A Very Sentimental Journey

After our visit, I was surprised to discover that our aunt had returned to drive us the short distance to our mother's house. It was still mid-afternoon, so we spend some time reorganizing our baggage after realizing that with all our shopping and the many gifts that were bestowed on us, we would be returning with fare more things than we left with. Somehow, the fact that we just had one more full day left in Japan refused to register for me. After just a few nights in our mother's house, I had completely stopped feeling like a visitor. The room we were in was our room. It was furnished for us and would always be available for us. For the first time in thirty years, there was someone else making sure I had a roof over my head and food in my stomach. Even without being consciously aware of it, that had a very powerful impact on me.

A little while after we arrived home, my wife asked if I wanted to take a walk with her. The day was beginning to fade into a long, spring twilight and I was happy to be able to get to know this beautiful part of the valley a little better.

A path above the canyon that was my wife's childhood home is typical of the subtle, rural beauty that is Hiro.

We left her mother's house and walked down the narrow, two-lane road that led out of town. A thickening stream of small cars and light trucks rumbled by and kept us on the inside edge of the half-meter wide pedestrian walkway. We took a small side road to the right and walked into a long, delicately sculptured canyon. Traditional Japanese houses of various sizes and ages stood on terraces carved into the steep walls. From a distance, they looked like precious mementos on the velvety green shelves of a display case.

An Unfinished Dream

We stopped at a small house on an upper rim on a lot that overlooked all the others. It was old, overgrown with weeds and obviously hadn't been lived in for several years. As old as it was, parts of the house that looked unfinished: thin fiberboard where windows would have been, molding trimmed some walls and not others. But, I was caught up in the view from the modest patch of a front yard and barely noticed these things. My wife slid open the front door and turned to me. "This is where I grew up," she said quietly. She stepped out of her shoes and into an old pair of leather house slippers sitting inside the door. I stood just inside the doorway while my wife walked through. A layer of brown dust covered the clutter of furniture and boxes of belongings that were still there. I was worried about walking along the old floor in my stocking feet, but knew I could not enter in my shoes.

My wife's father is a carpenter. He bought the beautiful plot of land and started building the house when she was a child. It was a dream he could never quite fulfill. Keeping the unfinished structure intact was the best he could do as the years passed. The house was the source of deep, personal shame for my wife throughout her child- and early-adulthood. It drove her to become the first in her family to go to college and she remained in the distant city of Kyoto from the time she graduated until we got married.

She came back to the doorway, stepping out of the slippers and back into her walking shoes, then gently slid the front door closed. "I hate this house," she said softly, looking down at the cracked walkway and up at the patched tiling on the roof. I held her as she softly cried for a while. We followed a narrow, paved path and walked further up past the edge of the canyon. We reached a narrow summit and turned to look back at the view. Her old house was barely visible, but the view of the random arrangement of houses and terraced fields enfolded in the soft green arms of the canyon was one of the most beautiful I'd ever seen anywhere in the world.

We turned and walked pack down to the main road. By one small farm plot, a young woman who was working in a garden called to my wife. She was one of my wife's childhood friends and someone she hadn't seen for perhaps twenty years. They greeted each other and chatted briefly. Her friend had stayed in the valley and still lived with her parents. They no longer had very much in common. We continued following he narrow road back down to the highway.

Ancestors

After a hundred yards or so, we took a short path up to a small family memorial plot with two markers and a neatly-tended vegetable garden. The newer of the two contained the remains of her grandfather. The other, of significant but indeterminable age, belonged to another ancestor she could not name. I helped her remove a few leaves that had fallen on the markers and we cut some wildflowers to replace the bouquet her mother had left a week or so before. She then invited me to join her in a brief prayer to honor them. I looked puzzled and she told me to simply say whatever I wanted to them. I pressed my hands together, bowed my head and offered my respects, expressing the gratitude I felt at now being part of their family.

The lingering dusk continued to deepen as we crossed the narrow highway and followed a walkway that took us closer to the river. We went past clusters of newer homes and came to a wide, stately single-story house that still possessed great dignity even though it was unoccupied and unattended. This was the grandmother's house that stood at the center of my wife's family for nearly a hundred years. To the left of the entrance, there was what was once a large garden. Like a movie star well into her twilight years, it held more than a memory of its original beauty.

This is the house were the family gathered for New Years, Obon and all the important family celebrations. Somewhere between the darkened-wood walls and the roof's curved ceramic tiles, lingered the laughter of the cousins playing in the garden, the steady chatter of gossip of the aunts and sisters as they sipped rich green tea and the abbreviated, guttural voices of the uncles and brothers at they sat smoking and complaining about work or bragging about fishing. Evenly chopped blocks of wood still piled in a long, neatly stacked rows outside the wide room containing the bath. Old and abandoned, the house still felt alive and important in many, many ways.

The Golden Gate (in miniature)

We walked further along the footpath towards a very strange sight. It was a suspension bridge, like a miniature version of the Golden Gate, spanning the river. The cables had blackened with age and the orange paint of the railings was peeling off the rusting and pitted metal of the side rails. It must have been years since the thick, rotting wooden planks of the ten-foot wide bed could have supported anything other than pedestrians and hand carts. We started across, my wife and I both giggling a little nervously at the bridge swayed and creaked under our weight. In the river forty feet below was just a trickle of water. The flood-control dam upstream was closed.

We crossed the bridge and looked back. With a gentle turn of are heads we could the expanse of the river valley, the elegant canyon and all the homes, past, present and eternal, of my wife's family. I knew enough to realize that it was a typical, not an ideal family. There were more than enough petty feuds, conspiracies and intrigues that still strain some of the relationships. But they remained bound together by a sense of place. This beautiful river valley would always be a family home and, while there was a home, there would always be a family.

I found myself remembering my father's sudden death seven years before and the long night I spent flying from California to Boston to be with my mother as my parent's only child. I thought of the small funeral ceremony and all the difficulty we had trying to track down many of my father's relatives to inform them of his passing. We were a family of immigrant Jews, who scattered themselves across Europe for several generations and then throughout America for two more. As I was growing up, there were certain cousins I enjoyed playing with when we visited together and a favorite aunt and uncle who moved far away when I was very young. For me, the concept of "family" was only a smattering of childhood memories. Looking back over that bridge, I began to understand about "family" as a way of life.

It was nearly dark when we started home. We walked in silence. I was thinking about all that I had lost and all that I had just found.

As I lay in bed that night, I was still realizing how moved I was by our walk that afternoon. It had never been easy for me to feel rooted anywhere. Now, it was as if a deep network of roots had quickly and effortlessly grown in the rich earth beneath me, bringing with them something I thought I never could have.

Next: Touring Kure

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