Saeko's Tadpole Story

Her father said, ‘She was an odd one.’ The child of his that most changed his perspective on the world; before her he was hard, unbending in his ways, brittle, even. Actions took place according to rules, and to defy them was to do it wrong. Saeko changed all that. She was his eldest daughter out of four.

‘I was the first girl!’ Saeko claims, opening and shutting her wide eyes, like two clam shells out of the sea. Her father says she behaved like an odd-ball, always speaking out of turn, living in make-belief and not playing with any toys, or other children. An un-favourite of the teachers, she would get picked on at school and get in the way at home - because of all this - Saeko would take herself off to the woods and play games on her own. Her family still live in the mountains, at the foothills of Mount Fuji, surrounded by tea farms and forests.

One time, Tetsurō her father, came across a glass tank made for insects filled with pond water and silvery fish in the middle of his corridor. These were fish you could fry and serve up as bar snacks, and he wondered about them, as he carried them into the kitchen for his wife to deal with. He then went and found Saeko and asked her where she had got all the silvery fish from. She replied she had caught them in the river, but Tetsurō was doubtful, ‘Surely not - they swim very fast. It would be difficult to catch one. How did you do it?’

She had gone down to the riverside with a butterfly net and some bonito flakes from the cupboard. She had placed a stone in the net and let it sink to the bottom of the riverbed, while holding onto the handle, then sprinkled some flakes into the net. When enough silvery fish had come to feast, she very slowly, incrementally, pulled the net upwards until all the fish were caught inside and couldn’t escape. Then she emptied them out into her tank of water, and repeated the steps again, and again.

That night her father ate the fried fish snacks with his cold beer, salty and crunchy, while reading a magazine in the lamp light. Many moths fluttered into the lampshade, sounding like the occasional ping of a rubber-band. Saeko slept soundly upstairs in her futon, in the room nearest to the rafters, where her family used to keep the silkworms.

At school Saeko kept herself to herself, to avoid being bullied by her classmates, or being called up in lessons to be made an example of, although she never studied hard, she was still coming top of her class. She thought big thoughts and roamed around freely. Her father was bothered about her attention span and wondered whether all girls were so weird, her mother didn’t mind so much, at least she seemed happy. When Saeko’s class went on an excursion to the river mouth, the teachers gave every child a bucket and spade and organised a competition. Who could catch the most tadpoles?

Children ran off in all directions, being told to stay near the shallows, which is where all the tadpoles were swimming anyway. Tetsurō recounted this story with a sense of held-back pride and a wide grin. The other children collected three or four, maybe, even six tadpoles. Saeko caught thirty-nine! The teachers and the other children crowded around Saeko’s teeming bucket to see how she did it. She cupped her hands under the surface of the water and waited, until one tadpole swam into her palms and she lifted it up. Everyone watched her calmly pick up tadpole, after tadpole, to place into her bucket. After the competition was over, everyone clapped as she released her colony into the waters, like nothing had ever happened.

‘I don’t know why they chased them. If you wait, they come.’

Flannel Chronicles Part II

Driving to the Ring of Brodgar

Flannel Chronicles Part I

Driving with seals in Orkney

A way of calling Love

So, I called Obaachan because every weekend I call my Japanese grandmother. Apart from the past three weekends, because one weekend I had a sore throat and, on the others, I’d been doing flat viewings and/or parties. I called her on Sunday and caught up with her news. She’s been trying to snack less and thinks it’s working because her face looks thinner. I think she just cut her hair, framing her face differently, but I didn’t say that – got to be encouraging. Mid-way through our conversation, she told me that my aunt’s husband, Toshiya, had gone back to his family home to visit his old mother.

‘Oh, that’s good’, I said. Toshiya had been saying recently that he should visit his old mum. His father passed away a year ago.

My aunt Mariko said, ‘You should go.’ Of course, he should: what a good idea. So, Toshiya got the car ready for the weekend and headed up North. His hometown was a five-hour drive away towards the Snow Country; icy temperatures mean you have to put snow-chains around the tyres. My aunt refuses to drive up there anymore, because one time she skidded and almost hit a telegraph pole.

His family were all there to greet him. He went inside and sat around the kotatsu, a warmed-up low table, with his brothers and their wives and their children, and the sickly looking cat and his nephews. Food was dished-up and everybody ate and drank and did what families do. In the adjacent room (traditional Japanese rooms are tatami; divided by partitions you choose to leave open or slide shut, depending on what you’re using the room for) was his mum sleeping in a futon. When Toshiya arrived, she was tucked up in her futon next door with the door wide open, and she greeted him from there.

 ‘Mother. Are you sleeping already?’ She didn’t stir but told him she was glad he had come and that she was tired, and only wanted to sleep. He didn’t want to disturb her so, kept on with the rest of the family. He presented the standard gifts you bring home from the city, like nicely packaged cookies with almonds and vanilla essence; and them being country folk, brought out the homebrew saké and freshly grown delicacies, you could never purchase in a store in Tokyo.

The next day Toshiya had to make his way home, as it was only a weekend trip and the drive was a long one. His mother was again laid out in her futon, and she didn’t get up all day. Toshiya went into her room and kneeled beside her soft cotton mattress. It was layered over with heavy blankets and shawls, like a cocoon. His mother’s wrinkled face peeked out from the pillow, and when she opened her eyes, she smiled a warm, toothy smile. He asked her if she was feeling well.

‘You haven’t got up the whole time I’ve been here Ma. Is anything wrong?’

