Hidemi’s Rambling No.528

About six months after I moved into the apartment I now live in, I began to see this woman frequently at the communal spa. We just exchanged hellos for weeks and then started chatting about the weather. She is a lively woman who is around sixty years old and laughs a lot. I secretly nicknamed her ‘Aunt Hearty Laugh’ because of her signature laugh. We don’t know each other’s names, don’t talk about personal matters, but have a friendly chat every time we see each other at the communal spa several times a week. Since I regularly take a bath with this Aunt Hearty Laugh while I have never done that with my own mother as an adult, she is almost a stranger yet feels so close to me. Two years ago, her pregnant daughter stayed with her for a couple of months. She joined our chatting and I heard about her office work and the relationship between her colleagues that I had no experience of my own. During her stay, her baby was born and Aunt Hearty Laugh became a grandmother. I took a bath with her newborn granddaughter as well. Her daughter visited her with the baby every long holiday and we took a bath together. At every reunion, the baby’s change interested me. She got bigger, taller, started walking and talking, and gave me a high-five the last time I saw her. Two weeks ago, Aunt Hearty Laugh told me that she was going to move to other apartment nearby. She has her old friend living there and feels secure because she lives alone and is getting older. She said laughing, “That apartment has a spa with thermal springs. Come to take it with me!” She also added, “I’m a lot older than you are but who knows? We could be friends!” which arose a question in my mind. Do I want a friend? I’m constantly short of time for anything and can I spare any time for friendship? I like being alone and can she be an exception? I realized how perfectly balanced my friendship with her had been. I didn’t know that chatting at the spa several times a week was the best relationship for me. To overstep the threshold by visiting her is an unknown territory. I was both curious and terrified. Besides, she said that for just being nice and didn’t really mean it. If she had meant it, she would have given me her information to contact. But, what if she meant it and waits for my reaction? What if she thinks I will give her my information if I want to be in touch with her? On the other hand, suppose I gave it to her, then my gesture would say, “Invite me!” which is so rude. After two-week’s pondering, I decided to wait for her information as her invitation. The other day, I saw her at the spa and she said she was moving out the next morning. She didn’t give me any way to contact her. Neither did I. We didn’t even tell each other’s names until the end. We just said we would bump into each other soon in the neighborhood since our apartments stand closely, and shook hands all naked. She left. Surprising sadness welled up inside me…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.527

The high school I attended held a mandatory summer camp when I was a freshman. The students chose activities such as swimming, hiking, cycling and so on beforehand. To spend the time in the camp together, my group of close friends at school decided to choose the same activities. We considered carefully which ones were the easiest and mildest, and chose archery and cycling. A couple of months later the cycling day in the camp arrived. We set off on each rental bicycle. Right after that, one of my friends, called Yone, fell. She quickly got back on her bike and we started again. Immediately, she fell again. We stopped to wait for her. She caught up with us by pushing her bike and said, ‘Sorry. Now let’s go!” But the same thing was repeated for the third time, her falling down, us waiting. We finally asked her what was going on and heard her astonishing confession. She said, “I can’t ride a bike.” We gaped. Being unable to ride a bike was nothing, but why did she choose cycling among all activities then? And telling us now? We pressed her for an explanation why she didn’t just say so when we decided on cycling. She told us that she couldn’t because we were joyfully talking about how easy cycling would be. In our group, she was the tenderest one, but also a pushover. She always had no opinion of her own and conformed to others. That was a given, but I never thought this much. We were talking about pushing our bikes and going all the way on foot with her when she said, “I’m ruining your plan for an easy activity. I can’t make you walk all the way because of me. Please ride on. I think I can manage along the way. I’m sorry. Sorry.” We mounted on the bike, not pedaling but walking while Yone kept falling and saying sorry for a million times. Her indecisive, weak-minded attitude has gradually gotten on my nerves. A girl of other group whom I had barely talked before pedaled back toward us. She had something to ask me. I answered and chatted, and we hit it off instantly. When I realized, I pedaled with her separating from my group. I stopped to wait at the foot of the downward slope and heard a scream. It was Yone flying down the slope on her bike and tumbling into a rice paddy. Other friends were chasing her and pulled her and her bike out of the rice paddy. Covered with mud, she was saying “Sorry” again and again. As a thoughtless teenager, I pedaled away with my new friend. When I thought about Yone again some miles away, the chain on my new friend’s bike suddenly snapped. While we were struggling to fix it covered with grease, Yone and other friends of my group caught up with us. By then, Yone was all over scrapes and mud like a cartoon. We ended up pushing a bike and walking together. A teacher came to us from the goal and reprimanded us, as we were incredibly late. On the bus heading home, my friends blamed me for being so cold-hearted that I had deserted Yone. But mud-caked Yone herself didn’t blame me but kept apologizing to me instead…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.526

