Granta 127: Japan by Yuka Igarashi

Author:Yuka Igarashi [Igarashi, Yuka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, Asian, Japanese, Philosophy, Movements, Phenomenology
ISBN: 9781905881772
Google: O_v1nQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1905881770
Publisher: Granta
Published: 2014-04-24T05:00:00+00:00

The guests now start to disperse; they know what formalities to expect, perhaps, but still they have tears in their eyes, and voices crack as they say goodbye, the way I can listen to the song that wiped me out at seventeen and still be fairly confident it will do the same now (if only because it brings back the memory of being seventeen, wide open). I think of the priest – he looked like an ageing Elvis, but he carried himself like a solemn man of Rome – and the place mats, on every one of which the groom has written a description of each of the eighty or so guests. I think of the Bach – it’s always Bach, I suspect – and yet ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ always stirs and uplifts.

Upstairs, in the third-floor Fitting Room, there are so many sobbing brides and kimonoed old women that people start welcoming the wrong grandmother, or thanking a bewildered-looking man who belongs to another wedding party. In the hallway, everyone is wiping off tears and mascara as the party from the next wedding streams out, in a similar state of emotional disarray. Our newly-weds are now in their room – part of the wedding package (though it’s not, I gather, the Moonlight Forest room, the Lovers’ Suite or any of the other love-hotel options, such as the View Bath Luna Suite).

A young boy from our group slips me a perfectly folded scrap of paper with a hand-drawn map on it. ‘We’re having a second party,’ he explains, in English. ‘Not far from here. In the park. Very relaxed. Lots of frisbees; kind of like a picnic. Please come.’

Outside, the bright autumnal sunshine catches flocks of kids heading back from a radiant day at Tokyo Disneyland nearby. I remember hearing that the wartime emperor, Hirohito, was buried with his Mickey Mouse wristwatch, the smallest thing changing value as it moves between cultures so that it becomes folly to laugh at any prop or to see it as out of context.

I’ve been to plenty of weddings in English churches where the women in broad hats whisper about the young Thai wife Charlie has brought back from his stint out East with Swire’s, or say, ‘Surely that woman couldn’t be a member of the bridal party?’ I’ve been to my share of New Age weddings in California where groom and bride stand barefoot above the ocean, a friend of theirs having acquired a certificate from the Universal Life Church to marry them, and recite Rumi before playing Van Morrison singing, ‘Have I told you lately that I love you …’.

I’ve even officiated at weddings in Californian gardens where the groom declaims from Shakespeare and the bride takes pains to prevent me from seeing how many previous husbands are listed on the certificate I’m obliged to sign.

But none has so affected or filled me up as this one. Somehow this seems more authentic, precisely because it’s planned so seamlessly, more full of feeling exactly because every moment is choreographed.

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