I know all too well that memory cannot be trusted, and I have surely heard this said by others. But I am constantly being shocked anew at how wildly deceptive memory can be. It beguiles us at every turn. I was taken by surprise again not too long ago.
Winter. Night. The moon.
I am a young boy and with my mother. We push a pram filled with peaches.
The single road connecting our town with the town on the west runs through open farmland, then rises and falls as it slopes gently downwards beyond an elevated stretch of sand dunes. It was a narrow, rock-strewn country road back then. On the slope there were no houses, only thick pine woods lining either side.
My mother and I make our way slowly down the hill. Soon we will come to the river at the bottom. The river runs to the sea. Beyond the river’s wooden bridge, paddy fields stretch into the distance. The air throbs with the bull-frogs’ heavy cries, the wet smacking of the mud snails. We are almost home.
I doubt if there has been a year in the thirty or more that have gone by since then when I did not recall that night scene. The image in my mind is always the same – if not so fixed as a painting, then perhaps more like some frames of underexposed film flickering on the screen. Especially on cold winter nights when I walk alone through the darkness with my coat collar turned up, the fragmentary memory of that night on the road comes back to me.
And each time, I have said to myself: Oh yes, I remember that – odd how well I do remember that night. The very words of this monologue, too, are the same, repeated year after year with all the intensity a second-rate actor would give them. And while I am busy congratulating myself on my stagecraft, the memory always slips away, its veracity untested.
But the scene needs more commentary.
My mother had taken me along to the neighbouring town that night to lay in a stock of peaches at an orchard or some such place. She could get better ones than at the local greengrocer’s, and they would be fresh picked. It was probably worth making a special trip and buying enough to fill the pram.
Peaches. Fruit like pure, sweet nectar – nothing else. Easily bruised, quick to spoil. And each one heavy, almost unnervingly so. Filled with several dozen of these heavy peaches, the pram must have been more difficult to push than if it had held a live baby. And like the downy skin of a newborn, each could be scuffed and bruised in an instant if my mother did not push the pram slowly and carefully.
The darkness must have exaggerated the distance, long as it was. The night was cold and, up well past my bedtime, I must have been very sleepy. Partway down the hill, my mother stopped and wrapped her beige shawl around me.
More than the cold, it was my fear of the dark shapes arising one after another along the moonlit road that prompted her to do this. She probably had to cover my eyes with the shawl and walk along holding me against her.
Perhaps she had been careless enough to tease me about foxes along the way, and this was what aroused my fears, dark shadows or no. She had told me several stories of the foxes she had encountered as a little girl. My mother was born in Osaka at the turn of the century and she spent her childhood in the city, but on walks to the deserted countryside she would always hear the foxes crying, and people would say that they could cast a spell on passers-by.
Her stories must have come back to me one after another, the shawl around my head powerless to calm my fears. Why did she have to start talking about foxes here? I’m sure I wanted to get down the hill and among houses again as soon as possible.
But to walk any faster would have been out of the question. The pram would have bounced along the rocky road, damaging the peaches. I had been the baby in this pram until not long ago. Now it was only good for carting things. Most of the time, it stayed in the storage shed in the corner of the yard.
And so the young mother and her little boy, pressing close and sharing whispers, slowly pushed the old, little-used pram down the hill of the deserted country road. Bathed in moonlight, the one added the clip-clop of her wooden sandals, the other the soft padding of his tennis shoes to the creak of the pram’s rusting wheels.
This, then, was the scene that had lived in the fondest part of my memory for so many years. In none of its details had I found anything to wonder at.
And then one day – in fact, just two or three days ago – as I was gazing blankly at the view from my window, it struck me with such force that, for a moment, I was unable to breathe. Peaches in the winter? Frogs and mud snails in the winter? How could I have failed to notice that until now? And, stranger still, what had inspired me – possessed me – at this one moment to seize upon the vital clue? For it was this that lay bare the hoax that memory had played on me year after year. Now, for the first time, I saw the wildly impossible connection that memory had made: carting a load of peaches on a cold winter night! Nowadays, perhaps. But back then? Unthinkable.
One after another, doubts began to overtake me. I would have to think it through from beginning to end. All right, then, exactly when was it? Why, in fact, were my mother and I walking down that hill so late at night? Were those really peaches in the pram? And if not, what were we bringing from the other town?
When it came to this, all I could be sure of was that one year, on one particular night, my mother and I had come down the hill on the road that linked our town with the next one. These unsubstantial facts were all that remained. Had it been peach season or shawl season? I did not know. I was far too young to have been alone – of that I was certain. But of that and nothing else.
