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Tokyo Popped—page 3
On one of my more recent trips back to Japan, I took the train down to the Yokohama nursing home where my grandmother, then 92, was living in a room as small as those six-tatami-mat apartments I'd lived in when I first moved to Japan. Atop the stacks of newspapers and books around her futon was a magnifying glass. She had cataracts, I had been told, and would soon need surgery. In the meantime, she squinted through the thick lens to make out newsprint. Her recall was still sharp, and she told me she had read my mother's most recent novel and was pleased that she had appeared in it as "the flying obaasan."
I had taken the train down with ideas about prying some living history from her. She had lived through so much: World War I, the Taisho era, Japan's fascist '30s and wartime aggression, the U.S. bombings and then Japan's re-emergence as a global power. She had actually been the second wife of my grandfather. His first had died giving birth to a stillborn baby. Obaasan, who had suffered from tuberculosis as a teen, was not considered a prize catch and thus had to settle for marrying a widower. Yet she had thrived, raised a prosperous family, survived Japan's wild 20th century ride and was now hearing reports of great-grandchildren emerging around Japan. When had she been happiest, I wondered?
"Right now," she told me, "right now is fine."
She was never a contemplative women. Unlike me, apparently, she chose not to dwell on the past. Perhaps in her case too much had happened.
Obaasan, in look and feel and in that smell of talcum and mothballs, still inhabited the form in which I always remember her. She wore the familiar heavy brown sweaters and midcalf-length dresses of thick cotton. Even as she walked, now with the aid of a gnarled, beige stick, it was with that same pigeon-toed gait she had used when visiting our family in Pacific Palisades, California, or more recently when she came to see me in Tokyo. She had slept on the foldout sofa bed in my living room and had taken out her teeth before she fell asleep watching NHK's educational channel.
When I was with her, as we slowly made our way from her nursing home to the shopping mall and the Chinese restaurant where Obaasan would buy me lunch, I felt again connected to this place. I didn't know the best bars or which nightclubs mattered, but I had my grandmother and my family. By blood, at least, I still belonged.
On my return from the nursing home I had a few hours to kill in Tokyo, so I decided to take a stroll past a few of my old apartments. There was the tiny one-room place above a family print shop in Kagurazaka. And then the apartment in Nishi Azabu upstairs from the photographer who kept a dune buggy parked in the downstairs lot. Sometimes, when I lived there and was returning home, there would be a line of models standing in the stairwell. Young, gamine brunettes and blondes holding oversized, leather head-shot books under their arms, waiting for a go-see with the photographer. But this time, when I checked the mailboxes, I saw that the photographer no longer lived there. I stopped in at Sunset Strip, hoping that Nina might by some miracle still be working there. Instead there was a longhaired Japanese kid with tattoos on both arms who told me he would rather be wakeboarding in Okinawa. Nina? He shook his head. He'd never heard of her.
That is the challenge of any return. One only knows how to seek out old experiences. I had never been a truly responsible adult in Tokyo. In Hong Kong, where I now live, I have a steady job, a wife, children. In Tokyo, where I had my first good times, I only know how to be a young man, and I find that role increasingly awkward to play with each return.
If you are truthful to yourself, you will admit there was a time when you felt most honestly and authentically yourself. A week or a month or, perhaps if you are lucky, a year or two when the swirling circles representing your character, personality, style and appearance swam into perfect congruence and you were precisely whom you aspired to be. Whenever I return to Tokyo, I am reminded of that state of equilibrium. I may now have a steady job, children, a wife, prospects, but one trip back and I am reminded of all the things I am no longer.
Obaasan had taken a tumble. she'd slipped in her room and may have been prone there for several hours before any of the attendants in the residence discovered her injury. She'd broken her hip. At 98, that can be a death sentence. I saw her a few days later, in a Kanagawa hospital. My uncles were there, crowded around her in the chilly ward. Japanese hospitals, like most public buildings in Japan, lack central heating. The rooms are unkempt, the bathrooms filthy. The family of the convalescing are expected to pitch in and help feed their stricken relative. My grandmother had had hip-replacement surgery. The surgeon showed my uncles and me X rays of her thigh, with the new artificial hip gleaming as bright as split wood. He told us it was now a matter of rehabilitation.
I looked at Obaasan slumped over in her wheelchair. For the first time, she no longer looked like my grandma. Her hair lacked any shade or hue, the sparse strands were so frail and spent that they seemed translucent. Her skin was mottled and sagging as if it had decided to abandon this task of covering the body and was seeking to slink away from this diminished woman. In the rush to move her from her room to the ambulance and then into surgery, her eyeglasses had been lost. Now, when Obaasan opened her eyes, she too saw only ghosts.
"Who are you?" she asked when I fed her sections of tangerine.
"Karl," I told her.
"Pick me up," she said. She'd been horizontal for more than a week. Her legs would have snapped if she stood, her artificial hip being new and her muscles atrophied. She would need to heal, then undergo rehab. Who could blame her if she didn't want to go through with all this?
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