I published this blog post on 2 February, but held back from sharing it until my mother was safely home. Now that she has been discharged, I’d like to share it:
https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/02/02/streets-of-fire-three-dekopon-and-my-rock-n-roll-mum/
My mother, who was hospitalised for a spinal compression fracture on 16 March, has been safely discharged. After 71 days of treatment and rehabilitation, she is finally back home. I am deeply proud of her perseverance and hard work.
Yesterday I visited my mum in hospital. With a social worker, her care manager, two nurses, and her occupational therapist, we talked through the support she’ll need at home for discharge. Watching so many professionals bring their care and expertise together so that an 82-year-old can spend her later years in calm and dignity was unexpectedly moving. It was a small meeting, but I came away feeling — quietly, but surely — that Japan’s future will be better.
Streets of Fire, Three Dekopon, and My Rock ’n’ Roll Mum
(Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young)
Streets of Fire (1984)
Music produced by Jim Steinman
Closing theme: “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young”
When my mother was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital on a cold day this January, I brought her a small present: three dekopon, her favourite citrus.
She looked at them, smiled, and told me to take one home.
Good things are never meant to be hoarded in her world — they are meant to be shared. That has always been her way: divide the last piece in two, make sure someone else eats first, quietly take the smaller share for herself.
That night, I peeled the dekopon at my kitchen table.
The first segment was absurdly sweet — bright, almost electric.
It tasted nothing like hospital corridors and paperwork. It tasted of all the years she had quietly kept our household running: the meals, the “have you eaten?”, the way she always pushed the best bit across the table to someone else.
Somewhere between the bitterness of the pith and the sweetness of the flesh, a line from Streets of Fire ran through my head: tonight is what it means to be young, and before you know it, it’s gone.
For someone in their twenties, “tonight” is a flash of neon — a single bright scene before the credits roll. For my 82-year-old mother, it has become something else: not a fleeting party, but a single point where all the years compress. Youth and age, gain and loss, all folded into one moment at a kitchen table with a piece of fruit.
And I realised: my 82-year-old mother is living inside a Jim Steinman song.
If you know the film Streets of Fire and its closing song, “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young”, you’ll remember the world it paints: a city that feels permanently midnight, neon and rain on the streets, engines growling somewhere under the music, two people who have already taken more than their share of blows and still choose to walk back into the fire.
It is not a polite song.
The drums don’t ask permission; the modulation hits like a motorbike coming over the hill. The singer throws everything into a promise that is half love song, half battle cry.
We are surrounded, we’re exhausted, everything is stacked against us — and even so, tonight we are going to burn as if we were young and invincible.
That is exactly the kind of world my mother walks through.
On paper, there is nothing romantic about her situation.
At 82, she has lived with schizophrenia for more than 30 years and developed drug-induced Parkinsonism from the medication.
One eye is blind from age-related macular degeneration.
Her fingers are twisted and painful with Heberden’s nodes.
Part of her intestine has been removed after bowel obstruction.
Her right breast is gone after cancer.
Her spine is fragile from osteoporosis; this January she suffered her second compression fracture and lost more of her height.
Add high blood pressure, regular medication, and the long shadow of 3.11 — the Fukushima nuclear accident — with years of low-dose exposure in the background.
A true “department store of illnesses”. All those diagnoses stack up like walls of bone and scar and pain around her.
Our family home, which my parents worked so hard to buy, is also gone now — for reasons entirely separate from the earthquake, but painful all the same.
On the chart, she looks like someone who has every excuse to lie down and stay there.
Instead, on the very first day she arrived at the new clinic, she started walking practice.
Not a graceful stroll: the kind of raw, shaky first steps where you can see every gram of effort. The occupational therapist stands close by, and my mother grips the parallel bars as if they were the neck of an electric guitar.
She is not doing it because she believes some bright future is waiting for her. There is no promise of recovery, no guarantee that today’s effort will be rewarded in any measurable way. She walks because walking is the best thing she can do with the body she has, today. That is enough reason for her.
If you have seen the last scene of Streets of Fire, you’ll remember the band playing full power in a world that is still broken, still dangerous, but held back for a few minutes by sheer volume.
That is what her face looks like during rehab: not comfortable, not resigned, but absolutely committed to one more verse.
She also has a very clear reason.
There are two granddaughters — my nieces.
For the elder one, she spent years knitting a complex lace sweater by hand: the kind of pattern you can only manage when your hands are steady and your eyesight still co-operates. She started it when the girl was still an infant; this year, with her granddaughter in her final year of high school and about to graduate this spring, she finally managed to give it to her.
The younger granddaughter’s sweater is still unfinished.
