I think about death a lot.

But I can’t openly talk about it with almost anyone I know, because you’d think I’m depressed and pessimistic. It’s quite the opposite for me; I think being mindful with death lets you truly live because it shifts everything into perspective. You don’t sweat the small stuff as much, it motivates you to do what you truly want to do, and you start measuring your happiness by experiences, and how fulfilling your relationships are. Thinking about death has made me a more present human being because it’s a constant reminder that tomorrow is not a guarantee.

It’s all because I’m a daughter of a rigorous Samurai upbringing. Any women of a samurai ritual come with an eventful background with a lot of stories to tell. One of them is the death, a complex one. There have been two people in my clan who died on my exact birthday. I have found three bodies on streets that led me to call the police to investigate. And two trains I rode hit a person and I saw exactly what human insides looked like more than several times, and how their eyes gazed into mine just before they splashed.

I also attract people who want to die. One of the memorable ones was when I got challenged by a man who was pathologically depressed; he sent me his medical records, all his money in cash, and letters to me and my family that he was going to surrender himself if I wouldn’t get into a romantic relationship with him. That almost annihilated me, but if you ask what was the worst death experience for me, I’d answer without any hesitation that it was when I abruptly lost someone very special on my birthday. That same month, I booked a one-way ticket to the United States and haven’t come back home ever since.

Death, or the prospect of death, has a way of clearing away everything that is not real. And you become so aware of your own mortality with many philosophical questions relentlessly running around in your head. You try all your best overcoming the adversities instead of dwelling, but when death frequently revisits you, it does a great job of alluring you into life’s conundrum that you keep avoiding to face. Every year on my birthday I attend a memorial and I find myself asking the same question; – “Is this just me?”

Women with a history know perfectly well that feelings are arbitrary; they wax and wane. Yet we can never deny the fact that we are still human, not robots. So when a slap hits you in your face, it’s quite natural to sulk. But when a tsunami of self-deprivation hits you in your face, that would take the longest to rebuild and regenerate. And if you are like me, you just keep chasing the waves. You start wading through the murky waters in the rubble and wonder if you are just doomed, evil, or a disaster, and even a karma. You then start believing that darkness revolve around you and make shallow assumptions that you might be Voldemort.

At an early age, darkness and I have been in an on-again-off-again relationship. I tried so many times to break up with him, but he’s never stopped calling me, especially on my birthday.

And this evening was no exception.

The beginning:

It was a beautiful evening in May, just right before the sun was about to sink into the darkness. I came home with a view like this; another darkness knocking on my door.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this”.

I told myself my go-to Skywalker phrase while parking my tiny Nissan in the garage and took this picture. If you have a similar “eventful” background of a daughter of a samurai from the Pine Village, you’d probably understand that this is something we do instinctually: – documenting. This habit of ours saves so much time when we go to the police, hospitals, courts, or brunch with our favorite girlfriends over tea.

I immediately melted on the ground with a gasp when I saw this. The darkness was a cat. A broken one.

“What happened?”

I wistfully whispered into his ear, hoping he could hear me. After seeing so many gruesome human bodies in the past, it did not affect me to see his face all decomposed and covered with mucus and infections. But one thing I am still not used to seeing is when one has to suffer. I felt his pain so much that I wanted to carry some of it by stroking his bony shoulders.

But he hissed. And he coughed a chunk of blood, and I remember it was a radiant red as a stark contrast to the color of the stone he was lying against. It was as if he coughed the last bit of his demon from him so he could finally rest his head on the ground. When he allowed me to feel his back, I could tell his life was coming to terms soon, and for some reason, he chose my doorstep to end his life.

“What’s your name?”

Stroking his thin fur, I asked him with my soft voice. But to be brutally honest, I didn’t even care what his name was. All I was dealing with right at that moment was the darkness inside me, asking me the same exact question I ask at every funeral on my birthday: “Is this just me?”

I cleaned his face with a wet cloth, and I tried to move him to a more comfortable location, but he initiated that he wanted to be left alone, and just wanted to be close to whatever he felt around my house. So I made a cat-size house out of cardboard, gave him my blanket, some food and water, knowing he would not be able to eat any of it.

