The summer was marked by fireworks. Night skies filled with showers of light, giant golden weeping willows, showers of green and pink stars, fizzing silvery rockets. The bangs and shrill screams and the scent of gunpowder. Words - even images - cannot truly describe fireworks. But always, there is a kind of magic about them. The hot, humid summer nights draw it out and it expands until the earth is fizzling with it and suddenly you feel things that much more. Always, on those summer firework nights, I have a sense of stepping out of myself, or being pulled into something.

On that night, I had been in Japan for a year. I’d traveled to Tokyo for the weekend, like returning to your birthplace for your birthday. So easy now that it didn’t even merit a mention. But this time… I had a friend. We’d spent the day making an otaku pilgrimage to the Odaiba Gundam, breaking from my usual gravitation towards ancient things, temples and museums. Odaiba was futuristic and strange and wonderful, the sea glittering silver in the afternoon light, seen from the windows of a train without a driver that seemed to float through the glass and metal city. And then dusk, and wandering through the hot, seething bustle of Ameyokocho, between little designer fashion shops and cheap Chinese clothing stores and juice bars and fish sellers with all the ocean’s produce laid out on ice beneath the glow of lights and the sinking summer twilight, everyone calling out and shouting and alive.

We went, then, to the place of a friend of a friend and sat on the floor of the empty apartment, eating sushi and yakitori and enjoying gentle easy conversation. Later, when the fireworks began to light the sky, we clambered over a fence and climbed onto the roof of the building, and there we sat with the wind whistling around us and Tokyo splayed out before us, city of a million lights, and in the distance the Sumidagawa Fireworks competition lit up the sky, two sets at once. Hearts and Mickey Mouse faces and the biggest fireworks I’d ever seen, green and purple and blue and gold and orange, beyond belief, humbling, exquisitely wasteful. The soul of summer, into the sky and exploding, filling me with something nameless. The emotions of year of living - really living for the first time in my life - seemed to float away with the smoke, and I was filled with love and gratefulness and renewed energy for this place I have so badly wanted to be.

And then I learned that sometimes it’s the silent fizz that yields unexpectedly large and exquisite explosions. Like meeting him. I remember lazing around with friends on a summer night, hot even after the rain, rendered useless by the post-Tokyo exhaustion. Someone said, “Hmm, we shoulda set off our own fireworks this holiday.” And we all sighed and agreed that it would have been cool, if only we’d thought of it, the convenience stores probably won’t have any in stock any more. And then, like a magician, he produced bottle rockets. I remember thinking that he had some kind of inexorable pull to him, dragging along anyone who drifted into his radius. And we went to a park, the four of us, and suddenly we were naughty teenagers again, laughing like idiots, trying to see how high the little rockets could go before popping into a pretty silver streak.

And last, the Mizunami fireworks. I went with a group of ALTs, and ate festival food and watched the fireworks. It had, to it, the catharsis of revisitation. I had dressed myself and my neighbour - capably, I think - and this time I was wearing my very own yukata, complete with accessories, chosen myself with all the umm-ing and aah-ing of someone choosing a really expensive and slightly useless set of things. And I enjoyed it, because I felt both that I had earned something and that I deserved nothing, and that every moment was a gift. I can’t really explain what I felt then and there, in the close wild madness of the bon-odori dancers and the tanabata streamers and the scents and the music, but it felt right, somehow.

Summer, with its strange, heady magic, smoothing fear like oil on water. This summer I put things to rest - finally, peacefully. I remembered things: enthusiasm, joy, the sense of accomplishment. And I started things. A new job, a new life. A new relationship, which is a tame word for a beautiful thing. I found that I had evolved in unexpected ways, and I felt… complete. And now that I have finally written these words, I can also lay summer to rest and get on with the beautiful aging of autumn, because everything passes. It’s been good, and I can’t wait to see what’s around the next bend.

Attachment is a funny thing; it comes on us when we least expect it.

