A Quick and Bloody End

You'll have to excuse the editorializing. Some of this was written well after the events took place.

After a decent night's rest, a 20 minute train-ride and 20 minute taxi ride put us at the doorstep of the ancestral manse. My grandmother lives in a small, amalgamated town called Fukutsu.

Essentially a single street lined with densely packed houses, Nishihigashi (the village proper), has no convenience store, grocery store, any kind of store, but does have a karaoke bar and a "love hotel" grandly named Palais Versaille (you can see it in this picture).


I don't have a lot of pictures to share of my grandmother's house, mainly because the depths of the disarray were almost too much to bear. Needless to say, cleaning the whole house was an impossible task. Even a neat-freak super cleaner like my mother was humbled by the sheer enormity of the task. The following pic is an example of a single room, probably the cleanest.


What's not evident is the dust and grime that coated every surface. Though I'm sure my mother was joking, there was more than a hint of truth in her comments of the house not being cleaned since she left to make a new life in Canada 30 years ago.

Our job started almost the minute we arrived, and consisted mostly of scrubbing, hauling, and burning. Piled about were all manner of boxes, empty or full of old clothes or junk, as well as an assortment of unused and forgotten appliances. The firepit that burned away the old and discarded, while not technically legal, helped us do away with things that would have made our lives all the more difficult had we had to find a place (even if only temporary) for them.


More surprising, however, was the cold. My vain pride in being born and raised in the Great White North crumbled under the onslaught of single-digit temperatures. In Canada, we face these kinds of temperatures without batting an eye, secure in the knowledge that we return to homes with central heating, R-value insulation, and warm beds. My grandmother's house had only the last, and a almost constant draft made life outside of the futon an almost unbearable affair. I can honestly say without hyperbole that I have never been so cold in my life.

There are of course coping strategies for the cold. A space heater, socks and layers, and hot baths all keep the cold at bay. The last proved interesting. In a Japanese bath, one cleans the body first before stepping into a deep bath whose water is reheated and changed only once every few days. The lack of a showerhead was disturbing, as it forced me to take what amounted to a sponge bath to clean myself. Remember that no part of the house is heated, and this includes the bathroom (literally in this case, as the bath is located on the otherside of the house from the toilet, just passed a kitchen that would give Ramsay a real nightmare).

Yet despite these deprivations, I'd like to state that ultimately, I truly enjoyed my time in this ancestral manse. For my whole life, my grandmother has been an almost hermitic creature, a mystery to me and a virtual stranger in my life. Yet over the course of 3 days in her home, I discovered a wonderful person, quick to laugh and ever ensuring that I was never for want of food or drink. On a more spiritual note, I visited the shrine where my great-grandparents' ashes are kept. After I left, I felt a little melancholy and introspective. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I was truly connected to spirits of my mother's ancestors, living and dearly departed. I am so glad that I was able, in a sense, to come home.

I'll end this entry with a few shots of the shrine, and various other sundry items...