Windy

I always thought my mom was singing, “Little Natsumi,” – she’d replace the song’s original namesake with my own childish nickname – “She’s going to go so far away…She’s so young… She won’t remember herself…” It was “Natchan”, not “Satchan”, in Tokyo, not Osaka, in an old Japanese nursery rhyme that I’d imagine that I had left myself there, lost, standing on the platform of Shinjuku train station, with my small hands clutching a red suitcase as the gray blur of a train whooshed past me.

“Natchan wa ne, tōku e itchau tte hontō wa ne…”

Of course, in such a dream, I didn’t know where I was going.

***

My mom’s childhood was hot, sticky, and windy. Hot in the summer. Sticky when she split her chin open on the abruptly hard pavement when she was five years old. Windy in the subway tunnels. In my mind my mom is standing there, teetering on stubby legs, tiny feet too close to the edge of the platform, her head all wrapped up with bandages.

My mom didn’t get to play during the first few weeks of her violin lessons – the ones she had so looked forward to. I imagine her mouth bound shut.

***

My mom recently told me a story I had never heard before. One that took place while I was too young for recollection. It was a time when, told as if mystical and long ago, my grandmother had had her first stroke, but could still walk. We measure family history in whether or not Baba could walk. I was a toddler.

Today, my mom is vague in her storytelling. Do I imagine Baba, hair coiffed to perfection, elegantly gliding between her prized, valuable, and hard-earned dishes and plates? (Today, we fly these to our Cleveland home collection by collection, carefully, fearfully, and wrapped in newspaper.) Or do I imagine Baba, her back now bent in an unforgiving question mark, scooted up helplessly at the dining room table? (The table she had once commanded. The kitchen, each flavor, her students, were all her domain. My mom, of course, was Baba’s domain. Each month, my mom would be fed the same dishes for every meal. Tiresome excellence for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Baba’s classes in full course meals were taught by the month and categorized by the season. Each month, for about the first week or so, my mom was glad to be eating something new.) I think, in this story, Baba still glides amongst the kitchen appliances.

***

Baba receives a call from an unknown voice.

“It’s your son,” the voice scratches at the receiver from far away, “I need help.”

The voice tells Baba that he, her son, has been accused of touching a woman on the train.

“It’s me, it’s me, it’s me,”

The voice needs bail money, and so naïve, concerned, and conscious of the devastating effect of social embarrassment, my grandmother withdrew a horrifyingly large sum and deposited it into another account.

“I’m your son, I’m your son,” the voice had said to her, insisting that he was so upset that he didn’t sound himself.

My grandmother tried to call her son’s number, but the line was kept busy. She didn’t know the line was kept busy by the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. She didn’t know that she’d been talking to a stranger.

When Baba finally worked up the courage to talk to my uncle again, the moment of family history was frozen for everyone.

“Mother, how could you ever think that I would disrespect a woman like that?”

“How could I have been so foolish?”

***

It’s likely I’ll never know my grandmother’s thoughts in this precarious moment. No way, in any of our lifetimes, will this story be spoken of face to face, and so like every painful moment, it’ll blow by. It must blow by. Instead, I’ll just imagine her face, skin stretched taut over high cheekbones and troubled folds above her well-painted eyebrows. She’ll be wondering how she could have done this to her whole family while all she was trying to do was help. She’ll be baffled by the person she became when all she was trying to do was be a mother.

***

On the rare nights when my mom was home to tuck me in, it was with an irreplaceable tenderness of touch. She’d let me cuddle up, my arms wrapped around her hand, and she’d begin to tell me a story. Every time, it was about a time long, long ago. Before me, before her, before, even, Jiji, my grandfather. In that time, there were my five great-granduncles – “Tomo-o, Tomo-jiro, Tomo-saburo…” My mom would pronounce them low and slow. Their names were essentially “Tomo-one… two, three, four, five,” and every time I’d be asleep before the last one was named. The whisper of my mom’s breath would be the last thing tickling my cheek as I drifted away.

“Little Natsumi, she’s going to go so far away…She’s so young, she won’t remember me… How sad, how lonely…”

***

My mom has the fondest memories of going to concerts with Jiji, my grandfather. She was remarkably young, as young as five years old, when she would take the train all by herself and meet Jiji at the concert hall.

How come she didn’t blow away? I think, maybe it was because Baba would be waiting at home, steam rising around her.

At seven years old, my mom saw her first classical ballet – Swan Lake.

In detail, my mom remembers wearing a prized light blue coat. She carried a handbag the color of a camel. She wore a navy blue dress, simple save for the amber rhinestones attached to the ends of her sleeves. She remembers peering into each of these precious stones, looking at the little, cavernous world in there. My mom remembers this after forty-six years. My mom remembers this, after packing a suitcase and moving to Wyoming for a violin-teaching TA job soon after college graduation

“What was Wyoming like?”

“After Tokyo, it was like landing on the Moon.”

***

Sometimes, my mom spares me the details. When she was very young, early in first grade, walking to school with my uncle, they came across the fallen body of a dead man on the street. Was he hit by a car? Had they seen him fall? Maybe he was drunk? Maybe he was just too tired and just too old?

My mom only remembers a feeling of surprise.

So, this is death.

***

In Wyoming, I picture my mom looking quite like me today. She was in her twenties, but she’d seem especially young to the western eye. I see her standing in solitude, slender, in the vastness and flatness of this moon so, so far from home. She was so, so far from Baba, Jiji, my-uncle-the-businessman, the train station, and sticky-sweet air, flown on the spur of a strong wind like dust landing on a little amber stone.

On this foreign planet, all my mom really had of Japan was her own thick, black hair, smooth, pale, luminescent skin, and her violin, slung across her back. Two things were the same: excellence in playing, and wind rustling sheets of music, gently lifting layers of her hair.

Today, my mom laughs with me, describing her younger self slurping soba noodles in her shared apartment as her roommate’s older brother skinned a rabbit across the same table.

Laughing, still, telling parts of this story to me in English, and parts in Japanese, my mom says it took her three tries to pass the TOEFL.

***

Even now, as an eighteen year old, with plenty more experiences and memories of my own, Japan, for me, is soft like the earliest recollections of my mother – and hard like concrete, hard like the weight of generations who filled subway platforms, burial plots, unknown caverns, and rice bowls before me, before Mama, and before Baba.

Today, it’s trustworthy phone lines which tie us all shore to shore. Today, it’s Baba in a wheelchair, eating the food they feed her, still critically. Today, it’s Mama in the kitchen, Mama in the Cleveland Orchestra, leaving home after dark, with her violin slung behind her back. Today, it’s me, huddled at the dining room table with the steam from miso soup warming my chin, the precious bowl of my grandmother hovering before my lips. Today, it’s the three of us – three generations, three women, three lives, three stories. There’s three of us, and two kitchens, countless tables, and the same bowls.

Today, yesterday, and tomorrow, there’ve been hopes and devastations. Growth and transplantation. Amber jewels, softly sung songs, and gentle steam. Through all generations, there’s been wind.

“Natchan wa ne, tōku e itchau tte hontō wa ne…”

So, this is life.