Winter Sonata . . . Korean soap operas on parade. My guess was that she had recorded them at triple speed, with three or four episodes on one tape. From the videos piled up on the TV stand, it seemed she watched them religiously.
With some effort I pulled out a large cardboard box, opened it up, and found bundles of tote bags, plastic bags, wrapping paper, advertising flyers, and empty boxes within empty boxes, like Russian nesting dolls.
The lowest tier of the closet was the same. There were broken dishes, old children’s clothes, outmoded women’s clothing, school bags, a dust-covered sewing machine, a sports bag full of old women’s magazines—Fujin no Tomo, Sōen, Mrs.—and old-fashioned handbags. As I pulled out each item, one by one, layers of dust hit my nose, causing me to have a sneezing fit.
The deeper I dug into the junk, the more I felt swallowed up in the past—a past that wasn’t even mine. No longer able to bear the oppressive weight of all the relics, I put them back, shut the closet door, and in a daze I glanced around the room. Reflected now in my listless eyes were the Buddhist altar and the memorial photograph of the father of the family, the black telephone, the huge CD-less radio-cassette player, the square fluorescent light fixture suspended from the ceiling, and the refrigerator, designed with the freezer as an upper compartment. I wondered how long Mother had been buried alive and alone in this place.
“If you’re not going to use any of this stuff, there’s no sense in keeping it,” I observed, as if to shake off the burden of it all. “You should sort through it and throw things away.”
“Perhaps to you it’s useless clutter, but it means a lot to me,” she admonished, reappearing from the other room. “I found this in the bedroom closet,” she added, thrusting a bulky photo album in my face, along with a postcard regarding a class reunion.
It was an old-fashioned album, with hard backing paper, glue grids, and transparent film to hold the photos in place. I leafed through it. It opened with pictures of a baby, held by Mother and Father. They were young, about my current age. The child must have been Kasumi, and her baby photos continued page after page.
“You would constantly complain that it was unfair, that almost all of the pictures were of her, with very few of you,” she said cheerfully.
“But there are too many of her . . .”
“Parents tend to take a lot of pictures of the firstborn. By the time the next one arrives, they’re over it. Besides, they’ve got their hands full as it is. It’s easier to let things drift.”
I flipped to the last page, finding photos of middle- and high-school graduations. “Quite a jump, I see.”
“I think Kasumi might have arranged this album,” she said.
The previous page contained more photos of the family trip to Disneyland, and the pages before that were all the same, depicting Kasumi as a teenager, sometimes with Mother and Father. There were only two shots of me: in one I was with Kasumi, licking an ice-cream cone and flashing my middle finger; the other was blurred, with me wedged between Mother and Father, appearing cross-eyed, my arms tightly folded.
“You would never allow yourself to be photographed normally,” said Mother, pointing at the frame by the television. “We’d ask a passerby to snap a photo of the four of us, and there you’d be, making faces. We’d get strange looks. I felt so humiliated.”
It seemed that even as a kid Daiki had been a real jerk. I thought about how he’d behaved at McDonald’s, but then remembered that the photo in question was not of Daiki—it was of me.
“I’m not in these shots either,” I remarked.
“That’s because you were the cameraman.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s with you? Remember who wanted to demonstrate what a great photographer he was in Disneyland?”
“Fine, if you say so . . .”
“I do say so. You with your various lenses, dragging that heavy bag everywhere . . . Have you forgotten? Is everything all right?”
“I remember, but my memory has faded now that I’ve given up on photography.”
“Remember when your sister said it wasn’t fun going out as a family anymore and then got into a huge fight with you? You kicked her, and she threatened to smash your camera. Your father finally slapped both of you.”
“Yeah, it’s all coming back. I lost it when she said she’d wreck the camera,” I said to play along, anxious to avoid causing any further suspicion.
“All you could think about was the camera, the camera.”
“I bought it with the New Year’s money I’d saved up, right?” I asked, trying to lead her on.
“Your father lent it to you, as I recall. I think you bought the one with your own money after you got into high school.”
“Yeah, that’s it. I put together the money with a boost from what I got when I passed the entrance exam.”
“And before that you’d borrow your father’s. You said you’d become a photographer, since we’d taken so few photos when you were small. You spent most of your allowance on getting film developed. Soon you were better at it than your father. I was proud of you. When he went his way, you developed his memorial photo yourself . . . You’d just entered high school,” she added, gazing at that same photo on the altar. “You made up his album quite nicely. And you took a fine photo of him in his casket. He looks just like he’s sleeping. It’s so good I wanted to show it to him. I treasure it.” She sniffled and then went on: “You had such enormous talent. So when you couldn’t land work in the field, I grew worried. May I say something? Let me . . .” She trailed off.
“What?”
As she sat up straight, I grew even more tense.
“When I badgered you about looking for work, the thing I was most afraid of was that you’d become apathetic. I thought that if you took a job, any job, a path back to photography might somehow open up, but that it wouldn’t if you abandoned everything. That’s why I gave you such a hard spanking.”
Feeling as though I were seasick, I started to stammer out a question, but she interrupted me: “Let me finish. I still fear that you’ll simply drift into lethargy, but I realize now that I was wrong in thinking that merely having work would prevent that. It was a mistake for me not to give you any time to pick up the pieces, and so, feeling cornered in your own home, you had no choice but to leave. I take responsibility. I’ve been wanting to tell you that. I’m not demanding that you return home or anything like that. All I want to say is that I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching. But you’ve never been back, so I haven’t had the chance . . . When I heard that you landed the job in the camera shop, I was so happy . . . Well, I’ve said my piece and feel much better now.”
She stopped speaking and blew her nose. As for me, I was bowled over. I headed to the bathroom and squatted down over the bowl, closed my eyes, grit my teeth, and clenched my fists. With nothing to hold on to, I would fade away. The “me” of me was taking leave; I was on the verge of being snatched away from the reality in which I had spent my entire life. What could I latch onto that would save me? I had no idea. I kept my eyes tightly shut, resisting the force that would tear me away. Breathe from your abdomen, I
