'Our Little Sister' a tender study of family and kinship

Sisters greeting an unknown sibling who shares one parent is the subject of Our Little Sister, a Japanese film now in art theaters. Adoption is not part of this story, yet the issues were close enough to the bone I was glad to be sitting in the dark, alone, with no one near me. They would have wondered how this deeply charming and quietly moving film would have elicited deep feelings in me. Some people might simply get misty eyed as the film ends, but I slipped my sunglasses on as I left to hide the outright tears.

Let's get on with the story: Three sisters, now grown and working, were left by their father 15 years earlier when he had an affair that produced a daughter, Suzu, now an adolescent. Suzu was living with the father, and a new wife in a distant village when he died. The three sisters travel by train to funeral, and Suzu, the little sister, meets them at the station, walks them to their hotel, and quietly says goodbye.


You soon learn Suzu's mother has already died, and she is living with her stepmother and three-year-old stepbrother, whom she is seen taking care of at the funeral. Suzu is in kind of a no-man's land emotionally and physically. Other than these sisters, she has no one who shows up to claim her as kin. She politely shows the sisters around a bit, takes them to a place with a beautiful view she and her father often went, and escorts them to the train a few days later. Everything is underplayed, no big emotions roiling over the story, but how alone Suzu will be when they leave settles in like a thick fog.

Jane and Lorraine, 1982, six months after
reunion, in Sag Harbor 

As the train is pulling away, the oldest sister, Sachi, who has been a surrogate mother to the others, suddenly proposes Suzu comes to live with them in their old family home where they reside. And so Suzu does. The sisters talk, eat, squabble over clothes, have boyfriends, meet their auntie, briefly connect with their mother who lives in some other city. Suzu meanwhile adapts to her new life, plays soccer, makes friends, and blossoms into young womanhood. She is sweet but never saccharine; she is the model of goodness. She is impossible not to like. In Sachi, who is having an affair with a married doctor at the hospital where she is a nurse, we see how history repeats itself in families. The doctor's wife is alive but ill. When he is offered a position in America, he asks Sachi to come with him.

The story is told in a gentle wispy way, like a leaf falling from tree in the fall but whirled around by a gentle breeze before hitting the ground. Suzu eats whitefish bait on toast, and in trying to please her sisters, says she's never had it before. When in fact, she and her father ate it often. One of the sisters wants to know what their father was like, because she was so little when he left, and Suzu of course knew him better. They show her a place where he took them, and the view is similar to the one Suzu knew with him that she showed the sisters.

Suzu finally says that she was born of a bad act, that led to their father leaving them. They assure her she herself is good, or at least that is the way I remember it. By then I was choking back tears. Not only have I heard many stories of how kept siblings react to the emergence of an adopted one, I put myself in my daughter's shoes. Her father had four other children. She died without meeting any of them, yet all of them knew of her existence. Since I was the bad woman in our story--the one who was the catalyst that eventually broke up a marriage, but too late to keep our daughter--I was also that woman--unseen in the film. I fell in love with a married man, and he with me, we had a child. And without him as a partner, I proceeded on.

But it was about my daughter Jane that I felt the deepest. Jane was was resented or simply ignored by his other children, her siblings--two girls, two boys--because she represented a relationship of their father's (Patrick) that was other. While that did not stop the women in this film, that was not true in Jane's life. His oldest daughter not only boycotted her father's funeral, she apparently convinced her younger brothers to do so also, according to Patrick's second wife. Jane and I both hoped she would one day meet at least her half-sister from his second marriage, but that also never came to pass. I sometimes wonder if she even was ever told about Jane, though I have stopped trying to conceal Patrick's identity. I refused to do it when I wrote Hole In My Heart. I was tired of protecting him or his family. My daughter was his family too. She need not be an embarrassment any more.

As I said, there was nothing about adoption in the film, but so much that resonated to me, and I suspect, will to anyone who is adopted. I've heard good stories of acceptance and redemption by siblings; I've heard about resentful siblings; I've counseled adoptees who don't know if they should contact their siblings if a mother or father rejects them. But those siblings are their kin and that cannot be denied. One can reject them, but one cannot do away with the desire to know one's kind and kin. A piece recently at adoption.com was titled The Five Reasons Adoptees Search for Birth Family Members, and the title alone struck me as offensive. The reasons go beyond words. The best answer to why do you want to search is: Because I do.

Adopted or not, we all have the right to know the people we came from, and the people to whom we are related by blood, lineage, and history. One would hope that natural birth mothers and birth fathers who are still hiding could willingly accept that kinship is not ever rend asunder by decree. We might think we can walk away from our kin, but good or bad, our biological families cannot be rewritten or obliterated. We can ignore them, we can wish they were somebody else, but they are there, a part of us, we breath them in like air.--lorraine
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TO READ
Lorraine Dusky's Hole In My Heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption is more than a good compelling story. While it is a gripping tale of one woman's journey though life as a birthmother; it is a story of an adoptee and the very real risk and challenges that many adoptees face. It is a story about forks in the road, choices lost and missed communications. It is a story about adoption, the history of adoption, and the story of adoption reform in the United States. I was soothed by the familiar mentions of studies on the long term outcomes of birth mothers (not good), the risks of secondary infertility, the suicide risks posed to adoptees, challenging the concepts of adoptees as " healthy and happy", the mythology of birthmother confidentiality, the current adoption practices with questionable ethics, and the history of sealed adoption records along with the quest for adoption reform most especially in New York. These are the facts that make this so much more than a memoir and a book that should be read by anyone who is at all touched by adoption.

What Lorraine does do beautifully, is weave story around factual informational and documented research in a way that greatly adds to one's understanding about adoption practices in America.--Claudia Corrigan D-Arcy at Amazon.