I can hardly remember my baachan’s first funeral, but there wasn’t much to remember anyway. I was six when she died suddenly of a stroke in the middle of the summer. Our family flew from California to Michigan, where my grandparents had spent more than forty years after immigrating from Tokyo. Despite the near suffocating humidity, my siblings and I spent much of the week running through the grassy field next to jiichan’s house with our cousins. As evening approached, the gentle drone of cicadas rang out and called us back to the house, where jiichan would be waiting with our parents and a pitcher of cold mugicha.
On the morning before her funeral, I engineered an escape from my sister’s tyrannical mind games by hiding in baachan’s closet, folding myself into the pleats of her collection of Issey Miyake dresses and jackets. As I traced the contours of the delicate fabric, the muffled voices of my Uncle David and my Aunt Kimi seeped through the gap below the closet door. An uneasy tension had settled between my Uncle David and my Aunt Kimi when jiichan calmly informed them that their mother’s body would not be at the funeral. She had decided to donate her body to science, he explained, and it was already being prepared to be put on display at a new exhibition that would travel the country, showcasing the mechanics of human anatomy. Carefully, I lowered myself to the carpeted floor to eavesdrop their conversation. Aunt Kimi was furious. How could she do such a thing! Uncle David shrugged it off. Her body, her choice, right? My dad listened quietly as his two older siblings went back and forth – Aunt Kimi was convinced that something could be done to reverse the decision, that the idea of this exhibition was voyeuristic and disgusting and degrading, Uncle David countered repeatedly that their mother had been the one to make the decision, that they had a duty to respect her wishes no matter how bizarre – before he sided with his older brother by finally asking, “What’s the point if we were just going to burn her and stick her ashes in the ground? At least this is what she wanted.” Aunt Kimi eventually acquiesced, but only because when she looked at her father sitting at the edge of her mother’s bed, the old man just shrugged and said without a trace of emotion that the funeral would be cheaper without having to pay for a casket or the cremation. The funeral proceeded without incident; instead of a casket, we paid our respects to a framed picture of baachan. Her second funeral happened twenty years later and was much more memorable than the first.
***
Shortly before she died, baachan had agreed to donate her body to an exhibition that took human remains and preserved them through a process known as plastination. Developed and patented in the late 1970s by a German anatomist, the process involved replacing the body’s water and fat with plastic in order to permanently preserve organs or cadavers in their entirety. The exhibition presented these bodies, skinned and poised to showcase the musculature, skeletal scaffolding, and network of nerves, arteries, veins, and blood vessels that powered our daily movements. There were plastinated organs on display: an intestine stretched out along the entire length of a room, a smoker’s diseased lung with a deposit box for visitors’ cigarettes, and even a series of miscarried fetuses, the inclusion of which initially confused but was quickly co-opted by both pro- and anti-abortion activists. They went so far as to demonstrate how our sphincters relaxed and contracted to make us shit by positioning a man squatting on a transparent toilet with a plastic turd shaped like a slicing cucumber and hastily painted a dark sugar brown repeatedly dropping out of and being re-absorbed into his frictionlessly dilating mechanical asshole. No one could quite wrap their heads around why baachan had agreed to such an arrangement nor how she had even heard of the exhibition in the first place, and they couldn’t quite find the right way to explain to their inquisitive children, most of whom were under the age of ten, what all of the adults had been so serious and hushed about. Your baachan loved science, my mom told me, even in the afterlife she was dedicated to teaching others about biology.
When I was twelve, six years after baachan died, I went on a field trip to the exhibition in San Francisco. There were multiple exhibitions across the country with hundreds of human bodies and we never heard from the exhibition after baachan’s first funeral, so it was impossible to know if she was part of the exhibition I visited. Mr. Adams, an otherwise unshakeable middle school science teacher, was noticeably perturbed when I proudly informed him in front of our class that my baachan’s body had been donated to the exhibition. “Well, um, thank you to your baachan for allowing our class to learn more about the, uh, wonders of the human body?”
The exhibition was housed in a repurposed warehouse on one of the piers along the Embarcadero. The walls and floors were painted a deep space black and the vaulted ceilings were hidden from sight by the blinding lights that dropped down from nowhere, giving the entire space the eerie feeling of a void. As I walked past the glass display cases housing the flayed bodies in all manner of positions, I tried to picture what baachan looked like, conjuring an image of her from her last visit to our family in Oakland and attempting to recognize any trace of similarity in the literal bare bone tendons and muscle fibers before me. The hallucination failed to take hold, her features always shifting and sliding out of place whenever I tried to project them onto the faces in front of me.
