Fragments of Eternity

In the spring of 2012, I photographed my mother in a white hospital room — clean but bleak — with a view of the mountains of Kobe behind the window. She wore nothing, and no one else was there.

My mother was about to undergo surgery. My father said it wouldn't be the most difficult operation, but for the first time in my life, I felt that my mother was dying. Father, I knew how worried you were. When I told Mother I would take time off work to come home, she told me to bring my camera. I packed a suitcase and carried my Hasselblad on a flight from Tokyo to the only home I have on this planet.

When I arrived in Kobe, where I can still see the ocean and the mountains of the city I grew up in, Father was sitting alone in the living room. The house smelled the way it always did, but without Mother there, it wasn't the same place.

My father is not a good cook. He made dinner for me only once in his life — instant ramen, for his two sons, and a disaster in the kitchen to go with it. Perhaps because my mother is the best cook either of us has ever known, he never had to learn. For those days, he ate bento boxes from the department store nearby. I know they didn't satisfy him.

After we shared one of those lunches, Father and I walked to the station. He bought several tickets from the machine and handed me one. Before I could ask why, he said, "I'll be coming here many times, so I bought a discount book." I knew what he meant — he was thinking about the cost, the way he always does. I remember thinking, what does it matter, let's just go. But I looked at his face and said nothing. I don't remember what we talked about on the train. The twenty minutes passed quickly anyway.

At the hospital, we took the elevator to Mother's floor. Walking down the corridor, the smell of the place made me uneasy. Father knocked, and without waiting for an answer, opened the door.

My mother was in bed. She smiled and sat up. I didn't know what to feel, so I smiled back, then looked out the window — at the mountains, at the station we had just left — anywhere but at the reality in front of me.

I began loading film into the camera. I had photographed people without clothes before, but photographing my own mother this way was the strangest experience of my life. She looked down at her stomach and said it wouldn't look the same tomorrow. She asked Father to wait outside.

I photographed her for no more than ten minutes. She didn't pose, and I didn't ask her to. She simply sat on the bed. I shot two rolls of black-and-white film, and I couldn't tell you now what I was thinking while I did. I wasn't there to make art, or to find beauty. I photographed my mother quietly, with almost no words between us. I spoke to her through the act of photographing. She spoke back by letting me.

Afterward, she put her robe on and began talking about Father — worried, as always, that he didn't know how to cook or take care of himself. When he came back into the room, she asked me to photograph the two of them together. I switched to color film. She linked her arm through his without hesitation. I had trouble focusing — black lines had begun creeping across the viewfinder screen as I shot, growing darker with every frame, until I could barely see through it at all.

The surgery went well. The doctor showed us what he had removed, and told us he was closing her up. Father, you were so anxious — you said, "Something must be wrong. Why else would he call us in the middle of the operation?" He was only giving us an update.

Back in Tokyo, not knowing what had happened to my camera, I brought it to a repair shop. The owner said it was likely moisture, trapped inside the screen.

Mother, I know very little about the world, or about life, or about you. I don't yet know what it feels like to watch my own child sleep, or to see the mother of my child holding them for the first time. I can only imagine it. But I have always felt that I live inside you, and that you live inside me. The scars on your stomach will disappear the day you turn to ash, but the memory of your warmth will stay with me for as long as I live. Maybe when I have children of my own, I'll understand you a little better than I do now.

I once worked with an artist in New York I still admire. In 2013, he made a piece called Music (Everything I Know I Learned the Day My Son Was Born). I think about asking him, someday, what it was he learned. I still don't know what it means to have a child. But I know this much: I want to raise mine with the same love you gave me.

I don't yet know when, or if, I will show the photographs from that day. I know it isn't time. But today, I think I can make a fragment of eternity visible through these few words instead.

This is for my mother, who is still alive. I am grateful to be growing old beside you, sharing these fragments of time with someone like you. Thank you, Mother.