A Man of the Showa Era

On Sunday, the day before yesterday, my father was cremated.

We had planned a small ceremony at the crematorium with just the immediate family. But his brothers and sisters came, along with their sons and daughters, and in the end about twenty people gathered.

Just before the cremation, my father’s closest friend called out to him in his coffin:

“Hey, Matsuoka! Wait for me! I’ll be joining you soon!”

They had been together since elementary school and had known each other for almost eighty years. Those words carried a great deal of weight.

Afterward, all the relatives had a meal together.

My father’s younger sister and her husband were sitting across from me, so I asked them about the old days.

Her husband had worked at the same company as my father for thirty years and knew a great deal about that time.

“Your father was an incredible man!”

“There are so many stories about the things he did!”

I heard things like that, but honestly, they did not quite resonate with me.

When I was a child, my father was rarely home.

With only about one day off a month, he was something of a rare sight.

The only times I really talked with him were around the time I moved to Tokyo in my second year of junior high school, and when I went to visit him on my own in Kyoto during high school.

After that, I went to Britain, and we had little contact until he retired at sixty-one.

He did make an appearance at important moments, but unlike my mother, he always seemed somewhat foreign to me.

Work was all he was interested in, and building a relationship with him was difficult.

We celebrated his birthday every year. Two years ago, when we gave him his present, he simply said, “Ah,” and my mother scolded him:

“You’re supposed to say thank you!”

This year, on what turned out to be his last birthday, I handed him his present.

He said, “Sorry.”

Men of the Showa generation really are hopeless.

I suppose expressing gratitude to their families feels embarrassing.

But the day before he died, I was worried about him and drove to Kanagawa to see him.

He was clearly dehydrated, so I bought some oral rehydration solution and brought it with me.

I also made mizutaki, a simple hot pot, and rice porridge, thinking they would be easy for him to eat.

My father could barely eat anything.

Since continually buying oral rehydration solution did not seem practical, I wrote down a recipe for a substitute made with salt and sugar and handed it to him.

That was when my father said “Thank you” to me.

As it turned out, “thank you” were the last words he ever said to me.

My mother looked pleased as she watched this exchange between us.

He had managed to set things right at the very last moment… That was how it felt.