MOVING  AN  ARMY

Although the weather up to moving day had been spring-like and almost balmy, when we woke up on the day itself, we were surprised at how cold it was. All the furniture we had left was the things we were leaving for friends and neighbors and the futons we were sleeping on. We’d done a lot of packing over the past few weeks: every night we’d managed half a dozen boxes of books, say, or a couple of suitcases’ worth of children’s toys. I’d been around to all our friends and neighbors with things we could not take with us: packaged and canned goods, kitchen implements, children’s clothes and linens.  We’d sold a few of the nicer electrical appliances and gotten rid of piles of stuff that no one could possibly use. I could remember when we first arrived in Japan and had almost nothing – a few sticks of furniture, our portable Mothercare travel cot, some clothes and bedding and books.  In nine years, though, we seemed to have acquired enough stuff for a small army, let alone a family of four.

We had moved into our house when Hannah was just ten months old. She learned to walk in the tatami room next to the kitchen: one day she took a few faltering steps then stopped mid-stride and stood there, an amazed look on her face that seemed to say See that? See what I did? Our youngest, May, had first arrived as a newborn a few years later, one sticky afternoon in early September. After a three-hour train journey from the hospital, then from the station via Hannah’s day nursery on foot, we’d brought her to this house and put her to sleep under a mosquito net. By late winter, she was crawling: she would scramble eagerly from room to room, popping wood lice into her mouth when she found them, spitting them out into my hand only with the greatest reluctance – I’d lived in fear that she would graduate from those to cockroaches, but fortunately the latter were too quick for her.

The house was old and rickety and home to a number of different pests: mosquitoes, ticks, wasps, crickets, wood lice, centipedes, millipedes, slugs, cockroaches, spiders, and mice – even a Norway rat in our toaster oven once. Our landlady had warned us to keep our bathroom vent closed: the previous residents had forgotten to do this and ended up being terrorized by a large snake. But pests or no pests, every room of that house was stocked with hundreds of memories. And a depressing lot of junk, too.

Moving is easy if you don’t happen to be sentimental. For us it was hell. What do you do with the tie rack your kid crafted in kindergarten out of a painstakingly tempera- painted egg carton? Of course you throw it away – even I know that. The thing was falling apart from the word go, and for pity’s sake – an egg carton tie rack? We threw it away, but I have to say that it hurt. And even after we trashed the tie rack, there was still so much more. The paintings. The plasticine empress-and-emperor dolls. The handprints-on-construction paper calendars. The endless childish drawings ostensibly of me, all of the same mindlessly grinning stick figure Mommy with apron around pre-childbirth waist and cutesy dress with de rigueur lace-trimmed Peter-pan collar, although I always protested to the artist that I hadn’t worn dresses like that since I was in the first grade. Some of these drawings were lovingly inscribed To Mommy – the best Mommy in the world, and I will admit that several of those got fished out the trash and eventually ended up getting packed, not discarded. How much does a drawing weigh, after all, and how much space does it take up? If one day I wished I hadn’t thrown it out, I could hardly go out and buy another one, could I? The problem is that if you use that logic with everything you don’t really need, it all starts to add up. And pretty soon you are surrounded by a world of junk. Which is how we accumulated it in the first place.

While my husband and I were busy packing up, the kids pretty much ran wild. We didn’t really mind. They were only six and nine years old, respectively, and we felt bad about separating them from their friends and the only way of life and home that they knew. During the month that we were engrossed in packing up, they played with their friends in the park and went out on their bicycles all day long, privileges they had not enjoyed quite so freely before. I lightened up on a lot of things out of sheer exhaustion:  mealtimes became catch-as-catch-can, as did grooming rituals like tooth-brushing and bathing.  The six-year-old in particular was notorious for going to bed without brushing her teeth and had to be nagged every night, and the nine-year-old had to be reminded to wash her hair or she would forget to do so.  During our last month in Japan, we had our hands full with boxes and plans and endless nitpicking details, and although I noticed that the girls’ grooming was being neglected, I told myself that we would get it all sorted out in the airport hotel where we had reservations for the next two nights. Our flight to London left very early in the morning, and Narita, Tokyo’s international airport, was hours away by train. We hoped to get our moving completed by noon so that we could get to our hotel in time for a swim, then spend the day before our flight doing absolutely nothing.

