• tumbl a few more passages from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• give away beauty
• read half a book for class tomorrow
• read Japanese blogs about walking a 1,400km pilgrimage
• write a thesis topic

Today my little sister is graduating from high school.

Graduating. From high school. My little sister is out of high school.

Guys I think I might have to be an adult really really soon.

I’m sure I felt this way when I was a senior in high school and Ellis came up as a freshman, but this time it’s serious.

So right now, I ought to be doing the considerable amount of homework that I have, but part of the way this semester is not going to be a sinkhole of unmanageable stress and bitterness (yes, it was) is by me taking a little time now and then to do the things I want to do, and what I want to do right now is write.

I’m listening to a genius playlist based on The Decemberists’ “Billy Liar.” It’s dark outside, but it’s clear, and if I weren’t in the middle of a city with terrible light pollution, I would be able to see stars. It’s cold in Kyoto these days (though nothing like Chicago, and by “nothing like Chicago” I mean about twenty-five Fahrenheit degrees warmer, a count which would mean nothing to most of the people around me), but the sun is finally starting to come up by seven, so I can wake up with light again. There are some dried jonquils in a little narrow-necked clay jar on my desk, tiny white and yellow things, which used to be fresh and fragrant— my host parents (probably Okaasan) put them there to welcome me back when I returned to the city two weeks ago (is that really all??). My room is covered in scattered papers and jackets and bags, which hide most of the tatami; it only took me thirty-six hours to take this space from pristine to me.

Coming back to Kyoto after three weeks in the States felt like coming home, which surprised me. I’d only been here for three or four months, after all, and you can add to that the fact that for any place in Japan to feel like home is a defition that I’m applying 無理矢理に, despite the fact that no matter how long I live here, I’ll more or less never be accepted as part of this society, especially in a city as foreigner-sodden as Kyoto.

I’m reading a novel by Enchi Fumiko, called 女坂, Onna-zaka, which is literally “Woman-slope,” as in the long, painful, arduous hill up which woman must climb over the course of her life. Twenty-four pages in, a woman is set to looking for a mistress for her husband, who respects domestic tranquility enough to say “pick out some innocent [virgin] girl from a good family, someone you can train to take care of the house” instead of bringing who-knows in from who-knows-where. It’s an assignment for class, which means spending most of my free time reading is actually doing homework, which is really nice for a change, but it’s hard. Enchi is a well-known and -respected female author (a separate category in Japanese bookstores), in fact so much so that it’s possible you might find her outside of the Woman Writers section, in just the regular Literature.

[As an aside, while this is pretty sexist and Japan is a very sincerely and well-meaningly vaguely sexist society— on which note, I am learning that it takes two to tango in that regard, broadly speaking— this notion of literature by woman writers being somehow markedly different than literature by men writers, theme aside, is also very par for the course for Japan in a lot of ways. For example, Murakami Haruki has been criticized for not being a Japanese writer, though his books are in Japanese and set in Japan. Apparently, their themes often are too universal— they could take place anywhere. What exactly it is that makes a book Japanese, on the other hand, is hard to define. The Japanese also think one of their intestines is longer than everyone else’s, so go figure.]

My classes this semester are translation and religion, both interesting and deficient in their own ways, but both, I think, useful for me beyond being inherently things I care very much about. It’s a bit frustrating that my translation professor, while kind and knowledgeable, is not infallible, and also is not always very good at declaring things positively, so we’ll talk about a sticky point and then just leave it sticky. My translation professor obviously knows a vast amount, but English isn’t his first language and he thought he’d be teaching in Japanese, so while his English is very good, he frequently asks if he “can say” things, and his organization suffers a little. (That said, I couldn’t teach a class in English LET ALONE in Japanese, nor could I be as amiable as he is while doing it.) More important to me in a big-picture sort of way is that I only have class after noon on Mondays and Fridays, giving me a great deal of the time I so lacked last semester. It’s wonderful. I still take care of my literature/translation professor’s son on Tuesdays, but Wednesdays and Thursdays are open open open, and that feels so wonderful. I can’t wait til it’s warmer and I can sit outside without needing to be inside somewhere.

On sitting inside places: unless you’re in a relatively big Starbucks, you can’t just go into a cafe and get a coffee and cake and study for three hours here. You shouldn’t sit in a coffee shop for more than an hour at the longest, and it’s much more usual to hang out visiting, not reading. Starbucks is an American import and the landscape of college students somehow came along with strategic lighting and gingerbread lattes. (Decaf espresso, to my despair, did not, however.)

