AIKO OFFNER

Creative Nonfiction | Harvard-Westlake School, Studio City, CA

Thirteen Strings

Name

I have two names. The first, the name officers at airport security assume I go by, Venice. They’ll always ask if I’m going to Italy, and then they’ll check my ticket and realize that no, I’m not, it’s kind of a rhetorical question considering they have all of my flight information. I still laugh and say no, it’s on my bucket list, though.

Then it’s Aiko. That’s the name my teachers will struggle to pronounce on the first day, the name my friends struggle to come up with nicknames for, the name people at cash registers will say is beautiful because they haven’t heard it before and want me to sign up for the newsletter.

My mom had a dream that her kid was named Venice when she was living in Venice, California with my dad. She named me after that dream, not the place. She was very pregnant and had just moved to Venice.

My grandmother named me Aiko. My mother had given her the duty of choosing my Japanese middle name. She and my aunt (mom’s younger sister) looked at a dozen books of names and different kanji, but ultimately decided on Aiko because my grandma heard someone say Aiko to their daughter at a train station, and she thought it was pretty.

Miracle Baby

My dad got really mad at me on a gloomy quarantine day in July. I was putting the dishes away when he came down in between conference calls for lunch. My mom had just left for Japan, so I was stuck doing all of the housework along with starting online summer classes and having to pack for my own trip. I was incredibly stressed, but tried to bury that in my appreciation for how hard my dad works.

But then he came down and told me to shut up and help on his own terms and how I was like an incompetent employee to him because I made the dishes clatter when he got a call.

So then I stormed out and got yelled at some more because I stormed out, then proceeded to cry in the middle of the kitchen, despite the fact that I was two inches taller than my dad and forty years fitter. Not that violence is ever the solution.

My dad kept saying how he was so sorry that I was crying and how I didn’t need to work myself up and started hugging me. I then asked if he knew why I was crying and he said, well, when people mess up, sometimes they cry, which made me stop crying and look at him.

I had to explain to my at-times-clueless dad who, himself, was just having a low-blood sugar level moment, that I felt rather burdened with everything I had to do, and how his words made me feel unappreciated.

I suddenly understood why my mother implodes sometimes.

My dad did feel bad, and he started giving me a speech about how important it is in life to take the extra steps. I was still heaving from crying, so I didn’t say that I was trying to take the extra steps. Halfway through his speech about how when he was eight, he continued to run towards the soccer goal after kicking it in, and the ball didn’t make it but then bounced off his chest and into the goal, he realized that I was the one taking the extra steps and he had inadvertently disrespected that. So he let me pick takeout for dinner.

He still must have felt bad, because he ordered chocolate cake, and then started to talk about stuff other than work, like how Taylor Swift surprised us with an album, Seth Meyers’ hair growing out, and how my grandfather on his side called me the miracle baby.

I asked why, and he said because he and my mom were using condoms.

I thought about leaving the dinner table but we don’t really do that in my household, so I just raised an eyebrow and kept working on my cake.

Little Lima

There’s this underground steakhouse, or teppanyaki in Omotesando that my grandparents take us out to once every two years. Omotesando is a rather hip, metropolitan part of Tokyo, and this traditional steakhouse, Little Lima, is tucked away next to some big department building.

You wouldn’t know it, walking into the basement that radiates a caveman-esque atmosphere, with yellow walls and reddish-brown leather seats, that the steak here is a gift from heaven that descendants of Adam and Eve aren’t worthy of. The chef and his son use domestic kobe beef, aged a month, that they grill in front of our eyes when we sit at the counter. It’s a family-run business, making the meal not just a delicacy, but an experience. The chef, in his seventies, is a very tan, thin man with a crooked smile and confusing Okinawa (islander) accent. If he were in LA he would be the man in his seventies, surfing 20 foot high waves. His son is a city version of his father, also tan and tall, but with side-swept hair and a transactional smile. Watching them cook is like watching table tennis at an Olympic level; they work as a seamless team in front of the counter. Even if you didn’t know them, you’d know they were father and son.