We still had the pram that night, which meant I could not have gone past the first few years of primary school – or ‘People’s School’, as it was called during the war. The one photograph that shows me in the pram – wearing a little white robe, my face a white mask of baby powder – was taken a month before my second birthday. If we were using the pram to cart things, it must have been falling apart, the hood broken, the waterproof cloth of the body peeling. Had I been so rough on it as all that? Had we thrown it in the storage shed because it was a wreck? And how about my age? I think I walked both to and from the other town, a goodly distance for me even now. My mother didn’t have to carry me. Surely I had left kindergarten by then and was going to primary school.
This was probably true, because I seemed to recall that when we got home late that evening, my brother, who was at middle school, was very put out with my mother and me. By then the war was on, and my father, a navy man, was no longer at home. Even assuming there was a moon that night, the road should have been dark because of the blackout. Still, the war was in its early stages; the air raids had not really started. It was probably the summer or the winter of 1942. My brother, so annoyed with us then, had left home by the following year. That night, he was probably hard at work preparing for the Naval Academy entrance examination. He must have been angry at my mother for being so late with his dinner.
But even as I go on making one reasonable-sounding guess after another, I realize that my ‘evidence’ has no more validity than any other tricks of memory. Not a thing I have mentioned here is certain. Indeed, I can refute every item without even trying.
First, there is the old pram. How long did we actually have it around the house? When did we get rid of it? And how? By leaving it in a nearby field? Sending it to the junk shop? I have no definite answers. It could just as well have stayed in the storage shed during the war and even for a time thereafter. Then the hoax would have been so easy to play: I might simply have confused that night scene with a post-war episode of stocking up on something.
Far from my mother’s leading me by the hand, it seems more likely that I was there to protect her, that the road was unsafe for a woman alone at night. By then I would have been in my sixth year of primary school or my first year of middle school. And we were wheeling not a pram-load of peaches, but of black-market rice or potatoes or sweet potatoes – or if I’m going to insist on a cold winter night – perhaps some New Year’s rice cakes. Then again, fuel being as hard to come by as food, it might have been kindling or charcoal or scraps of coal with which to stoke our old-fashioned bathtub.
Under this kind of scrutiny, the lovely image of a mother and child slowly pushing a pram downhill on a moonlit night is suddenly transformed into something less charming – a suspicious-looking couple transporting black-market goods. We would then have had our reasons for moving about under cover of night.
But where does my scowling brother fit in? He should not have been there waiting for us. Following his demobilization after the war, he was almost never at home. And if it so happened that he was in the house on that particular day, he would have had no reason to be angry with us. If anything, he would have been grateful. And so it was not my brother, probably, but my father who was waiting for us. It was always my father who stayed at home. Or rather, as a former officer, waiting at home was the only job there was for him to do.
But no, this has to be wrong. Those were peaches, I’m sure of it. All I have to do to make the memory consistent is change the cold winter evening to a summer night. This casts doubt, of course, on my mother’s wrapping her shawl around me and the feeling I have that she told me tales of foxes as we walked along. But literary tradition aside, there is nothing wrong with the subject of foxes in summer. Only the shawl is out of place.
As far as literary hoaxes go, the most obvious one is the moonlight that comes flooding into my so-called memory. I could easily have been led from an old story of the fox’s cry on a cold winter night into yet another story that my mother probably told me around the same time.
It was a story about a distant relative of hers, a young girl, something that happened when my mother was herself a girl. Born with a bad leg, the girl was sent to a convent when the other girls her age were marrying. She was suspected of having stolen something from one of the other nuns, however, and the older nuns beat her cruelly. That day, or perhaps it was the next day, or a short time thereafter, the girl drowned herself in a pond. It happened on a moonlit winter night, my mother said, unfolding the bright scene of death before me.
Within the grounds of the convent – somewhere in Kyoto, or possibly Nara – there was a large pond, on the banks of which grew a giant plum tree. Its heavy, gnarled branches stretched out low over the water to the middle of the pond. It looked just like a bridge, my mother said, as though she had seen the tree herself. Dragging her bad leg, the poor young nun crawled quietly along the branch in her white robes as the moonlight flooded down. Then she fell and disappeared beneath the surface. The thing she had supposedly stolen was found some days later among another nun’s belongings.
I suspect my mother embroidered rather freely on the story of the young girl’s suicide but, child that I was, it moved me very deeply. More than the horror of her fate itself, however, what struck me was the fact that such a dark drama of an ill-fated life should be concealed somewhere out on the furthest branches of the bloodlines that connected me to others. Its ancient stage settings, like something out of the Nara or Heian past; the indistinct backdrop, like the ones in the shadow plays: these were what left an impression on me.
Is the image in my mind, then, of the same tradition as my mother’s eerie tale? Did I create it for myself, as one often hears is done, by unconsciously fusing two wholly distinct memories into a single night’s occurrence? Was this one of those ‘beautiful recollections’, a pack of lies put through a sentimental tinting job until it comes out ‘like a little story’? It might well have been.
