Kartika_Issue15

the story of how I began studying Japanese both to connect with my
grandmother and also bring Japan back from the graveyards of pop culture.
18.
When my brother and I got in a car accident in the family Subaru, I was in
grade school, holding a children’s manga in my hand that my sobo had
picked out for me a week before in Japan. Though I have a scar on my
cheek and another one on my scalp to prove that crashes aren’t just the stuff
of atomic bombs, I survived, the rest of my body unscathed. The doctor told
my mom later that if I hadn’t been holding the manga in my hand (the thick,
pulpy pages acting as protective spirits from land of the sun-origin), I might
have died. Or been disfigured. That car accident proved that my monolithic
self has never ceased being threatened since the day I realized I was a hapa
performing a white person. This is the story of how Japan saved my life
from narrative monomania or cultural duality.
19.
As a writer, language is how I slow down time and shed the words I’m ready
to let go of. It’s also my project of memorialization. I write so that the
reader is forced to do the remembering for me. After all, writing is aesthetic
delirium, a diachronic synthaesia of person, language and event that infects
the reader with narrative dementia, entrapping her within my own textual
wonderland. I’m wandering, always wandering through the leviathan of
small details, I’m exposed, already infected by the unstable neurotoxins of
memory, sickened by the lyrical (cyclical) passages of this memoir. This is
the story of how a writer (reader) leaps over the canyon of amnesia and finds
his lost grandmother in the wasteland, hidden somewhere in the library
stacks of his own memory where everything is waiting to be sewn into a
coherent story that falls apart at the seams when you hold it up against the
light.
20.
During the last year of her life, sobo recreated her own island of the sunorigin.
She read tiny Japanese novels that she bought at the San Diego
Kinokuniya, tucked inside the Mitsuwa supermarket on Kearny Mesa Road.
My mom also got Nippon TV installed on their cable box so my
grandmother could watch Japan in real time, leaping over fifty years of
suspended animation with a push of a button. This is the story of how we
create nations, mountains, and cities inside of ourselves that are not
simulacra, but perfect imagined worlds, more perfect than the original design.
68