“I can’t possibly die before I finish hers as well.”
In Steinman’s universe, heroes stand in the fire for someone they love, with guitars howling underneath and impossible promises on their tongues. They talk about dreams that are small and fragile and still somehow everything they have.
My mother’s version is quieter, but it’s the same contract.
Her battlefield is a hospital corridor. Her weapon is a pair of knitting needles waiting for her at home. Her dream is modest — two sweaters, a clean kitchen, a grandson and granddaughters who know they were loved — and it is absolutely all she has, and all she needs.
No one would blame a woman with that history, at her age, for deciding to take it easy, to skip the pain of rehab and accept the wheelchair. She knows that. She walks anyway.
There is always a choice: make things worse, or make them a little better.
She keeps choosing “better”, one painful step at a time.
Our finances over the last couple of years would look, from the outside, like an opening shot from the film: a city where the lights are going out one by one.
Household income has fallen to roughly a quarter of what it was.
Both my mother and I have lost a great deal of weight — not as a lifestyle choice, but as a side effect of simply having less.
Even so, when she talks about the future, she does not use the language of despair. She speaks in the language of work to be finished.
From her point of view, the equation is simple:
if she can come home and take on as much of the housework as she used to, then I will have time to continue my research and writing, and if I can keep publishing, perhaps the world her granddaughters — and their children, and their descendants — inherit will be a little kinder than the one she grew up in.
She believes it — completely.
It is an outrageous belief, very much in the Steinman tradition: a ronin’s son in Fukushima, convinced that his equations can nudge the structure of the world by half a degree.
She believes it.
And because she believes it so fiercely, I have no choice but to try to live up to it.
Sitting by her bed, watching her practised determination, I find myself thinking that this — more than any theory — is what a non-fungible soul looks like. You cannot swap her out for another statistically similar woman and get the same story. The trajectory is unique.
What it really means to be young
I want my mother to spend her remaining years quietly, with a full heart and as little pain as possible. In my ideal version of the story, her late life would be peaceful: good books, small treats, time to nap in the afternoon sun.
The woman in front of me in the hospital bed was not peaceful at all.
Even on the ward, with monitors humming and curtains half closed, there was a hard light in her eyes. Her body is down to around 40 kg and still falling, but her heart is on fire.
A small woman in her eighties, 40 kg and falling, standing up in a hospital, determined to support her son who insists on nudging the structure of the world with his equations.
So this is what it really means to be young.
When I close my eyes, that one scene is sharper than any frame from Streets of Fire: no neon, no stage, no crowd. Just a small, scarred body forcing itself upright one more time, because someone she loves is still trying to push the world by half a degree and she refuses to let him do it alone. One day, the walls that pen her in — bone and muscle and pain — will finally come down; when they do, I suspect she’ll be moving faster than any dream.
So this is what it really means to be young.
#Fukushima #FukushimaJustLife #JimSteinman #RockNRoll #Schizophrenia #StreetsOfFire
I was hungry, yes—but it’s been ages since I last had a freshly boiled egg, still warm in the shell.
It was so absurdly good that I polished off two without even thinking.
At last, the gas heater has arrived.
Compared with air-con, it isn’t merely warmer—it’s in a different league: proper, immediate heat.
Yes, gas costs more than electricity, but the flame has its own authority. Once you’ve felt this kind of warmth, there’s no going back.
At 14:57, I tried Apple Music Radio for the first time. The very first song it served up was Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now—immaculate timing, as though the universe had taken over the DJ booth.
It made me wonder: had I quietly crossed a small threshold without even noticing?
At 5:53 pm yesterday, **my mum—82, and living with #schizophrenia—**was taken to A&E (Accident & Emergency) and diagnosed with a spinal compression fracture.
We’re a household of two, and she has long been our quiet engine, keeping life moving so I can keep thinking; last year, especially, she carried more than her share.
All I ask now is a generous pause, a clean mending, and her coming home—in full colour.
Lunch was oshiruko.
For my mum, 82, I made it “soupy ohagi” style—glutinous rice instead of mochi—so New Year sweetness stays within reach when swallowing needs to be gentle.
And yes: it behaves beautifully with strong, bitter coffee.
Mikka Tororo (3 January) is a gentle New Year custom: tororo to settle the stomach after festive fare, and to invite a year that moves smoothly.
Tonight I made tororo soba for my mum, 82, who lives with #schizophrenia, as she keeps to a quiet spell of rest.
I grated the yam with one clear wish: long life, and a swift return to comfort and strength.
Simple food—quietly auspicious.
Toshisada Utsunomiya
Toshisada Utsunomiya