Authors: Mark Sakamoto
Forgiveness
A Gift from My Grandparents
M
ARK
S
AKAMOTO
For my daughters, Miya and Tomi, so you know what you are made of
ONTENTS
Prologue
I held the cassette gently in my hands, flipping it from side to side. It felt like a relic. I know that in actuality an audio cassette is simply a spool of magnetically coated tape, wound through two spools encased in a protective plastic shell. But the transparent rectangle in the middle of the cassette was a window into my past. My mom was in there. She was laughing in there, she was carefree, she was in love. The cassette was thirty-two years, four months and sixteen days old. My mom was alive in there. She was alive and well.
I’m ashamed to admit that I had had the tape in my possession for over a year. I had held it in my hands countless times. I would round the edge with my fingers, staring at it, dwelling on it. This outdated piece of technology made my mind race and my heart ache. I cursed each time that cold wave came over me. I knew the routine. There was that one memory—different every time—that triggered loss of breath and then heaving and tears. There was the thought that I should regain control of myself. There was the failure of that thought. There were more tears as I surrendered.
I was eight all over again.
I’ve never had the strength to play the tape. Sometimes I wish it had never come into my possession. Thirteen months earlier, my
grandpa Sakamoto died. Hideo Sakamoto was ninety-six and the local newspaper ran a story about him. Harold Brucker, an old customer of his, recalled him running up and down the grocery store stairs with one-hundred-pound potato sacks.
“He was like the Atlas Man,” Harold reportedly said to the
Medicine Hat News.
As an adult Hideo weighed only 124 pounds, but he was simply indefatigable. Those burlap potato sacks would cut into his bony shoulders. The weight of his family, too, rested on those sore shoulders.
Sometimes he was wrong, like in 1954, when he decided to plant all the crops two weeks early only to have them completely wiped out in a flash frost. But he was right when it mattered. His life’s most important decision was a grand-slam home run. He married an angel. Mitsue Margaret Sakamoto was his wife for sixty-eight years.
Throughout his married life, as he went about his day, he would repeat her name over and over again under his breath. Just the idea of her seemed to keep him going.
“Mits … Mits … Mits …”
he would whisper.
He was meditating on her. She was his
koan.
She was his everything. I’m sure I’ll live my whole life and never witness a love so necessary.
Two days after Grandpa’s funeral, I went over to my grandma Sakamoto’s. Parking in the driveway, I could see her through the kitchen window, standing at the sink looking down, hard at work, no doubt on some dish for me to eat.
She has spent tens of thousands of hours in that very spot, thinly slicing beef for
sukiyaki
, mashing
kamaboko
, thawing
tako
, mixing the filling for
gyoza
, draining
ohitashi
, rolling
maki sushi.
She moves through the kitchen with an ancient grace. I have spent my whole life watching her cook.
But it always started with tea. Piping hot,
matcha
green tea.
As I walked through the side door that day, my grandma was drying her hands with a dishcloth. This scene, too, had played out a million times.
“Hi, Gram,” I said as I took off my shoes.
“Hi, come in, come in. I’m making rice.”
We met in the middle of the kitchen and hugged. I kissed her cheek. Her face was round and elegant. Her skin at eighty-nine was still soft and vibrant. There were many years when she went without, but her appearance did not betray that hardship. She could pass for sixty-five. At five-foot-seven she was taller than most Japanese women. She was reserved and exceptionally polite. But this gentle exterior masked a fierceness and pride that has served as the foundation for every single person in her family. And
her
family it is. She is our candle. Our entire family delighted in sharing her with as many people as we could. Countless friends had paraded through the same side door I had just entered.
Grandma opened the cupboard and pulled out two small Japanese
ocha
cups. I caught a glimpse of my grandpa’s cup sitting where it always has, on the bottom shelf, first cup on the left. We sat down. The kitchen table was littered with sympathy cards, way more than you’d expect for a ninety-six-year-old man. The broken handwriting of the card just to my right was unmistakable. It was from my maternal grandfather, who lived just down the Trans-Canada Highway in Calgary.
A life well lived. With love & sympathy, Ralph MacLean.
I smiled and turned back to my grandma.
“How are you feeling? Did you sleep well?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m okay. You know, I miss him. It’s so quiet here now. But I couldn’t die before him.”
It’s true. He would have been completely lost.
The tea had finished steeping. I poured her a cup, then one for myself. She nodded a thank you and ran her index finger across the ceramic lip. She was lost momentarily in thought or grief, I couldn’t tell for sure, but then she snapped to attention.
“Want some fish? Or
tsukemono
?” She giggled.
