Memoryland hr686

 

My memories shared with my mother are stored in Memoryland. It’s the place inside of me that holds all my memories and I named it Memoryland by myself. Recalling my memories means visiting Memoryland. Like it or not, a scene or conversation with my mother sometimes happens to flash back in my mind when I inadvertently step into Memoryland.

I carefully avoid the section concerning my mother whenever I visit there. It always evokes heartache and anger. Taking a glance at my mother’s section, I find notable examples. I was in my late thirties and came back to my hometown for the first time in years to see my family. Instead of welcoming me, my mother said to me, “You’re not famous at this age of yours. That proves you have no talent in music. You have failed in music and you are a failure.” On my other visit, she said, “To get this family’s fortune, I gave up everything that I wanted to do and married without love. But you are doing what you want with someone you love. Taking everything isn’t acceptable! Because you don’t sacrifice anything,  you’re not entitled to inherit the family fortune. So, don’t ever come home. Visits are unnecessary since you’re not a successor.” Just a few glimpses of my memories with my mother cause a lot of pain, and that’s why I try to steer away from my mother’s section in Memoryland.

My relative called me ten days ago and let me know that my mother passed away.

She was a chronic liar and an evil-doer. She got our family’s fortune by sacrificing her life, yet seemed unhappy day after day. It appeared that she had taken it out on others by trying to do harm anyway she could think of. Eventually she lost the fortune when she and my father failed the family business and moved out of their big house. After she moved into a condo, she had submitted to violence from my sister. She ran away to hide and moved into a small apartment where she died alone, covered with her own vomit and excreta. Despite her advanced age, I had assumed she wouldn’t die soon. Her revenge for her unhappiness was never enough. I supposed she would persistently plot evil schemes or throw heartless words at me and others around her which would keep her going. Since I had thought her time wouldn’t come in the near future, her death took me by surprise.

Has she repented and gone to heaven? In my theory, people realize their mistakes and wrong deeds before their deaths. They admit, regret, and thus are forgiven, released from suffering called life, and then die. I wonder if she also has been forgiven. Considering her nature that she wouldn’t admit her wrong doing, it’s hard to imagine she could ever be forgiven. Nevertheless, as she has actually died, she might have been.

I dared to go into her section of Memoryland. Passing through her countless lies I received and her desperate efforts to make people unhappy, I found a tall, heavy brass gate in the deep back of the section. It was locked by a huge bolt, which meant I had blocked this memory. Summoning courage and bracing myself for what horrible memory was there, I unbarred the bolt and got inside. It was on the bus that was running along the beautiful coast of the sea. My family was on a trip and taking a tour bus. I was a small child and was in the window seat with my mother next to me. She pointed at a big rock jutting out of the sea and uncommonly tenderly asked me, “Hidemi, what does that rock look like to you?” “An elephant,” I replied. “Really? Yeah, you’re right! It does look like an elephant! Then, how about that rock over there? What does it look like?” We continued this conversation for one rock after another and she said I was right each time kindly. While she seemed a different person from the one I met every day, I felt extremely happy. Later though, when I told her how happy that bus ride was, she confessed to me that she had just tried to divert my attention so that she wasn’t embarrassed by me who could have thrown up on the bus because I usually got car sick too easily. In any case, the funny thing was, I unconsciously had blocked one of the happiest memories of mine.

On the night of that day when I was told about my mother, I burst into tears all of a sudden. I couldn’t figure out why. I just couldn’t explain the emotion I was having, but it engulfed me. While crying hard, I was dismayed and tried to understand what I was feeling. It was more like emptiness rather than sadness. I felt as if the long fierce battle I had engaged in abruptly came to an end with my arch enemy evaporated. I even no longer knew whether I loved her or hated her.  Maybe both. I was simply overwhelmed by an illogical, strange emotion that I couldn’t comprehend and kept bawling.

The Umbrella hr681

 I was about to leave the beauty salon for the supermarket across from it when there suddenly came a downpour. It rained heavily enough to whiteout everything around. Some people were dashing toward the supermarket soaking wet instantly. I pulled out a folding umbrella from my bag. In my school days, my grandmother would never forget to say, “Have you got an umbrella?” whenever I was leaving the house, rain or shine. That has made it my habit to carry a folding umbrella wherever I go regardless of the weather forecast to this day.

When I was a high school student, I went to school by local bus. I needed to transfer the bus on the way because the school I went to was far from my home. One day, while I was transferring and waiting for the bus at the bus stop, a heavy rain started to fall. The bus stop was on the street and had no roof. I stuck my hand into my school bag for a folding umbrella, then remembered that morning at home. Since it shined brightly and I felt it bothersome to go get my folding umbrella, I lied to my grandmother’s daily confirmation for once and said yes though I didn’t have it in my bag. As it sometimes happens, it never rains but it pours. I wasn’t carrying an umbrella on that particular day. Learning how right my grandmother had been, I was bracing myself to get drenched. Then, it stopped raining all of a sudden. To see what happened, I looked up. There was an umbrella above my head. And I saw a girl who was about my age and wearing a uniform of a different school standing close to me. I hadn’t noticed she was also waiting for the bus and stepped closer to me to let me share her umbrella when it started raining. It was her umbrella that covered me.

