Fifty Sounds, page 16
“I know,” I said. “It really was.”
And it flashed through my mind to say to him, teasingly,
“It’s because you’re so mote-mote,” or rather something more English of the kind, but I didn’t, because I wanted to let him know without a shadow of a doubt that I was on his side.
¶ kasa-kasa: the sound of the desert heat in the heart or the desert heart in the heat
THE MORNING I TOOK MY leave from Y, he came to his door to say goodbye, as he always did. In the genkan sat his gladiator sandals: thick leather strips woven into a burned pie lattice, so well-worn that the leather had grown soft and saggy. I loved those sandals. I loved them and I loved the world that contained them. It was a world where every item had a provenance, which I could ask about and which would be related to me with satisfaction, even relish; which would be interesting to me because it mattered to him. He slipped his bare feet into them as he faced me, so he wouldn’t be standing on the dirty floor. I was now over the threshold.
“Goodbye,” he said in English, then leaned over and kissed me, and stroked my cheek. “Have a nice life.”
Of course, he wasn’t to know how “have a nice life” sounded—by which I suppose I simply mean, I don’t think he did know. I think he wanted the words to say exactly what they seemed to say, but they stabbed me regardless. I might have lingered, talked it through with him, but it was too risky to stand about outside his flat in case the neighbors saw me. We touched hands, and I moved off, down the steps and onto the road, and he closed the door softly.
Outside the day was young and half-fresh, there was still an hour or so until the humidity dump that would make the world unnavigable. Wherever I looked, surfaces were picked out in flashes or blocks of morning sunshine, and beyond the car park, the rice field glowed green. Everything seemed almost oppressively healthy and functional, poised to leap into action. And there was me, a castaway from the world of functionality and usefulness—even as the thought formulated itself, I knew how questionable it was. Up until just a few minutes ago, I’d been clinging to the narrative that I had no choice but to go. However large a cog I might have become in Y’s reality, I was not an operative part of its mechanism: like an element whose function was purely decorative, I spun free of the other interlocking parts. A luxury, as he’d once called me—and that had stung as well. But now, as the reality of it all began to seep in, I started to catch glimpses of a different way of seeing things. However untenable my current situation was, however reprehensible it would have been regarded by people on the island if they were ever given the chance to regard it, this was the only one I had. If I were really invested in our relationship as I said I was, if I loved this island like I said I did, I would have chosen to stay and see things through, until we were discovered and shamed. Instead I had chosen to leave him to his flat and his sandals and flee into the easy embrace of the big city. At no point down the line had this really felt like a choice, but now I saw incontrovertibly that it was one.
What I wanted more than anything was to run and hide myself away, to turn off my mind and my body. The thought of walking along the main road and potentially encountering someone I knew seemed too much to take, so I swerved off at the first street on the left, passing down semi-familiar backstreets which were mercifully both deserted and shaded. Stumbling along, looking around me for somewhere I could sit and regroup, I eventually came across an old petrol station on a corner of the street.
By now, I’d worked out that the island had the power to absorb things into itself. On my daily walks down the alleys to the beach, I was used to seeing the ways that the salty air and the breeze staked their claim over all kinds of surfaces, and the same happened in inland places like this one too. Nobody could have called this petrol station dirty or ruined, and there were no creeping plants intruding on its plain surfaces, but it was notably lacking the cleanliness and the sharp edges of sites tended by humans. The white dusty stone of its smooth floor and walls seemed far removed from any industrial process, and in their muted colors even the metal signs appeared more like archaeological ruins than the product of modern capitalism. It looked like a place you’d find on the outskirts of a desert, its concrete assuming the texture of blasted bone, replete in its silence. My wish to hide had reached desperate heights, so I snuck in and crouched at the back of the plot, behind a stone block that looked like it used to be the oil-changing station.
Leaving here was too much to be borne. Crouching there on the bone-dry concrete, hot sun beaming down on me, I felt the emotional reality of this truth I’d always rationally known swell to fill my body. I began to stab myself with a question: Why are you walking away if it really means that much to you? I didn’t have an answer, and sitting there that morning as the heat amplified around me, none came. I couldn’t even feel real sadness. What I felt instead was a scrunched up, dry despair. Kasa-kasa—that was the word that Y would sometimes use when he ran his fingers over the dry skin on my shins scriddled with tiny lines. I’d looked it up in my dictionary to find that it was the rustle of dried-up leaves, the feel of flaky skin and parched land.
