Writer's Excerpts

The Man Who Built Walls and Tore Them Down

by Kerri Sakamoto

published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto - Book 2

It was the first time I’d sat down with Frank since moving out five years earlier. More might have passed were it not for Yuri killing himself. I recall thinking spring was the season I would’ve chosen, too. It was the first time in a long while that I’d relinquished my resistance to thinking of Frank as my father, instead of simply a man whose existence was parallel to mine, and only incidentally connected through people I loved.

We had faced each other in the crematorium of course, two months before. We’d watched Yuri’s mother gather up five pieces of her only son’s bones with disposable wooden chopsticks—not wanting his bones to feel the coldness of metal—with such dexterity it seemed she’d done it before. She hadn’t, but she would do it a few more times, outliving her widowed sister and even Frank. She performed in calm, in silence, except near the end when she whispered Yuri’s name as if to coax him from his hiding place. I’d always found it ironic, my father giving my older half-brother a name that sounded both Jewish and Japanese when Yuri was the full-blooded one.

To read the full piece, purchase TOK: Writing the New Toronto - Book 2