A night had passed. Surprisingly I slept okay that night. Kabuki, my cat who I also rescued from the street, acted a bit more restless than I did. The black cat did not even touch the food that I snatched from Kabuki’s dinner, instead, his blood was framing his face more than yesterday. I carefully placed my hand on his back and poured some water with my IKEA gardening kit around his mouth to clean his blood, so he could breathe more easily. It was as if I was watering a plant on a cat, and it looked silly. I still remember feeling the gradual warmth of his body through my hand, just like when your lap feels the gradual warmth through your MacBook right before its data is about to overload.

But I felt no kindness. My mind was so busy, like a database accessing passwords of every single wreckage of my eventful past. I felt just as rotten as his decomposed facial damage, and it was giving me a terrible sensation of weakness in my chest that both of us could do nothing to save ourselves from the darkness that was only moments away. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be Voldermort; to feel no kindness but my own worries in front of a dying little creature. As I continued cleaning his decomposed face, I felt so selfish and shallow in my own thinking.

The sickness inside me was eating me alive, so I decided to take a long walk right after I fed the black cat. This is something I do for my mental health; to go on a long walk into the woods with my noise canceling headphones, listening to my Spotify playlist I created under the name “Deep Walk into the Woods”. When Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful piano ballad was flowing in my restless thoughts, I found this beautiful creek deep in the mountains. I closed my eyes, and let the beauty of life crash into me for a long while. The sound of “Seseragi” and the glimpse of “Komorebi” did the fantastic trick of distracting my mind and the sickness inside me submerged softly.

Nature and music are my ibuprofen; they numb the pain just before I open my eyes and march back to reality.

We call this Seseragi, the water sound of a flowing creek. And Komorebi, sunlight filtering though the leaves of the trees💧🌱✨. #ilovewords

A post shared by Yuki Matsumura (@yukitastic) on May 2, 2018 at 7:50pm PDT

My “ibuprofen” expiredright after I saw the black cat back home. This time he was laying right in front of my parking garage, so I parked outside. I quickly got out of the car and checked on him, and noticed that he was still breathing. At that point, he had no more energy left to nod his little head when I asked him how he was doing. So I just kept on “watering” him with my IKEA gardening kit to clean his blood and made sure he was comfortable enough in his cat-box I had made for him. I was happy to see him alive, but also felt awful that he was still there suffering in pain, and I was suffering in mine. This little black cat was bringing out all my contradictions and I hated it; it was as if the universe was testing the level of my compassion and I felt immensely inadequate because nothing I did worked, just like my eventful life, especially on my birthday.

While I was deep inside my dark thoughts, I noticed an old woman standing outside of my garden. She was probably around 75, and was waiting for me to notice her existence. I let my head bow one time but not my eyes, pierced into her searching gaze. This is a Japanese bow of assent; “Hi. I see you there, and you are allowed to speak now” without exchanging any words.

I could tell her rules were bending. She was losing her battle to remain uninvolved with the unknown. She stumbled at first, then walked straight at me and the black cat, and slowly entered a whole new world. It was as if Bambi was stepping out from an airplane, landing on foreign territory for the first time in her life.

“The cat… He came here!”

She exclaimed with her heavy southern accent. She was looking at me and the cat as if she was seeing two ghosts in one picture, and I was so confused what was so surprising about it. “Do you know this cat?” I asked her back. She was looking at me, but I could tell her mind was like Narita airport with too many gates to look for; she was trying to gather as much information as possible in such a short time, and I felt so bad that I seemed to be the one giving her a sort of headache with too many things for her to think about.

“We all know this cat. He is a stray cat, dying, and we were troubled by him, because we didn’t know what to do… Look at him, he is so messed up and…” She finally let her gaze down to the cat, then looked back at me again. “And you… you cleaned him?” I said yes, and I still wasn’t sure what she was insinuating. “And you made a box for him, with your blanket inside?” I didn’t reply to this question, because we both knew what my answer would be. Instead, I decided to give her more specific information about the cat’s condition by telling her what I knew so far.

