Shiny Worn-out Shoes hr646

 Heaps of old jackets, skirts, shirts and dresses that I no longer wear are sitting in the back of my wardrobe. All of them are bargains and out-of-date. Even though it’s said fashion recurs in a cycle, they are too old and worn to be put on again. And yet, I can’t throw them away.
In addition to a memory that each one of them holds, I feel guilty to throw away what is still somehow usable by keeping its original form. That sort of my own rule applies not only to clothes but to everything, from food to a cardboard box. I just can’t waste anything. Recently, I have often seen a notice on the table in a restaurant, which says ‘Clear your plate for the earth.’ or ‘Remember again the old don’t-waste-food spirit.’ As a person who is too cheap to leave food on a plate, I always wonder since when Japanese people stopped clearing their plates and forgot the don’t-waste spirit. I’ve practiced it all my life as a habit. A bus person might mistake my finished plates and cups for clean ones because not a bit or a drop remains there when I leave the table.
I attribute it to my grandfather’s DNA. I lived with my grandparents when I was a child and I used to go out with my grandfather. His black leather shoes were totally worn-out. They were not as bad as Chaplin’s but a tip of the shoe had a hole. No matter how often my grandmother asked if he should get a new pair, he was adamant that he could still walk in his shoes. For him, it didn’t matter how he looked in them but whether they were usable or not. Since he kept putting on those shoes with a hole, my grandmother had no choice but to polish them for him. As a result, a weird item as shiny worn-out shoes came into existence. My grandfather would take me to a department store in the city in those shoes and strolled around grandly. Even as a small child, I was embarrassed by his shoes and hated to go out with him.
It wasn’t about money. He had enough money to buy new shoes. On the contrary, he was a rich man who had quite a few properties. That meant his shiny worn-out shoes weren’t necessity. Whether wearing them was his hobby or his principle is still a mystery.
It’s more than a decade since my grandfather passed away. I wonder how the world would be like if people around the world put on worn-out shoes as a common practice. Goods wouldn’t be consumed so much, the number of factories would be less, and more forests would remain. There would be less CO2 emissions, climate change would be delayed, and wildfire and a new virus would be sporadic. All it takes is us wearing worn-out shoes. The problems are solved.
Regrettably, I don’t have the courage to do so. I’m too self-conscious about how I look to others. I don’t want to be looked down on by my looks. Even if my actions led to the destruction of the world, I would like to stroll about a tinseled city and show off by dieting and dressing myself in fashionable clothing. Am I a senseless person? I wonder how my grandfather feels looking at me from above.

The Dream Super Express hr642

 

I was born and grew up in a small village of Kyoto, Japan. My family made a living by farming, which contributed to my even more old-fashioned childhood than usual that was nothing like a current ordinary life.
Food on the table was almost self-sufficient that came form our fields or the front yard and the chicken coops of the house. We had only one tiny refrigerator without a freezer that was more than enough as beer or watermelons were chilled by pumping well water. The bathtub was round and made of wood. Its floor was a round iron plate on which a round wooden board was put in to sit. Beneath the iron plate was a small furnace that my grandmother put wood, straw or used paper in the fire to heat water in the bathtub. Our toilet was a wooden bucket placed in the garage. My grandfather would carry it on a wooden pole to our fields as manure. Not only the way of living was old-fashioned, but also the way of thinking was. All the family members obeyed submissively my grandfather who was a patriarch of my family. Women were deemed to be inferior to men and treated unfairly. Families were giving and receiving them through marriage as if they were commodities.
But the changes of the world can’t be stopped. In the year I was born, a bullet train started running between two major cities in Japan, Tokyo and Osaka. It was dubbed ‘a dream super express’ because of a high speed. The city of Kyoto where I lived was close to Osaka and on the line of the bullet train. A new special railroad and its platforms were built above the existing ones. The railway near my home accordingly had the new overhead railroad above it. When I was an elementary school student, I crossed the local train railroad and the big, tall, splendid bullet train railroad by an underpass beneath the tracks on my way to school on foot every day. In the middle of the passage, when a local train or a freight train passed above my head, I would cringe at an enormously thunderous noise. But the bullet train sounded like a whistling wind, almost soothing.

