Is this the resumption of regular posting or just a shot of text into the dark? Who can say? If you’re still following this blog, I hope this post finds you well.
“It’s true that stepping into a cascade of cicada song is like walling yourself inside all the summers since time began.”
Norma Field’s From My Grandmother’s Bedside is a memoir of post-war Tokyo written in vignettes, but that description feels lazy. Its scope is broad. Focused on the time Field spent caring for her grandmother following a stroke, Field seems to cover the whole human experience.
Topics include Japan’s national identity, atomic weapons, family relationships, personal identity, death, aging, and the simple rhythm of household cleaning rituals. It was the sort of conversation in which I was deeply aware I had less to bring to the table, and I was thankful for the lopsided relationship between author and reader.
As a child and then as a teenager, I vastly preferred the fantasy novel to any other form of writing. Sometime in college I got a taste for memoir and autobiography, and my reading habits have been permanently changed.
I love autobiographical works because they let me slip into another person’s memories for a few thousand words. Seeing real life through other eyes is enlightening, encouraging.
I picked up Field’s book as part of some pandemic light reading, hoping to distract myself with a window on Japan. I found this didn’t quite work as anticipated.
Field conjured a powerful vision of her childhood neighborhood, and within a few pages, the easy “otherness” of a distant culture was destroyed. Though Field still had much to say that was particularly about Japan, the museum tour of another world was over.
I didn’t realize this had happened until well past the halfway point. The cicada quote at the start is what really made me cognizant of the change in experience. Field’s life, her Japan, her experience, is different from my life and experience in just about every conceivable way, but that truth about cicada song was like being dunked into a pool of my own memories. Her memory overlapped my own memories of walking to my grandmother’s house on summer evenings when the cicadas were almost unbearably loud.
“Or more precisely, we’re caught in the tension of knowing what ought to be done and that it ought to be able to be done in peaceful parliamentary democracies and of knowing that it almost certainly will not be done.”
This quote came just a few pages before the mention of cicada song. It was the first time in a few years that I’ve made a note about a book I read for pleasure. It seems simple enough, but to have a thought that’s been especially frustrating over the last three months be stated so plainly is reaffirming at the least.
This is an experience I had time and again. Field is writing 23 years in the past, mostly about a culture a world away and often about events even further removed from the present, but time and again, I am reminded of our own circumstances.
This is not, of course, a novel experience, but every time it happens it is an important one. I offer my final quotation without further explanation.
“The specter of discrimination, unleashed by the outbreak of 0157 (E. coli) among schoolchildren, within businesses, between regions afflicted and those apparently safe, should remind us of how scientific knowledge — about how disease is transmitted, for example — crumbles before perceived threats to livelihood.”
Author’s Note: My childhood was colored by a fixation on and idealization of the British and Japanese cultures. Works I loved came from there, and they seemed manifestly different from my lived reality. If you followed this blog for my discussion of anime, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read works like From My Grandmother’s Bedside.
Cultural appreciation is a good thing, but idealization is bad for the brain. Learning about the cultures that produce art we love is a fascinating experience. I have only the most tenuous grasp on Japanese culture, but learning more about political and philosophical trends and the daily lives of people a world away has been a net positive for me. And, y’know, anime and manga take on new meaning with every drop of additional context.
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