It is the beginning of March and my mind goes to spring 14 years back when I had just arrived in Japan and was awaiting my first sight of the famous cherry blossoms. This memory was just inspired by my 8-year-old son who, along with his sister, has grown up hearing stories of Japan. This particular instance began when he spied the small music box I keep on the top of my computer desk in the study. It is not much of a music box, just a matchbox sized mechanism inside a heavy paper casing with the picture of an apprentice geisha, a maiko girl, playing hanetsuki. It tinkles out "Sakura Sakura" when the holder rotates the little arm with its small red ball on the end. It is something I picked up at the sundries counter of the Okura Hotel in Tokyo, where it lay with the chewing gum and postcards. It is one of my treasures. And now he has asked me to play it for him, again.
Sakura Sakura is, of course, the anthem to the cherry blossom and anyone with any interest at all in Japan is sure to hear it and remember it. Even those with a less intimate knowledge of Japan may find it familiar, for it has a slow and haunting melody that is world famous. Whether it is played on the traditional stringed koto, or on a tinny little music box, it has the power to evoke what is at the heart of the cult of the cherry blossom. Sakura Sakura captures that painfully bittersweet quality we all feel when we behold something of exquisite beauty that has but a brief and glorious hour and then is swept away by a sudden oblivious gust.
When my children were infants, I would amuse them with the music box, and, missing Japan terribly, I would create stories for them and word pictures. I never let them listen without closing their eyes and imagining the ethereal pink mists floating in the branches. They told me at these times that yes, they could see the clouds each time I played the music. Now at 8 and 10, they still ask to see the cherry blossoms and to hear of the little sweet rice cakes and sake. That, somehow, makes up for the transitory nature of their, the blossoms', and my, existence.
Now I have just come in from smelling the sweet aroma of the orange blossoms on my patio. It will be another day with a brilliant blue sky and mild weather. But I hunger for that other clime and the anticipation hanging in the air when the only possible opening to any conversation would be when the blossoms would open. I hunger for the chill of early April and the mounting impatience as the weeks go by and the blossoms, like beautiful women, make us all wait. I hunger for the excitement that their arrival triggers and the "O-Hanami" blossom viewing parties under the branches laden with pink and white wisps of clouds. I hunger for all that my little music box speaks of, which is all that remains to me now of cherry blossom time in Japan.
Posted by Jeanne Belisle Lombardo
March 04, 2002
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