It reappeared in my life carefully layered in tissue paper and bubble wrap, part of one of the semi-regular care packages I still receive from my mother. Over the years, I had become used to her sending me random items from my childhood: photos, jewelry my late father had made for my sister and I, favorite books, battered kokeshi dolls and copies of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, even old vaccination cards; objects from a life where the person I was now felt distant in relation to the person I was then. The small parcel was flat and circular, but I couldn’t guess what it was until the wrappings were torn away.
A round wooden frame held a painting on now-yellowing paper, the once pure black fading. It was one the first pieces of art I created as a child, made with my mother’s sumi ink, which was part of a burnt-orange, gold, and black lacquer-boxed sumi-e (black ink painting) set she brought with her on moving to America from Japan to marry my father around 1970. She would from then on be a Japanese woman framed by Western culture, just as the painting would come to represent my life in three cultures.
I remember observing her when I was little: both of us sitting at the kitchen table where I watched as she would carefully add water to a hollow in the rectangular black sumi block, pick up a black stone—this one small and narrow with white scrolling—and move it carefully back and forth in deliberate, undulating strokes in the hollow until the two combined to thicken and form a small pool. She would then select a bamboo-handled brush from the box, dip it into the ink, and practice her calligraphy. They were large but extremely light with perfect balance, giving an illusion of awkwardness in the way seed head dandelions feel they should be heavier than they are when plucked and in the hand. The motions of this ritual seemed organic to my young mind; a natural extension of her breathing, her fingers, her thinking, herself.
Years on, I would discover Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, his book of observations on Japan, and read the following: ‘as for the brush, it has its gestures, as if it were the finger … it has the carnal, lubrified flexibility of the hand.’ Being as yet unaware of any meaning of carnality, I likened it then and even now in my memory to a kind of lullaby; half-somnolent, half-hypnotic in its scent, appearance, and sounds. Much later, ink itself would subsume carnality and elegance, possibility and imagination as the fount of my becoming. For the time being it remained cloaked in the wonder of naïvete.
Though a washi pad was part of the sumi-e set, she used it sparingly, no doubt because there was nowhere she could have easily purchased another back then. As I watched, I sometimes opened the pad to stroke the textured paper. Its contrast of rough and silky was so different from the Western paper I knew, yet it was instinctually understood somewhere in the depths of my bones. What might come across as cliché was nevertheless a truth; unexplainable and ever-present. Often her work was done, as were most of our drawings and paintings, on spare, smooth, company-headed paper, drafting film my father brought home from his job as an industrial designer. Looking back, the contrast of the light, almost ethereal brushstrokes on paper which would have normally held technical drawings for machine parts was part of ink’s ability to be simultaneously relevant in both the present and past, tradition and modernity, a chameleon of time and culture.
In her practice, she remained connected with Japan while being present in Wisconsin. Living in two cultures this way, ink became her way of accessing an absence which reminded her of who she was in a place where she knew only one or two people like herself. Before she assimilated into her new life, I saw my mother first as wholly Japanese, navigating the strange by holding on to the familiar.
I have sometimes considered the seeming absurdity of attempting to physically grasp a liquid which would only run over the fingers and wrists. But it is far from absurd. What it reveals is the seriousness of ink’s purpose: to penetrate, permeate, and indelibly mark, with a sensuality lying just beneath its tranquil surface, waiting to be awakened. This realisation would come in full later on when I discovered shunga, Japanese erotic ukiyo-e, woodcut prints.
Barthes reflects upon the gesture of the calligraphy brush and writing but barely mentions the preliminary act of creating the ink, from where all gestures and meaning flow. He only writes of ‘the brush (passed across a faintly moistened inkstone)’. But in this context, there would be no brush without ink. Ink is a source—a beginning, where my mother had gone back to again and again to remember, in order to move forward. More than the calligraphy itself, I remember the quiet scrape of stone on stone contact and the liquid which came forth; dark but rippling with light, empty but full. An abyss, a universe, possibility. I now see the repetition as a gestural incantation done in honor of memory but also in protection; not just for herself but for me, a child born to the in-between, or Ma.
