Yasushi Inoue - Life of a Counterfeiter

In N.’s case, an extraordinary disruption of his life had stolen his memory, leaving him only those three cards, but to some extent we are all in this position: each of us holds one or two cards that have been in our hands for years, who knows why, while the cards that should be paired with them have disappeared, instilling in us the desire to try and learn, through our own games of picture-matching, which particular section of what larger design they might make up.

I myself have forgotten the greater part of my childhood memories in the course of living, and yet a few small, fragmentary recollections remain vividly etched in my mind. They all date from the years before I entered elementary school, and it is impossible for me to say now which part of what picture they compose.

I must have been about five or six when this happened. My grandmother Kano and I were on the beach of a little fishing village near Shimoda, at the tip of the Izu peninsula, watching a ceremony for the launching of a newly built boat.

I’m sure it was autumn — September or October. I was neither hot nor cold, not even sitting there on the sand with my legs stretched out in front of me. Before us there was a small inlet the shape of a drawstring pouch, in the dead center of which a boat with perhaps a ten-horsepower motor floated, completely covered with flags. Years later I saw a launching ceremony for another small fishing boat at a fishing village in Wakasa where I had gone to swim: the flags had vertical stripes in five colors — white, red, purple, pink and yellow — and were hung in close succession not only from two bamboo poles, one each at the bow and stern, but also from cords strung between the poles. The ceremony for the boat my grandmother and I saw was undoubtedly more or less the same.

I stared and stared at that little boat decked out with all the flags as my grandmother watched beside me. There were crowds of men on board, but either the drinking had already ended or they were so worn out from celebrating that they were taking a break, because the fully dressed boat simply stayed where it was, bobbing there in the middle of the inlet, exuding an oddly quiet atmosphere.

We must have been waiting for someone. The village was my grandmother Kano’s hometown — though of course I am basing this on knowledge I acquired later. Kano was a geisha in Shimoda when my great-grandfather took her as his mistress; after his death she was entered into our family registry as my grandmother, and I grew up in her care, but since she had been his mistress, and was inherently strong-willed, neither my family, nor the villagers, nor her relatives in her hometown liked her.

My grandmother must have been past sixty then. What had prompted that visit to the fishing village where she was born and raised, on the other side of Mt. Amagi? I’m unable to say, because I know nothing of her life in those days — but in any event there we were on the beach, facing the inlet where the newly launched boat floated, waiting for whoever was supposed to come and meet us.

Maybe my grandmother was expecting a childhood friend, now an old woman, or a niece or nephew. All I remember is us sitting on the sand, and the time we passed there, undoubtedly waiting for someone.

I suspect the reason I have never forgotten this picture, in which I myself appear, is that it seems so cheerful and relaxed, and yet at the same time feels oddly empty.

Even now, when I think of my grandmother, something in my memory of her then troubles me. Why did she make that trip to her hometown, which she had visited so infrequently before, and go out to the beach, of all places, and sit on the sand?

If there is anyone out there who can furnish some other part of this picture, I would love to place that person’s card beside my own. But I doubt anyone like that is still alive.

I incorporated this little fragment of memory into a story of mine. In the story, my grandmother decides on a whim to visit the village of her birth, and she goes there, stopping by the temple on the mountainside to request prayers for the dead of the family into which she was born, and then she takes the road straight through the village, where no one recognizes her, and for the first time in ages goes out to the beach where she played every day as a child. On the strand, she sees a newly launched boat floating in the center of the inlet. This, more or less, was how I presented the episode.

Naturally, having no basis for imagining whom my grandmother might have been waiting for there on the beach, I passed over that point in silence. And so my grandmother comes across in the story as a solitary old woman, afflicted with the prosaic loneliness of the old.

In my memory, though, my grandmother does not seem at all lonely or sad. The only feeling she evokes as she sits on the sand gazing out at the ocean is an inexplicable emptiness. She sits there even now in my memory, a look on her face that seems to be saying that the place to which old age carries us is neither a loneliness nor a sadness, but an inlet where a motorized boat in full dress floats quietly on the water.

*

I remember another fragment. This one is of a summer night. Stars were scattered across the sky. My mother and I had been standing for quite some time in a secluded, dark spot behind the train station. A wooden fence stretched on and on beside us; from time to time, we heard trains sending up puffs of steam.

My mother hadn’t said a word to me the whole evening. She stood clutching a sizable bundle, tied up in a furoshiki , and seemed not to be thinking of me at all. I hated having to stay this long in such a dark and desolate place; I would hover for a while near my mother, then crouch down on the ground. Whenever I made to walk away, my mother would give my head a poke. She was a gentle person, and the harshness of the gesture was unlike her.

At some point, as we were standing there, my father turned up. He stood talking in a hushed tone with my mother without casting a glance in my direction. Eventually he noticed that I was there and came over, suddenly sweeping me up in his arms and hoisting me high into the air. He set me down again after that, giving my head a perfunctory rub, and then went back to my mother.

My parents talked again for a while in an undertone, and then, as though they had forgotten that I even existed, started walking together, just the two of them, down the dark road bordered by the fence. I hurried after so I wouldn’t be left behind… And there the memory ends.

Years later, I told my parents all this and asked them to think where the station might have been, but neither of them could recall such a night. They couldn’t identify the location for certain, because as a young army doctor my father had always been moving from one small city to the next, wherever his regiment was stationed. He said it had probably been Chikamatsu, since we lived near the station there; my mother said it was probably Toyohashi, where she often took the road behind the station.

In any event, I get a sense from this small memory that my parents were in the grip of some terrible sadness when it happened. Seeing as neither one of them remembers that night, however, whatever it was that had occurred must have been easy enough to forget once it had passed — too trivial, even, to merit description as an “incident.”

I worked this little fragment, too, into a story, making it one of the main character’s memories of her childhood. I had her interpret that evening as an embodiment of some secret her parents had shared, something they hid from everyone — a sort of hard core that they held in common, that could never be expunged from their shared past, no matter how hard they tried.

Here, too, I can’t say I succeeded in capturing the meaning of that tiny memory. Without knowing where my father had been, where he had just come from, I will never be able to elucidate the sadness inherent in this isolated picture. Maybe he had left my mother and me to wait while he stopped by the pawn shop, or went to a friend’s house to try and borrow some money, only to be refused. Or maybe, letting my imagination run, he had just come from a visit to someone about some unpleasant business involving him and my mother.