Father

Father’s life in Japan is shaped by an attachment that becomes both a vocation and a family inheritance: he arrives as a diplomat, falls in love with the country, and takes up Noh. His daughter remembers him through scenes that do not settle into a single portrait. He can be carried away by cultural discovery, bewilder her with the voice of a performer, or quietly let her splash through floodwater at his side.

Identity and Background

In 1967, Father left Belgium for Osaka to serve as consul. It was his first posting in Asia, and Japan quickly became, in the narrator’s account, the love of his life. His enthusiasm preceded his command of the language: an interpreter accompanied him on his explorations, translating and introducing him to Japanese culture. That early dependence on a guide became the route to an art form that would transform his public and private identity.

His enthusiasm also appears in the family’s response to the narrator’s awakening. When the child emerged from her earlier, less responsive state, Father felt as if he had a newborn and called his mother in Brussels to announce that the Plant had woken up, urging her to come to Japan. The grandmother delayed her journey to have suits made; she stayed only a month, but the visit and its pleasures coincided with the child becoming, in her parents’ eyes, more or less normal. Their relief was great enough that they began calling her by her first name. Father’s excitement makes the change feel not merely like a developmental milestone but like the arrival of a child he could finally recognize.

Noh and the Public Father

The interpreter introduced Father to Noh by taking him to a renowned school in Kansai, where the master teacher was regarded as a Living Treasure. At the time, the narrator recalls, Westerners tended to be closed to Noh even as they admired kabuki. Father, by contrast, approached the performance with the fervor of a beginner. He felt as though he had stepped a thousand years into the past. The singing intensified that impression: its first sound to him was like prehistoric rumbling, and the historical world of the performance provoked the nervous hilarity of someone looking at panoramas in a museum.

The art that first struck Father as strange became something he himself performed. Years later, the narrator watched him enter a temple garden where the ritual Noh setting had been arranged outdoors. He wore a Japanese costume and moved deliberately. Before he sang, she felt pride in him. Then his familiar voice became, to her, an unrecognizable howl coming from his stomach. She feared that something had happened to him and wanted to escape, comparing her impulse to the urge to cry after witnessing an accident. Her mother had prepared her for singing, but the sound was frightening rather than pleasing. The contrast reveals how differently the same art could be experienced: what had drawn Father into Japan’s cultural world appeared to his young daughter as a disturbing rupture in the person she knew.

Father and Daughter in the Flood

Away from the stage, one of the narrator’s most intimate memories of Father unfolds during the rainy season. Little Green Lake had nearly doubled in size, overflowing the azalea bushes; at times there was nowhere to swim, and the child could feel flowering shrubs beneath her feet in the water. When the rain paused, Father held out his hand and invited her to walk with him through the flooded streets.

She loved these walks. Father would become absorbed in his thoughts and let her do what she pleased. She jumped with both feet into the torrent running along the curbs, soaking her dress and his trousers. Her mother would not have allowed it, but Father seemed not to notice. The episode presents his care less as instruction than as a permissive closeness: he offers his hand, accompanies her, and leaves room for her unruly delight.

The walk fixes that freedom in a particular landscape. Their neighborhood was quiet and beautiful, with tiled walls and ginkgo trees overhanging from gardens; the street became a path winding beside the mountain toward Little Green Lake. Holding Father’s hand there, the narrator felt, for the only time in her life, profoundly at home. The memory makes his presence part of a larger feeling of rightness: the flooded streets, the gardened walls, the lake, and the child herself seemed to belong together.

Memory, Misrecognition, and Narrative Role

Father also becomes the focus of a child’s mistaken understanding of his work. The narrator was delighted by the idea that her father had a job connected with water. When her mother rushed her to identify the storm drain he had gone into, Father emerged as the sewer man, lifted from the drain with a rope by neighbors. A crowd had gathered to watch; he came out covered in miso-like mud, a spectacle the narrator describes as a mudman. The commotion taught her that he was not a drain-keeper and that his fall had been an accident. Her disappointment was double: she lost the pleasing idea of a family member working with water and had to work out again what consul meant. The episode turns an ordinary accident into a gap between a child’s imaginative account of her father and his actual diplomatic identity.

The narrator’s claims about memory give these scenes a particular weight. She says that White Chocolate gave her an identity and that she remembers everything after February 1970, while acknowledging that she does not recall every parental worry or conversation. Before that point, she has no memories and must rely on what others tell her; afterward, she presents her recollections as firsthand, while admitting that the claim cannot be proved or disproved and that she is increasingly uninterested in being believed. Father’s performance, their walk, and the drain accident thus belong to a sharply bounded remembered world, not to an exhaustive record of family life.

That boundary matters again when the narrator recalls her suicide attempt. She says she never told her parents that it had not been an accident, or told them what Kashima-san had done or failed to do. The scar on her left temple serves as material confirmation for an episode she sometimes wonders she dreamed or invented, but the account does not disclose Father’s knowledge or response. His place in the narrative is instead established through remembered acts and scenes: his exuberance at the child’s awakening, his devotion to Japan, his startling Noh voice, and the hand he extended across a flooded street. Together, they make him a figure through whom the narrator recalls both the strangeness of childhood and a rare, embodied sense of home.