A Record of My Father and Mother

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

A Record of My Father and Mother

市川郢康 — prepared for online publication

In a clod of earth, the scent of Mother. When I take soil in my hand, there is my mother's familiar scent. Memories of childhood live in the clouds crossing the sky. Blue sky, green ranges of hills, clear sky, birdsong: all are as they were, and I feel no distance of time at all. 「ふるさとは近くにありて思うもの」

From 市川勝也's essay collection, 『土くれに母のにおい』

How My Parents Met, and My Life Began

That I, a specialist in American literature, came into this world was also due to my parents' fateful encounter. Neither is in this world now. Can human destiny be so full of sorrow?

Mother was born in 1922, the daughter of my grandfather, who ran an inn in Hoshino Village, Yame District, Fukuoka—now Hoshino Village in Yame City—famous for its tea. She grew up there. I have heard that in those days the veins of the Taiō gold mine in Ōita extended into the mountains of Hoshino, and many miners used the inn. Mother's father planted cedars on the mountains visible from it and was also involved in the timber trade. Father, working in the materials department of a coal mine, visited Hoshino to buy timber for pit props and stayed at the inn. Apparently my maternal grandfather took a liking to him. Whether Grandfather said, “Hoshino is where lucky stars fall,” I do not know—that is a joke—but he must have brought the two together. They married happily, and I was born.

Thus, until I became old enough to remember things clearly, I grew up running through Hoshino's tea fields. Mother's eyes were always watchful, and even when I played in the river, her heart was with me. Fireflies danced over the rice fields along the Hoshino River. On the veranda beside a room hung with a mosquito net, we ate watermelons Grandfather had grown, cooled in well water.

Father Supported the Lives of the Coal Miners

The headquarters of Father's first employer, Meiji Mining, were in Tobata, Fukuoka—now Tobata Ward, Kitakyūshū. Its founder, Keiichirō Yasukawa, also founded Yaskawa Electric and the Kyūshū technical school, now Kyūshū Institute of Technology. Mining workers lived in miners' housing, while office managers lived in company houses in an area called Yamanote. Our home was in Yamanote, but I often heard sirens announcing cave-ins or gas explosions. Such accidents occurred repeatedly. One day a friend's father, a promising, strongly responsible mining man, would suddenly return as a corpse blackened with dust: such sad things happened. Father cried, and Mother cried. When Father put on a helmet and rode a mine trolley to inspect the construction of passages with timber supports, Mother saw him off praying for his safety. They say children grow up watching their parents' backs. Those were precisely such days.

Mother was someone who did not yield to hardship.

Behind Father's early departures for work and my journeys to school, she managed the household and, whenever she found a spare moment, learned traditional Japanese arts: dance, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and the koto. She always sympathized with the lives of those around her and hurried to help, but perhaps those lessons also sprang from a determination to raise me firmly, whatever adversity might come. She was always considerate of Father too. After he returned exhausted, bathed in the iron kettle bath, and changed into a yukata, the hand with which she poured his sake trembled slightly. Both were tired. Yet such consideration! Here too, I learned.

Transfers were inseparable from Father's mining work. We moved from Tobata, where the headquarters stood, to Akaike in Tagawa District in the Chikuhō coalfield—now Fukuchi—and to the Iizuka–Keisen area. One step outside the house, and the sounds never stopped: coal wagons running all day, winding machinery, drainage and ventilation equipment, and the noise of the coal preparation plant. Around the beginning of my second year of junior high school, the coal industry entered a slump, forcing many miners' families into lives of extreme poverty.

