RING & MARI

Suzuko was born in 1907 in Nagoya, the crucible of Japanese industrialisation. It was an affluent life but one hard earned by her father. Her mother, by contrast, was mildly decadent. She appeared to breath through an elegant long pipe, conveniently the family’s business was tobacco. Suzuko’s voracious appetite for books confused her mother. The bedroom light would be on into the early hours. Even before Suzuko was a teen, a boy’s aggressive curiosity over what she was reading proved seminal. His family couldn’t afford to educate him. Suzuko became a teacher, she bought herself a ring, a marker of her hard work and independence. Two decades later the ring was confiscated in the wake of Japan’s defeat. She was fleeing Korea, where she’d been stationed with her husband. This ring is the replacement he bought her, passed down to her grandaughter Mari, after Suzuko’s death in 2007, aged 100.

23 Jun 2013