Poet Machi Tawara appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on January 20th. She talked about her memories of her parents.
My father passed away in 2024 at the age of 91. That morning, he was barely conscious, but I was wondering whether to cancel an important afternoon appointment or stay by his side. Encouraged by a palliative care doctor, I went to work in Tokyo, and after work, I got a call telling me he had passed away just as I was climbing the stairs to the subway. "I think my father would have been okay with that," I recall.
After her father's death, words began to flow over her. She had doubts about choosing death as her theme, but a question from her palliative care doctor came to mind: "Which do you think your father would like?" "My father loved my poems so much, so I thought he might tell me to choose which one to recite, and that helped me to let go of my feelings and write a poem to see my father off," she says.
Her mother, who turned 88, lives nearby and spends her days with her, accompanying her to hospitals, etc. "My father was a big fan of Go and Shogi, but my mother sorted out and disposed of his books, and I got really angry and thought it was bad luck, so we ended up fighting," she said, revealing an episode about her parents.
In a fit of anger, he called his son, who said, "Maybe Grandma wanted to do something related to Grandpa?" and "Using your hands is calming, so maybe that's why." He was taken aback. When he asked his mother, she said, "That may well have been the case." When he praised his son for being a good son, she also said, "I can see things objectively because I'm far away, so the most important person is my mother, who's right next to me." "I know I'm a bit of a doting father, but don't you think he's a pretty good son?" he said proudly.
His father was a physicist and researched magnets. He is said to have created the strongest magnet in the world. When he was in elementary school, his teacher asked him to bring any magnets he had at home in a science class. He borrowed his father's magnet and brought it with him. "It was amazing, it seemed like everything stuck to it," he recalled.
My father loved to study. Apparently, his family was poor and opposed his going to university, but he was able to go to a university where he could commute without living in a boarding house. He then went to graduate school with a scholarship and part-time work, and wrote his doctoral thesis while working as a salaryman.
When Tawara was doing her homework as an elementary school student, her father would say to her, "Kids these days are so lucky. They can study to their heart's content." Perhaps thanks to this, she grew to love studying as a child. "My father was very happy for his daughter, who later became a poet," she said. "She remembered my tanka poems better than I did, and would occasionally hum them to me."
