Kartika_Issue15

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THE TRANSFUSION OF YUKIYO KANAHASHI Jackson Bliss 1. The English word dementia is derived from the Latin word demens, meaning “out of one’s mind.” Taken apart, demens is composed of two words: the prefix de, meaning “away, down” and the noun mens, the Latin word for “reason, mind, intellect.” This is the story of how language and memory fall apart but never disappear when you break everything down. 2. In the final year of my sobo’s life, photography was an important motif of the beautiful dream and the fleeting world. My Japanese cousin, Eikichi, took several obligatory photos of my grandmother’s final trip at a Buddhist temple in Ōsaka. The photos are painful to look at because—with one exception where my grandmother is laughing a joyless laugh, her eyes closed—there’s no laughter in her face at all, no exuberant sparkle in the temples like before. They are exactly what I expect of Japanese family photos: people glued by tradition, cemented by hierarchy, weighed down by honor and gravitas. The photos are also powerful for the simpler reason that my sobo is barely there in the ukiyo (the floating world). Her face is supernaturally pallid like a poisoned moon, her lips are crushing the line between them. Her eyes are unsettled and overpowered by exhaustion. In at least two photographs, while my Aunt Shizuko looks straight at the camera (you), sobo is looking off into the distance as if she can’t bear to look you in the face. Maybe she didn’t know Eikichi was taking her picture. Maybe she stopped caring. In another photo, sobo looks incurably sad, the saddest, in fact, I’ve ever seen her in my entire life. Her eyes plead for more time. They mourn the inevitable great blur, speaking in the voice of loss. Her eyes are the orphans of the invisible war taking place inside her body. You are her witness now. You are her casualty. In another photograph, sobo’s mouth is half open, as if she’s groaning. If you look long enough you can see the emotion hemorrhaging inside, the quiet slowly bleeding out. The agony on her face isn’t just the pain of the body breaking down or the mutiny of her lungs. It’s also the pain of not knowing how to cover your pain anymore. The collapse of ganbaru, the Japanese verb of perseverance. When the pictures are put together, her face tells a story of suffering and exile: how she lost her country and family once she moved to America, how age and disease slowly pilfered her memories fifty-eight years after Japan 60
ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013 surrendered on board the USS Missouri. Sobo looks like she keeps finding the same wound inside her, the same returning paradox. Despite her visit to Nippon and the surrounding ambient details of staccato Buddhist chants, ringing bells, long-winded Japanese honorifics, despite the lingering smells of kamaboko, senbei and overflowing good-luck incense in the background, she looks mortified. Her face is not a silent pain at all, it’s a grievance she shares with the viewer by accident, as if tripping and falling on your heart. This is the story of how the particles of my sobo’s soul were slowly dissolving into the atmospheric mesh threads around her like a bleeding silkscreen. 3. It took most of my life to piece together her story, and even more time for the scraps to cohere, but one day I finally understood the truth about my sobo: part of her died when she left Japan as a young woman. During the American occupation, Japan nationalized its shame, handed over its army, and ignored the crimes against humanity it was both clearly a victim and also a perpetrator of. Meanwhile, a new constitution was translated from English to Japanese (making Japanese laws essentially foreign). Clean-cut GI’s became power brokers of a country they didn’t understand or love, after hundreds of thousands of civilians perished in the Tokyo firebombing (which my grandmother survived by jumping into the river and holding her breath). After America’s radiation experiment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nippon lost its emperor, its national narrative, its urban landscape, its memory of the physical world. In that post-war chaos, my sobo was working in Yokohama as a seamstress when she met my grandfather, an American soldier who was a stubborn drunk, an amnesiac and a future sex offender. This is the story of how Japan lost the innocence it never had again and the story of how my grandfather died of cirrhosis of the liver at an American army base before I was born, killing himself before I’d have the chance to, a kamikaze without honor or sake. 4. The word dementia is also a cognate to the Latin infinitive demēre, meaning “to take, cut away, withdraw, subtract or take away from.” Medically, dementia is considered a chronic cognitive disorder, often caused by injury or disease to the brain, resulting in severe or partial memory loss, mood swings, strong personality shifts and conflated recall (both sequentially, spatially and temporally). This is the story of sobo’s loss of reality, the abduction of her narrative arc by the serial killers of memory, all of them. 61
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Cover Art: “The Home Front" from
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MISSION STATEMENT Kartika Review se
Page 6 and 7:
EDITORIAL Eugenia Leigh Dear Reader
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Purvi Shah’s “Tree Risings” d
Page 10 and 11: The Home Front Jordan Josafat 10
Page 12 and 13: lip as she tried to swing her swoll
Page 14 and 15: “Masayuki! Tsune, sit quietly. Be
Page 16 and 17: simple wedding was kept. Along with
Page 18 and 19: Etsuko had backed out the door slow
Page 20 and 21: SKIN DEEP Anu Kandikuppa To: Kinder
Page 22 and 23: northwestern part of India, in part
Page 24 and 25: must use a blend of oils and perfor
Page 26 and 27: To: Ms. Clayton and Ms. Simpson Fro
Page 28 and 29: To: General Manager, Crayona Compan
Page 30 and 31: “Yes,” I said, “though I’m
Page 32 and 33: THOUGHTS OF SINKING Kaitlin Solimin
Page 34 and 35: I paused. How had she remembered th
Page 36 and 37: never touched any of the girls inap
Page 38 and 39: the next generation couldn’t best
Page 40 and 41: Chenxi climbed up the silver ladder
Page 42 and 43: she’d tried. She’d climbed to t
Page 44 and 45: else. For now, this tall, slow Amer
Page 46 and 47: “That’s true,” I said. I hate
Page 48 and 49: I’d read a newspaper article many
Page 50 and 51: Bomb the Morons 50
Page 52 and 53: Into the Wild 52
Page 54 and 55: Runaway Train 54
Page 56 and 57: PAROUSIA I Karen An-Hwei Lee Red bu
Page 58 and 59: QUARANTINE Henry W. Leung My feet p
Page 62 and 63: 5. Some people will accuse me of bi
Page 64 and 65: Platonic knowledge is joyful recoll
Page 66 and 67: our self, freed from the constraint
Page 68 and 69: the story of how I began studying J
Page 70 and 71: Jackson Bliss earned his MFA from t
Page 72 and 73: piece suit nearest the air conditio
Page 74 and 75: AUTHOR INTERVIEW WITH MONIQUE TRUON
Page 76 and 77: suspect everyone in Saigon was conc
Page 78 and 79: KR: What is the physical act of wri
Page 80 and 81: CONTRIBUTOR BIOS FICTION Sharon Has
Page 82 and 83: ART 82 What The Jordan Josafat Jord
Page 84 and 85: Nonfiction Editor, Jennifer Derilo
Page 86 and 87: Kartika Review is a national Asian
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