In the early summer mornings, when the humidity was already on the rise in Kawasaki, I would wake up to the sound of my grandfather working enough spit to aim into the bathroom sink. The sound of this would echo through the little two story home. It would wake up my aunt, who would start scrambling into the kitchen to make breakfast for the 10 of us living under the same roof. As the morning stirred to life in the little wooden house, I would throw off my blanket and stare at the water soiled ceiling, waiting for the sound of the railroad grade crossing to sound.
I spent my summer like this, a 9-year-old finding my way through Japan. It always began the same way, with my grandfather’s spitting and the rest of the house awakening to it as an alarm clock. I memorized every sound he made as he prepared to leave for the Tsukiji Fish Market in the early morning, wrapping my fist into a tiny ball and remaining still so that I would not arouse his attention. He would leave by shutting the sliding doors with a bang, and the house would settle out of its nervousness, back into a slower, duller mood as we seemed to time our movements to the rhythm of the singing cicaidas in the neighborhood.
I wonder what my grandfather thought of me?
We were in Japan because my grandmother was dying of colon cancer, giving me the only opportunity to meet what grandparents remained of my family bloodline. What my grandparents did not know, however, was that I had come to Japan pre-conditioned to hate them.
My mother, who was given away to a neighbor’s lover, steered us away from her blood family, using their home as a hotel stop from where she would board us on endless train trips to socialize with her adopted family members. Her older sister, Mitsu Yamanaka, was what any grandmother should have been for a child. She was my Yokohama no obasan, an affable, loveable older woman who wore kimonos or long skirts and drew such lovely, fluid calligraphy paintings in home she shared with her husband, eldest son, daughter-in-law and a mynah bird that shouted in Japanese. In the mornings, when the panel doors were opened to let in the blistering Yokohama heat to permeate the tatami room where we would sit, Yokohama no obasan would look enraptured as I dizzily filled her head with stories. Most days, we would take the train to Zushi where I could spend several days playing on the beach with my adopted cousins.
There were those times when we would stay back at my grandparents’ home in Kawasaki, where the 10 of us were crammed into a small home. The Kawasaki home had two tatami rooms where my grandparents and uncle slept, a single upstairs room where my mother, sister and I stayed and the old Japanese style toilet which was a simple hole-in-the-ground with the most putrid smell that lingered far too long in the summer heat. It took me weeks to get used to the stink. The kitchen was a mish mash of random colors and metal pieces that would be nailed to the walls. We would take our meals sitting Japanese style on the floor, where a fancy mosquito net would be draped to cover our food. Since there was no in-house bathing facilities, we would spend our evenings marching off to the public bath, where my cousins and I would cause plenty of trouble before running home to watch television or play with fireworks.
This was an idyllic way of life for a San Francisco born and bred Western Addition girl, who spent her summers playing on the broken concrete streets of McAllister. I envied anyone who had a cousin to play with or had family vacations to enjoy while I remained back in the city, spending hours at Japanese language summer school. I went from summers where my mother sent me to get math tutoring from a girl who lived at the top of a 3-story home brownstone, where I climbed endless, darkened stairs to the smell of paprika and pork to sit through an hour of looking at numbers that seemed to jumble, mix and appear in different places for an hour. This time in Japan was different and joyful, even as I was bounced between both the adopted family and blood relative households.
Unlike the order and quiet of Yokohama, the Kawasaki home was chaotic and loud. My uncles seem to come for a visit everyday, where we would all sit around my grandmother and watch TV. To my mother’s consternation, my uncles would teach my sister and I how to swear and speak in Japanese slang. We went to summer movies where children were free to run around in the theater, or play in the streets until the evening. I spent my daily allowance, a rich 100 yen per day from my grandmother, buying fireworks, which my uncles and cousins would set off in front of the house before we went to sleep. Living in Kawasaki seemed filthy at times, with the stench from the no-flush toilet in the home and the presence of so many flying cockroaches to scare me away from brushing my teeth, but I loved the constant disorder, riotous laughing and yelling of living among my blood relatives.
My mother, however, did not. She seemed to spend days away from my sister and I, although she did bring us on a small trip to the Kansai areas of Japan. Most days she was away from the households, leaving my sister and I to our relatives. Even then, my grandmother, the reason for our trip, seemed to be a minor extra in my mother’s plans.
There was never time to be alone with my grandmother that was not already occupied by a visiting physician or her need for sleep. Before coming to Japan, I had only seen photographs of her as a younger, more healthy looking woman who had grown steadily overweight over the years. The grandmother I met in Japan seemed so very old and feeble, with a messy head of gray, disheveled hair and thick bones that protruded through the brown kimono she wore everyday. My mother had told me on so many occasions that she hated her own mother, and my grandmother’s own frightening appearance brought to life so many villainesses in books and movies. I scarcely heard laughter, forgetting that she was in immense pain and under heavy medication, and her smiles frightened me as the skin around her mouth as she would bare large, yellowing teeth.
When she was cognizant, she seemed to want my company. If I was home in the evening, my grandmother would always ask that I snuggle next to her on the futon as the family watched television. So frightened that I would get yelled at for making the wrong move, I would remain motionless, hoping that our gatherings would end soon that I could escape the bony grasp that clutched me close to her. I was always afraid that she would be a louder, more evil and combative version of my mother. Despite my fears of her, my grandmother would request watermelons and an assortment of favorite foods would appear on the table so that we could enjoy our meal. She did so much, and yet I said so little to her. It was only two years ago that my aunt mentioned how my grandmother kept mentioning me before she lost consciousness and died.
