New Neighbors on Family Land

 They have actually been here for over a year but they are new to me. They bought half of the plot behind our house. I wish we had had enough money to purchase that piece of land between our house and my in-laws’ but since it was zoned as house land, it was extremely expensive, so much so that it was actually divided into two lots. They managed to squeeze two houses with non-existent yards onto a lot that held one house and a comfortable garden.

It had been owned by my father-in-law’s cousin Yoshika, also a Nibe. I thought he was one of the nicest relatives in the family when I first got married. In spite of the language barriers, he made every effort to communicate with me, listening to my mangled Japanese sentences and patiently repeating things until I could understand. He was a bit younger than my father-in-law and he was second son in his family, but came to inherit the family land when his father and older brother went missing sometime in the 1940’s. His father was not terribly successful so he decided to take advantage of Japan’s occupation of China and get involved in some kind of trading venture. He and his older son set out on a merchant vessel but never returned. There is no record of their death but one can only assume that during those chaotic years, either their ship was sunk or they are still wandering around in China. In any case, they never returned. The mother fell ill with tuberculosis and the remaining children were taken in by my father-in-law’s family. During the War, Yoshika worked in a factory outside of Nagasaki. He actually witnessed the bombing of the city but he wasn’t near enough to suffer any immediate effects, however, he succumbed to brain cancer when he was in his 70’s.

It is he who lived in the house with his wife and children. It wasn’t a really great house or a well-made house but he kept it nicely and had a productive garden and nice trees. His wife hated it – she hated living in this village and hated living next to my in-laws! She was from the next town, a very small town but it was on the other side of the river where (she believed) more sophisticated people lived. Upon Yoshika’s death, she abandoned the house and it fell into ruin. When we moved here, the kids and I would explore the grounds, cutting the weeds and trimming the trees, searching for little treasures in the garden even though it was kind of spooky over there. The soil around his house was rich and loamy, unlike our house land which is fill dirt – mostly clay and rocks. And now the new houses cover it up and have concrete gardens! I wish I could’ve at least had the soil. Yoshika’s two children were like their mother and didn’t want anything to do with the village or the family home, so when the price was right, they sold the land to strangers. It seems wrong to have someone else living there, on the land that had belonged to one family for generations. The old trees that defined the property have all been cut down and except for the old water pump that I took, there is nothing left of his home. Yoshika shares the same tomb as our family but has a different marker – his is unpolished and covered by lichen – forgotten by his own children.