Actually, there was another sister between me and Yoshio. That's why my brother's father was different from mine. My father had passed away many years before, and since then my mother had both remarried and divorced. My cousin Mikiko, a student at a nearby women's university, was also at home.
There were quite a few of us at home back then: my mother, me, my little brother Yoshio, who had just entered the fourth grade, and my mother's old friend Junko, who was living with us for a while. Now I want to stand up and give myself, steadfast and determined, a round of applause for maintaining "me," even though I had been thrust into such a strange psychological dilemma. A strange sensation, almost as if I had been floating. There was no question about it it really was me in that album. I had my period when they took that shot, so it was a pain to even stand up, and. I recognized each one of them from somewhere. All the places I'd visited, all the scenes I'd encountered. Without a doubt, it was me in the pictures - that long hair and radiant smile. Later, all alone, I opened the pages of my photo album in secret. Really? I thought, returning their smiles. You look so different, almost like a new person." When I revealed myself to my family and friends, they barked out unanimously, "Sakuchan! We've never seen you with short hair. By the time winter rolled around my hair had finally grown in, and I was sporting a trendy, short cut. or at least that's what I've been told.īefore they performed my surgery, they shaved my head, and in an instant I was bald. How was I ever able come to terms with myself?Īpparently when you do something major like cutting off all your hair, your personality undergoes a transformation as well, because you change the way you act around other people. Was my life, all those days and months and years, nothing more than past time, piled up like fallen snow? Perhaps I'd felt the same way all along, perhaps not. I no longer had any way of knowing how I felt about myself and the world. In other words, at some point I had lost the power to distinguish what was real, all of those things that had happened in life prior to the accident. It's like remembering a story someone told me in the past. Every element that had gone into making me who I was gradually made its way back to me, and now I have the power to reflect on all that has happened. I'm finally at a point where I can recall everything: all twenty-eight years since my birth, every one of the so-called "episodes" of my life as Sakumi Wakabayashi, that strange conglomeration of misfits who came together to form my family, those foods that I liked, those things that I didn't. Every now and then I wonder if things weren't different in my case. I've often heard that if you go through something really intense your perception of the world will change entirely.
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