Memoirs of a Shattered Soul — 04: The Mysterious White Fox
As a child, you never think much about your parents’ lives before you were born. But now I find myself thinking about that constantly.
March 2, 2013
My father had told me that Marilyn DeZeuw was unlike anyone I had ever met before. I was surprised, actually, that he would make such a statement. I also wondered, privately, if anyone could live up to such an introduction. I thought perhaps I would be disappointed. In the end, though, he was exactly right.
Marilyn lives in a large house in Lauterbrunnen, known as L’Oasis, where people from all over the world come to lodge, to study, to find peace, to find knowledge, perhaps to find God. They come for a few days or sometimes for a few months. It seems like an odd arrangement to me, but apparently it’s worked perfectly well for decades now. So who am I to judge?
Marilyn herself made an impression on me immediately. She is in her sixties, but as soon as I saw her I felt dazzled by her. I don’t mean by her physical appearance, although she is beautiful: she has long white hair that falls like an avalanche to her slender waist and deep blue eyes that always seem to be twinkling in the light. However, it’s something else about her that leaves an impression… a kind of peace and stillness and gentleness.
“Yukiko-san,” she said to me in perfect Japanese. “I am honoured that your father has brought you here today.”
My father looked as though he wanted to laugh at my reaction. I speak English and French relatively well and had imagined that we would be conversing in one of those languages. He had mentioned to me that Marilyn could speak Japanese, but it’s difficult sometimes for gaijin. Yet Marilyn spoke it as if she had known the language all her life.
It turned out that she had, in fact, learned Japanese in her childhood. She told me that during World War II her mother had been a prisoner of the Japanese in a POW camp in Sumatra. Marilyn was born the year after the war ended. She and her mother went to live in Japan when she was still a baby. Essentially her mother was a Christian missionary who desired to build bridges and bring healing to the nation that had tortured her during the war.
“It was tough for me, being the only blonde blue-eyed girl in my classes at school. I was always teased. I used to go home and secretly pray that I could be magically transformed into a Japanese girl.” Marilyn said that with a laugh, but I felt devastated for that little girl she used to be. I know how hard it can be to fit in at school in Japan, even if you’re not gaijin. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
Marilyn brought us to her library, which was usually full of lodgers or visiting scholars. This afternoon it was just for us. I think I have never seen so many books together in one house before. Over the entrance there was a large reproduction of a painting that that I had seen before, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
Seeing my father glancing at the painting as he entered, Marilyn said cryptically, “You really took to heart what I told you all those years ago, didn’t you?”
My father smiled. I could almost imagine the two of them there in this room almost thirty years ago. He said, “Well, I still say that I’m not so remarkable. You were right, though, that art and fantasy are part of what makes us human.”
As a child, you never think much about your parents’ lives before you were born. Well, I never did at least. Now that I’m fifteen, going on sixteen years old, I find myself thinking about that constantly, curious to know more. Who was Takeyoshi Karematsu when he was my age? Just a dreamy kid with a sketchbook full of imaginary characters no one else had ever seen. Just another nail sticking out that needed to be hammered down.
It didn’t help that my grandfather, Hideki Karematsu, was a distinguished scientist working hard to rebuild Japan after the devastation of World War II… a man who didn’t have much time for art and fantasy. He won a Nobel prize in Chemistry when my father was only eleven. In those years during my father’s childhood, it seemed as though everyone in Japan was working hard, as if the whole country were under a sign saying “No Daydreamers Allowed.” My grandfather died before I was born, so I never got to meet him or see him interacting with my father, but I know their relationship was not always an easy one.
I could well imagine my father coming here to Lauterbrunnen in 1985 with his parents, walking under Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” seeing this room filled with books, meeting Marilyn for the first time… and feeling as if he had escaped from a prison and come to a literal oasis.
All of this was running through my head when I heard my father exclaim: “Oh! You still have it!”
In another part of the library there was a framed painting, much smaller than the Van Gogh, showing a white fox in the forest. A kitsune. I could tell immediately that the artist must have been Japanese.
Marilyn was beaming. “That was a special Christmas for me, when you and your parents came to visit. And this was a precious gift. Of course I still have it, Take-san!”
By this time I had walked over to my father’s side to look at the painting more closely. The mysterious white fox gazed out at me from inside the shadowy forest covered in snow. It was so lifelike that I could almost believe it could walk out of the frame and rub noses with me, and so beautiful that I almost wished it would.
Yes, I knew that my father was an artist, as well as being a writer, video game creator and “professional daydreamer.” Even so, in all my life I had never seen a more exquisite example of his artistry.
Perhaps sometimes you need to travel far away to truly see the people closest to you.
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