I rise before the sun. I walk barefoot through the house and sit in front of the window. Summer is leaving.
Now, everything seems still. Like footsteps, something pulses.
I see the word “part” from every side, as if it were a cube.
On one side, I see my dad, in a kimono, packing suits.
His suitcases are made of leather and have straps like belts. The walls are made of rice paper and the doors slide. I can see the whole scene. It’s soft.
I turn the cube and think about him departing, not when he left Japan, but when he decided to stay in Argentina. A piece is missing from that scene. There is something in that decision I don’t understand.
I look at the other side of the word. Partum is also the act of coming to life.
You know when it is time. Not because of the doctor’s calculations, but because you recognize it, like you recognize someone you’re waiting for when you just see their silhouette. Or right before.
You accept what you feel. The doctor “gives” a date, like a sentence.
I decide not to go to work. I stay at home all day. I don’t eat and I pace back and forth, like a caged lion. I am the lion, and I am the cage that imprisons it.
I think about my childhood.
I first realized we were different when I went to school.
The other kids would stretch their eyes with their index fingers and call me the “Chinese girl.” I’d tell them I was Japanese, and they’d say it was the same thing. I wouldn’t respond. I didn’t understand why they would say that, or many other things. They yelled at me, pushed me, and sometimes hit me. They all seemed very angry with me.
When I thought it had all passed, the way earthquakes pass, two older boys made my brother cry in the locker room at school. I never knew why.
From that day on, I started to speak in the first-person plural.
Earthquakes aren’t just the Earth’s tremors or one of the first words my dad learned. For the Japanese, they’re a real possibility.
They, the other kids, were angry with us.
I didn’t say anything about other differences I noticed. Like, for example, they didn’t say thank you. Like when things were always where they found them. It was like no one put them there. Food, clothes, toys.
They also left shoes scattered all over. They didn’t arrange them in parallel, like their feet, so they wouldn’t get in the way, messy. Sometimes they were left with the sole up and the laces tied, and sometimes it would be a while before they felt like putting them on again.
Then I was introduced to their families and their houses. They were different, too. Or we were the ones who were different. I didn’t know.
The food I liked the most was salmon roe. My dad brought it sometimes, from the boats. The other kids didn’t know what it was. They didn’t know where Japan was, either, or that there had been a war beyond the movies.
As a teenager, the movies made me angry because they romanticized the war. War isn’t like that, I thought. When I asked my dad, he told me about the fear, he described the nights of blackouts and the attempts to hide in the darkness. Suddenly something rips through the silence and grows. Then, a parade of enormous white birds. The noise is a vibration through your body. The silence lies in pieces on the floor. He spreads his arms. His eyes are wide open and looking at the sky, which outside is light blue, but he and I see black, sitting in our dining room. The planes that came to bomb them. He told me they were beautiful. Frighteningly beautiful.
I stop turning the cube of words and images. My body is calling.
I recognize one of the signs they taught me in the class. It’s time.
It’s past eleven at night. I make the calls to let them know. My parents say they’re coming to get me. I’m calm and I wait. I’m sitting in my living room. The music I put on earlier is still playing. Bach. Some things are universal. Most of us follow more or less the same paths. With a few differences.
I don’t have a TV. We didn’t have one when I was a kid, either. By choice. It’s hard to explain why you choose certain things when you do it from a place without words. My dad, when he was a kid, would fall asleep looking at the wood grain of the house’s beams. TV isn’t necessary. The cube shows another side.
I keep waiting. Legs crossed in lotus position, one hand on top of my belly and the other underneath. The future bursts inside me and it’s almost a reflex to look to the past. My childhood insists: the other children never corrected their parents like I did, sometimes telling them that it was “cup” and not “cap.” I adopted this place of difference as my own.
I had to adopt some place: the country I was living in considered me a foreigner, and the other, it didn’t even occur to me to go.
Twenty years later I went. And I was also a foreigner. It hurt like a blow to an open wound. Suffer, love, depart, tango says. Neither tango nor soccer interested my dad. He went for other things. I don’t see one side of the cube, as if it were incomplete.
When I got to know Japan, I got to know my father. Not for what they had in common, but what made them different. The rebelliousness, for example, neat and tenacious.
I lift the cube and look at another side. To part is to make halves, the dictionary says.
Half. In Japan, that’s what they call the children of a Japanese person with someone of another race.