Other large thing I’m doing this semester: a research project on 神仏霊場巡拝の道 (there’s a Japanese Wikipedia article but nothing in any other languages yet), literally and clunkily Gods and Buddha(s) Holy Site Pilgrimage Circuit Road— that is, a new pilgrimage route listing hundreds of places holy to gods and the Buddha/s. It’s a really big deal because while Shinto and Buddhism (Japanese flavored) are both practiced on the lay level, they’ve been more or less strictly separated at the level of clergy since official anti-Buddhist movements during the Meiji period (cf. ie. haibutsu-kishaku, the violent effect of Shin-Butsu-bunri, both meant in “the more narrow” sense of Meiji activity), and this is a pilgrimage being put on by major clergimen in Buddhism and Shinto, and involving shrines (S) and temples (B). This may very well turn into my thesis for graduation next year. While originally I was looking for other things— dietary restrictions, lay practice, liminal spaces— this is getting more and more interesting, because the disconnect between official policy and practice is something I’ve always had an eyeball on in different ways in the States.

Two last notes:

1) Japanese people LOVE OBAMA, mostly because he’s black and that is FASCINATING, but also because the more politically savvy Japanese got wind of the fact that our last president at the very least sounded stupid when he spoke and did things a lot of people didn’t like, plus this new BLACK MAN president had major popular support, which is weird and foreign and interesting. Relatedly, there is a tiny nowhere fishing town with a hotspring in Fukui prefecture called Obama, and boy HOWDY did they capitalize/are they capitalizing on that.

2) A poem from centuries ago, which I have to cut to tiny pieces to show you why it’s so beautiful:

たち別れいなばの山の峰に生ふる　まつとし聞かば今帰り来む
tachiwakare inaba no yama no mine ni ouru matsu to shi kikaba ima kaerikom(u)
Though we part and I am gone, if I hear that like the pines on the ridges of the mountains of Inaba you are waiting, in that moment I will return to you

The English is three times as explicit as the Japanese, which turns on two kakekotoba, basically unfunny puns, double meanings on words that sound the same. The kakekotoba in this are ‘inaba,’ which is ‘if/when I am not here’ and also the name of a mountainous place, and ‘matsu,’ which means ‘pine [tree]’ and ‘to wait.’ So you have to read this poem in three bursts: “tachiwakare inaba,” “We part and I am not here”; “Inaba no yama no mine ni ouru matsu,” “The pines growing on the ridges of the Inaba mountains”; and “matsu to shi kikaba ima kaerikomu,” “If I hear that you wait, now I will return.”

It should be noted that this is the ONLY thousand-year-old poem I can read, because we studied it in my Noh class last semester (it’s central to the play Matsukaze, which you should find a translation of STAT). It should also be noted that all good poems a thousand years ago worked like that, basically. This poem is in the Kokinshu (Kokin Waka Shuu), a collection of ancient and modern waka poems, compiled between like 900 and 920 CE. Modern is a relative poem. It was written by Ariwara no Yukihira, who was a huge G.

Hi, everybody.

So, I promise I’m really in Japan. I realize this is extremely difficult for everyone to believe since I fell off the place of the planet… Now that it’s eight weeks in and Fall Break, here’s a brief recap of the last eight weeks:

I landed in Japan at the very end of August, staying in mitcho’s teeny tiny apartment, which he shares with two other (apparently frequently changing) tenants. Each has his own room, with a shared bathroom, shower, and kitchen, and I managed to meet no one the three days I was there. It’s clean and cute and very cozy, and manages to avoid being cramped… if you’re not over 5’4”. While mitcho went to work, I explored his neighborhood (near Hatsudai Station in Shinjuku Ward), making friends with a fruit vendor and learning the word ‘pharmacy’ (薬局・yakkyoku) and generally being the only foreigner for miles around, strangely enough.

On Wednesday the third of September I rode the bullet train southwest to Kyoto, and was immediately shocked to find that Kyoto is, relatively speaking, FULL OF FOREIGNERS. In retrospect, as a city with very little economic UMPH which relies on its history as the Old Capital and Geisha Central to draw tourism, as well as having more college students per capita than any other city in Japan, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

The fifty of us in the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies, a handful from more than ten prestigious American universities, gathered at the Hotel Fujita for orientation. Orientation consisted mainly of being shown where some things were, but since none of us had any blinking idea where anything was, it was immensely helpful.

