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.

A Long Way to Freedom hr670

 

I have started a video Podcast.

A complex about looks resides in me always, all my life. When I was a child, my mother used to say, “If only you don’t have a nose like that,” by shading my nose with her hand. She daily instructed me that the only way for me to make it through in this society was to be affable to anyone since I wasn’t pretty. Adding to the piggy nose, I was fat, and given a constant notion from my mother that I was ugly. Although I had a dream to be a singer, the complex about being ugly led me to switch my dream to be a radio personality that could hide looks. Then, while I had been suffering many more bitter experiences of my looks mainly at school as a teenager that relentlessly implied my ugliness, there came a big music trend in Japan, in which singer-songwriters who didn’t have good looks and abstained from TV appearances made big hits. I saw a new path appear in front of me. My dream to be a singer was back on and with my own songs this time.

Sadly, that music trend didn’t last long. By the time I got down to pursue my music career in earnest, the trend had died out and good looks had been required for singer-songwriters as well. Although many record companies and music producers contacted me when they listened to my songs that I sent to them, they turned down the offer as soon as they saw me at the first meeting. I had tried to hide my looks as much as possible in the course of my career as a musician because they would work adversely. My complex had deepened further.

I am vain by nature. I grew up hearing my mother say that the most important thing is how we look to others. It seems I’m unable to break her spell. While my life has been a long journey to fix my flaws and complexes, the biggest obstacle is my vanity. I thought it was about time to face off. Now that I’m no longer young, my vanity has been forced to be compromised drastically. Aging has made my looks even worse, my moves clumsier, my careless mistakes more frequent. I’m too old to care about good looks that are way out of my reach now. To get rid of the complex by beating my vanity once and for all, I decided to take on a video Podcast that would reveal my bad looks to the public.

I connected my microphone into my computer and set a photo shoot light that I newly bought. The light got broken quickly and the microphone didn’t work properly on the computer. I ended up shooting with my smartphone. Although I had recorded several Podcasts without a picture for some time, doing on video is a whole different business. Sitting in front of a smartphone with makeup and good clothes feels as if I were in front of others. Because I’m not social, I easily get extremely tense and can’t talk as I usually do. On every recording, I sweat all over from tension. Sometimes my head goes blank and I just stare into space while opening and closing my mouth that utters nothing. I begin to get nervous a couple of days before the recording and feel like running away by the time I start shooting.

However, I feel surprisingly refreshed when I finish, and I want to do more. Since it appears to work as therapy for my social phobia and stage fright too, I think I had better continue. Above all, it helps me to be free from my mother’s spell though it took so long. I should be content to show myself as I am even if nobody watches or I look hideous or I can’t speak as I intend to. And I hope that recording becomes enjoyable for me someday. That would be the day when I have overcome my complex and have won this battle. 

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~Talking and Reading from Japan by Hidemi Woods~

video Podcast: [ Youtube ] [ spotify ]

Podcast: [ Amazon Music ] [Apple Podcast] [Castbox]

Good and Evil hr668

 I haven’t seen my parents for about five years now. When I saw them last time, they were in their late seventies and my mother told me an episode for a giggle. It goes as follows.

During a recent trip my parents took, they went along the highway beside a lake by car. They found a signboard that advertised a tour boat on the lake. It was already late afternoon but they thought it was still early to check in the hotel. They decided to drop by the lake for the sightseeing boat. When they pulled up their car, the staff at the ticket window was closing the tour boat office and the boat crew who had just returned from the last tour of the day was leaving the boat. My mother jumped on the staff and asked for the tour. The staff replied that today’s tours had been over and told her to come back tomorrow. That was the point where my mother unleashed her specialty. A fabrication.

“My husband and I are an old frail couple who came all the way from a very far place just to get on this boat. We had been looking forward to sightseeing this lake by boat so much for a long time. It’s extremely disappointing not to be able to get aboard. We arrived here later than we had planned because we couldn’t drive fast due to our age. We won’t have enough time tomorrow to come back here. If anything, I’m not sure if we could come back here ever again because we’re too old.”

In this made-up story of hers, there is not a jot of truth but all lies. However, the kind staff bought her fake misery and talked to the captain of the boat. He willingly untied the mooring rope and prepared the boat especially for my parents. They monopolized the entire boat as if it had been their charter tour. After she told this to me who was downright disgusted throughout the whole story, she added that although the tour had been boring and the lake hadn’t been appealing, she had exulted in her deed by which she made the staff work overtime just for her and my father and made the staff go home late that day. It appeared that she was proud of what she did to them since it showed how clever she was to take advantage of them. My father was smiling and nodding amusingly.

