Kinds of Talk III

It wasn't always like this.

After the first stroke, after the two long weeks of coma, she began to talk again. It wasn't the way she had talked for the previous eighty years of her life. My poststroke grandmother

was an almost new person. She seemed to be discovering words as a direct expression of feeling for the first time.

—If you hurry up and get well, Obaachama, you can tend to your garden again.

—Don't want to get well.

I don't have an answer for this. Then I try,

—What if you didn't have to do anything? Would it be all right to get well then?

Long pause.

—Maybe.

—The tulip tree has been spectacular this year. And the flowering quince looks like it's going to be beautiful, too.

—No need for them to blossom like that.

Just as shocking as her candor is her use of informal verb endings with strangers, such as nurses. Then again, she can surprise with formal greetings—and, in another twist, dignified annoyance at repeatedly being asked to say her name or to count from one to ten.

Most unexpected of all:

—I long for that young doctor.

She is referring to her neurosurgeon (strange that English uses possessive pronouns for such relationships), who is my age. She uses another of those untranslatable words, akogareru , expressing an admiring yearning that does not expect to be fulfilled. My grandmother has never betrayed an attraction to a male in the flesh, as opposed to the screen or the printed page. Was it such discipline that made it possible for her to live with my grandfather for over sixty years?

Though her condition is too vast and abstract to talk about, she can refer to specific manifestations. One day she says to me, sadly,

—They're gone, aren't they.

—What's gone?

—My legs. I've been looking all over for them. But they're gone, aren't they.

I decide to sing to her. Melodies known to her from girlhood and young womanhood, familiar to me from childhood, from that vast, lovely repertory of art songs and songs written in the first decades of the century for schoolchildren (in many cases, as part of the official course of instruction) by Japanese composers thrilled by the encounter with lieder.

First Love (Hatsukoi)
Lying on my belly on the sand of a sand hill
day of recalling the faraway pain
    of first love

This is one of our shared favorites. The plainspoken lyricism of Ishikawa Takuboku, born the same year as my great-grandmother (1886), was gorgeously set to music by Koshigaya Tatsunosuke. I can't hit some of the high notes, but that doesn't matter. There's the familiar "Flowers" (Hana), composed by the talented Taki Rentaro, who was even able to study in Leipzig but contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of 24 in 1903; the deceptively innocuous "Red Dragonfly" (Aka tombo), which begins with a young child's memory of a red dragonfly seen at sunset over a nursemaid's shoulder, then moves on to how the nursemaid herself, married off at 15, no

longer hears from home. The lyrics to "Red Dragonfly" are by the Symbolist poet Miki Rofu, and the song, composed by Yamada Kosaku, one of Japan's outstanding modern composers, was released in 1922. Yamada's uninterrupted prominence through the war years now makes him vulnerable to the charge of war responsibility. Many of his achingly beautiful compositions are among our favorites. Cheerful songs are hard to find in this repertoire, but there's the bouncy "Stood Up" (Machiboke), also set to music by Yamada.

So far, so good. There's not much I can do about the lost sensation in her legs, but the singing seems to have distracted her. Flipping through the song book, I come upon "Pechika" for the Russian pechka , fireplace. It's another Yamada composition from 1925, the year before my grandmother had my mother, with lyrics by the poet Kitahara Hakushu. My pocket Japanese-English dictionary is inadvertently more helpful than larger dictionaries, for it offers as a translation of pechka "Manchurian stove." I knew the word couldn't be Japanese, but as with many sounds familiar from childhood I had never stopped to look it up. Is "Pechika" the relic of friendly intercourse between settlers and colonized, especially as remembered by the settlers?

The song is about the pleasures of a pechka on a snowy night. Outside it's cold, but inside it's "Burn, pechka , burn, let's tell stories, / from long, long ago." If there is such a thing as wistful coziness, this song captures it. I like it because I've associated it with my grandmother's growing up in the cold of Hokkaido.

But her brows furl in distress.

—Mother, come!

I've never heard her call her parents, though her father was alive until I was four or five. Her mother died in her late thirties, nursing her youngest, my granduncle, through a bout of dysentery.

—Mother, Father!

Turning to me imploringly,

—They won't come. I keep calling them, but they still won't come.

I call my mother, who is able to comfort her. Soon, my grandmother will begin calling her "Mother:' And after the second stroke, she stops calling for anyone.