I write this from my denuded desk in a quiet staffroom on my last day here at school. It’s pelting down rain outside; I am still slowly drying out from my walk to school this morning. I’m in a strange state of passivity; things seem to be flowing past me terribly fast, but somehow… they’re other people’s things. I have on my desk my last rent payment for my apartment, my disappointingly bland farewell speech, my watch and cellphone and a letter to my successor. Small things float through my mind - how wonderfully silky these stockings feel; how I’ve never thought to wonder why there’s a photo of the Acropolis in the hallway outside the staffroom.

It hasn’t seemed real. It felt like something I kept saying but never quite got around to believing. Every time I told a student I was leaving and they reacted with surprise, I was reminded of an incident that happened years ago. I’d been visiting my sister’s house and was playing with my nephews and niece in the garden; they were very young at that stage. We’d just gotten into one of those rough-and-tumble games where everyone is yelling and laughing when my aunt arrived to fetch me. She was in a hurry and I had to leave at once. I remember trying to be very casual about it, but the kids were standing there looking kind of bewildered and surprised and terribly, terribly disappointed, as though they couldn’t fathom how something so fun had been cut off so suddenly and without warning.

Until a relatively late stage in life, we simply don’t have any sense of the future. When children play, they’re not kept in reserve by the thought that the source of their fun might soon disappear. Teenagers don’t think that their failure to study today might have repercussions for their university careers. Our foresight extends as we grow older, but there are always those aspects of life that we live with any firm concept of transience. No one looks at a lover or a parent and thinks, “This person will die someday” without experiencing emotional distress, which means that we tend not to think about that very hard at all.

The funny thing is, I’ve had a long time to prepare for this departure. When I first heard I’d have to leave the school, I was devastated. But somewhere along the line… it stopped mattering quite so much. It was sad, certainly. But I found my heart becoming oddly buoyant. Not that I threw myself into things less; if anything in these months I’ve interacted more with the students than before. It was simply that I was aware of the end. As though the plant that represents me in this little garden was putting all its energy into making beautiful big flowers, but the roots were ever shallower.

There are other factors, too. When I arrived here, this school was my life. My colleagues were as close as I got to friends; I watched my students as keenly as though they were fond relations, throwing my silent self into the barely-comprehensible play of their lives. I became an expert people watcher, without being able to interact with them at all. But as time went by, I realised my life lay elsewhere. I found my Japanese surrogate family, people who genuinely care about me and enjoy playing a part in my life. I made friends with people because I liked them, not simply because they were there.

And my students… I suppose I realised that I was but a transient thing to them too, just another ALT (assistant language teacher, another name for the native English speakers hired to improve the linguistic skills of Japanese students) in a long procession of foreign faces trotting through their lives. Conducting one-on-one interview tests with the first years, so fresh from Junior High School that they wear their skirts below the knee, I was surprised to see how the factor that determined whether or not they even remembered the name of their previous ALT was the degree to which that person had taken a genuine, warm interest in their lives without becoming their “friend”. And that was what I tried to do. Care about them without trying to cross the line into comradeship, lavish upon them all of my attention - from the beginning of one school day to the end. They seem to enjoy me, and I have enjoyed them, and I think it’s all I need.

So that’s my requiem for the work of this strange and wonderful year, ended in a day where the air outside is made grey by rain. I have loved this job, for all its difficulties; I have enjoyed the people, the students, the teachers who smiled at me every day and greeted me. I have enjoyed melting into unremarkability; while on the streets I am stared at, here I’m just another face. I have found out that I am interested in career paths I had never considered before. I have appreciated my light schedule, the opportunity to pour time into studying Japanese and other things. But the end of this time, this school, is come, and that… is oddly OK.

Verbal telecommunications are the death of non-native language speakers. I hate talking on the phone in Japanese, or talking to Japanese people on the phone in English. With a good deal of careful observation - gestures and facial expressions and so on - navigating the turbid waters of cross-linguistic communication is pretty much do-able. But on the other side of the phone, deprived of those little signposts, I always feel utterly, despicably at sea.