My parents are evil. They haven’t changed as they became older. My mother never stops deceiving people whether she gains benefits or not. Benefit doesn’t matter to her but deceiving is her purpose even if she would suffer a loss in return. Too many times I have seen her do harm by lying to her family, acquaintances and strangers alike. It seems someone’s unhappiness is her only pleasure. As her child, I have had more than enough share of suffering by her lies. It started by what she had kept teaching me as far as I can remember as her mantra that was all the people in the world were evil and they spoke ill of  me behind my back while they seemed nice. When I was hospitalized in a children’s ward for nephritis, she came to see me mere half an hour before the visiting hour was over at night and went home hurriedly though she promised she would come early afternoon everyday. A thorough examination day was scheduled for me at the hospital and I earnestly begged her to come early for once and accompany me because I was nervous and the nurse also urged my mother to do so. She made a promise, and of course she broke it and didn’t show up. The nurse accompanied me in place of my mother the whole day through numerous kinds of examinations. When they finished and I got back to my ward, my mother was sitting beside my empty bed, not apologetically but satisfactorily. Beside these instances, I was hurt by my mother’s constant lies, big and small. Worst of all, I couldn’t help trying to believe her while I duly knew she was lying, which enhanced my disappointment. As I grew older, her lies to me got more fierce thus the damage resulted bigger. My father is her puppet who does whatever she tells him to do and connives at her lying. Eventually they ruined my business and then stole my money. I learned a lesson in a hard way before I estranged myself from them and finally cut them off. We haven’t been in touch for years.

Although I sustained irretrievable damage from my mother a million times, I feel envious every time I see a mother and a daughter hanging together. I always wonder if there’s such a thing as good parents in this world when I watch the award show on TV and the recipients mention gratitude toward their supportive parents in their speeches. It sounds more implausible than envious to me. On my part, I want to think that a child from evil parents can grow into a good person. I sincerely try to prove it by being good myself.

Something Never Obsolete hr667

 There are many things that used to be common and have become obsolete now. In Japan where I was born and grew up, an analog calculator called ‘soroban’, a Japanese abacus, had been so popular and seen everywhere when I was a child. Almost every store and household had one and even the elementary school had mandatory classes for the fourth grader to teach how to use it so that students needed to buy it. Most stores in my neighborhood used it as a register. It had been a major tool to calculate until an electronic calculator appeared.

Private soroban schools were abounding accordingly. It was a common practice that students went there after school. In my neighborhood, all children who had learned the multiplication table attended the soroban school. I was one of them. The school was the teacher’s house located right next to my house which was actually part of my family’s premise that we rented him. The class was held twice a week, in which students with different grades and ages sat side by side on the floor and practised soroban on the long narrow low desks elbow to elbow.

Soroban has a national certification system that officially certifies a grade by an examination held regularly . After learning the basics, students would take the examination to get grade certification that started from the level six. The lesser the number, the higher the grade. For some reason, I was extremely good at soroban that required speed and accuracy. I was able to finger the beans on a soroban faster and more precisely than anybody else. I acquired the certification with one try straight from the level six to the level three, which made me the youngest level three holder at the age of ten. The school had never had a student who achieved that before me, and another girl named Junko. We were the same age, got in the school on the same day, and made this achievement at the same time.

Junko was the opposite of me except for skill in a soroban. She was pretty, thin, considerate, and from a poor family. She once suspended and ruined her timed session at the soroban school just to hand me tissues when I had a nosebleed next to her. When I was waiting for the soroban class to begin in front of the school with her and my mother came out of the house to hit me, she helped me run away by carrying my soroban bag and following me. She was the one who taught me how to ride a bicycle in place of my busy indifferent parents and witnessed my first-ever ride, and jumped for joy screaming “You got it! You got it!” over and over. She was such a kind girl.

After we moved on to practice for the level two examination, things had changed. The level two was a whole new game. While up to the level three the result was decided by the total marks of three subjects, which were multiplication, division and addition, the level two required above 80 marks for each subject. Digits were huge including decimals and slip addition was added as one more subject. To pass the level two, we had to score above 80 in all these four subjects. The teacher told Junko and me to brace ourselves for difficulty ahead because we wouldn’t pass with one try from here as we had done so far. He was right. Both of us failed the examination for the first time. Then we had stuck there for over a year by failing three times more in a row. Although we had been on a losing streak, we were looked up to at school because nobody there had ever passed the level two and we were the only students who were trying for it. But gradually, people around us had had an interest in our rivalry since we had progressed in sync. They began to whisper about which one of us would pass the level two first, which had incited competition against Junko in me while we were best friends. Since I was regarded as the top student there with Junko close behind me, I felt I should pass before her. My mother also started to demand that I should, out of her vain. I had been under more and more pressure so that I became convinced I must have beat her on the next try.

