I decided early on that it was hopeless; I would never be Japanese, so why try? There was too much to know, too much to be understood that could not be conveyed by the spoken English word. I would rather be forward-looking—American.
But much as I tried, I could never leave it behind. Someone would die. We always seemed most Japanese when someone died.
“We should go to the funeral,” my mother would say. “Iwashita-san came to Pop’s funeral.” If someone had sent flowers, we would send flowers. If they had visited the house and brought food, we would do the same. Koden, funeral money, was carefully recorded and returned when the occasion arose. It seemed there was a giant ledger that existed in my mother’s head that painstakingly noted every kindness ever rendered or received. How could I ever know or remember its contents? I couldn’t keep track of my own short life. A friend of mine was hurt once because I didn’t remember staying at his sister’s house in Minnesota. I felt awful about not remembering. It seems that there are whole periods of my life that have simply dropped from memory. Sensory overload. Am I busier than my mother was, or is there a Japanese gene that weakens in succeeding generations with increased Americanization?
Perhaps I was simply born too late. The youngest of four girls, I was the only one who didn’t remember living in the old Victorian in Japantown where my mother grew up and my grandparents lived until they died. I was the only one who couldn’t understand what my grandmother was saying, even when she was speaking English. When someone talked about what a family acquaintance had done for us, I was the only one who didn’t know who the person was.
This record-keeping and reciprocation did not revolve only around death. My mother would tell me one day on the phone, “The Noguchis are coming up from Los Angeles. They want to take Kiyo and me out to lunch.”
I had never heard of the Noguchis, but it turned out that sixty years before, Bachan (my grandmother) had let them stay at Pine for a month after Noguchi-san lost his job. Noguchi-san had recently undergone surgery for cancer. “Osewa ni narimashita,” he had said. He had incurred debt. He wanted to repay it before it was too late.
The repayment of debt, then, apparently passes down from generation to generation. What will happen when my mother and my aunt Kiyo are no longer around? The ledger will be gone. How will I know to whom I am obligated, what debts to repay? One day in the future will I open the door to find a total stranger bringing me home-made sushi because of some kind act my grandmother did in 1946? Probably not. When I meet the grandsons and great-granddaughters of my grandparent’s friends, who among us will know that our families were once connected? We will have lost the intricate web of obligation and reciprocation. The people who remember. This community.
(Copyright 1993, R. A. Sasaki. All rights reserved. First published in Into the Fire: Asian-American Prose, Greenfield Review Press, 1996.)
“Koden“: Courtesy of Chris Kim. Licensed under cc by NC-ND 2.0
love the stories