In their plastinated form, the bodies were hard and dull. The faces, stripped of the pillowy flesh that would have given away baachan’s moon-shaped face, haunted me with their gaunt expressions. Their intense glares confronted me, challenging me to uncover who they once were. I wanted to shrink from their clutches, to escape into the lightless rafters above me, but as I walked along the blood orange carpet, my fear gave way to pity. Frozen in their display cases, they seemed oblivious to their nakedness, staring at the visitors as if agonizing to remember what it was like to be among the moving. The exhibition’s cool air reminded me of the Italian butcher’s shop where my mom bought cold cuts and handmade chicken sausages, with meat splayed and split and draped in awkward poses from the ceiling. The flesh in the exhibition was bloodless and stale, the distance between their present state of lifelessness and their former membership among the living so clear and deep it opened up like a chasm beneath my feet. Unlike the fresh cuts of meat hanging on their hooks, there was no future for these bodies; having survived death and escaped burial or cremation, no further transformation awaited them and they gathered alone in the glass cells of their secular purgatory.
At the end of the field trip, when I’d cycled through the exhibition twice and was sure I’d seen every single body and failed to find baachan in any of them, the excitement of potentially seeing her again after so many years caved into the realization that I had barely known her and, having only a faint image of her in my memory, would probably fail to recognize her if I’d seen her on the street.
***
“That’s not her,” Aunt Kimi stated plainly.
Aunt Kimi stood in front of the skinned mannequin that was supposed to be her mother seated on jiichan’s couch, the body frozen in the position in which she’d spent much of her life: hunched over an invisible microscope. A few years after I visited the exhibition in San Francisco, the governor of California investigated the exhibition after an article in the San Francisco Chronicle surfaced allegations that the exhibition had sourced cadavers and organs from the Chinese black market. The investigation did not uncover any connections between the exhibition and the Chinese black market, but the curators of the exhibition failed to produce documentation for the provenance of nearly ninety percent of the bodies, which was enough for the governor to shut down the exhibition, ordering that the bodies that could be returned be sent back. The ensuing legal battles raged quietly for over a decade, intentionally hidden from the public, until one day jiichan called my dad to let him know that his mother’s body was making its way back to Michigan. Now, with our whole family gathered again for the second time in twenty years, Aunt Kimi was convinced that the exhibition had sent us the wrong body.
“How can you be so sure that it’s not her?” Uncle David responded. “It sure does look like her. At least, those are definitely her eyes.”
Of course, they weren’t actually her eyes, just glass eyeballs. Without eyelids, they bulged out of their sockets, forever unblinking and on the verge of falling out. Her left eye had been positioned in front of the microscope’s single eyepiece, and perhaps because the eye wasn’t firmly fixed in its socket, her right eye had slipped so that it gazed lazily out to the side. The muscles in her face had been contorted into an inquisitive expression but without the microscope or the the skin closed over her right eye, she appeared to be hunched forward, as if dodging our disbelieving stares, her hands coming up protectively towards her face, her right eyeball on the lookout for some unseen projectile. I wondered how many kids she had scared the living shit out of with her right eyeball fixed on them while her left eye looked down at the microscope. I tried to remember if I’d seen a body seated in front of a microscope on that field trip all those years ago, but could only recall a basketball player towering over me, dunking on a net suspended from the ceiling.
“Ma didn’t look through a microscope with her left eye. She was right eye dominant,” Aunt Kimi protested.
“You think the people who skinned her and pumped her full of plastic knew what eye she used to look through a damn microscope?”
“I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s her. Her proportions are off. She wasn’t this small.”
At this, Uncle David scoffed and walked out of the room. Aunt Kimi looked at my dad, who shook his head. “What do you want me to say, Kimi? You want us to go back to these people and ask them if this is really Ma? They don’t even know where half of these bodies came from, I think we should just be happy that they sent us something after all this time.”
Aunt Kimi paused and then let out a deep sigh, as if finally accepting that the exhibition had in fact repatriated her mother to her. “What are we supposed to do with this, Paul?”
“Well, we can’t cremate her now, that’s out of the question. And I don’t know if we should bury her like that.”
Uncle David re-entered the room with a bag of wasabi peas, casually popping handfuls into his mouth and offering the bag to everyone as he walked around the room. “Why don’t we just cut her up and stick the parts in a box?”
Now it was Aunt Kimi’s turn to throw her hands up. She decided instead to ignore his suggestion and held her hand out for a handful of wasabi peas, picking them up delicately with her thumb and index finger and eating them one at a time. She winced as she chewed, allowing the heat to flush out her already liquefying sinuses.
It was jiichan who, sitting quietly in the corner on his old worn La-Z-Boy recliner, finally offered to sell baachan’s body. It wasn’t easy to plastinate an entire human body, he pointed out. The process could take up to a year and cost tens of thousands of dollars. It was no longer legal to display plastinated bodies in the U.S., but it was still legal in Japan. We would be able to continue honoring her dying wish, he reasoned, and we’d be able to give the money from the sale to the grandchildren. When he finished making his suggestion, we sat in stunned silence. He quietly motioned to Uncle David for some wasabi peas, who shuffled over to the recliner and poured a large amount into his father’s hands. The only sound in the room was the crunch and smack of his dentures smashing the hardened peas. He had obviously put a lot of thought into this, though how he knew about the economics of the international plastinated body market was beyond anyone’s guessing.
