The River Ki Book

I used to have this friend who was a writer. He was unique among my (all past) other writerly friends in that he didn't persistently offer for me to read his writings (I never minded the reading. It was the pressure for enthusiastic feedback that made me feel tired beyond my years). He was not unique in that he bragged, constantly, about his works. The one that was brought up the most was about five generations of women. I heard about the progress of the brilliant five generations of women story for years (sometimes it was a novel, sometimes it was a screenplay) and never saw a word of it. I don't know why but the most reaction I ever had was an "Oh." (An old woman "Oh" from one has formed the words so many times her lips creak. It is world weary to want to feel stuff all of the time.) I began to feel like it was a joke that I wasn't getting. Is it a cliche to write about generations of women? It could be but the three generations of women (it is really four. It was wrong to discount Toyono! I kinda love her. What about her mom?! I bet she had one) in The River Ki made me smile a smile of effort in a natural way. Something that looked a lot like laugh lines after a full life (maybe too full of what I could do without, sometimes. Such is life). It is wearying to want to feel something and sometimes it happens after a lot of walking.

I've been reading so many Japanese novelists these past months. The old fashioned imagery stuff appeals to me soooo much. I wish I could turn Japanese for real and feel at home in another earthiness. If the name was not already taken by sometimes member of Animal Collective I would strap on the appropriate headgear and be "Geologist". I'd taste synthetic metals for the taste of fear and rocks to see what tasted like the sweat from the rocks or from the sweat of my nervous palms. Maybe I could be Zoologist instead and wear the appropriate wild animal costumes and paint the towns all of the nature colours. I'll wear scuba gear and a bee bonnet and talk to the birds and the bees. So I could get really into the metaphors about The River Ki. It's the connectedness to something else feeling. These words about rivers (I was born by a famous river myself. The Singing River in Mississippi. My favorite childhood stories were about the legends of hearing the indians singing as they drowned. "Evil white men!") reminded me of the could be anyone else feeling (so deep right? These trees are so old and who else has walked on this earth?). I could have expanded it and cut through the earth (I really am really into nature metaphors) and said that Sawako Ariyoshi's book is a river filled with the man-made toxins of telling it too much like it is when the waters should have flowed. I would have said that when the day and day outs of their lives breathed like something like, well, breathing that one does without talking about it was the bright spots on the bottom of the river bank. Those spots are what it must have looked like a long time ago before there were oodles and oodles of generations of people to fuck it all up. (Oops, I did say that stuff about the rivers.)

"In my study of English literature, I came across the words of T.S. Eliot, who said that "tradition" should be positively discouraged. I cannot describe tradition as he describes it. According to Eliot, traition negates all that preceded it and will be negated by all that follows. And yet I feel I know what he means when I think of the bond between you and me. The "family" that has flowed from you to Mother to me.
Please don't laugh at me. One day I shall marry and have a daughter. It amuses me to imagine how my daughter will rebel against me and regard her grandmother with affection. And then, I shall think that, just as people lived in the distant past and will continue to exist in the years to come, however difficult the present may be for me, I must live for tomorrow.
Now I know why I feel nostalgic about Wakayama. I could not have made this discovery or experienced this peace of mind and happiness if I had never been close to you."

I loved that letter and this book a little (ahem a lot) more because of it.
The third generation Hanako wrote this letter to her grandmother, Hana. Hana's daughter Fumio despised her mother for what she viewed as submissiveness and too keen an interest in the past ways of Japan. Hana would die in the Japan changed in WWII. I wish that Ariyoshi had not explained in words that Fumio despised her mother, that Hana believed a woman should act from a man's shadow. i lived with them when Hana listened to her husband's breathing at night. How she matched her own rhythms with those of her family said more to me about her riverliness than that could have. Being told and believing it aren't the same things. My name is Mariel Cathleen (thanks, Mom!) and that means I can be an MC too. It saved me when Hana felt close to her granddaughter by walking the same earth together. I get it now! This is what generations are all about. Taking on the name of a new family in marriage and giving her daughter a name like Fumio is MC like a rapper with samples from an '80s hits cassette. Hana's day to days were less backbeat and more uncredited hook from David Bowie and Queen teamed up to be Under Pressure. I love the book but can my animal costume please come without footy pajamas? We want to walk further than that.

But I loved Toyono loving Hana and Hana loving Hanaka. That's what Roger was talking about in 101 Dalmatians when he said "Melody first, my dear, then the lyrics." That's how days are made.