Twelve Views from the Distance

Chapter 11: Imagining Father

188 x imagining father 1 Tangible things are not the only things that can leave deep scars on the soul of a young child. Sometimes things that do not exist—things that are absent from one’s life—leave even firmer imprints on the soft flesh of the heart. In my early youth, the thing that I missed above all others was a father. My father died soon after my birth, well before I had emerged from the blackness of oblivion into the light of consciousness—before I had even really come into being. In a sense, my father’s absence preceded my very existence. When people asked me, “Mut-chan, don’t you wish you had a daddy?” I would shake my head and say,“Nuh-uh,” without any expression at all.People must have thought me very unloving,even indifferent to the idea of having a father. Quite the opposite. Since I had lost my father, I was compelled to think about this thing called a“father” far more often than children whose dads were a constant part of their lives. Mother and Grandmother always seemed to be trying to construct an image of my absent father within me. I imagine they were doing this on purpose. Even Grandfather, who barely spoke, would sometimes say, “Your daddy died so young. What a poor boy you are!” thus calling up a virtual image of my father within my imagination. From the moment the first twinkling of consciousness appeared within me—that moment we call in Japanese “a mind for things”—I became skilled in the process of 189 imagining father taking words and incarnating them into flesh, much as Christians believe the word of God created mankind. The most important source for me in the sacrament of incarnation was the painting of my father that hung above the sliding closet door hiding the Buddhist altar. In the portrait, my father’s hair was slicked back with pomade. The painting was executed in a clumsy attempt to make the light and shading look naturalistic. He had a forehead that was not very wide, one of the traits of the Takahashi family. His eyebrows were thick like Grandmother’s, and his eyes were open wide as if in surprise. High cheekbones.A prominent Adam’s apple.A neck that hardly looked strong enough to support his big head. An outer kimono that lined up with the collar inside just a little too perfectly. On the sleeves of the kimono was the family crest, a hanging wisteria. The artist had drawn the crest in the folds of the kimono in a way that looked somewhat unnatural. Since the whole portrait was done in a thin wash of ink, it had faded terribly with time and turned the brownish color of tea. This was my father:Takahashi Shirō, born May 13, 1906, deceased March 29, 1938, at age thirty-one. The portrait only showed him from the shoulders up. My father did not have a body. In a certain sense, I guess I could say the portrait was symbolic. Since my father had been lost to me from the start, it was strangely fitting that in the portrait he was missing everything from his chest downward. After all, the portrait depicted him in a corporeal form that, at least in my view, he had never even had. The second thing that helped me construct a mental image of my father was the family gravestone, located a little more than a half-mile from Grandmother’s home. The belt of land where she lived was called Shinnyū and lay across the railroad tracks a little ways from the town of Nōgata. Shinnyū, in turn, was broken into several other little neighborhoods, scattered across the countryside.There was a little song made up mostly of place names that would help travelers remember the order of the neighborhoods: Wada, Hachiryū, Kamenko Eira, Baba, Saikōji Go up, go down, Kamoda 190 imagining father In the neighborhood of Wada, there was a hill covered with short, leafy kumazasa plants, and on top of that was the graveyard where many of the localhouseholdsburiedthecrematedremainsof theirdead.If youclimbed the hill to the cemetery, the landscape of Wada unfolded right before your eyes. A little farther beyond that was Hachiryū and Kamenko. The other side of the hill afforded a clear view of Eira, Baba, and Saikōji...