She knew I loved
tsukemono.
She knew everyone’s favourite dish and always had it at the ready—it was her welcome mat.
“Sure, Gram—thanks.” I smiled, knowing the chain reaction I had just initiated.
Tsukemono
: in the fridge, in a ceramic bowl wrapped in Saran, second shelf to the left. Two small plates: cupboard to right of the sink where the cups are, bottom shelf. Chopsticks: same cupboard, top shelf, in the middle between the rice bowls and the teacups.
Shoyu
: cupboard to the left of the sink, top shelf, beside the blue bowl of white sugar with the ornamental spoon from Niagara Falls.
This kitchen is the one place in the world where I could function completely blind. Everything is in the exact place it has been for my entire thirty-four years. In my mind’s eye it always seems so much larger than it actually is. The kitchen is essentially a galley. The counter runs across the north wall, with the stove and fridge side by side and the kitchen table hovering on the other side of them. The south wall is covered with bamboo wallpaper sent by my grandpa’s cousin in Tokyo. The table and chairs are standard 1960s fare. It’s actually retro-kitschy. It is also the most comforting place in my universe.
When I was in grade school, I would feign illness to spend the day at my grandparents’. My elementary school was just down the road from their house, a six-minute drive if you didn’t hit the one red light at the bottom of the hill. Peering through the school’s main foyer doors, I’d wait to see my grandpa’s lime green 1979 GM pickup crest the hill. On the way home, we’d stop at the video store and Grandpa would bellow a heavily accented “Hell-ooo,” which actually sounded more like “Herr-ooo,” to no one in particular and flash his toothy grin as we walked in. Man, that guy could smile.
By the time we got home, the salty sea smell of
miso
soup would be filling the kitchen and the futon would be laid out on the living room floor by the television. Grandma would greet me at the door; she’d feel my forehead and look at my face.
“You’re warm,” she’d say, lying.
We were conspiring to spend the day together. I loved being in on it. Our collusion went unspoken.
I’d spend the time slurping tofu chunks and
miso
soup, drinking ginger ale and watching ninja movies with Grandpa.
“So, what are your plans today, Gram?” I asked, coming out of my reverie.
“Ahh, I have work to do. He kept so much junk.”
This was a monumental understatement. Hideo Sakamoto had been a pack rat in the first degree, a borderline hoarder. Their garage was crammed to the ceiling with old farm supplies, thousands of yards of twine, hundreds of dirty old baskets, twenty-eight shovels, boots for a small army. There were thirty-one sets of work gloves, all size small. I could see his crooked fingers slipping into them for another day of hard work that would only make his arthritis worse. Their garage was a dusty monument to toil under the Alberta prairie sky.
The basement was no better. It was filled with remnants of a long life spent far from friends and family. There were boxes upon boxes of letters from Japan stacked to the ceiling, and unpacked
omiyage
, gifts from visiting relatives. There were farm invoices and bank statements that proved you really could live on love. Grandma had started to tackle those first.
“I found a few boxes for you.” She was almost whispering as the tea steam rose from the cup on the table in front of her. “Do you want to see them?”
I nodded. It was a lie.
We made our way down the stairs. She descended slowly but deliberately. I followed her into the rectangular rumpus room, half living room, half storage container. There were two old couches against opposing walls with a futon between them. When my brother Daniel and I were little, we’d strip down to our white Fruit of the Looms, give ourselves gonchy-pulls, and engage in the ancient art of sumo wrestling—or at least our version of it. Fortunately we grew out of that. In aggregate, I have probably spent more waking hours of my life in this room than in any other. Daniel and I arrested
thousands of villains, vanquished countless storm troopers, and generally kept the world safe in this single twelve-by-thirty–foot room.
There were two boxes in front of the futon. Grandma kneeled to open the first one.
“This stuff is all from Fiji,” she explained.
When my dad graduated from college, the first job he took was at a hotel in Suva, Fiji. It was a fifteen-room facility located on the south side of the island. The owner was a Canadian who had made his money in the lumber industry and struck out to find his own heaven. He hit pay dirt. My dad thought so too. Stanley Gene Sakamoto would start each day eating pineapples and mangos and then wade into the Pacific Ocean for his morning swim. He was twenty-four years old and living in paradise (aside from a few inconvenient political coups).
Three months later, my mom followed him. They quickly made friends with other expats and locals. My mom got a job at a childcare centre. She would marvel at how happy life could be in the midst of relative poverty. Laughter was as abundant as sunshine. She would watch the children climb the coconut trees in their bare feet for hours. For her, it was a religious experience. There, perhaps for the first time in her life, she felt close to God.
