Kimiko Matsukawa

I still tie my hair the same way my mother did—tightly, in a low bun at the nape of the neck. It keeps the heat off. When I was a girl, my mother would say, “If your mind is calm and your head is cool, you’ll live a long time.” I didn’t take it seriously then. But here I am now, 106 years old, and I think she might’ve been right.

I live in a wooden house just above the river bend, the one with the bamboo bridge. The roof leaks when the rain is strong, and the floor creaks even when the wind passes, but this is where my husband and I raised our three children. He never came back from the war. The telegram arrived one spring, and that was that. I raised them with my mother and sister. My son lives in Naha now, my daughters are gone—one to illness, one to Tokyo.

Some years ago, before the virus came, strangers started showing up. Foreigners with cameras and translators, wanting to know how we live so long. One woman asked me what I eat. I told her, “Not too much. And I don’t eat alone.” She smiled and wrote that down.

Every morning I drink miso soup with seaweed and radish. Then I walk to the garden and pick bitter melon. Sometimes I curse at it for being so stubborn and then laugh at myself. I’ve been eating that green monster for longer than most of these researchers have been alive. I still cook for the women in my moai once a week. We sit, talk, sometimes just listen to the wind.

Last month, one of us died. Chiyo, 102. Her chair is still in the corner of the meeting hall. No one touches it.

You want to know the secret to living a long life? Stay useful. That’s what we believe here in Ogimi, Japan. I still weave basho-fu—slowly now, but with care. The threads are thinner than they used to be. So am I. But the pattern still holds.

When I die, I don’t want any fuss. Just place me near the river bend, where the bridge hums in the wind, and the bitter melon grows like it owns the earth.