I had answered the phone at my office a few days before Christmas and was pleasantly surprised to hear my wife's voice on the other end. It is very un-Japanese for a wife to call her husband at work -- or vice-versa, for that matter -- so this made only the third or fourth time in five years that I had received such a call. My pleasure was short-lived, though, when she burst into sobs. "O-ba-chan is dead," she said, using the standard Japanese term meaning "My Dear Grandma." Instinctively, I shouted, "No!" but she assured me it was true. We had just had lunch with o-ba-chan, alive and healthy as a horse at 82 years old, just a few days before at a Buddhist ceremony for our unborn child. That we would not be seeing her near-toothless smile or hearing her cheerful, quavering voice again was inconceivable to me.
Not that I had understood her much, mind you; or she, me. She was a bit hard of hearing, which made it difficult for her to understand my accented and clumsy-in-unfamiliar-topics Japanese. And her 82-year-old vocal chords and somewhat traditional language made it difficult for me to understand her. But we knew we liked each other, and I took comfort in that fact as I felt the sense of loss settle in on me. When walking, I would often take her arm; and during dinner, when the others were ignoring us because we were both a little troublesome to include directly in the conversation, I would give her a wink or a smile and her face would open up into a broad grin. The photo the family chose for her funeral and subsequent shrine was even one in which I was putting my head on her shoulder (though I was, of course, cut out of the final print for the funeral). “It’s the only one we could find where she was smiling,” my wife explained.
