It’s a Mediocre New Year
By Cheryl M.
I have a simple family.
Me, my brother, my mother, my father, my grandmother and the dog.
So it should be a simple family reunion.
Me, my brother, my mother, my father, my grandmother and the dog, except my grandmother thinks the dog is my grandfather.
My real grandfather died a few years ago. He was 90 years old and went in his sleep without fanfare. My father thought Grandma would be lonely, so when we heard our neighbours were giving up their old Akita dog it was his idea to adopt it as her new companion.
It never even got its own name. Before we knew it Grandma began calling it Masao, and that’s how an elderly white dog became my grandfather. I see him every New Year when I take a break from my job at a bank in Tokyo and go back to my rural hometown in Fukuoka.
It’s the day before New Year’s Eve and I’m almost at the end of my journey. From Tokyo it takes a plane, two buses and thirty minutes by foot to get to my family’s house. As I walk along the fields I wonder if Grandpa’s gotten fat. The last time I saw him, his belly was starting to sag.
My family home finally surfaces out of the distance. It’s an old house with a rickety wooden veranda, patched with dirt and wear and surrounded by the small green fields where my family grows vegetables. In the middle of the green is a dark round dot that vaguely resembles a walnut. My eyesight has been getting worse. As I approach, the walnut starts waving.
I call out: “Hello, Grandma.”
My grandmother is bundled up in her old brown parka, digging up taro roots from the ground with our white dog faithfully watching by her side. Her back is hunched over in a dome and her rough wrinkled hands look like a pair of ginger roots, but the taro roots are completely at her mercy. She wrenches another cluster out of the soil. The dog barks and Grandma finally looks up.
“Oh, it’s Haru!” Grandma lets the muddy cluster drop back to the ground. She shuffles over and wrenches me off my feet into a hug with the same force she gives her harvest, and I feel just like one of the taro roots squeezed between her puffy brown parka.
“It’s good to see you, Grandma.”
“You’re still working at the bank, aren’t you? My clever granddaughter. Last week they were airing a TV show about the blockchain and its impact on fraud reduction, and I had it recorded for you.” My grandmother lets go of me and reaches down to pat the panting dog at her feet. “Say hello to your grandfather. He’s missed you.”
That’s the thing about Grandma. She discusses banking and finance trends with the coherence of a high-powered CEO but also tells me to greet my grandfather the dog. There are typically three emotions when I meet Grandma: joy, grief, and cognitive dissonance. I pet the dog anyway and obediently greet him: “You look healthy, Grandpa.”
My mom is in the kitchen making osechi for the New Year. Lacquered box tiers are spread out on one of the counters, some empty and some filled with food. Shiny black soy beans, sweet omelet rolls, cross-sections of lotus roots with gaping holes. Burdock roots pecked with sesame seeds, tiny herring fish wrapped warm in a blanket of black seaweed. Fish with mouths gaping open as if they were left in shock after being grilled.
Next to this abundant pile of food is another smaller pile, which looks identical but a tiny bit smaller in scale. Scattered around it are several emptied tins of dog food. My mom scoops them out with her long thin fingers and gets to work shaping and molding them until they look exactly like the food she’s prepared for the humans.
She keeps well clear of the salt, making sure everything is bland and healthy for our old dog. As far as Grandma is concerned, he belongs at the head of the dining table and eats the same food as the rest of the family.
But it also won’t do to poison the dog, so my mother makes canine-friendly substitutes.
She’s a good cook. Her dream had been to become a chef in the city, until she ended up in this village helping my father to take care of the vegetable farm. I’m not sure why she ever did that but I suppose it was for love. It certainly wasn’t potatoes.
A thumping sound comes from upstairs, where my older brother is cleaning the house for the New Year. Or so I thought. When I go upstairs to check on him, my brother isn’t cleaning. He’s in his bedroom holding a broomstick upside down his arms, waltzing around the room in between untouched piles of mess. Weird screechy music is playing out of the CD player. “It’s the Viennese waltz,” he explains as he maneuvers the broomstick on his shoulders.
My brother never leaves the house because there is nothing of interest to him outside of it. His only purpose in life is to stay at home watching videos of ballroom dance on his computer and practise in his room with the broomstick, because it’s the closest substitute to a female partner.
I watch with mild disappointment as he weaves in and out of the clutter. Empty bowls, old magazines, broken razors. “Natural turn, step step step, slowaway...” my brother murmurs into the broom’s ear. There isn’t anything to add so I leave them alone and head downstairs to find my father.
My father injured his back in the fall—the pumpkins he harvested this year had come in at record weight—so it seems he’s been spending a lot of time lying around. I find him in the family room eating mikan in the kotatsu, his skinny frame swallowed by the thick blanket. There’s a pile of mikan and flaky peels scattered around, but weirdly he doesn’t seem to be eating as much as concentrating on peeling them with a little knife.
I watch as he makes tiny little stabs into the thick orange skin while the fruits remain naked and untouched on the table. And is that a smartphone next to him? It must be new. He was still using a flip phone last year.
