闭经记 身后无遗物 初老的女人 Menopause Diaries / Nothing Left Behind / The Newly-Old Woman

AI-generated translation.

One morning I got a message from my friend Xiao Wan: “I just had a thought — I am now a young little old lady. I’m going to live according to a little old lady’s mindset. What would a little old lady’s mindset be?”

Oh, I know exactly! Because I’ve been reading Hiromi Itō lately.

I crossed paths with Hiromi again while looking for Ishiguro at the library. I was scanning the Japanese literature shelves, confident I’d spot Ishiguro’s spines, when I got pulled in by Hiromi Itō’s Nothing Left Behind and The Newly-Old Woman. Later I realized — Ishiguro is a Japanese-British author and his books are filed under British literature. I gathered up those two slim Hiromi volumes, delighted, like running into an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages.

A few years ago I got to know Hiromi Itō through Menopause Diaries. The title alone tells you a little old lady wrote this, and that successfully hooked my curiosity. Right — what is the process of menopause actually like? What is “the change,” in legend, actually like to experience? Is it… really that scary?

In her fifties, Hiromi was working, caring for her elderly father, dealing with her teenage daughters, the old family dog, fighting her ageing body and the hormonal shifts of menopause — busy beyond belief. And yet her prose is playful and lovable. After my daughter fell asleep, I’d leave the little bedside lamp on and hold this small book, unwilling to sleep, even more unwilling to finish.

After her mother, her father, the dog, and then her husband died in sequence, facing old age and life’s constant subtractions, Hiromi Itō writes: “Those few years of menopause were actually fun. When it ended, I felt that rising-into-the-light sense of seeing daylight again.”

“In my early sixties the world in front of me suddenly lost its colours. It was so different from the decade I’d spent battling my fifties. The world withered. People were going. I felt I could sense it: my own one-way road in life would also end in withering and parting… I thought, well, this is just how it is. But unexpectedly, life is not quite what I thought.”

“After my husband died, once I’d gradually got used to his being gone, for some reason the clouds in my head suddenly lifted. My field of vision broadened. I started seeing things I hadn’t been able to see until then. My body keeps loosening, ageing, day by day, but I felt I’d been thoroughly rinsed clean, and lightened all over.”

“In sixty years of living, this is the first time I’ve felt so light. Like stepping into zero gravity — open in every direction, clean, colourless. A small nirvana, pleasant and comfortable. Looking back, my head and body used to be full of cluttered, busy colours; I was irritable, foggy and reckless. Could it have all been hormones acting up? Now that menopause is over, all of that is gone — and I almost miss it.”

In Nothing Left Behind, Hiromi pushes the lens forward into the ageing that follows menopause. She comes across like a seasoned player of the game of life, sharing her walkthrough — earnest, unadorned. I kept catching myself comparing her to my own situation as I read: which stage am I in? What challenges might the next stretch hold? Whether the looming labour or the possible emptiness, in Hiromi’s hands they become experiences within reach. Her candour, humour and accumulated wisdom give me a steadier present and a more anticipated future.

“But I never imagined that after menopause, ‘old’ would arrive in this form, and just keep on going. Ah, life is full of unexpected things… I fell in love and thought I’d finally found my person, and it didn’t go well. I was anxious. After marriage life settled, and I discovered I no longer wanted sex. The bitterness of divorce qualifies as ‘unexpected.’ My beloved children grew into teenagers and bared their teeth at me ‘unexpectedly.’ Lots of unexpected things, and I stumbled out of all of them. So I’ll stumble out of this old age, too. But this time, what’s coming to meet me on the other side will be death.”

“I can’t count how many times I cursed my husband: hurry up and die. And when he really did die, life suddenly cracked open, and a vast emptiness appeared. I knew the emptiness was coming, but I could never have predicted how empty. To every old wife who isn’t getting along with her old husband, I want to say: only after I really went through it did I realize how lonely this can be. Lonely to the bone. I’m not saying ‘cherish the person in front of you.’ I really am not. I want everyone to put themselves first, secure their own survival first. If you just keep yielding and yielding, life loses its meaning. We can kick the other person aside and live without fear.”

