What I Know
· I was raised by my grandfather, Yoshi Sarashima.
· I lived with him in a white house in Meguro, Tokyo.
· In the evenings he would read to me.
· He told me every story but my own.
My grandfather was a lawyer; he was careful in his speech. Even when we were alone together in his study and I would perch on his lap tracing the creases in his leather armchair, or later, when I sat on a stool by his side, even then, he had a precision with words. I have kept faith with that precision to this day.
Grandpa read everything to me – Mishima, Sartre, Dumas, Tolstoy, Bashō, tales of his youth and duck hunting in Shimoda, and one book, The Trial, that became my favourite. The story begins like this: ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.’
When we read that line for the first time, Grandpa explained that the story was a translation. I was twelve years old, stretching out my fingers for a world beyond my own, and I reached out then to the yellowed page, stroking the written characters that spoke of something new. I read the opening aloud, summoning the figure of Josef K.: a lonely man, a man people would tell lies about.
As I grew older, I began to argue with Grandpa about The Trial. He told me other people fought over it too, that they fight about it even today – over the translation of one word in particular – verleumdet. To tell a lie. In some versions of the story, this word is translated as ‘slander’. Slander speaks of courts and accusations, of public reckoning; it has none of the childhood resonance of ‘telling lies’. And yet, when I read this story for the first time, it was the translator’s use of ‘telling lies’ that fascinated me.
Lies, when they are first told, have a shadow quality to them, a gossamer texture that can wrap around a life. They have that feather-light essence of childhood, and my childhood was built on lies.
The summer before my mother died, we went to the sea. When I look back on that time, those months hold a sense of finality for me, not because that was the last holiday my mother and I would take together, but because it is the site of my last true memory.
Every year, as the August heat engulfed Tokyo, my family piled their suitcases onto a local train and headed for the coast. We went to Shimoda. Father remained in the city to work, but Grandpa Sarashima always came with us. Each time, he stopped at the same kiosk in the station to buy frozen clementines for the train, and in the metallic heat of the carriage Mama and I would wait impatiently for the fruit to soften so we could get at the pockets of sorbet within. Finally, when our chins were sticky with juice, Mama would turn to me in our little row of two and ask what I would like to do by the sea, just she and I, alone.
Our house on the peninsula was old, its wooden gateposts warped by the winds that peeled off the Pacific. As we climbed towards the rocky promontory at the top of the hill, the gates, dark and encrusted with salt, signalled that my home was near: Washikura – Eagle’s Nest, the house overlooking the bay, between Mount Fuji and the sea.
Our country is built around mountains; people are piled up in concrete boxes, cages. To have land is rare, but the house in Shimoda had belonged to my family since before the war, and afterwards my grandfather fought to keep it when everything else was lost.
Forest sweeps over the hills above the house. I was not allowed up there alone as a child, so when I looked at my mother on the train that summer she knew immediately what I would ask to do. In the afternoons, Mama and I climbed high on the wooded slopes above Washikura. We watched the tea fields as they darkened before autumn. We lay back on the rocky black soil and breathed in the sharp resin of the pines. Some days, we heard the call of a sea eagle as it circled overhead.
Grandpa knew the forest but he never found us there. At four o’clock each afternoon, he would venture to the base of the hillside and call to us through the trees. He shouted our names: ‘Rina!’ ‘Sumi!’ Together, we nestled among the pines, giggling, as grandfather’s voice wavered and fell.
I often heard Grandpa calling before Mama did, but I always waited for her signal to be quiet. On our last afternoon in the forest, I lay still, feeling the soft and steady puff of my mother’s breath against my face. She pulled me against her and her breathing quieted and slowed. I opened my eyes and stared at her, at the dark lashes against her cheeks. I took in her pallor, her stillness. I heard my grandfather begin to call, his voice thin and distant. I snuggled closer, kissing her face, pushing through the coldness with my breath. Suddenly she smiled, her eyes still closed, and pressed a finger to her lips.
We no longer own our home, Washikura, on the outskirts of Shimoda; Grandpa sold it years ago. But when I go there today, climbing up through the undergrowth, I can feel my mother there beneath the trees. When I lie down on the ground, the pine needles sharp under my cheek, I imagine that the chill of the breeze is the stroke of her finger.
Rina
Atami
Rina stood in the garden of Washikura and looked out across the slopes and mountains stretching towards Mount Fuji, at the deep shadows forming on the forested hills. She thought of how the plates that created this peninsula had converged at Fuji-san millions of years ago, causing a land of volcanoes, earthquakes and hot springs to rise from the sea.
The volcano was still active, she knew. On a clear day one could see vapour and smoke curling above the snow-covered peak, hinting at the new islands, plateaus and peninsulas waiting within. But that summer, as Rina watched the slopes before her turn gradually from lime green to pomegranate to rust, she did not think of what was to come; she thought about her daughter kneeling beside Grandpa Yoshi in the garden, digging into the dark soil of the azaleas with her trowel, her face turned sullenly away from her mother. Rina looked up at the mountains watching over them, and beneath their quiet gaze she climbed into her red Nissan and drove to Atami.
At the crowded beachfront Rina stopped and looked for a space to park. Atami had become a place for pleasure-seekers. Salarymen flocked to its beaches, eager to supplement their existence in Tokyo with summer condos, shopping malls and karaoke. Hotels capitalised on the natural hot springs, and buildings long ago replaced the trees. The forests of camphor and ferns that once surrounded the town were all cut back until little trace of them remained. Rina left her car at the end of the beach and walked along the waterfront, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun as it glanced off the concrete.
‘You came!’
At the sound of his voice, Rina turned. Kaitarō was walking across the beach towards her, barefoot in the sand. She smiled and watched his slow, loping stride.
‘I was afraid you’d stood me up,’ he said as he reached her.
‘You weren’t afraid.’
‘I am when you’re not with me,’ he replied.
Rina laughed and they began to walk towards the yachts bobbing against the blue of the sea. She stopped by an ice-cream stall advertising azuki, red bean flavour. At her side, Kaitarō passed his sandals from one hand to the other and reached into his pocket for some change.