The Sweet Potato Man

Postcards of Memory 　　 (1)　 February



I know it's autumn now, and soon it will be winter, because the sweet potato man is standing with his cart in the little square in front of our station.
A squat and lumbering old chap. His hair is crew-cut, there are some deep, serious wrinkles on his red baby-face. He wears a warm, padded vest and a worn fish-wife apron, his hands in its pocket jingling the change while waiting for his clients. He is standing in front of a cubic-shaped camelia bush; silent as a sweet potato.
Vine-coloured roots with soft, yellow insides are being roasted on the logs. Just as it should be, a rusty, clumsy stove-pipe is sticking up into the blue sky. The old guy sprayed some lemon-coloured stripes on the cart that now looks like a tousled and sketchy wasp. He's neatly stuck paper-bags to the side of the cart and even a broom to clean the small square around himself.
The fragrance of sweet potatoes and the real flames crackling in the iron stove are indispensable components of the winter feeling: you cannot find them anywhere else in this streamlined, large city.
I know the sweet-potato man is going to stamp about here, warming fists in pocket, all through the winter. In March there will come a day when he'll stick a large sheet of paper to the side of his cart for his regular customers, scrawled in big letters: "Thank you all for buying from me. I am not coming from tomorrow. See you again in autumn."

The Basement Studio

Postcards of Memory 　　 (2)　 March




"He is bloody rich" my young friend Tibor (with the indispensable headphones, connected to a CD walkman, around his neck) said, poking the sweet potato guy. It was early afternoon on a Sunday, we were waiting for some friends to come and play soccer. "He's just here for the company and to enjoy sunshine; but he doesn't make his living on potatoes at all. Do you know where he's really in his element? At home, in the basement of his villa. He's set up the most luxurious hi-fi sound studio for himself. He steps in, wipes off two specks of dust. Peak-technologies are humming in a solemn stillness. And then, heavy-metal roars up. He turns the volume to the extreme, leans back: he is listening to Nirvana. The ground resounds and rumbles. Moles, panic-stricken, emigrate to faraway gardens."
"Sweet-potatoes loosen out of the ground."
"You fools" - laughs Miyuki, the local resident, waving her hands in resignation. "He is so expensive! And what a hot-head! An angry little red devil, he is."
"That's true", I admit, "he chased me away once when I wanted to take his photo."
But then I say to myself: it is just right, he should be serious. A guard on duty shouldn't give himself away too cheaply. He should keep the fire and smoke and warmth for us. The flame of nostalgia. Even today, I cannot look at the old man without my thoughts flying to Tibor, who moved to Europe years ago; without pricking up my ears to an imaginary sound studio; and without seeing a tradition-protecting soul who is striving after nirvana.

A Crow of Peace

Postcards of Memory 　　 (3)　 April



"What a lovely, springy mountain-bike!" - Miyuki exclaims with longing, in the park. "If I'd had one of those when I was a kid, I would have gone crazy about it and ridden it all the time."
The bike-guy starts out on his regular training-course. He free-falls from the trees at the top of the slope and jumps over an elevated path - the highlight of this course. He draws a circle on the clearing - he has trampled down the grass there, frustrating the park authorities - and climbs back up the slope to the little hill.
Last year I happened to witness the scene when two men arrived in a little truck, and they dug the ground as if they were digging a garden - at the most sensitive spot of the course, at the jump. The guy was there with a friend. They didn't complain - just withdrew to the grove, and when the park-keepers left, they started out on the course again.
Today, some ten-year old girls arrived here. They wait for their turn after the bike-guy and then start out on their bicycles - a little girl in a red and yellow striped cardigan even has a shopping basket attached to hers. They are good at jumping, too. Without talking to the guy, they are playing in harmony.
Peace. It is spring.
For a few seconds nobody is riding on the course.
And then, the next moment a crow flies out right there, from the same spot, from among the trees. Flying low, just above the course and following it in a wonderful arch, without moving its wings. Gliding up, it makes a soft landing on a branch.