So you can’t blame me for thinking it was a little weird when my colleague informed me she was planning for us to eat lunch at a “fishing house”. “You catch fish and then you eat,” she told me.

Oddly, the link between catching fish and eating lunch didn’t immediately occur to me. I hail, after all, from Gauteng. Despite years of recreational fishing with my dad, I had never ever actually caught a fish. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was technically possible. I’d more or less come to believe that fishing rods were a symbolic necessity, an accessory, if you like, for sunny days spent at the dam. When you braai (barbecue) all that beef you brought along, maybe the presence of the fishing rods makes it taste better or something.

So, best case scenario, I figured it’d be something similar. I’m an optimist, sometimes. Pretty soon, though, I arrived at my colleague’s home and after some careful questioning realised that yes, we were in fact supposed to catch our own lunch. (Oh God, I thought. I hope they have other stuff on the menu, because if not I’m going to starve.) On being told that lunch was trout, I had further hideous visions of waders and failed attempts at fly fishing.

I should have known better.

What awaited was not scenic stretches of river and the challenge of snaring a wily fish, but minivans and Families out to enjoy Family Activities. And you can’t make Family Activities too authentic, right? Oh, the trappings were there, alright. A thatched mountain hut huddling amid wild, lush emerald vegetation. The fishing rods were thin bamboo poles. It was charming - woody, worn, rustic.

But the pond was - relatively speaking - tiny, and alive with fish. I was struck by their uniform size, about 30cm or so. Catching them was no more or less difficult than dipping at rod in - literal fish in a barrel. It felt embarrassing - all the times I’d argued against canned hunting and here I was, no better. I was apparently the only one feeling squeamish, though, and pretty soon my colleague’s five-year-old daughter had hooked her first catch.

I procrastinated as long as I could before dipping my line in the water - it was in for about half a second before I felt it snag, and then there was nothing to be done but pull the damned fish out of the water. I caught my breath as it broke the surface, gleaming silver and red in the sunlight with those characteristic trout speckles along its side. It was exquisite, a magnificent creature. I swung it closer. I wanted to unhook it and throw it back, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to touch it - every time my fingers brushed against that cold, writhing, slippery body, my hand shot back like I’d been shocked.

My colleague’s husband quickly came to my aid and they stood around grinning and congratulating me as he deftly unhooked the fish and threw it with a plop into the bucket of water that held our booty.

I watched it go, abjectly, and before I could stop myself I said, “I’m sorry, fish!”

My colleague’s family - including her little kids - stopped and stared at me.

It was pretty bad, really. Whatever this post may imply, I’m no naïf when it comes to the origins of our food. I know that some adorable little piggy bites it whenever I get the craving for a pork sausage, or that doe-eyed cows die by the millions to keep Mickey D’s in business. But the nudity of my part in the death of this living creature came as a rude shock. Coupled with the almost sick ease of catching it, there was no sense of need, no sense of achievement that might have helped me justify my actions. I wasn’t starving. I didn’t need it to survive. It was almost a game, only the currency of the game was the spark of life.

We carried on fishing. My colleague, at some point, bent over the bucket and counted the slim, sleek bodies swirling in elegant, desperate circles, the water darkened by blood from hook-torn fish cheeks. “How many can you eat?” she called to me.

I thought about it. “Two,” I said cautiously.

She thought about it for a while, presumably attaching appetite value to family members. “OK, then we need to catch another three.”

That made me feel a little better, I think. I caught another fish and hastily presented it to her husband to deal with. After we’d reached our quota, the bucket of fish was delivered to the fishing house kitchen and decisions made as to how our catch would be prepared.

