japan revisited

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kawanabe

This gallery contains 10 photos.

She looks very innocent, like butter wouldn’t melt, but…

川辺 – kawanabe

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once upon a time in wakayama

knitting, studying, dreaming of japan

This gallery contains 37 photos.

around the funny-looking mountain, december 2011

The last photo – 5th December 2011

around the funny-looking mountain, november 2011

naniwa kitten therapy

i wrote something about nagai park and thirteen years ago once

It was the summer of 1998, and I was almost twenty-three. I had just graduated the University of London after five long years of boredom and despair, at least as far as studying was concerned. Having managed to dig my way out at last from beneath a mountain of textbooks and lecture notes, I found myself blinking in the sunshine. I was in a daze, and didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to look for a job, but I wasn’t ready to face that yet. I didn’t even want to think about it, so I went back to Japan instead.

I stayed for a month in a hotel beside Nagai Park in Osaka City. My dad lived in an apartment nearby, and my brother was also around that summer. I met up with them at night to eat too much food and get drunk on shōchū, but the rest of the time I spent by myself. To begin with I just sat all day in Nagai Park and watched the world go by — joggers, rollerbladers, buskers, students, the homeless, old people doing tai-chi or playing Japanese chess, and housewives on their way home with their shopping or being dragged from tree to tree by overheated dogs (there were a lot of Siberian Huskies that summer). I chain-smoked charcoal filter cigarettes, and drank bottle after bottle of barley tea. At lunchtime I went to a convenience store and bought something to eat, usually riceballs with pickled plums inside, and more barley tea.

One day I borrowed my dad’s shopping bike, and cycled to Tennoji. Cycling was good, because it disturbed the heavy, sweltering air and gave the impression of wind. I wandered into a bookshop, and came across a book called A Guide to Short Stories for Young Readers by Haruki Murakami. I bought it, sat on the steps outside the station, and started to read. I hadn’t read anything remotely literary since the beginning of my final year at university. The introduction sounded promising, so I went back to the bookshop to look for the collections containing the stories featured in the Guide. I found one, but it seemed for the rest I would need to cycle further afield.

So I spent half of the rest of the summer cycling all over Osaka in search of obscure short stories by postwar writers I had never heard of before: At the Water’s Edge by Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, The Horse by Nobuo Kojima, Glass Slippers by Shōtarō Yasuoka, Still Life by Junzō Shōno, and The Story of Akutadashi by Shirō Hasegawa. (The only story I didn’t manage to find was Saiichi Maruya’s Tree Shadows.) The other half of the summer I spent attempting to decipher these stories.

Each morning, I would cycle off on my dad’s shopping bike, its basket laden with an electronic Japanese, Kanji and Japanese-to-English dictionary (also my dad’s), the Guide, a collection of short stories, a pencil and some paper, cigarettes, a fan, a big bottle of barley tea, plus several riceballs. I would go to places like the port or Osaka castle, find a suitable bench, park the bike, and start to read. I had to look up practically every other kanji and every other word in the dictionary. I had to look up quite a few words I didn’t understand in the dictionary definitions as well. When I still didn’t understand, I looked up the words in English, but my English wasn’t up to much in those days, either, and the translated sentences I scribbled down in my notebook were truely awful.

But by the end of the summer, I finished reading the five stories, and, with a little help from Haruki Murakami and a lot of help from my dad’s dictionary, I felt I knew what they meant, or at least I had an idea. Reading about alienated people who, having survived the war, didn’t know what to do with themselves made me feel better, and when I left Osaka a week after my twenty-third birthday, I had almost regained the will to live.

Back in Britain, I found a job. I continued to wander into bookshops whenever I felt lost, and to fill every available space in my life with reading, translating, and, more recently, trying to write something of my own. Ten years down the line, I am no longer young, but I am revisiting those short story collections, reading them in their entirety, without the aid of either Haruki Murakami or a dictionary. I have just ordered a second hand copy of Saiichi Maruya’s Tree Shadows over the internet. I don’t have a bicycle these days, but I do have an internet connection.

Ten years down the line, I also find myself in the ridiculous situation of studying for exams all over again, an experience I swore I would never repeat. I am studying in the hope of returning to Osaka, maybe for good this time. I have been buried under a mountain of notes and textbooks since the beginning of the year, and am bored and verging on despair already. But I have a lot of reasons to survive this war, too, and remembering that summer of ten years ago keeps me going. I can’t wait to find myself blinking in the sunshine again. I can’t wait to go back to Japan.

issue four • may 2008

the elephant longs to return to a carefree summer of books and bicycles

‘i spent half of the rest of the summer cycling all over osaka in search of obscure short stories by postwar writers i had never heard of before… the other half i spent attempting to decipher them’

while japan was shaking and drowning

scenes from the ghetto field animal hospital in tanba, kyoto. the carpenters and i did a tiny bit of good, maybe, if only to stop at mister donut with a bongo-load of bitches on the way home

hope everyone is okay after the quake. be safe, i’m thinking of you xo

so long my friend, there must always be an end

skeeter was my first ever dog, who i chanced to meet at the perfect moment in 1998 (i had just left university and moved to the middle of nowhere. life with skeeter began when he was hit by a car, and i was sent to peel him off a road on the first day of my first job). for eleven years and a few months, above all he was always there. he was there for me when i couldn’t sleep and needed to go for a walk in the middle of the night. he was there for me when half the world disappeared. i thought he would be there for me too when i moved half way round that half-disappeared world, but he died on 23 november last year. i will never forget the way he looked at me one last time and licked my face when i was sitting with him in the boot of my brother’s car. so it was that life with skeeter ended with a car, too, but at the worst possible moment. i will never forget how heavy his ashes were after he  was gone.

that was in britain. i have been living in japan now for nearly ten months. i carried the box of ashes up the mountain outside of my window first thing this morning, and set skeeter free. red maple leaves fell from the trees, and bamboo whispered in the breeze; there was the faint smell of incense and sound of a bell from the temple a little way up. i was going to cheat and keep some of the ashes, but in the end i let all of him go. my rucksack was light when i finally walked away: it was as empty as i have often felt this past year. now his ashes are gone, all i have left is the skeeter inside of my head, and the mountain outside. it is pouring with rain. i am too tired to remember, but i can’t stop looking out of the window.

i’m not sure how long i will be hanging around in japan, but i hope to be here when the leaves turn next year, to look for skeeter in the trees. i’ve been psyching myself up to write something really good about him today, but i give up, because there are no words. for not nearly long enough, he was about the only thing that kept me connected to this tattered world. it is unbelievably hard to keep it together without him. a skeeter-sized part of me died on november 23.

skeeter’s trees may be found at 34.916112,135.436985 http://bit.ly/dA8n13

once upon a time in wakayama

“My dad was born in 1947 in Japan, in a rice farming district outside Wakayama city. His family was poor; he had a strict father but a liberal mother, and three older sisters. He graduated technical high school, managed to get a job in an electronics firm in Osaka, and in 1969 he was transferred to New York. That was where he met my mum (my mum is from New Zealand), and that was where my brother and I were born.

Until recently, I didn’t know much more about my dad when he was younger. We didn’t get on very well when I was growing up, so mostly I didn’t know any more because I didn’t want to know. After my dad had his first brain haemorrage last year, I went up to his room and found a wooden Suntory whiskey box full of old black and white photographs. All of the photographs were taken before he left Wakayama almost forty years ago, at the age of twenty-one. I had never seen them before. In the photographs, my dad was strikingly handsome. He looked almost exactly like my brother did not so long ago. My dad’s eyes were lucid, without a trace of the weariness or anger I had always known. There were images of my dad in his student uniform complete with cap, surrounded by innumerable friends on his graduation trip to Nara. In others he was leaning against a wall with his sisters, hugging his pet dog, lounging in the sun, or posing on his motorbike in a denim jacket and traditional wooden clogs. He was laughing in most of the photographs. Even when he was drunk, I had rarely seen my father laugh. I had certainly never seen him laugh before with a mischievous look in his eyes.

