Memories Mellow Like Kusu

Keep looking ahead!

Never look back!

We hear this advice all the time, but it seems it is not always right. According to research at the University of British Columbia in Canada, losing yourself in happy memories stimulates the brain and markedly improves test scores.

During the Cultural Revolution, Nien Cheng was imprisoned on false charges for six years. In her book “Life and Death in Shanghai” she writes that by recalling the happy days of her past she was able to ease the unbearable pain of torture, and to survive, unbroken, a situation of utter despair. Good memories work on body and mind like good medicine.

And sad memories? After the despair of losing her only daughter to the Cultural Revolution, she lived on with pride for more than forty years, in a body damaged by torture, and died at ninety-four. It is true that the facts of a sad past cannot be changed. But, as she showed, the way we interpret them can.

To take my own case: my late father, with whom things were never simple, is now one of the people I love most, and thinking of him moves me deeply. Ozu’s film “Tokyo Story”, which once bored me, has grown richer with every year I have lived, and is now a jewel of a masterpiece.

Watching the innocent sleeping face of my first grandchild, I feel that all the comedy and tragedy that led to this moment was meant to be. With time, the sorrows of the past fade, and only the joys mature, like kusu, Okinawa’s aged awamori. Kusu is there to be savoured. Let us soothe ourselves for a while with the kusu of memory, which never runs dry. And then, dreaming of a new and even finer kusu, let us start laying it down. The New Year is the perfect time to begin.