I had been a bad person under the influence of my mother. She was all vanity and cared only how she looked to others. She made me go to the most privileged school in the area based on her values. She believed which school they went to decided people’s rank. After I actually enrolled in that private school, I found out that other students thought in the same way as my mother did. As I was too weak to defy it, I went with the flow and soon adapted that kind of ranking myself. Each school had its own uniform by which the school a student went to could be identified. I was sporting my uniform of the elite school to show that I belonged to the upper class. Most Japanese students use public transportation to school. The students of my school including me were snobbish and overtly despised other schools’ students when we were riding the local bus together on our way to and back from school. We cold-shouldered and ignored the students of the lower rank schools as if they had been invisible. Accordingly, other schools’ students apparently hated us because of our attitudes. As a result, an inamicable, tense atmosphere was created whenever we shared public transportation. The girl who held out her umbrella for me was wearing a uniform of one of those schools that we had been looking down on.

My mother’s mantra had been that everything people do was nothing but for gain, which had inevitably inhabited my mind for a long time since my childhood. But here she was, a stranger who was getting drenched half of her body by giving up half of the cover for me. Even though she had recognized from my uniform that I was one of those pretentious students of the privileged school, she didn’t gloat over my misery. Her expression wasn’t patronizing at all, but rather apologetic as if she expected that I would consider help from a lower rank school’s student as an insult and reject it with anger. I was flurried by an umbrella offered without gain. It proved my mother’s mantra was wrong, my friends’ attitudes were wrong, and I was wrong. I thanked her and we waited for the bus together silently under one umbrella. And we separated into each other’s friends as usual when the bus arrived. Only, now that I broke an evil spell of my mother and my friends, my attitude had changed since then. I learned the school’s rank wasn’t proportionate to the students’ humanity, or rather, was inversely proportional. I greeted that girl every time I saw her and sometimes had a chat with her on or off the bus. When my friends saw me doing that, they would sneer at me saying, “Is she your friend or something?” to which I replied yes. What I didn’t explain to them was that she was my benefactor who rescued me from the evil world with her umbrella.

When I was opening my folding umbrella under the eaves of the beauty salon, I noticed a woman came out of the building, looking discouraged by the pouring rain. I thought of sharing my umbrella with her momentarily, and stopped. I’m extremely careful about helping people. Whenever an occasion arises, I muse deliberately and discreetly whether I should offer help or not because I don’t want to offend someone with my help. I imagine some people may regard it as an unwelcome favor and would rather do it by themselves. I also fear that someone takes my kindness as being looked down on. From those worries, I always try not to meddle with someone. In this case, however, I wavered because an umbrella was involved. While the encounter with the girl in my high school days popped up in my mind, I chose to stick to my way and stepped out in the downpour alone. A few steps later, the woman dashed past me in the rain. The moment I saw it, I shouted to her, “Would you get in my umbrella!?” totally unconsciously as a reflex action. She looked back in surprise and I covered her with my umbrella before she replied while I was surprised at my action myself as much as she was. We ran to the entrance of the supermarket together under one umbrella. She thanked me gratefully and disappeared into the store gleefully. Half of my body got drenched which was exactly what I had prevented by carrying a folding umbrella all those years. Although it  felt stupid to get wet by breaking my principle not to meddle with others, I felt extremely good at the same time because I looked like the girl of the umbrella, half of whose body had been drenched as I was now. I realized how deeply her deed had resided in me and how much I longed to become a person like her. 

