Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
kumiko
essay
by ANNA DUBOSC
photo
by RICHARD WONG
Anna Dubosc, a Paris-based writer, is the daughter of Japanese poet Kumiko Muraoka. When avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker traveled to Tokyo in 1964, commissioned by the French Government to create a film about the Olympic Games, he instead made a movie about Kumiko, titled ‘The Koumiko Mystery’. Here, Anna Dubosc writes about her mother’s love-hate relationship with Japan, alongside photos taken by kumiko’s friend Richard Wong.
I never knew how to write my mother’s name. The exact transcription is Kumiko. That’s how she spelled her first name, even at the risk of it being mispronounced. In my early writings, I used that spelling but later switched to Koumiko.
My mother wrote and spoke to us in French, in her own poetic and ambiguous way. I was always wary of that ambiguity, afraid my mother would remain foreign, elusive, unpronounceable — as if misunderstanding were contagious, and I myself were at risk of misinterpretation.
My mother was born in 1936 in Manchuria, to Japanese parents. During Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, her father obtained a customs position in Ryojun, later transferring to Harbin, where they remained until the Soviet invasion and the evacuation of the Japanese in 1946.
Until the age of 10, my mother lived happily on a land she believed was her own. What did she feel years later, upon learning of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army? The scorched-earth strategies that claimed the lives of 2.7 million Chinese civilians, the mass rapes, the experiments conducted on civilians and prisoners of war, the Unit 731 victims subjected to vivisections without anesthesia, exposed to germs to test biological weapons?
Did her rejection of Japan crystallize at that moment, or was it earlier, in 1945, upon Japan’s surrender and the loss of the Manchurian territories, just days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
She never stopped writing about that rupture, that tearing away. About the long cargo ship journey back to Japan, the illness, the hunger, the dead buried at sea, the quarantine. The discovery of an insular, humid country ravaged by war.
Thus begin her Mémoires d’une somnambule (Memoirs of a Sleepwalker):
The days pass on the ship held motionless, equidistant from land.
This unusual gentleness of the mountains, this unusual humidity in the air. This foreign land, unknown, mysterious. And again, unending days and days on the motionless ship.
Had something changed? Or had nothing changed? I didn’t know, I didn’t think about anything. I just remained there, facing that blue of the mountains. The strange blue dream, the chromatic dream. The vague premonition of something I was unable to grasp, discern, or articulate, something so slowly oppressive.
I was far from understanding that the port had already closed behind me. Silently.
I found myself in an unfamiliar place, in a foreign country, in an “elsewhere.” Ah, that impossible “elsewhere”! That Japan!
Drafts of air from all sides. The space so temporary, so incredibly precarious, without axis, without reference points, without walls, but only paper doors that slide, that flee, that escape… How could I find myself in this space? What could I lean on? The void? The persistent humid cold, and perhaps the sadness as well.
I know little about Kumiko in the 1960s — the adult Kumiko, the Kumiko of Tokyo. She spoke little to us of that time. She endlessly revisited her happy childhood in Manchuria, Harbin and its wide-open skies, as if everything after were a mistake or as if time had stopped in August 1946.
I discovered late Le Mystère Koumiko (The Koumiko Mystery), the film Chris Marker made about my mother during the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. I can’t recall who first told me about the film — my father, perhaps, or a friend of my mother’s — certainly not her, absolutely not. The film opens with a race competition. Among the spectators is my mother, whose portrait Chris Marker begins in voiceover: “Koumiko is not the model Japanese woman, assuming such a creature exists. Nor is she a model woman or a modern woman. She is not a case, not a cause, not a class, not a race.”
I remember feeling uneasy about Chris Marker’s tone and the familiarity with which he addressed her, suspecting an intimacy or seduction between them. This, when Kumiko had raised my sister and me far from men, as if trying to preserve her own childhood or prolong it through us.
Watching the film, I also recall my amazement at the playful side of this young woman who was not yet my mother but already had her language, her uniqueness.