A Japanese band Tulip is the decisive reason that I chose a musician as my lifelong career. It literally changed my life entirely when I came across their music. I’ve been an avid fan of them since I was a high school student. The band had broken up, but has been reunited occasionally for its anniversaries. Last year, it had the 40th anniversary concert tour. I went to three venues by paying for the expensive tickets, the bullet train fares and the hotel stays. A large sum of money for a poor and cheap person like me was spent on the concerts because it crossed my mind that it could be the band’s last tour and my last chance to see them perform live. Considering the members’ ages of above sixty and their tour rate of one every five years or so, the next tour seemed precarious to me. But I was totally impressed by their high-level performance at the concerts in this tour. They played their old familiar tunes better than ever. Listening to their performance, I realized I had had a keen eye for the true rock band even as a high school student. The band I picked among many other bands was the one that kept shining and still played lively rock through all those years. After the last concert, I felt in rapture how lucky I was to be a fan of them. I wanted to go to the bathroom when I was leaving the hall, but there was a long line of people. Next to the hall was a hotel and I was headed there for the bathroom. I found a bunch of people gathering at the passage between the hall and the hotel. It seemed they were waiting for the band members to come out of the hall, as they would get in the cars here. Holding my desire for the bathroom, I joined the crowd and waited. No one showed up. After a while, I began to think the information among these people was false. An hour has passed and people started leaving. I was close to the point I couldn’t hold it anymore when the members finally appeared one by one with the staff guarding them. They waved, got in their each car and drove off. I got to see my favorite member Toshiyuki Abe off stage for the first time since he signed on his essay book for me and shook my hand at the book-signing event when I was a college student. I shrieked his name to him as I usually did. He glanced at us, waved at us, smiled at us, looking so happy. He got in the car, waved at us again and went away. I ran to the bathroom and felt the utmost happiness, never suspecting that was the last time I saw my idol. The end pounces abruptly. The other day, the news that he had passed away in India came in. Another dream of mine has been broken. I had dreamed of being a popular singer-songwriter and having Abe’s guitar playing on my songs. I had been striving by this goal in my mind. I can’t believe I would never get to go to a Tulip’s concert again. My memories related to Tulip are the only good ones during my dismal teenage period. How fun it was to go to their concert with my friends! How hard we laughed together reading Abe’s essays after school! How hopeful I was when I was singing their ‘Blue Sky’ out loud with my friend looking up the blue sky from the class room window! Tulip was a symbol of hope for me. And now it’s gone forever with Abe. I don’t know what will get me going from now on. I’ve cried every night. Only one solution seems to remain, that is to let him play the guitar for my songs inside my mind. I listen carefully and reproduce his playing by making his sound and technique with my synthesizers and computers. I think I can do it because he now lives with me until I die…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.525

The nearest train station from my home that I usually use has no station attendants on site. All it has are a ticket vending machine and an emergency phone. There’s no ticket gate either. A passenger gets a ticket from the machine and goes directly onto the platform. Upon arrival, they put the used tickets into a box on the wall. There are several no-attendant stations like that along this local line. That means it’s possible to ride free if you get on and off the train both at those stations. It’s kind of an honorable system that whether you pay for the ticket or not all depends on your conscience. Of course riding a train without a ticket is a crime. To crack down on it, a conductor sometimes makes spot checks on the train. He or she checks all passengers’ tickets and stamps on them. If someone has a ticket for the minimum fare, the conductor asks the destination and collects the full fare. Since many passengers make the payments on the train, I suspect the honorable system doesn’t work so well. I’ve once seen a passenger without a ticket caught by the conductor. She received the conductor’s severe rebuke and paid a lot of money. Some passengers try so badly not to be caught when a conductor begins the spot check. Their common ways are simply running away from the conductor by moving back and forth between the cars. A conductor sometimes gets off the train and steps onto the platform at a no-attendant station to check the tickets of the passengers who get off there. In those cases, a passenger who cheats on the fare walks toward the far end of the platform opposite to the conductor. The train eventually has to leave on schedule and the conductor doesn’t have enough time to go up to the passenger for the ticket. The passenger waits there for the train to leave with the conductor back on while pretending to rummage through his or her bag for the ticket that doesn’t exist. The most impressive passenger I’ve seen was a young woman who pretended to sleep in her seat when the conductor asked her to show a ticket. No matter how loudly the conductor asked repeatedly, she wouldn’t wake up. Although he almost shouted in her ear in the end of the persistent demands for the ticket, she was still asleep. I thought if she wasn’t acting, she was dead. After he went back, her acting finished and she woke up. Unfortunately for her, the conductor was as determined as she was, and came back to her again. She was caught this time, but pretended to look for her ticket and declared she had lost it somewhere. A woman with an iron heart! She told her departure and destination stations which credibility was questionable, and paid the fare to the conductor after all. A stingy person like me buys a ticket each time. Even so, I feel nervous and have shifty eyes every time a conductor walks through the train cars. That’s because I may or may not devise some ways to save money for the ticket, but I leave it to your conjecture…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.524

