My relative’s home where I mistook my grandmother’s uncle for a kidnapper was the place that my grandmother had lived in mostly until she got married. Her mother was a geisha and died right after her birth. As she didn’t have a father, her mother’s parents took her in and raised her at their home. When I visited there as a child, her mother’s brother had succeeded the family. Her mother’s brother, or my grandmother’s uncle, who is the one that took me to the secret place, was a medal-awarded artist for Japanese lacquer. He had a studio beside the house and his young son invited me in. There, his son made an origami crane with a tiny sheet of paper merely half an inch square and gave it to me. I felt like I watched magic. His older son was an architect. So, the lineage of my grandmother on my mother’s side is abundant in artistic people. When I left home to pursue a career as a musician, my grandfather approved and let me go despite of my parents’ opposition. But a few years later, he realized that I had been determined and wouldn’t come home to succeed the family. He began to blame my mother. He thought I became a musician because of part of my blood, which came from my mother’s side that had a geisha in the lineage…
origami
sorrow and desperation led to unreasonable anger
Back in my hospital life of my childhood, the next room to mine was a room for six boys. One of them was a five-year-old boy with leukemia. He often hung around my room and we got along well. I taught him how to fold origami. Because he was little, his mother stayed at the hospital with him. She frequently yelled at him, hit him and even kicked him. I was terrified of her. One day, my mother came to see me and went to take some tea for me from the free tea stand near my room. There, I saw her talking with the boy’s mother and learned that he had only a few months to live. His mother sounded so gentle and so sad. I understood why she treated him like that. For the first time in my life, I realized that sorrow and desperation led to unreasonable anger. Although I was only nine years old, I had never felt mortality so closely and strongly while playing with him…