Making Peace

TWO OF my aunts lived in the same senior citizens’ home. The older one, “Big Aunt,” ninety-nine, had been bedridden for years. The other, Aunt Nobuko, eighty-five, had a terminal illness. When my mother told me she had visited her sisters-in-law because neither had long to live, I debated whether I should also go. I hadn’t seen them for years and we would have nothing to talk about. Above all, I didn’t like them—bottomless sources of callous comments who believed everyone in the world but themselves was a fool. But I embarked on the long train ride from Tokyo to the home. I apparently hadn’t sunk so low as to assume sending customary condolence money to their funerals would suffice to fill my role as family.

Heavy rain alternated with autumn drizzle throughout the train and taxi rides. While the car sped through an unfenced, narrow path across a vast rice paddy, a tall gray bird—standing still in this rain—flicked past my view. When I’d come here years ago, Aunt Nobuko and I took a walk and saw the same type of bird swoop into a paddy and flap its sizable wings as it balanced in the mud. She told me it was called kanada-zuru, and it flew here every year.

Aunt Nobuko was in a good mood then, but I had stayed alert throughout my visit. She, like Big Aunt, was capable of carrying on an innocuous conversation for a while; then she would shoot a poisoned dart, making me regret interacting with her at all. When I’d been in middle When I returned to Japan after years of overseas life, we had a disagreement on something—perhaps what kind of job I should get—and, knowing we would never agree, I said she and I had different values. , she spat. Our communication was studded with this kind of displeasing moment, which was minor but reason enough for me to stay away from her. And both aunts, as Tokyoites, scorned the fact that my mother came from the provinces, and never appreciated her nursing their aging parents. I always wondered why my mother bothered with occasional phone calls to ask after their health or travel all the way here to visit them, even after my father died. The sense of family obligation entrenched in her was beyond me.