And then lunch. Bizarrely, it was one of the loveliest lunches I’ve ever had. Japanese culture has elevated rustic simplicity to an art-form. I cannot begin to tell you of the sheer pleasure of being seated on straw mats inside that wooden hut, looking out on the breathtaking green of the mountains, sipping hot, refreshing tea. The food was superlative - clear broth with little river oysters still in their shells, rice flavoured with mountain herbs and mushrooms, miso goheimochi (rice pounded to a glutinous texture, shaped around a stick, coated with miso and grilled to sticky, crisp perfection). And of course, the trout. I had one fried and another grilled with salt, and both were beyond delicious, sweet, succulent, clean-tasting white flesh. The unpleasantness, the guilt, was easy to forget then.

I leave you to come to your own conclusions about fish, fishing, eating, vegetarianism, and frankly whatever else you’d like. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole thing or whether it’s at all necessary to come up with some sort of unified theory on how to feel about killing one’s food. Perhaps it’s enough to just say いただきます (itadakimasu) - the standard Japanese expression said before meals. Its meaning, packed with linguistic nuances, is, “I humbly and respectfully partake (in this food).” My iaido sensei, who (along with my actual dad) gets the privilege of “My Dad Says” status, once told me that itadakimasu refers to the concept of being grateful for the sacrifice of life and essence that goes into our meals. “Not just the animals,” he said. “Even the plants. Even the sand that makes the pottery for the dishes. Even the wood for the chopsticks.”

Certainly, food for thought.

I’ll be changing jobs as my contract expires at the end of July. Due to to this fact, my stinginess with my paid leave throughout the year means that I have a lot of leave days to use up in the really short time before the end of my contract. This excess of free time has been tremendously useful, what with the time-consuming and frustrating driver’s license business. Thursdays in particular afford me a good opportunity to use my leave days - I’m not needed in any classes, and would otherwise essentially spend the day sitting around desperately trying to jam one more kanji into my overflowing brain.

So while I do, of course, use my time to get important chores done, I’ve also found it an invaluable opportunity to do less serious stuff, like simply wandering around Nagoya after I’ve completed my tasks for the day.

Before you recoil in horror at my absolutely irresponsibility, let me point out the value of these expeditions. Firstly, I get to use Japanese surprisingly little in my daily life. Other than the occasional exchanges with neighbours (”Hot, isn’t it?” calls Neighbour with a friendly wave as I walk past; I look appropriately horrified by the heat and call back, “Yes, isn’t it hot!”), I pretty much spend my days silent and unable to spring my new vocabulary on unsuspecting Japanese people. These outings are thus a great opportunity to try Japanese in new contexts without the luxury of someone holding my hand.

Secondly, despite having lived here for almost a year*, I know painfully little about the place. When I go to Nagoya, it tends to be with a specific purpose in mind (sightseeing, usually), and leaving the beaten track confuses and terrifies me. Dear poor patient Dani has been the recipient of many a frantic email along the lines of, “OMG, I’m going to die lost and alone in the bowels of some subterranean shopping mall in Sakae!” or “Help! All these bloody department stores look the same! I’ve been wandering around for an hour looking for the exit!” And so purely for the sake of convenience, I thought it’d be good to spend some time getting to know the place.

Nagoya Thursdays, as they’ve become known, have been surprisingly interesting. There was the hat salesman with whom I spent over half-an-hour talking to, mostly about soccer. He was very friendly and very sweet; it was the first time I’d really spoken to a Japanese guy like that and it was really rather pleasant. And then there was the soba (buckwheat noodle) shop owner whose sour face and terse attitude gradually softened the more I smiled at her. One trip saw me successfully delivering two pairs of too-long pants for alteration; hooray for pushing through the terror of communication.

I’ve encountered some amazing places, too. One particularly lost day, I ended up in front of a rather nondescript building with the words “ランの館” (Ran no yakata) on the outside. Knowing that “ran” is Japanese for orchid and “yakata” means building or hall, I decided to check it out.

You may not know this, but I really, really love orchids**. Ever since reading The Orchid Thiefby Susan Orlean (one of my favourite books, incidentally), I’ve had a mad crush on orchids. They fascinate and delight me, nature’s little weirdos. Sadly, in South Africa we don’t get to see a lot of them, just single-stem Woolworths phalaenopsis in about three colours.