“I called the vet. And talked to the veterinarian himself and asked for his advice and he told me it’s probably better if I take care of him here and see what happens, because look… I don’t think we can do anything at this point. He is coughing blood, not eating, and now I’m “watering” him by cleaning his blood like this so he can breathe better and possibly drink some of this water as well.” I then demonstrated the watering-the-cat performance with my IKEA gardening kit, flashed a smile and said, “See?”. This short-circuited the lady’s brain. I could clearly tell this confused old lady was trying to find the missing pieces in her puzzle by a young girl with a snobby Tokyo Accent, watering a dying decomposing cat in her garden, with her strange-looking Swedish gardening kit.

“You…. you did this much…?” As her eyes started to glaze, I finally understood what she was initiating; I realized no one wanted to take care of this smelly cat and he was like a radioactive Darth Vader in this community, and this new chick from Tokyo was taking care of the cat, like it was no big deal.

Judging by her age, it was obvious that she had been living in this community for many years. And it was the call-to-action for other neighbors to succumb to the curiosity; by the time  I realized, there were four other older ladies in my garden discussing the notorious cat and there was a little women-only get-together happening in my garden. They all seemed to know each other well enough that they asked about their pets and husbands, and they seemed all apologetic that the cat decided to end up at my house.

“We’re so sorry that we had to put you through this…” They said with their sad puppy-dog eyes. I was deeply touched by this because they seemed to think of this cat as if he was theirs, and they genuinely thought he was supposed to be their responsibility, even though he clearly wasn’t.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of him!” I replied with my dimples, and they all looked at me like I had eight noses on my face. After living abroad for many years, I noticed that I seem to shock so many people in Japan with things I say or atmospheres I produce. I wasn’t sure what I said wrong, but it was not a reproachful stare; It was affection.

While they were still trying to figure out what I was, they told me that it was quite uncommon that the cat was here, because stray cats usually prefer to die alone somewhere quiet, and this place we lived in was right next to four beautiful bamboo mountains. “I wonder why, then” I replied as nonchalant as possible, as my attempt at dispelling their guilt; it was obvious that they were feeling guilty that I was the one who was doing the job no one wanted.

I was still in pain with my darkness from earlier, but I knew that was my own problem so I made sure to keep my manners the entire time with the ladies. But when one of them mumbled something so disturbing, the fake gracious smile I wore quickly faded, just as the sun fades in a valley when the darkness appears on it.

“Animals know where the angel lives around here….”

They asked if I know what to do when the cat died, as they hunched the regulation in this town was different than Tokyo, where I’m from. I shook my head and said no idea, but I really don’t remember the rest of the conversations after, because they told me that I was an angel.

When I heard those words, I found myself wading through an ocean of confusion, and let myself be trapped into one of life’s idiosyncrasies. I fervently wished that they could’ve also explained how a Voldemort can be an angel, but I didn’t want to bewilder them any more than they were already. So, I just put on my “commercial smile” that I learned from modeling in Thailand, and told them that we should’ve called it a day and see what would happen tomorrow. I bowed one time and thanked them for their kind understanding about my situation.

Half an hour after they all went home, I noticed that the lady, the first one with her searching eyes, came back into my garden again. She was carrying a giant shovel this time, almost as tall as she was, and she slowly placed it in the corner of my garage.

I was first puzzled by this view, but I soon remembered that I told them I don’t have a shovel to take care of the cat after he passed away. The lady went home, and came all the way back to me so I can use her shovel for later. The lady, approximately 151cm in a pink plaid jumper, was painfully gazing down on the cat for a while and left with obvious concern. It felt peculiar having that shovel next to the cat while he was still alive, but I could easily tell she did it with good intentions. As I watched her leaving, I noticed that she also left me a new perspective about death.

We often think that life and death are in stark contrast, but maybe they are not; – death is included in life. The death that’s moments away from the Black Cat becomes the radioactive Darth Vader in the town, and this Darth Vader doesn’t destroy the town. It becomes a kind of mystic hope for the town, and people come out of their houses in the alleyways, or in my garden, and help each other. When this kind of disaster strikes, people become nicer to each other, thinking they have to save the person who is in trouble and they become better people.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to equate darkness with disaster – It’s something we live together with. Just like the Sadness from “Inside Out”, the movie that changed my life forever. And those “negative elements” are the ones that we need to learn how not to demonize them, because without the darkness, you can never know the light. I think it’s called Yin and Yang.

