It was about when I was eight years old and visited my grandparents’ for
the first time since their house was rebuilt where their old one in
which my mother was born and grew up had stood. I stepped into the
living room of their brand-new house and my uncle welcomed me.
The house belonged to my grandparents on my mother’s side. As an old
custom of Japan, the first-born child used to live with his or her
parents after marriage. That’s why I had lived with my grandparents on
my father’s side all the way until I left home. Accordingly, my mother’s
eleder sister took a husband into the family and had lived with her
parents. Her husband was this uncle of mine. He was married to my aunt
as an heir-to-be and related to me by marriage not by blood.
He has gotten the best seat in the new living room. It was placed at
the top of the table and the closest to the TV. What caught my eyes was
the painting hung on the wall behind him. It was a large copy of Mona
Lisa.
I don’t think I recognized it as Mona Lisa back then, but I knew it
was a Western painting and felt a decisively unsuitable, out-of-place
sense. The house was located in a rural area in Kyoto, in typical
countryside where Western paintings were hardly spotted. Though it was
new, the house was Japanese-style. The living room had no chairs as they
sat on the floor around the low table. Yet, above my uncle was a
gorgeously framed, dignified Mona Lisa. I’m still not sure if someone
gave it as a housewarming gift or he got it himself, but it was
certainly the furthest thing from my uncle who was a lean, uncultured,
gamble-inclined man. While I gaped at the painting thinking how opposite
it was to my uncle, he said to me smiling, cheerfully and proudly,
“Isn’t this painting nice? I like this. It’s nice, isn’t it? Nice, hah?”
Until mid-teen, I had often visited the house. Mona Lisa was always
there as my uncle’s favorite. In every New Year’s holiday, my uncle
acted as a dealer for our annual family gambling card game at the living
room. It may sound peaceful, but it was a serious high-stakes battle
between my uncle, my cousin, my mother and me. Although my uncle loved
gambling and was buried into every bet, he would lose big every year.
From above, Mona Lisa watched him losing to his son with tears in his
eyes, with her archaic smile.
I went abroad for the first time when I finished high school. I
visited France and saw the real Mona Lisa at the Louvre. I wasn’t
interested in art so much then, and walked through rather than
appreciated. But once I entered the big hall where Mona Lisa was
displayed, I noticed something fundamentally different. Although there
were quite a few visitors, the hall was almost completely silent. The
air was strained and tense. It was as if everybody had been holding
their breath. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. I walked
forward and found Mona Lisa at the back of the hall. Since it was beyond
security guards, tasseled ropes and the reinforced glass, there was
still some distance from me when I stood in front. Nevertheless, the
real one was surprisingly powerful and captivating. I clearly remember I
felt like being gravitated to it and couldn’t help fix my eyes on it.
As for my uncle’s favorite copy of Mona Lisa, when my grandparents’
house was burned to the ground in after years by my grandmother’s
carelessness in which she lit a candle too close to a sheet of Buddhism
talisman paper on the alter one morning, Mona Lisa was burned away with
the house. When the fire broke out, my uncle, who had been even thinner
because of terminal cancer, carried in his arms my aunt, who had been
fat and suffered from dementia and was asleep in the upstairs bedroom,
ran down the stairs holding her, and saved her life. I thought I found
out who his favorite lady really was, and who he really was...
Saturday, May 4, 2019
Mona Lisa hr618
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