My mother sent me a photograph of you—Baachan, my grandmother—when she returned from your funeral, which I did not attend. I had feigned the usual excuses: no money saved; can’t get away from my job just now; busy, very busy, too busy; sorry, really sorry. But lying flat on my back the night of your funeral, lights out, staring at the ceiling, I realised I did not feel connected enough to you to come.
There was always a language barrier between us. You never became conversant in English, holding your native tongue to speak in Japanese—too shy or perhaps too embarrassed to do otherwise. The tower of odd sounds must have cascaded around you daily—radio, then television, neighbours, shopkeepers, and even your own children when they returned home from school.
On the other hand, I never became conversant in Japanese. But remember that one time when I was home from university for the weekend? I had just begun studying Japanese as my two-year language requirement. Mother was making her usual Sunday night long-distance call to you in Santa Ana, California, and she insisted I get on the extension line phone to speak with you.
“Moshi, moshi. Ikaga desu ka?” I spoke haltingly. [Hello, hello. How are you?]
You waited patiently, receptively. “Watashi wa genkidesu.” Then asked, “Anata wa dodesu ka?” [Yes, I’m fine. And you—how are you?]
“Ah, so desu ka… Yoi shirase desu ne.” I replied, “Watashi wa genkidesu.” [Oh, is that so… That’s good to hear. I am fine.]
We continued to banter back and forth tentatively when, at last, Mother intervened, reverberating with happiness and pride at our brief exchange. I was relieved, having just broken a twenty-year-old sound barrier between us.
After our first conversation, I continued to write to you using hiragana, the basic Japanese phonetic alphabet I was learning. You responded with your handwritten calligraphy on delicate translucent white rice paper, which appeared like a flock of miniature birds in flight, flowing from top to bottom and right to left, column after column. Eventually, I had to get my parents to translate your letters, and then my correspondence faded.
Still, Baachan, I regret feeling only glimmerings of you during your life. It was only later, when I was home for the holidays and leafing through the black pages of my mother’s aged and musty Kobayashi family album, filled with curling and scalloped-edged photographs, that I remembered the brief times I spent with you. The snapshots of childhood summer visits to stay with you and Grandpa Geechan at your poultry farm in Stockton, California, reveal soft-focus images showing rows upon rows of chicken roosts stilted on the endless sands of your land.
Even now, I can hear the cluck and the clatter of hens laying egg after egg, while the roosters crowed, awakening everyone at sunrise. And the sounds of eggs rattling down tin metal chutes into bins, still warm with tiny feathers stuck to them. I would help you gather those eggs.
The smell of the rising heat of the day and the morning winds carrying the stench of white-feathered birds with their red combs permeated the air. I can almost feel the grit of the sand that got into everything. It was even buried in the shag of your washcloths that I’d clean my face with during those early morning risings.
And you, Baachan, I can still see as a blur, moving here and there, constantly attending to this and that, like the steady whirring and turning of your tabletop fan on the kitchen table, moving calmly in the stifling heat of summer. Preparing breakfast, I see you squeezing bright oranges for juice, fresh from your son’s orchard across the dirt road, then scrambling batches of eggs gathered from under your hens and turning crackling bacon in a heavy black steel pan. At the time, you seemed so ancient to me with your grey netted hair, though relooking at those same photos decades later, you appear to be only in your late 50s or early 60s.
And here you sit now, stilled in a photograph on my desk in my New York City loft, far from where this picture of you was taken in Matsuyama, near the tiny island of Gogoshima in the Sea of Japan, where you grew up.
You are now enclosed in a frame, stationary and ageless, in the picture Mother sent me upon her return from your funeral. She must have found this image of you stowed away when she cleaned out your belongings from your home, as I have never seen this picture of you before. Yet, staring at this image, I can begin to feel your genes spiralling around me, encircling me, binding me to you.
What messages have you transmitted to me as your genes regenerate, subdivide, and rearrange within me? How does your genetic code manifest and translate itself? Like yours and my mother’s, my black hair begins to wave and grey as I age. Time brushes over our heads. The cast of your moon face, translucent at age eighteen, is already embedded with your inner knowledge of pleasures had, dreams, and a future yet to be experienced—sketches, etchings of my mother and myself yet to come.
I see us in you as you perch on the edge of a Victorian-style chair, dressed in your traditional kimono and wig, posing for the photographer that day, some 100 years ago. We are in the slant of your eyes, in the turn of your nostrils, in the swell of your lips, in the posture you hold; parts of us to come are all contained within you. We reside in you at the instant the photographer captured your reflected light and imprinted your image onto a chemically-laden glass plate in his studio for the future to see.
Yet, odd with all the images and memories of you floating in my mind’s eye, I did not feel connected enough to you to come to your funeral—you, my mother’s mother, my grandmother, my Baachan.
“Gomen nasai. Sumimasen, neh?” [Please forgive me. I’m so sorry, yes?]
© 2025 Catherine Jo Ishino
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