Wildflowers bloom without a thought. Even beside the rubble of an abandoned mine, red spider lilies flower. Here is a haiku:

廃鉱の世相をよそに曼珠沙華

In mining towns there were spoil heaps: mountains piled high with useless rock discarded over many years. When I went to look for fossils on the way home from school, mothers carrying small children on their backs were searching for fragments of coal. People in poverty entered the spoil heaps, found coal, and either used it as domestic fuel or sold it to dealers to support their lives. The sight of crowds gathering in the miners' housing square and dancing happily at Bon during the industry's heyday is burned into the mind of someone who spent his elementary-school years in a mining town. It was a folk song sung by miners and indispensable to Bon dancing. From a wind-up gramophone came the Tankō-bushi: 「月が出た出た、月が出た、ヨイヨイ」.

Father Supporting the Miners of Hokkaidō

Father went to Hokkaidō on company orders. In the coal city of Akabira, in the Sorachi River basin, winter temperatures fell to minus twenty degrees Celsius. Mother put a boiled egg in each of my pockets for the walk to junior high school. The winters of our seven years in Hokkaidō were unbearable to me. It was around the end of summer in my second year of junior high. When I faced a Hokkaidō winter unlike anything I had experienced in Akabira, Sorachi District, I told Father, who had come home after drinking, “I'm going back to Kyūshū.”

I cannot forget the eyes with which he looked back at me. They were not angry, but full of an inexpressible sorrow. He must have been tired; his mind must have been full of work. Thinking of that, how thoughtless were the words I had thrown at him. I was wrong; forgive me. Facing the family altar and looking at my late father's photograph, the words catch in my throat.

Father said nothing, but his silence hurt. Ashamed of caring only about myself, I resolved to remain in Hokkaidō. Yet Father understood my feelings: near the end of my third year of junior high school, I was to go alone to Kurume. In the days before the Seikan Tunnel or the Shinkansen, the journey took two full days. The Hokkaidō mine where Father worked for seven years eventually closed. He moved to Meiji Mining's Tokyo headquarters, but the company itself was soon broken up. After working for an associated company for a while, he left mining life behind and went to Osaka.

In this way our family kept moving, but I now understand how admirably my parents disciplined themselves.

For example, in his mining days Father did more than enjoy go and mahjong as diversions. He was versed in archery and kendō, held fourth dan in archery, and shot at a target in a practice ground made at the edge of the company housing. His bearing was so gallant that it seemed to reveal the Japanese spirit itself. He owned several swords. After hosting a sword-appreciation gathering at home, where participants identified makers by style without looking at the signatures engraved beneath the hilts, he would perform test cuts in the garden on bamboo wrapped in rope.

As a small child, I watched with fascination. At other times he invited friends home and became absorbed in mahjong. The games continued late into the night. Mother, working behind the scenes to prepare drinks and snacks and serve a late meal, was admirable too. I remember her sitting beside my bed sewing, while the clatter of shuffled mahjong tiles kept me awake.

After retiring, Father lived with our family in Osaka for about two years. Feeling some uneasiness about two households sharing a home, he then readily sold the house and settled on the outskirts of Kurume, near Mother's family home in his native Kyūshū. Rice fields spread around the house then. In spring he gathered bracken in the nearby countryside and enjoyed wild-vegetable dishes with Mother. It saddens me that the fields and hills have now been developed for housing, with rows of houses leaving no trace of their former appearance. In Kurume, each of my parents enjoyed their interests and lived peacefully. It was also around this time that Father, overriding the objections of those around him, declared his wish to donate his body to Kurume University's medical faculty. Mother said that that night she dreamed of a body sunk in a tank of formalin and could not sleep at all. Living and dying: I think she must have respected Father's philosophical acceptance of both.

Father Became a Social Critic

The coal business came to an end through the progress of civilization and economic activity, but I, his son, know Father's struggles. His efforts were admirable. Put into a haiku:

懐かしや古書に交じりて亡父の文

Through the social welfare council's employment service, Father found another opportunity to work, a year and a half after moving to Kurume. Feeling firsthand the harsh conditions of small and medium-sized businesses, he nevertheless drew on accumulated knowledge and experience, kindling the passion of old age. Alongside work that allowed him some time, he adopted the pen name 「らくがき亭」 and engaged in a wide range of writing, including political criticism, continuing to submit to newspapers. I cannot forget the sight of him at his manuscript, pipe smoke curling upward.