“What do you expect from life?” Chris Marker asks her in the film. She answers: “I ask for a lot of things and very few things at the same time. I wouldn’t need much in life — just to look, to know how to listen. Many things, so many things still, but it’s all mixed up without order. Maybe that’s my misfortune.”
The foundation of her writing is already there, in its disarray, in its misfortune, in that feeling of exile in her own country.
At Kumiko’s funeral, I met Richard Wong, a Chinese man from Singapore who had been living in Paris for 30 years. He showed me photos he had taken of my mother in Tokyo between 1964 and 1966. I didn’t know that Kumiko either.
Richard Wong had come to Tokyo in 1964 to study Japanese, joining his Singaporean friend Chua Lam.
The two of them shared an apartment in Shinjuku, near O¯kubo. Every day, they went to the cinema on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art.
It was there that Chua first met my mother. He had heard her laugh in the darkness and waited for the lights to come back on to discover the face behind such a laugh.
At the time, Kumiko lived in Ko¯enji, a neighborhood in central Tokyo, in a tiny studio of just a few tatami mats. Richard and Chua were always at her place. They were inseparable, like in Jules and Jim, Richard kept telling me. To me, she evokes instead those women in Ozu’s films — the ones who refuse to marry, who drink, who smoke, who worry their fathers. Women who symbolize a changing society.
I always knew my mother had loved a Chinese man, that he was the only man she had ever loved. I heard this from different people at different times, but never from her. She spoke of Chua without defining their relationship. She simply said, “Chua.”
In the late 1980s, after he had become a famous columnist and producer, my mother took us to Hong Kong to see him, but I have no memory of him. Is this a reconstruction? An invention? Did I imagine my mother’s plan to reconnect with Chua? Did she meet him one evening? Did she leave my sister and me at the hotel, or did we meet him together in a café? I no longer know. But he was there, in her stories, in her words, in that strange language in which we grew up. Our own country.
Richard Wong insisted that she was very happy at the time and didn’t talk about Harbin. It’s true she is smiling in all the photos, but I think that happiness was tied, paradoxically, to Manchuria, and that those two Chinese men reminded her of the land she had lost, even though they were from Singapore. I believe she never truly lived outside that nostalgia, that this feeling shaped and dominated her life, as she wrote in Arithmétique Horaire (The Arithmetic of Time).
Color floods the city today. That’s why the sheets, the chairs, the air, the window, and the surface of the table are all tinged; everything is tinged with the color of rusted iron… That’s what she wants to explain.
Yet, it’s implausible that her room has anything to do with the current city. If it’s connected to the city, it’s the city of 1944. If she opens the window, she only sees the city of 1944. And if she closes it, it’s the same.
Because of all this, she almost suffocates. Yet she doesn’t show it, as she has long since lost the ability to breathe.
Kumiko left Japan in 1966. Richard and Chua accompanied her to the port of Yokohama. They waited for the cargo ship to depart. Kumiko stood on the deck. They watched her drift away and disappear. Richard said she never truly left Chua — only Japan.
At the first crack that opened, I rushed into the void, a blind rocket. There was an urgent need to act — immediately! Cross the border, pass through the door so miraculously ajar while it was still open — quickly, very quickly! Leave, escape, save myself! Break free from confinement, deportation, the trap! Leave, leave, depart! Never again see this country of misunderstanding that had caused me so much despair. I was so panicked, so tense, so terrified, so frantic. So full of joy! I felt a slightly crooked smile creep up as I held in my hand the multicolored streamers that were being torn apart.
I’m leaving! I’m leaving! I’m leaving! Finally!
END
THE ITALICIZED TEXTS ARE EXCERPTS FROM KUMIKO MURAOKA’S MÉMOIRES D’UNE SOMNAMBULE (PUBLISHED IN REVUE DES ÉTUDES SLAVES, 2001) AND ARITHMÉTIQUE HORAIRE (PUBLISHED BY LA DÉLIRANTE, 2013).