For a hundred tiresome reasons, everything took a lot longer than expected and we didn’t finish packing up until that evening. We had promised our expensive clean-air kerosene heater to neighbors, and that had to be disconnected, cleaned, and shifted, as did several carpets. It was already April, we reasoned, and we would be working and moving about, so it didn’t really matter that we would have no heating for a few hours. What we had not taken into consideration, however, was the weather. Even the weatherman had gotten it wrong:  it was supposed to be cold, but no one had foreseen snow. At some point during the day, we looked outside and saw that it had been snowing in earnest. The ground was already covered and more snow was falling fast and furious, blown about by a fierce wind.  Inside the house it was bitterly cold and we had packed almost all of our warm clothes. One of our neighbors ran back to her house and brought me back a cardigan, and our kids put on layers of clothes in an effort to keep warm.

We hadn’t had enough time to do a proper cleaning in weeks, and part of me wondered whether this was really necessary since we knew that our house was due to be demolished in the very near future. But the friends and neighbors who had come over to help us pack murmured that the house might well be let for rent again, even if only for a month or two, and it was only right to do a proper job. They scoured and vacuumed and wiped surfaces with great energy. I was appalled by how much cleaning had to be done and I felt as though I would never be able to repay everyone for all their hard work in that now-frigid house. In the ramshackle shed where we’d had our washing machine and done our recycling of bottles, cans and milk cartons, we found whole worlds of trash that had somehow escaped our notice. Newspapers and old magazines, all wet and molding. Old towels and cans of paint, broken toys, and rusting pieces of unidentified junk. We were all exhausted and frozen and sleepy; I remember thinking that no sooner did I turn my back on that shed than more garbage mysteriously surfaced.

Because I seemed to be the one person who knew where everything was supposed to go, I was constantly pulled from one job to another by my ever-helpful neighbors and the moving men – Where do you want this, okusan? Mary – should this go with the kitchen things? Excuse me, okusan, which box should I put these in? Although I could have sworn that we had packed 80% of everything we were sending to the U.K., the remaining 20% seemed to duplicate every thirty minutes. At one point, the moving men asked me if I really wanted to keep a certain box. I was distracted and did not really see what they were indicating, but said yes to be on the safe side. I remember that they were laughing over whatever it was; six months later when I finally opened the box in Scotland, I discovered a wealth of disgustingly dirty rags, used toothbrushes, rusty can-openers, empty jam jars, bibs, and dozens of pacifiers. All of this junk was carefully wrapped in layers of paper.

Moving is a lot like childbirth. No matter how well you think you’ve prepared for it, when you’re in the thick of things you can’t believe what you’ve gotten yourself into. It just seems to go on and on and on until you think you will go out of your mind; you are so sick of the whole situation that you tell yourself Never again will I do this. And yet, at some point, it all does come to an end. And after a good long interval, should the need to move arise again, you think Oh well, why not? I did it before, after all -- I can do it again. 

We finally hauled our last bag of trash to the local neighborhood garbage disposal spot – we’d been given special dispensation to discard trash on a non-garbage collection day – and the last stick of furniture and rolled up carpet was carted off to our neighbors’ house. I put the keys to the front door into an envelope and walked from empty room to empty room, marvelling how with all our furniture and possessions removed, our house had suddenly become a foreign place. Our voices echoed in the corridors and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by all the memories that came rushing back – the holidays, the illnesses, the noisy birthday parties. Say goodbye to the house, girls, I told the kids. But they couldn’t really grasp what was happening. Although they wanted to appreciate the moment, they were really too excited about our coming holiday – a week in the U.K. followed by six weeks in the U.S. –  to be properly sad.  I was sad for them. We will never come back to this house again, I kept thinking. Never sweep that doorstep, never hang the clothes out on that line, never come back through that gate after a hard day’s work.