I’d seen quite a few orchids in Japan, mostly white and profuse. But nothing prepared me for the sight that awaited me in the Ran no Yakata. The main exhibit is a massive atrium and my first bizarre impression was that there was a tear in the space-time continuum and some parallel orchid universe was profusely vomiting its contents into ours, cascades of white phalaenopsis as tall as me, sprays of spiky cattelya, orchids of every shape and colour you might care to imagine. Something in my brain made a sort of choking, fizzling noise and I spent nearly the next hour just in the atrium, slavering over the colours and shapes and pedantically trying to photograph every variety of orchid I could see.

I’d never even heard of the Ran no Yakata, and discovering this crazy delightful oasis in the middle of built-up Sakae (a really snooty shopping district in Nagoya) was one of the nicest surprises I’ve ever had.

I wouldn’t say that my Thursday trips are exactly relaxing, but they certainly afford me fascinating glimpses into another side of life here.

* I love saying that, it makes me feel like such an old hat.

** Luckily I don’t suffer badly from orchid lust; I like to look at them but I’m rotten at keeping them alive, and wise enough to know that.

Carelessness

On the weather-grayed splintery wood of the bench beside the bus sits an old man, perhaps in his seventies, legs folded in a neat half-lotus, sandals discarded on the ground before him, trouser legs rolled up. A cigarette dangles from the corner of his downturned mouth. I am struck by the effortlessness of his straight strong limbs and it comes into my head that before me is a man who, in this moment, is completely at ease, the tiny cogs of this complex existence fallen into place. On this sweltering day, looking at him, Buddha pops into my mind unbidden.

Scent

As he brushed past, fragrance drifted from his clothes and I recognized the scent instantly, unquestionably correct. He smelled of the incense of Sanjūsangendō – a strange, rough scent, spicy, not sweet, charred, smokey. The incense I had bought there months ago lay in my home, never burned. It was too intense for my casual purposes, too unique to that holy place. But here, as a stranger smelled of that infinitely long hall of silent statues, the echo of reverence shuddered over my heart. He stopped, caught me looking at him. I looked away, but I wished I could tell him.

Flames

Eleven-thirty, Saturday night by the banks of the Kamo River, Kyoto. I am adrift in a joyous, inebriated crowd. The drum’s unsettled rhythm ripples the warm, humid night air. There are fire dancers, two men and a woman, lithe, stripped to bare essentials, skin glistening in the eerie light, carving primordial patterns in the darkness. The woman has a shawl of silver spangles about her waist and dances with a fire hoop, its radial spokes like petals in orbit around her undulating frame. A strange pathos washes over me as I watch her, exquisitely isolated in her cage of flame.

A note about this post: Scent: Sanjūsangendō is a temple in Kyoto famous for its hall of 1,000 life-sized statues of Kannon, a Buddhist deity said to have 1,000 arms. I wrote about my visit there in this post. Also, free of the constraint of my 100 words, I can provide some background: at the time of this encounter, I was at an iaido taikai in Kyoto not too far from Sanjūsangendō - the person in question may conceivably have visited there earlier that day, although he was dressed for iaido and the taikai started early. I was just startled at my ability to pinpoint the origin of that scent - it really is incredibly unique and memorable. Who knows?

As probably everyone who knows me knows by now, I love Kyoto. It’s my happy place. My face breaks into a grin whenever the shinkansen loudspeakers go, “ding-ding-DING-ding-ding! This train will soon make a brief stop at Kyoto. Passengers changing to the Kansai, Tokkaido or Kintetsu lines should get off here.” (I don’t know if that’s accurate - I actually never listen to the announcements.) So anyway.

Also as anyone who knows me knows, I love iaido. Iaido plus Kyoto - well, that’s almost too good. This weekend saw me going there again, this time to participate in my second iaido taikai (competition).

