Katatsumori
Daisuke Shen on the filmmaker Naomi Kawase, grief and grandmothers, and diagnosing diaspora.
On the side of the road tomatoes open up like blouses. A woman wearing an apron stoops slowly, breaks the rubies off their green necks, deposits them in her basket one by one.
It is my grandmother, her tomatoes. With them she will make salads, or bathe them in soy sauce, place them in stews. For my dead grandfather, she learned the art of Southern cooking: how to pick them when green, roll them around in flour and egg, fry them to perfection.
In the short film Katatsumori, Naomi Kawase’s grandmother stands in front of a spray of flowers. She wears the sunlight around her, bathing her in pinks and tans. Peeling apart the leaves of her plants, checking for bugs, cupping the flowers in her knuckled fingers, she is a deity of living things. The world is covered with a seal of orange as if we are seeing it through radio waves. The film rolls and clicks and I imagine it is speaking some sort of language that reminds us it is living too.
Naomi Kawase is 24 at the time of this film, the same age I am as I write this. I want to say that I know her as I know her grandmother, this country grandmother so like my own baachan, my own aunties, standing in their fields and gardens wearing wide visors and long sleeves. I want to share this with Naomi, but maybe all we share is our obsessions with our grandmothers. Or maybe this is another part of my diasporic craving: for someone Japanese to see me as Japanese too, or at least to think of me as familiar, safe. To search for my face in a crowd of strangers and feel instantly at ease.
Here are some things that Naomi’s grandmother and mine have in common:
- They are both Japanese.
- They are both from the country.
- They both have gardens, extraordinary in their own ways.
- They both raised their grandchildren.
- Their love is the kind that shoves its fingers down your throat: a bitter release.
- Eventually they both will die.
When we go back to Japan, my grandmother seems softer. We sit in the same room we have stayed in on all of our previous visits to Toyohira. It’s meant to house a number of people, so in reality, I could choose any bed to sleep in. But the top bunk is restricted because I might shatter my skull when climbing down the stairs.
She carves pears and cucumbers happily as the TV repeats the same commercials. It is scary how calm she is here, like a whistle might come erupting from her mouth at any point.
Connie-chan, can you get me some more tea, please?
Her dimples show. The joy of being back home makes her beautiful.
And I comply. It is almost as if we are a normal pair, like the paranoia and anger have never been there.
I press down the tea dispenser into the cups and slide them onto the plate. As I walk toward her I trip a little. The cups spill and break, a disaster of green and glass.
You stupid girl. Why do you always have to be so stupid?
I’m sorry, baachan.
And suddenly American grandma is back again, the dimples disappeared.
Perhaps it was the uprooting from home that brought this out from her. In Hiroshima she was someone different, but in America my family tried to stay away from her as much as possible. If she ever got diagnosed with something, we wouldn’t know, but I do know that mental illness is and is not something that just blooms out of nowhere, like a potato erupting from the earth. Who she might have been without the trauma is still there somewhere between who she is and who she was, but the trauma is there now too. The deaths of her son and her husband, poverty, living through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, all the memories swallowed down and even the ones we were spared but are still somewhere inside. Back home I wanted that Japanese grandmother back, could see the fake, plastic one as if a reel of film was stretched out before me. But as soon as we got to the good part, where we know that everything is solved and the relationship lasts forever and ever, it would cut off.
Kawase baachan is laughing. The camera is so close to her face we can see molars, sweet crow’s feet, a lump of a nose, one birthmark below the right eye.
Why are you always videoing me? she asks. I won’t die that easily. I’m going to live until 100. Stop. Shooting me all the time. Seriously, stop. Stop. But still she laughs and laughs and we are gathered up in her laughter, all floating around.
The scene cuts to the kitchen faucet, dripping slowly into a bowl of water. It disrupts the stillness but is somehow still a part of it. The sink is scattered with dishes, washcloths. I think of a kitchen sink in South Carolina that looks similar.
Then an opening of a window like a well-known myth. Kawase baachan is gardening. But it seems important that she does not see us seeing her in this moment of normality, this mundane and terribly exciting thing. It feels almost frightening, like if we were to close the window Kawase baachan would disappear for good. But still we look without speaking, Kawase baachan in her sandals, razing a haze of peas, her crooked silhouette so small. She seems almost lost in the stalks and ocean of green and yellows that surround her. Still, we look without yelling out, I love you! We don’t say, Baachan! or anything like that. We cannot disrupt nature. We shut the window again.
