This morning I had a conversation with a friend who lived in Japan, and whose parents still live there. And then later started reading Where The Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, book by Marie Mutsuki Mockett, whose family lived nearby the Fukushima nuclear plant.
It made me think, I have relatives in Japan, too. The last time I saw them was over forty years ago, when my family — my parents, grandmother and I — visited. I was ten years old. I couldn’t speak much Japanese, but I bonded with my grandmother’s grand-nephews, who spoke no English.
The evening that we arrived in their rural home, the boy grabbed my hand and rushed me down their unpaved road. “Hanabi!” he shouted. I didn’t know what that word meant, but after weeks of being the only child on guided tours through the temples and shrines of Kyoto and Nara, I was thrilled to be around another kid. I followed him to a ramshackle building with an open window, and a woman inside, selling paper sacks of what looked like incense. Inside the bag were some matches. My little cousin struck one against a rock, and the stick fizzed into sputtering fire. It was a sparkler! He handed me one, and we drew figure eights in the air around us. So this was hanabi: fireworks. We ran back and forth between his house and the firework stand, coaxing coins from my father and the other adults. After going through a dozen sparkers, we graduated to cone-shaped fountains and ground spinners and sparkly fire blossoms.
On the last day of our visit, his father hauled a carton the size of dishwasher into the back yard. It was filled with fireworks of all sizes- the kind that only adults could light — roman candles and exploding rockets, peonies and flying fish. He gave a speech to the gathered neighboring children, of which I only understood “Su-san-chan” and “Hanabi.” It was for me. I remember the thrill of seeing the sky rain down colors, how my uncle would crouch down to light another canister and point at me as they exploded. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.
I don’t even know the name of that boy, whom I only referred to as “Hanabi” for the rest of my childhood. He, like me, must be in his fifities now. I wonder if he remembers a hapa cousin coming to visit from America, and the fireworks we bought.
My family — my husband and daughters and mother — returned to Japan ten years ago, but we didn’t look up the relatives. My mother’s memory, softened and blurred by dementia, had let go of their names, their address. I recently digitized a boxful of slides I’d found from that long-ago trip and it made me sad to think how we have slipped away from each other. I wonder if they wonder about us too, their lost, long-ago family from America.