I really never expected to enjoy taikai (competitions - last stop for the translation train, you’ll have to actually remember the word from now). But I do. They’re a good place to immerse yourself in the culture of iaido, not to mention an unparalleled opportunity to watch and learn from masters of the art. What’s more, going to taikai creates chances to build really good relationships with the members of your dojo - there’s a lovely sense of camaraderie. And it’s a chance to test yourself, see what you’ve learned. Although I don’t believe there’s such a thing as “practicing” iaido (because even in practice, you’re actually doing it, not leading up to something), the stakes are higher at taikai because you’re in the public eye, representing your family, your dojo.

Unlike the last time I went to Kyoto for an iaido taikai, this time I was actually going to participate in one. I spent the previous night* at IchiEnSou Guest House (rapidly starting to feel like my home-from-home in Kyoto), and Sunday morning saw me making my bleary-eyed** way to the Kyoto Kaikan (it’s a big complex near the Heian Jingu where the last taikai was held), with a brief stop at Starbucks for a Chai Latte (how cosmopolitan!)

I got there, I went in, I hung about nervously waiting for the people from my dojo, they came, I registered… and then, without warning, I realised I’d be performing in the very first group of the taikai. It was, I admit, kind of harsh - unlike the previous taikai I’d attended, there was no warm-up time. But at least I didn’t have time to get nervous. Last time I thought I was OK, but I started to tremble uncontrollably as I performed one of my waza (techniques). The trembling incident worried me, which was part of why I signed up for as many competitions as possible - I figured the more used to it I became, the less likely I was to get as nervous in the future.

I didn’t start trembling, but I did make a couple of horrible screw-ups, some of which I remember and some of which I don’t. When you’re in front of the judges, there literally isn’t time to think about all things you know you should do during the technique - at the end of the day, it comes down to repeating a waza enough times that you don’t have to think. Ironically, my current reading is D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, which discusses Zen and swordsmanship in depth. Suzuki spends a lot of time talking about how a hair’s breadth separation between thought and action means failure in swordsmanship; I think I’m starting to understand why.

I wasn’t particularly (or at all, really) happy with my performance, but what was done was done. I watched some of the higher-level iaidoka, ate lunch, chatted with some of the people from the dojo and, after lunch, scored a lift back to Aichi with them. Not really relevant to the story, but it was lovely driving from Kyoto to Aichi - I saw a whole bunch of things that you don’t see from the shinkansen, like Lake Biwa. Also got to eat yummy custard pudding soft serve and warabimochi covered in kinako or matcha. Mmm, delicious.

So what did I learn, you ask? What did this weekend teach me? What do I take from this experience?

The truth is, iaido is a difficult thing to explain to people who aren’t into something that’s a little bit unique and weird and culturally-specific. And it’s different in Japan, too, where people are a lot more accepting of the fact that once a week, every week, you spend an entire day going somewhere, dressing in funny clothes and essentially trying to follow to the letter a set of ancient traditions that seem to have little or no relevance to modern everyday life. But somehow, somewhere along the line, it’s expanded to fill my life, my mind.

Iaido pushes my mind outward, an expansion of growing consciousness that has brought a startling awareness of the physical and the spiritual. When I look at my sword, there’s a strong urge to strip away the parts of my self that make me unworthy to use it - laziness, weakness, fear, indifference, passion, anger. My thoughts had no name, no shape, until I discovered Zen, with its profound and fundamental call to exist simply and without blurred, twisted lines. I have read of it described as the “university” of religions - no hand-holding, no being taught what to think, merely having to find it yourself.

Like iaido. You could have the best sensei in the world, the most supportive dojo members, but it is always only ever your hand on the sword, your muscles grown used to the shape of movement, your responsibility. And so for me Zen and iaido are interlinked. It’s like seeing two sides of the coin. Only the more you look, the more the coin becomes transparent and soon enough you may realise it’s not really a coin after all - after all, no matter what you thought in the beginning, it has no value and can’t be used to gain anything. The longer you stare, the more apparent it becomes that this transparent round thing is a bubble with a fragile skin and suddenly you’re afraid it’ll break and you’ll be left with nothing. But you can’t stop there, because if you look deeper you’ll realise that you are the one creating the skin.