‘I’m fit and fine, I tell you. Only I’m tired these days.’ Toshiya didn’t speak and looked patiently down at his mother, who blinked twice. ‘I’m so pleased you came. Travelling all this way. You must take some apples.’ He turned the engine on to heat up the car before he left. Family who were still there on the Sunday came out to see him, bowing until they were out of sight in his rear car view mirror. Toshiya made his way, across small country roads that cut through long stretches of paddy fields.

I ask, ‘Is Toshiya’s mum OK? Is she really ill?’ Obaachan continues. When Toshiya got home, Mariko asked him how his mother had been, and he told her that she hadn’t got out of bed the whole time he was there, and so, Mariko had asked the same question as me.

She was clearly worried, ‘What if there’s something wrong with her heart?’

Toshiya didn’t know. In five days time he got a phone call. It rang after work hours, but not too late, a considerate time to be receiving a phone call out of the blue. On the other end of the line was his old mum.

She said, ‘I want to apologise. You made your way up here and I was asleep the whole time. The truth is, when I heard you were coming, I went out early to the fields to pick the best vegetables and pulled my back. Then you arrived.’ Toshiya, held the phone receiver tightly against his ear and bowed many incremental nods, listening carefully.

‘Wait! Why didn’t she tell Toshiya that when he was there beside her?’ My question hangs in the long-distance fuzz between me and Obaachan.

‘Mmh. I only heard this from Mariko. Probably, she didn’t want him to feel guilty.’

‘But… he went all the way up there. Five hours there and back in the snow!’

‘Mmh.’ Obaachan agrees with me slightly. To her this seems plausible, simple, yet to me it’s inexplicable. I think of all that time and opportunity wasted, when they could have had a proper conversation. And now we’ll never know what they didn’t say to each other, truly.

November surprises

November is one of the hardest months to deal with. Shadows get longer, the commute becomes steamier, the night dominates. Trees are lovely and orange, but then slowly their foliage disintegrates, and the roads are covered in moisture, so you can’t wear Converse anymore. You need hoods and umbrellas; waterproof coverings that help you have more extraneous belongings to leave behind at bars and on train carriages. One frosty faff after another, with the added runny nose.

A colleague of mine suggested I try a store on Rivington Street, which sells bits of fashionable wood to find a going-away gift for my flatmate. He is basically a zine, so I trust his recommendations and it took the pressure off me having to find the “right” shop. I walked in wearing my raspberry beret and mohair coat. The doorman gazed past me through the glass pane at the street tinted blue.

In the store were mobiles hanging from the ceiling that looked like Alexander Calder, and I thought, ‘When I own an apartment, I’d like to fill the void with abstract art that twirls around on a wire.’ I sat in a smooth wooden chair made for Eames enthusiasts, beneath bare low-wattage bulbs that flared above my head. There were books and binders, aprons made from bark, terrarium, cacti, succulents. Small vest for a dog.

The run-up to Christmas is tiring with Santa schemes and end of year drinks, industrial-sized fairy lights flashing on all over town. It’s easy to go along with when it’s happening, but in November when you know that mountain of merry is looming, I get tired. I get that premature feeling I’ve frittered away another year when really, I haven’t, this is called life; where like walking, every day follows another, like your left foot follows right.

Over there on a shelf I spot something.

In a flimsy, square, see-through casing – no it can’t be?

Few objects are seared into your memory like they are from childhood. The avid collectors and hobbyists we are at age ten. You remember your favourite yoyo that lit up when you performed “walk the dog”, or your special eraser that smelt of something sickly-sweet kept in your smudgy pencil case. There it was. My plastic, carrot-scissors. (Tiny with a magnet on the underside – the blades hidden in an orange sheath that looks like a carrot stick – the handles lurid green - moulded into the shape of leaves - like a cavolo nero.) I loved this pair of carrot scissors and I stuck them to my table-leg in Year Four. I can’t remember why I liked them, they may have been the perfect size for a ten year old’s hands, or the cuteness of them was fun to contemplate, who knows.

One day after sports, I came back to find that they were gone. I checked all the other tables, disbelieving how they were gone. I looked on the whiteboard, which was also magnetic in blind hope. I began to panic and asked the form teacher what had happened to them? Did she know about my important scissors, or did teachers try not to pry into the lives of little children, with all their hideous collections of soft toys and stickers?

‘Don’t worry.’ She said. I couldn’t convey to her the gravitas of the situation. Quietly, I hoped. And she was a good teacher, so she wrote up on the board, ‘Has anyone seen a pair of carrot-shaped scissors? If you borrowed them, please return them by the end of the day.’ Weeks went passed and I got used to it. Someone stole my carrot scissors and they were going to get away with it: what a world!

Now I turn its flimsy packaging over in my hands. I can’t believe it. To be re-united with these feelings after twenty years. What I would give, to be able to go back in time, to present this to myself. And I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at whoever gave me the scissors (a la Back to the Future) because they mattered so much to my formative sense of justice.

Thank god the shop didn’t have any reindeer food or eco-friendly candy canes, otherwise I might have been put off the whole idea. With Christmas coming around the corner, why not? It’s the price of a pint and I could forget about the whole thing, making the surprise even sweeter on Christmas Day. (I felt silly, but I shouldn’t have because I owed it to myself.) The man in the fisherman’s jumper behind the counter, folded down the edges of a brown paper bag over my plastic purchase. I plopped it into my tote to forget about it, then browsed the shelves for gifts. There was nothing here for her.