On the day of the examination, I planned to have a warm-up before heading for the examination site by having my father time my calculation of the four subjects. Junko was going to drop by my house to go with me. However, I didn’t have enough time to finish all four timed subjects before she came because I overslept. I would have to do without a complete warm-up. My mother jumped on my decision fiercely and ordered me to finish a thorough warm-up. I explained that Junko would come before I finished. “I will make her wait,” my mother said, “Ignore her! You’ve just got to pass this time!” I was constrained to start calculation and I heard Junko coming in the middle of it. My mother ushered her into the dining room that was next to where I was practicing. I heard my mother talking to her to distract her attention but I knew she noticed I was practicing by the sound of soroban beans and my father’s voice of “Start!” and “Stop!” for timing. She was sitting at the table quietly sipping tea and listening to my mother’s gab. I imagined how much she wanted to practice too, instead of wasting valuable time before the examination just by waiting for me. When I finished a warm-up and saw her face in the dining room, guilt assaulted me furiously. We left for the examination together and she didn’t mention about my warm-up or her excruciating wait. My mother’s devious trick worked. I passed. Junko failed.

I was proven to be the best as the first level two certification holder at school. The teacher and all the students admired me. My mother seemed satisfied, but said it was her who made this happen, not me. As for me, I was all guilt. I passed by outfoxing Junko who had been incredibly nice to me all the time. Although everybody expected that I would move on to get the level one certification, I quit soroban. Junko continued, passed on the next try, and acquired the level one certification eventually.

The digital era arrived and a soroban became obsolete. People no longer used a soroban for calculation and the soroban school disappeared. It has been forgotten as time goes by. Yet, I still have an urge to scream and run away every time I remember the day of my last level two examination. Qualms and shame have never disappeared and die hard in me.

Lazy and Talented hr666

 

I started taking piano lessons at the age of four and had continued on and off until I was fourteen years old. Yet, not a single classical piece exists that I can play properly. There are several clear reasons for that.

Photo by Do The Lan on Pexels.com

To begin with, the motive for the lesson was wrong. My vain mother bought the piano as a symbol of wealth not to play it but to show it to visitors although she really hated music. Then she assumed she would be ashamed if someone noticed the piano in our house stood exclusively for a decorative purpose and she decided to make me play it well. I took lessons at my mother’s order, not from my own passion. At first, a neighbor woman who had played the piano when she was young came to my house regularly to teach me. With an introduction from her, I got into Kuribayashi Piano School before long.

The school held a recital once a year at the big hall in downtown. My mother would invite her parents to show the pretty dress in which she clothed me. She would make me practice so earnestly for this once because her vain couldn’t allow me to fail on the stage in front of a large audience. It used to be a big night for my family. The piece for each student was picked up according to their skill by Mr. Kuribayashi every year. Gradually, year after year, the students who were much younger than I was were assigned to much more difficult pieces than mine because I had developed my skill too slowly due to lack of practice. The spot of the students in a recital was decided in ascending order of difficulty of the piece, from the easiest to the most difficult. Consequently the best student of the school played last in the recital. In this order, I had become next to a small boy by the time I was a junior high student. The rehearsal was taken place in the large living room of Mr. Kuribayashi’s home. When my turn came and I sat in front of the piano, I found the chair was too high as the player before me was a small boy. I tried to adjust the chair but didn’t know how. I struggled for some time while other students were quietly waiting and staring. I became panicky with embarrassment. I was all of a sweat jiggling the chair for the time I felt eternally. I glanced at Mr. Kurubayashi for help. He was just watching without a word. At that moment, I suddenly realized. I had long been not his favorite any more. How could I have not known for such a long time, about such an  apparent fact like this, I wondered. Amid terrible embarrassment, horrible disappointment gripped me. A girl who was about my age became unable to just watch my embarrassing fight with the chair and came up to me. She adjusted the chair for me in a flash. That girl was assigned to the last spot of the recital that year, which meant she was the best student. She beautifully played her piece, Chopin’s ‘Fantaisie-Impromptu’ that I believe is the most difficult piece for the piano in the world. When I listened to her play, I felt embarrassed further for my low skill and my longtime self-conceit. And I was clearly convinced that she was the favorite of Mr. Kuribayashi. Immediately after the recital, I left the school.

While I liked music so much that I wanted to become a professional singer someday, I loathed practicing the piano. My older cousin who was good at the piano visited our house one day and asked me to show how much progress I had made so far in playing the piano. I couldn’t understand why she tried to ruin her visit that I had been looking forward to. As I had imagined, she pointed out flaws in my play and began to teach me by which the day was ruined for me. Before I knew it, the keys went blurred because I was crying. She was shocked to see it and apologized repeatedly, but seemed puzzled why practice gave me so much pain. I shared her wonder for that matter.

