EDITOR’S NOTE: This story contains discussion of suicide. Help is available if you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters. In the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.
As I stepped off the bus in Tokyo’s wealthy Mejiro neighborhood and onto its quiet streets, the familiarity hit me hard and fast.
Though the rows of traditional Japanese homes were now dotted with a scattering of modern houses — some with luxury cars parked in the driveway — there was no mistaking it: my father’s childhood home.
Originally built by my great-grandparents in the 1930s, the plaque bearing my family name was still at the entrance next to the steps my dad used to help me climb as a child during our visits from Michigan.
But we never stayed long — my father was always restless, always ready to move.
It was a stark contrast to our life in the US, where my dad raised my sister and me. He was always present and never missed a chance to attend one of our school events. He was a man of few words, but always knew how to make people laugh. He loved taking care of others, never hesitating to pay for dinners or baseball games.
But now, standing before my father’s childhood home as an adult, I saw more than memories in its frame — I saw the foreshadows of the moment that changed my family’s life forever.
Though it happened 25 years ago, I still remember his death vividly — pain leaves a far more stubborn mark than joy.
When I was 12 years old, my father hanged himself in our suburban house outside of Detroit. We had just gotten into a fight over his spending habits, and I told him I hated him.
As a child, I failed to see how complicated he really was. Beneath the generosity that earned him so many friends in his adopted home was an obsession with money and success. Eventually, he turned to gambling, always wanting more.
I thought speaking up would help him. I thought he would listen to me because I was his daughter.
He was rushed to the hospital and put on a ventilator, but it was too late.
For more than 20 years, I carried the weight of his death in silence, obsessing over ways to say “I’m sorry,” while wondering if something was broken in me for not being able to let it go.
The first few years after his suicide I had terrible nightmares, images so realistic they pulled my sweat-drenched body upright in the middle of the night. I believed his death was my fault and didn’t understand how to process what I was feeling.
It took about five years before I could cry about it, with therapy never a consideration as I thought it meant I was weak. I left home before I finished high school. Everything reminded me of him and how I failed him.
What saved me was his love for the camera.
Growing up, my dad was constantly taking videos and photos of my sister and me. Big events — and the quiet moments in between — were carefully preserved in a photo album or a VHS tape, each one marked with a retro date stamp and title card.
These included an album filled with photos of him as an infant in Japan in the 1960s, another one from his childhood living in Turkey in the 1970s, and a scattering of photos from a trip to India in the 1980s.
One day it hit me: I had a travel itinerary.
I decided I would leave the comfort of my job in Hong Kong as a producer at CNN, a world so distant it felt untouched by my father’s shadow, and follow the path of his life.
Armed with my camera — lightyears ahead of the one my dad used — and his photo albums, I was ready to hit the road. First stop: Japan, where my father was born.
My mother, Kyoko Maruyama, once told me my father never liked staying in his parents’ house when he visited. Even when business trips brought him to Tokyo, he booked a hotel.
Seeing it in front of me that hot July day in 2024 immediately stirred memories of visiting as a child, but provided little comfort.
The house, sold over a decade earlier, showed signs of neglect. My heart sank as I viewed the peeling paint and spiderwebs.
The family grave was also discarded, its headstone gone, weeds covering the plot. The city government had apparently removed it, unable to find a successor to take care of it. It was as though my father’s history had been erased, and I was too late to save it. All I had now were the photos.
Thanks to those images, I was able to identify the university he attended in Japan and locate a few of his friends. They were shocked to learn of his death and agreed to meet me at a yakitori place in central Tokyo — just as they did during their college days. As we dined on chicken skewers coated in sweet and savory teriyaki sauce and drank cold beer, his friends shed light on my dad’s adventurous youth. He was the leader of their college’s international club, they said, and, being the sole English speaker, took on the responsibility of guiding his classmates through India.
They also confirmed my suspicions: my father, the eldest son in a wealthy family, felt immense pressure to carve his own path to success.
“His favorite movie was ‘East of Eden’ with James Dean,” Masako Kuramochi, a college friend who traveled with him to India, told me, referring to the cinematic classic about a son’s deepest desire to please his father, based on the John Steinbeck novel.
“He loved James Dean so much he tried to act and dress like him!”
Hearing these stories meant the world to me. With no family left in Japan, my dad’s friends were the only people who could offer any insights into his photos. It helped me prepare for my next stop: Turkey.
Most visitors to Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, head straight for its world-famous sites, like the Hagia Sophia or the Roman-era Hippodrome.
My first stop, however, was the Istanbul Technical University library — one of Istanbul’s most prestigious engineering schools.
I had already found some info online. My grandfather, Shohei Maruyama, had been an engineer employed by Japan’s largest electric company, and was involved with the construction of a large dam in Turkey. I knew from my own family that my father attended international school in Ankara, but little else.
At the library, I found a book in Turkish that said my grandfather was in charge of a large 1970s hydro project near Samsun, on the coast of the Black Sea.
