The Grave on the Wall. Brandon Shimoda
And not long after that Nakanose became a distant memory.
Geiichi’s brother Kamaki, the doctor, was also, like their father before him, an alcoholic. The morning after he died, his wife shaved off her eyebrows. Yumi Taguchi slid the door back. One hundred years later, the house was gone. The stone wall too. Only the rectangle remained, though out of its frame, in the air, unencumbered.
Your grandfather’s legs were carved of wood, Yumi Taguchi said, then pressed her hands together and disappeared. Midori wondered, are her legs also carved of wood? Each leg is the spirit of a person who is no longer with us, Yumi Taguchi said. Midori thought of his other grandfather, who had died in Hiroshima. His feet. He remembered feeling lost in their lack of smell. Midori envisioned a soap bubble, round and wet. It rolled along the path, through the trees, bounded along the limbs and leaves, and caught the sun, casting a purple cataract on the ground. Wooden legs were hanging from thin, weathered beams. Hundreds of wooden legs—aged, spotted, stained, dark, laced with black characters, though some were pale and new. It seemed, when the legs came together like chimes, that they could become bold, climb up the beams, run away.
How will I remember her face? More and more formless, yet familiar, I can feel it. A small sun in mind, plain yet lost, as though baked into a larger sun, the leaven of an old, fading memory.
When Midori disobeyed Yumi Taguchi (he thought), she sent him outside to pull weeds. He went to the river. A handful of weeds was a knife. Yumi Taguchi made him remove his shirt and lie face down on the floor. He closed his eyes and imagined a family living in the dirt under the house. She bundled the weeds tightly in her hand and lit them. The weeds began to smoke. She waved them above Midori as if she was signing her name on his skin. It was not the burning of the weeds that mattered but what Yumi Taguchi was making permanent. Midori, the dutiful harvester of weeds, smelled the smoke, the impoverished incense of wood, burning hair, crushed grass, Yumi Taguchi’s knees. The weeds held the memory of behind the house.
My great-great-grandmother Yumi Taguchi’s house no longer exists. Or it exists as a letter from a mother to her son, suspended in the air like a window without a wall.
The day I visited where the house no longer exists, there was smoke in the air and the smell of grilled eel. There was a river and, in the middle of rice paddies, a graveyard. The town did not exist either. Nakanose became Kashima, Namazu to the west, Kaminakama to the east, mountains to the south, a river flowing west into Shimabara Bay, the Ariake Sea.
We traveled by bus. We departed from a parking lot in Osaka, ten at night. No station, but a small park across the street from a parking lot, folding tables, young people with clipboards. We sat on a curb beneath a young tree. On the bus, seats were assigned by last name. A piece of paper taped to the front seat read: シモダ. I had never seen Shimoda in katakana. I read and understood my name, for the first time, as western, American. Everyone had already taken off their shoes, put on paper slippers, and fallen asleep.
The road was black as a river with no moon. We sailed soundless as fish. Trees tall and feathered. No reading, no lights, no one snored. We were sailing off the map, the map dissolving in our wake. I was feeling foolish and sentimental. I tried to write a poem. I scratched a few lines while looking out the window. The thick, feathery trees started to wake up.
In the beginning, I was blind. I fell asleep, and when I awoke the country was blue. We were crossing the Kanmon Strait. Seven hundred years before, the eight-year-old emperor of the Heike, facing defeat by the swords and arrows of the Genji, leapt with his grandmother into the waves. Dawn. The shadow of the bus began to float upon the opening to the Inland Sea.
The woman selling tickets in the Kumamoto bus station had never heard of Nakanose. She gave us a map but did not know where on the map Nakanose was. Yoshie, the young mother we stayed with, had never heard of Nakanose. Nor had her father, who lived a few streets over and had grown up there. They looked at the map and found a post office in a village called Kumamotonakanose—only a few miles from Yoshie’s house—but could not tell from the map how to get there.
All Shimodas are from Nagasaki, Yoshie said.
Her father drove us around the neighborhood farms in his sedan. The roads were only as wide as the car. We drove past rice paddies and empty greenhouses. It was late July. Most everything had been harvested. There were tomatoes and watermelon. It was hot and overcast. I looked up the names of vegetables in a simple dictionary.
Dear Hiromi Ito,
I am a poet. My partner Lisa (also a poet) and I are going to be visiting Kumamoto this summer—where my grandfather was raised, where my great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother are from—
Dear Brandon Shimoda,
Kumamoto in July, August is awful weather! Just hot, hot, hot, hot and humid, humid, humid! But I am going back there probably July as well.
So how can I help you?
I am wondering if you might have any suggestions of places to visit—museums, small restaurants, temples. We are very simple travelers—content to sit, look at trees, walk, eat, talk with people.
I’ve never gotten these mails before, asking me advice about Kumamoto sightseeing from unknown people who know me by my books. So I am little bit puzzled how to react.
[pause]
We have 800 year-old camphor tree, and it is gorgeous.
I go to the riverbank as I weep, and there the water flows steadily along, I don’t know how deep it is, I look and see myself reflected once, twice upon the water, there I am, if I had a regular life I could live to be more than a hundred years old, but can I make it that far? 11
The poet Hiromi Ito and her daughter Zana met us at the bus station. I never turn right, is the first thing she said, out the window of her car. She drove us, by way of a series of left, ever-tightening turns, to a small noodle shop where we ate sea eel tempura with soba off round wicker plates with potato cream and ginger, and drank tea from the buckwheat foam strained from the pot. I told Hiromi that we were looking for my dead grandfather and for a town called Nakanose. She had never heard of it. She called her friend Baba-san. Baba-san was the first person we met in Kumamoto who had heard of Nakanose, but we never actually met Baba-san, fitting for a guide who knew of a town that no longer existed. Hiromi offered to take us.
I do not remember the way. We passed through a landscape made nondescript (I remember MOS Burger) by the anxiety of trying to remember instead of seeing everything we were passing.
We crossed a bridge. Hiromi pulled to the side of the road. Nakanose, she said. A demolished wall. Smoke in the air and the smell of grilled eel. There was a road parallel to the main road, and a smaller road connecting them to a levee between the river and rice paddies. A silhouette moved in a garden near a small pickup truck. Kase River, but the map said Midorikawa: Midori River, green river.
In the middle of the rice paddies was a small graveyard. Two dozen gravestones. White mold. Black rectangles. A small white house with a gray-shingled roof. Four bushes and a tree. Dead flowers between stones.
Hiromi turned left onto a narrow levee and stopped beside the graveyard. Tiny frogs flamed across the muddy water and sky.
Tiny peaches grew in clusters on the leaves of rice—pink, twenty-five or thirty to a cluster. The peaches were the eggs of the apple snail. The snail lived in the water, emerged to run its eggs up the leaves, where they would be safe.