My mother’s kimono

This week my place is a kimono museum.

For the past five years, since we started clearing out my mom’s house, a pile of Japanese kimono* that belonged to my mom and aunt have been sitting on my childhood bed, neatly folded and wrapped in a cotton sheet, while I tried to figure out what to do with them. My bed was a last foothold in the process of giving up the family house.

Before my mom died, the kimono were stored in a musty old trunk in her basement for 70 years as my mother busied herself getting on with her life. Because they had been packed away and forgotten for so long, their history was lost to us — we didn’t know which was whose, or when they had been worn. They were never taken out for inspection, so we never had the opportunity to ask or learn about them.

Everything in that trunk was packed before 1942, when my mom’s family was forced to leave San Francisco for Tanforan Assembly Center, and then Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, for the duration of World War II. Their landlord on Pine Street was a Greek fellow named Tom, who kindly allowed them to store belongings in the basement, not knowing when or even if they would ever be able to return.

They did return, three and a half years later, and Tom did keep his promise. When we discovered the kimono after my mother died, I knew I would never give them away. I inventoried them, photographed them, used the photos as graphics or motifs in various digital projects. I researched how to care for them, hesitating to just bring them to a cleaner, where they might be destroyed or discolored by harsh modern chemicals.

This week, after a long progression of steps including clearing space in my house, moving my mother’s dresser in (with drawers large enough for a folded kimono), and asking others about the do’s and don’ts of kimono care (one acquaintance had a horror story of ruining a vintage kimono by storing it in mothballs), then securing acid-free tissue paper and cotton pillowcases, it was time to upgrade my storage method. I repurposed two “jo” (bojutsu) sticks (I had studied this martial art when I lived in Japan) to use as hangers. Two at a time, I unwrapped the kimono and hung them inside my house to air (avoiding direct sunlight).

Unfurled, rising out of their musty pile, the kimono wafted gently in the breeze coming in through my screen door. No longer a burden — taking up space but too important to be thrown away — my mother’s kimono, like her buried past, opened their arms and took wing.