In the middle of August every year, Japan has the Bon Festival. It’s believed that spirits of ancestors return to each family during the festival. If I had stayed in my hometown of Kyoto and gotten married there, I would have been the 63rd successor of the family. I suppose my ancestor had acquired land around where the house I grew up in stood, long before Kyoto once became the capital city of Japan 1200 years ago. The family has farmed and lived on the same spot generation after generation since then. To sustain the family succession, some of my ancestors may have given up what they wanted to do, some may have been forced into arranged marriages for the tie between families, some may have had troubles over their shares of an inheritance, and some may have been distressed for the pressures of succeeding the family. I imagine quite a few ancestors of mine had a terrible life. The family line is finally to come to an end by me, but I doubt my ancestors feel sad about it. The times have changed and the farming business in the urbanized Kyoto isn’t sustainable. Without farming, to preserve land isn’t meaningful. My mother used to say repeatedly to me that our ancestors would punish me bitterly if I left home and lived the way I wanted to live instead of succeeding the family. That hasn’t been the case so far. Since I left Kyoto, I’ve been better off. To me, it seems my mother whom my ancestors kept punishing relentlessly. A fortuneteller came to the door of my parents’ house once. She told my mother that all the spirits of our female ancestors, who suffered unhappy lives because they sacrificed themselves for the family succession, had possessed me. My mother interpreted it as the proof of her theory that they would punish me and lead me to an unhappy life. I don’t know if it was because of those spirits or my own will, I got to leave home, break the family succession and live my life. Now it depends on me whether I will have a happy life or not…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.523

When my great-great-grandfather passed away, the family sought any possible way to sustain a line of the family succession. He had four sons. His firstborn, who had been supposed to succeed the family, was perverted possibly because his father had drunk up the family fortune. He had tattoos all over his body and became a yakuza, a Japanese Mafia member. His father disowned him and kicked him out from the family. He drifted in from time to time though, and the family member asked him to leave with some money. My great-great-grandfather’s second son died young and his third son had been adopted to a samurai family. As his fourth son was too young, the family called back his third son as a successor from a samurai family. That’s my great-grandfather. By then, most of our ancestral land and all the servants were gone thanks to my great-great-grandfather’s lavish extravagance. My great-grandfather needed to work as a farmer by himself on a scarce piece of the remaining land instead of making tenant farmers work for him, which his ancestors had been doing for a long time. While he worked side by side with the ex-tenant farmers whom the family once employed, he got married and had a daughter and a son who is my grandfather. Since my great-grandfather wanted my grandfather to be a teacher, I suppose that he was poised to end the family’s farming business and its succession. But in reality, things went to the contrary. Because of his unaccustomed work and way of life, he got ill and passed away in his middle age. His son, that is my grandfather, gave up what he wanted for his life and began to work as a farmer to support the family. He did it well, gained back some land and passed it on to my father. Both the family business and its need for a successor sustained. Even my great-great-grandfather who dissipated his inheritance money, his first son who became a yakuza, or his third son who wanted to close down the family business couldn’t break succession. They all continued to live and raise a family on the same ancestral land, and their children did the same. Unexpectedly, it is I who finally moved out of the house and am very much likely to end the family as I am…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.522

The oldest episode of my ancestors that I heard from my grandfather is about my great-great-grandfather and I hereby write it down for the record. According to my grandfather, his grandfather was quite a prodigal. He didn’t work and just squandered the family money. Our family was a powerful landowner when he inherited the family fortune and became a master of the family. They had lived in the same house I grew up and all the land stretched as far as the eye could see from it was his land back then. He had a lot of tenant farmers that worked for him in his land. Many servants lived on the family premises and also quite a few relatives of the family lived in the house. My grandfather once showed me his old photographs in which our distant relatives were taken together. I asked if they were group photos of some important events, and he told me that they all lived together in this very house. Our house was over 100 years old and the remnants of my great-great-grandfather’s prime were here and there. The old kitchen remained on the earth floor with one big and six or seven small clay ovens. We didn’t use them any more but I always wondered how much cooking was needed for how many people when that ovens were used. Across the front yard from the house was a gate building in which had a small room. It was my first own room when I entered elementary school, but it used to be one of the quarters for the servants. Beside the gate, an old wooden container with carriage poles was parked on the wall. In old days, it was used as a fire extinguisher that people carried water in the container with the poles on their shoulders. Only a powerful family had it for the entire hamlet. Our old local name that had been used in place of our family’s last name was written on the side of the container, telling how big our family used to be. On a hot summer day, my great-great-grandfather made his servants take him to the river that runs through the busy district just to make them fan for him and cool himself down. All year round, he visited a place where geishas served him and had a party. He was a lavish spender and the family fortune dwindled away. In stead of working, he sold his ancestral land piece by piece for his extravagance. As his land had been passed to his tenant farmers and the number of his servants had shrunk fast, he kept partying. By the time he died, only the house and a few tiny pieces of nearby land had remained. No one knows why he lived that way, but he drank up the family fortune. I imagine he must have had painful parties and have drunk terrible sake every time…