Blog contributor Marjorie has been posting a series of posts on children’s author’s memories of their grandparents. Her last post in the series is here. I read these posts with much interest since I have been investigating my own grandparents’ history (as well as my memories of them) especially lately on this visit to Japan. Both sets of my grandparents were in Japan and I could only visit them peripatetically over the years. Now they are all gone, but my maternal grandfather, Toshiro Saito, passed his memoir onto his children. I was very interested in this document, but alas, I could not read such complicated Japanese! It took me a few years, but I managed to translate the entire document with the help of my aunt. Recently I was able to publish two sections of the memoir in Canadian journals - one section entitled “Puppet” covering my grandfather’s memories of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 in on-line journal The Winnipeg Review, and another section, ”At War’s End in Indonesia,” about my grandfather’s experience of the end of World War Two in The Malahat Review. The latter contains his account of embracing his ten year old daughter, my mother, on his return to Japan after an absence of nearly four years during the war. Translating my grandfather’s memoir gave me a new appreciation for the printed word and the importance of keeping a record of one’s memories — that’s the job authors do every time they set down a word in print. They remember, and share, and that is their gift to the reader. I strongly urge you to check out the rest of the posts in Marjorie’s wonderful series. (The photo, I’ve posted, by the way, is of my grandfather’s gravestone in Kyoto with the magazine his work appeared in.)