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pudseyrecommends 's review for:
Things Remembered and Things Forgotten
by Kyōko Nakajima
I finally got to finish “Things Remembered and Things Forgotten” by Kyoko Nakajima. I started reading this book last Summer, but something stopped me from finishing it then. Maybe it was because I needed something more punchy and fast paced (I was also reading Last Call by Elon Green and Dangers of Smoking in bed by Mariana Enriques at the time); or perhaps because it just pushed my buttons with the fact that it kept reminding me that I couldn’t be In Tokyo as I was supposed to be because of the pandemic, so I just pushed the book away to be digested another time.
I picked the book up again last week, and I was finally ready to be transported to all those many strange familiar places. Nakajima captures the mix of old and contemporary Japan so beautifully.
Some of the stories take us back and forth from current days to moments of Japan’s past like aftermath of World War II. In fact, a few of the ghost stories follow the World War II theme: an old forties typewriter without a heart is the hook for The Lifestory of A Sewing Machine, which paints a painful world of women trying to survive in a Japan where American Occupation jeeps roar up and down the roads and some have no choice but to work for brothels set up to satisfy the sexual desires of American GIs; the ghosts in The Harajuku House remember the times when buildings were demolished to stop fires from spreading during the American firebombing; And the ghosts of war orphans haunt Ueno Station in Kirara’s Paper Plane. Others, are ghosts of a very different nature like Global Positioning System (GPS) which tells of a mother and their daughters struggle to support a father who appears to be suffering from early onset dementia, and they buy him a phone with GPS, so that they can locate him in case he gets lost in his wanderings.
My favourite is probably the Last Obon, the last story in the book. Obon is a festival about remembrance, and it seems that the main character Satsuki and her family have forgotten even how to remember. Like other short stories, it is peppered with dead characters that appear to the living as real people. Nakajima takes us through a whole Obon ritual, with a Buddhist priest coming in for sermons, with the special dishes that need to be cooked for the celebration, and others that needs to be completely avoided. We learn all about the Obon ritual as the family prepares to remember their ancestors.
“Surveying the little scene around her, it occurred to Satsuki that the belief that the ancestral spirits returned at Obon wasn’t something mystical or paranormal, nor was it a metaphor for human existence—it was an expression of how the dead were resurrected through the gestures and actions of the living in the performance of traditional customs and practices.” At the end I felt that this was what Nakajima was doing with this collection of stories: resurrecting forgotten, almost dead, memories through her storytelling. It is gentle and rich.
I picked the book up again last week, and I was finally ready to be transported to all those many strange familiar places. Nakajima captures the mix of old and contemporary Japan so beautifully.
Some of the stories take us back and forth from current days to moments of Japan’s past like aftermath of World War II. In fact, a few of the ghost stories follow the World War II theme: an old forties typewriter without a heart is the hook for The Lifestory of A Sewing Machine, which paints a painful world of women trying to survive in a Japan where American Occupation jeeps roar up and down the roads and some have no choice but to work for brothels set up to satisfy the sexual desires of American GIs; the ghosts in The Harajuku House remember the times when buildings were demolished to stop fires from spreading during the American firebombing; And the ghosts of war orphans haunt Ueno Station in Kirara’s Paper Plane. Others, are ghosts of a very different nature like Global Positioning System (GPS) which tells of a mother and their daughters struggle to support a father who appears to be suffering from early onset dementia, and they buy him a phone with GPS, so that they can locate him in case he gets lost in his wanderings.
My favourite is probably the Last Obon, the last story in the book. Obon is a festival about remembrance, and it seems that the main character Satsuki and her family have forgotten even how to remember. Like other short stories, it is peppered with dead characters that appear to the living as real people. Nakajima takes us through a whole Obon ritual, with a Buddhist priest coming in for sermons, with the special dishes that need to be cooked for the celebration, and others that needs to be completely avoided. We learn all about the Obon ritual as the family prepares to remember their ancestors.
“Surveying the little scene around her, it occurred to Satsuki that the belief that the ancestral spirits returned at Obon wasn’t something mystical or paranormal, nor was it a metaphor for human existence—it was an expression of how the dead were resurrected through the gestures and actions of the living in the performance of traditional customs and practices.” At the end I felt that this was what Nakajima was doing with this collection of stories: resurrecting forgotten, almost dead, memories through her storytelling. It is gentle and rich.