The darkness is only a disaster, if you let it. And this black cat was the one who showed me that. And he became a mystic hope for the ladies in town to unite us together.

That same night the clouds were hinting that they might have rained, so I prepared my favorite umbrella my grandma gave me and placed it over the cat. My hunch was right; when I woke up at 6 am the following morning and went outside, it was raining. I was glad to see the cat stayed dry, but he was gone already. He died just before I woke up.

I touched his stomach, not moving. I checked his body, already started to stiffen. “Okay, you are gone now” Now what? I then looked at the lady’s giant shovel, and briskly started to dig a hole right under the pine tree in my garden. I bet it looked like I just killed my husband for insurance reason and wanted to hide the body as quickly as I can, because by the time the clock hit 6:30 am, the cat was already in the hole I just dug in the rain.

It’s something I trained myself to do during hardships; – act before I feel.

Like any daughters of a samurai of the Pine Village, we are used to dead bodies. But one thing I can never get used to is funerals. When I placed my blue Hydrangeas on top of his belly, all my emotions simply broke through the fragile wall that had held them, and with a sudden rush of reminiscence, I laid my head on my lap and let them drain out of me.

It’s always funny to me how a little thing like a piece of flower can trigger the darkest memories. And by the time the cat was covered with the beautiful spring flowers I collected from my garden, the darkness was also covering my entire being, and my auditory nerve seemed to be suffering the most; I started to hear the sound I used to know. The sound of mortal agony on repeat in my head, from my old playlist that I thought I unsubscribed from the inferno. If you have attended a funeral before, a complex one, you will know what it sounds like. And for some reason, that was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the cat covered with flowers. Hashtag, PTSD.

I managed to hold all my tears except for a few, and I forced myself to execute my funeral ritual; a speech.

“Hi.” I stopped for a second to collect my thoughts, and continued. “I don’t know you, but I guess it was nice knowing you. You might be wondering what to do next, but don’t worry; there will be two of my guinea pigs called Musashi and Biggsley waiting for you, and they are going to show you around Animal Heaven.” The rain was tickling my cheeks, but I kept on going. ” You made me realize kind of an important thing, so I decided to bury you under the Pine Tree, as a symbol of my last name, Matsumura.” Matsu means Pines, and Mura means Village. Pine Trees are our family crest.

That reminded me that I asked him what his name was when I just met him, and I realized I should give him a name. “Okay, how about Darkness?” I tilted my head for a couple seconds and let my imagination fly into the misty sky. “Yeah, your name is Darkness. You will make sure you exist under the Pine Tree of Matsumura, making sure I won’t defy you, but embrace you, and live with you.” I paused for a bit to think, and added, “Because you are not a disaster. You are part of the living. You are part of me.”

I took a final glance at Darkness, and gave him my go-to goodbye quote that I learned from one of my favorite comic books, Major;

“This is not a good-bye. This is a see-you-later. If I live as hard as you did, I will be able to see you in heaven again. I’m crying, not because I’m sad. It’s because I will miss you. I don’t know how long it will take me to see you again, but until then, see you later!”

After my silent prayer, I lit the incense and placed it right next to the tombstone I picked for him, and went back inside my home to hold Kabuki for the longest time.

By the time the clock hit 9:30 am, the rain stopped. And it was around this time the real magic happened.

And no, the cat didn’t come back from the grave. That would be awesome, but he wasn’t Christian; There was no resurrection. Instead, he came back in the sweetest surprise, and I’ll tell you how that happened in the next chapter.

Ah… “Next chapter”:

Around 10:30, I finished cleaning the lady’s shovel, then I accessed my memory of last evening when she introduced herself as “Yama~” something. So I loaded her shovel in my car, and decided to check all the nameplates nearby that started with “Yama~” something. And I found a “Yamasaki” plate, just around 50 meters away from my home. The house was overflowing with the plants and flowers, and I made a wild assumption that this was her house, just because I felt it. I pressed the doorbell, and I heard someone said “Haaaai!”. It felt so silly standing in front of someone’s doorstep early in the morning, with a giant shovel in my hand.