The number of children had been increasing as the economy was picking up. The elementary school I went to burst with students and a new school was built when I was in the fifth grade. I was sent to the new one that stood right next to the railroad. Out of the windows, the bullet train was running. From a brand new school building, I had never get bored to see the bullet train zipping past at incredibly high speed through the countryside where time went by so slowly. Thanks to the bullet train, my new school had the air conditioner since the building had soundproofing windows that can’t be opened because of train noises. My former four years in the old school with wooden buildings and coal stoves were felt like ancient.
I loved the bullet train so much. To me, it seemed alive with a soul like Thomas the Tank Engine as its headlights looked like eyes and its coupler cover looked like a nose. Since I had difficulty in getting along with others back then, I felt more attached and closer to the bullet train than other human beings. Every time I saw it passing by, I sensed it glanced at me and was running toward the future, carrying hope and dreams. Years later, I left home of an old village and moved to Tokyo by bullet train to become a musician.
Sometimes there is a day when we feel that this world has come to an impasse and been headed just for destruction. But if we adapt ourselves to new ways of living or thinking, we may be able to see more of something bright and exciting. In 2027, Japan is going to have a new railway on which magnetic levitation bullet trains called Linear Bullet Trains run at the highest speed of 320 miles per hour. I wonder how their faces look like. I can’t wait to see them.

The Dog with An Eternal Life hr627

There was a small old cemetery near the house where I grew up. As the Japanese law hadn’t been changed to cremation until I left home, all of my ancestors were buried there when I was a child. A patch of land was allocated to each family in our hamlet of an old city Kyoto, and a family would divide the patch into individual graves for the deceased. Our family’s patch had about ten small graves each of which was marked with a few small insignificant stones. It was a very primitive burial site that young people nowadays wouldn’t believe.
My grandmother used to accompany me when she visited there twice a year. We would bring incense sticks, a box of matches, stale cookies and a tin kettle filled with water. She would stick lighted incense into the ground of each grave, put a cookie beside it and spilled some water from the kettle onto the ground. Since the stones didn’t bear names, who was, or were, under the particular grave depended on my grandmother’s memory and what she was told. After we finished praying to each grave, she always said, “Now, the dog,” sounding like the most important event remained. And she would stick the last incense and spill the rest of water along with the last cookie onto the foot of a weed-grown mound that was beside the narrow trail to our family graves. Under the mound was the place where our family dog had rested in peace.
I had never kept a dog but my father had. My grandfather reigned harshly over his family members and never allowed me to keep a dog. But he hadn’t started his hobby of growing chrysanthemums when my father was a child. No chrysanthemums meant an approval for a dog. When my father told me that he had kept a dog, I couldn’t picture that a dog was running freely in the yard of our house.
From time to time, I visited the cemetery with my father. His main purpose there was to pull out the weed that easily gulped up the entire grave patch, rather than to pray. After clearing up the ground of our ancestors’ graves, he would pray to each grave shortly. And in the end, he prayed to the mound, for his dog. Although among our ancestors, there were his brothers who were twins and died shortly after birth, he prayed for his dog longer than for them. Seeing him do that every time, I knew how much he loved his dog. That also explained my grandmother’s ritual for the dog’s grave. He was an important member of the family back then.
According to my father, the family never decided or even talked about keeping the dog. He was a stray dog that showed up one day from nowhere, and kept coming. Soon he stopped leaving and just began to stay in the yard. My father fed him and he slept under the eaves of our house. That was how they got to keep a dog. He was a big dog with long fluffy white fur. My father named him Maru, that means ‘round’ or ‘circle’ in Japanese, because he looked like a big white hairy ball. In those days, keeping a pet was so easy and casual that Maru didn’t wear a collar and wasn’t on a leash. They had never taken him for a walk because it was unnecessary. He was strolling and running around the yard all day. Although he had died long before I was born and I had never seen him, it was one of my customs to pray to Maru on a visit of our family cemetery.
I had wanted to keep a dog all through my childhood but never been allowed because my grandfather filled the yard with his chrysanthemums. When I was a teenager, my first boy friend gave me a big white stuffed-animal dog for my birthday. My father looked at it affectionately and said, “It looked exactly like Maru.” Instead of to a live dog that I couldn’t have, I named that stuffed-animal dog Pon-maru by mixing my nickname ‘Hidepon’ and ‘Maru’. He became my official make-believe pet. A few years later, I left home. My grandparents passed away. The family house was demolished and the site was sold. The rest of my family moved out of Kyoto. The custom to visit the family cemetery was gone. Only, Pon-maru still lives with me in my apartment that is far from my hometown, in a shape of a big, a little-grayish fur ball.