Hiromi doesn’t chase grand, epic narratives. She points her camera at the world closest to her — her parents, her husband, her daughters, the dog, the daily feelings that belong only to her. Interestingly, on a certain emotional frequency she meets Ishiguro head-on. In A Pale View of Hills he uses delicate, restrained brushstrokes to render an immigrant Japanese mother’s guilt about her daughter. Hiromi isn’t a literary “shadow mother” — she is that immigrant mother. She didn’t live through the war’s smoke, but in her youth she lived through storms big enough to tear the inside of her apart. Her apology to her daughters, especially the second, is heartbreaking and moving.

“When I was a teacher I lived alone. Later, broke and out of options, I moved back in with my parents. That period was really the trough of my life. I was tangled up with a married man, I had an abortion, I broke up with him, and on an impulse I flash-married someone. A flash marriage can’t be happy. I divorced immediately. Even though it only lasted a few months, the taste of divorce was deeply bitter. I had another abortion… I always had no money. After the divorce I wanted to live alone, but I couldn’t manage, so I went back to my parents. I was sometimes fat, sometimes thin, smoked, did weed, drank myself into the gutter. It was around then that I met my lifelong dear friend Eda Mitsumi. I held poetry readings, published a poetry collection, the publisher told me to keep writing and I kept writing, but not with the kind of urge I have now — I didn’t have to write. Looking back from where I stand today, I’d surely say my younger self was lazy and impatient. Back then I was only desperately trying to find a way to survive — I just didn’t put down the pen. That really was a dazed, dark stretch, with only a small flicker of light at my feet… right? I think everyone has been through something like it too.”

“I really don’t want to say this, but I’ve always thought of myself as a poor mother — and not in a way ‘unfit to be a mother’ can cover. Do I need to spell it out? I had a perfectly good husband and family; I destroyed that family. Even if it wasn’t entirely my fault, the fact remains the family collapsed. And then I took my daughters to America, to California, and made them suffer needlessly. Made them taste, fully, what hardship tastes like. ‘Taste hardship fully’ — I’m using that phrase for the first time. I don’t normally want to, but only this phrasing gets at what I mean. They were ordinary children born of an ordinary family in peacetime, and they ended up tasting the kind of hardship only refugee children, war-era children, disaster-movie children would taste.”

By the time we get to The Newly-Old Woman, Hiromi has gone back to Japan to teach. You can’t help thinking: what a life-force! She runs a column in newspapers and magazines answering readers’ letters. Her life advice to young people: be yourself, lie flat, do what you actually feel. She sees how the roles of “good child / good student / good mother” squeeze a person to suffocation, and so she advocates being looser, rougher, less polished. Rebel, just a little, where you’d be expected to submit — especially against the “respectability script” your parents would write for you. When her younger daughter resists her father, Hiromi privately cheers her on. To her female students she says you don’t have to wear makeup, you don’t have to shave your armpits — she practises “no bra” herself.

“I think life needs a few basic principles, and the rest can be improvised. The first is ‘I am me.’ People who can stick to ‘I am me’ can also understand ‘others are others.’ Once you understand ‘others are others,’ you can fall in love, deal with neighbours, relatives, and colleagues. ‘I am me,’ put another way, is ‘hold to yourself.’”

“The second is ‘rough-and-loose, sloppy, half-baked.’ After watching all kinds of suffering, I noticed that most of life’s troubles come from trying to play ‘good child’ and ‘good person.’ The more capable a person is, the better their acting gets. As a result, they’re trapped by the role they’re playing and can no longer breathe. So I propose ‘rough-and-loose, sloppy, half-baked.’ Let’s chant this mantra, and the moment we’re about to turn into ‘good child,’ ‘good person,’ or ‘good mother’ — we charge straight through.”

“While we’re at it — rebel against your parents. If you’re in your teens, I don’t need to tell you, you’re already rebelling. I did, and my daughters did even more. I think you should hold to this: even after you become a grown-up, even after you enter menopause, even after menopause ends, keep rebelling against your parents as much as you can. Don’t live to be your parents’ pride. Try, instead, to live like dust. I don’t usually love the word ‘try,’ but here I have to use it. Suppress the part of you that wants to be a ‘good child.’ Going along with your parents is easy — resist that easiness. Without effort, none of this is possible.”

Hiromi makes me feel that life is the act of kicking aside roles and expectations that don’t belong to you, and then redrawing your own outline on the blank space. If you, too, want to be a “young little old lady” right now, don’t hesitate. Put yourself first. Let emptiness step aside. Embrace each surprise and each loneliness as they come. Just like that. Throw off the constraints. Light-footed. Keep walking.