Just when my anticipation was killing me slowly, the familiar face popped up from the door and we both raised our eyebrows with delight and exclaimed the famous Asian “Aaaaaa~!” to each other. “Oh, you! You came all the way to find me! You didn’t have to!” The lady smiled, then told me she already checked my garden and saw the cat was gone. I smiled back sadly and said I did a funeral for him first thing in the morning under the Pine Tree, and gave him flowers and incense. “I think he can find his way to heaven now”. By the time I finished my sentence, I knew I did the thing again when I unconsciously shock people with things I do, and next thing I knew, she was already covering her mouth with both her hands, as if she was trying to hide her jaw that was dropped in astonishment. She was looking at me like she just captured a prehistoric creature in a net at her doorstep.

I lifted up the shovel in front of me as a way of breaking the awkward silence, and gave it back to her and said “This shovel! This was extremely helpful. Thank you so much.” with my deep bow. The lady woke up from her stupor as I was just about to leave and she suddenly exclaimed “Chotto matte!”, meaning, “One moment!”. She frantically ran to her kitchen and quickly came back holding a white bag with a cute logo of a witch, which reminded me of Kiki’s Delivery Service, one of my favorite films by Hayao Miyazaki.

“This… it’s just two pieces of cake. I couldn’t finish it so I’d like you to take it.” She then yanked the bag in front of my face and said “Please take this. Thank you so much for taking care of that cat.”

Once again this sweet old lady was talking like the cat was her responsibility, even though he clearly wasn’t. I felt like I was in the film; – she was enchanting me by re-creating real-life Kiki’s Delivery Service, and I felt like it was one scene from the film where the white-haired old lady was inviting Kiki to her botanical house for a cup of tea. I accepted the bag with both hands, just like Japanese businessmen would exchange their business cards. I looked at the logo of a witch on the bag with my mooned eyes and wondered if this was what it would feel like to be bewitched by magic. I thanked her with a deep bow one more time, feeling like a birthday girl. As I was about to get inside of my car, the lady popped her head from her garden and exclaimed one last time:

“You see, I’m from Hiroshima!”

You might be wondering what this meant, knowing I’m not from Hiroshima. But I knew instantly what she meant; – she knew that I was new here, and she wanted to let me know that she used to also be new, and that she understood me, and she accepted me by letting me know she was from Hiroshima, just like I’m from Tokyo. As I looked at her from my car window, she was looking straight at me from her garden. We both exchanged a smile and I drove away after another bow.

When I came back home, I was still feeling like a birthday girl. You see, there is no such thing as a birthday cake if you are a daughter of a samurai of the Pine Village. Patience and discipline are two of my strongest forte, but I’m acutely aware of a girl inside me no matter how old I get, and every birthday she seems to come out and want nothing but a birthday cake more than anything in her life. I opened a cake box, as if a little girl opens her very first birthday gift, and there were two beautiful cakes covered with the sweetness waiting for me to devour what it would feel like to be a birthday girl. I looked at them for a while with sparkles in my eyes, and waited for my swollen heart to stop squeezing my softest spot.

Then I noticed a small sticker by the barcode on the box. “Date of Manufacture 05/04/2018”. I tilted my head for a bit, and the sudden lightning struck me soon after. “It’s today….” I told myself, then I quickly grabbed my MacBook and googled the logo of the box “Sorcie”. The “Sorcie” website was an old-school HTML style and needed some serious rebranding, but it did tell me that the store opened at 9 am. I then google-mapped the location of “Sorcie” and it was telling me it would take 18 minutes from her house by car. I quickly checked the clock on the wall, and it was hitting 11 am.

If you live a life, you will often encounter many human traits we subconsciously follow, and one of them is the obligatory gratitude. It’s a way of socializing in today’s society where the kindness is contingent upon peer pleasure. It’s almost everywhere now, and you will never notice this until you meet the real thing, where the kindness is contingent upon pure human compassion. And it was that lady for me, from Hiroshima.

