I am a Multitude[i]
1
A cardboard box has sat in the bedroom of my apartment. It, as large as
a mandarin orange box widely used in Japan, was sent from the country by
surface mail in the last March after I packed an article in it. The box,
arrived about one month after when I came back here, has been existed without
unpacking and keeping a strange presence there. In the case of other packages,
they were usually opened and emptied soon and treated as rubbish.
In the mid March, I returned Japan for the first time in the last three
years. It was a movement for two weeks for a man of long-term-escapee from the home country like
me. I, therefore, cannot express the trip either as “return” or “go” without
having some hesitation. I have been living in Australia as long as I have
to feel such hesitation.
Since
the movement was a stay in Japan after a long absence, I had a nuber of things to do.
One of them was to visit Niigata.
Exact in the same month of three years ago, I visited Japan and met my
wife there. She and I had lived apart in Perth and Sydney which were both
ends of the continent for more than ten years. My wife and I then visited
the Nakano ward office in Tokyo and finished the formality of our divorce.
After the documentation completed, we had a lunch together at a small restaurant
in the shopping center near the Nakano station. We, among some customers
who were eating a quick lunch, seated ourselves at an end of counter table
next to each other and had a set menu lunch of grilled fish as if having
a ritual dinner with a feeling of somewhat formal.
Niigata was the ex-wife’s native place and her family was a rice grower for many generations
there.
In October of 24 years before when I and wife came to Australia, we never
expected the visit would be such a long stay. Therefore, we borrowed a
space in the storehouse of her parent’s home in Niigata and have kept our
furniture and belongings packed in some boxes.
However, since our marriage had ended in that way, we would not keep our
common goods there anymore. This was the reason why I had to visit Niigata.
I left Tokyo in the early morning by a Shinkansen train, and changed to
a local line train at the Niigata station. At almost noon I was arriving
at a local station near by the ex-wife’s parent’s home.
Niigata,
where is known of much snow fall in winter, had almost no lingering snow on
every street in the time of mid March and some white surfaces were only seen in
mountains far behind.
The train which I took was slowing down to stop the local station. At that
moment all of a sudden a scene which I saw more than thirty years ago when
I was mid twenties came across my mind.
It must have been in a cold season. I had decided my mind to marry with
a girl. A night train which left the Ueno terminal station in Tokyo previous
evening was arriving at the same local station in the early morning. I
was a passenger of the train to see her parents and ask for the permission
of marriage.
An
entrance of a carriage, where had smells of a toilet and smoke of locomotive
engine, was filled with freezing air coming through an opened door. At that
time, and this time too, passengers who got off the train were only a few
including me.
Since then to now, more than thirty years has gone. The surroundings around
the station have changed largely. However, atmosphere of the station square
was nearly unchanged and still quiet. It was one of the country where had
been an envious place from childhood for me who is city-bred. It was also
the place where the man who was the second generation of a salaried employee
family was becoming to a member of a family which had held their lives
relying upon the blessings of nature. That is, these two scenes I had seen
were two cross sections of my life. One was the beginning to involve such
a different lifestyle and the other was the end of the involvement.
The only brother of the ex-wife, who had once been a problem teenager and
even expressed an hostile attitude to me who had come from the city, now
became the heir of the farming family and the good father of a son and
a daughter. He came to the station to meet me with a quiet and cordial
manner.
The
ex-father-in-law already had been seriously senile almost like an infant in the
old house where I had not visited for long. The ex-mother-in-law had passed
away years earlier. The dignified large house which had taken over for many
generations was in air of slow rundown.
The
main family business, rice growing, had been retreated to be secondary and
double earning of the ex-brother-in-law and his wife through being employed
supported their household like an urban family. A big indoor working space of
the house had lost own roles and changed into a dreary storage place now.
The ex-brother-in-law unlocked by inserting a crank-shaped rod into a small
rectangular hole and opened the old-style heavy and thick door for me.
When I got into the storehouse by stepping over the threshold with a rat
trap, stale air fully containing humidity and musty smell told me the meaning
of the length we had spent.
When I removed some cardboard which had been put to avoid covered with
dust, familiar furniture had appeared. At that instant many scenes which
the furniture was used in our everyday life but which were completely disappeared
from my mind during the twenty-odd years were remembered. Then I faced
to a sort of torsion of time and space, in which as if I simultaneously
experienced two different myself which were apart each other by the long
time span.
I carried the furniture out one piece by one piece from the darkness to
the lightness in a back yard. After a while, the back yard became messily
filled by those items which had been used in our earlier life. That scene
was, as if I was witnessing a site hit by a disaster which had blown off
walls and roofs of a house and its furniture and contains were exposed
totally in the open air.
Like one of those sufferers of disaster, I, by picking up those items and
unpacking a few boxes one by one, was caught by a desire to immerse myself
in a memory of the past days together with an obligation to bring back
respect and attachment to the forgotten time. However, according to the
schedule for the two weeks, the time I could spend to dispose those goods
was limited within the afternoon of the day and the morning of the next
day only. An extra time to spend for those desire and obligation was clearly
none and needless checking up time and works once more.
I, like an soldier ordered so, should have been absorbed obediently in
the works to dispose those goods except for retrieving an important object.
I, as if killing another myself, dispose those familiar items efficiently
and calmly by my own hands. Then, once on the day and once more on the
next day, I, helped by the ex-brother-in-law, carried them to a garbage
incinerate plant by a small truck with a full load and burned everything.
Although, I, while carrying out of those tasks, found an unpleasant feeling
at first, I rather became to think that it must be a rational activity.
When nightfall of early spring was quickly coming, I finally found a familiar
mandarin orange box in piled up boxes and bundled books at a corner of
the storehouse being lit up by an electric lamp which was set temporally.
On the upper surface of the box, there was a sign showing “Hajime’s Notebooks”.
I carried it to the yard and open it. About 30 notebooks with musty smell
were appeared under the weak light of sunset by being freed from the box.
They were those notebooks covering about two decades of my life from the
late period of high school to the mid thirties just before I left Japan
to Australia.
I, being struck by a strong emotion, picked up a notebook by those hands with work gloves and open it. At that moment, a peculiar meaning was going to appear. It was the moment creating a meeting of those two myselves which had been totally unexpected even at the time I decided to go to
Niigata, of course at the time I was writing something of my mind to the
notebook. Those two myselves were the young myself on one hand and the
other myself in decades future on the other.
Next day I completed all my missions including posting an overseas parcel
of the notebooks’ box. Now, the time to leave the place where I had been
given a multi-dimensional expansion of my life was approaching. When I
came back again to the station with deep emotion, the ex-brother-in-law
who was sending me off told me, as if asking me to rethink the decision
of mine and his sister’s.
“Please come back to here again at any time in the future like so far.”