My grandfather, however, was the real enigma. He made his dislike of both my sister and I so apparent from the start, beginning with his grousing about the sadness he felt over our ability to speak English. While I at least looked Japanese, he was far crueler in his assessment of my sister, who looked Filipino. Whatever his differences with us were, I was far too young to make sense of any of it. I just knew that he ignored us, except for the numbing moments when he would bore deep, sharp eyes into me that tore me into little, thin pieces of scrap paper.
When my cousins and I would walk past our grandfather’s fish stand in our small town, he never once spoke to me. However, he did make a rather spontaneous decision to join a huge 4-day family outing to Aizu Wakamatsu. He made a particular point to complain about the presence of a Western bed in our room, but ended up sleeping in it as an experiment. He so enjoyed the experience that he slept on it every night while we were in the hotel.
Throughout our trip, my grandfather made a pointed digs at Western life when he saw some bread or other non-Japanese food. His dislike of America and its people were quite clear, and there were times when I would feel his displeasure as if he were putting the weight of a war upon my tiny back. My uncle would protect and reassure us, and those unpleasant moments would never linger.
There were still other parts of my grandfather’s behavior that confused me. My cousins and I moved through town eating fruits from stores or gulping down multiple bottles of fresh milk at the public baths without every paying. When our family groups visited several restaurants in town, a plate of curry rice would magically appear for me. I only found out later that my grandfather had paid our debts and had demanded that local restaurants allow outside food deliveries of curry rice if I was in their restaurant. He knew I disliked most Japanese foods, and wanted to make sure that I would have something to eat.
My grandfather liked to keep his children on edge, only softening his demeanor for his Japanese born grandchildren. He manipulated and demanded, openly disliked his wife and yet fathered ten children with her. When he decided that my uncle Mineo should take a bride, he picked a farm girl from a reputable family out in Aizu Wakamatsu. To sweeten the young girl’s favor towards the family, he declined to introduce her to Mineo. Instead, he paraded two younger and far more handsome sons in front of the girl while using his own charms and guile to attract her to the family. She approved of the union, despite the eventual opposition from her own family and after discovering that she would marry neither of the sons to which she was introduced.
After marriage, however, she found herself being the caretaker to her husband’s parents, along with his 4 younger brothers and a sister. She lost 20 pounds after the first year of marriage, prompting one of her own family members to ask my grandfather if the family was “…intent on killing my daughter…” By the time I arrived in Japan, my aunt was a slim, attractive woman dressed in shorts who zipped through the house like a tornado. She prepared everyone’s breakfast, prepared our lunches for school, did the laundry, cleaned the home and managed to tend to every household chore seamlessly while also finding the to sit and chat with me after I came home from school. Years later, my aunt would tell me that she was driven to take care of everyone because of her open affection for my grandfather. His kindness and attention to her had been stabilizing in a chaotic household.
Sometimes, I wonder if she was the only person in the house that my grandfather liked. I had only one other uncle who told me of a ramen eating contest he had with my grandfather, but I would later find that the story was not true. He managed to build up so much animosity among his children, who disliked his ornery behavior and cruelty. When my uncle asked each of his brother’s if they would take my grandfather in while the Kawasaki house was being rebuilt, every brother refused.
As a method of revenge against his other sons for their refusal, my grandfather hung himself in the new family bathroom. I never understood why my grandfather would carry out his act while in the house of the only people who looked after him, the house of his second son and wife, along with the only two young children who loved their grandfather.
My mother received the phone call from Japan on her day off, a late afternoon in summer. She broke down on top of her bed and began moaning, “…if he only waited a year, I would been back in Japan…he should have waited for me to come home…” She would repeat this throughout the evening until she cried herself to sleep.
I wondered which version of her own father she grieved, as she only seemed to speak of her hatred for him. They were virtual strangers, a man with whom she barely spoke to when we were in japan. On the occasions that she did speak to my grandfather , my mother never referred to him as “father’, just as she never referred to my grandmother as “mother”. They were those strangers only entitled to her contempt, the ones who surrendered all rights to her when she was still an infant. They were the birth parents she hated, happily abandoning them for my father, a man twenty years her senior whom she met and moved in with four hours after striking up a conversation with him at a bus stop.
I also cried a little bit, but it was for my mother’s grief. I could not muster real tears for my grandfather, and there were so many moments when I questioned my own capacity for empathy or compassion. In his death, all I seemed to recall were those empty eyes that saw through me because I never mattered to him. Or I thought he did not. If his life flashed before him while his soul slowly escaped his strangulated corpse, I wondered if my image would make an appearance. I never thought it did. Sentiment never mattered to him, and I wonder if any images of his own family made it past his final, fleeting glances of fish and ramen.
I would resent him for the damage he left behind, and for reinforcing every bad image I had for him. Grandfathers were not supposed to be like this. They were not supposed to leave their vengeful, blackened body behind to be discovered by their grandchildren in the early morning.
In the days I wasted trying to deconstruct my grandfather over the years, his death left me convinced that he was better off not being understood. The family still holds the requisite death observations for my grandfather, but there is a part of me that believes that he deserves no such honor. When I wash the family grave stone, I always try to show respect for the relatives entombed within the site.
There was that one day, however, when I openly stuck my tongue out at my grandfather.
I am still curious about him, even though Naojiro does not deserve such consideration.
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