This September will be Yoshie Hattori's sixtieth birthday. We have been together now for thirty years and in that time she has shaped my life, perceptions, freindships and thought. Living with her has changed how I learn and who I share my learning with. I have been thinking about this a lot since we moved to Boston and Yoshie began to share her photos more widely through her blog itis, which she describes as "Photos and other scannings of what I see as it is. A record of patterns, rhythms, reflections."
Living together has changed how I see, what I taste, the ways I touch, how I experience places and how I speak.
Sight
Walter Benjamin described photography as the 'technology of the optical unconscious.' Photographs capture what we see but often fail to notice, the underlying fabric of the world that helps us continue across each day's haze. Yoshie's photos help me to pause and look more closely.
Part of this is the spatial rhythms she experiences so strongly in a sky (here and here), a wall, a ceiling, a window a door or just hanging there. Each place, day, moment, glance has a rhythm. Being able to see these rhythms helps me, anyway, stitch the days together and get out of the blur and pressure of a life that seems to always be leaving too much behind.
Leaving too much behind and unnoticed. There are traces of things everywhere we go. The imprint of a newspaper on a sidewalk or an idea stiched into the pavement. When we renovated our old house in Kitsilano she saw things in the debris or left on the walls. There is intimacy in the details that follows in surprizing places.
And in all of this detail there is a world of signs, from footprints in East Vancouver, to a choice of directions or written in light.
Today, when I walk or cycle, much of what I see I see through Yoshie's eyes. I notice more details, and my movement opens into the larger rhythms of sight. But her photos still surpize me, and I am often puzzled when she stops, spends minutes looking, sometimes it seems as if she is waiting, and I am often waiting (hopefully with a book to read), and I am still waiting, to really see. Something has opened for me.
Taste
A big part of our life together has been preparing food and eating together with family and friends. It is one of the things I miss most about not being in Vancouver, our big Zawazawa Kitchen and all the people that come by for dinner.
Living together for thirty years we have blended our sense of taste but most of what is best in how we cook comes from Yoshie. One can see this in our salad dressings.
Yoshie Style
- A neutral oil, usually grapeseed, sometimes with a touch of a nut oil if more depth is needed from the oil
- A flavoured vinegar, often the tarragon vinegar that Micheline Gill taught her, but sometimes a rice vinegar or an apple vinegar
- Shallots
- Sea salt
Steven Style
- Olive oil or a mixture of oils that includes a nut oil
- A fruit acid, usually from lemon (with a bit of the zest) or raw 100% cranberry juice to be local
- Shallots and sometimes a white onion or a red onion or a bit of garlic
- Sea salt
The approach is Yoshie's. She has taught me to keep it simple, focus on clean flavours that will call to each other, and pick up the high notes of the season.
It is often hard, but we are slowly getting better at cooking together. (Shouldn't this be easier after so many meals?) Learning to cook together and accept each other's place in the kitchen is probably a good metaphor for our whole relationship. We are both stubborn, passionate, controlling and we want desperately to share, to understand and to be understood.
Everyday that we cook together I discover a new taste - how roasted eggplant combines with apple vinegar - yuzu mixed into salt - the flesh along the backbone of a grilled sardine - tomato just tomato sauce.
Touch
Our home is filled with random objects.
A sheet of paper, torn along the bottom edge, pinned to the wall Bark fallen from branches Tiny hammers, pliers, needles Strange shapes of coloured plastics The normal mixture of seeds, stones, dried flowers
All of these are interesting to look at, but they are more interesting to touch, to see with one's fingers. Seeing with one's fingers gives a better idea of what they have been and what they can become.
Yoshie began to knit when she was three years old and hasn't stopped. Over the past few years she has been knitting small things using wire, bits of paper, strips of discarded plastic, and beads. The use of circles, mix of materials and questioning of form reminds me of Eva Hesse. The shapes have become organic, reminding me of Ernst Haeckel's drawings of sea creatures. This makes sense to me as both Haeckel's drawings and Yoshie's knittings have helped me understand a little more about the evolution of form. Holding one lightly in my fingers it is surpizingly firm and pliable. Rubbing it gently the different textures blossom into intimate worlds. In small things there is more than words can say, so "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Place
I lacked any deep sense of place until Yoshie and I had lived together for several years. She is deep rooted and staying with her has helped me grow my own roots, tangled in with hers, and searching together for the nitrogen fixers we need to grow.
There are many places that are part of our life together,
- Rubbing noses in the winter cold
- A waterfall in Kyoto
- The beach in Copenhagen
- The house, now gone, in Kohoku and
- The levy where we often walked
- And walking in Senjogahara
- The harbour at Katsuyama
- Or anchorage off Dai-Ni-Kaiho
- Our house in Kitsilano
- The beach below it
- Gastown where we worked, have friends and where Kaito works today
- Another anchorage, this one in the Gulf Islands
- Widgeon Slough where we still canoe
- The deck of our apartment in the South End
- A restaurant in Sestri Levante
- Where and ever we can be together
Speech
When we are alone together Yoshie and I speak an odd jumble of Japanese and English, with the occaisional French or Swedish term thrown in. Our children understand most of it, and maybe a few friends who are also bilingual in English and Japanese and who have shared parts of our life. It makes sense to us to say things such as
"The plant's tendril is guru guru around the wire."
"Maa, kore wa chotto too abstract to act, dakara shirabte hou ga ii."
"The rain smells sabishi."
Translation is a large part of my life but the translations that matter the most to me are those that expose the gaps between languages - almost any translation of Paul Celan for example. Living in two languages is a constant exploration of those gaps, a pulling apart and then stitching together. Sometimes the threads snap, and sometimes the gap is too wide to close without pain. What does close the pain, after thirty years, is our friendship.
