My Grandmother's Poetry Collection

People often tell me that I resemble my late paternal grandmother.

We both tend to clutter up rooms, love patterned clothes, were born in April, enjoy traveling, are sloppy with housework, yet have quick minds, and—without anyone asking us to—we both write.

My grandmother’s hobby, between farming and raising children, was composing tanka poetry. Long before I was born, she was growing vegetables, growing fruit, and composing poems. She would submit them to newspaper poetry columns, gather with fellow poets, and even compile her own self-published poetry collections. What we would call a ZINE today.

Even as a child, I knew that my grandmother’s hobby was 'tanka,' but I didn't think it was particularly cool, and I didn't understand why she was so passionate about it.
In fact, I even wondered if there was any point in paying money to make a poetry collection yourself.

Occasionally, my grandmother would shyly show me her poems published in the local newspaper, but I don't remember ever saying anything more insightful than 'Oh, I see.'

Some of the poems were about me, her grandchild, but the idea of 'a poem my grandmother wrote about me' felt embarrassing. I felt awkward thinking that this was how she saw me, and in short, I was just too young to understand the meaning of the poems or the feelings behind them.

Even so, whenever her poems were published in the newspaper, she would always point to the 'Shinmai Kadan' column with her sun-tanned finger and read them to me. I remember that after she finished reading, she would always give a bashful, evasive smile, looking just a little bit proud.

***

My grandmother died when I was a college student who had already moved out of my parents' house.

I remember receiving the call that 'Grandma has collapsed' on my first-generation iPhone SE while I was in a second-language Chinese class at university. I remember rushing out of the classroom, bumping my hip on the corner of a desk, packing a minimal bag at lightning speed in my cheap apartment, and jumping onto a bus headed for the station. Frustrated by the slow-moving bus on the university road, I imagined my grandmother in a hospital room far away. Grandma, wait, is it this soon? Now? Like this?

I took the Shinkansen, transferred to a local train with only two cars, and when I finally arrived at the hospital, my grandmother was no longer able to converse. A major blood vessel in her brain had burst, and while she was barely alive, she would never wake up or speak again.

I took my grandmother’s hand as she lay in bed and looked at it closely. It was still sun-tanned, the skin around her nails was dark with pigmentation, and it was a large, sturdy, unmistakably working hand. A hand that had picked peaches, planted seedlings, made miso, wrapped oyaki, driven a light truck, and also jotted down poems. That hand, too, gradually lost its tan during the days she lay in the hospital, becoming thin and frail, and by the time it was as small and helpless as it could possibly be, my grandmother passed away.

I didn't cry much. At the funeral, other grandchildren who hadn't lived with her were crying, but I didn't really understand that 'my grandmother had died.'

To me, my grandmother was the one who would peel an apple with hands I wasn't sure were washed or not, stab it with a knife, and hand it to me. She was the one who would give me marble chocolates she had bought in bulk at the supermarket on February 14th, saying 'It’s for Valenti' (I thought every year, 'It’s actually Valentine’s Day'), and she was the one who would take a 100-yen ballpoint pen with hands I wasn't sure were washed or not, and write poems on the back of flyers or in college notebooks.

The person lying in the hospital bed and the person lying at the funeral felt like complete strangers to me.

***

More than ten years have passed since then, and I am now a 31-year-old married woman.

I spent my twenties thinking only of myself—it would be a total lie to say I haven't forgotten about my grandmother for a single day—but now that I have experienced marriage myself, I sometimes wonder if my grandmother’s life was a happy one.

Born into a farming family, she finished elementary school, and she would laugh about how she was a primary school graduate because, while children who had worse grades than her were allowed to go to girls' school, she was not.
She came to my parents' house after being told by her parents to marry a man she didn't know, also a farmer from the next village.

There were two young men in the house she married into, and when she thought, 'I wonder if that tall, kind-looking one is my husband,' it turned out to be his younger brother. She said she was truly disappointed when she realized she was marrying the man with the sturdy, square face.

That man with the square face was my grandfather (this story is still a running joke in our family, told when my grandfather isn't around).

My grandfather with the square face is a man who is like the patriarchy walking around in clothes.

I don't use the past tense because he is still alive even after passing 95, and I often say, 'This is what they mean by

ill weeds grow apace,
,' but my mother always scolds me, saying, 'Don't say such hateful things.' No, it’s the old man’s fault for living a life that makes his grandchildren hate him, isn't it?I cannot look up to my grandfather, who has treated my grandmother, my mother, and me so terribly, as a 'beloved grandpa,' and I secretly think that the sake I drink at his funeral, which will likely be held in the next five years or so, will be delicious.

A long time ago, there was a night when my grandmother was made to cry by my grandfather with incredible intensity. I was watching TV in the kitchen when I heard a scream from my grandparents' room next door.

It was a literal scream, the kind of sound someone would make if they encountered a murder scene—a 'GYAAAAAAH' sound.I was surprised and went to check, and my grandmother was crying loudly. It took me a moment to realize that the scream I had just heard was the sound of my grandmother crying. I was still in elementary school, and I didn't know that people could cry with such a sound.

'Grandma, what’s wrong?'
When I asked timidly, my grandmother sobbed and said,

'Even Grandma wants to die...'

For a moment, I couldn't understand the meaning. It didn't sink in that my grandmother, who was usually always laughing, the grandmother who would shyly show me her tanka poems, was crying and saying she 'wanted to die.'

