, and from then on we drove along the right-hand shore. Low hills rose above the road on the other side, and beyond them, I had been told, was the Sea of Japan; but it didn’t feel as though the ocean was so close. Here and there the earthquake had caused landslides that looked as if they could have happened yesterday.
The car drove twenty minutes along the shore of the long, narrow lake—twenty-four kilometers around, I had heard. Then, just as we were about to enter the village of Kitakata, I suddenly broke off the conversation I had been having with the driver and asked him to stop the car. All at once, it had occurred to me that the lake in that childhood memory of mine looked a lot like this. It was slightly past noon now, too, in spring, and the water was shining.
I got out of the car and stood on the shore. “Unusual for a lake to be so bright, isn’t it?”
“It’s only because it’s spring; from fall on into winter it gets real dark here, actually—you get this feeling of solitude driving in this vicinity that I can’t even describe. There’s nothing else out here but this lake, after all, like a big puddle.”
The driver pointed out a landslide visible on a distant hill and told me that even now some of the houses up there were still buried. I couldn’t tell from the way he spoke whether the sense of solitude he had mentioned came from the landscape around the lake, or from the fact that there were houses buried under the ground. Either way, though I could see the area probably looked pretty desolate in winter and fall, just as he said, it was hard to imagine with the spring sunlight streaming down all around.
Of course, this wasn’t the lake I recalled from my childhood. There were no reeds or silver grass growing on the shore, no platforms jutting out into the water where boats could be tied up.
Life of a Counterfeiter Page 6