Tsundoku
Poem by Leo Yamanaka-Leclerc
Art by Maggie Lu
My grandmother slept
in an alcove in her living room wall,
early-century façade solidified amidst the war
and the repercussions of Shōwa
on the fragments of the rising sun.
She once lived upstairs,
at a time when her body had been molded
of a more fluid dynamism.
And the old steep stairs
have forced her down
from the wide windowed rooms:
tatami made of rice,
the bamboo shoji
and the futon set low to the floor –
all beside the sliding panel which led
to the low cold roof,
a groaning pastel corrugation
where the laundry hung waiting hours
in an ancient comforting formlessness
in the shadow of the shinkansen tracks.
She made breakfast alone and content
in the single-file kitchen:
brewed a pot of sencha
and felt the aromas in her skin and mind,
stirred cloudy golden miso
while the rice-cooker made the gohan,
and the steam when she unveiled the finished product
painted sinewy whispers against the slanting cabinets
and the walls as old and withered and firm
as she.
And when she shuffled out from the darkness,
delicately holding her feast
with ten wrinkled fingers strong as spider silk,
there remained behind her
a lovely cacophony of smell
which melted up and outwards
to bathe the house in the drug of home.
But it is all empty now:
the alley kitchen cold,
alcove bedroom an empty anomaly in the wall,
the soft breeze lonely without laundry
to kiss so gently beneath the sun,
the low-ceilinged concrete foyer
shoeless and clutter-less,
once a place of ritual welcome
and now a place of ritual cold:
what then of this once-home,
while she lives the rest of her days with others?
This is
tsundoku
(the art of buying books
and leaving them unread)
built of food and family,
artificial earthquakes from passing trains,
the smell of okonomiyaki
from the home restaurant next door,
the dim city lights hardly visible
through concrete pillars and a thin twilit mist;
and when it is all empty there is nothing left
but fragmentation –
so when I hear my grandmother’s voice over the phone,
a crackle across the Pacific,
I trace that old home
as language and the silences between words,
formless images weaving in and out of existence,
memory in its basest form:
synesthetic time,
and the DNA of the past
unbodied and untethered.