My Japanese grandmother was standing in the background of a few of the photographs taken outside the house in Wakayama. Her hair was jet black and she wore simple kimonos that were captured in various shades of grey. She looked on serenely from the shadows as my dad enjoyed the limelight. I could see my dad in her face for the first time. Before, I had never been able to find him there.

This past week, my dad has been doing a lot better. He seems almost like his old self — I don’t mean how he was just over two weeks ago before he had his second brain haemorrhage; in a strange way, he seems young again somehow, the way he was in these photographs. We were looking through them together the other day, and he told me all kinds of stories from back then. I had a revelation this week that, really, I’m not so different from my dad. When he told me about a road trip he went on with one of his friends, for instance, I remembered the time my best friend and I hitch-hiked to Amsterdam. My dad nearly amputated his little finger once during a rice harvest, and that reminded me of the time I was kicked in my head by a horse in my final year at college: we both have the scars to prove it. My dad found his first dog wandering around in the middle of a road. I found mine and took him home after he was hit by a car. And my grandmother used to protect my dad from my grandfather, in much the same way that she protected me from my dad during the five years I lived in the house in Wakayama. It was my grandmother that bought my dad his motorbike. She didn’t buy me a motorbike, but in a community where being different was frowned upon, she let me be myself. I didn’t realize until I was much older, but even after we moved away to Britain when I was ten, she was always a part of me.

My dad is a part of me, too. It has taken me a long time to realize this, but now that I have, I wouldn’t want him to be anyone else. Above everything, my dad taught me not to have any regrets, and I am relieved that he doesn’t have any, either, in spite of all that’s happened.”

elephantasmagoria – friday, 7 december 2007

i remember osaka, 2003

“It’s strange what you remember at times like this. After I wrote what I wrote yesterday, I dug out the negatives from that trip to Osaka four years ago. I took a lot of photos over there. As I’ve been scanning a few and getting rid of the worst of the scratches and dust, I have remembered all kinds of things.

For instance I remember now why I signed up for that photography course. It was because of these photos. They were the first ones I took with the Nikon FM2. Up until then if I ever wanted to take photos of something, I bought a disposable camera. I had no idea what I was doing with the FM2. I vaguely focused and fiddled with the shutter speed and aperture until the light meter said ‘0’ rather than plus or minus. It all seemed a bit too much like hard work at the time, I seem to recall. I’m not sure why I bought black and white film. It was probably the mood I was in. I remember I couldn’t find anywhere to get it processed in Osaka.

But back in Britain, when I got the prints back from the lab, I remember thinking the photos looked cool. I still do. I doubt I’d have the courage to take photos like these anymore. I had a lot of nerve, I think, pointing my camera at strangers like that. Or maybe I just didn’t give a shit. But anyway, that’s why I signed up for the photography course. I wanted to learn how to use my manual camera properly. One thing I notice I learned on the course is how to hold the camera straight. Almost all the Osaka photos lean to one side. I also learned that it’s much more fun printing my own images, rather than leaving it up to the lab.

 

As for the camera, I remember now where that came from, too. My dad bought it for me when I graduated from university in 1998. He still lived in Osaka then, and I went over to visit. I hadn’t been to Japan for ten years, and I had rarely seen my dad for nearly as long. I remember we went to a camera shop in Shinsaibashi. My dad wanted to buy me an automatic SLR like the one he had, but when I saw the FM2, a heavy, clunky brick of a thing with a few dials that goes ‘thunk’ when you press the shutter release, I asked if I could have that one instead. ‘Why?’ my dad asked. ‘Do you know how to use it?’ I don’t know, I said, and no, but I’ll figure it out. It wasn’t for another five years that I began to try.

So photography is something else I owe to my dad. My dad is awake now. He knows who we are, but he is going through his own private hell at the moment, and he isn’t ready to let anyone in yet. I can only hope the day will come soon when I can tell him about the things I remember, and how grateful I am for not just the camera, but everything.”

elephantasmagoria – sunday, 25 november 2007

rainy days and mondays

after catching up with my aunts, taking flowers for my grandmother, and eating too much food yesterday, i was planning to visit my book- loving cousin and stay overnight in wakayama. but i was a little tired and fed up, and from what one of my aunts said my cousin is a little tired and fed up too, so i decided to come home. i came home last night, drank a can of beer and stared into space for a while. i stared into space for a while, and then i went to bed

today is my day off and i woke up at six as usual, but i didn’t get out of bed until eight. i lay still for two hours and listened to the rain. for breakfast i had some biscuits my aunts gave me to take home yesterday. after breakfast i did some cleaning, because a volunteer is coming today to stay in the spare room. i think she is staying for a week, but i’m not really sure

to stop me staring into space again i finished unpacking my stuff from britain, and stuck some pictures on the walls. i feel a bit better now stanley donwood and david lynch are back. and the hundertwasser postcards my brother bought me in vienna, the zencentricity flyer from fifteen or something years ago, the patrick wolf ticket from the week before skeeter died last year, the old man with the saxophone’s golf ball, photos of people and dogs and cats and places from my old life… all these things helped me feel a bit better

my friends in britain used to worry about me moving to japan and starting again by myself. i would always laugh and tell them that i’d be okay, that i could live anywhere and be happy as long as the dog was there, and i had an internet connection. i don’t feel so okay now the dog is dead, i am here, and i can’t use my mobile phone let alone the internet when i am at home. but i’m just going to have to be okay, and i am confident i will be one day. i’ve met a lot of people since i moved here, and i’ve made a few friends already. from tomorrow i will be fostering a puppy for a while. a week today the internet people should be coming. so things will get better, slowly but surely, and i will be okay

i’m not ready to replace skeeter, knowing full well that skeeter can never be replaced, in the same way my grandmother can’t be repaced, the old man with the saxophone can’t be replaced, my friend who died five years ago can’t be replaced, and my old life can’t be replaced. the trouble is, in my mind i am not ready to let go of my old life. in my mind i am desperate to replace it, even though i know full well it is irreplaceable. i am just not ready to commit to this new life of mine, that is the trouble

but this has happened to me before. as long as i keep moving, and i give myself a little time, i know i can get used to anything, and learn to like it, even. so today i will go for a long walk under my big blue umbrella to the supermarket, in order to keep moving. i could drive i suppose, but at times like this, i always think driving is cheating. i will probably listen to patrick wolf as i walk, and along the way i will probably stare into space. but at least it won’t be the same space, and at least i won’t be listening to the rain. and even if, after i come home with a week’s worth of groceries, i wind up staring into space again and listening to the rain, at least now there are pictures on the walls to stare at and get lost in

the long walk home

“For some reason there was a mix-up with the dates, and my dad didn’t go back to Japan last week. His flight is on Monday. His flight is on Monday, but he will not be flying.

After supper on Thursday night, my dad had a seizure. He fell off the chair he was sitting on and hit his head. He was rushed into hospital. He was conscious at the time, but when he started fitting again the doctors anaesthetized him. The scan of his head showed he’d had another brain haemorrhage, a year and a half after the last one. They weren’t going to operate this time.

By the time my brother and I got there, my dad was on a ventilator, and hooked up to an array of drips and monitoring machines. The hospital let me phone Japan, and I spoke to his oldest sister. She was going to cycle over to the temple straight away to pray like she did last time. I sat up with my dad all night in ICU, holding his hand. Sometimes he squeezed my hand, and sometimes he looked as though he was starting to come round. When he did that one of the nurses came over and topped up his anaesthetic.

