What is hidden in the photographs we keep of each other?

is professor of anthropology at the University of Redlands, California, US. She is the author of Home Away from Home: Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States (2005). Alone in the cluttered spare bedroom of my mother’s apartment in Japan, I found myself surrounded by the accumulated contents of our family’s life.

There were towers of boxes, and stacks of books, piles of old clothes and miscellaneous household items – the residue of decades that no one had been able to sort through. My sister had died unexpectedly years earlier; my father, too, was gone. So I had flown back to Japan from the United States to help my mother, who had been hospitalised after breaking her hip and had also begun a slow descent into dementia.

In the apartment, I spotted a moving box with the words ‘Sawa’s Albums’ written on the outside. When I recognised my mother’s handwriting, I broke down in tears. Inside the box were hundreds of photographs of my sister and me.

They were the product of my parents’ sustained and deliberate labour, beginning in the mid-1960s, when taking pictures still required skill and expense. My father, an avid amateur photographer, kept a meticulous visual record of our growth, which my mother arranged into 14 neatly organised and captioned albums. These albums depict the family life my parents worked hard to build: my sister and me on the beach with packed bento lunches, standing stiffly in our new clothes in front of our old house on the first day of school, and smiling on the steps of a Shinto shrine on New Year’s Day.

As children, we would pull out the albums time and again, telling and retelling to ourselves the stories of our family. Now, decades later, I flipped through our childhood albums alone. Black-and-white photographs gave way to faded colour prints.

In the early years, they were accompanied by my mother’s delicate handwriting, naming dates and places; later, her captions were replaced by my childish writing, then by my cheeky teenage annotations. I immersed myself in the faces and stories I remembered from childhood. At first, the experience felt like a return to something intimately familiar.