They place bricks of beef on the burning metal connected to the wooden countertop, and slice the meat when it’s cooked. The older chef, Nakazone-san, will take the middle pieces and place them on my grandmother’s, my aunt’s, and my plates. As he places the bite sized meat, cooked bronze on the rim and tie-dyed to pink on the inside, with juices seeping through, he’ll wink and whisper, “Because you ladies are my favorite.”

Halfway through the meal and after a glass and a half of wine, my grandpa, who sits to the right of me, will lean in, and before he’s fully finished chewing, say, “This is where your mother introduced us to Dan.” He’ll forget that he’s told me that every time we’ve gone, since I was two, and I’ve never questioned it.

But one summer, when I’m around twelve, I’ll ask, “Did you meet him here because Mami said he was the real deal?” I think I had just learnt how much each course cost.

“Dan was the first guy Mami ever brought home,” my grandpa will say.

Miracle Baby

My mom had me when she was 43. She met my father when she was 41, at an art gallery where she was helping her friend from college for the night. He was wearing hiking boots and a ragged T-shirt when he plucked lettuce from her breast, and introduced himself.

“I think my parents had given up on me finding someone,” my mom will say fifteen years later, when she is drunk and happy.

Koto

It’s another humid summer night, and I go next door to deliver the leftover potato salad to my grandparents. I give it to my grandpa, remind him to put it in the fridge because it has mayonnaise in it, and he nods but I’m not sure if he heard me.

“I doubt he heard you,” my grandmother says sharply. “He always nods, and says yes, yes, but he doesn’t really care to listen.”

She says that with a glint in her eyes, so I laugh at her dagger-like words, and she laughs, as if she meant it as a joke. We both know she didn’t, which only makes it funnier.

“Come here, I have something to show you,” my grandmother hobbles up and leads me out of the air-conditioned room and to her sticky hallway. At the edge of the elevated platform (because there’s a step from where you take off your shoes to where you can be barefoot in Japanese apartments) there’s a shiny department store bag holding a bundle of decaying paper.

She pulls out a stack of old booklets, each page yellowish and brown towards the edges, bound by navy blue string woven through the three holes. The papers are hard but crumbly, due to decades of sitting in a forgotten attic, decomposed so they resemble thin, soggy graham crackers. Pieces of paper crumple from the bottom of the pages , swallowed by the cold granite floor.

I sat down at the edge of the hallway next to her, letting my feet smush my grandfather’s leather shoes. My grandmother scrolls carefully to the middle of the top book, opening it left to right, the way you do with old Japanese books.

She opens the page to an array of rectangles, like a stretched out bingo square, with a growing ivy of a brown stain at the base . In the boxes, numbers are listed vertically and underlined, mainly in black pen but with occasional scratches with red ink. Despite the stain of old age, the written characters remain pristine and clear.

“This is the music for koto,” my grandmother says, a faint smile of pride dancing on her lips. “We played music from this.”

I am immensely confused.

“Are the numbers, like, do-re-mi-fa-so? What do the numbers mean?”

“The numbers are the thirteen strings in the instrument,” she explains, then pulls her glasses off to look at me. “I don’t think I’d be able to play, now, with the current notes and music.”

I look in awe at the list of numbers written in Japanese kanji, in box after box that I read as measures. Occasionally I see an f, or mp, hints of a musical language I can understand. I look closely, and notice the marks and kanji in red ink are written in the same handwriting as the printed black numbers. I point, and look up at my grandmother inquisitively.

“This is transcribed,” she explains, putting her glasses back on again. “There weren’t many books printed back then, especially the more advanced pieces, so we had to transcribe the music onto our own sheets and play from that.”

“This is your writing?” I ask.

“It is.”

