Onigri 🍙
By: Tom Fukuzumi Midgley ︎
The last summer I spent with her, I noticed how old she seemed. Her former sprightly stubbornness had been replaced by something heavier—a darkness that ended conversations and gave her a perpetually tired expression. Aware that our time together was limited, I decided to ask her questions about her life and the past, making the most of this living link to my history and the experience of the country that was my escape from the realities of teenage life back in London.
At first, she seemed hesitant. "Obaachan, don't you have photos from when you were young?" I had to press my point a few times before she wearily got up to retrieve the albums from her room. She returned with small, leather-bound books that looked like they hadn't seen the light of day for some time. They contained pages and pages of photographs, some having come unstuck from their positions after years of shelf life. The oldest ones were frayed at the edges, their subjects sat rigid and emotionless in front of the camera, as people in old photographs tend to do. The women were white-faced and clad in kimonos, the men sporting round spectacles and neatly cropped hair.
"That's my mother." As I turned the page, my grandmother pointed to a young girl seated between two stern-faced older women. "She was very beautiful. This next one is of me." It was a black-and-white photograph of a bowl-cut youth, unsmiling and clutching a wooden doll. "I was never an attractive child. I have the face of a man." She said this without bitterness, but I wondered if this self-assessment was truly her own.
The next photograph was of a handsome man wearing a loose yukata and a relaxed smile. My grandmother's eyes lit up. "This is my father. He loved taking photographs. I remember he had a camera that a friend brought back from America, and he cared for it like it was his child. Whenever there was something happening in our neighborhood, he would grab his camera and take pictures of everything." As I admired the handiwork of my grandmother's father, I noticed something that made me double-take. What seemed to be a simple picture of a crowd, on closer inspection, showed that the jubilant people were all waving flags embossed with the unmistakable swastika.
I said, "They're all waving Nazi flags!" My grandmother looked at me blankly. This obviously did not mean much to her. I reminded myself that Japan had been allied with Germany at this time; the sight of a swastika would not have been shocking. I sensed that for my grandmother, memories of the past were not ones to dwell on; the Japanese do not have an easy relationship with their recent history. Once, when I asked her about the war, she ended the conversation with, "It's alright for you, you can look back and think about these things. You won. We lost, and who wants to think about losing."
As I progressed through the photographs, I observed the passage of time; kimonos were replaced with skirts, and hairstyles became bouffant. My eyes landed on a picture of a young couple on a motorbike. The woman was wearing red lipstick, her arms wrapped around the waist of a man with a rockabilly hairstyle and an idly dangling cigarette. I squinted and realized these were my grandparents. My grandmother looked so youthful and vibrant, unlike the tiny woman who sat beside me. But it was my grandfather, whom I remembered as frail and unspeaking, only moving to light another cigarette, who really caught my attention. How people change, I thought. I looked over at my grandmother and saw her gazing down at the photographs, her face clouded with emotion.
My grandmother died a few months after I returned to London. Despite having fought valiantly for so many years, there was only so much an old body could take. My mother had been with her at the time. I was sad that I could not be there for her funeral but made sure to ask lots of questions when my mother returned from Japan.
My mother sipped hot coffee. "Your obaachan was very tired towards the end. Her mind wasn't in order. She got confused about simple things and couldn’t remember a lot." I looked out of the window, biting my lip to fight back the tears.
"She was insistent on one thing, though," my mother said. "She wanted to be cremated with some of her old photos. She'd been going through all these albums and talking a lot about her family. She said she missed her parents. She wanted to be with her memories, I guess." My eyes met my mother's. Before either of us could say anything, a loud beeping broke the momentary silence. "The rice is done," my mother said, walking over to the cooker. "I will make onigiri."