For a while, Canberra became home, not on the first try, not even on the second, but on the third, after a disastrous year spent in Kenya, where my father had a job flying for East African Airways. That’s when Mum called it quits, when I was fifteen. In an act of sheer self-preservation, she dug her heels in and declared she’d had enough. She told me she was never going to move again. It turned out not to be true, of course, because Canberra was too small for the both of them once my parents had divorced. We did stay there long enough for me to finish school and university—only a few years, but it felt like an eternity to me. And I did develop a love of the place, not the city itself, which is stultifying, but of the rolling, empty landscape around it, and the broad skies above it. When I was old enough, I took my mother’s car and drove all those wide, loopy roads leading out of town, just to see the country. Maybe that was me going home, back to those childhood voyages through days and nights of unfurling plains under their canopy of sky.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. When I left for England, I thought I was putting as much distance between me and home as possible. Over the next few years, I kept coming back to Australia—to see Mum, to make money—but escape continued to be my main aim in life, possibly my only aim. How else to explain the insouciance with which I got on a flight to Tokyo in 1982 with no real plan in mind, except to run away from Sydney, a city to which I’d decided I could never belong. Now I see it was only what my upbringing had trained me to do: pack up and move on, and never mind the consequences.
The consequences, in this instance, were only good. I’ve been travelling back and forth to Japan now for more than thirty years. Being married to Shin has meant learning as much as possible about where he is from, not just for my sake, but for the sake of our children. It hasn’t been easy. Because we decided to educate the children in Australia I have not spent as much time in Japan as I would have wished, and I’m not as fluent in the language as I’d like to be. But what I have lacked in expertise I hope I have made up for in enthusiasm. There is a lot to love about Japan. If I have a home in that country it would have to be in Arita, the old porcelain town. There are dozens of places in Japan I would just as happily return to: Shirakawa, in Kyoto, where the spring cherry blossoms explode in a pink blizzard at the hint of a breeze; Yanaka, in Tokyo, where the megacity retreats and the old narrow streets are a warren of small-town traders and hip bars; Mount Aso where you can sit in an onsen outside and watch the snow fall on the cedars. In all of these places, and so many more, I have imagined I could happily end my days. If they are not my home, then they are places that have marked me, shaped my sensibilities, created affinities. Added together, they take up the space in my heart where my home would be, if I had one.
Shin and I have lived in Brisbane since 1998. Our sons grew up and went to school here. My mother died and is buried here. I’ll die here myself. But Brisbane is not home to me. Not really. I’m a latecomer to this town. It still strikes me as an unlikely city, too raw and rough to take seriously. It does have its charms, however, and I do like the fact that on the streets of my neighbourhood I’m reminded all the time of my children when they were young, of my mother when she was still alive, of myself in a former life. So I’m attached to the place in that way, but not as attached as people I know who have lived here all their lives, and for whom the city is like a second skin. This is not the fault of Brisbane, it’s just that there is a level of belonging I can never aspire to and must live without.
In Arita, where we have our other home, they make handsome porcelain funeral urns. I have asked Shin to decorate one for my ashes, with his trademark laughing skeletons, and told him to keep it with him until he is ready to toss me out. Where he should scatter me is still a topic for debate. We had always talked about going to Okinawa together, because it’s a part of Japan we have never seen.
‘Maybe take me there,’ I tell him. ‘You and the boys. You could find a pristine beach somewhere and throw me in the sea.’
It’s just one idea among many, and not very practical. None of us has the slightest connection to Okinawa, so the gesture would probably be meaningless, if not downright offensive to the Okinawans, who take their homeland very seriously.
Another idea we’ve had is to divide my ashes and throw half of them into the Brisbane River. Shin could then take the other half to Japan and scatter them in the stream that runs through the centre of Arita. What worries me is that Shin might well leave the town at some point, once he grows bored with it, and move to somewhere new, veteran nomad that he is. The best argument in favour of this plan is that it would satisfy a symbolic purpose, reflecting the way my life has been divided between Australia and Japan for three decades.
If I’m honest, I don’t really care one way or another what becomes of me, so perhaps I’m not the right person to make the decision. The best thing might be for Shin and our sons to decide for themselves what to do. I’d prefer they make an arrangement that suits their needs and that brings them some comfort. I trust them to talk about it sensibly in a way that Sarah and Eliot and I could never discuss these matters. And I trust they’ll be together on the day they dispose of my remains, so they can offer each other support. I’d urge them to go off to a bar together afterwards and grieve for me over a couple of drinks, because I know that’s what I’d do, if I was in their situation.
III
Endings and Beginnings
The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto explains his obsession with the sea as stemming from an early childhood memory. He is travelling on a train with his parents. The track hugs the coastline, entering a series of short tunnels—light, dark, light, dark, light, dark—then emerges to reveal the bright sea stretched out in front of him all the way to the horizon. At that point, he claims, he comes into consciousness. This is me, here, now, seeing this—the sea, the sky, the sun.
Ever since I heard this story I’ve tried to remember my own moment of coming into consciousness. It’s not my earliest memory—an insignificant recollection of playing in mud—but the time I saw a kookaburra swoop down from a branch to spear a skink and gobble it down live. This is what dragged me out of unconsciousness. This is me here, I thought, and that is you there, and where there was a skink there is nothing. Sugimoto also claims that immediately following his awakening to his existence he experienced a premonition of his death, and I’m prepared to believe him, because it was certainly that way for me. The skink’s disappearance was explicit. Things live until they die. Consciousness begins and then it ends.
How it ends I’m only now discovering. I can only speak for me, of course, and everyone is different, but dying slowly, as I’m doing, feels like a retreat from consciousness back to the oblivion that precedes it. This retreat is led by the body, which grows weaker and weaker, requiring less and less fuel and more and more rest, until a few trips to the bathroom and back are all the exertion you can manage in a day. I am no longer shocked by how feeble I am. My body is a dying animal. It is ugly and deformed, a burden I would like to lay down if only I could. But the body has its own schedule in the matter of dying, and its own methods, none of which I understand.