Photos of my dad, grandfather and his Turkish colleagues in Samsun offered more clues, and after making a few enquiries I was connected with a former intern, Erdogan Ozoral, who shared some images and stories, including one about a man who had known my grandfather, but died just a few months before I arrived in Turkey. “He said your grandfather was a good man,” Ozoral told me.
Accompanied by the former intern, I drove from Samsun, now a city of about 740,000 people, to a remote area an hour away. Crowded streets of commercial buildings faded into the countryside, the occasional house punctuating the landscape.
Eventually, we reached a long road winding up a mountain, with a large river on our left and a green forest on our right.
“This is it,” my companion said as we stopped in front of a large dam.
Word had spread about my visit, and soon we were joined by about a dozen locals who dissected my photographs and excitedly walked around trying to identify the exact spots they were taken.
Before I knew it, I was wearing a hard hat and an orange neon vest and being taken underground.
“Your grandfather helped create the first dam with this underground mechanism,” said the former intern, smiling. “You should be proud.”
When I was in Japan, I felt as if my family’s legacy had been erased. Unexpectedly, I had found it thousands of miles away.
Yet it also made me reflect on a moment I have long struggled with — seeing my grandfather, who took an emergency flight from Tokyo, sitting next to my dad as he lay unconscious in his hospital bed on that terrible day back in Michigan.
My mom wanted my grandparents to be part of the decision on whether to take him off life support. I could only see the back of my grandfather, but he looked so small that day.
My dad spent his life chasing his own father’s approval. I wondered if, in the end, my grandfather ever questioned it all.
With this weighing on my mind, I headed back to Istanbul to plan for the next leg of my journey. Suddenly, while walking through the city’s European side, a movie poster of “East of Eden” caught my eye, propped up against a wall outside an antique shop.
I looked at James Dean and smiled.
Understanding the meaning of death
The India portion of my trip was the most challenging to plan, mainly because I didn’t have many photos to reference.
My father’s college friends came to the rescue again. One gave me his own photo album featuring highlights from their India trip. The first page featured a hand-drawn map highlighting their destinations — including New Delhi, the Taj Mahal and the Ganges River — and whether they planned to travel to each by plane or train.
Landing in India’s capital weeks later, the chaotic streets were both overwhelming and exciting. I took a tuktuk to Old Delhi’s famed Khari Baoli spice market, where the aroma of Masala-filled pastries and freshly grilled street food filled the air. Vendors loudly showed off their treasures to passing shoppers. Colorful shops were crammed with clothing, tools and spices.
I tried to imagine how my father would have reacted to these sights and sounds and recalled a conversation I’d had with his friends back in Japan.
“No one took your father seriously,” said Masuko Kuramochi.
“Yeah! That’s why when he said he was going to meet Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, we didn’t believe him! But he did!” added Kimio Settai, another friend.
As wild as that sounded to me — a random meeting with a world leader — another buddy, Naoki Hosono, who was with my dad that day, confirmed the encounter.
Naoki was kind enough to join me virtually for a video chat during my own visit to Indira Gandhi’s former house — now a popular museum dedicated to her memory — and explained how it happened.
“Your dad woke me up and said, ‘We’re going to meet Gandhi!’” he laughed. “Next thing I knew, we were outside her house, and he was talking to the guards.”
Somehow, my father convinced them to escort the pair inside, to a courtyard.
“Right there!” Naoki shouted at me through the phone screen as I made my way across the outdoor space. “We were just a few feet from her.”
My dad’s nerves apparently got the best of him. Naoki said he froze, but the prime minister initiated a conversation, and my dad answered her breathlessly.
Unable to speak English, Naoki couldn’t recall what they talked about. He said my dad was perhaps a bit too excited, so much so that he stumbled into a minor collision with a tuktuk when they exited.
As I finished making my rounds through the museum, Naoki paused.
“You look a lot like your father,” he said, emotion hanging in his voice. “He was a great friend.”
Following the map, my next stop was Agra, where I visited the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, both of which featured in my father’s images.
It was a surreal feeling, standing in the exact spot his photos were taken, the scenery unchanged from the 1980s. I touched the marble of the Taj Mahal that my dad had leaned against decades prior. It felt like he was with me the entire time.
It was the holy city of Varanasi, in India’s north, that really offered me a sense of healing.
My mother told me that when my parents were in college, my dad had said he wanted his remains scattered in the Ganges River. And it was there that I felt, for the first time, what he had experienced when he’d stood in the very same place.
It was about 11 p.m. when I arrived at Varanasi’s Burning Ghats, where I watched families say goodbye to their loved ones as bodies burned on funeral pyres in front of me, the quiet sounds of crackling wood filling the air.
When a man approached, asking where I was from, we talked about the scene in front of us and what it all meant. “How can someone truly let go of their loved ones?” I asked him.
The man, whom I later learned was a beggar, explained that according to Hindu beliefs, the spirit moves on to a new life and we, the living, must accept it and also move on.