I am visiting my grandmother while I am back home in Greenville. It is strange what time and distance has done to this house I grew up in. The list of Japanese characters hanging up on the kitchen wall is peeling. Jesus stares up toward heaven from his frame, and I don’t know him anymore. The clutter on the table, the peeling wooden chairs, the china brought from Japan locked safely in its case assures me everything is the same, but my grandmother looks faded now, small.
Kochi ni kite, she says. On some occasions something miraculous will happen and my grandmother decides to share memories after all. Nani ka wo misetai.
I move toward her and this time I am not impatient to leave. Usually our visits are explosive, always ending in me rushing out the door, but this time things feel fragile. She picks up a box of pictures, lays them all carefully on the table for me to see.
There is one of her in a dress, fixing a bride’s hair. Her hands are suspended in midair, as if about to conduct an orchestra. Light filters through their bodies, my baachan gorgeous and lipsticked, my baachan a fixer of beautiful things.
Who is this?
That was my best friend, Peko chan. But after I left Japan I could never get in contact with her again. We promised we would always stay in touch, but her number is different, and I don’t know her married name.
I flip to another picture. My grandmother on the beach, surrounded by a group of friends. It is strange to see my grandmother, the loner, with so many people who seem to love her. She poses modelesque, clutching one leg, her head bent over as she smiles so serenely at the camera. Her body is smooth and lustrous in her bikini, the boys and girls around her smile as if to say, We are living in eternal bliss!
I am jealous of these people who got to revel in this smile, of the fact that all of her happiness seemed to have shriveled up by the time I was born and was replaced with pain and paranoia instead. Apparently the war had not been enough to destroy her at this point. It was what came after that did, perhaps — the dead son, the dead husband, the sick daughter.
Don’t I look pretty? she smirks as I keep looking at the photo. I was so pretty back then.
And she does.
Another photo of her in a fur coat, luxuriously tangled in it. One leg juts out from underneath, her hands wrapped around her as if to hold all the glory in. My grandmother, the model. My grandmother, the seamstress, the ballet teacher, the not yet grandmother, the not yet scary and impenetrable in her trauma.
I still have the coat, you know, she says. Even sitting down I can see the top of her head, the sparse hairs, can almost smell the sweet, familiar smell of her scalp.
Really? Can I have it?
Why you want something like that for? she asks. Suddenly the tone of her voice has changed. I have for a long time practiced listening for the change of tone, the sleight of voice that signals something not right.
Because it’s a part of you.
She shrugs. Okay. You can have it.
The last picture is the one that is special. It is a picture of my grandmother, asleep, her face sticky with Vaseline, lying next to my grandfather. The shot feels voyeuristic — is voyeuristic — and it is the first time I have seen my grandmother so vulnerable, so relaxed. And, I think, in love.
What was she dreaming about? I hope that it was not of the mushroom cloud, or the lesions on her parents’ skin that came from the radiation. I hope that it was not about eating grasshoppers for lunch because there was nothing else. I hope she dreamed of water candy, and rice fields that stretch for miles, and the most perfect cherries anyone has ever seen.
Don’t you show this to anyone! Suddenly she is looking at me with something not unlike fury. I should never have showed you this. It’s disgusting.
She shoves the picture out of sight. The rest of them I have taken pictures of with my phone, and for that, I am grateful. I lift up out of my chair, leaving her and home again.
We are watching Kawase baachan from the window again as she talks to the neighbors. Light falls onto the shrubs. Her voice warbles over the shot, stuttering yet still so sure of itself:
After graduation, you studied photography. Do you miss me? Do you still love me as I loved you? It never comes out of your mouth, though.
We watch Naomi’s grandmother from the window in speckles of orange and yellow, our breathing so quiet in the dark blue of the kitchen. From the windowpane we stretch our fingers, caress her face from so far away. It is almost as if we are holding her, feeling the warmth of her body, the blood rushing through. We are memorizing the contours of her face but can never let her know. Kawase baachan talks and talks to the neighbor in her garden, their monpei a clatter of patterns that only countrypeople wear. Her hands wave around, accumulating dust and conversation. Our fingers trace the curls, the gold-rimmed glasses, the laugh lines around the cheeks.
