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I don't know a kanji whose shape seems to convey its meaning more starkly than 亡. The stroke order feels like a child's drawing interrupted: a jaunty chimney, a roof, one solid wall and a floor … and then nothing. A structure for the wind to howl through.
The character is thought by some to derive from an ancient one meaning “knife edge,” and is generally pronounced “bō” in its Chinese reading and “na” in its native Japanese reading. 亡 always carries a sense of painful disappearance, whether through disaster (as in 焼亡, shiyobō, “destruction by fire”), displacement (亡命, bōmei, “becoming a refugee”) or death.
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Japanese doesn't have an exact single-word equivalent of the English noun “grief.” A Japanese speaker would likely use 悲しみ (kanashimi), a more general word for “sadness,” and explain it was because they had “lost” someone (亡くした, nakushita).
亡くす, nakusu, is pronounced the same as another verb, 無くす (more often written just with kana: なくす), which means “to lose something” in general. But when you replace 無 with 亡, it means solely “to lose someone through death.”
Some English speakers sneer at statements like “I lost my father,” considering anything but “my father died” to be babyish euphemism. All I can say is that a blunt knife is also dull.
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I lost my father almost without knowing it. He had a sudden heart attack about 12 hours after our last phone conversation (when he'd excitedly told me about the red-shouldered hawks nesting near his house). I say “almost without knowing” because around the time he must have been dying, I had a migraine aura that cut everything I looked at in half.
I came within five minutes of learning about his death from Facebook, when a colleague he'd often grumbled about tagged me in a condolence message. A frantic relative got through to me just in time.
I was walking through the sculpture galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum when I got the call. I remember, not collapsing, but sitting down very deliberately on the floor; I remember the pop-up afterward asking me to “rate the call quality.” I don't remember how I got home.
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It wasn't just me who had lost him. I realised that as I saw the tributes from his colleagues, students and neighbours. One student, hit particularly hard, changed his Facebook profile picture to my dad's. Whenever this appeared in my feed, it gave some sub-rational part of my brain a cruel false hope. But somehow, I didn't feel entitled to tell this student how to deal with his loss.
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Both Dad and I had an on-off relationship with religion. In the days after his death, no picture of the afterlife seemed convincing to me; I only felt that he must be somewhere. Eventually I wrote my poems Imperfective Future and The Same Province of Nothingness, which are all I can say with conviction on the subject.
… though I know
what people will say
Yet still I feel
that you and I will go
to the same province of nothingness
and that the hum of eternity
will sound a little different for our chord
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The death of one of my favourite authors was announced last week. I discovered Higashino Keigo's detective novels thanks to Fukuyama Masaharu, who's played his physics-professor-turned-sleuth Yukawa Manabu (“Detective Galileo”) in films and a TV series. He was Japan's best-selling author in translation, but the vast majority of those sales were outside the English-speaking world (particularly in China, where his death was a national news story). In fact, of the more than 100 books he published in Japan, less than a tenth have been translated into English. I'd been rationing them to delay the bereft feeling that always comes when I run out of new works by an author. And I'd optimistically bought the Japanese edition of his novel The Black Showman (also made into a film starring Fukuyama) for the day when I'd be able to read it.
Higashino died at 68, the same age as my father. He'd had cancer, but hadn't made it public, so his death was a shock to his fans. The day it was announced, I scrolled through social media posts in Chinese, Thai, Indonesian; like many others, I posted a photo of my copies of his books. Our shared grief seemed like a bulwark in the gap left by his death.
Higashino and Fukuyama were friends as well as artistic collaborators, but Masha stuck to the artistic side in his public statement: “Having lived as one of the inhabitants of Mr Higashino's works, I feel very close to the life he poured into them. I feel that his life is still here.”
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Masha was still a teenager when he lost his father. Fukuyama Akira died at 53 from cancer caused by his childhood exposure to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki; as the genetic effects on survivors’ children weren't known, Masha spent much of his life thinking he might die around the same age. Now 57, he’s said he considers every year after 53 to be a bonus.
Masha's father has been a frequent presence in his work, particularly in his song 道標 (Michishirube, “guidepost”).
I could say the words to my own father too.
Meeting people, believing in people, being hurt by people,
Hating people, forgiving people, and understanding people again;
Blown by the wind, through tears and laughter on this path of life,
Your smile is my guidepost.