The memory I have (or seem to have) of pushing the pram down the hill with my mother is unique: it happened that once and never again. Her wrapping her shawl around me when we were out together was a common enough occurrence, however, and her storytelling was by no means confined to night-time walks. It could and did happen anywhere – at the dinner table, in my room, and probably most often while she was sewing.
At that age – be it summer or winter – I would most often walk with my mother at night on the way back from my aunt’s house, which lay in precisely the opposite direction from the hill, in the town to the east. There was a river in that direction as well, but it was a river we followed for a while rather than crossed. The water’s dark surface used to frighten me badly. My cousins had told me of a boy my own age who had fallen in when hunting crabs on the bank and had sunk into the mud and died. The story had an eerie epilogue, which the girls had eagerly supplied: on windy nights, you could hear the dead boy’s sobbing from the riverbank.
I would hide my face in my mother’s sleeve, trying not to see the faint glow of the river as we passed by in the dark. Here, too, there were few dwellings, and the road was lonely and hemmed in by pine woods, but once we left the river behind I felt safe. Sometimes my mother would stop to gather a few pine cones and put them in her basket. One night, she stopped walking quite unexpectedly and, instructing me to stay put, waded cautiously into the deep grass by the roadside. I watched until she squatted down, then waited, praying that no one would come from either direction.
Thus, while I was familiar with the road to the east from an early age, I passed the hill in the other direction late at night only that once. If I am right in recalling that those were peaches we carted, it could have been no later than shortly after the war broke out. While my father was away, my mother had part of the lawn dug up and four peach trees planted, three yellow and one white. They were mature trees and bore fruit the following year – in such numbers that my mother had to spend many evenings tearing up old copies of her ladies’ magazines and pasting the pages together to make covers for the still-green peaches. Every summer through the war years and after, we had more peaches than we could eat, and she was kept busy giving them away to relatives and neighbours. We never had to buy any.
All of which leads me to believe that the night in question had to have been in 1942. The trip she made to buy that load of peaches may have given my mother the idea to plant her own trees. Or, possibly, having decided to grow peaches, she went to the orchard in the next town to see how it was done. But, in fact, where these questions are concerned, my memory tells me nothing at all.
What I do remember, however, as inseparably associated with the peach trees, are the face and voice of a man. It was he who had encouraged her to plant them, who actually brought the young trees and put them into the ground. And every year he would come with fertilizer, inspect and prune the trees, and have a long chat with my mother before he left. He was the son of a local landowner whose family had built and rented many houses here for several generations and who also farmed the land. He was ‘the son’, but he was of my mother’s generation and by then was head of the household. He had often visited us before the war, too. My father bought our land from his father. Apparently, it had once been their watermelon patch.
My mother never invited the man in, but whenever he would drop over to say hello, bringing a bundle of vegetables at the peak of the season, she would serve him tea on the open veranda outside the dining room and sit nearby to talk. She left the care of the peach trees entirely to him, and the time would come when she would ask him to dig a bomb shelter as well. He could be asked to scoop the night soil, do any job. A round, ruddy man, he wore a cloth cap and a workman’s waistcoat with a large pocket on the front. He had a loud, ringing laugh that he would suppress for no one.
The dining-room veranda was my ‘territory’. On the cement floor underneath were kept bundles of firewood, bales of charcoal, dried tulip and hyacinth bulbs, cobwebbed flowerpots and a watering can. It was a sunny spot, and cats from other houses would come to stretch out there. I once saw a sick-looking cat eating weeds that had sprouted from cracks in the cement. They were long, slender plants with seed clusters like bonbons. I used to lie on the veranda, looking at all these things through the spaces in the planks.
One day, as the afternoon sun was fading from the veranda, the man and my mother sat there engrossed in conversation. It was just then that I came home from school.
Their talk was more light banter than anything serious.
‘I know your type. You’ve done it all. With all sorts of women …’ I heard my mother saying.
‘No, not me, no …’
To hide his embarrassment, he laughed his ringing laugh, but he did not look at my mother. His eyes stayed fixed on the peach trees he had planted.
I was having my afternoon snack close by, and all at once I found myself listening to their every word. The banter continued for a time, but then my mother caught her breath.
‘What? Would a woman dare to do such a thing?’ I heard her say.
I knew nothing about sex at that age, of course, but I had some vague idea of what they were talking about, enough to know that it was a dangerous topic.
Not long afterwards, on a day when the smell of the peaches was stifling in the summer heat, I was in my room with my mother, listening to the broadcast announcing the end of the war. My father did not come back until September, too late for him to be served peaches. But the fruit that lay rotting on the ground continued to fill the garden and the house with its heavy, sweet perfume, and my father must have been aware of it long before he reached the doorway.
