Chapter 24: What Recordings Retain and What They Lose

—When a clipped voice becomes 'evidence'—

When I read the transcript submitted by the opposing party, I felt a strong sense of discomfort seeing my own words lined up there.

They were indeed my words. However, the flow of the conversation before and after those words were spoken had become thin on paper.

Things that were spoken naturally during the meeting as a whole were becoming difficult to see in the document. I was bewildered by that.

A recording appears to retain everything. However, the meaning of words is not determined the moment they are recorded.

Which parts are extracted and in what order they are placed—depending on that arrangement, the same voice begins to take on a different meaning.

I learned that painfully through the recording of the family meeting on December 10th, the year my father passed away.

The meeting was recorded. And what's more, without my knowledge.

What the opposing party later submitted to the court was a transcript of that recording.

There, I was forced to see how my words were clipped, rearranged, and shaped into a different meaning.

What a recording leaves behind is the voice itself.

The premises that existed at the time and the context of which topic the words were spoken in are easily lost.

Rather, a recording is organized into a certain meaning by having necessary parts extracted and placed in a different order.

In that process, the words are quietly retied to the logic of the party submitting them.

The void of the lost context is filled with a different meaning.

What was being discussed at that time was not a meeting to confirm that my father would formally pass on the farming to one specific person.

I had heard from my father that he wanted to continue farming while the whole family worked together.

Therefore, I had no discomfort with the opposing party participating in the cultivation itself.

However, it was not a conversation in the form of my father designating the opposing party as the sole successor.

In fact, while the agricultural ledger listed my father as the first-priority farmer and me as the second-priority farmer, there was no entry for the opposing party.

Regarding the A4 farmland, there had been a promise between my father and me looking toward the future since around the time I was building my home. Even after that, my father and I continued to cultivate it while working together.

My older brother himself added reservations, saying things like, "I'm the only one who heard this," and "It's not exactly a will." There was still some wavering in his memory.

What was being discussed in the meeting was what kind of words my father had left behind while he was alive.

How to continue the cultivation of the farmland that had been ongoing until now.

My brother was introducing, one by one, the words that had been entrusted to him by our father.

What to do about the house. And, my father had also spoken to my brother while he was alive about the funeral for when our mother eventually passed away.

It was an exchange where we discussed the issues left behind in our daily lives while confirming each family member's memories.

In fact, my response was as follows.

"He did say that. Father told me that as well."

That was a remark I made while my brother was introducing several things our father had said.

The year before he passed away, there was a period when my father was hospitalized. My father told me not to let my brother or the other party know about that hospitalization.

It wasn't my mother, who lived with him, but my father who asked me to be involved as the key person. I think my father believed it would be difficult for my mother to take on that role.

That is why I ended up having relatively long periods of time to talk with my father while he was hospitalized.

My father talked about his own health. And, little by little, he also spoke about farming.

"The work in the rice fields was truly difficult."

He would sometimes say things like that. That he might not be able to continue as he had until now in the future.

That it was becoming difficult to maintain it without the family supporting each other.

That was closer to a conversation about how to support the life we had continued for so long from here on out, rather than a conversation about who to inherit what.

"My health is poor, and I might not be able to do farm work starting next year."

It was also during that hospitalization that he confided that to me.

Therefore, when my brother spoke of my father's words, I replied, "He did say that."

That was not to corroborate my brother's story, but because it overlapped with the anxiety I had heard from my father directly.

However, the preparatory brief submitted by the opposing party stated the following:

On December 10th of the year my father passed away, my brother stated that my father had said, "I will have my younger brother take care of the demolition of the house, my mother's funeral, and the succession of the farm."

To this, I replied, "That's right. He said it. I heard it too."

Several separate topics had been consolidated into a single statement. And my acknowledgment had been replaced with a more definitive word of agreement.

I did not utter such words.

But more problematic than the difference in the words themselves was something else.

Even if I had uttered similar words, what was being exchanged on that occasion was not a scene of agreement regarding who would succeed the farm.

It was a remark made in the flow of family members confirming each other's concerns about my father's health and the future.

Consolidating several topics into one and replacing an acknowledgment with a word of agreement. Through that dual process, words of confirmation had transformed into consent for succession.

Words exchanged as confirmation had, before I knew it, drawn closer to words of acceptance. The distance between confirmation and approval had been quietly narrowed on paper.

Furthermore, I remembered that my mother had said on a different day, "As long as I am alive, I will not give it to anyone, I will not divide it."

However, those words did not appear anywhere in the transcript of December 10th.

It was only natural that they were not in the record for that day, but when I realized that, I became anxious.

Would words that did not remain in one record also fail to remain in another in the same way?

Only my response, which had been cut out, was given a new outline within a different context.

What is happening here is not merely a clerical error or a difference in memory. It is the process by which the technology of recording organizes the words of daily life into "evidence."

I finally realized that fact by tracing the transcript submitted by the opposing party in reverse.

A recording was not something that fixed the truth.

Even if the voice remains, the context does not. The lost context is rewoven into a different meaning.

Tracing the remaining voices, I found myself reconnecting the sequence that had been severed.

🌸 This article is a chapter from the series
"Even So, I Wanted to Live with My Family."

One day, a family's life turns into what is called "evidence."
I am recording that process in chronological order.

📖 Read more

📘 For first-time readers (Overview)

🕊 Read from the prologue

▶ There was no white knight
(Why did life turn into "evidence"?)

📚 Read all together (Follow in order)

For those who want to follow the flow of life as it happened
▶ Click here for the serial magazine

🧭 Read by meaning (Columns)

For those who want to understand from the meaning and structure of events
▶ Click here for the list of columns