While the commonplace belief that not much ever happens in this city may at times be true, on other occasions the social whirl picks up. The latest of these eddies has had a bittersweet quality. My exchange students completed their internships and yesterday graduated their programme. Some are staying on for skiing and travel, others are returning home to the last of the humid Kanagawa summer immediately.
These young women are modest and tend, I think, to measure themselves by a deficit rather than a credit model. One explained in her farewell speech how she had aimed in coming here to overcome her “weak points”, one of which she identified as speaking in public. I don’t think their teachers see them in the fashion: we notice instead their persistence and resilience, their willingness to take hard knocks and refuse to give up. I hope in their studies and work to come they have time to reflect more hopefully on what they’ve experienced and accomplished here.
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My recent visit to Japan was my third. On all of these three I have made many mental and pen-to-paper notes, with the intention of writing up everything later, and on each occasion I have felt–what?–not so much stymied as muted upon my return. Increasingly I shy from the conventional “on this day I did this” touring narratives, and yet don’t seem to be able to come up with an alternative.
When it comes to Japan, I think that part of this is something like travellers’ superstition. I love that place, and hope to be able to continue to return in future, perhaps even with the señor in tow. These emotions leave me feeling in part that if I say too much about my adventures, I’ll break their spell, that I’ll be able to return to them only in print, rather than in the storehouse of memory.
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Friends, I have been out and about, which is why there has been so little activity here of late. I italicise those adverbs in order to convey, in some skinny way, the exhilaration of having a break from the every day. Not the tender pleasures of life at home, in which the señor and I slowly consume our merged collection of DVDs (“it’s only a film, h-bird,” he said as I gripped his arm during the final two or so hours of The Seven Samurai), and in which the too-longness of the dogs’ nails is recorded in the score-marks on our arms as they attempt to insinuate their hairy selves into our couch-sitting, all at once. No; the every day from which I have happily flown is the predictable minutiae of work: interesting students, affable colleagues, tasks completed without too much throat-clamping pressure of time (unlike the first-semester blues), but a routine so familiar to me I sometimes dream it and think my day’s finishing when it begins.
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Asides and questions from commenters send me scurrying in delightful directions in search of new artefacts. I’m not sure that I’m ready, for example, for this jelly, music for older listeners from when I was a young listener. What a treat: sleek and cool and stripped of every trace of archness. Duran Duran never had it so good.
The timing—both band and place—couldn’t be more apposite, really, given the extent to which Japan’s been on my mind of late. I have rustled up the airfare and could make the money for a rail pass in time for the southern spring during which I’d hoped to return, but I’ve decided instead not to go back at the moment. My navigatory circle has shrunk to the home front and at the moment I want to read and reflect, not voyage. To go to cities new, now, would mean having similar experiences to those on my last journey, but in different places. I want there to be some change in me before I set off again: more language, more ability to read and recognise kana, something in myself that will mean the triad of person, time and place gets differently activated. There’s the material consideration, too, by which that money could also be spent on paying dog stud fees, or that zenith of suburban life, home improvement.
There’s the fact, as well, that I don’t really want to have adventures by myself at the moment. I want to have them with the good señor, and at present there are plenty of things to do at home. What does it feel like to be at present without wanderlust? It feels … limpid. It is a happy torpor.
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When I came back from England in April 2003, I was miserable. It had been a short trip, but enough to remind me of how things at home felt out of synch, in tangible and intangible ways, with what I would have liked them to be. The job of which I’d had such high hopes nearly two years before was offering few, if any, opportunities to do the kind of teaching I was at that time interested in, and my friends from postgrad days had dispersed to the four corners of the earth.
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Posterous
West of Japan
18 May, 2008
in at home,commentatrix,O internet
Asides and questions from commenters send me scurrying in delightful directions in search of new artefacts. I’m not sure that I’m ready, for example, for this jelly, music for older listeners from when I was a young listener. What a treat: sleek and cool and stripped of every trace of archness. Duran Duran never had it so good.
The timing—both band and place—couldn’t be more apposite, really, given the extent to which Japan’s been on my mind of late. I have rustled up the airfare and could make the money for a rail pass in time for the southern spring during which I’d hoped to return, but I’ve decided instead not to go back at the moment. My navigatory circle has shrunk to the home front and at the moment I want to read and reflect, not voyage. To go to cities new, now, would mean having similar experiences to those on my last journey, but in different places. I want there to be some change in me before I set off again: more language, more ability to read and recognise kana, something in myself that will mean the triad of person, time and place gets differently activated. There’s the material consideration, too, by which that money could also be spent on paying dog stud fees, or that zenith of suburban life, home improvement.
There’s the fact, as well, that I don’t really want to have adventures by myself at the moment. I want to have them with the good señor, and at present there are plenty of things to do at home. What does it feel like to be at present without wanderlust? It feels … limpid. It is a happy torpor.
[click to continue…]
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