Marisa "Mooge" Guerrero

You probably like your name, right? I hated my name for the longest time. A long time ago, I decided to look into its origin, and becoming a bit sentimental, I decided to write.

“Why did you name me Taeko?” I asked, as an elementary schooler, to my father, deliberately while he was in a good mood.

“Let me think…During the war, when I was evacuating to Miyazaki, the wife of the neighboring family was named Taeko. She was so kind, and beautiful. I named you after her.”

“Oh…”

I didn’t have anything to say in response. I couldn’t believe my name was chosen for such a trivial reason. My father continued on with his day, paying no mind to his daughter’s response. My father in his late-teens must’ve been attracted to this neighbor wife who was “so kind and beautiful.” But I was expecting a more direct reason, so I ended up disappointed. I was laughed at by my friends for this. Finding my father’s response disappointing, I decided to ask my mother as well.

“Hey, when I was born, what did you want to name me?”

“Hm, I thought that Yoko would be a good name for you.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s a nice name. Yoko…and, the Chinese characters?”

“The yo from taiheiyo, Pacific Ocean, and ko as in “Child,” of course. 洋子. A child with a heart as wide as the Pacific Ocean.”

“That would have been perfect. Yoko is a way better name than a weird one like Taeko. Mom, why didn’t you name me Yoko?”

“Well, because the father chooses the name, that’s why.”

My mother laughed a little bit troublingly. My father is Hiroshi, my mother Reiko, and my grandmother was Misa. All names in vogue.

It would’ve been nice if I also had a name more modern, more fashionable, but oh well. I could tolerate it if they at least added “chan” to the end of my name, calling me “Taeko-chan,” but my family doesn’t have that kind of culture, just calling me “Ta-eh-ko” without any suffixes. My grandmother, she always called me “Taikoh,” like the drum. She, being Okinawan, probably had a hard time combining those difficult sounds together. The “eh” sound in “Taeko” becomes “ee”, and the end inflects with an accent, pronounced with a delay.

There weren’t many others in school with the same name as me, but there were occasionally a Taekos who spelled their name with different Chinese characters, like 多惠子: “Child of Many Blessings.” 妙子, my spelling of Taeko, being uncommon, had a feeling of extraordinariness, but…

“This name, how do you read it? Myoko? Shoko?”

I’d get this question a lot. They’d write the wrong characters, 好子 instead of 妙子, and eventually I got sick of having to correcting my name all the time.

I was a bratty kid, so I was often scolded by adults around me. Additionally, I tended to play by myself, unable to fit into any existing friend group. So, I blamed my strange personality on my name, “Tae Child” or “Queer, strange child,” and I gradually grew to dislike it. I could by no means become the “Beautiful” and “Kind” Taeko my father wished for. So I hated myself–the owner of this name–as well.

奇妙, Kimyo, Queer; 微妙, Bimyo, Dicey: These words all contain the character 妙, and none of them leave a very great impression. Moreover, 妙 always appears in sutras that Buddhist monks chant. It shows up a lot on Buddhist gravestones, too. For the longest time I was under the impression that the character was old fashioned and stale, like the smell of old book pages.

However, once I became a functioning member of society, I ended up working together with another Taeko, a senior colleague. She was incredibly beautiful. Her hair was long, she had the facial features of a Japanese–pale skin, small face–and a body of a westerner, and altogether, she just had this aura. Moreover, she was a dynamic woman who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, so I could only catch a glimpse of her from afar. Her name matched her perfectly, for a woman showered in public attention, and she was proud of it, but because of her name, she was like the Madonna of our close-knit workplace. In contrast, I was never called by my first name, even until the very end when I transferred jobs–the shadow of Taeko.

During that time, I had a close friend visit me once at my workplace. When they called my name at the front desk, they said “Could you please let me speak with Taeko?” without mentioning my last name, and the attendant thought they were referring to Madonna Taeko. It seemed they didn’t immediately catch on, that another Taeko existed.

“What was that about?” said my friend as we met, looking at me fixedly, and I wanted to ask the same back.

Since then, whenever I come across a woman with the same name as me, my senses heighten, and I scrutinize their physical appearance and personality. Like, in Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel “The Makioka Sisters,” there’s an important main character named Taeko. The youngest daughter of the Finger 5 is also a Taeko. Singer-Songwriter Taeko Ohnuki is still going strong. Finding salvation in these celebrities became the reason for reexamining my name and finding happiness in it.

Incidentally, this year (2024), I decided to challenge myself to try new things, and I began attending a Chinese poetry composition class. The first lesson was getting accustomed to chinese-japanese dictionaries. At first, my teacher instructed me to look into the composition and meaning of my name. As I was taught how to use a chinese-japanese dictionary for the inexperienced, I found the character 妙.

As I copied the character from the dictionary into my notebook, unknowingly, I started to cry. The fact that it was a word that contained so many gracious meanings. And so it showed its face so often in buddhist sutras, and despite the old fashioned connotation, it had persevered to this day, becoming my name.

If I could go back to when I asked my father about the origins of my name, and he were to tell the etymology of the word that comes up in this dictionary, would I, with my peaked audaciousness, have been compliant accepting this as the meaning of the word, been thankful, and have matured from it? Or would I feel like a burden, a failure to my name? My father has already gone to the other side, and we are in the 2020s, but after looking into the origins of my name, I’ve realized that this name was an amazing present.

Recently I’ve come across the words, “As you come to like your own name, that name comes to bring a good life.”

It’s been 69 years since I was named Taeko, and for a long time I understood it to be an odd name. Now at last, I’ve finally accepted my name, and decided to give it tender, loving care. And at the same time, I’ve come face to face with myself, and from now on, I want to enjoy life.