As I hated practice that much, lessons at Kuribayashi Piano School became a torture. I took a lesson once a week, but I often didn’t touch the piano for the whole week until my next lesson. I was such a lazy student who was always short of practice. Nevertheless, I was somehow the favorite of my teacher, Mr. Kuribayashi. He liked my playing that was stumbled almost constantly, and kept admiring me by saying “You’re talented.” While I was playing, he often hummed along and danced to it. He hadn’t been in good spirits like that with other students. He instructed them strictly and sometimes scolded them. My younger sister started taking lessons a few years later and going to the school with me. Unlike me, my sister was a diligent student and practiced playing every day at home. In one lesson, after Mr. Kuribayashi danced to my usual bad playing and uttered his ‘You’re talented’, in my sister’s turn he slapped my sister’s hand and yelled at her, “No, no, no! It’s not like that! Not at all!”, which drove her to quit the piano for good. On the other hand, he had never scolded me. He was pleased with my play no matter how badly I played. He just showed his frustration saying, “If only you would practice…” Even when I was lazy enough to come to his lesson without cutting my nails, he would quietly hand me a clipper and tell me to be ready while he taught another student. Since I was too dependent on his ‘You’re talented’ and fully conceited, sometimes it took months to finish one piece and move on to another. In those cases, Mr. Kuribayashi would say, “Let’s change the mood, shall we?” and introduce me to a different composer’s piece for lessons, but would never scold me even then.

Ironically, I have never hated playing the piano. On the contrary, I’m fond of it after decades have passed since I quit lessons. While I still don’t practice, being able to play Chopin’s ‘Fantaisie-Impromptu’ remains one of my far-fetched dreams to this day.

The Insufficient Child

 I was a nine-year-old child living in Kyoto when I was hospitalized for nephritis. In my room for six patients of the children’s ward, a girl named Ayumi also suffered from nephritis and was next to my bed. She was so little, probably three or four years old, that her mother was allowed to stay in the ward on the makeshift couch beside her bed.
Ayumi’s mother studiously read thick medical books everyday to study kidney disease for Ayumi’s recovery while looking after Ayumi. She would ask millions of questions to an intern nurse and learned from her by taking detailed notes. For Ayumi’s medication, she went to get wafer papers and would divide a dose of powdered medicine into a couple of small wrapped doses three times a day so that Ayumi took it easily.
Next to her bed, I was struggling to swallow powdered medicine though I was nine, and often coughed up and blew powder all over my bed. My mother was hardly around. She visited me barely a few minutes before the visiting time was over and left immediately. She blamed her dash visit for her busy work as a farmer, but I doubted she cared. Looking at what Ayumi’s mother was doing for her, I was stunned by the difference between her mother and mine. Mine had never been attentive like hers even when I was a small child as far as I remembered.
The worst part of my hospitalized days was loneliness and hospital meals. As a nephritis patient, I was banned from taking in salt. My meals are salt-free and with minimum seasoning. I felt like eating sponge three times a day. The volume wasn’t enough either for me who was chubby. Because I persistently complained about the meals to my mother during the short visit, she brought me potato chips. Since potato chips were deemed as the biggest taboo for nephritis, she told me to hide under the bed and move the contents from its flashy package into a plastic bag. She continued to bring other salty snacks and I made a bag of my best mix under my bed. I was strolling about the hallway, carrying the plastic bag of snacks in one hand, munching in my mouth. In case I passed someone, I stopped munching and hid the bag behind my back. But one afternoon, Ayumi’s mother caught me. She asked me to show her the plastic bag. As I did, she said somewhat sadly, “It contains everything you can’t have.” I ignored her caution and kept snacking on what my mother brought. My mother enticed me to hide under my bed and let me eat a can of corned beef with a big topping of mayonnaise there. As a result, I stayed chubby in the hospital despite the controlled healthy meals.
One day, a younger girl who had been annoying all the time next to my bed on the opposite side of Ayumi enraged me. I was bashing her with a coloring book while yelling the biggest taboo word in the hospital this time, “Die! Die! Die!”, with full force. Impatient at my unprincipled behavior, Ayumi’s mother raised her voice toward me, “That’s enough, Hidemi! Clean up your act, already!” I thought she was a carping critic because I hadn’t realized evilness of my mother yet back then and had been such a nasty child who had totally accepted my mother’s bad influence.
Ayumi’s father came to visit her on his day off. I was taking powdered medicine on my bed that I had gotten used to swallowing without problems by then. He said to me smiling, “You have gotten the knack of it and no longer choked. Good for you!” I wondered how he had known that as I had rarely seen him here.
A family of caring. Not that I was familiar with.