Before they used the word “ainoko,” which meant something like lovechild, but after the war that word started to have a derogatory charge because it was used for the children of the Japanese with American soldiers. Children of the enemy.
So I’m “half.” I’m japonesa in Argentina and argentina in Japan, lowercase for me and uppercase for the country.
To part is also to break, adds the dictionary. To break, to separate parts. Another side of the cube. In Japan, my dad left his mother, a widow since he was two, and his brother, sick since the war.
My grandmother was named Katsu and they say I am like her.
I didn’t know her except for the stories my dad told and a photo I saw once, in which I looked for the strong woman who singlehandedly supported her family and her husband’s, losing everything several times over during the war.
In the photo was an older lady who looked like one of those plums they call umeboshi. Tiny and wrinkled, uncomfortable in front of the camera.
Now more than ever they say I’m like her. Now that I am going to have my son alone. Alone at forty. They say I’m aged, which, to me, sounds like I’m a tree. Trees don’t give birth. Some conjugations of the verb parturire, to bear, seem more related to holding or enduring than to giving birth. Trees don’t give birth. They give shade.
The way I feel like a tree, which I do more now than at twenty, is in its soundness. A certain kind of strength.
One of the ways to say strong in Japanese is kenta. What a beautiful word…
The pain they told me about arrives. It interrupts and devours everything. I don’t scream like in the movies. The house is silent.
My parents arrive, together, like they have for the past forty-two years.
They got married a few months after they met. My dad had just one guest at his wedding: an employee of the company he had come here to work for. My mom, on the other hand, had hundreds, because they were in her city and that city was small.
Marrying a Japanese man was the strangest thing someone could do in Necochea. I once read that the most extreme form of exogamy is marrying someone of another race.
Later they came to live in Buenos Aires. The office where my father worked was in La Boca, near the port where the fishing boats he worked with docked.
He had two bosses. For a Japanese man, a boss isn’t the same as for an Argentine. The hierarchies are deeply engrained. It’s not a capricious order, it’s something ironclad.
One day, the bosses told him to bring his wife for dinner. My dad told her the date and time. They waited for her at the door to the office. She took two subways and arrived six minutes late. Five minutes after the set time, the bosses said they were going to walk to the place, that she should come when she arrived. My dad stayed to wait for her. She arrived a few seconds later. The bosses walked a few meters ahead without turning around. My parents, behind them.
The bosses were offended by her lateness, and my mother, by their manners.
My dad stood between them, parted. Or multiplied.
She always accompanied him. Like the walls of a house accompany the ceiling. She was always there in an almost invisible way, like how I’m writing. And sometimes she seemed more Japanese to me than he did.
She records the time between one pain and the next. My dad drives.
Reclined in the backseat I see banana trees, rosewoods, maples. The pain erases them. In their place, it leaves a desert without trees.
To part is to divide. To divide is to know how many times one number fits into another.
How many fit into one. One, a starting point. There everything fits.
My dad chose to stay in this land for my mom, and for other reasons. I look for them.
He once told me that he stayed for the bridge in front of the Law School on Avenida Figueroa Alcorta, and because in a forest in the south (in Bariloche, I think) the trees that fall aren’t removed but left to form part of the landscape.
The fallen trees are also the forest.
The idea of death was always different in my house. It wasn’t the opposite of life, but a part of it.
I can make a list of the words that had a different meaning in my house from what they had outside: death, I, winter, other, salt, effort, word, kiss, honor, grandparent, wait, tea, work, eat, silence, acceptance, pain.
The midwife says I must not be in labor because if I were, I’d be complaining. My mother tells her that I don’t complain, and gives me her hand.
Many people complain about the weather. In my parents’ house, I never heard complaints about the sun or the rain, the wind, the dew, the frost.
The midwife does the examination and, before finishing, calls the anesthesiologist and the emergency obstetrician.
I let go of my mother’s hand.
One hour later, my baby is in my arms.
I can only say the same phrases already uttered by all women when looking at their children.
The doctor fills out a form without looking up. “Name?” he asks, now looking at me.
I see my blood on the gloves he’s still wearing.
I look inside.
“Kenta,” I answer.
I say the name again to give it to my son. Soft and firm, I repeat: Kenta.
I feel like I’m part of something much larger.
Something that started on the other side of the world, where people arrange their shoes when they take them off, and that continues here, where people leave them however they want.
Translated by Madison Felman-Panagotacos
