| Beauty Surviving, Memories Enduring |
June 11, 2009
The stories of Mary Yukari Waters in the collection The Laws of Evening are simply wonderful. They are perfect renderings of those crucial but often fleeting moments when both life's beauty and its brevity are recognized. The stories are seamless, creating almost a novel about an extended Japanese family branching out through time and place. The stories range in setting from the days before World War II, to the difficult years of the war and the years after, and coming up to the present time, to a modern Japan still in touch with the old ways of the alleys, the shrines, and the rituals. Waters' characters have faced crises but the stories don't deal with the crises: they deal with the aftermath, the survival, the facing of mortality not with fear but instead with gratitude, or regret, or simple acceptance.
Every story is simple yet exquisite; the simplicity is deceptive because after finishing a story, the layers of understanding unfolded in my mind. I could look back and find in the story the most beautifully wrought sentences conveying the core what it means to be human. Waters relates with utter naturalness the difficult condition of adulthood, of living with full knowledge of both the sorrows and the joys that make up life. Children and animals are exempt from that knowledge: it takes a mind that can process both memories and hope to understand the cyclical nature of life, the ups and downs. One character says, "My whole life has been a process of losing security. Or identity. Perhaps they are the same thing." Life changed in leaps and bounds, often torturously, for Japan in the twentieth century. Waters examines what is held onto (memory) and what is looked forward to (hope) and what remains (the survivors).
Both memory and hope are themes throughout the stories and Waters handles the themes without melodrama or excess. Her characters must work out for themselves the tools of their survival against the worst of loss, pain, and longing. Her characters are far from perfect, they are very real with their flaws and their warts. And yet they are amazing because of their commitment to being worthy of life: "nobility of spirit was the grace -- or ability -- to move through this world voluntarily, as a game or a dance."
In one story, Waters likens memories to seeds that are scattered, without plan, some taking root in our brains and some disappearing forever: "Masae felt this moment shrink into memory, shriveling and gathering into a small hot point in her chest: a stray seed, It could have so easily been lost." Another characters talks of the memory of losing her son and husband in a bombing: "Only occasionally now it will seep into my body, staining my saliva with a faint coppery taste, which makes me think that somewhere, within the tissues and nerves of my body, I am bleeding." The layering of memories is also explored: "surely tonight's festival owed its luster to all that lay beneath, to all those other evenings of her past that emit a lingering phosphoresce through tonight's surface."
Hope is found both in rituals of the past and in recognition of the relentlessness of life: "The dappled lead shadows moving over the earth like dark cells, the entirety of this garden harmonizing and fusing -- plants, with carbon dioxide and sunlight; soil, with water from her plastic can; herself, with all the kami [spirits] that have only now begun revealing themselves but have always existed, shifting and rotating in slow timeless patterns...In the end, being alive is what matters."
Hope is also something that can survive, no matter how irrational: a granddaughter tells of sounding like her dead mother over the phone and how her grandmother "would have a crazy lurch of hope that Mother's death has all been a big mistake." I understand that line too well: I still will hear something or see something and for one crazy moment, I will be sure that my sister is still alive and reachable. Does that hope hurt me or does it allow me one moment of respite from the reality of her death? I want the respite, no matter how short; when I dream of her, I have the same feeling of relief.
Hope is not limited to the young: even the very old can have it, even when others have written them off as senile or feeble. An older woman in one of the stories has the sensation of being in both past and present, seeing in her grandson both himself and his father, her son: "For a fleeting instant her mind was vast enough, strong enough, to inhabit both afternoons at once....She knew her mind to be strengthening, widening..." The peace she had been hoping for comes with her sudden understanding of past and present.
Waters has a character quote lines from a Masahide poem: "Since my house burned down/ I now own a better view/ of the rising moon." The simplicity and force of those lines are what Waters stories are like: beautiful, natural, and yet disciplined. Waters exercises a very lithe pen to reveal the heaviest of truths in these most beautiful of stories.
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