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 Call from Hell hr620

I’ve got voice mail from my mother. Her dismal voice made me creep all over. Since her calls almost always aim to hurt me, I’m used to receiving bad messages. But her tone was new low this time and I had to brace myself.
   I guessed it was either she conceived a new bitter idea to strike a blow at me or she turned the brunt of her daily anger toward me. Nevertheless, there was a slight possibility that the call was about some emergency, such as my father was taken to the hospital or something. I didn’t want to spend any more nervous minutes worrying what was that all about as much as I didn’t want to return a call. I decided to face the fear and called her back with sweaty palms.
   She started with trivial social chattering and suddenly burst into wailing. I couldn’t believe my ear that was hearing my mother crying hard on the other side of the line. I had seen her crying only twice before. The first time was when I was too little to understand the matter. A relative of ours was driving us home from my mother’s parents’ home. While she was talking to him in the car, she burst into tears and he consoled her. The second time was when I failed the entrance examination of a renowned junior high school. She suggested that we took a bath together and started crying in a bath tub, saying, “I’m so disappointed!” again and again. Even as a 12-years-old, I realized how hugely I blew it and I was terrified at my failure. And this was the third time. I was astonished as much.
   I asked her what happened, and she confessed that my younger sister had begun to live with my parents. I have no idea why, but she had concealed it from me for about a year. My sister had been my mother’s favorite. Unlike me, she did everything as my mother told her to do. She was the pride of my mother who always bragged about hers to me as if it had been a proof that doing as she told was the key to success. That pride of her had worked abroad in a managing position at one of major hotel chains. But she quit the job and returned to Japan a year ago. Soon after she started living with my parents, the relationship between them  got atrocious. My sister blamed my mother harshly for having parted with the land and the house that had been inherited for generations, and for messing up her life by telling her to do the wrong way. That wasn’t surprised me because those things are the norm for a person like my mother whose lifework is to make people around her unhappy by telling a lie on an every possible occasion she gets. I was rather surprised that my sister had gotten along well with her for such a long time until now without noticing her malice. Then, new surprises easily topped it.
   My sister’s constant rebukes to my mother didn’t stop just there. According to her, my sister had made her cook, wash, clean, shop, do all chores with authoritative commands. She also had piled up the trash inside my parents’ condo, making it eat up almost all the rooms so that my parents barely had space to sleep. They hadn’t have enough time to sleep either because she demanded that they be up and wait until she came home in the middle of the night. When my sister found anything that wasn’t as she liked, she would throw things or abusive words at my parents. My mother admitted on the phone, crying, “I’m in hell.”
   Her countless evil tactics have only led herself to a horrible life so far. Although she married for my father’s money, she failed the family business and lost everything. She sold the family’s big house and moved into a small condo that she had despised all her life. When I met her two years ago, she said, “This is what means ‘as a man sows, so shall he reap.’” in an unusually regrettable tone. I had never imagined her life would have any room left to get even worse than that like this. I wonder when she is ever forgiven. I know she has done too much evil and has been burned by unquenchable fire, but I feel compassion for her for the first time in my life. It’s so pitiful for her if the day she is forgiven will really never come.
   But wait. It’s my mother with whom I’ve been dealing here. Don’t forget she’s a world-class liar. No one can tell which part of her story is true and which part is an act. It’s even possible that everything is bogus and simply her new scheme to bog me down in some way. It took me some time after I hung up the phone to come to myself and remind myself of the facts above. I might have fallen for it at least for a while...

Bruises hr615

The reason I am excessively self-conscious is apparently because my mother hammered in my childhood how I should look and behave.
   Appearance is the most essential thing in my mother’s life. She always puts face-saving first among other things. That inevitably leads to her daughter’s reputation. For it, she doesn’t care how her daughter feels or what she wants. People’s opinions are everything to her.
   When I was in junior high school, the local public transportation bus I took everyday to school slammed on the brakes suddenly one day and threw me out of the multiple seat at the back. I hit my shin against a metal bar. After I got off the bus at the nearest bus stop from my home, I did my usual 15-minute walk to my house limping. My parents happened to pass by in their car on that particular day. I thought how lucky I was to get a ride when I had a sore leg of all occasions. As soon as I got in the car, my mother bawled me out for limping without asking what had happened to me. “You’re walking like a vagabond. How embarrassing!”, she scolded. She ignored my say that I had a small accident on the bus and my leg hurt as if it wasn’t the point at all. She kept lashing out with her mantra, “How would others think if they saw!?” It must have been so shocking to her that she had grabbed every chance to bring up the way of my walking and nagged at me about that one-time-only limping for years. Now, the sight of my limping has haunted her strongly enough for her to believe I have a slight limp by nature.
   Walk while eating used to be regarded as bad manners in Japanese society. My mother made me go to the cram school to prepare for an entrance exam of a renowned junior high when I was an elementary school pupil. The classes were three days a week after regular school hours and the cram school was far from home, which it took 40 minutes by train. It was usually close to 7 p.m. when the class was over, and we were all hungry. My fellow students would buy chocolate and eat at the platform while waiting for the train home. I had never done that as I didn’t have extra money and was forbidden to eat standing in public by my mother. One of them gave me a piece one evening. I stashed it to have it back home. But I became very hungry in that particular evening when I transferred to another train at the terminal station. I had put a piece of chocolate in my mouth when I arrived at the nearest station from my house. My mother happened to be there to pick me up for once. She almost screamed, “You’re chewing gum in public!” She ignored my say that I had never done this before and the thing was chocolate not gum. She kept wailing, “You chew gum in public! How embarrassing! How would others think if they saw!?” To this day, when she meets me, she still nags at me about how disappointed she was when she saw me chewing gum that evening.
   Those instances could go on endlessly. She didn’t allow me to go to the school nurse's room no matter how sick I felt at school because it looked bad in front of other kids. When we had our house robbed, she stopped me from calling the police because it looked bad to our neighbors. She made me wear the class president pin wherever I went during my term for show. I was raised by a lump of vanity like my mother and have become a vain person myself who cares too much about looks and behavior unconsciously.
   My family took a trip by train early in my teens and I missed a step of the stairs at the station with my new unaccustomed high-heeled boots. I fell and rolled down the stairs over a dozen steps. I stood up at the bottom of the stairs despite pain. My mother walked down the stairs calmly and indifferently instead of rushing over to help me, and said, “I didn’t think it was you. I thought it was a stranger.” Not one ‘Are you all right?’ came out of her mouth that day. After we checked in a hotel, I saw my body in the bathroom. The half side of my body was covered with dark bruises. I imagine how wonderful it would be that someday the bruises on my mind finally healed and disappeared along with my massive self-consciousness...

