Kartika_Issue15

our self, freed from the constraints of rationalism? What if sobo on her
deathbed was not an abridged version of her former self but a completely
unfiltered and unfettered version of who she’d always been inside? The
Yukiyo Kanahashi I knew had a permanent accent and a shrunk-in-the-dryer
vocabulary. She was unfaithful with definite articles. Sometimes, she
stressed the wrong syllables of words, making them momentarily foreignsounding
to native speakers. She also did other things with language that
was unique: all dogs were doggies, my brother’s name became a swear word
with a slight intonation shift, and sakura could be a holiday, a flower and a
song. And yet, as much as I loved the English-speaking version of my sobo,
that was just an excerpt of a larger body of work, a shrink-wrapped version
of herself suffocating under a layer of cellophane. Her English was a
performance. At times, almost a racist caricature of herself. Her Japanese,
on the other hand, was the uncorking of the impossible bottle. When she
spoke nihongo to her siblings on the phone every New Year’s day, our house
became an opera house of repackaged stories, translated for our protection.
This is the story of sobo’s dementia as both an act of defiance of western
(linear) time and also an expansion (opera) of who she used to be before
yellow people became lab rats for the Manhattan project.
14.
When my grandmamma moved to America, Japan froze in time. Her photo
album of dementia was distinctly diachronic, looping continuously in a
temporal helix that often crossed wires and became knotted, the form and
content of her past changing with every frame, every row, every page,
working out a new permutation of memory, each fresh (non-linear) narrative
traveling back and forth, up and down, contracting and stretching. Sobo’s
memories of Japan, on the other hand, were devoutly, distinctly synchronic.
While her life in America continued to progress in the changing of
presidents—Eisenhower-Kennedy-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-
Clinton et al.—Japan was stuck in the Showa period for good, its doctrine of
racial superiority and the sins of Nanking only recently erased by the blunt
force of Enola Gay’s urban liquidation, the Battle of Midway and the
occupation of the emperor’s throne by toe-headed hakujins that didn’t speak
a word of nihongo, and didn’t know Shinto from shindo (the Japanese words
for earthquake, depth, progress and elasticity). Was it her attachment to a
lost childhood, the bloodshed and the amorality of war, the erasure of
nationalist narratives of violence or simply the implosion of Hirohito’s
personality cult that made my sobo cast such a sweeping spell on her
homeland, the land of the sun-origin stuck in suspended animation, frozen at
the exact place where civilian blood flowed profusely? This is the story of
66