A Tale Of Two Chests

In our hallway, there is a wooden chest with iron fittings and handles. It isn't an especially beautiful piece of furniture, but I prize it greatly. Not only is it useful -- you can put clothes into it and years later they will smell as sweet and fresh as the day you stored them -- but it was a real find: my husband saw it on the local rubbish heap between a rusty refrigerator and a set of broken plywood shelves. When he brought it home, spattered with rain and mud, we had no idea it was anything special.

The chest was relatively light but bulky, composed of three parts which could be neatly stacked on top of each other. I didn't appreciate it at first; it had obviously spent decades in somebody's kitchen, and while the wood wasn't warped, it was a dull, drab color from years of exposure to kerosene and cooking smoke. I wrinkled my nose as I opened the drawers, expecting the stale fug of old, damp furniture, but was pleasantly surprised by the sweet-resin smell of fresh-cut wood. Over the next few weeks, the chest only rose in my estimation: although clothes put into our other chests-of-drawers quickly dampened and furred over with mildewed in Tokyo's humidity, whatever I put in this one stayed fresh and sweet-smelling.

One day, a friend came over. As soon as she saw our new chest, her eyes lit up. "Where did you get the Paulownia chest?" she asked. I told her, and she shook her head in amazement. "You were so lucky! Those cost a bundle nowadays."

"Why would someone throw it away then?"

"It was probably some young person going through the effects of an elderly relative. Somebody who didn't know any better." She ran her hand over the top of our chest. "This is a really good one, too -- at least 60 or 70 years old."

My friend told me that her family's Paulownia chests were sanded down at the end of every year. The iron fittings and handles were removed first. Afterwards, the freshly-sanded chests looked and smelled brand new. "You can keep anything in a Paulownia chest," she said. "Silk kimono, pillows, bedding -- nothing will sour, and the moths won't touch it. Hang onto it." Even if she hadn't admired it so, I was already loathe to part with it. Because if something you pick up for a song is special, something you find on the rubbish heap is even more so: it reminds you of your good luck and your good sense.

We brought another chest-of-drawers back from Japan too, an even larger, heavier one that made us sweat and curse as we heaved it through narrow doorways and up the stairs. We bought it in a used furniture store in Abiko, in the summer of 1998, on a day so hot that the sweat rolled off us as we stood, fanning ourselves in the air-conditioned shop. In fact, the heat made us choose hastily: it was solid and beautifully crafted, but it was far too big for our tiny house. For years, it overwhelmed our cramped little living room.

The clerk who showed us the furniture was a personable young Ghanaian man who spoke English and fluent, unaccented Japanese. "I know he's wasted on us!" the proprietor of the shop told me. "He studies all the time, that's all he does. Up in that little room of his -- you should see all his books! Japanese, law, politics." She fanned herself with a furniture pamphlet. "If he was Japanese, he could be prime minister of Japan in a couple of years, I'm not kidding."

When we left Japan, we brought both chests with us to Scotland. The second year we were back, I took the handles and fittings off the Paulownia chest and sanded it with the finest sandpaper I could find. I like to think about the long life it had before it came to us. I try to imagine it in the kitchen of some Japanese family, where it no doubt saw out the war. I wonder if the family crouched near its bulk during air raids, if the woman who opened the drawers to put things in and take them out was as comforted and cheered by the sweet smell of its wood as I am. And I wonder what she would have thought if she had known the future her chest would have, going off on its own adventure with an an Anglo-American family.

I look at our large, sturdy chest-of-drawers too, and try to remember how hot it was the day we bought it, how freely we sweated, standing in that used furniture shop, running our hands over its wood. I wonder what happened to the young Ghanaian man, whether he is still in Japan, what he managed to achieve. My memory is stretched just trying to conjure up the heat of that day, what a headache it was getting that chest into our house, and how ridiculously oversized it looked in our living room.

And I can't help but wonder: what adventures will my furniture will have after we have parted ways?