The
Brady Archive
Going
Home Again
By
Robert Brady, (KJ 56)
HOME HAD BEEN
A LARGE GRAY, RAMBLING WOODEN HOUSE that rattled pleasantly during earthquakes.
Built in the Western style in the heart of Tokyo, it wasn’t far
from the road along which the 47 ronin had carried the head of Kira
on that winter morning in 1702. When I’d moved there in the early
1970s on my first trip to Japan the house was already old, somehow miraculously
having survived the 1923 earthquake and the Tokyo firebombing maelstroms.
I lived there on and off for five years, leaving it for the last time
in 1977 and moving on.
Now again on another leg of that long journey the traveler’s life
becomes, at the tail end of a trip north I was getting off the train
at the old station on an evening nearly 30 years later, just to walk
the old streets and see if the house was still there.
At the station itself, I couldn’t recognize a thing but the name.
Back then practically a third-world train station, it now had an Irish
Pub, a Bucks coffee shop, a gourmet vegetarian restaurant...
It would be getting dark soon; I had to move on.
Out on the street I couldn’t find the way home. Used to be a small
alleyway right there… Canyons of mirrored glass now rose over
streets that had once been person-level byways lined with small shops
tended by their owners, who lived in the back and who knew you for walking
by every day, stopping in now and then to buy and chat. Blundering around
the new expensively flashing corners I came upon a narrow canyon that
looked like it might have been the way I used to go, but I still couldn’t
recognize a thing; there was nothing left but the narrowness. As I walked,
now and then I paused and closed my eyes to see if I could still see
what had been here, a street that meant something to me, to replace
what I did not want to see, the violation done to what had been secretly
mine, to the open simplicity of a past that no one wanted anymore…
What used to be here? I could close my eyes, see it as it used to be
and know the way; then I’d open them and be lost again. I should
have come another time, I thought — when I had more time, was
less tired, more eager, less vulnerable to these feelings — I’d
been hiking since dawn; these moments deserved more than this, more
than I could bring to bear from the past of a single aging life…
But those moments were mine; if they were to flow this far and perhaps
beyond, they had to flow through me: no one else could do this. You
have to take the past as you find it. How correctly we remember doesn’t
seem to matter all that much, only that we remember, or at least that
we try…
And each step brought me nearer…
FOR MILLENNIA NOW HERACLITUS has been telling us, and more recently
Thomas Wolfe, among others, that we can’t go home again, yet still
we try; return is the child of departure. But I wasn’t trying
to step into the same river twice, or to go home again. I was simply
trying to go back to where once I had lived — where I had spent
some of the highlight years of my life — simply to see what had
become of the place where it had all happened. It had seemed like just
an idea, only a couple of hours at the tag end of another of my travels.
But even when we step into that always different river of the same name,
or go again to what is no longer home, there are hidden currents that
can carry us away, different streets and other rooms filled with familiar
spirits, that beckon yet…
Right about here, I remember there used to be an old madwoman who every
evening at about dusk leaned out of her upper windows and screamed her
madness into the street, then closed them and went about her life. She
and the house were gone now. And I don’t remember what used to
be over there, but it wasn’t a parking lot. This corner was where
I’d been wearing a blue kendo jacket as a fashion item right here
on the street and an old man, shocked by the concept, had walked into
that telephone pole.
As to the house, built of thin, unpainted wood it had looked like it
would take only about ten minutes to burn to ash. Surely it was gone
by now: another 30 years! There were the steps into the temple; it was
closed! But no, only because the stone walk was being reconstructed.
I went around, up the side road, the way we used to go when things were
tipsy. I reached the priest’s parking lot — and there, as
it had always been, stood the house, grayer and more fragile than I’d
remembered.
BUILT IN SEVERAL STAGES, the house had early on had a number of additions,
it was two storied, the portion I’d lived in had a very small
kitchen with a bath beyond, two large rooms upstairs, downstairs the
same, with a large sunporch and sunroom, all looking out on the piece
de resistance, the garden and its pond, backed by a small forested slope
that led up to the road that was home to a few small oil-rich embassies.
It had originally been the residence of the temple priest, whose forebears
had clearly been quite progressive. I was told when I first moved in
that Sun Yat-sen had lived in the house during his time in Tokyo, though
I could not confirm this. The new priest, son of the former priest,
had built a new modern house in another corner of the grounds and lived
there with his family, renting the old house out, largely to foreigners.
Japanese wouldn’t live there, it was said, because the temple
cemetery was right out front.
The house had engaged one of the earliest telephones in Tokyo, the number
on the big old clanky chunk-a-chunk iron thing ending 0084. Other separate
apartments in the large old place at the time were home to a ronin law
student, a radical young designer couple and an ever-changing stream
of foreigners.
As I stood there watching now, looking at the house the way I’d
never really done while I lived there, I saw all those I’d known
back then come visiting, come walking down these very stones along that
path to the doorway 30 years ago, and right here in the rain…
all those people I had never seen again, so many there were, what has
become of them all, I wondered, standing in the river…
NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK you know, to bring together the real and the
remembered is to mingle tears and ashes. For what is remembered is not
real, and cannot be brought before you. Only when you have traveled
long enough to have a distant past do you feel the desire to go back,
see where it happened, see how it was, but of course it is all gone
now, the ratios have changed, what happened has changed, what was is
no longer, and so it is that you come to stand on the very spot in the
wisdom of your new confusion and let the loss wash over you.
As I stood there looking I went back, far back along the river that
led to that moment, where I saw my past as the parting of a veil: so
many times over so many years I and my loves and friends of those days
and nights had walked this path, turned this corner, entered these doors,
gazed out those old windows upon our long futures, and I have never
seen those loves and friends again; yet so brief it seemed our partings
would be!
How temporary tomorrow appears to those who have so many of them, so
many tomorrows to spare for other things, knowing nothing as yet of
long times gone, or of the vast abyss time holds in each tick; there
were too many final partings in this place. Such roads of life are not
easy or joyous to retrace, and when you do you find that they are for
other feet than yours now, the paths you knew are no longer there, they
have gone to where old roads go, to the inner valleys of the heart,
where eternity resides…
And if we can’t go back, then what are memories for?
As in your dreams everything you dream is you, so in your memories everything
you remember is you. When in the real world you return to a place of
memory, it is like looking into a mirror and seeing no one there. In
the past, you are invisible. All that remains is you now, looking: what
you have found is the self you have become.
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