Osaka

Osaka is both the base of Father’s first diplomatic posting in Asia and a formative, though only partly understood, setting in the narrator’s childhood. It connects his discovery of Japanese cultural life with the child’s early familiarity with polluted Osaka Bay and the later journey to the Sea of Japan.

The Diplomatic Posting

In 1967, Father left Belgium for Osaka to serve as consul. It was his first posting in Asia, and he fell in love with Japan almost immediately. The narrator’s family was living in Japan during these years, but the child had little understanding of Father’s working life: at two, the narrator knew only that he came home in the evening, not where he had been during the day.

Father’s enthusiasm for Japan led him to seek out its cultural traditions. Because he did not yet speak the language, an interpreter accompanied him and acted as a guide to Japanese culture. She introduced him to Noh, taking him to a celebrated school in Kansai to see a performance. What began as a diplomatic posting thus became the setting for an intense artistic education.

Father’s Noh Apprenticeship

During the five years he worked at the Osaka consulate, Father took a three-hour Noh lesson every day with the school’s venerable master. The relationship between teacher and pupil grew into a strong bond of friendship and respect. Father became a Noh performer of some accomplishment and was known throughout Japan as the Singer of Noh with Blue Eyes.

The narrator learned the explanation for this unexpected career only twenty years later. That retrospective revelation contrasts with the child’s earlier view of Osaka: the city belonged to Father’s unseen daytime life, while the artistic transformation it enabled was not yet part of the narrator’s knowledge.

Osaka Bay and the Child’s Geography

Osaka also entered the narrator’s early sense of the surrounding country through its bay. The narrator already knew what the sea was from becoming somewhat familiar with Osaka Bay, described as a cesspool at the time; swimming there was out of the question. In April, the family crossed to the other side of the country and went to Tottori, where the narrator encountered the Sea of Japan and was captivated by it.

The contrast gives Osaka a practical place in the narrator’s childhood map: its bay supplied an acquaintance with the sea, but not a safe place to swim. The journey to Tottori turned that limited familiarity into a first encounter with the open shore. The narrator recalls approaching the water with both fear and desire, while Mother took the child by the hand and led the way in.

Retrospective Significance

Osaka links two forms of experience that the narrator could not initially join together. The city was the setting for Father’s work and daily Noh training, yet those activities remained opaque to the two-year-old who watched him return home each evening. Only later did the narrator understand how Japan, and the Osaka posting in particular, had redirected Father’s life toward traditional performance.

For the child, meanwhile, Osaka was more immediately legible through its unusable bay and the journey away from it. The city therefore marks both a family’s cultural immersion in Japan and the limits of the narrator’s early knowledge: the adult life taking shape around the consulate lay beyond the child’s understanding, while the difference between polluted bay water and the sea at Tottori could be felt directly.