A drop of that blood must remain in my family, and in myself, since I have felt a very special attraction to that country for as long as I can remember, an attraction not due to an interest in a culture that, in theory, is exotic for a Westerner. My relationship with Japan is also a consequence of history: my family, on my father’s side, comes from Coria del Río, a town in Seville where Japón is a common last name, ever since the samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga was chosen in the seventeenth century to lead a diplomatic mission to the then-powerful Spain, which reached through the Guadalquivir River. We are all mothers when we fall, the mother who gives birth to us in each of those golden cracks that unite the mud that forms us but that has broken so many times, to be put together again, perhaps with a function more suitable to our own being, according to those desires that we weren’t able to fulfill before our fall. All other scars show that we are the ones who, so many other times, had to give birth to ourselves. Only the belly button is a scar that proves that a woman gave birth to us. We are born as many times as we are capable of recovering. When I see a wound, I admire it because there, and not in our unbroken flesh, do I find the nature of being human: its vulnerability, but also the enormous energy that it requires to pick up our pieces from the ground, reunite them, and be born again. Just as pieces of broken pottery can be put back together by covering their cracks with a varnish of gold dust, so could I both in my day-to-day life and in what I write try to protect the historical and aesthetic value of scars. It was that professor, a professor of art history at the Sophia University in Tokyo, who made the kintsugi technique my philosophy of life through writing. For me there was no Snow White, no Little Red Riding Hood-the stories my great-grandmothers told me were their own dramas: their husbands were soldiers who got drunk to ease the weight of their consciences their children lay in the common graves of Spain without names on their tombstones. One of my earliest memories is an image: in Toledo, when it rained, red rivers flowed down the paved slopes, the rain mixing with the blood of neighbors, the baker, the teacher, who from one day to the next went from being friendly when they met one another on the street to being mixed in the flow of the same water pouring downhill. From such direct and vivid testimonies, I understand to some degree the fear of losing one’s life, the tragedy of killing a brother, the hunger and the chaos that follow a bombing. As a baby, I was rocked to sleep by two great-grandparents, and I have been able to have mature conversations with two great-grandparents and all four grandparents. I am a granddaughter of the Spanish Civil War, a member of a very long-lived family.