A Teacher

Postcards of Memory 　　(4)　 May



"Fragrance passing through the terrace, / our old apple-tree has come to bloom..." Every spring I remember this poem. Here in Nishi-Eifuku, while looking at cherry blossoms, I also see a garden in Debrecen with fruit trees. They look like beautiful brides, honey-bees flying around them. The image reminds me that wherever I live - right here or over there - home does exist and revival does exist.
The poet Kiss Tamas, my high-school teacher of Hungarian literature looked old to us, as his face wrinkled early and densely. He was told to be a kind teacher with a philosophy that "literature is recreation for our heart". I never heard these exact words from his mouth, though. What did I learn from him? I have absorbed all those many lessons, and today, after more then three decades I wouldn't be able to recall what he told us about The Odyssey, which we studied thorougly; about his favourite poets or even about Csokonai, on whom he wrote a novel.
I remember one sentence by him clearly, from 1970. I can see exactly where he is standing in front of us and the way he glances through the classroom window at the sky. I can hear the echo of his emphasis vividly; his voice is warm and with an dynamism in it; it belongs to someone who is able to be surprised and is able to dream:
"They bring ... India!"
It makes me shiver that Kiss Tamas understands us. He knows why we are so excited about that band of the four Englishmen - the guys who traveled to Asia recently, who are even playing sitar in their music; the band who took inspiration from the East.

Riverside Terrace

Postcards of memory 　(5)　　 June




"Where did you leave your friend, President Nixon?" - the Mama-san asks me.
She is wearing a kimono, geta slippers and her hair is done in a bun. She means my friend David.
Far inside the park there are two forgotten houses and there is a large cherryblossom tree, some vending machines, a few chairs and tables. You serve yourself from a machine, that's almost all that is the Riverside Terrace café. All is green around; the river is near and there is a quiet little lake, too.
In the afternoon the regulars, old men lean their bicycles under the trees. Enjoying a can of beer or cup of sake they play Japanese chess and talk around the long, red metallic table. Next to their back is a mural that covers the whole outside wall of the house. The world under the sea. There is Adam after the Conception from the Sixstine Chapel, although in place of the Lord there sits a sweet mermaid, shaking her hair, and instead of little angels there are baby kappa river-dwarfs. They are playing with that certain apple Eve had collected in Eden.
We enjoy a pleasant breeze. Sitting under a Coca Cola parasol we are sipping our can of iced cocoa and coffee, resting our eyes on the moss-covered body of this wonderful cherry tree.
"She looks like dancing, doesn't she?"
After a full, long minute I get the answer.
"She's a ballet-dancer, the cherry-tree spirit. She's dropped on her back and her legs just fling about, you see, towards the sky."

Our Trainer

Postcards of Memory 　　 (6) 　　 July




We threw neckties over our T-shirts after we finished our Sunday soccer and immediately lined up as a jubilation choir. Jozsi, surprised, froze and stood there with jeans in his hand, ready get dressed.
He used to wear the same kind of jeans and sneakers when he first arrived in Japan. This is what he wore on Sundays, coming to play soccer from the faraway research center where he sat day and night in front of his computer; and in the same puritanic way he just had a suitcase when after three years he left us, returning as a professor to a university in Budapest. This time he was just visiting Tokyo to give lecture at a conference, but he also packed his shorts and sneakers so as not to miss our regular soccer in Nishi-Eifuku. As if this was the purpose of his trip here from an other continent. He was told to come, we said with a nod, by our trainer. Our imaginary Uncle Pista.
Perhaps it was Jozsi who used to be the most consistent among us in creating the image of our strict and fair trainer. In this corner of the world, far away from home and all too easy to lose one's compass, we began weaving an authority figure from movie- or book characters, from teachers or threads of memories of real trainers. An unshakeable man, who can shout at you: do this! this is the right thing! Showing up at our Sunday soccer felt like a moral obligation.
Jozsi soon joined us in singing. He knew the song as he used to be with us when we practiced Neoszarvasbika at the good old bathhouse with the Mt.Fuji mural. After the song we hang a silk ribbon with a painted, wooden medal over Jozsi's neck. A gold medal he won from our trainer.

Immersed

Postcards of Memory 　(7) 　　 August




"The boy who was always reading War and Peace in the swimming-pool" appeared in a favourite novel of mine when I was a student. I coudn't forget that image, the image of utmost luxury: summer by a water, and all the peace you need to read a huge novel.
I can hear screams of kids playing with balls, jumping into the pool and chasing each other; happy screams of little ones holding on to their father's neck or swaying on life belts. I have to look up from my book to see that it isn't the swimming-pool of my childhood but the one in Wadabori park. The wooden barrack of the locker room is painted blue, the ground is covered not with grass but green plastic, and Eifuku family houses appear above the fence, and the reddish building of a shrine.
At sunset, watching the colours of the sky while swimming in backstroke, it's just like floating about in an Eden of long ago.