It’s not enough to say that the things I’ve learned in iaido are applicable in real life, but for the sake of brevity, they are.  It’s so easy to assume a bowing, scraping, kowtowing, jammer-ek-leef attitude; and equally easy to be an arrogant, devil-may-care Individual asserting your right to do whatever you want. But as I walked past dozens of senior iaidoka on Sunday morning and felt their eyes on me, I found with sudden clarity the balance, and I drew myself straight and remembered the person I wanted to be. To be dignified, to be calm, to be humble, to have patience and respect your place, because you are the person responsible for it.

So I didn’t tremble, and I wasn’t happy. But I know how to keep at it. That’s what I’m learning.

* More about the rest of my weekend later.

** This was from lack of sleep***, by the way, before you get any wrong ideas.

*** THIS, in turn, was caused by my stressing about the taikai and a drunken Australian stumbling in at 4.30am.

In response to a cavalcade of naggery (see what I did there? It was a play on words and it’s going to bug you all day) from both my readers (did they sit in adjacent rooms, I wonder, and co-ordinate their attack?), I find myself back at the blog, desperately seeking something interesting to say. Interesting to anyone other than me, anyway.

The truth is that my life has taken on a monotonous busy hum - I trot to a rude, quick rhythm of work, study, iaido, friends (not necessarily in that order). I don’t have time to update during the week because I’m studying or working; I don’t have time to update on weekends because I’m either with friends or at the dojo. And I feel like there hasn’t been much worth saying, either. There has been the long, tedious and drawn-out process of converting my International Driving Permit to a Japanese driver’s license, but I’ll skip the account of that because the only thing more boring than dealing with bureaucracy is reading someone else’s account of doing just that.

One of the spinoffs of this bureaucratic involvement has been to catapult me headfirst into an almost frantic state of Japanese language study. With each passing day I find more is expected of me in terms of being able to deal with things alone. Translations from bilingual acquaintances are fewer and farther between. People don’t write everything in Hiragana* anymore.

And the price of failure is high. Missed opportunities to talk to people, to learn things, to save money, to attend events. Worst of all, embarrassment. I may have gotten somewhat better at deciphering menus in a relatively short time, but I still whip out, “何をすすめですか？” (What do you recommend?) with humiliating frequency**. Although by and large, Japanese people are surprisingly kind and friendly to functionally illiterate foreigners with limited vocabulary and hobbled (probably wrong) grammar, all but the most patient and curious Japanese will give up after a few tries when aforementioned foreigner is standing there looking bemused.

The embarrassment - the humiliation, the frustration - is the worst part of it all. It’s intellectually easy to understand that making mistakes is all part of the learning process. But for someone who has always taken pride in my ability to express myself, every mistake grates. I have talked about my power (douryoku) instead of my colleagues (douryou), confused boring (taikutsu) with important (taisetsu) and said a multitude of other incredibly stupid things that I try not to think about too much.

In a desperate bid to stop feeling like such a whopping idiot, studying Japanese has quite literally become my hobby. It makes me half-amused, half-annoyed when people say, “Oh! You must be fluent!” After barely a year, how many toddlers speak fluent anything? I feel a nagging sense of guilt though, and wonder if I’d studied that little bit harder (instead of updating my blog), if I’d paid that much more attention, if I might be at least slightly more comprehensible. The other half of my brain, exhausted by the hours of writing out sentences and trying to remember hundreds of words, merely holds up its hands in despair.

What seemed like a thrilling adventure a few months ago has become an uphill slog that sometimes feels like a desperate scramble against a landslide, and I can’t see the top of the mountain anywhere in sight. Giving up is terribly tempting. I’m surrounded by people who speak better Japanese than I do, who are better acquainted with Japanese customs, who have adapted to their situation better. (Did they make better use of their time? I lament, wringing my hands with frustration.)