I’m not religious so I didn’t pray, but I spoke to my dad inside my head. I talked to him about the last time we went to Japan together. It was in the late spring over four years ago, and we were supposed to be going to the wedding of one of my cousins. The week before, my dad told me he wasn’t going to let me go. I was skinny and funny in my head at the time, and I got the impression he was embarrassed for the rest of the family to see me that way. So he was going to go to the wedding by himself, and I was going to hang around in Osaka.

I was furious with him, and at the airport and on the flight over I didn’t speak a word. We stayed in a hotel in Tennoji the first night we got to Japan, and I went straight to my room. I was moving my stuff over to a youth hostel in Nagai the following evening.

In the morning the phone rang and my dad said he was taking me out for breakfast. I was completely vegan back then, and he said he wanted to show me the kind of things I could eat. I said I could figure that much out for myself, thanks, but he said, ‘Please,’ which wasn’t like him, so in the end I agreed.

We went to Yoshinoya and he bought me natto (fermented soybeans) and rice. He asked me what I was doing that day, and I said I was going to go for a walk. ‘I don’t have anything to do, so I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Whatever,’ I said, and he followed me out of the shop.

I walked extremely fast in those days, and I stormed from Tennoji up to Umeda. I looked back a few times and my dad was trailing behind, struggling to keep up. At Umeda I went into a bookshop and bought a pile of books while my dad smoked outside. When I came out I started walking again, and my dad followed.

When we got to Osaka Castle my dad called my name and said, ‘Hey, can we stop? Please, can we sit down?’ We had been walking for hours by then. We stopped and sat down on a bench opposite the moat.

My dad talked about when he worked in Brooklyn when he was my age, twenty-seven. He talked about how he used to walk the streets by himself. He had a few Jewish friends and he talked about them. He said he used to eat bagels all the time. He asked me if I like bagels. They’re OK, I said.

We went to another shop and my dad bought me some warabi mochi, which is a kind of seasonal sweet somehow made from bracken that you dip in this yellow powder made from soy beans. It sounds disgusting, but it really isn’t. After that my dad went to ride the subway back to Tennoji, and I resumed my walk.

My dad went to the wedding, and I spent the rest of the week mostly walking and taking photographs. We met again at the airport. He brought me a bag full of presents from my cousins and aunts. On the flight home I listened to him talking about other things he remembered from when he was my age. When we landed in Britain, I went back to my life, and he went back to his. I don’t recall seeing him again for almost two years. It has only been over the last few years that we have become close. Then he got sick and now this has happened and I was afraid I was never going to see him again.

When you wake up, Papa, I said to him in ICU, please remember who you are. Whatever else happens, I thought, it might be shit, but I’m sure things will work out, as long as you can be who you’re supposed to be, if only inside your head.”

elephantasmagoria – saturday, 24 november 2007

the cat returns

“My dad is moving back to Japan, and my brother, his girlfriend, the dog and I went up to visit him on Friday night. My dad has been talking about going home for a long time, but what with the brain haemorrhage he had last year and the aftermath of that, and then the endurance event that selling the house became, for a while it seemed like it would never happen. But it’s happening now, and it’s been happening really fast ever since the house finally sold last week. My dad booked a flight to Kansai, and on Friday we went up to say goodbye.

My dad has hit some major low points recently, but on Friday night he was on form and the happiest I have seen him for ages. He showed us the apartments he is going to look at in Wakayama and Osaka. He wants to live near enough to his three sisters and their families, but also far enough away. One of the apartments he is interested in is in a building called Neverland. I have visions of strange, plastic-faced men with single white gloves moonwalking down well-oxygenated corridors past my dad, shrieking things like ‘shamon’ and ‘hee-hee’, possibly with a troupe of dancing chimpanzees in tow. Anyway, we laughed, we ate miso soup and chestnut rice, and we talked about his plans. We talked about the proper oden he will be eating in a few weeks. And the Mild Sevens he will be smoking. I almost don’t dare think this, but maybe things are going to be OK.

The house was pretty much empty. My dad isn’t taking anything with him apart from a couple of suitcases. This move is going to be his new beginning. There weren’t any beds so we slept on the floor in empty rooms. The wind was howling outside, and the dog and I curled up together under a big pile of blankets in my brother’s old room.

We left my dad on Saturday after lunch. I said I was going to try to book the day off to come and see him off next week, but he told me he didn’t want me to. ‘I’ll cry,’ he said, in his broken Japanese-English. ‘I’ll cry, but then I’ll go through the departure gate and laugh, ha ha ha.’ He is planning to come and visit us in the early summer, a few months after my brother and his girlfriend’s baby is due to be born. ‘I don’t like babies when they’re small and wet and slimy,’ he said, and pulled a face. He has invited me to visit any time I want, and my brother and his girlfriend, too, once their baby is big enough to travel. I will probably go over in the the autumn. My dad has already planned all the things we are going to do, and has promised he will take me round all the best bookshops.

*

Nobody said very much in the car on the way back. I looked out of the window and watched the world go by. After my brother and his girlfriend dropped us off, the dog and I went to sleep for a few hours. The cat hadn’t turned up yet, so I’d brought his food bowl in and left the window open for him. When I woke up he still wasn’t back. It was after six by then, so I went out with the dog to the Cholera Pit. No sign of the cat. We came back in and had our supper. Still no cat. The window was open and it was freezing outside; there were fireworks going off everywhere, more of them it seemed than on bonfire night. I was feeling increasingly anxious, and kept thinking about the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but not in a good way. I wrote and posted yesterday’s blog. I refiled my hard drive. I read some more Beckett. Still no cat. I felt guilty about the bad thoughts I think about the cat when he is annoying. I felt guilty I hadn’t thought of him once while we were up at my dad’s house under all those blankets. Then I felt guilty I hadn’t even mentioned the cat in this blog yet, so I found a photo of him and I was going to post it under the title ‘come back cat, all is forgiven’. But at that point I heard a ‘meh meh meh’ at the window and there he was, in all his gingerness. He came in and I gushed and picked him up and gave him a big hug. The cat purred and rubbed his face against mine, and then bit me. The dog rolled his eyes and groaned.

Lately, I sometimes find myself getting this overwhelming feeling of being at home, and when the cat came back last night was one of those times. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else but here, with anyone else but the dog and the cat, doing anything else but this. He tried, but for the past nine years he has lived here I don’t think my dad ever truly felt like that about anywhere or anyone or anything in Britain. I hope when he goes back to Japan, he finds a place he can call home.”

elephantasmagoria – sunday, 11 november 2007

random tokyo people inside my defunct mobile phone

i like the man in the third photo because he reminds me of the lion out of the wizard of oz

stream of tokyo consciousness

shinkansen from shin-osaka → shinagawa. fuji-san under cloud except for very top. thinkharukers might have written story about shinagawa once. probably. hotel = dolphin hotel of old school sheep professor variety

round and round the yamanote line. harajuku girls yeah whatever gwen stefani, but yoyogi, yo that’s where the yo-yoing yogis are at. yo. i also like gotanda because there is a giant gnome there. exams are possibly appropriately in a place called sugamo = duck’s nest, quack quack

‘i hate students’. remember bob saying that while we were standing in foyer back in london nearly 12 years ago waiting to go in for finals. not much has changed. same old shite, different time zone, basically. not to mention century. and millenium. bloody hell

micachu mixtapes = face-pulling music on loop on mobile not at all phone. samples: ‘sensible, how can i make sense of bull’, ‘what do i do now my head’s fucked up, head’s fucked up, head’s fucked up’. giving me the munchies for overpriced waitrose belgian chocolate studded raisin and oat cookies though. also making me wish i could go back, back, back, to when i used to shapeshift and shift right back

anpan + matcha latte = new substitute for peanut butter and banana sandwich, maybe even religion