Still, what had my mother been talking about with the man that day? As I thought about it years later, their strangely forced repartee began to flare up, incandescent, a point of peculiar brilliance in my memory. Here was the landlord, a man with a reputation for debauchery, trying to laugh off indecencies that he had broached with reluctance, while on the other hand, there was my mother, increasingly serious to the point of catching her breath. Indeed, it was she, a woman in her prime left alone to guard the chastity of her marriage bed, who sought to draw out this kind of talk. The sharp contrast between the two of them struck my heart again and again: the man grown weary of women; the woman separated from her husband by years of war. As far as I could tell, her life had undergone no change, and it was precisely because of this that I recalled the scene as though witnessing a dangerous tightrope act.
I had been a child then, but surely I had said to myself: My mother is a soldier’s wife, not the kind of woman to enjoy such vulgar talk with another man. But my skin, no doubt, had been feeling something a little different. I still liked to sleep with my mother in those days. And in the winter, especially, there were many opportunities to do so. At bedtime, of course, I would get into my own bed, but I would snuggle into hers after going to the toilet in the middle of the night. Too sleepy to chase me out, she would have to make room for me. Then, drifting on the edge of sleep, she would clasp me to her breast, entwine her naked legs with mine. Where the nightgown had slipped open, the flesh was hot, as if with fever.
Before long, this had become my nightly pleasure, until finally I myself no longer knew whether I was waking up because I needed to go to the toilet, or going to the toilet was an excuse to be held by my mother. Surely, when she held me, the feeling that came through my skin was not just my own pleasure, but the jagged restlessness of my mother’s flesh, and the sinful awareness that I had thrust myself into the void left by my father and was enjoying her greedily.
Yes, a third person not actually present could well have been part of that night scene on the hill. And was it not my father? Some unusual circumstance must have been responsible for my mother’s being there at that strange time and having me with her.
They had quarrelled, perhaps, and the repercussions had come to me. I do seem to remember something that happened between them just before the war.
My father was warming one hand over the charcoal brazier and commanding my mother, sitting on the matted floor opposite him, to ‘Go, I said! Go now!’
The ringing of the copper kettle made the silence that followed seem horribly long and suffocating.
‘I’m telling you, go and settle it properly, once and for all,’ he said, his authority overwhelming. My mother hung her head in silence. He turned away.
‘But it’s so late …’ she murmured in desperation.
‘I don’t give a damn. You go,’ he said and looked away again.
‘Please, not tonight. I’ll go in the morning. I swear I will.’
‘I said tonight and I meant it.’
Their confrontation went on, and eventually my mother seemed to be crying.
‘Oh, please forgive me,’ she sobbed. ‘Forgive your wife!’
She reached for the hand he held over the brazier, but he swept her hand away as if it were something vile, knocking the fire tongs into the ashes. As they fell, she crumpled before him, clinging to his knees.
Perhaps he had only been trying to avoid her touch, but his hand had struck hers, and this filled me with terror. Now it was my turn to burst into tears, I suspect, and my mother, resigned to what she must do, probably led me out into the night.
The failing for which my mother was being blamed that night may have amounted to nothing at all. Obstinate military man that he was, my father often tormented her this way, and she submitted meekly.
That scene, too, ends abruptly, and I have no idea where it leads, no way of knowing what came of it. But even now I can hear my mother in tears at my father’s knee: ‘Oh, please forgive me. Forgive your wife!’ Her cry rings through the darkness, caressing, seductive. I do not doubt that my father heard the almost unseemly erotic appeal in her voice, the soft, clinging tones of the Osaka woman. And he did not succumb to her sexual onslaught because I was there, watching.
Was not this my cold winter night? And if it was, then my mother had taken me to the neighbouring town not to buy anything, but to accomplish something far more important – or at least, something far more painful. But the further I pursue this line of reasoning, the more confused I become, for another part of me clings stubbornly to the memory of pushing the old pram down the hill with my mother through the winter moonlight, our breath white in the cold.
After wandering thus in endless circles, I feel as though I have been hurled once again on to the hill on the road that – today as then – links our town with the next.
I know that my mother and I passed that place wheeling a pram – but does all certainty end there?
Having retreated fifty paces, let me fall back a hundred: perhaps I was merely riding in that pram? Or, yielding another hundred paces: perhaps the dark hill – the one place that seemed more eerily unknown than any other to my boyhood imagination – perhaps this setting could be an image that stayed with me from a time when I passed there alone several years later? And through some weird manipulation of memory, I may have been arbitrarily throwing into this setting an image of myself in the pram wrapped in my mother’s shawl, or an image of myself on another road on another night that I passed asleep and only heard about later, or yet a wholly different scene of my mother and me pushing something in the pram.
What emerges from this is the arcane spectacle of me as a boy, wheeling a pram that holds my infant self.