Farewell, Summer Days | Naoyuki Agawa (Vice-President in charge of Shonan Fujisawa Campus)
2012.11.01
The sweltering days of this year's summer, so hot and uncomfortable that I began to seriously wonder if they would last forever, are now, I realize, a distant memory. The autumn days, a cycle of cool weather followed by a quick return to steamy heat, have also given way to mornings and evenings that feel chilly. The other day, I woke up, opened the living room curtains, and saw the sky an unusually clear blue, with a snow-capped Mt. Fuji standing majestically beyond the city of Yokohama. Winter has already come to the mountain.
Facing a deadline for a major paper at the end of August, I spent this summer vacation working every day, even on days when I had no work at Mita. Other than swimming in the pool every few days for a change of pace, I went nowhere, just single-mindedly reading materials, structuring my writing, and struggling through it. The only time I went far was for a two-day external research workshop in Hakone. After somehow completing the first draft and finally having a little breathing room in early September, my wife and I set off on our first trip. We called it "Nozomi to the West." We stayed in Kyoto and met with people, had a meal with a friend's family in Kobe, and then arrived at our true destination, Hiroshima.
Hiroshima is my father's birthplace. Even after settling in Tokyo after the war, he returned often. My three siblings and I, raised in Tokyo, also frequently traveled to Hiroshima from a young age. As soon as school holidays began in our elementary school days, our parents would take my sister and me to Tokyo Station and put us on a third-class sleeper car of the "Asakaze" limited express train. The bell would ring, and our parents would get off the train to stand on the platform. The locomotive would sound its whistle, and the express would start to move. We would pass through Yurakucho and Shimbashi, eat the bento boxes our mother had prepared, and as the scenery outside the window sank into darkness, I would fall asleep in the bottom bunk of a three-tiered bed. Early the next morning, the train would climb the steep grade between Hachihonmatsu and Seno with an auxiliary locomotive, then slowly descend toward the plain, slow down, and glide into platform one at Hiroshima Station. My aunt and uncle were always there on the platform, waiting for us.
During the summers in Hiroshima, we learned to swim in the river and the sea, played with the local children, occasionally did our homework, ate fresh fish from the Seto Inland Sea, and tirelessly watched the limited express and express trains running on the Sanyo Main Line near the house. This annual summer ritual seemed as if it would last forever, but time flowed on steadily. The pencil marks my aunt made on a pillar in the storage room, marking our height and the date, grew higher each year and are still there today.
My uncle was 19 years older than my father, who was still a child when my aunt married into the family. As my aunt and uncle had no children of their own, they doted on my siblings and me as if we were their grandchildren. When my parents went to study in America, they looked after me, then four, and my two-year-old sister for a year. Our summer vacations in Hiroshima during our elementary school years were a continuation of that. However, my uncle passed away from a sudden illness during a business trip to Tokyo when I was in junior high school. My aunt maintained the house all by herself—the house where my grandparents had settled in the Taisho era, where my father was born and raised, where she had married into the family, from which she returned after the war from Manchuria, where she saw off my grandparents, and where she took us in and welcomed us back every summer. "I have to take good care of this house your grandfather left behind until you all come back," was her favorite phrase.
My aunt managed this house by herself until she was 97, but it finally became too much, and she moved to a care home on the opposite shore of Miyajima. She was remarkably energetic there, too, eating well and moving about often. When I visited her a few times a year, she would try to carry my heavy luggage or make me eat her food; it seemed that no matter how much time passed, to my aunt, I would always be a child. Her mind and words were still sharp. "This home is full of old people, it's so depressing," she would sometimes say to me with a scowl, even though everyone around her was about 20 years younger than she was.
Until just recently, my aunt had been eating with chopsticks by herself and walking vigorously with a walker, but over the past year, she has weakened considerably and now relies on a wheelchair. Her speech has become difficult to understand, and she doesn't seem to clearly recognize who I am. She dozes off drowsily during the day. This past August, she turned 104, so perhaps it's to be expected, but it is sad to see my once-robust aunt begin to visibly decline.
Still, when I visit her occasionally, she wakes from her sleep and her face lights up. Then she sheds a few tears. When it's time for me to leave, her expression turns sad. This time, too, my wife and I took the train from Hiroshima to visit the home. When I called out, "Auntie," her expression suddenly came to life, and she said clearly, "Oh, you've gotten so big." The memories of me, accumulated over 104 years, remain in her brain. When my wife held her hand, she nodded, teary-eyed. After we talked for a while, her expression grew hazy again, and she began to doze off. Even so, a few hours later, when I told her we were heading back to Yokohama and would be back again, she cried out disappointedly, "Oh, you're leaving!" Hiroshima is far, but I must come more often.
Before visiting my aunt, I went to our family temple in the Teramachi district of the city. Here lie the graves of my grandfather and grandmother, who passed away after the war, and my uncle. My aunt's family grave is also here. Her father, who died in the atomic bombing, also rests here. My grandparents, who moved to Hiroshima from another region, must have decided to use my aunt's family's temple as their final resting place. As a child, I visited this temple many times with my aunt. I didn't like visiting graves, but this was the one thing she forced me to do. She probably no longer remembers anything about the temple, but I'm sure she would want me to go. With that in mind, I came, belatedly, to pay my respects at the graves for the Bon festival.
Bathing in the still-strong summer sun, my wife and I did a simple cleaning in front of the two graves. We drew water in a bucket from a well beside the cemetery, carried it over, and poured it on the gravestones. We offered the flowers we had bought. In this sunlight, the spirits must be hot, too. After going back and forth several times to fetch water, I returned to the sink to wash the bucket and return it to the temple, when I saw a large ant had fallen inside and was struggling desperately to climb out. But its feet kept slipping on the wet stainless steel surface, and it just flailed about. If I turned on the water, it would be washed straight down the drain. Feeling sorry for it, I gently picked up the ant with a dead twig I found nearby and set it free on the ground. The ant, its life saved, quickly disappeared into the bushes.
Two months have passed since then, and summer is already a distant memory. But the images of my aunt and the ant overlap in my memory and will not fade. The other day, on a flight back from a business trip to Germany, I was listening to Tatsuro Yamashita's "Sayonara Natsu no Hi" (Goodbye, Summer Day) and thought of my elderly aunt, the ant I had saved, and the various summers of my life, from childhood to the present.
(Published: 2012/11/01)