Expose Yourself to Art

Postcards of Memory 　　(8)　　 September

On the high bank of Zenpukuji river, I catch sight of a small boy.
The little girl he embraces is sitting on a large, round-shaped rock that is smooth as marble, wearing a light summer dress. She is a bronze sculpture. Her eyes are half closed, she is smiling with lips slightly parted, and she is turning her face to the caress of the sun, or, as the carved title suggests, to the sound of the river.
The boy, embracing her neck, is efishly kissing her lips.
Three women are trying to stop him - his mother, his sister, and his grandmother - but it seems like putting out fire with gasoline: he sticks to the girl and kisses her again and again.
The grandmother looks a bit embarrassed. The sister stays apart, angrily turning her back on him. His mother, laughing, is pulling him - the man who has discovered art.

The Camellia Phonebooth

Postcards of Memory 　　(9) 　　October



Pearl-coloured pampas grass fluttering in the autumn sunshine. All those empty lots have been built in during the past ten years. All the long barracks were torn down, old gardens and wooden family houses have disappeared.
Only one of them is left in our street, crumbling away. Behind the sponge-like stone walls the garden is running wild with palm-trees and a tangle of bristles, creepers and flowers. The earliest-blooming ume tree of our neighbourhood, covering the entrance into the house, is going to be chopped down sooner or later and a new block of mansions will be built here as well. Today I stop and look at the fine slats of the windows, a style of woodwork that was ripened through centuries.
In a small side-street by the corner of a garden there used to be a green telephone covered by a camellia bush. The prettiest booth to make a call from that I'd ever known. The new bicycle parking shed seems to be grumbling: If you are in the mood to make a romantic call, buy a mobile phone. You'll find a rose-bed somewhere in the park.

He's retired

Postcards of Memory 　　(10)　　 November




Red leaves are rolling about the square in front of our station. My eyes are searching for the sweetpotato man, but his place is empty. He is missing every day.
I was hoping to see him, although he had told me in spring that after thirty-five years here, he would retire. He returns to the country, where he's been working every summer at some kind of a transportation company. As an explanation for me to get it right, he pointed at the building of a bank in the corner of the square: I can move it for you from here to - over there.
In our shopping street the asphalt has been changed to colourful stone cover recently, a new cafe and a shiny bento shop has been opened; suddenly we turned to be trendy. Perhaps it's only me who'd cling to the past and would like if everything stayed as it used to be.
And what about the sweet potato man? Somewhere far, far away, over the mountains, he is busy making banks flying through the sky.

Whirlpool Caramels

Postcards of Memory 　　(11) 　　 December



The three gingko trees and the golden leaves, little fans, that have fallen below, get a warm light from inside. A night in early December. Fujiya, family restaurant.
A tent-shaped building with cosy proportions inside, windows facing evergreen bushes. At the entrance there are glass shelves with delicious European-style cakes. Two more tables with Santa Claus-red boxes of sweets, milk candies, toys. And here is the emblem of Fujiya restaurant, a doll of a little girl: Peko-chan. She is the one who welcomes and bids farewell to us. She seems to be a foster sister of my childhood's Peti chocolate and - at least in my eyes - a spiritual relative of Macko cheese as well.
Miyuki and me used to come over for long hours and have fun at our regular comfor-table. Salad bar and Darling tea.
Tonight, I walk there with a book. Fujiya has proven to be the best place for overcoming attacks of nostalgia.
Sweet, milky currents. Peko-chan and whirlpool caramels.

Well, How Do You Like Japan?

Postcards of Memory 　　 (12)　　 January



Pretty cool, I mumbled one night walking home by the rails, pondering why I liked the embankment and platform next to me so much.
Definitely, not just because of the rich hydrangeas it's covered with in June. It's not just the little square with the station building from where my trips always start, up for adventure, and where it's so relaxing to arrive back from abroad. It's not just those clean and pretty trains, and that I enjoy waiting up there on the platform, looking down at the shops, gazing at the wide sky, the clouds, the evening moon, until the familiar sound can be heard from the level-crossing gate.
Then something I hadn't thought about for a long time struck me. My grandfather used to be a railwayman. How strange - the village station had an embankment with this same height; and my grandparents' garden lay in the same direction as my present apartment. As a kid I used to wait up there on the platform, looking down at the meadows, the garden, our playing grounds.
Without knowing, the new pattern got projected on the one of a long time ago. Tokyo on the village of Jozsa. I realize that Nishi-Eifuku is within me, not without. Japan for me doesn't exist as a separate entity any more, and today I hear the question like this: Well, how do you like your life? How do you like this world?