A Trip after The Storm hr611

Although I had received “the last letter to me” quoted as written from my mother a few months before in which she wrote she wouldn’t like to see me or hear from me or receive any gifts from me or stay in contact with me any more for the rest of her life, I ignored it completely and made an annual visit to my parents as usual. She had sent me that offensive letter behind my father’s back and he doesn’t know about a broken relationship between me and my mother.
   My father also used to be bad-tempered and attack me when I returned home once a year or two. But since he sold our family’s house, he has welcomed me in a good mood at his small apartment in an unfamiliar town and hasn’t criticized me. He seems simply happy to see me each time I visit their apartment. And I know that is exactly what annoys my mother to the limit.
   To her, her new life is degradation. She was always unhappy when she lived in a big house with her husband to whom she married for his money. And now she has become even unhappier living in the small apartment without our family’s fortune. It’s easy to imagine how disgusted she is by my father’s upbeat attitude toward his new life. She must have sought revenge to make him equally unhappy and come up with that letter. She thought I would stop visiting them as she asked to. That would take away one of his pleasures and get him one step closer to unhappiness. She loves any kind of plot all her life but none of them is ever clever. This one is no exception that is too apparent for me to be fallen into. My decision to carry out a visit despite her letter implicated harassment to her because it would show her that her wicked plot failed yet again.
   A week before the trip, a big typhoon hit the western part of Japan where my parents live. Much damage resulted from it including to Kansai Airport on which my flight was going to arrive. As the airport is a man-made island in the sea, its runways and facilities were flooded by a storm surge. On top of that, a tanker crushed into the only bridge that connects the airport to the shore and broke it. The airport has been shut down.
   I hesitated about the trip. I couldn’t decide whether I should cancel my reservations for the flight and the hotel. Above all things, I wondered if this was a sign telling me not to visit my parents.
   But I had to go at all cost because it was my mother who had told me not to come. I’ve discovered and followed the unshaken rule since I was a teenager -do the opposite of what my mother says and I’ll be happy and everything will go well. This rule has worked 100 percent and has never failed in my life.
   Meanwhile, the airport partially reopened unexpectedly sooner than reported. Among most suspended flights, mine was one of the few that partially started re-operating. The damaged bridge to the shore returned passable by the limited lanes. I visited my parents as I had planned.
   I knew it would be so awkward to see my mother but I had determined not to get angry at her or blame her on her letter. If I did so, it would be her achievement. Her purpose is always to make me unhappy with any blow she could think of. I should behave unbreakable, which would be my blow against her.
   My mother met me at the entrance of their apartment as if nothing had happened between us. She desperately acted joyfully, uttering shallow flattery like I looked young or my outfit was pretty. Not only when my father was around, but also when there were only two of us, we never mentioned about the letter. She just kept on flattering and wearing fake smile. She even told me what she had never told before -tons of complains about her favorite, my younger sister. What surprised me more than that was the fact my mother had aged so suddenly. Her countenance had changed too. She had a face like a devil. With her aged shape and evil countenance, she looked exactly like a witch in “Snow White”. Looking at her sudden change, I realized that she regretted the letter. The moment she dropped the letter into the mail box, she became aware that she was old and helpless. Numerous unusual disasters that hit her region after the letter, such as crazy heat, a big earthquake and the typhoon, made her more insecure and anxious. She regretted that she had cut me off from her life because she threw away a thin rope by herself that she could have relied on in the future. It’s too late now.
   On the train back to the hotel, I felt good as everything went well on my side. At the same time, I felt an enormous relief and found how nervous I was during the visit. As it turned out, it was a showdown rather than a visit...

