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Passion: The Beginning of My Music Career by Hidemi Woods
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The Beginning of My Life
After I was graduated from a Catholic high school in Kyoto, Japan, I went overseas for the first time in my life as a family trip around Europe during spring break right before starting college. The culture shock I experienced there seemed to alter my brain. It took control of me and began to inflict cracks everywhere on common practice of the small hamlet of Kyoto that I was born and grew up in.
One of the things I realized in Europe was that so many different people lived by so many different ways of their own. It had been always that way and not worth mentioning, but that kind of notion blurred in my home town where everybody knew everybody who lived in the same way. As a firstborn, I was destined to succeed my family that had lasted over 1000 years, which meant I should live with my family in the same house, on the same location, for my entire life until I die. Although that had been fixed according to the hamlet’s long-standing common practice, what I saw and felt in Europe told me that shouldn’t be the only way to live.
Another thing Europe showed me was better understanding of my parents. Through numerous happenings during the trip, I learned their true self. They weren’t wise, weren’t respectable and didn’t even love each other. It became questionable whether I should follow the fixed life that was demanded by my parents now that I found they didn’t deserve trust.
The first day of college came in only a couple of days after I returned from Europe. It was an orientation day on which we had a physical checkup. I didn’t understand why it was necessary in the first place. For a few-minute-long checkup, all the freshmen had to stand in line waiting for their turns. We waited for three to four hours doing nothing, just standing. I couldn’t leave the line for lunch. A friend from the same high school as I had been in spotted me and went to get a cookie. While I was munching it standing in an everlasting long line, I felt dreadful for my college life that had just started. I had been fed up with my school days that were inefficient, wasteful, full of totalitarian practice. I thought I finally got out of it but it turned out to be started all over again. Everybody did the same ineffective thing at the same time here in college too.
The college had a compulsory two year’s curriculum claimed ‘general education’ and one of the subjects was physical education. About 30 students of the same class gathered at the ground wearing the college gym uniform. We played catch in pairs in one class, and danced odd moves to music all together in another. To me, it wasn’t college at all. I was sent back to kindergarten.
I asked myself what I was doing day after day. The world was infinitely vast yet life was too short. There was no time for doing what I was told to like others did. Time had to be spent on what I wanted to do even though others didn’t do. Three months later, I stopped attending all the classes other than an English conversation class. I knew I would neither graduate college nor get a degree as a result, but I didn’t care. There, I chose what to do by myself, and my own life has begun.
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The Singer-songwriter
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My childhood diet was very healthy. That may be the reason why I was such a skinny kid, contrary to how I am today.
I was born in a farmer’s family in Kyoto, an old city in Japan. My family used to be almost self-sufficient. We mainly ate the leftover vegetables of eggplant and spinach that weren’t fit to be sold at the market because of flaws. We also planted rice and other vegetables such as onions, potatoes, carrots, radishes, burdocks and green peppers, not for sale but exclusively for our daily meals. We kept barnyard fowls that provided fresh eggs every morning. Our breakfasts and lunches were almost always row egg mixed with rice and soy sauce, pickled vegetables and too-weak miso soup.A natural life may sound beautiful and relaxing, but it’s not in reality. Our fowls would holler screaming crows at dawn every day which would induce the clamorous barking of dogs in the neighborhood. Sometimes, one of our fowls that I named and fed every day like my pets was missing, and we had chicken on the table at dinner that evening. It took time for me to realize I was eating my pet fowl while I was worried about its whereabouts. Sometimes, I did witness my grandfather choked and plucked our fowl.
Since we didn’t have to buy vegetables, we had large servings at meals. Unfortunately, all vegetable meals of ours tasted horrible because we had to pay for seasonings or cooking oil and we were stingy enough to refrain them. Everything on our table was flavorless and bland. It never stimulated my appetite and I stayed skinny. As time passed, shops had been appearing in the rural area around our house. Also, my grandfather began to loosen his tight reign of the household and my mother had been able to have some discretion to go shopping and spend money. Our self-sufficiency was rapidly falling. Foods from outside tasted awesome. My appetite finally came out of its long hibernation. I was hooked by ham and mayonnaise in particular, and became chubby in no time.
Of all the terribly-tasted foods that my grandfather had long eaten, he picked yogurt as the worst. When he saw my sister eat it everyday, he asked for one out of curiosity. He said he had never had such an awful food in his life. After I left home for my music career and started living by myself in Tokyo, he often asked my father to take him to my apartment that was far from Kyoto. He wanted to see what was like to live alone there. My father didn’t feel like taking on such a bother for him and used a clever repelling. He told my grandfather that I was eating pizza everyday in Tokyo.