The Last Letter from My Mother hr608

My parents sold our farms, house, land that had been inherited from generation to generation and lost everything after they had failed their business. They moved out their hometown and started their new life in a small apartment in a strange city. It was a huge blow to them because my father had given up everything that he had wanted in order to inherit them, and my mother had married my father whom she didn’t love in order to get his family fortune. Although they had planned the similar life as theirs for me, I refused to inherit my family by sacrificing what I wanted to do. I chose a musician as my career and left home. That drove them to be eaten up with enmity against me and they had done everything they could think of to make me give up and come home. While I kept defying their attacks for a long period of time, they lost all the family fortune and had nothing left for me to inherit. Their battle against me was automatically terminated. Oddly, since they moved in their new apartment, they have become gentle to me as if they had been different persons. Their dramatic change of attitude toward me had often perplexed me. I had tried to explain that they became old, felt weak and had learned a little from their failure, which was why they mended their ways to treat me. As I hadn’t had a good relationship with them for decades, I slightly wished we were having a new starting point to build a better one. That was just about when I received an unexpected letter from my mother that crushed my wish so easily. To my great surprise, all that the letter contained was blame and reproach to me. She just kept on criticizing me at length, complaining how much I disappointed her, how much she bore a grudge against me, how much she felt chagrin at me being a musician, what a bad person I was. Although she had done innumerable cruel, heartless, thoughtless things to me over the years, she had the audacity not to mention one word about those. At the end of all slander, she concluded her letter by writing, “This is the last letter from me to you.” To summarize her long letter, what she wanted to tell me was that she didn’t want to see my face ever again and didn’t want me to send her birthday presents or Mother’s Day gifts ever again. She asked me not to stay in contact with her anymore. I had been treated unfairly by her for so many times but this letter exceeded all the spite that she had shot at me. The letter was out of blue and shocking enough for me to wonder if she was having some kind of brain disorder. Since I was little, she has had a strong tendency to tell an every sort of lie from grave to transparent, and to forget about anything inconvenient to her. For a person like her, it’s not so unpredicted that her old brain got murky. In any case, I was deeply shocked. I shouldn’t forget that things like sending this letter is the norm for her and I’ve gotten used to it already. She only did what she usually does again and I was the one who was fooled by her recent nice gestures. But I asked myself repeatedly if it’s impossible for human nature to be changed after all. My mother is a scorpion which ultimate goal is to make others unhappy regardless of its own profit. The fact that I have the same DNA in me horrifies me. A good thing is that I was mostly raised by my late grandparents. I may have grown up to be a decent person not to be like my mother. I will, and should, prove it by myself with the way I live...

A Demon’s New Home hr575

I visited my parents for the first time since their financial difficulty made them sell their house and move into an old condominium. It situated only two train stations away from Kyoto but in the different prefecture, which meant they were kicked out of their hometown too. The moment I met them there, I noticed a big change. Both of them had turned into different persons. They used to be grumpy, gloomy and nagging all the time. But now, they were cheerful and lively. It was as if demons living inside my parents had departed and they regained consciousness. I felt like I saw my good old parents whom I’d known when I was little for the first time in decades. Even their faces had been changed somehow. My father was raving about his days of exploring his new town with childlike excitement. As he had been raised and lived as a successor of the family that had continued for generations on the same land, he had never imagined moving to a different place let alone actually moved out of the house. He moved to a new place for the first time in his life and realized how comfortable it could be. Because our house had stood in an old uncivilized area of Kyoto, everything here seemed modern and incredibly convenient to him. He rapturously talked about his new daily life of shopping at a discount store and eating at McDonald’s. He even mentioned that he intended to start new hobbies such as drawing or English conversation. I had never seen him so positive. It seemed he enjoyed his first freedom. My mother also talked about how much she liked the view from the balcony and how convenient to live in a compact apartment instead of a large house she used to live in. Only, she added every time lamentably, “But I had never imagined myself ending up my life in a small apartment.” I know too well how far the reality diverged from her plan. As a young girl, she planned to live a rich life whatever it took. So she got married with my father whom she didn’t love, and endured living with and taking care of my grandparents, all for money. In return, she believed she would live luxuriously in a mansion until she died. When I was a child, I often heard her say, “How stupid women who marry for love are! They live in a small apartment. But look where I live!” As it turned out, though, she found herself living in an apartment, being old without either love or money. “I should reap what I have sown,” she murmured with a cynical smile. My new changed parents didn’t attack me, which they used to do every time. Not a single complaint came out of their mouths. When I was leaving, my mother looked as if she would miss me. My father walked with me to the train station to see me off. In addition, he slipped me some money and told me to eat something good with it. All those things couldn’t be explained unless demons stopped possessing them. I got on the bullet train from Kyoto toward home and uttered “I’d like to come to Kyoto again.” That was what I’d never said before in my life. But I should have been careful about a wish. My wish to travel to Kyoto came true too quickly. The very next day I returned to my apartment, my partner’s brother called him to let him know his father passed away. Since his father also lived in Kyoto, I traveled back to Kyoto with my partner for the funeral only two days later. And then, three weeks later, I went down to Kyoto yet again with my partner to place the ashes of his father in the grave. I decided never to say ‘I’d like to go to Kyoto’ ever again. After his father’s death, my partner’s brother suddenly changed from a tender and modest man to a completely different person. He came up with a scheme to have a small inheritance all to himself, instead of dividing it with my partner as his father had told to. A demon which left my parents chose him as its new home and moved in…

