Silhouettes

M.E. Macuaga

 

2nd floor: living room: 骨壷 (kotsu-tsubo): urns

On a wooden cabinet in my ancestral home in Tokyo, two urns sit side by side. My mother and father, Yoko and Javier — Japanese and Bolivian, born at opposite ends of the planet. Now here they are. And here I am, their only child, the floating debris of their DNA.  

My mother’s urn is smaller. She was shorter than him, but I hadn’t thought it was by much. When he died eleven years after her, it surprised me how much bigger his urn had to be than hers — how much room I had to make for him on the shelf.

I’d brought each of them home in a cedar box, sized to fit by the crematorium, cloaked in standard-issue, white, synthetic slipcovers. One night, in a frenzy of red wine and orange crafting scissors and glue, I chucked the covers and redressed my mom and dad in washi paper, her in lavender and plum, him in two shades of forest green. Light and dark. Much better, they agreed.

Her life ended at 67 — his at 78. These numbers shock me; they seemed so young to me at the time. And I, now 52, am still easily turned back into a child when I think of them, reach for them through the void and find my palms on the soft paper, imagining their bones.

2nd floor: bedroom: かつら (katsura): wig

Every time I open my parents’ bedroom closet to see if I can bring myself to donate any more of their clothes, I’m startled by my mother’s head. Or, what looks like my mother’s head: a custom wig on its stand. A beautifully crafted, disturbingly realistic rendition of her short, sporty, salt-and-pepper hair. My mother had it made when she knew that chemo was inevitable and hair loss likely, planning way ahead, determined to get back to her new class of nursing students and teaching them English. But she died before needing the wig. I’m not sure what to do with it now, except cover it with a blue-green handkerchief, her favorite. Then tuck it away again for my children to find when they play hide and seek. 

1st floor: entrance: 靴箱 (kutusu-bako): shoe cabinet

Downstairs, in the storage nook by our front door, my mother’s shoes and father’s shoes remain neatly stacked. Six narrow shelves of low-heeled slip-ons for my mom, four shelves of brown and grey rubber-soled walking shoes for my dad. All polished and ready to go, dutifully waiting to carry their charge, one foot then the next, as they did for years, over the pavement and around the corner and onto buses and trains and subways and up and down the stairs and elevators and escalators, across the city and into the world of classrooms and blackboards and desks and EFL books and students. I don’t know if these shoes will ever understand that they’ll be waiting waiting waiting forever now because I hate to tell them, but their humans have already left, and won’t be back.

2nd floor: study room: 出生祝い (shussei-iwai): birth announcement

Buried in the bottom drawer of my mother’s wooden desk, I find my birth announcement. A little white card with a half-inch ladybug button on the corner. A bright red line drawing of a girl in pigtails jumps across the front, waving, with a wide-open smile and a speech bubble:

“Hi!”

My parents must have designed and mailed these within a month of my grandfather Senkichi’s funeral since he died only two weeks before I was born. Condolences would still be coming in for my mother’s father who had railed against her marriage to a Bolivian “savage;” thanks would still be going out for the gift money received at his funeral. Amidst all that, to send out this whiplash announcement — “Hello again, it’s a girl!” — how did my parents keep track? Who got which news? Who got both? 

People must have been expecting me. The great swell of my mother’s belly would have been impossible to ignore at the funeral: a glaring reminder of the marriage, the child, that drove poor Senkichi-san to his grave in fury. Bad luck, bad luck.

I wonder if either of my parents saw him in my eyes when I was born. Reincarnated after a quick two-week break, ready to haunt them from the body of this baby girl.

“Hi!”

1st floor: storage room: 表札 (hyōsatsu): nameplate

One morning in my father’s workshop as I excavate vast collections of sandpaper and vinyl rope and corks and screws and magnets and matchbooks and construction paper, I find two heavy, dusty nameplates made of smooth, thick porcelain. I lug them upstairs to the big kitchen sink and scrub them down, wiping and washing until thirty years of neglect swirl down the drain, and in my hands I soon have the two parts of me. One nameplate with the family name Iwasaki, 岩﨑; the other, Macuaga, マクワガ. Both printed in bold black calligraphy strokes that echo each other, form a pair. Once upon a time, they hung by our mailbox, where every family hung their hyōsatsu. We were one family with two names. It seems so simple in my soapy hands.

2nd floor: study room: 辞書 (ji-sho): dictionaries

In Japanese, we say the traffic light is blue, like the ocean, and trees, and fresh vegetables. 

In English, traffic lights and leaves are not the color of the sea.

2nd floor: living room: ピアノ(pee-a-noh): piano

Before my mother rebuilt our house into a light-filled, Western-inspired modern structure, it was an old traditional Japanese home of dark wooden beams, grass tatami mats, and paper shōji doors. There, until I was ten, I slept next to the piano. It stood in a tiny room that served as a passageway from our living space to the engawa — the narrow deck that runs between a Japanese home and its garden — and the instrument rose high against one wall, a gleaming monolith. Every evening, I hauled my futon out of the oshi-ire closet across from this giant slab and unfurled it along the wedge of tatami that remained, head toward the garden and feet toward the living room.

Some nights, when the moon was bright, I could see the photograph taped to the wall above the piano: a black and white portrait as large as a hanging calendar page. It captured a pianist on stage, seated at a grand piano in silhouette, stark black against the backdrop like a seagull against the dawn. She was poised over the keyboard, her back a graceful curve, her hands striking a chord only she could hear, and her long hair was gathered in a low ponytail. Her face was hidden in shadow, but from her poise and her ponytail, I knew it was my mother. She found her calling as a foreign language teacher, but she had once dreamed of traveling the world as a concert pianist, and she’d kept this photo to always remember her inner artist. She never played, never spoke of her vanished career, but her love for music shaped our lives as she filled our house with Mozart and Vivaldi, encouraged me to sing, learn piano, and even join an opera. One of my earliest memories is of sitting at our living room table, drawing a blue airplane with my crayons, while she and Daddy had a bitter fight by the piano — I imagine over the bank loan they needed to buy the thing or the expense of my Suzuki lessons. Another time, I refused to practice, and my mother, enraged, locked the lid and hid the key until I begged for her to let me play again. This was her passion for the piano: so profound that she stayed firmly in silhouette while challenging me to own the instrument, find my muse, develop my voice and one day take the spotlight.

Only years later did I learn that the photograph was actually from a calendar. It was not my mother at all. She didn’t know how to play; a piano was a Western luxury that was far removed from her post-war, complicated childhood. In retrospect, it was obvious: Her deep connection to music was certainly real, but the rest of the story, the whole romantic saga, was purely in my brain.

“You got all that from the ponytail?” she laughed.

“It looks just like you,” I said, still incredulous.

She was pleased. We looked up at the wall, at the mischievous woman, this marvelous silhouette.

“It’s a great photograph though, isn’t it?”

 
 

M.E. Macuaga is a Japanese Bolivian storyteller and escape room addict whose diverse work can be found now or soon in The Seventh Wave, HAD, Superpresent, Luna Station Quarterly, Flash Point SF, and elsewhere. A finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship, the NYC Midnight competitions, and The Florida Review Editors’ Award in Creative Nonfiction, M.E.’s communities include Tin House, Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Jentel Arts, International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime, and Storyknife. 

Meredith Davidson CNF Intern 2024