Story Photographs

It was when I was four and lived with my maternal grandmother for the summer. One evening, a person visited from the newspaper company to collect the monthly subscription fee. I noticed the visitor from the window while playing on my own, but being extremely cautious around a stranger, I immediately called my grandmother. My […]

When my brother was little, he was very much a mommy’s boy. We all believed that it was probably because of the long period he spent with her at hospital as a baby. Since he was born with a heart disease, from the first day of his life on earth, he was thrown into an

It was when I was four or five and attended the local YAMAHA music school with my two childhood best friends. Once every week, we all went to an hour-long group lesson together accompanied by our mothers and younger siblings. The lesson studio was located at the top floor of the YAMAHA music shop in

One summer day when I was six, three of my mother’s college friends came to visit us in our tiny half-dilapidated apartment. As far as I remembered, it was my first time to meet them in my life. As they arrived and seated themselves on the tiny couch, I sat on the floor nearby with

The spring I was in Grade 3, we had a sport festival at school. Among the many games we were enrolled in was a tug of war. The four classes in Grade 3 were going to fight against each other to win the trophy cup. For the weeks leading up to the sport festival, we

When I was about four, my father had a habit of leaving his clothes wherever he removed them inside the house instead of neatly folding them. Each evening, he would come home and change into his pajamas, leaving his work clothes scattered all across our tiny half-dilapidated apartment. And each time, my mother would scold

In my early years at primary school, I was one of those few kids in the classroom who spent the breaktime mostly on her own. It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends, but I preferred being on my own daydreaming and writing stories in my notebook than participating in the games others were playing. At

I was five year old when my father gifted me with my very first dictionary. One evening after supper, he said that we were now all going to go to the bookstore to buy a Japanese dictionary. It was rare for us to go out for shopping that late, so I got very excited. “What

When I was little, my little brother and I got along well, but there were moments when a fight erupted between us over some small things. One morning when I was four and my brother was one, my mother took us to her workplace to take photocopies of a teaching material. There was nobody else

When I was in primary school, every summer, there was a series of mandatory swimming lessons. Like many typical public schools in Japan, there was an outdoor swimming pool on the school premises, and whenever the water temperature was above the certain degree, we were called to the poolside for the lesson. While most people