Naomi’s voice falls over this scene as if to say if only we knew everything:
Do you still love me like I love you? It never comes out of your mouth.
We wipe the condensation from the window, leaving fingerprints behind. Kawase baachan looks toward the window, then turns back toward the neighbor again. Our fingers are still damp from recording memory.
This is the way life begins: vines erupting from the ground in green shoots, the air alive with cicadas in the warm summer sun. Across the soil grandmothers ripple like spines, bending and straightening and harvesting until the baskets are full.
It is August and I am in the mental hospital. My mom and aunt come to visit me. We sit in the cold cubicle with the green walls, the wooden-backed chairs, me wearing pants that don’t belong to me, no windows except for the ones where the nurses can peek in and count heads. Our conversation is just one of the many happening around us.
I tried to protect you as much as I could when you were younger, my aunt says. She is pretty and people used to say that I was pretty in the same way she was, but I don’t know if that is a word that is used to describe either of us anymore. When I moved away, I know it was hard for you. I hated leaving you there with her.
It’s okay. It really is.
I know that she loves you, Connie, and that you love her, but she’s just so toxic for your mental health. My mother is speaking now, in her famous Southern drawl that is so surprising when people hear it for the first time. She is the one usually in and out of mental hospitals, not me.
Once, a poet that I loved said to a room full of other Asian American writers, It is time for us to move away from writing about our grandmothers.
For me, a film is a way to once again spend time with something I will never encounter again — it’s a kind of time machine, Naomi says during a screening of her short film Uso in Harajuku. I imagine her sweating under the Tokyo sun, wearing violet, a small gold chain wrapped around her neck.
How far back does she want to go? I want to ask. With her time machine, does she visit only the good parts or does she go back and forth into the darkness too?
I play time traveler in writing about my baachan, albeit a bad one. I don’t know all the rules of what should be visited and what should be laid to rest. I figure that if I spend enough time writing about my baachan, she will never die and we can finally forgive each other, if not ourselves.
I will say, I forgive you for showing up to my house so many times without warning and taking my car and for saying you wish my aunt had never been born and I forgive you for never asking for forgiveness and all the other things that are too difficult to talk about. So please hold me and tell me I’m worth more than my loss.
When I went back to Japan during the summers for school, my baachan would sit toward the back, watching. I would plug in my headphones, lean my head against the window, try to pretend she wasn’t there.
Leave, I would say. Why are you here? But still she wouldn’t budge. Love is not the same as obsession, though sometimes the two overlap.
My grandmother, small and all but sunken into a chair in the back of the bus. My grandmother, young, wearing suits and smelling of Chanel No. 5 when we go to church, smiling as I twirl in the aisle. My grandmother in the classroom, during lunch, in the locker room, at the mall, in my bedroom, in the bathroom, at my apartment, at tennis practice, in the hospital, in my hotel room, downtown, online. My grandmother, born in the year of the horse. My grandmother, my most beautiful moth.
I don’t want to lose any of it. I’ve saved voicemails, e-mails (yes, even the scary ones), pictures, whole paragraphs of text. I’m preparing for what is coming. I’m learning what it means to record a life. I’m learning what a life spent recording life looks like.
Close up on flowers. Only one flower is in the shot now, grandmother fading in and out of the corner, hand frantically waving. It is the hand that unravels me, the opposite of the closed fist, a goodbye in hopes that you will be back again soon. A bundle of plants shoot up from the ground, green but not innocent.
The camera pans around Kawase baachan’s face. We know this woman by now, the hollows of her cheeks, the thin skin, array of gold teeth. No angle is left untouched.
It is embalming in real time, while she is still alive, like trying to think what parts of our loved ones we will remember most after they die. But I don’t think either my baachan or I are as scared of dying as we are scared of all that remains.
There are tomatoes growing in our garden. They are peppered with bug poison we wash off in the sink. During the winter they will wither and die.
I remember seeing them for the first time when I was young. I remember being surprised that something so beautiful could grow on the side of the road.
Daisuke Shen is an Asian American writer with a Pisces sun, Cancer moon, and Scorpio rising. They grew up in Greenville, SC and Toyohira, Hiroshima.
