Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
Supposedly, the last sense to go is the hearing. On her deathbed, as her
forehead was burning up, I crawled in my sobo’s bed. After thanking her
again for her indomitable love, strength, generosity and devotion, I
whispered one final thing in her ears: Obāsamawa, watashitachi no hikari
desu. Grandmama, you are our light. You are our light. This is the story of
how I tried to help my grandmother cross to the other side, a world I prayed
was full of butchered Mozart Sonatas, Ōsaka festivals, the smell of
kamaboko and senbei in the background and good luck-incense rising up, the
tendrils of smoke painting sakura branches in the sky.
When she died, my grandmother was completely out of her mind. Dementia,
after all, is the travel between the self, beyond the self and around the self
until there is no self left, or until there are too many selves to count. The day
before I left California, I was sitting at a café with my brother, reflecting
about my sobo, focusing all my attention on her as I opened up my portable
Japanese-English dictionary which I’d brought to help me speak with her
when her English collapsed into rubble. I had probably creased the page
myself days before without knowing, pressing my hands firmly on the spine
in case of emergency. Even so, these are the kanji I found on that page, just
as I was thinking about her, just as I was replaying the last minutes of her
life with me: hieru, meaning, “to grow cold,” higashi, the kanji for “east,”
hikitoru, meaning “to take care,” hikō, the noun for “flight,” and most
importantly, hikari, the kanji for “light.” This memoir is the story my sobo
didn’t want to tell anyone, the story she kept telling me in excerpts of
encoded trauma, the voyage I wish I could forget and the story I was
destined to assemble and retell in a way that only I could, written in the
lyrical (cyclical) style she would have forbidden and demanded of me. This
is the story of my sobo’s deracination, her self-multiplication and also her
return to the motherland. This is the story of my memory of her memory,
transposed into a series of (im)perfect and flawed translations, a project of
narrative multiplication, the lyrical disorder of a damaged (artistic) brain,
and an honest arpeggio of memory. This is the story of how a memoir can
also be a blood transfusion, giving sustenance to every version of her life she
forgot and every version she left untold.
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