A Call to Hell hr623

I checked out the hotel on the last day of my trip to the western region of Japan, flew from Kansai Airport and took an airport bus to the station where I would catch a bullet train heading home. When I finished a late lunch near the station, I noticed there had been voice mail from my mother on my cell phone. My parents had declined to meet me the day before when I was going to visit them who live in the western Japan. I thought the voice mail was about lame excuses to hide the fact that they didn’t want to see me, and called her back although my phone’s battery was extremely low.
I started sarcastically, “It was a pity that we couldn’t meet yesterday although it was a once-a-year opportunity, wasn’t it?” to hear her made-up excuse. Then, she replied, “Huh? Yesterday?” sounding like she had already forgotten about it. And she continued on as if it wasn’t important at all. What she wanted to tell me was why my parents had run away from their condo where my sister had begun to live with them, which I had learned also the day before as a surprise.
According to my mother, my parents had prepared an envelope that contained ten thousand dollars for me for a tax avoidance reason. They were going to hand it to me if I visited them because they didn’t know my bank account number to wire it. They had put the envelope on the Buddhist alter of their home. When my sister found it, she got into frenzy and began to hit my father, shouting, “Get out of this condo!” As her violence didn’t stop, they ran away with almost nothing but the clothes they wore. They had stayed at a hotel for a few days and moved in a short-term rental apartment that my sister later traced. As they wouldn’t let her in, she scratched my father’s car, broke his bicycle, torn window screens and put garbage at the door. They had been moving from one place to another for three weeks because she found them each time and repeated her harassment. They were still looking for another apartment to escape from my sister. As if to sum up, my mother said to me, “We couldn’t get back to our home where the envelope that had money we were going to give you sit. Your sister stole your money.”
I had heard about some abuse my parents have been inflicted from my sister when my mother called me a month ago and told me that she was in hell. But I hadn’t known things have gotten even worse like this. Although I just learned all her miseries, only one thing seized my mind – ten thousand dollars. It triggered something in me and my eyes turned dollar signs like a cartoon. I swiftly responded her that it happened because they had prepared it in cash and that I would give her my bank account number not to repeat this in the future. I was desperately trying to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. I thought they might wire it again once they got my bank account number. By then, my cell phone’s electrical voice had uttered ‘Low Battery’ and ‘Charge Now’ for several times over my mother’s lamenting. I told her to get a piece of paper and a pen immediately and started the names of my bank and its branch. She was getting them so awfully slowly that I suspected she did it intentionally. After a painful wait, I started the number. But right before the first digit came out of my mouth, my phone went dead.
I felt quite chilly because the timing was so precise that it didn’t seem coincident. I also felt ten thousand dollars were slipping through my fingers. I looked around for pay phones to finish the number, but couldn’t find one. I came home by bullet train, recharged my cell phone, and called back my parents. Both of them didn’t answer. I called them again the next day. My father answered this time with the same vacant voice as I heard on the phone during the trip. He told me that he couldn’t talk with me now as he was in the real estate agent’s office for another apartment hunting to hide from my sister. He sounded completely absent-minded and made me feel uncertain. My mother came up to the phone and told me their effort would be in vain anyway since my sister would eventually find out their new place somehow. I offered that I would find an apartment for them around where I live if they didn’t bother it would be 500 miles away from where they are now. It was when my mother burst into tears again. “Will YOU help me? Really?”, she bawled, as if she couldn’t believe my words.
After I hung up the phone without telling her my bank account number, I finally came to my senses. My dollar signs tumbled down from my eyes and my reason returned. My mother is, has always been, a liar. She tells any kind of lies from big to small to anyone. She also has set her mind to make me unhappy in every possible way. She has wielded countless tactics for that purpose. The marked example was when the music label my partner and I started finally got on track after strenuous years. When she noticed our beginning of success, she offered financial support to back me up. I foolishly trusted her because she was my mother. My partner and I moved to a bigger office and hired more staffs. Shortly after that, she tried to take over our business by threatening to stop financial aid unless we handed over the profit. I realized that she had offered money in the first place to crush our business, but it was too late. Our label suffered heavy losses and damage with her sudden finance withdrawal. Thinking back my bitter experiences of many years, it has been proven that she never does anything good for me and she never hopes my well-being. It’s totally a blue dahlia that she would give me any money. I almost took in her ‘ten thousand dollars’ this time and was stupid enough to be about to tell her my bank account number.
I wonder why I keep being fooled by my mother after all those years from childhood. My mother has never been forgiven for what she did and things have increasingly gotten worse around her year after year. I may wish somewhere in my mind that she is finally brought back to her sense and cleans up her act. Then she becomes a better person and someday she accepts me and loves me. Probably those vain hopes are my weakness on which my mother plays with her lies. Or more simply, like mother like daughter, I’m as greedy as my mother, that’s why I easily fall for her…

