Cardboard Box

Inspired by The Emissary by Yoko Tawada

Great-grandmother told me about a book she read in grade school many many years ago. It was called Wonder. She didn’t tell me who wrote it because they were American. The boy in the story wore a space helmet because of a disease that ruined his face. I get to wear a full space suit because I’m sick on the inside. Not the outside. The word for wonder is beautiful in French, that’s where great-grandmother was before the box closed. Now people aren’t allowed into our country so we have to act like we never knew the outside existed. Great grandmother tells me about how pretty France is but I’m not allowed to know about France. If I remember the pretty tower in Paris I have to keep it in my own box, the box in my head. Sometimes things come out of the front door by accident though. In the newspaper, someone got in trouble for saying the French phrase for “I miss you” but it’s so much prettier in French. They’re on vacation now great-grandma says, but the newspaper says he was sent to ‘Execution’ and but I’ve never heard of that place so it must be really foreign.

Newspapers have always been helpful with the newest scientific research being presented. How to make the kids live longer. Annya always knew that she would have to watch Sadao die. He was a clever little boy, always seeming to know what to say when Annya fell into her rabbit hole of worries. A sort of inner connection to anyone he spoke to, Sadao could always tell how someone was feeling even if they hid it. In the meantime, Sadao is still a little boy going to school with his great-grandmother in tow, he used to have to be carried but new technology continued to come out as ways to help kids be able to be more independent. Every day, kids are weaker than yesterday. Society runs off of the elderly as they have stronger bones, stronger veins, stronger souls than the youngest. Sadao’s mother died 2 years ago, his grandmother still living in the part of Japan where the soil was still rich, unlike the contaminated soil of our town. This is where the factories are. This is where the real Japan is. This is what we are keeping from the rest of the world. Since Fukushima, negative effects are ringing throughout the country’s veins, intoxicated its blood so that only a few towns remain safe. So great-grandparents and their great-grandsons and great-granddaughters stay in Japan’s weak links. The strongest and weakest of society left to praise things as simple as clementines because their own blood left them.

Sadao amazes me more than any other child. The other day at breakfast he told me to stop reading the newspaper because he can see my air getting thicker when I do. He’s a clever little boy, but not that means nothing now. No matter how smart he is, he can hardly walk. All people need is for children to be healthy, but most die before their parents. Everyone dies before us great-grandparents. Sadao’s generation seems to be the last. Japan has become so deeply ill that the people living on its land are becoming just as ill. What a dreadful time to be a pediatrician! All our children are breaking. All our children are broken.

         When a country breaks. When it’s soul dies. What happens to the people that made it? My generation has been working for years to make this country great, we still work at age 110 and older. The fundamentals of this country are being tossed to the side with no positive future in sight. We are worked to the bone living off of rice and giving all the milk our cows produce to our children hoping they stop losing their teeth. Japan’s bone are breaking just as much as our children’s’ bones. I’m starting to think my future may outlast Sadao’s. Even worse, my country’s.