Sometimes, because of a newspaper's circumstances, a carefully prepared piece was rejected. Usually the reason was lack of space, or society's sudden turn toward a new subject, but the writer felt crushed. Mother told me that his spirits would often sink and his drinking increase. His wish to collect newspaper clippings in four scrapbooks and then publish them at his own expense was never fulfilled. At his sickbed, I promised in his ear that I would realize that ambition.

In March 1986, I was to go to America for a year as a researcher. Father and Mother came to Osaka International Airport to see me off. But Narita Airport was closed that day by heavy snow, delaying my departure by two days. “Things can only turn out as they will,” Father said, and went straight back to Kurume with Mother. Those were the last words he spoke to me. Two months after I arrived in America, he entered National Kurume Hospital—now Kurume University Medical Center—for partial resection of an enlarged prostate. Subsequent tests revealed prostate cancer. After chemotherapy he was discharged at the end of July, but suffered a heart attack attributed to the medication's side effects and entered Koga Hospital.

To live is to bear hardship: such is our destiny. A week after his admission, he collapsed in a hospital toilet. He was found late, and I was told he had become critically ill. Leaving my wife and three children, I set out for Japan. Mother and I heard the doctor's explanation: a CT scan showed damage to the rear half of the left side of his brain. I visited the hospital for about two weeks and returned to America once his condition had settled. Speech impairment and paralysis of the right side remained, but he spent six months in rehabilitation at Maruyama Hospital, founded by the physician and poet Yutaka Maruyama, and was discharged in March 1987. Two months later, difficulty urinating led to readmission to National Kurume Hospital. Tests showed terminal prostate cancer, and we were told surgery was impossible. Day after day, Mother and I watched as Father, still attached to an oxygen apparatus, lay with the whites of his eyes slightly showing, in agony so severe that he seemed about to faint. Mother asked me to buy sushi from a nearby shop, then insisted that I eat it in the sickroom. She apparently wanted to teach me to remain strong in the face of Father's approaching death. For the first time, I felt Mother's strength as a woman. One month later, early one June morning, his condition changed abruptly, and he died at sixty-nine.

With permission from Kurume University Hospital, where he had registered as a body donor, we brought him home. The wake and funeral were held in the house where he had enjoyed six years of his remaining life. A year later, some of his cremated remains returned from the university hospital were taken to Moji, Kitakyūshū, where the Ichikawa family grave stands. The cemetery was on a low, wooded hill overlooking the town and port of Moji. My paternal grandfather worked as an engine driver for the Moji Railway Bureau. Father grew up in a poor family with five younger siblings, brothers and sisters, and one older sister. After graduating from the municipal Moji Commercial School—now Fukuoka Prefectural Moji Daishōkan High School—he joined Meiji Mining and attended the evening division of Yahata University, now Kyūshū International University, while working. The house where he was born and raised was sold when I was small. I have never visited it.

Mother, sixty-five and now living alone, invited her flower-arranging and tea-ceremony pupils home and devoted herself passionately to teaching them. Though she always held herself with dignity, the long years of caring for Father had made her bent back worse. Her older sister, three years her senior, sometimes came from Hoshino to stay. Spending time together seemed to be Mother's greatest pleasure. Yet from around the time she turned seventy, concern for her living alone continually crossed my mind, and my wish to stay beside her only grew. I decided to leave my long life in Kyoto and live with her. Through a friend's introduction, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to move to Kurume University, leaving my wife and three children behind.

For the first time in my life, it was just Mother and me living together. In her seventies, devoted to flower arrangement and tea ceremony, she was full of life with her pupils. Everyone has a life of their own. There is no distinction of greater or lesser weight. Every life is weighty. Now that I have finished writing, I cannot help feeling so.

(End)