Price of Greed hr572

According to my parents, I was such a sullen infant who always put a long face. I had the habit of uttering “Butch!” as if to show dissatisfaction, and I received ‘Butch’ as my first nickname from my parents. When I started talking, I was a child who constantly grumbled. My mother’s impression was that I complained about anything whenever I opened my mouth. Indeed, when I recall my childhood memories, they are abundant in all kinds of complaints I made. My mother would ask me why I couldn’t have even the slightest feeling of gratitude. She told me how fortunate I was to be born into wealth since she always boasted our family’s fortune. I was never convinced because if we had been that wealthy, we would have lived a better life in which I didn’t need to complain so much. Mostly I complained about meals, but I did about other things as well. Among them was about clothes. I was ten years old when I began to get fat. I’m short now, but I was quite tall for a ten-year-old girl back then. My mother stopped shopping children’s apparel for me and put her used clothes on me instead because I was big. I went to school every day with her clothes on that were mainly brown and mean boys called me a cockroach. I insisted to my mother that colorful clothes for adults existed and pestered her to get them, which was rejected. I frequently criticized my parents’ way of working, too. They always tried to curry favor with my grandparents who lived in the same house and were so stingy. My family used to farm and my parents worked so hard on the fields from dawn to night. And they told me we were wealthy. It was obvious they worked crazily not to earn money but to impress my grandparents. I repeatedly explained to my parents that what they were doing was completely pointless and demanded to come home early, which was rejected too. I regularly appealed for a raise of my monthly allowance. I was so persistent in this particular request because it was scanty despite my mother’s claim of our wealth. I never stopped after I was rejected for a million times. By the time I was a teenager, when I started casually “Mom,” my mother would cut me right away saying, “About money, isn’t it? No!” She told me that she would have a nervous breakdown if she heard more of my ‘Mom’. Thus, I spent my childhood as an extremely unsatisfied child. I think I’m greedy by nature. But I believe that greed can make people progress. Resignation is considered as virtue in Japan and greed is loathed excessively. In my opinion, we need greed to make changes for better. There was a line in a US TV show, “Happiness is to be content with what you have.” I think wanting more can be happier with efforts and hope. I often feel sick and have a stomachache after having too much at an all-you-can-eat buffet. As the communal spa is free in my apartment, I take it too long every day, which sometimes puts me in bad shape and lays me up. But it’s more fun and livelier than doing things acceptably. Besides, I can’t stop it because this is who I am. Being greedy is one thing, but getting what I want is a different matter. While I find more and more things I want, they are usually out of my reach. I have to face disappointment all the time that I can’t possibly possess what I want. Even so, my greed is too strong to accept reality…