7-11 is rubbish compared to lawson

in tokyo trains run like clockwork but exams start 2 hours late

4 down 1 to go

[please excuse this. i wrote it on the back of various 7-11 receipts while i was bored and possibly losing it a little between exams today and yesterday. links to wikipedia because i can’t be arsed to explain]

optimistic

so here i am in japan. i have lived here now for almost a month. well, not exactly ‘lived’. mostly i have been killing time, waiting for next month, vaguely staring at notes as i try but fail not to be distracted by the internet, and life going on without me elsewhere, on the other side of the world while i sleep

don’t get me wrong, i am not sad. i feel like i have moved on, and there is no turning back. i am slowly but surely starting to remember even the hardest of times with fondness, and that, i think, is a sign of the distance i have travelled

the day after tomorrow i catch a bullet train to tokyo, to sit exams that have been over two years in the waiting. whether i pass or i fail, after next week my new life can finally begin. i cannot wait to start looking forward again, and not always back for a change

so long, and thanks for all the fish

I turned the clocks forward this morning and spring cleaned the house. The sun is shining and my window is open. My sister-in-law is packing her enormous pink suitcase in readiness for Tuesday, when she and my brother fly to Malaysia for their second wedding, the big one. My brother is sleeping. I can’t wait until they come back in a few weeks, because the day after they do I am flying to Japan. Not forever, not this time. I am flying to Japan this time in preparation for forever, which is hopefully coming around about this time next year.

It is going to be a busy year in the real world, so I am putting the elephants (-asmagoria and returns) to sleep for the time being. I plan to wake them up one day, once I can retreat into the world inside my head again. I am not sure when that will be. In the meantime Noboru Watanabe will write the odd, pithy thing over at twitter, if you are interested. See you around, I hope.

one small step closer to home

There was an envelope from SOAS waiting for me when I got to work today. It contained my results for the Level 1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I passed. I got 93%. To celebrate, I phoned my brother and my best friend, did a little dance, and had a jacket potato with vegetable chilli and cheese for lunch. Nice.

my family and other animals

It is the last day of February. I was excited a few weekends ago because I was thinking the results of exam number one would be out very soon, any time from tomorrow. I was sick and tired of waiting. But then I made the mistake of looking at the SOAS website, where I learned that the results will not be posted until ‘towards the end of March’. This put me in a bad mood for about a day, but I am pleased to report I am now resigned to my fate, and have thrown myself headlong into a renewed frenzy of time-killing.

Here are a few things I have done since the last time I wrote. I have found a good home for the small clanger. The small clanger is now living with one of my imaginary friends — not one of the ones in my head, but a real imaginary friend who I met last year through the medium of this blog. Once the clanger was safely rehomed, the dog and I went to stay with my best friend for a few days. My best friend and I did fun things together like go on a charity shop shopping spree. (I wonder if I am any less of a good person for spending six pounds on two jumpers in the shop of the charity I work for, and only one pound fifty on Alan Bennett’s ‘Writing Home’ at Cancer Research. Incidentally, my best friend bought a French dictionary at Relate, and a Pet Shop Boys LP at the RSPCA.) While my best friend was out training for the half-marathon he is due to run tomorrow in spite his wobbly knee and the hole in his heart, the dog and I entertained ourselves listening to Radio 4, most notably a feature about a Christian sex shop called ‘Wholly Love’ on Women’s Hour. I also baked a diabetic pumpkin cake, only I couldn’t find any pumpkin in the south-west so I used carrots instead.

Back at home, I have been knitting the small grumpy old man’s birthday tank top. I have almost finished the first book of The Gormenghast Trilogy. On Monday, my brother, his wife and I watched The Butterfly Effect, which was depressingly bad, but also interesting, because on Tuesday when I was making a tomato and tahini pitta for lunch, I blacked out on my way to the table where the tomatoes were. When I came to, I was sitting on the sofa tucking into a banana and tahini pitta. I wish I could rewrite the past like Ashton Kutcher. I wonder what the world would be like if I had selected the fruit I had intended. Perhaps I might have saved another few banks from collapsing.

Today’s mission was to take a photo of the five of us for my dad, who is still living in Japan by himself, and whose birthday is next week. The photo has turned out quite well I think, even though the dog and the cat look somewhat grumpy and bored, probably because it took such a lot of messing around to get the seating, lighting and timing right. During the hour the photo was being printed in town, I went to the haberdashery and bought a book of left of field crochet patterns, to the stationers for a padded envelope plus card and chocolate bar to go with the photo, to the library for a book for my sister-in-law, to the grocery shop for courgettes, mange tout and baby sweetcorn, and, most excitingly, to the record shop for all five seasons of Six Feet Under, which is very naughty but a. I was paid yesterday, b. it cost less than what I used to spend a month on smoking, and c. I have a whole month left to kill, and I need more than knitting and Gormenghast to get through it, god damn it.

confessions of a hedgehog wrestler

It has been a busy week. I have managed not to completely mess up being my brother and his girlfriend (now wife) ‘s wedding photographer. Or at least I don’t think I have. I have unblocked all the drains in my flat. I have been knitting thin wool in ever-decreasing circles with a set of five tiny double pointed needles, which is a bit like wrestling a hedgehog. I have sat in a park with a bunch of pigeons, plus a friend I haven’t seen for a while. I have eaten carrot cake and banoffee pie. And a cheese and onion pasty. I have continued to work on being a logical person. I am one week ahead of schedule, which is a good thing, because I am on holiday as of this afternoon, and I intend to spend my week off being as illogical a person as I possibly can.

The dog and I had a fight on Thursday. Or not really a fight. We just got tired of each other. I was tired of only being around to 1. make sure he eats sensibly, and 2. stop him being run over by cars, and he was tired of me spoiling his fun when, for example, I shout at him when he is about to launch himself into a busy road in pursuit of some kid or other’s cast off McDonalds or KFC or whatever it was. The dog and I sulked and didn’t speak to each other for a few days, but I challenged him to a game of tug of war earlier, and we became friends again. Our relationship was cemented when I turned a blind eye as he ate something unidentifiably disgusting in the Cholera Pit before supper.

The most exciting thing I have done since I have been on holiday is buy a ticket for Monkey — Journey to the West. I am going to see it in London a couple of nights before the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which I am sitting in December. At least that’s something to look forward to. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s opera, I mean, not the JLPT. The next exciting thing I am doing is going to the Light House tonight to see Man on Wire. Tomorrow morning I am having a lie in. Tomorrow afternoon I am going to my brother and his wife’s flat to play on their Nintendo Wii and eat sukiyaki. And tomorrow night I am catching a train to the West Country with the dog, to see my best friend. I like being on holiday. Holidays are exciting.

gezunteit

I am doing quite well with my list. After getting up ridiculously early and going to work yesterday morning, I sorted out the passport photos I need for my application to sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The seat in the photo booth was broken, so I had to lean forwards and hover to make my face and eyes fit in their designated places. In the photographs, I have a slightly furrowed brow, and look as though I am about to take off.

Then I went to the health food shop to buy dates and popping corn. I also went to a haberdashery (I like that word, it sounds like sneezing) and bought the wool for my next few knitting projects. Wool is expensive, but I was thinking about it on my way home, and at least it is less expensive than cigarettes. This big pile of wool cost less than all the cigarettes I used to smoke in a month.

It was tempting to start knitting when I got home, but I made myself fill out the JLPT application form, arrange a parcel to be redelivered, and write about The X Files instead. I’m not exactly sure why I am writing about The X Files. Maybe I thought it would be funny. Maybe I spent so much of my time watching them this summer, I want to have something to show for it. Or maybe, because I started writing about them, I feel the need to finish, which would be unfortunate, as I still have Season Nine to write about. Oh, and Season One. I just remembered I haven’t written about Season One yet.