I sit back and just stare at the open page of music for the traditional Japanese instrument. I think of the marks I make on my own music with my number 2 pencil, sitting against the little stand on the piano, the music that’s starting to brown and fray as well, from the wear and tear of my and my mother’s use from years ago. I think of all the red strings I cut on the little box of a metronome. I think of all the tears shed over the black and white keys, the f-words bounced off Chopin’s Black Keys etude.

“Oh this,” my grandmother says, “this is the teaching license. Oh dear, it’s been gnawed at by bugs.”

She hands me a square certificate, her given name written on the front.

“How do you read that?” I ask, pointing to her given last name.

“Hijii,” she says. “I had such a pretty name before I married him.”

I laugh, and open the certificate that had been folded in three. In thick brush writing, my grandmother’s right to teach koto stares back at me, dominant. Identification traits that now fit with a little black and white picture on a small card that could be mistaken for a YMCA member card, are spread across a foot-long piece of bamboo paper, decaying, but powerful. My grandmother points to a name to the left of the scrawl.

“I came to Tokyo for that teacher,” she says. She looks at me again, takes her glasses off and lets them hang at her chest. “If it weren’t for that teacher, you wouldn’t exist.”

Survival

World War Two created a stark divide in my grandparents’ childhoods. My grandfather lost everything in the war. He stole persimmons from his neighbors’ trees to feed his eight siblings and himself.

He came to Tokyo to find a job in the city, and ended up taking work in the steel-trading industry that took him around the world. My grandfather uprooted his family seven times, moving between Japan and several countries including South Africa, Turkey, and the United States.

My grandmother, from an affluent family in Kyushu, lost little but her innocence. Her family owned a hotel business, and therefore land, so they had food on the table and a bed to sleep in. And that was enough.

She then grew up to fill the role most commonly followed in the Japanese patriarchal society; silent support of the family. My grandmother survived amongst sharks of foreign languages and customs, entertaining guests whose languages she did not speak, planning dinner parties she would not attend, and raising my mother and aunt.

My grandparents could not be more different if they tried. My grandmother is meticulous, detail-oriented, and can shuffle around so quietly you only feel her presence when she snakes her head next to your ear. My grandfather, long and lanky, belongs to the wilderness, staring at the stars for hours at a time, knocking over glasses and leaving stains wherever he goes. He traveled the world while she survived; his work earned him a salary; hers, a family.

It’s weird to think their common ground was their memories of crouching under school desks while bomb sirens went off. They survived on two different sides of the country, but they both were witnesses to what humans can do to one another in the name of a modern society.

Privacy

“He told me I was pretty,” my grandmother says, when I ask how she met my grandfather. He went up to her and told her she was pretty.

I had asked her once before, and she told me it was an arranged marriage. I had heard from my grandfather that they met randomly, at a café in Ginza, and three years had passed before I tried again to get the real story.

“He came up to me, told me I was pretty, and asked me to a festival at his college,” she recounts.

“I’d rather be called smart,” I say.

“Me too.”

“So you went out with him?” I know I’m prying on the topic of romance with my grandmother. I can’t help myself.

“Yes, I did, much to my regret.” My grandmother doesn’t talk to my grandfather for weeks at a time nowadays. “It’s his fault for leaving the light on,” she’ll say.

“I went out with him, and at the end, he said he had to take his friend’s friend home, so he asked if I was okay going home on my own. I said okay, sure, because I always enjoyed being independent. But then it occurred to me later how rude that was, so I ran after him.” She’s laughing now.

“You ran after him?” I think that’s the funniest thing in the world at that moment.

“Yes. I ran after him, and said ‘No. That’s not okay’, and he was like, oh okay, and dropped off his friend’s friend with another friend, and took me home.”

We’re both laughing now.

I pry a little further, asking about the proposal, knowing that arranged marriages were more common in her day. She deflects, though, and I know I’ve reached my limit. I ask my mother later, to which she says, “She’ll tell you if she wants to. Privacy.”

I’m glad I don’t know. I hope eventually I will, but if I know now, I know I will write it. And I know I cannot Americanize that part of her life too.