Different people take different paths, different journeys at different times. They are not travelling with a specific destination in mind. Yet, they are walking toward the same place. Whether they meet or not is not relevant. It‘s not a mathematical equation/

The memory of the dark, one-story house on the once-large property where my mother grew up. I barely remember. I see blurred dark brown and green/

I remember the typhoon breaking in between tall trees. Chestnuts with long spines rain down on me, spines like toothpicks. Chestnuts, as I have never seen them before, hit the ground to the left and right of me. I flee with my hands protecting my head/

My grandmother‘s house is dark and smells old – dampness, cellar, mold. Despite the fact that the summer day is no further away than a thin wooden wall, it‘s cool in here. The floor is built in the traditional way on stilts – wooden planks a few centimeters above the ground. And above that, a simple green carpet, the kind found in hardware stores and garden centers, just as good for outdoors. I remember parts of the floor where, under the carpet, a board was missing – rotten, broken. The carpet stretches over the holes. When you walk on it, you realise you‘re stepping into a hole, your foot barely held by the carpet, which gives way a little/

I‘m sure that my grandmothers‘ house was not standing for long after the time of this memory, and my grandfather didn‘t live much longer either. After that, my grandmother lived in a new house until her death. There, she spent many years in bed in a bright room on the ground floor. After her death, she was laid out in that room, on ice and flowers, and the family spent the night with her, drinking and laughing, so that obāchan‘s soul wouldn‘t be afraid and would feel encouraged to embark on the next journey/

At the time of the memory, however, my grandmother and grandfather still lived in the house with the carpet that spanned the holes, ensuring that no one disappears into them. A house surrounded by tall trees, from whose crowns chestnuts fell, striking down those who fail to protect themselves/

Old age made my grandfather crazy. That said, they say he‘s always been crazy. As a young man, he signed on with a merchant ship to avoid being drafted into the war. He fell in love with my grandmother in Hiroshima, where she was a teacher at a school. Together, they fled the city due to my grandmother‘s family, which was not willing to tolerate the foreign marriage. Yokatta, yokatta, otherwise the atomic bomb would have taken my grandmother too/

My grandparents moved to the property near Tokyo. The property had been large, on the edge of fields. Over the years, it has been halved over and over again, turned into asphalt parking lots and more houses. Later, a modern single-family house was built right next to the old house where my grandmother lived when my grandfather was still alive. Inside the old house, a green carpet spanned holes in the floor. It was dark, damp, and during a typhoon, chestnuts hailed down outside. Those who did not know how to protect themselves were struck down and injured/