After I gave up writing about The X Files last night, I read about how to make papier-mâché. I also looked on the internet for a new pair of trainers to replace my old falling apart ones, but I got bored and wrote a few e-mails instead. I asked my best friend if he knows what ‘Puis-je le donner un coup de pied?’ means. He thinks it means ‘Can you kick it?’, too, but he is about as rubbish as I am at French. He said he would check with l’homme Français, who from what I understand is still dans La France avec l’enfant.

I wrote an essay for The Elephant Returns today. I also sorted out the pictures for the translation. I went out to buy the Observer, but only to make papier-mâché with. I also bought flour. I picked up a chew for the dog, and also the duvet he wet himself on last month. Then I sat in the sun with the him for an hour, and finally finished reading The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. After I finish writing this, I am going to read the book I am reviewing for The Elephant Returns, in between having tea, going for a walk with the dog, and sleeping.

I only hope I can keep this up. I have one week left until I turn into a pumpkin.

woman found living in closet

‘Police arrested the 58-year-old, identified as Tatsuko Horikawa, on suspicion of trespassing, after she was captured on film taking advantage of the owner’s absence to move from her tiny dwelling to the fridge in search of food.’

It is news like this that makes buying the Guardian on Saturdays worthwhile. ‘When we slid open the closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side,’ said a police spokesman in the sleepy town of Kasuya, Japan. I like the idea of finding a woman living in my closet. I might stock up my fridge this weekend, make some space in my closet, and start opening it more quietly, because you never know. I wouldn’t want any woman who may be living in my closet to be nervous. Then again, it would probably be more fun to be a woman living in someone else’s closet, so I am also going to start looking out for a good closet I can secretly move in to, preferably in a sleepy town in Japan.

Apart from the paper, I bought a toffee and pecan cookie for me today, and a rawhide chew for the dog. We are having a lazy day, which is the way all Saturdays should be. I am thinking about skiving off studying and reading the rest of the paper instead.

diagonal mood

My stars in the Metro on Wednesday said that someone I know was feeling sad and lonely, so I should call them. My best friend and my brother aren’t lonely these days, because they have a boyfriend and a girlfriend respectively. I don’t know many other people, and of those the only person I could think of who might be feeling sad and lonely was my dad. After work I phoned him, and he did sound pretty sad and lonely, so I said I’d go up and visit him this weekend.

I walked to the train station at seven yesterday morning. I was sleepy, so I treated myself to a medium-sized cup of frothy coffee with two brown sugars, which was nice, but I’m not sure was worth £1.99. I caught the 7.48 to Chester, started to read a book about Yuriko Takeda, and before I knew it it was time to get off the train. As I walked to my parents’ house through the mist, I chanted ‘There is no such thing as just one cigarette, there is no such thing as just one cigarette…’, but I got bored of that after a while, and wondered instead about why things suddenly look sharper and brighter than they really are when you get close up to them in the mist. When I got bored of that, I thought about photos I want to take and things I want to write about but probably won’t have time to, at least not for the next few years.

My mum had gone away somewhere, so I spent the day with my dad. We talked mostly about Japan, and I watched him smoke four cigarettes. He fell asleep in the afternoon, and I read some more about Yuriko Takeda. Then my dad woke up, smoked another cigarette, and made seafood fried rice, which was very salty. We talked a bit more, and after that I walked back to the station. I am not convinced I have helped my dad to feel any less sad and lonely. Maybe he will feel better when he goes back to Japan next month.

It was warm and sticky last night, and the air was suffocatingly green. People were smoking and laughing and talking in Welsh accents outside the pubs I walked past. The train was thirty minutes late, and full of drunk people. I was too sleepy to read and it was too noisy to sleep, so I looked out of the window and watched the sun going down over never-ending fields of rape. It was dark by the time I got off the train. Town was full of people smoking and laughing and talking in Black Country accents. There were plenty of drunk people, too.

The dog was fast asleep when I got home. He seemed surprised to see me. My brother told me he spent the day watching my brother’s girlfriend making vegetable samosas. I was very thirsty and drank five glasses of water one after another before I went to bed. I’m sure I was thinking about something important as I fell asleep, but I can’t remember what it was now.

fitter, happier, more productive

Or a bit more than I was this time last week, anyway. This week hasn’t been too bad, except I fell over at work yesterday and broke the only bottle of something important we needed for today. I felt terrible about it, but we managed to borrow another bottle from somewhere else, so it was okay in the end. I fell over walking home from the station yesterday, too. I hadn’t fallen over for ages until yesterday. Maybe there was a ghost in the falling over centre of my brain. I haven’t fallen over yet today.

Apart from working and studying a lot, this week I have been eating porridge with almond milk and dates for breakfast, grape nuts and soy yogurt at tea break (today I had a slice of the green tea yokan I brought back from Japan as well), a banana and tahini sandwich for lunch, and piles of vegetables for tea. I have eaten so much aubergine this week that I feel almost purple, which is far better than red or blue. I finally finished the Book of Disquiet on Monday, and started reading the pile of little paperbacks I brought back from Japan. Usually I buy loads of books when I go to Japan, but last month I only bought two, apart from all the textbooks and practice papers for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, that is. But when I visited one of my cousins in Wakayama the night before I left, she lent me eight books she thought I might like, which I am more excited about than the two I bought, I have to say. The books I bought were a couple of new (ish) ones by Haruki Murakami. I’ve finished those and they were okay, but not that great. Haruki hasn’t written anything great since the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I don’t think.

I’ve written a few emails, and a letter to my housemate for the week I lived in Myokenguchi. My dad was sixty-one on Monday, and I sent him an iPod for his birthday, plus a concert DVD of a Japanese singer he likes called Hibari Misora. I hope he likes his presents. I haven’t heard from him directly, but rumour has it he has found a flat he likes in a place called Takarazuka, which is pretty close to where I hope to be living and working soon. I hung out with my little old lady friend and the Indian man with the super-long arms in the Cholera pit for an hour or so the other day. The Indian man makes me laugh, because he philosophises at great length about every day things. His topic this week was showering. When I said I don’t have a shower in my flat, he looked mortified and patted my shoulder consolingly. The dog loves the little old lady because she always gives him a biscuit or six. I like the little old lady, too.

I saw my brother on Wednesday, and my best friend is coming over tonight. My best friend is leaving his French boyfriend at home. The French boyfriend is very nice, but because he isn’t coming, my best friend and I will be able to slob all weekend with our dogs rather than go out and do grown-up, cultural or constructive things. I sense a weekend of Heroes coming on. My best friend has a lot of catching up to do. The cat will probably disappear until my best friend’s dog is half way back down the M5 on Sunday, but that’s okay, too. Apart from being a long overdue opportunity for me to practice the fine art of fag-haggery, the best thing about my best friend coming over is I have a valid excuse not to study again until next week.

They were so nice last week, right now I am baking some mushrooms stuffed with avocado and rice again for tea. They are almost ready, I think. I’m starving.

after the quake

I am sleepy today. A few things have happened since the last time I wrote. Apparently there was an earthquake in the small hours of Wednesday morning. I slept through it, but everyone was talking about it on the train and at work. The epicentre was the town where I lived for a few years after I graduated from university. According to the Metro, it was the biggest earthquake in Britain for the last twenty-something years. It seems that the last big earthquake started under the town I lived in when I first moved to Britain. I must have missed that one, too. I don’t remember it. I was probably sleeping again. Also, the other week, there was an earthquake where I used to live in Japan when I was small. There are a lot of earthquakes in Japan around where I used to live. I don’t think all this means anything, but it might, so I thought I’d better mention it in case I am in some way responsible. I’m sorry if I am.