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 Sentence Finisher hr595

I don’t like someone to tell me what I’ve already said or known. There’s no such thing as copyright to what we utter, but I always feel like claiming it. Actually, I often urge people close to me to admit I’ve already said what they just said. It doesn’t matter how ridiculously trivial the issue is. As long as I recognize I’ve said the same thing before, I declare that I’ve said it before they said it. Even when I haven’t said it but known it, I can’t help telling them that I’ve known that. It’s impossible for me to hear through something pretending that I hear that for the first time or I didn’t know that. My mouth involuntarily utters “I’ve already said it!” or “I know it!” I’ve had this irksome habit since I was little. Suppose I said to my mother, “It’ll be hot tomorrow, I’ll wear summer clothes.” Next morning, when my mother said, “It’ll be hot today and I put out your summer clothes,” I instantaneously claimed, “That’s what I said yesterday!” She would go, “Is it?” And I would go, “Sure it is! I said that! You should add ‘as you said’!” If I’d heard the weather forecast for rain and my mother said “It’s going to rain today,” I said, “I know!” at once. As such an annoying child like that, I gave my parents painful conversations when they inadvertently touched what I had said or known and forgot to add ‘as you said’ or ‘you may know’. Their experiences must have been so torturous that my father still hastily adds, “As you said,” when he talks to me to this day. It seems my childhood practice caused him a trauma and he sometimes adds ‘as you said’ to what I haven’t said. My terrible habit hasn’t subsided, it has, rather, aggravated to sentence finishing. Now I anticipate what someone is going to say and want to say it before she or he actually says it. I just simply can’t wait for them to finish once I make out what’s coming. For instance, my partner begins, “Tomorrow, I’ll…” and I interrupt him, ‘Go to the convenience store to make a payment for something, right?” The problem is I’m more than often wrong. My partner answers, “Yeah, that reminds me,” and he forgets what he was really going to say. My interruptions make our conversations unnecessarily long and cumbersome. It appears that I want to be ahead of everything by showing that I know everything beforehand. And that’s all because I want to appeal how smart I am. No wonder I’ve been disliked by anyone, including my own blood relatives. Of course I can imagine there are numerous other reasons for that particular matter…

Phone-Phobia hr579

When I was a teenager, a smartphone era was still years away to come. I came from a large family that had one phone in the house, which meant a scramble for a phone call. It was usually a three-way battle: between my grandfather, my mother and me. My grandfather used to be the chairman of a local senior citizen club and make and receive lots of calls. Once his phone time began, it lasted forever. He would pull a chair from the dining table, set it in front of the phone, sit in, spread some kind of papers and start dialing. The stand where the phone sat turned into his makeshift office desk while my parents, my sister and I were eating dinner right beside it. The background music of our dinnertime was usually his telephone conversation that sounded totally unimportant and ridiculous. The minute my grandfather finished his phone time, the phone rang that would be from my grandmother on my mother’s side. She would call my mother almost every day to report her day. It would always consist in complaining about her son-in-low. After my mother finished listening to her endless nagging, it would be finally my turn. I used to chat with my friends over the phone for hours as a habit of a teenager. Although I did that so often, I have a confession to make. I hated it. I was really loath to talk over the telephone, to be honest. But as everyone knows, the phone call is a must among teenagers. If I had confessed I didn’t like the phone and asked my friends not to call me, I would have been instantly branded as a nerd. To be popular, I kept it secret and talked with my friends by acting happy but weeping inside. I forced myself to be funny and a class clown at school although my true self didn’t want to. At least when I was at home, I wanted to return to be myself who liked to be silent and alone. But the phone call would intrude into my home and destroy my peace. I cultivated my dislike for the phone during my teenage years like this. After I graduated and left home, my condition got much worse. The phone attack from my parents began when I started living alone in a small apartment in Tokyo as a musician. Since they opposed strongly about my career choice, they denied me, insulted me and cursed me over the phone. The ring became the most distasteful sound in the world to me. I couldn’t take it any more one day and turned off the ring. I stopped answering phone calls altogether by setting the answering machine. Then playing messages on it gradually got painful and even seeing the message lamp blinking made me sick. My dislike for the telephone had evolved into phobia by then. Besides the nasty phone calls from my parents, I sometimes got prank calls. More and more, the telephone looked an entrance to hell. To this day, I jump to the phone ring and talk into the receiver feeling ultimately tense with my hands sweating and my throat drying. Every time I see someone talking casually over the cell phone on the aisle of a supermarket, I think I’m seeing someone from other planet. The other day, I was shopping online at Amazon. When I was paying with my credit card, an error message appeared on the screen that said, “The payment was failed. Please contact your credit company”. I called the company while I was twitched with fear, my fingers were trembling and even my eyesight became blur and white. It turned out that my card had been suspended because the balance in my bank account was short. My distaste for the telephone has grown deeper…

