As thoughts of watermelons open a window to the past, it becomes clear the significance the seemingly-mundane may hold…
by: Ava Lee Kawamura
We were on our way back from the supermarket when my grandmother began to tell me a story about watermelons.
It was one of those excruciatingly hot summer days in Tokyo, the kind where the sunbeams so heavily upon the ground that mist begins to rise from the earth and form the slightest mirage. The air felt thick and tar-like, punishing the lungs that struggled to take in and push out our weighty breaths. Yet despite the manual labor required for each step we took, Bachan continued with her story.
“He and his friends used to steal watermelons from the farm nearby, back in college — Jichan, you know. I guess the landowners never noticed, or maybe they did and just let it be. Who knows.”
I’m still not exactly sure why Bachan chose to tell this particular story. I had just asked to hear about her and my grandfather’s university experiences, prompted by our walk through the college campus neighboring their apartment building. But if there was anything I had learned that summer, it was that nothing could stop Bachan once she began to tell a story.
We rounded the final corner, with my grandparents’ building finally visible at the end of the block. Bachan was rambling at this point. “I don’t know why he did such a thing. Maybe he was hungry?” “Watermelon would be great right about now,” I replied, wiping the droplet of sweat that had traced a path from my hairline to my brow. Glancing over at Bachan, I saw her face was uncharacteristically flush, even her body — normally conditioned to the oppressive Tokyo heat — struggling to put up with the day’s extreme temperature. I shifted the bags of delicately packaged vegetables, freshly caught fish, and melting tubs of miso paste bought to replenish their deteriorating reserves, while I sought for the cool, air-conditioned lobby air to rush out and overwhelm my sticky skin, mercifully unleashed by the glass floodgates of the automatic door.
Upstairs, Jichan sat waiting. I immediately inquired about his juvenile thievery. “Watermelon? You got watermelon?” he asked, confused, his eyes curiously peering into the bags that had just landed on the kitchen counter. “Never mind,” I said with a smile, not wanting to get his hopes up for a phantom fruit. I never brought up the topic again.
Over the years, I have come to realize how everything around me is entangled in associations, many of which blur the boundaries of sensory experience. Objects become verbose conversations, words become mental windows, and scents become long-lost memories that will forever exist only in the intangible realm. I am never aware of when these threads of connection emerge; it is only after the fact, when I am suddenly transported to a moment days, months, or years prior — when a particular image or a phrase pulls on that thread — that I am able to recognize the significance the seemingly-mundane now holds. In this manner, it was months after that initial afternoon when I realized that watermelons, and the mere mention of them, have become a stimulant of this kind, catalyzing a mental chain reaction that always takes me back to that hot, summer day spent with Jichan and Bachan.
But before watermelons became windows to the past, my grandparents existed in my mind as blurred figures. It was hard to imagine Jichan as the young and deviant college student that Bachan described. It was hard to imagine him as anything other than my bespectacled, gray-haired grandfather who always wore crisp button-downs and slacks whenever he left the house, one of the core — and only — details I’d retained throughout my childhood. In fact, there exists a photo somewhere of me, my parents, and my grandparents at the summit of Mount Kintoki, just after completing a hike several hours long. My nine-year-old adolescent face is noticeably red and framed by sweaty strands of hair that clung desperately to my cheeks, but standing beside me is Jichan, who could have just as well been on his way to an important business meeting in his pristine attire.
Bachan had been more of a force than a human outline, a voice and a collection of stories told to, not by, me, some of which I convinced myself I remembered from the photographs of our interactions preserved by my father’s long-gone camera. But with the world quite literally separating us as I grew through infancy, adolescence, and my teenage years, I am ashamed to admit that she had been a shadow in my imagination, her identity never fully-understood or captured by our limited conversation.
And so I found myself in a shocking situation when, months later in New York, I saw a pile of watermelons in a grocery store — impossibly stacked in a precarious mound — and my mind instantly jumped to an image of Jichan as a young college student stealing fruit from a farm. It was a novel feeling, to associate something personal, however small, with someone you have grown close to, a detail that only few can say they know. What had been a miniscule anecdote uttered in passing had become an emblem of familiarity, a feeling of kinship and emotional connection that I had previously lacked.
It seems impossible to describe that feeling of realizing when you finally “know” someone; “relief” seems obliging, “satisfaction” condescending, “privileged” understating. Somewhere at the intersection of those emotions lies the feeling I describe, that emerges when you are in so deep you can envision what that person would say or do in a particular situation with almost unsettling confidence. But like the associations that creep up around us and are only realized upon their full formation, I am never sure of the boundary that demarcates who I do and do not know. My best guess, though, is that it comes in tiny increments, through the privilege of proximity, and through stories like that of watermelons and excruciating heat. It was through a combination of these factors that my summer in Tokyo transformed from an initial attempt to find personal escape into a collection of packaged memories and parceled associations that have granted me the gift of familiarity.
