Kartika_Issue15

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.
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