A Heavy Gate hr601

On the day that I would meet my former high school teacher for the first time in decades, I commenced a journey by train from the hotel I stayed to the station of our rendezvous. I had made a detailed plan beforehand for this train trip since quite a few transfers were involved along the way and the area was unfamiliar to me. I took the first train and repeatedly looked over the note I had taken for which train of what time at which station to catch. The plan was perfect. Now that I got on the first train right on schedule, all I needed to do was just moving the rest of the way according to the note. The train arrived at the station where I was to make the first transfer. I was standing in front of the car door to get off when the train stopped. Oddly, the automatic door wouldn’t open. I was waiting for a while until I heard the departure bell ring and noticed a sign saying ‘This Door Doesn’t Open. Use One at Opposite End of Car’ I panicked instantly. The train was about to depart and I had to reach the opposite end of this long car. I dashed down the aisle like a sprinter while all the passengers were startled at my frenzied run. I was barely in time to get off. As I passed a close call of the day, I transferred to the other train line with a relief. Then, the bigger trial assaulted me on the platform of that line. An electric board that shows the upcoming trains in the green light had turned all red. It indicated that all the trains were delayed severely by heavy rain and the next train was cancelled. My jaw dropped. I didn’t see that coming as it wasn’t raining at all here. Plus, the next train that had been cancelled was the very train I was going to take. What are odds that the exact train I was taking is the only train cancelled among all? Taking that train was crucial because I had more transfers to make on the way ahead. Missing that train would disrupt the whole connections. A big piece to complete my journey fell off and my perfect plan came to naught unexpectedly quickly. Now I was officially in a panic mode. I tried to come up with an alternative, thinking hard about which train to take instead and where to transfer to get to my destination. When I frantically looked through information boards on the platform, a delayed, out-of-schedule train came in. Its destination was a big famous terminal that I thought would take me somewhere from. I hopped on it, and found out that the train to which  I was going to transfer later would also stop at the terminal. If I had caught it there, I still could have made it on time for the planned appointment. As soon as the train arrived at the terminal, I was a dashing sprinter again, rolling down and up the stairs to move between the platforms like a cartoon character. When I zipped by a businessman in a flash in the middle of a flight, my bag somehow caught his umbrella. I found myself running dangling an umbrella. I ran down to him who gaped at me, returned his umbrella, ran up again, reached the platform and jumped in the train. Inside, I realized that the train wasn’t what I had planned to take but the one happened to be there after a few hours’ delay. It didn’t depart on schedule, which meant I didn’t have to dash around the terminal like a maniac. This unknown train turned out to go straight to my destination without transfer. In a very weird way, I made up for the disruptive schedule with each delayed train and arrived almost on time. I stepped out of the train, completely exhausted. I wondered why I had to endure great hardship like this in order just to reunite with my former teacher. It wasn’t such a long distance. I simply wanted to see my teacher and bridge the decades’ gap. It was supposed to be easy, but it wasn’t. I saw the reason why I had never tried to see her up until now. I wasn’t brave enough to show myself to her. I had believed I ought to be successful when I met her again. I hadn’t had the courage to admit that I haven’t achieved anything and I was still nothing. To see her, I needed to verify what I’ve done in my life so far and get over my foolish pride that I had held onto for a long time. In this trip, I challenged it. This trying journey to see her signified a long difficult way to accept who I am. I struggled around, but reached after all in an accidental way. Over the ticket gate at the station, I spotted her waiting for me smiling...

Reward hr569

My parents didn’t get married for love. Their marriage was part of a deal to inherit the family’s fortune and they took it for money. Another part of the deal was to carry on the family and they had me as a successor. It had gone according to their plan until I decided to do what I wanted for my life and left home. Since then, they attempted every evil way to pull me back in the family. They tried all possible means to make me give up my carrier as a musician. They said I had no talent, I was a failure, and how bad I was as a human being, over and over at every opportunity. They conned me once big time. Out of the blue they offered money to set up my own record label, and after I rented an office and hired the staff, they suddenly withdrew their money, crushed my label and bankrupted me. I defied any kind of attack, threat, temptation and begging from them because I was determined to be a musician. When they realized I wouldn’t succeed the family, they told me not to even visit them because they didn’t want to see me any more. On their repeated requests not to come see them in their house, I understood they didn’t need their child who wasn’t a successor. From that experience, I have a doubt about a concept of unconditional love. I spent about 10 years to complete my last song. The new song I’ve been currently working on hasn’t been completed yet after four years. It was not because I was loitering over my work on purpose. Making music is the only thing I do seriously without compromise. I don’t want to let time interfere with my music. It’s completed when I’m satisfactorily convinced it’s finished. And I dream of my future in which my song will be such a big hit that it will make me a celebrity and take me to Monaco. The other day, I noticed an unfavorable fact. While I dedicate my life for my songs that I spend all my effort, time and passion on, I unconsciously expect reward from them. Although I already have so much fun and feel indescribable happiness during work, I believe that my songs should bring me money and fame someday. That sounds awfully like my parents’ attitude toward me. They raised me while they expected reward when I grew up. Do I also nurture my songs for reward when they are completed? If so, I will end up exploding my anger if my songs don’t reward me with money and fame. Am I the same as my parents after all or can I give unconditional love to my songs? I get enough reward in the process of completing songs. My reward is done when songs are done. From then on, all I should care is to make my songs happy, which means to support them all my life by doing whatever I possibly can to make them be heard by a lot of people. Can I love my songs that way and be satisfied with my life until the day I die? I must try. Because even if I don’t have any money or fame at all, I think I’ve already received reward called life with freedom and happiness…