My grandfather, standing to the side, muttered awkwardly, "I went too far, too." I realized that the old man had said something terrible to my grandmother and made her cry. I glared at my grandfather.
Back then, I didn't know the concepts or words for "patriarchy" or "moral harassment," but I somehow understood that "this guy is the root cause."

From the events of that night, I clearly began to dislike my grandfather. And I also realized I disliked my grandmother for being his wife, my father and mother for not standing up to him, and even myself for being their grandchild. This house. A house like this. I vowed that one day I would definitely get out of this house.

***

When I returned to my parents' home for the first time in a while the other day, I suddenly thought to ask my mother, "Is that book of tanka poems Grandma used to write still around?" Times have changed, and tanka is popular in the world now. I had noticed more young people around me writing poems, and I thought, "Huh, I guess it's trending." Come to think of it, what kind of poems did Grandma write? I couldn't remember at all.

My mother said, "I never thought you'd ask about that," and went with me to look for it on the bookshelf in the storage room. My grandmother's poetry collection was tucked away in a spot between bookshelves that was hard to reach, and after my mother and I struggled to shift the shelves, I finally managed to stretch my hand into the gap and pull it out.

My mother handed me the collection and said, "If you read it, Grandma would surely be happy, rather than it just sitting here unread by anyone." As I earn my living as a company employee and write in a small corner of the internet, I was the only one among my grandmother's eight grandchildren who had become someone who "writes things," just like her.

Although I had my grandmother's poetry collection in my hands, I felt hesitant to just read it easily, so I left it unopened for a while. I was a little afraid of how I would feel if I read the inner thoughts of a relative who was no longer in this world.

While I was hesitating like that, several months passed, and the NHK morning drama "Tiger and Wings" began. It is the story of the first woman in Japan to serve as a lawyer, a judge, and a court president. Watching the drama every day, I thought about my grandmother. The same era my grandmother lived in. When the woman who inspired the protagonist became a court president in the real world, what was my grandmother doing, living in a rural farming village in Nagano?

If my grandmother had been able to go to a girls' school, she probably wouldn't have married my grandfather, and I wouldn't be here. But perhaps my grandmother wouldn't have had to be made to cry by my grandfather like that. I exist because my grandmother lived in that era, lived as a woman, suffered as a woman, and was made to stay with a man she didn't even like.

What is a woman? What am I? What is a woman? What is life? What is it all about, Grandma?

I felt I had to read my grandmother's poems now. I took the collection, which had been sitting unread, and went to a cafe. I felt I should read it alone, away from my husband.

I sat at a cafe table and turned the pages of the poetry collection one by one. It is the rainy season now, and the scent of rain drifts in from the open window. I read each poem carefully. About daily life, the weather, the fields, my father and mother (my great-grandparents), the children (my father, uncle, and aunt), and the daughter-in-law (my mother). Poems where my grandmother expressed her feelings not as "Grandma," but as someone's child, someone's mother, a worker, and a woman.

The shining green of harvested asparagus, the joy of buying a blouse at a bargain sale, the loneliness of waiting for her husband alone on a rainy night, the pain of a hangnail, the inability to throw away the padded jacket my mother once sewed for her, the trip she was looking forward to—.

With every poem I read, a side of my grandmother I didn't know emerges.
The moments of a woman's life, not just "Grandma," flow into my mind.

The poems, starting from the Showa era, are arranged by the year they were written.
I reached the page for "Heisei 5." The year I was born.

I felt a little hopeful that maybe I was written about. With a pounding heart, I turned the page and found this poem.

“The infant sleeping while sucking on a baby bottle, may you grasp great happiness in those hands”

I felt my body temperature rise suddenly. My grandmother had eight grandchildren, but I was the only one sucking on a baby bottle in Heisei 5. This is a poem about me.

“The infant sleeping while sucking on a baby bottle, may you grasp great happiness in those hands”

I read it carefully once more. Tears welled up, and I wiped them away with my hand so the cafe staff wouldn't notice. I imagine my grandmother's face as she watched me sleeping right after I was born. The same smiling face she had when she showed me a poem she had written well. My grandmother, the one I knew.

A person who lived with a man like that for 40 years, didn't have much money, but sent her children to university so they wouldn't be poor, went to the fields while being pushed around by rice acreage reduction and price-cutting, and yet still wrote poems. She was never called a poet, but she was someone who couldn't help but write.

If only I could tell her how much I appreciate her poems now. I want her to read my writing, too. I wish she had written a poem about my wedding. There was only one day I could book the venue, and it happened to be the anniversary of Grandma's death. Hey, Grandma definitely orchestrated that, didn't you? How did you feel when you got married? How did you turn your hardships and joys into poems? There is so much I want to talk about and so much I want to ask, even now, so much.

I don't know if my grandmother's life was happy. I'm sure there were nights she wanted to die.
Even so, ahead of my grandmother's life is me, for whom she wished "great happiness," and I am actually living quite happily. I live happily, leaving my room messy, wearing patterned clothes, doing housework sloppily, and writing things no one asked me to write.

I don't believe in the "family" unit. Patriarchy should just perish, and I'm not particularly diligent about visiting graves either. But when I have something I want to tell my grandmother, I think I'll open her poetry collection from now on. A collection written by a super cool woman who resembles me.

Table of Contents for "Swimming While Wounded"

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