I hope I am awake for the next earthquake. At school in Japan, there were earthquake drills, so I know what to do. If there is an earthquake, you have to crawl under your desk and brace yourself. I’m not entirely convinced of the wisdom of this. My classroom was on the third floor, I seem to recall — if the floor collapsed, it would have been like having a desk for a parachute. Still, I went along with it back then, so much so that when an alarm went off when I started going to school in Britain, I crawled under my desk. It turned out to be a fire drill, and I got shouted at a lot. I haven’t had the chance yet to put into practice what I was taught in Japan. I don’t have a desk, but I would find something to crawl under, maybe the dog. As long as I wake up, that is.

Here are some other things that have happened this week. My dad flew to Japan (I don’t want to write about this yet). I started revising the 2000 kanji I need to know for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (I don’t want to write about this yet, either). I wrote a few emails. I have been reading Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. I’m about two-thirds of the way through. I like it, but it’s exhausting. It must have been even more exhausting to write. I’m down to my last six packs of Mild Sevens. I have eaten a lot of vegetables. My kitchen is covered in mustard seeds. They exploded everywhere when I threw them into the pan earlier. I don’t think they were supposed to do that. Maybe the oil was too hot. I seem to have lost over two kilos since last week, but I suspect that has more to do with the fact I was wearing lighter clothes when I weighed myself today.

I’m kind of depressed. I am having trouble stringing these sentences together. Today is exactly six months until my birthday. I wish I’d been born six months earlier, because I’d only be eight years old then. I’d still be at school in Japan learning useful things like what to do in an earthquake. I’d pay more attention in class, and learn my kanji properly, all 2000 of them.

these feet were made for walking

I didn’t drive after all when I was in Japan. I drove my brother’s little Starlet round and round the Asda car park and home round the ringroad the night before I left; that went pretty well so I was prepared (sort of) to grapple with a car in Osaka. But the combination of mountains, ice, snow, automatic car without winter tyres, irrigation canals, not to mention the right angle bend off the lane on to the steep, narrow ramp down to the house where I was staying wasn’t promising. I wasn’t concerned nearly as much about dying as the prospect of wrecking the car. So I politely declined to drive, and used the bus instead when I couldn’t get a lift.

I caught the 6.11 bus most nights down the mountain. It always came on time. The worst thing about catching the bus was the cold. And the humiliation. The first time I caught the bus, I stood in front of the door waiting for it to open, but it turned out I was waiting by the wrong door. I was waiting by the exit. Having managed to find the right door, I went to pay the driver, forgetting that in Japan you take a ticket and pay the driver at the end. Only you don’t pay the driver. You look at the number on your ticket and the corresponding fare on the screen, and put the right money in a machine. With your ticket. Which I’d lost during the struggle to warm up my hands.

The best thing about catching the bus was the half-hour walk from ARK to the bus stop. The light was pretty around then, and there were some spectacular sunsets. I drove my brother’s car to and from our parents’ yesterday. Driving is fun and I miss my car sometimes, but I like walking better. I notice so much more, and it gives me time to think. My brother says I can drive his car whenever I want now it’s safely back on the road, but I will walk to the station as usual tomorrow morning when I go back to work. I like trains, too, because they give me time to read. I don’t like buses much and I don’t use them often, but I miss catching the 6.11 to Myokenguchi.

jigsaw falling into place

It never ceases to amaze me how life has a way of working itself out. Almost three years ago, I had a revelation that this has much less to do with anything I do than I’d previously liked to think. These days, I believe that life is just a random sequence of chances and choices. You take them and make them — in the end, all you can do is go with the flow. And as long as you don’t fight the flow, you seem to wind up where you’re supposed to be.

So it was that I found myself in Japan over the last few weeks, at a place called Animal Refuge Kansai in the mountains north of Osaka City. At ARK, I hung out with 500 odd dogs and cats, some rabbits, a duck, and 30 or so staff and volunteers. I was introduced to some people in Osaka who are keen to help me come back to Japan to do what I do now and more, who are excited about me coming back, even. After work, I chain smoked Mild Sevens and stayed up late talking arse with my housemate. We laughed a lot. I played with her little dog, who normally doesn’t like other people but for some reason liked me, and her two ferrets. We watched cartoons on the TV that I remembered from years ago. It was freezing cold and snowing a lot of the time. The washing machine turned into ice. The heater ran out of gas at the worst possible moment. We wrapped up warm and I ate a great deal of natto, nori and rice. When I went to bed, my teeth chattered until I fell asleep, and getting up in the morning was hell on earth.

While I was in Japan, for the first time since November, I didn’t think about much. My mind was like an ocean. Sometimes, when I was walking in the snow with one of the dogs, or when I was watching the sun set as I wandered down to the bus stop at the end of the day, when I warmed my hands on the hot can of coffee I bought at the vending machine back in the village, when I was sitting on the train to Osaka on my day off, or when I hung up the payphone after speaking to my relatives in Wakayama, I would suddenly remember where I was. But I didn’t think about it. It felt right, that was all, and I was content. I was in a strange place full of strange people and strange animals, but I felt like I’d come home.

I will have lived in Britain for twenty-three years this April. I love it here, and I’ve had a great time. There have been hard times, too, of course, but looking back on them now the lows seem less real than the highs. It won’t be easy to leave. Recently, though, as comfortable as I am here, I have had the nagging feeling that something is missing. I don’t know what is missing, exactly. I don’t know if I will find it in Japan. All I know is that I am ready to try to find whatever it is I’m looking for, and I’m not going to find it unless I move on.

So, having been given this chance, I have decided to take it, to do my best to make it happen. I have a feeling that if I don’t try now, I never will. On my way to Japan, I thought I was going mostly for my dad’s sake, but by the time I was leaving, I realized that I mostly want to do this for me. ARK feels like the beginning of something. There are amazing people there doing amazing things, against the odds. There is a lot of work to do, and I have a place waiting for me. I don’t think I can change the world, but I’d like to make whatever difference I can, in my own way, however small. In the meantime, I have some major exams to study for. I am hoping that studying will be easier knowing that there are so many people willing me to pass.

All going well, I will be ready to move to Japan in another two years. Two years seems like an incredibly long time, but as someone I spoke to in Osaka pointed out, what’s two years when I have the rest of my life ahead of me? I am going to make the most of what might be my last two years in Britain. When I think about it like that, two years is nothing.

the elephant returns to japan tomorrow

Lately, I feel like I am moving uncontrollably fast. I worked a lot of overtime last week, and when I got home I wondered what I was doing and banged my head against a wall. I went into town on Friday afternoon to pick up a few things I need for next week, but I wound up buying a big pile of books instead. Oh well. I am useless at buying practical things, but unstoppable when it comes to books. At least I will have plenty to read when I am hurtling through the sky tomorrow.

I am leaving tomorrow morning, and should be in Osaka by Tuesday teatime. I have to hang around in Dubai for a few hours in between, which I am slightly nervous about. There was an article in the Metro on Friday about a man who was arrested at Dubai airport because of a few poppy seeds that were found on his clothes. Apparently he’d had a bagel or something for breakfast. I think I will have porridge as usual for breakfast tomorrow. As far as I know there aren’t any drugs that are made out of oats.

The dog is with his incontinent lady friend, and once again I am home alone with the cat. In an attempt to slow myself down, I did some writing yesterday. It seemed to work. I wrote a few letters to friends, and a couple of articles for The Elephant Returns. I also wrote two book reviews for Goodreads. I haven’t written much so far this year, mostly because I have become tangled up in real life stuff. I have a feeling that when I come back in ten days, I will be even more entangled. It’s good to be living rather than just killing time for a change, but I fear my mind will become a tangled knot I can no longer untie unless I find a way to keep writing as well. I have had this problem before, and it really wasn’t pretty.

Anyway. Today I will have a bath, clean the flat, do some laundry, and pack. As I write, my brother is desperately trying to get his car back on the road, amongst other reasons so I can try driving it later, which is nice of him. I haven’t driven for almost three years and I have to drive next week. I think I can remember how to drive, but I’m not sure. My brother’s car exploded when he took it to the garage for its MOT yesterday, though, so it looks like I might have to wait to find out until I am faced with a car in Japan.

