Momotarō
about my grandmother in Okayama
Short updates:
In addition to Ballaké Sissoko et al. in March, which I talked about last time, we’re going to see A Raisin in the Sun at Court Theatre next week, and Kishi Bashi at the Auditorium Theater in April. I guess we’re settling into a one-date-a-month routine.
Paczki day (aka Fat Tuesday) is March 4. We haven’t really found a replacement after Dinkel’s closed. I’m sure we’ll try some new ones.
I was reading the book How to Be an Epicurean by Catherine Wilson, which I don’t fully endorse because the author tries too hard to make the content contemporary for 2019 and I don’t think it’ll age well. But I did find this segment that perfectly captures the sentiment I was going for in my last post (the part that starts with “Another thread that I’ve been exploring”):
To experience oneself as part of this system [of living nature] is to feel at once diminished—since our petty concerns about being liked and disliked, successful or ignored, rich or strapped for money to fulfill consumer ambitions, can come to feel trivial—and at the same time enlarged. The very fact of having been produced by mindless atoms and yet having a mind; of having been produced by blind forces and yet having direction and purpose, can seem miraculous. We become aware of our good fortune in existing in a vast and—for all practical, if not theoretical, purposes—otherwise lifeless universe.
The eating, drinking and mirthfulness of any social animal are not in every way different from our own. The Epicurean philosophers were more concerned to break down exalted human pride in our species than to puff it up by echoing the more usual views about human exceptionality. But as far as we know, we are the only species that can put pleasure in vitality and sadness over any death that is too abrupt a departure from the ‘feast of life’ into the wider context of life and beauty.
No, I won’t be talking about the Japanese restaurant Momotaro in West Loop1. This is about what it’s named after.
My older son, who recently turned 3, was asking me to read a particular picture book to him almost every day in January. And this was Momotarō. Momotarō just might be the most famous folk tale in Japan. If you ask a Japanese person to tell you the story of Momotarō, you’ll almost certainly get something like this:
A long time ago, an old man and an old woman lived together in a village. The man goes to the mountain to get firewood, while the woman goes to the river to do the washing2. As the woman is washing at the river, she sees a large peach, floating down the river3. Surprised, she takes it home to share with the old man.
Back at home, as she is about to cut the peach, it splits open on its own, and out comes a baby boy. The couple names him Momotarō (basically “peach boy”), and raises him as their own child.
As the boy grows to be a strong young man, he learns that oni (ogres) are pillaging all the nearby villages. So he decides to raid Onigashima (literally “island of the ogres”) to put a stop to it. The old couple makes him kibi dango (millet dumplings) for the road, which are apparently great for fighting. Momotarō befriends a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant on the way by giving them the dumplings. With their help, Momotarō defeats the oni, and everyone lives happily ever after.
You may have some questions, like why peach? Why dog, monkey, and pheasant? The question that came up in my head was, why is this story making me think of my grandmother every time?
My grandmother in Okayama, at 96-years old, is my only living grandparent at this point. Early in January, we learned that she caught the flu and was unable to eat for many days, making us fear the worst—I guess one message to you is to get your flu shot, so that you can protect people like her a little better.
Her situation seems more stable now, but the episode made it clear that I may not necessarily see her again. I think I had been operating under that assumption, but it’s still painful to be confronted with that.
Now, why does the story of Momotarō make me think of her?
First, it’s not every book that has a picture of an old Japanese woman, so that’s one reason.
Second, a lot of people think Okayama is where the Momotarō story came from4. There is a statue of Momotarō with his animal friends in front of the Okayama station, and they even named a big road extending from the station after Momotarō.
Kibi, that word for millet, happens to sound the same as an old name for the region around Okayama. So there’s traditional sweets called Kibi dango, as in dumplings from the Kibi region. And Kōeido, the most famous producer of this confection, have gone all-in with the idea that these are the dumplings in the Momotarō story.
A note on these sweets: Kibi dango is a very good souvenir. You can buy them at the Okayama station or depachika, the food section in department store basements. They are soft mochi balls with delicate sweetness that go great with tea—exactly what you hope for from depachika Japanese sweets.
But you can do even better with Kibi daifuku from the same shop, where the same mochi surrounds some red bean filling. Where Kibi dango can get a bit monotonous, the red beans in the daifuku give you a great contrast. This is top-tier even in the competitive field of depachika sweets.
Finally, the peach in the story reminds me of summers I spent in Okayama as a kid with my grandparents—which I’ve already written about:
When I was in elementary school, I remember visiting my grandparents in Okayama during summer breaks. They would buy white peaches that grew ripe on the tree at a peach farm nearby. Those were about the juiciest peaches anywhere, and it was messy. And Grandma being a grandma, once she figured out that I liked peaches, she gave me a lot of them. Even accounting for the nostalgia factor, I think these are still the best peaches I’ve had.