Of course he knew both that I wasn’t and that my grandfather didn’t know what pizza was. He explained to my grandfather that a food called pizza was oily round bread covered with sour sticky substance called cheese that was stringy and trailed threads to a mouth at every bite. And he added a threat, “You would eat that thing in her small apartment. Can you do that?” My grandfather replied in horror, “Why should I eat such a thing rotten enough to pull threads? I can’t ever go to Tokyo.” That pizza description cleanly stopped my grandfather’s repetitive request.When I returned home for a visit once, my grandfather asked me a question at dinner time. Pointing the four corners of the dining room and drawing invisible lines in the air with his chopsticks, he said, “Your entire apartment is merely about this size, isn’t it?” As I replied it was about right, he asked, “How come you chose to do all what is necessary to live in such a small space and eat stringy rotten foods with threads although you have a spacious house and nice foods here? Is music worth that much? I don’t understand at all.” He looked unconvinced. As for me, while I had a certain amount of hardship, I had a far better life with tasty foods and freedom compared to the one that I had had in this house. Nevertheless, I didn’t utter those words. I said nothing and pour sake for him into his small empty cup, instead.
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by Hidemi Woods [Click to Buy at Amazon.com]
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Memoryland hr686
My memories shared with my mother are stored in Memoryland. It’s the place inside of me that holds all my memories and I named it Memoryland by myself. Recalling my memories means visiting Memoryland. Like it or not, a scene or conversation with my mother sometimes happens to flash back in my mind when I inadvertently step into Memoryland.
I carefully avoid the section concerning my mother whenever I visit there. It always evokes heartache and anger. Taking a glance at my mother’s section, I find notable examples. I was in my late thirties and came back to my hometown for the first time in years to see my family. Instead of welcoming me, my mother said to me, “You’re not famous at this age of yours. That proves you have no talent in music. You have failed in music and you are a failure.” On my other visit, she said, “To get this family’s fortune, I gave up everything that I wanted to do and married without love. But you are doing what you want with someone you love. Taking everything isn’t acceptable! Because you don’t sacrifice anything, you’re not entitled to inherit the family fortune. So, don’t ever come home. Visits are unnecessary since you’re not a successor.” Just a few glimpses of my memories with my mother cause a lot of pain, and that’s why I try to steer away from my mother’s section in Memoryland.
My relative called me ten days ago and let me know that my mother passed away.
She was a chronic liar and an evil-doer. She got our family’s fortune by sacrificing her life, yet seemed unhappy day after day. It appeared that she had taken it out on others by trying to do harm anyway she could think of. Eventually she lost the fortune when she and my father failed the family business and moved out of their big house. After she moved into a condo, she had submitted to violence from my sister. She ran away to hide and moved into a small apartment where she died alone, covered with her own vomit and excreta. Despite her advanced age, I had assumed she wouldn’t die soon. Her revenge for her unhappiness was never enough. I supposed she would persistently plot evil schemes or throw heartless words at me and others around her which would keep her going. Since I had thought her time wouldn’t come in the near future, her death took me by surprise.
Has she repented and gone to heaven? In my theory, people realize their mistakes and wrong deeds before their deaths. They admit, regret, and thus are forgiven, released from suffering called life, and then die. I wonder if she also has been forgiven. Considering her nature that she wouldn’t admit her wrong doing, it’s hard to imagine she could ever be forgiven. Nevertheless, as she has actually died, she might have been.
I dared to go into her section of Memoryland. Passing through her countless lies I received and her desperate efforts to make people unhappy, I found a tall, heavy brass gate in the deep back of the section. It was locked by a huge bolt, which meant I had blocked this memory. Summoning courage and bracing myself for what horrible memory was there, I unbarred the bolt and got inside. It was on the bus that was running along the beautiful coast of the sea. My family was on a trip and taking a tour bus. I was a small child and was in the window seat with my mother next to me. She pointed at a big rock jutting out of the sea and uncommonly tenderly asked me, “Hidemi, what does that rock look like to you?” “An elephant,” I replied. “Really? Yeah, you’re right! It does look like an elephant! Then, how about that rock over there? What does it look like?” We continued this conversation for one rock after another and she said I was right each time kindly. While she seemed a different person from the one I met every day, I felt extremely happy. Later though, when I told her how happy that bus ride was, she confessed to me that she had just tried to divert my attention so that she wasn’t embarrassed by me who could have thrown up on the bus because I usually got car sick too easily. In any case, the funny thing was, I unconsciously had blocked one of the happiest memories of mine.
On the night of that day when I was told about my mother, I burst into tears all of a sudden. I couldn’t figure out why. I just couldn’t explain the emotion I was having, but it engulfed me. While crying hard, I was dismayed and tried to understand what I was feeling. It was more like emptiness rather than sadness. I felt as if the long fierce battle I had engaged in abruptly came to an end with my arch enemy evaporated. I even no longer knew whether I loved her or hated her. Maybe both. I was simply overwhelmed by an illogical, strange emotion that I couldn’t comprehend and kept bawling.