I looked at the Google map with sickness in my heart – though it was a pleasing kind of sickness, if such a thing exist. I was lied to more than several times in my life, but the lady’s lie was the most pleasing kind. It was obvious the cakes were not her leftover. She drove a car early in the morning for 18 minutes to the bakery, and bought these cakes for me, and drove another 18 minutes to come back home, just because I took care of Darkness, the stray cat who had nothing to do with her.

I’m used to the darkness. But I’m not used to a piece of cake with strawberries on top as a result of the darkness. But I guess sometimes life deals us a tricky card, where you become all cheezy and forget every rigorous life lesson you learned from the past, and say dreamy things like, “life is like a box of cakes and you never know what’s inside until you open it.”

I’m not particularly fond of commercial pastries with white sugar. I’m usually under a very strict low-carb diet. But I didn’t care about any of it that morning. I just wanted to eat them so I could remember the taste of this amazing encounter that just happened.

The cakes tasted so rich in flavor, filled with complexities with a hint of sugarcoated conflicts. As I was savoring the vanilla flavored dopamine in my system, my pancreas was releasing insulin so fast and I never knew I was craving sugar until I tasted it. It was so amazing and so sweet, in fact, it was a little bit too much; That’s probably why I went into deep thinking, and decided to add some bitter evaluation about my “eventful” life to go well with my sweet cakes. Almost like how I order my coffee at Starbucks; – I take it bitter-sweet, and here’s my reason:

Perhaps my samurai upbringing is not equipped for most practical things in life, I did learn that honesty and integrity were my greatest assets. I learned that discipline yields wisdom and resilience in most things. I learned humor and laughter would bridge most difference for short-term gains. I learned social manners, how to contribute myself in the most gracious way. Somehow I became tenacious; I look for the best in others, forgive easily, and learn quickly. I painfully learned I wanted my darkness to be of a different kind, something that I carry every day in order to truly understand what made me who I am today.

It’s all because of my darkness, my good old nemesis who I used to try all my best breaking up with. I now see him as a special gift, though he was disguised and hidden in my deep trauma, that I now learned how to appreciate.

It’s all because of Darkness, the decomposed black cat who turned my life as a Voldermort upside down. I looked at the cakes, and took another bite of it as well as life’s idiosyncrasies; – this life we live in is so rich in flavor filled with complexities with a hint of sugarcoated conflicts.  And this inexplicable ambivalence might be something we need to learn how to embrace more of.

Sometimes what we want is a deep story. Something with life and death with an interior and some depth of our own. But sometimes, all we need is a black cat waiting for you to open the door, or an old lady staring deeply into your eyes from the alleyways, waiting for you to give her a nod. And let’s just see what happens next, because life is like a box of cakes; you never know what’s inside until you open it.

I’m sorry if this sounds too dreamy. But you know what they say; Yuki Matsumura, she is an angel.

😉

Thanks for reading.
-Yuki

p.s. This week I knocked on her door again and surprised her with my annoying dimples shoving a bag of my freshly baked banana muffins in her face. She was once again looking at me like I was an alien but I baked a lot and I wanted her to have some of them because of the reason I wrote on the caption here:

I live alone. But I always bake enough for 20 people. It’s not because I have a sweet tooth, nor a good metabolism to devour them all; it’s because I want to know that my grandma still lives inside me. . She taught me one of the most ancient Japanese traditions that no one does anymore today; – it’s called “Wazatto”, meaning, “this is just a little food I made, but I would like to share this with you, because you are part of my life.” So when I bake, I always make sure I bake for my people, and I deliver to their location with a crazy glint in my eyes exclaiming, “Here comes my Wazatto, bitches!” 😎💕 . They usually have no idea what Wazatto means, so I always have my online dictionary ready and brag all about my amazing grandmother who taught me how to appreciate people around me. Now, you go do Wazatto, and help me continue the Samurai legend! ⚔️ #japanesebyyuki

A post shared by Yuki Matsumura (@yukitastic) on May 24, 2018 at 11:46pm PDT