The Decision hr568

We all face decisions every day, big or small. It may be as trifling as what to eat for lunch, but sometimes it is as important as what decides a course of our life. And the big one often comes abruptly like a surprise attack when we least expect it, unguarded. I faced the first crucial decision unexpectedly on my 20th birthday. In Japan, 20 years of age is regarded as the coming-of-age and there is a custom to celebrate it. When I was 20 years old, I lived in a big house with my family. My parents had a hefty fortune inherited by my ancestors as it was before they failed in their undertaking and lost every thing. For them, my coming-of-age was such a big event that they had bought an expensive sash of kimono for me months in advance for a municipal ceremony held in the first month of the year. Since I defied the custom and didn’t attend the ceremony for which the sash was wasted, my parents determined that my 20th birthday should be memorable at least and planned a party. I wasn’t told about the party because they wanted to surprise me. On my birthday, I was hanging around and having fun with my friend until night, not knowing that my parents and my sister waited for me with 20 red roses and expensive steaks cooked and delivered from a restaurant. As crazy as it sounds, my curfew was 9 p.m. back then. I had too much fun and broke it that particular day. I came home half an hour late bracing for a rebuke from my parents. What awaited me was beyond rebuke actually. I usually came in from the back door that was left unlocked, but it was locked that night. I went around to the front gate that was locked too. I thought my father had locked them by mistake and pushed an intercom button. My mother answered and I asked her to open the door. She said in a tearful voice, “I can’t. It’s no mistake. Your father shut you out of the house.” She started crying and continued, “We were preparing a party and waiting for you from this afternoon. We waited and waited until your father got furious. He said that he didn’t want you to come home because you never appreciated this important day and your family. I can’t open the door. Your father doesn’t want you in this house any more.” I was astounded at the deep trouble I suddenly got into. I could have apologized repeatedly and begged her to let me in. Instead, I was wondering if that was what I really wanted. I didn’t have anything but now it was a chance to leave the house. Totally out of the blue, the moment for a decision for life came up. If I lived in this house forever as a family’s successor like I had been told to, I would inherit family’s fortune. But if I threw it away, I could do whatever I want for my own life. In a matter of seconds, I decided. I chose freedom over money. I said, “That’s fine. I’m leaving.” I felt oddly refreshed and upbeat. My chained life came to an abrupt end through the intercom. My mother panicked and shouted, “What do you mean that’s fine? Wait! Don’t go! I’m coming to open the door! Stay there!” I saw her rushing out of the house and dashing toward the gate. She grabbed me in. On the dining table, there were two empty plates that were my father’s and my sister’s and two untouched steak plates that were my mother’s and mine. In the center was a big vase with 20 roses. I ate steak with my mother who was weeping through on my completely ruined 20th birthday. Shortly afterwards, I eventually left home and became a musician. My mother, my grandmother and my aunts were married unwillingly for money. My father and my grandfather gave up what they wanted to do in order to succeed the family. They all looked unhappy and I didn’t want to live like them. But I also didn’t know freedom didn’t come cheap and my decision would lead to trials and hardships that I had to endure as a consequence…

Casino de Montreal hr559

I visited the casino in Montreal for the first time in seven years. It had been remodeled into an even more gorgeous, glorious place than before. I arrived there before noon and had an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch at a fancy restaurant. I enjoyed the splendid buffet at an incredibly low price. Compare to the amount of money I was about to spend for gambling, everything seemed cheap. Every time I lose, I always try to calm my anger by thinking the money I spend here somehow serves to make the city better since it’s a public-managed casino. The city is so beautiful that I regard what I lose in the casino as an entrance fee to a theme park called Montreal. I used to live in Montreal but had to leave as I became short of money for life abroad. When the time to go back to Japan drew near, I seriously thought of gaining money to stay in Montreal, by gambling. I determinedly sat at the slot machine of a high progressive prize for a couple of days. On the last day, it happened. As the slot I had played kept gobbling up my money, I moved over to another slot machine and a middle-aged woman came to the one I just left. She turned it for only five or six times and hit the jackpot unbelievably quickly and easily. If I had continued for five more quarters on that slot, I would have won. She snatched $100,000 away from me right before my eyes. While she screamed for joy, the lights flashed, the sound blared and the casino workers scurried toward her with papers, I was running into the bathroom. I couldn’t help crying in there. I was trembling with chagrin. I cursed my bad luck and my coming life in Japan. A long time ago, my mother asked a fortuneteller about my future. She told me that according to the fortuneteller, I would often come close to big money, but it would slip away each time. “So, you will never be rich,” my mother said to me. I remembered that and I thought I saw proof that she was right. After I returned to my apartment, I wailed out loud like a baby. My former self was that stupid. Now, I play the slot machine just for fun. I sat at the minimum bet slot with a low prize. If I was lucky and won a little, it meant that I could play longer with that money. The band started playing at the stage on the casino floor and I enjoyed soft drinks that I took from the free drink bar listening to it. I won a little, which let me stay and play there longer than I had planned. As fatigue from the long flight began to kick in earnestly, I got back to my hotel room and fell into bed. It was an excitingly fun day at the casino that cleaned me out yet again, as usual…

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…