Here’s the outline of my grandmother’s life, as I understand it.
She grew up in Engaru, Hokkaido, one of the coldest and remotest parts of Japan, where her father worked at a boarding school for kids with behavioral problems—essentially boys who were at risk of getting locked up. She was raised at the school with these boys.
She was a teenager at the end of World War II. Her future husband was slightly older, being in training near Hiroshima where he saw the mushroom cloud5. He went into child education after the war, which I believe is how they met.
In the 1950s, she gave birth to two sons—my uncle and my father. By all accounts, they were extremely rambunctious, and she routinely had to go around the neighborhood apologizing for whatever trouble they caused. Since my first son was born, and especially since my second son was born last year, I’ve felt a strong affinity to boy parents, and she’s one of the people that I think of in that context…although, I don’t imagine us having to go around apologizing for the boys with any regularity6.
I realize I’m doing the thing where I’m defining a woman’s life by the men around her. I suspect this reflects the time and place she lived in, and that includes how reluctant she was to tell her grandson details about her life7. But she did have an outlet for expressing her feelings and reactions to her surroundings, and that was tanka.
Everyone knows about haiku now, but did you know that haiku developed from a slightly longer poetry form called tanka? Where haiku consists of 3 lines, with syllable counts of 5-7-5, tanka consists of 5 lines, with syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-78. People have been writing tanka since at least the 8th century9.
My grandmother was writing tanka when I was growing up. She published a collection in the early 90s, which I should read the next time I visit my parents or Okayama. I don’t know exactly when she started, but considering the number of these short poems that fit in a single page, and how the collection surely only contains a small fraction of what she wrote, she must have been writing more than a poem a day for many years.
Selfishly, I only know about the poems that I’m in—my parents helpfully bookmarked the pages. In one of them, she’s describing a phone call, where I sang her a well-known kid’s song called “Shabon Dama” (“bubbles”). So this is another kid’s thing that will always remind me of her.
What I’m listening to now
Here’s another mini-genre that shows up on my Spotify from time to time: Turkish psychedelia. I’m no expert on Turkish music, but it seems to have a lot of “exotic” elements that psychedelic bands were experimenting with in the 60s, so it makes sense that there’s a lot of bands digging in this mine—you can say the same about Southeast Asian music.
This whole album by Kit Sebastian is a vibe, and I’m not sure if I have a particular favorite song. This feels like something you should just immerse yourself in.
What’s interesting about Turkish psychedelic music is that so many bands are based outside of Turkey. Kit Sebastian formed in the UK, and I can think of others like Altin Gün10 (the Netherlands), Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek (Germany), and Şatellites (Israel). I do know that the Turkish diaspora is very large in Europe (over 10 million people), so I’m not sure if I should be surprised that there’s so many very good Turkish bands outside Turkey.
The only Turkish band in Turkey that I remember listening to is Baba Zula. If you’re a Turkish music lover, I’d welcome suggestions on what to listen to.
Which I somehow haven’t been to, yet. We did order delivery from them during the pandemic. It was good.
We have been to their sister restaurant Itoko in Lakeview and we liked it. We’ve also ordered their turkey curry pot pie for Thanksgiving for the past 2 years.
I can’t resist linking to this. “Mum Does The Washing”, by Joshua Idehen:
Hilariously, there’s an onomatopoeia, どんぶらこ (donburako), that is used to describe the giant peach floating down the river in this story, and is never used in any other context.
Where is it really from? I’m not sure.
My other grandfather was almost a decade older than them, and fought in the war. He didn’t talk much about it, other than about the bullets that were still in his thigh and how they got in there.
We’ll see how “free-range” they can get.
My other grandmother had a 2-year college education, but when I asked her about it, she pretended she’d forgotten about it.
Actually, I heard very few of these stories about my grandparents from their own mouths. My maternal grandfather was by far the most forthcoming with personal stories, and they were mostly about baseball or hiking.
There’s actually kind of a “musical” reason for why these lines have 5 or 7 syllables. Japanese syllables are very consistent in the amount of time they’re pronounced for, and this is what happens with these poems: Each line takes up 8 beats. If there’s 5 syllables in a line, you take 5 beats to read it and rest for 3 beats. If there’s 7 syllables, that’s 7 beats to read it and 1 beat of rest.
English syllables don’t have consistent length, so there really isn’t a reason to do 5-7-5 in English other than as a curiosity.
There was a tradition, kind of a game, called renga, where one person writes the first 3 lines of a tanka, and another person completes the poem by writing the last 2 lines—I imagine these people were writing poems on the regular and improvising wasn’t a problem. Eventually, writing the first 3 lines became its own art form, and that’s haiku.
Last year, I saw someone wearing an Altin Gün shirt on a sidewalk in Ravenswood, and I still regret not complimenting them on it.
Good update! You're still the only substack I look forward to, always something unexpected!