STORIES TO REMEMBER - by Kalpana Mohan
When I finished reading the eponymous opening story of Things Remembered And Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima, I was as if struck by lightning. I was at Singapore’s Changi airport, unable to share my experiences with anyone.
When I was back home in Saratoga, however, there was the right kind of audience, a young man who is both a sensitive reader and writer. My son, who can exasperate me many a time, astounds me at other times with his insights and observations. I read the short story out loud to him. The facts were there for us to see. However, there were as many words uttered in the story as there were details left unsaid. It had been polished and perfected until it shone from every angle. After we finished reading it, we marveled at the beauty of a tale so well told that it made us wonder about the story itself as well as the subtle connections between the writing craft and the culture of a place.
Things Remembered And Things Forgotten called out to me from the bookstore when I was en route to my gate at Changi Airport. The title did me in, of course, as did the cover and the many reviews. Translated by Ian McCullough MacDonald and Ginny Tapley Takemori, this work was published in 2021 by Sort Of Books—such a brilliant name, that—in the United Kingdom.
Whenever I read a work translated from Japanese, I feel I get to savor both simplicity and complexity in equal measure. In the Japanese culture it seems that things are often created or stated simply—like the plastic food on display at restaurants—with an eye to verisimilitude, minimal artifice and an in-your-face directness. The treatment is beautiful and artful, of course. Yet, hiding in plain sight, behind the braided beauty and utility, are the many muddled truths of a thing that only gets more complicated the more we think about it.
The two other Japanese works I read in the last year were MASKS by Fumiko Enchi and SWEET BEAN PASTE by Durian Sukegawa; both reminded me of this same feeling, of the narrative arc of a life (and death), of the many layers of strife upon the human soul, of the people we become over time, of the half-truths we tell ourselves, and of the full-lies we begin to believe while doing a disservice to ourselves.
I felt that this collection definitely suffered from the uncertainty that many short story collections suffer from. Not all the mangoes we receive in a summer basket are sweet. In this collection, too, some pieces did not seem ripe enough for consumption. Despite that, it’s a book worth reading and I believe it will be a terrific pick for a book club.
In a story Nakajima titles GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM, we see the hopelessness of relationships in a dysfunctional family. Even though the three daughters in a family are financially secure, they’re emotionally rudderless; there is little love lost between themselves and their parents. As the father’s health tanks, we watch the mother’s hapless and sneaky attempts to save the foundering family. She hopes the daughters will come to see their father if she casually mentions the word “money”. Every reader will relate to the deep sadness of this tale.
I learned that when Nakjima’s debut novel “FUTON” was published, her father was diagnosed with dementia. For over a decade, until his death in 2013, Nakajima helped take care of her father while working on her fiction and nonfiction. She is known to base her settings and characters on personal experience. Her time caring for a parent with dementia is exploited with great sensitivity in GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM even though I didn’t feel the story was as strong as some of the other stories in the collection.
MY WIFE WAS A SHIITAKE MUSHROOM is a tale about the struggles of a man fresh in the throes of having lost his wife. A cooking lesson teaches him not just about his wife but also about how to find her voice anew through her diaries and through the foods she used to prepare for him. It’s a heartbreaking tale about how partners can take each other for granted. It’s a look at just how much entitlement can dog a relationship and how this awareness often marks every recuperation from loss.
We begin to see how every living thing is invested with life and memory and it’s a thoughtful segue into our feelings about inanimate objects, too. I loved the placing, in this collection, of the next story THE LIFE STORY OF A SEWING MACHINE.
When our loved ones leave the world, we begin to invest the objects they used with a reverence we didn’t feel before. In this story, we see how an old Singer sewing machine which we may often call junk can be imbued with so much meaning and significance. In the story, the sewing machine has unusual miraculous powers from the day it rolls out of the factory until the day it’s discovered by Yuka. Whoever uses the machine becomes both talented and successful at their craft.
It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination an attractive object that could be used as an ornament. It’d be more appropriate to say it really was junk, a relatively bulky object and waste of space that nobody would buy even as a joke.
Why is it here?
Some people whose job it is to clear out properties of the dead brought it here.
Properties of the dead?
That’s right. People leave stuff behind when they die.
While this was a terrific story, Kyoko Nakajima’s tendency to drop an idea midway to tell another story and then return to the opening segment rendered a story clunky. The seams showed. It was as if I could see the underside of the cloth Nakajima was sewing and that threw me out of the reading experience in some instances.
My personal favorite became a tossup between the breathtaking opening story and one titled KIRARA’S PAPER PLANE, a ghost tale about two children. I began reading this with more than a bucketful of skepticism. By the time the story ended, I was heartbroken and speechless. Kirara is a smelly, unkempt child who is befriended by a ghost called Kenda. For a few days, Kirara is listened to, cared for, fed, bathed and entertained by Kenda. This is a story everyone must read and weep over for we discover how friendship and love can blossom in the oddest places .
For the first time in her life, Kirara folded a paper plane all by herself, from start to finish, and sent it sailing through the air, happily chasing it all over. Kenta, for the first time since becoming a ghost, wished he could stay in the world just a bit longer.
I believe readers will love CHILDHOOD FRIENDS, a story about a man and a woman in their fifties who find themselves rekindling a childhood crush from the time they were in middle school together. It’s a piece about the sudden turns that our lives take that lead us into a happier place. It’s told in the garrulous voice of the woman and the tone is conversational and immensely relatable. It is one of the strongest stories in the collection.
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