I will be fine. As usual, I’m just going to have to be. It’s always worked before.

the elephant’s adventures in governmentland

This past week has been exhausting, in a slanging match by email with a Japanese government agency kind of way. It began with me asking a simple question. They replied by answering a question I hadn’t even asked. So I asked my question again, and they still didn’t answer — this time they accused me of breaking the law instead. I pointed out that I would hardly be writing to them if I intended to break the law. I was getting a bit angry by this point, and the tone of my last email was kind of ‘whatever, forget it, thanks for nothing, you’re about as much use as a chocolate teapot.’ I got a reply that apologized for hurting my feelings (their words, not mine), and finally answered my question. Well, sort of.

Whenever someone pisses me off, I find it helps to think of them as characters in books. Luckily, I was reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last week, so it didn’t take too much imagination. This particular government agency was definitely the Queen’s croquet-ground, and its representative was the Queen of Hearts. Or at least that’s who he thought he was. He was more like the White Rabbit, as it turned out. I almost feel like I’ve won.

I haven’t, of course. I suppose if nothing else I made the White Rabbit drop his fan and his gloves for a minute. I felt like rampaging through the croquet-ground screaming ‘Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’ before, but I feel a bit calmer now.

enormous changes at the last minute

I haven’t written for ages, but since last week a ridiculous amount of stuff has been happening.

Since the end of November, when my dad had his second brain haemorrhage a few days before he was finally, after a long, long wait of a year and a half, supposed to be going home to Japan, I have been thinking about how I might go back, too. My dad will have to wait at least another six months now before he can try again, but when he does, I’d like to be there for him. I just hope that isn’t too little, too late.

I haven’t lived in Japan for twenty-three years. I kind of speak Japanese; I can read and write it much better. But the main problem is I work in a field that is almost completely alien to Japanese society at large. I believe in things that the vast majority of Japanese people don’t.

I think I’ve mentioned that I like what I do. I find the thought of going back to Japan and starting again — doing something completely different, trying to fit in — extremely depressing. I spent most of Christmas and New Year lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. Quietly, I’ve wanted to go back to Japan off and on for a while. But until recently I have always dismissed the idea, because I thought it would be impossible to go back and be who I am. And then there’s the dog, of course. I didn’t think I could bring myself to leave the dog behind. But since the end of November, like it or not, I haven’t been able to dismiss going back to Japan, because this isn’t just about me any more. Sitting in ICU with your dad and being told he might not wake up again changes a lot of things.

But I think I might have found a way to go back — and maybe make a difference, maybe even be happy. Hopefully, the dog could come, too. I sent my CV to a place in Osaka on Tuesday night, and since Wednesday there have been emails and telephone calls, the upshot of which is I am flying out to Japan for ten days next month to see if things might work out. Nothing is certain yet. It all sounds too good to be true, and I am waiting for the catch. But as someone I know pointed out to me the other day, maybe I deserve a little bit of good luck after all the bad stuff that’s happened over the last seven years. I don’t know if such a thing as luck really exists, and if it does I’m not sure I deserve it, but I hope they’re right.

Anyway, until I go next month, I’m going to try not to think about Japan too much. I’m going to read The Three Musketeers, get issue two of The Elephant Returns published, and start preparing my entries for the 7th Shizuoka International Translation Competition. I’m going to go to work, and try to be normal — I’m going to try not to be too happy or too sad.

flowers for algernon

A few things happened just over two years ago, and I have been obsessed with remembering ever since, or actually not so much remembering as not forgetting. I wrote a novel based on the things that happened, and I also started writing a diary. But the diary was taking over my life, and it’s a relief to be writing a consequence-free blog like this instead. The best thing is that I am forced to spare a few details. I like details, maybe a bit too much, but they make a lot of noise in my head. It’s been nice having some (relative) peace and quiet for a change.

In this diary of mine, my mission was to write down everything I remembered, not just everything that happened that day, but thirty-two years worth of everything. Of course it was impossible, but I did my best. I was a compulsive declutterer before decluttering was trendy, and I hadn’t hung on to much to remember the past by. I started to regret that a few years ago, and I suppose the diary was my way of trying to make up for all the things I’d thrown away. It was a futile attempt to be a kind of librarian of my life.

Over the last few months, I have discovered that very often it’s only once you stop trying so hard that you remember all kinds of things. It’s also much more fun to allow your memories to jump out at you when you least expect them, rather than force them to appear.

For example, one of my imaginary friends at Goodreads happened to add Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon to read last month, which reminded me I’d read a Japanese translation of that book when I was thirteen. Hang on a minute, I thought, and set about turning my flat upside down, and I found it, that very book. It was one of the rare items that I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw away. Not that I thought I might want to read it again some day. I kept it because it was about the only book I read when I was young because I wanted to, as opposed to because someone told me to.

My copy of アルジャーノンに花束を has no cover. It has no cover because I stole it from the ‘library’ (which was really just a couple of bookshelves) at the Japanese school I used to attend in Manchester for three hours each Saturday. I threw away the cover because I felt guilty about the stickers that were stuck to it, which politely asked for the book to be returned, preferably on time. If I could return it now, it would be around twenty years overdue. I don’t even know if there is a Japanese school in Manchester anymore.

I reread アルジャーノンに花束を once I got to the end of Samuel Beckett’s plays. It meant something different this time round, of course, but I remembered it as though I had only read it yesterday. I also remembered what made me want to read it in the first place, so for old times’ sake I ordered a second hand copy of Kyosuke Himuro’s first album, which happens to be called Flowers for Algernon, over the internet for five hundred yen.

The CD arrived last week. Frankly, it’s pretty bad, but in a good way, like, I don’t know, bad eighties pop is good to a certain friend of mine — you know who you are — whose musical taste I really do take the piss out of far too much, when it turns out mine is worse, but not always, I hasten to add. Anyway, Himurock, we used to call him, back when we were thirteen. We used to draw pictures of him on our notebooks. What cheekbones! And those skin-tight pichi-pichi leather pants! If any of you watched the Final Fantasy VII film, the end credits featured one of his songs (Calling, I believe it was). Kyosuke Himuro was a J-pop god.

I was writing Christmas cards today to people I don’t see very often, and it made me sad because I wish I’d kept in touch with my old Japanese school friends. I didn’t have many; there were only six people in my class. I didn’t like the one who gave me my original, long-lost tape of Flowers for Algernon, but another girl, Junko-chan, was my best friend in those days, and I had a cool teacher for two years called Aikawa-sensei. Apart from me, everyone went back to Japan after a few years in Britain. As far as I know, they are still over there. I wonder how they are now. I wonder what they’re like. I wonder if they remember Flowers for Algernon.

once upon a time in wakayama

My dad was born in 1947 in Japan, in a rice farming district outside Wakayama city. His family was poor; he had a strict father but a liberal mother, and three older sisters. He graduated technical high school, managed to get a job in an electronics firm in Osaka, and in 1969 he was transferred to New York. That was where he met my mum (my mum is from New Zealand), and that was where my brother and I were born.

Until recently, I didn’t know much more about my dad when he was younger. We didn’t get on very well when I was growing up, so mostly I didn’t know any more because I didn’t want to know. After my dad had his first brain haemorrage last year, I went up to his room and found a wooden Suntory whiskey box full of old black and white photographs. All of the photographs were taken before he left Wakayama almost forty years ago, at the age of twenty-one. I had never seen them before. In the photographs, my dad was strikingly handsome. He looked almost exactly like my brother did not so long ago. My dad’s eyes were lucid, without a trace of the weariness or anger I had always known. There were images of my dad in his student uniform complete with cap, surrounded by innumerable friends on his graduation trip to Nara. In others he was leaning against a wall with his sisters, hugging his pet dog, lounging in the sun, or posing on his motorbike in a denim jacket and traditional wooden clogs. He was laughing in most of the photographs. Even when he was drunk, I had rarely seen my father laugh. I had certainly never seen him laugh before with a mischievous look in his eyes.