Genetic Parsimony from Atavism hr571

I was brought up by my grandparents who led an extremely saving life. Although we were well off and lived in a big house back then, most lights were kept off to save the electric bill and the house was always dark. Turning on the TV was available by my grandfather’s daring permission. We would eat dinner in the poor light under a small kitchen fixture. My family had farmed in those days and what we ate were vegetables we grew in our fields. We grew some kinds for our family’s use, but most vegetables on our table were what were too damaged to be sold in the market. We ate eggplants almost every day in summer and spinach in winter. Meat seldom appeared and we lived like vegetarians. Protein was supplied mainly by beans from our fields. We kept hens that brought us eggs. Sometimes my grandmother got cheap fish at a nearby mom-and-pop store and grilled it that seemed to have more small bones than flesh. Every meal was bland and tasted terrible, as my grandmother saved seasoning. Snacks were hopeless too. Since my grandparents had tried not to waste money on them, we had only few snacks of Japanese style cookies that occasional visitors brought as gifts. They were damp and limp because we kept them as long as we could. I usually didn’t have any appetite and was thin probably owing to that eating habit. When I visited a relative’s house and ate there once in a while, everything on their table looked gorgeous. In that case, I devoured and called the house a restaurant. My relatives would wonder and ask me what I ate at home while they were watching perplexedly the way I was eating their regular meals. My grandmother spent most of her spare time sewing and mending something. She mended holes in socks and patched futons so that we could use them for a long time. I had never seen her get new clothes and she wore an old kimono every day. Her scarce cosmetics were the cheapest ones on the market. My grandfather went out by using a senior citizen’s pass for a free ride of public transportation, wearing an ancient drooping jacket and shoes with a hole. Whenever he ate out, he brought back the leftovers in a doggy bag. As a child, it was a mystery to me why they lived like that although they had plenty of money. I hated it and longed for a better life. Then I grew up and got to live in the way I liked. And now I find myself mending tirelessly my tattered socks. I’m not rich, but not that I can’t afford new ones. I replace elastic at the waist of pants, turn off the lights in my apartment as much as I can, buy and eat old food that is half price, ask for a doggy bag, and find free samples for my cosmetics. I think it’s not about saving money. I simply hate wasting. Not just money, but anything. If we waste time continuously, we will end up wasting our whole life. When I avoid wasting something successfully, I feel like I’m smart and that feeling brings me joy. I imagine my grandparents thought the same way. I gradually don’t loathe being stingy myself while I’m duly aware that someone notices and sneers at mended marks on my socks…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.557

At the end of my last homecoming day, I got into the cab heading for the train station, saying goodbye to my mother who was merrily talking about which condominium she would move in, to my father who was weirdly cheery, and to the house and its land one last time. When I dropped out college and left home for Tokyo to be a musician a long time ago, I thought I would never come back to this house again. I have made unplanned visits since then, but I assumed it would be the last visit each time. I was accustomed to a farewell feeling toward the house in a way and I departed with no particular emotions this time either. The cab was running through my familiar neighborhood where I spent my entire childhood. It was still shabby as it used to be. The cab drove through old houses of my childhood friends where I used to play with them, and under the overhead train bridge where I ran into perverts so many times. From the window, I saw the elementary school I went to, and the sidewalk my first song came to me while I was walking on. The bookstore where my father bought me my first English dictionary and also where he spotted his missing cousin. A place where a milk factory used to be that I waved to its plastic cows beside the gate every time I passed by in my father’s car. The old temple where my late grandparents used to take me and let me feed doves. Then something struck me and I suddenly realized. It wasn’t just the house I was losing. I was losing my hometown and departing from my childhood. I would never be in this neighborhood again because it was going to be an unrelated, foreign place from now on. Although I had always hated my neighborhood, that thought brought a lump to my throat and soon I found myself crying. I was stunned at this unexpected feeling. If I hadn’t been inside a cab, I would have wailed. The cab came near Kyoto Station that was my destination. My late grandfather often took me to this area around the station that used to be undeveloped, decayed and in the miserable condition. But now, after years of intense redevelopment, it has become an urban area with numerous modern buildings of hotels, fashionable shops and huge shopping malls. It was a completely new different place and I found no trace of what I was familiar with the area. The cab stopped at the signal close to the station and there stood a new movie complex by the street. I casually wondered if it showed ‘Tomorrowland’. Then I felt I was actually stepping into it. Things and places I had been with were all disappearing and a place I had never seen before appeared in front of me. I saw a change more clearly than ever. I was leaving everything old behind and going into a new world. The world I’m walking in is unknown, but therefore there are full of possibilities…