In as random a connection as only the universe could create, my parents met in Israel in the late 60s. My mother was a Japanese university student at the time, on an abroad program. My father was travelling Europe and the Middle East after time spent in a military academy and the army. They thought enough of each other that an epistolary relationship ensued, and he eventually proposed via letter, sometime after which she moved to Wisconsin. I was born in the mid-Seventies; you could say I was the result of ink as much as the physiological white liquid of conception. Romantic, perhaps, but now it does not seem farfetched that it alongside blood, ink was present inside of me even then, waiting for me to follow where it led.
The late 70s and early 80s were a period of time where multiculturalism was not a given in all American cities. For a long time, I remember we knew four other families where a spouse (in all cases, the wife) was Japanese, and of those, two were in the same city as us. Throughout my school days, I was the only half-Japanese student. Within the home, my life was simply my life. Outside of it, I saw elements of it which others had no familiarity. This was compounded by my parents being war and post-war (WWII) children themselves. While the years between my parents and the parents of my peers were not that great, it was enough culturally and historically to be vast in other ways, such as the relative austerity of their childhoods at that time vs the time of burgeoning consumerism and wealth of my friends’ parents. This is not to say I had an alienated childhood, in many ways it was simple and happy. The friends I had were friends in the truest sense: who I was only mattered because it was who I was. For people like that, no culture or practice is strange, it is just another thing in the world which opens the eyes to what exists.
There is a photo of me with one of the neighborhood children, with whom I used to play. He and I are sitting on the sofa in my house, smiling broadly. What we are wearing are not store costumes, though we are playing at superheroes; our capes are fashioned from my mother’s furoshiki cloth. When she is sent care packages by her sisters, my delighted friends are offered seaweed crackers, delicate biscuits, and elaborate candies. I lived in a world where I moved between a particular essence of Americanness which lies in consumption and consumerism, and its (traditional) Japanese counterpart, about the relationship between creator and creation, material and materiality.
I had both remembered and forgotten the painting in the contradictory way one stores some of the accumulated memories in their distant personal past. These things occupy a permanent place even as their particular meaning temporarily fades. They become a pleasant object on display in the mind, a memory you occasionally encounter but also stop actively engaging with.
This painting had hung for years, I imagine right up until the point my mother sent it to me, on one of the downstairs walls. My parents had framed and put it, pride of place and a little out of it too, next to a chaotic assortment of artwork and artefacts bought from garage sales and antique shops, brought back from travels or Japan, or painted by relatives which made our otherwise normal Midwestern living room look more like one of the packed rooms in London’s Victoria and Albert museum or Paris’s Louvre. Faux-gilded frames holding pastoral scenes crowded next to more copies of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, those were next to a cased hagoita (an elaborately decorated Japanese wooden shuttlecock paddle), a keffiyeh and knife my father brought back from his travels in the Middle East, and paintings of Cologne and seascapes by my German great-uncle, the painter Helmut Summ, considered one of the Wisconsin Modernists group. For years, the little blot painting sat among its elders, naïve amidst grand statements of subjects, part of a microcosm reflective of the cultures of the world.
So what was it I had painted? That’s a good question: neither my mother nor I know for certain. It looks like a squirrel or a mouse with a nut or similar in front of it, but it seems unlikely I deliberately intended to paint one when I was so young. I had simply painted some inkblots which happened to resemble it. But what is more interesting than the result of my childish endeavor is the possibility of the blots which appear to take the form of something specific to the eye; how the mind perceives, then organizes those shapes into something familiar, how each of those images can be interpreted in different ways. Ink is a material, but in another way, it is a medium: it divines our unconscious and compels us to see into ourselves. In our human story, the mystic has always existed alongside the practical. This opaque liquid is the embodiment of those things, the combination rendering our lives and desires transparent.
We learn by sensory observation and repetition. The importance which the people close to us bestow upon certain things or acts cannot help up extend its reach towards us. Even if we do not take them on for ourselves in the way they do, the imprint or mark remains even as it changes infinitesimally, necessarily, through our perception and experiences. The shape of a memory is never static. Emotions and feelings escape their boundaries, bleeding into others. What is recalled at one point in a life may take on a completely different character when later revisited; in a way they are like Rorschach’s famous inkblots. What do you remember, what do you see? Look again.