Nozomi Imanishi has served in Japan as a Church Planting Associate in two different projects. Presently, she is a student at Regent College in Vancouver, while working on special projects for Asian Access.

Grandmother's Pumpkin

April 27, 2006 | JAPAN

by Nozomi Imanishi (A2)

Squares of orange pumpkin shine in my grandmother's pot. She cooks, not with love, but with spit. Tasting, re-tasting, bare old fingers slipping into the heat of the stove.

She's disjointed, not all the time, but enough. She sings sometimes, rarely, and most often after she's been cutting away at her houseplants with scissors.

At the train station she tells me about my grandfather, how he was shot. An X on his back where they cut the bullet out sans anaesthesia. How he barely crossed a river. How he lived in Siberia for a while. Cold and hungry.   

The squares glisten in the dim kitchen light. A deep glow seeps out of them, staining the pot orange.

"See that?" she asks, pointing to a leafy plant lining the tracks. "My mother would tell me to pick them. I'd pick armfuls." She becomes her youth as she speaks. Her mother's voice, softens her hardness. "We'd eat them with anything we had, miso or sesame."

Her heart fails her often now. She enjoys watching television shows about doctors, re-visiting often her fears of surgery and death. She reads the Bible, clinging to Jesus, in a strange mix of love and voodoo.

"When your mother became a Christian I tossed her out of my house. She begged me to let her stay until she finished high school." She pauses, "I feel badly about that now." She lets me pat her leg -- they are friends now.

Her hands shake as she lifts pieces of pumpkin into a small shallow dish. She takes a spoon and drizzles some of the juice from the pot over the pumpkin. Soy-sauce, sweet rice vinegar, sake, sugar--amber brown juice.

If she were British she would have collections of tea cups featuring royal weddings, births and deaths. Instead she follows avidly Michiko-sama's need to birth a son. "They should let girls take the throne." She is in love with Aiko-sama, the girl child of the current crown-emperor.

The pumpkin squares like fat, orange jewels. I lift a piece into my mouth. A drop of amber brown curves around my wrist.

A liquid cut, my grandmother.

At the low table, she sits down, whispers a prayer and we begin to eat.

Related:

• Japan's imperial baby boy: Japan celebrates as Princess Kiko gives birth to a baby boy, resolving a crisis over royal succession.
• Nozomi Imanishi's staff profile

© Copyright 2006 Asian Access.

All rights reserved. Do not copy or distribute without the expressed consent of Asian Access.