But then I remember the mountain. Not being the fittest of human beings, I commenced a walking regime a few months back. My favoured daily route took me up a steep mountain road. Puffing and panting, halfway up I would have the same thought every single time: give up. Go down the mountain and walk a flat road. You’re tired. You had a hard day. But the I’d see the corner up ahead, and think, just to the corner, then. And when I reached the corner, I’d think… just to the top of the road, then. Sometimes I’d rest for a few seconds, glance back to see how far I’d come. And at the top of the road, well, it’d be a shame not to climb up to the summit. And so I’d drag myself up to the summit, and stand there with the hot sweet wind whipping my hair into my eyes, with my beloved town layed out below me like a gift, like a prize.

It’s true what they say about giving up. You can attribute it to fear, or laziness. But each time it becomes harder to get back on track, and pretty soon there’s nothing you’ll cling to. And this is a lot like the mountain. I don’t want to give up. It would be easy. But succeeding at this isn’t something that’s beyond me. I want to fight for my life - a life as a functional human being in a society. There’s no fast track to forging a life. But I’m held in thrall of the lure of the next “just until” on this road.

Why? Because I can.

* Japanese has three alphabets - Hiragana, which is phonetic and comprises around 50 letters; Katakana, which is also phonetic and is used for writing foreign words; and Kanji, which is the bulk of the language - “word” or “idea” characters with multitudinous different readings.

** As far as I can tell though, this is quite culturally sound and Japanese people ask other people for their opinions on quite arbitrary decisions all the time. As an illustrative example, I went shopping with a colleague once, who at some point asked me whether she should buy a pair of black stockings with a 3cm diamond pattern or a pair of black stockings with a 4cm diamond pattern. I was like, “Which pair do you like?” and she was like, “I don’t know! You choose!”

The Face of the Iris

Unexpectedly, I find myself crouched on my haunches by the side of the road, skirt tucked under my knees, chin cupped in my hands, staring at single purple iris that has split through the grey bank of a rice field. Its isolation surprises me; there are no other flowers for twenty or thirty metres on either side. I cast about, seeking something to mark this moment; Nina Simone’s tremulous rendition of “The Last Rose of Summer” comes to mind. But the deeper I am drawn into the iris’s face, I see no loneliness, only a cheeky vivid grin. It dares.

Dreaming

The mountains, dark against the sky, rest in the contours of a man in repose on his side. All figures soften when so contemplated: sleep gentles away the promise of sin, the threat of fear. Like the slumber of living things, the sight of mountains brings a strange warm empathy, a yearning to share the incommunicable dreams. My thoughts slow to the rhythm of breath. I watch and wonder, half-longingly: what bones give frame to that rich skin of dark soil, what secret watery veins wend through it, what whispering dreams drift and swirl there between the roots of trees?

Peanuts and Fishies

There before me is a side dish of peanuts and sesame seeds and tiny finless dried fishes gleaming metallic silver. My chopsticks hover. Why such agonizing detail on bodies barely half-an-inch long? I peer closer and stare at the remnants of fish eyes, the contents of fish heads, ferocious little jaws roaring open. I pick one up, gingerly place it in my mouth and bite down. All I can think of is my teeth crushing those jaws from above, a monstrous giant with unspeakable power. But, I think, my chopsticks already lifting the next one, they don’t taste half bad.

A note about this post: I’m a big fan of the Japanese forms of haiku and tanka poems. The challenge with those is to compress a profound feeling, an immense sensation, into fewer words than are commonly used to express the most mundane feelings of life. To me, the essence of a good haiku or tanka is being able to tap into a sense of the universal, to draw on empathy or common experiences. It’s a suggestion, a streak of colour that leads us to our own memories. You can’t read them without a good imagination. I’m not quite at that level of eloquence yet, so today I tried these instead.

A very personal, frank and unapologetic discussion of some of the things that have been on my mind lately. Skip ahead for more fun content. Read the rest of this entry »