No one could come up with an alternative to jiichan’s proposal and so it was decided. Before we figured out the logistics of selling and sending her body overseas, Aunt Kimi suggested that we hold an impromptu second funeral now that we at least had what we hoped was baachan’s body here with us. We spent the afternoon trading stories about baachan: jiichan’s first memory of seeing baachan at the university and thinking that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen; Aunt Kimi bursting into tears over the time her mother accidentally dyed her hair bright pink and then rolled with it, continuing to dye her hair vivid colors throughout the last decade of her life; Uncle David salivating over the food she’d make for them when they were sick; my dad recalling the first and only time she ever drove on a family road trip, when she nearly drove the whole family off the highway after an eighteen wheeler overtook her because she was driving twenty five miles below the speed limit.
Tilting a handful of wasabi peas into my mouth, I turned to look squarely at baachan’s skeletal frame, inhaling their chemical fragrance before tilting the sea green pearls into my mouth.
In the brief moment between feeling the echo of my teeth grinding the peas and sensing their flavors wash over my tongue, her face emerges, blooming like a magnolia opening itself to the pre-dawn light. Her hair, a pixie cut dyed a light shade of pink, glows around her skull like a halo. She’s handing me a single disk-shaped pea. I pick it up, the size of my fingernails. Examining it closely, I note first the vaguely salty scent before glancing back up at baachan. I tilt my head to ask her what exactly she wants me to do with this tiny pebble. She smiles before opening and closing her mouth, inflating her cheeks with air, telling me to eat. I comply, copying bachaan’s movements by placing the disk into my palm and flinging it into my mouth. I crunch, exaggerating my chewing as she did. The pea is salty as I’d expected, but as my saliva begins to break it down, a light sweetness leaks from the starchy interior. I buzz with excitement and baachan radiates her amusement back to me. She digs into the bag on her lap carefully and selects a perfectly round pea, coated sparsely in a light mint cream. I offer my palm eagerly and, not even waiting for the pea to come to a rest, fling my hand towards my mouth. I start humming my satisfaction even before my teeth move, encouraged by baachan’s smile. It takes only a second for me to register the scorching heat of the wasabi paste raging throughout my mouth like a bushfire. The burning sensation evaporates the water in my mouth, sending the vapor to collect in my eyes. When the burning becomes unbearable, the reservoirs burst. Through my tears I can see baachan’s face erupting into laughter, angling back and popping another handful of peas into her mouth. She swings her chin back down to face me and her smile dissolves my feelings of betrayal. Her hands reach out to wipe the thick rivulets of tears off my cheeks.
When I finish speaking, the faces around me are smiling pleasantly at the thought of being tricked by the woman whose corpse is sitting quietly on the couch.
“Baachan sure had a great sense of humor,” Uncle David beamed.
Sitting in the corner of the living room listening to these stories of baachan I’d never heard before, I tried to preserve the faces of my relatives as they spoke: jiichan’s wistful expression as he reached back through time to retrieve that first image of the woman he’d spend decades of his life with; the way Aunt Kimi’s tears collected at the corners of her eyes as she remembered her mother, her voice trembling before collapsing into peals of laughter, sending the tears cascading down her cheeks; how Uncle David’s voice maintained, however briefly, an air of seriousness as he listed off the kind of food that had only ever existed in the house we now sat in; the way my dad’s mouth roared into a panicked scream as he pantomimed his mother’s only attempt at highway driving. I almost forgot about baachan’s plastinated presence amidst the laughter and happy tears until I looked over my left shoulder and made eye contact with her glassy right eye. The rigid tendons and muscle fibers of her face seemed to soften into a smile as the fresh memories of that afternoon began to replace the faded images I’d tried so hard to hold onto.
***
Later that evening, we piled into separate cars to head to baachan’s favorite Japanese restaurant, leaving her behind on the couch. Realizing I’d left my phone in the living room, I ran back into the house. Alone with baachan in the room, I took another look at her hunched figure perched on the edge of the couch. Wrapping my arms around her torso, I slid her body back into the seat of the couch and discovered that her plastinated body, though stiff, was pliable and light. Her muscles were rough and hollow like a fallen, rotting tree trunk. Slowly, I began pulling and twisting at her shoulders, contorting her corpse into a more comfortable position. The couch molded to receive her familiar form. Propping her head up with a worn cushion and placing her hands on her lap, I poured the last handful of wasabi peas into the cup of her right palm. With her shoulders drawn back, her skeptical expression eased into the comfortable environment. I crouched on the rug and looked up at baachan, bringing back the day she’d introduced me to the potential pain and pleasure encased in a wasabi pea. I grabbed my phone from the spot on the floor where I’d left it and thought about taking a picture of baachan to keep for later but stopped myself, satisfied with the feeling that came with finally recognizing a woman I’d hardly known after twenty long years.
–
Kaz Tomozawa lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Originally from Honolulu, Hawaii he likes to spend his weekends at Jacob Riis Beach and Prospect Park.
© 2023, Kaz Tomozawa
Halfway Down the Stairs 