My Japanese grandmother was standing in the background of a few of the photographs taken outside the house in Wakayama. Her hair was jet black and she wore simple kimonos that were captured in various shades of grey. She looked on serenely from the shadows as my dad enjoyed the limelight. I could see my dad in her face for the first time. Before, I had never been able to find him there.

This past week, my dad has been doing a lot better. He seems almost like his old self — I don’t mean how he was just over two weeks ago before he had his second brain haemorrhage; in a strange way, he seems young again somehow, the way he was in these photographs. We were looking through them together the other day, and he told me all kinds of stories from back then. I had a revelation this week that, really, I’m not so different from my dad. When he told me about a road trip he went on with one of his friends, for instance, I remembered the time my best friend and I hitch-hiked to Amsterdam. My dad nearly amputated his little finger once during a rice harvest, and that reminded me of the time I was kicked in my head by a horse in my final year at college: we both have the scars to prove it. My dad found his first dog wandering around in the middle of a road. I found mine and took him home after he was hit by a car. And my grandmother used to protect my dad from my grandfather, in much the same way that she protected me from my dad during the five years I lived in the house in Wakayama. It was my grandmother that bought my dad his motorbike. She didn’t buy me a motorbike, but in a community where being different was frowned upon, she let me be myself. I didn’t realize until I was much older, but even after we moved away to Britain when I was ten, she was always a part of me.

My dad is a part of me, too. It has taken me a long time to realize this, but now that I have, I wouldn’t want him to be anyone else. Above everything, my dad taught me not to have any regrets, and I am relieved that he doesn’t have any, either, in spite of all that’s happened.

i remember osaka, 2003

It’s strange what you remember at times like this. After I wrote what I wrote yesterday, I dug out the negatives from that trip to Osaka four years ago. I took a lot of photos over there. As I’ve been scanning a few and getting rid of the worst of the scratches and dust, I have remembered all kinds of things.

For instance I remember now why I signed up for that photography course. It was because of these photos. They were the first ones I took with the Nikon FM2. Up until then if I ever wanted to take photos of something, I bought a disposable camera. I had no idea what I was doing with the FM2. I vaguely focused and fiddled with the shutter speed and aperture until the light meter said ‘0’ rather than plus or minus. It all seemed a bit too much like hard work at the time, I seem to recall. I’m not sure why I bought black and white film. It was probably the mood I was in. I remember I couldn’t find anywhere to get it processed in Osaka.

But back in Britain, when I got the prints back from the lab, I remember thinking the photos looked cool. I still do. I doubt I’d have the courage to take photos like these anymore. I had a lot of nerve, I think, pointing my camera at strangers like that. Or maybe I just didn’t give a shit. But anyway, that’s why I signed up for the photography course. I wanted to learn how to use my manual camera properly. One thing I notice I learned on the course is how to hold the camera straight. Almost all the Osaka photos lean to one side. I also learned that it’s much more fun printing my own images, rather than leaving it up to the lab.

 

As for the camera, I remember now where that came from, too. My dad bought it for me when I graduated from university in 1998. He still lived in Osaka then, and I went over to visit. I hadn’t been to Japan for ten years, and I had rarely seen my dad for nearly as long. I remember we went to a camera shop in Shinsaibashi. My dad wanted to buy me an automatic SLR like the one he had, but when I saw the FM2, a heavy, clunky brick of a thing with a few dials that goes ‘thunk’ when you press the shutter release, I asked if I could have that one instead. ‘Why?’ my dad asked. ‘Do you know how to use it?’ I don’t know, I said, and no, but I’ll figure it out. It wasn’t for another five years that I began to try.

So photography is something else I owe to my dad. My dad is awake now. He knows who we are, but he is going through his own private hell at the moment, and he isn’t ready to let anyone in yet. I can only hope the day will come soon when I can tell him about the things I remember, and how grateful I am for not just the camera, but everything.

the long walk home

For some reason there was a mix-up with the dates, and my dad didn’t go back to Japan last week. His flight is on Monday. His flight is on Monday, but he will not be flying.

After supper on Thursday night, my dad had a seizure. He fell off the chair he was sitting on and hit his head. He was rushed into hospital. He was conscious at the time, but when he started fitting again the doctors anaesthetized him. The scan of his head showed he’d had another brain haemorrhage, a year and a half after the last one. They weren’t going to operate this time.

By the time my brother and I got there, my dad was on a ventilator, and hooked up to an array of drips and monitoring machines. The hospital let me phone Japan, and I spoke to his oldest sister. She was going to cycle over to the temple straight away to pray like she did last time. I sat up with my dad all night in ICU, holding his hand. Sometimes he squeezed my hand, and sometimes he looked as though he was starting to come round. When he did that one of the nurses came over and topped up his anaesthetic.

I’m not religious so I didn’t pray, but I spoke to my dad inside my head. I talked to him about the last time we went to Japan together. It was in the late spring over four years ago, and we were supposed to be going to the wedding of one of my cousins. The week before, my dad told me he wasn’t going to let me go. I was skinny and funny in my head at the time, and I got the impression he was embarrassed for the rest of the family to see me that way. So he was going to go to the wedding by himself, and I was going to hang around in Osaka.

I was furious with him, and at the airport and on the flight over I didn’t speak a word. We stayed in a hotel in Tennoji the first night we got to Japan, and I went straight to my room. I was moving my stuff over to a youth hostel in Nagai the following evening.

In the morning the phone rang and my dad said he was taking me out for breakfast. I was completely vegan back then, and he said he wanted to show me the kind of things I could eat. I said I could figure that much out for myself, thanks, but he said, ‘Please,’ which wasn’t like him, so in the end I agreed.

We went to Yoshinoya and he bought me natto (fermented soybeans) and rice. He asked me what I was doing that day, and I said I was going to go for a walk. ‘I don’t have anything to do, so I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Whatever,’ I said, and he followed me out of the shop.

I walked extremely fast in those days, and I stormed from Tennoji up to Umeda. I looked back a few times and my dad was trailing behind, struggling to keep up. At Umeda I went into a bookshop and bought a pile of books while my dad smoked outside. When I came out I started walking again, and my dad followed.

When we got to Osaka Castle my dad called my name and said, ‘Hey, can we stop? Please, can we sit down?’ We had been walking for hours by then. We stopped and sat down on a bench opposite the moat.

My dad talked about when he worked in Brooklyn when he was my age, twenty-seven. He talked about how he used to walk the streets by himself. He had a few Jewish friends and he talked about them. He said he used to eat bagels all the time. He asked me if I like bagels. They’re OK, I said.

We went to another shop and my dad bought me some warabi mochi, which is a kind of seasonal sweet somehow made from bracken that you dip in this yellow powder made from soy beans. It sounds disgusting, but it really isn’t. After that my dad went to ride the subway back to Tennoji, and I resumed my walk.

My dad went to the wedding, and I spent the rest of the week mostly walking and taking photographs. We met again at the airport. He brought me a bag full of presents from my cousins and aunts. On the flight home I listened to him talking about other things he remembered from when he was my age. When we landed in Britain, I went back to my life, and he went back to his. I don’t recall seeing him again for almost two years. It has only been over the last few years that we have become close. Then he got sick and now this has happened and I was afraid I was never going to see him again.

When you wake up, Papa, I said to him in ICU, please remember who you are. Whatever else happens, I thought, it might be shit, but I’m sure things will work out, as long as you can be who you’re supposed to be, if only inside your head.