“We need to see what is in front of us, those that are living around us,” he said.
It was the message I needed to hear as I readied myself for the part of the journey I was dreading most — going home to the US.
It was my dad’s ambition that brought him to Michigan in the early 1990s. After he finished university, his goal was to work for the largest American company in the auto industry — and the Motor City was where his dream came true.
When he got hired at Ford Motor Company, I saw a rare glimpse of pride in his eyes. He even called his father to share the news — a moment that felt almost like triumph.
Coming back to the quiet Michigan suburbs of Rochester Hills in October 2024, I felt like a weight had settled back on my shoulders.
Though it had been decades since I left, the memories sang like I’d been here yesterday.
My childhood home was still there. Kids rode bikes through the street with their parents. There were no new buildings, just different people living in those same homes.
I had a very American life there when my dad was alive, and it was a good one. He was friends with all the neighbors; people knocked on our door almost every weekend, wanting to hang out with him.
After he died, word quickly spread, and the neighbors stepped up to help. If it snowed, someone was there to plow the driveway. When fall came, someone was there to rake the leaves. When lightning hit a tree in our yard and blocked our driveway, three neighbors showed up with a chainsaw to clear the way.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without this community.
And I think my dad liked his American life, too. He participated in every school event, every neighborhood parade, and celebrated all of the traditional American holidays and activities, even heading out each December to cut down a tree for Christmas. He got into home renovations and fixed up our basement. Home Depot became his favorite spot — a far cry from his life as a college kid in Tokyo.
While back in Michigan, I visited the farm my dad would take me pumpkin picking for Halloween and grabbed one of the giant gourds, just like in a photograph taken when I was seven.
I felt my dad watching over me with a smile.
I still had one more place to go: Indiana, where he lived for a few years during university after transferring from Tokyo before moving to Michigan.
Accompanied by a friend, I drove south to the town of Fairmount, the childhood home of James Dean, where a sign bearing a classic image of the actor welcomes those arriving by road.
I held in my hand a photo of my dad visiting James Dean’s grave in Fairmount, a sketch he made of the actor when he was a high school student, and another photo of him with James Dean’s cousin, Marcus Winslow.
Winslow never left the house he grew up in with Dean, so he wasn’t hard to find. Neither was the grave, which is now a tourist attraction.
We knocked on Winslow’s door and there he was, the same face from the 1980s, just a little older. I showed him a picture of him with my dad. He didn’t remember much about the visit, but we had a lot more in common than I thought.
Winslow lost Dean when he was 12 years old. I lost my dad at the same age. Through our short chat, he reminded me it’s OK to miss your loved ones, whether it’s been 23 years or 70. It was a message that echoed what strangers from around the world taught me during my travels — love for a lost loved one crosses all borders.
As my trip neared an end, there was just one more person to see in Indiana: the man who knew my dad like no one else, his best friend Mohammad Beitvashahi, who he met after transferring from university in Tokyo.
The drive was familiar. The annual road trips my dad took us on to see Mohammad and his family were a ritual we looked forward to. I remember watching my dad and Mohammad get into brotherly wrestling matches — their strange way of saying “I missed you.”
Twenty-five years ago, when Mohammad heard what happened to my dad, he dropped everything and drove eight hours from Indiana to the hospital in Michigan, sleeping on the waiting room floor beside me. He just couldn’t bring himself to step into my dad’s room.
Mohammad eventually took some of us home to take a break from the bedside vigil. When my mom called from the hospital to break the terrible news, he was the one who answered.
“Your dad’s gone, Mayumi,” he told me after hanging up the phone. “There’s nothing we can do now — I’ll be here in the morning.”
This news made me nervous. I immediately began dreading the moment everyone who came to take care of us would go home — I didn’t want to be alone.
But Mohammad was there the next morning and for decades after, sometimes sneaking cash into my car whenever I came for a visit, making sure I was okay. No matter what country or state I was in, he was only a phone call away.
Sitting in front of him in the present as we looked through his old videos and photos, I realized I was never alone.
“I miss your dad, he was the only person I could talk to,” said Mohammad as one videotape, taken during a New Year’s party, rolled.
Seeing my father laugh on the TV reminded me how lucky I am to have him watching over me, his best friend by my side, to share these memories.
Each chapter of my dad’s life held quiet struggles, some that may have led to his decision to take his own life. I’ll never fully understand why he left, or if I can ever truly forgive him.
I still feel angry about what he did, but I have come to realize it’s because I loved what I had in the life he created for me — and I can’t understand why he had to leave it so soon.
But by walking his path, I came to know him — and myself.
His final years were filled with the images he took of my sister and me. With my own camera, I turned the lens back on him — across countries, continents and time.
He passed on not a legacy to uphold, but a way of seeing shaped by love. In every frame, he reminded me that being my father was his greatest role.
For that, I thank the camera. And I thank my dad for showing me the way — again.
I am proud to be the daughter of Shuhei Maruyama.