On Saturday we all were shuttled off to our respective home stays, sans the five or so kids in apartments, who were shuttled off to their apartments. I recognized my host parents from the pictures they had sent me from CAIRO, where they had taken a trip over the summer. I soon came to find that the Matsunagas consisted of an extremely energetic husband, aged 69, named Toshiharu, who once lived for two months in Malaysia just for fun (despite speaking nothing but Japanese and a heavy smattering of English vocabulary) and now beats younger men at tennis and softball, and his tiny lovely wife Hiroko, 65, who’s pretty game for about anything and sometimes is his  doubles partner. They go overseas sort of mind-bogglingly often, visiting places for fun and going to graduations and weddings of their many, many, many past homestay students… The Matsunagas have been taking in homestay students for almost twenty years, and I am their 36th. We often talk about previous kids, whose pictures are all in two large frames over the dinner table.

I placed into the highest Japanese class, which, while flattering, is also the hardest Japanese class of my life, and the teaching style (interrupting the flow of class for criticism and correction) of one of the teachers I find somewhat jarring, mostly because I’m used to being good at things and not to being criticized, honestly. But my class’s teacher seven out of ten sessions a week is an incredibly sweet and compassionate woman, named Uemiya Mariko. Uemiya-sensei, bless her heart, has much more faith in the eight of us than is probably perfectly wise, and convinced us all at the beginning of the year to sign up for Level One (“Ikkyuu”) of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). We, innocents that we were, all did; last week we took a practice kanji and vocab section, and generally made about half the score required for passing (in my case, at least, that was half owing to pure chance as well). This is slightly terrifying, but nonetheless, it is I suppose a good experience to be genuinely chewed up and spit out by a test once in one’s life.

My other two classes are on Noh & Kyougen (traditional theatre; Kyougen is comedic) and modern literature. The Noh class is fascinating, but it’s also three hours long, which is a little much for anything, even if your teacher (Professor Monica Bethe) IS a charismatic woman with a face deeply lined at the places one uses to make incredibly dramatic expressions, who happens to have memorized basically everything Noh play there is to memorize, as well as the drum rhythms and the flute patterns, and also has carved her own Noh mask, and also has been translating Noh texts (CLASSICAL Japanese, think Chaucer’s English) and books on Noh into English since the seventies. (Not kidding.) The lit class is much lower-key but enjoyable. Professor Sarah Frederick is a laid-back individual and one doesn’t immediately realize the depth of her knowledge about Japanese literature and modern history. She also has brought to Japan a one-year-old daughter (as of October 25th), a three-year-old son, and a husband who speaks no Japanese (hers is very good).

On Tuesdays and sometimes Fridays, I pick Frederick-sensei’s son Sam up from his Japanese preschool and babysit him for a couple of hours until his mother and sister Maia get home. Sam is quickly turning bilingual, which is delightful for me to interact with. His mother started speaking to him in Japanese a year ago, and the teachers and children at his preschool obviously don’t speak any English, so his Japanese is improving rapidly, and he mixes the languages in incredibly endearing ways. Maia, the one-year-old, is round and blue-eyed and drooly and cheerful and is almost enough on her own to convince anyone that having a baby is a fantastic idea.

I ride my bike to school every morning, unless it’s raining, taking the sidewalk down by the river to avoid hills and stop lights. Kyoto, built on a grid, is slowly becoming familiar to me, especially since it’s not vast like Tokyo, or even Chicago. I spent a lot of time at Nishiki Market, a narrow street lined with shops selling traditional pickles and fish and sweets, as well as stores offering tea goods and knives and gifts. There are also stalls selling fried things and shaved ice, which I confess are my favorite. It was the site of perhaps my most touching interaction with a Japanese person, serving to basically erase the bad feelings I’d gotten from a few other experiences ranging from ambivalent to incredibly negative: I was sitting finishing my shaved ice on a bench next to a young mother and her son, who looked no older than four. I thought they were talking about me— I caught the word “onee-san,” which means “older sister” but is a way to refer to young women you don’t know— but couldn’t tell. Then, suddenly, the tiny boy holds out his bag of tiny soymilk donuts, saying “Go ahead and have one.”

DELIGHT!!!

I asked him what it was, and he was like, “it’s a donut! It’s good!!” and I ate it and thanked them and smiled and smiled as they walked away. Children are adorable.