We were all tired and shivering from cold and exhaustion by this time, and hungry for hot food. Friends gave us a lift to the station and stood waving goodbye until the train to Narita arrived. It was already growing dark.

On the train to the airport I felt like crying. Instead, we discussed the days’ events. I was carrying an extra package: a rather heavy gift I had been given just before we were due to leave by, of all people, a neighbor I had talked to perhaps five times in eight years. She had come to our house just as we were loading all the boxes onto the moving van to give me the gift – (a picture frame) –and her address. We will all miss you, she had told me. For years I had passed her on my way to work in the morning, a pretty young woman with small children that she seemed to constantly be ferrying to and from kindergarten. We had always exchanged greetings, but hardly ever talked to each other. And yet here she was on our doorstep with a card and a present and tears in her eyes. Other neighbors, too, had come to say goodbye:  our landlady’s daughter, the children’s ballet teacher, the parents’ of their friends – and dozens of their friends themselves. Promises to write had been made, hugs, cards, and addresses exchanged, photographs taken.

‘Mom,’ said my eldest, ‘my head’s itching.’ I looked at both kids. They were wearing layers of clothes against the unseasonable cold. Their faces were smeared with dirt –and the chocolate they’d received from friends – and neither one had washed her hair since God knew when. ‘No wonder! When was the last time either of you washed your hair?’ They had to think about that. ‘When we went swimming that time in Higashi Abiko.’ ‘Well, that was weeks ago! For that matter, when was the last time either of you brushed your hair?’ The girls shrugged and yawned and I had a good look at their teeth for the first time in ages and practically gasped. ‘And when was the last time either of you brushed your teeth!?’ They shut their mouths and looked sullen. I made a mental note to monitor their tooth brushing for the next month.

When we got to the hotel, it was really too late to go for a swim, but we were all in dire need of a hot bath. In Japan, bathtubs are often big enough to accommodate several people, as families frequently bathe together. I got into the tub with my eldest and helped her wash her hair, which turned out to be full of sand, it looked like, or perhaps it was dirt. ‘Scrub it really hard, Mommy, it itches!’  I squirted on more shampoo and duly scrubbed, then I ran my hairbrush through her long blonde hair, and more of the dirt came out with the suds. ‘What in the world have you been playing in? Have you been rolling around in grass or something?’ ‘Mmmm, yeah. That feels good.’ ‘Well, have you?’ Hannah recalled that she had played in grass, but she didn’t remember getting any of it in her hair. I had to wash her hair three times before she was satisfied, then we got out of the bath and I suddenly noticed that some of the grass or sand that was stuck to the side of the bathtub appeared to be moving. Of its own volition. I got down on my knees and had a closer look.  Oh, sweet Jesus.

Except for my husband, who keeps his head closely shaven, we all had them. Hannah’s head was the worst: she must have had an especially tasty scalp, as her head had been seriously colonized. There were hundreds of the creatures, plus all their nits; I raked her head with a fine-toothed comb for a good long time and many generations of lice and nits kept falling out. The youngest had quite a few too, and so did I – my very first case of head lice. After all, we used the same hairbrush: I’d given up on getting the kids to use their own, as they could never remember where they’d put them and mine was always so handy. All of us had very thick, long hair, and I very quickly grew weary of combing and brushing.

And so on our very last day in Japan, the day that we had planned to spend swimming, sleeping, and relaxing, we trekked all over Narita looking for a preparation for head lice. We had to go to at least five pharmacies before we found one that had what we needed. I might be paranoid, but I’ll bet to this day at least one pharmacist remembers the three bushy-haired Japanese-speaking foreign females who came in search of lice shampoo.  And I still dread to think of all the children who must certainly have caught head lice from our kids – all that hugging and kissing and close camaraderie.

We left behind many people that we loved in Japan. But we took with us an entire, albeit dying, army.