I approach his cocoon with a can of Asahi Super Dry and a box of butter cookies, which I know are his favorites. “Dad, long time no—”
“Not on the table!” He cries, whipping an arm between me and his orange fruit pile. I set the beer and cookies down on the floor instead. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry, I’m just in the middle of making my boar.”
“Your what?”
“My boar.” My father holds out a mangled mikan. “I’m cutting my mikan into the zodiac animals. Can’t you tell?”
I examine the carnage of peels in front of him and try to look for any form of identification. If I look closely enough I can see what looks like ears raggedly snipped into the orange skin and tails splintering off like they were torn down the middle. That could be a tiger, yes. Maybe that one’s the rat. But then I stop concentrating and they go back to looking like compost.
“What are you doing this for?” I ask my father.
“It’s for Twitter,” he says.
Unbelievable. My sixty-year-old farmer father is on Twitter. He must have discovered it on that new smartphone.
“Did you know thousands of people can see what you put on the Internet? The other day on TV they were interviewing this man who made sculptures out of his cat’s fur. So I thought, why not do the same with all this mikan we grow. I’m going to sculpt animals and shapes out of them and show them on Twitter. Perhaps people will want to come and buy our produce.”
The ravaged mikan look a bit too worse for wear for anyone to want to buy them. But I am rather impressed by my father’s entrepreneurial ambition and apparent acquaintance with viral social media, so I stay kind and quiet.
He finally notices the beer and cookies.
“Oh thank you, you brought those cookies I like. I know you’re earning lots of money now but you don’t have to buy these expensive gifts every time.”
I give my father’s hand a pat. “It’s not a problem, they’re my souvenir from Tokyo.”
“My good daughter. You’re a successful working woman who still remembers my favorite sweets from...” he peers at the label on the cookies. “Famima Cafe and Sweets.”
Just then the dog comes out of nowhere and plunges his nose into the mikan before taking a bite out of one of them and sending my father’s mikan flying across the table.
“Not the mikan!” He yelps in indignation and bats the dog away, and the dog yelps in indignation.
“Masao!” My grandmother comes tottering into the house with arms full of radishes. “It’s not time to eat yet!” She grabs Grandpa by the collar and drags him away whimpering in the direction of the kitchen.
The scattered debris of peels looks even more forlorn now, so I spend the rest of the afternoon helping my father cut animals out of mikan. But neither of us have much artistic sense, so the poor animals remain unrecognizable and unlikely to ever see the light of viral success.
It’s the last hour of the year. We’re sitting around the table with Grandpa at the head, panting over his bowl of toshikoshi soba (pureed senior dog chow squeezed out of a piping bag). Next to him is Grandma, with her own bowl of soba. She still insists on having it even though most of her teeth are gone and she can’t chew very well. Once she choked on the noodles when they slipped past and down her throat, and we welcomed the new year in a car enroute to hospital. So now she cuts up her noodles into small pieces which makes it easier to eat, but also cancels out the whole idea in the beginning. Practical longevity, I guess.
Every New Year’s Eve the whole family would sit together for dinner just like they do every other day of the year, except our grandfather (the human one, when he was alive) would have everyone go around the table and talk about themselves. Grandma would talk about her vegetables and my brother would tell us about the new dancers at Blackpool every year. They seemed to get younger and younger as he got older and older. My parents would sum up their year the exact same year they always did: It was good and we’re looking forward to another good year.
I think Grandpa liked my sharings best, because I was the only one who had left for the city and brought home stories and treats from a place far away. I tell my family about the people and the buildings and the lights in Tokyo, describing at length the bank I work for and the view of the endless city from the top of their fifty-storey building. The floors are lined with sleek desks and the windows are shiny and spotless; you can see your reflection in the glass as it floats above the concrete density below. It makes you feel larger than life and a million miles away from the countryside where our lives are stocked in a farm. Grandpa appreciated hearing these stories.
Now I find myself telling them all to an old white dog instead. He looks interested enough. His droopy tongue is hanging out as Grandma sits by him trying to lift noodles into it. They’re slipping uselessly around his snout and I want to tell my grandmother she can’t force feed a dog tradition. But she wants to pretend, so I just pretend along with her. We’re a family of pretenders anyway.
The New Year descends as silently as a ladybird’s footsteps. Time gives a soft, short shudder—and then moves on. For the next few days we repeat tradition, performing every ritual and symbol like clockwork. Everything is well contained in this house, sowed and harvested exactly the same way and at exactly the same time every year.
When I return to Tokyo, the streets are as crowded and abuzz as ever. On the way to the bank I work at in Shinagawa, I stop by the convenience store. I get a bottle of water, the in-house brand on sale for 80 yen, and the box of butter cookies that my father likes. The cashier rings up my items, reciting my total like a robot that has just resumed operation.
Up on the 50th floor where a multinational banking corporation stakes out its fort, numbers are being crunched and words are being exchanged. The coffee machine is whirring away. The rough sounds of radishes emerging from the earth and dog pants have disappeared from my ears. I look out the window on the 50th floor—a light layer of dust that’s settled in the few days no one was here. I wipe at it and now it’s clear again. I can see myself standing in my janitor’s uniform, holding a bucket and cleaning wipes. I wipe again, and the city comes back into view around me.
It’s going to be another mediocre year.