If the me today could explain to the girl crouched down on the floor of an abandoned petrol station why she was feeling so confused, she’d try and explain how it was that there were two Japans she was experiencing simultaneously. Externally, I would say to the girl, she was utterly replaceable. She had been granted a place in the system but scarcely, as a mere place-marker, and the more that time went on, the more she got the sense that the idea she was marking, the concept of foreigner she was being paid to symbolize, was in fact defined by its unreachability—that she was something like a flagstick on a golf course, marking out a hole. It was expected that she knew nothing about Japan, could say nothing in Japanese, socialized exclusively with other Westerners, or else with Japanese people who spoke English. She was a mascot, and she would be loved to the extent that she could accept that the attention given to her was premised on the fact that she was bigger and clumsier and differently shaped and colored to other people, and the notion that the sweaty person inside was the same as everyone else was of little interest. This was not something that she liked, or something she was able to accept without resentment, and that was why she did not excel at this job.
And then, I would explain to the girl that, in a way that felt qualitatively other and spatially distinct from her mascotry, she felt absolutely involved. There was the intimacy that had grown between her and Y which was something that she’d not experienced before, the friendships formed from bouts of strangely consuming conversations, and the bonds that formed between her and the children, whose intensity seemed almost uncontainable. But while she found these ties to be utterly necessary, found the thought of being here without them untenable, she gradually discovered, like bumping up in chemistry experiments against the sharp edge of a scientific law, that they had to remain on the inside. They were not ratified by any outside structure, and so there was no way of manifesting them. Externally, which is to say visibly, linguistically, publicly, in the dimension which observably mattered, she was still an outsider, and the fact that she had swapped little bits of her life with people was something she had to keep within.
She resented this, and the resentment would rush out at times in a way she recognized to be futile only afterwards; it would manifest itself in speaking in a certain tone of voice about Japan which often sounded like possessiveness or arrogance, or worse, sheer ignorance, but really she just wanted some way of marking socially that bond which she felt, and on which she staked so much importance. She wanted the right to belong on the outside as well as in. Her decision to leave the island was fueled at least in part by an understanding that this was never going to happen, and that such a condition was unsustainable for her, and that was the truth—but when she was dwelling on that truth, she almost necessarily wasn’t thinking about the other one, namely how attached she felt herself to be. The truths seemed to live independently of each other, up until the point of her departure, when for the first time, they emerged into sight simultaneously. And that was why she was sitting rendered immobile with an emotion she couldn’t properly feel.
Whenever I was at Y’s flat and he found a new patch of scaly skin on my arms, he would go to the windowsill to fetch the tube of cream. I remember one time hearing him muttering to himself as he rubbed it in: “It’s because you don’t take care. That’s why it gets all kasa-kasa like this.”
He spoke in Japanese but used the English word, kea, for care. As I mostly did in those days, I took this to mean exactly what it would have done in English, failing to consider that it might be a faux ami like so many katakana words were; not realizing that here, kea meant specifically skincare, the application of products.
And so, like a petulant child in a bad film, I objected: “I do take care! I do!”
Y looked up at me curiously. “Oh, you do?” he said, his voice placid. “Well, okay then. I didn’t think you did.”
Now, looking back, I think that however you defined care, Y was right. Certainly I didn’t have a good skincare regime, but more generally, I didn’t take care of myself properly, because I didn’t know how to, and I especially didn’t know how to when such wildly different things seemed to be wanted of me, and I myself wanted such wildly contradictory things. I didn’t really understand what was going on around me, and if I could see to a certain extent what was happening inside, I had no idea at all what to do with it.
And so it was that I ended up like this, crouching on the dusty floor of a petrol station, cracked, sore, and broken.
¶ bō’: the sound of a ship leaving shore
I SAW IT ALL THE time, before it happened, after it happened, an event whose symbolic value far exceeded that of its actual happening: the ferry pulling away from the harbor for the last time with me on it. There would be the whirring of the engines, the smashing of the gong as it moved away, and then once it was onto the open water, the ferry would let out a deep bellow that seemed to emanate from its very bowels. I don’t actually know now if the horn was ever sounded, but this was how I saw it in my head and that image surpassed everything else. Bō’ is how you say the sound in Japanese. Spoken it is very low, half animal and half mechanical. I’d learned it recently, and was fixated with it, but even that seemed a meager approximation of the sound of the ferry as I heard it in my head. That sound resonated forever.
¶ kira-kira: the sound of a #magiclife, or embracing your shining future
TOKYO: IF I CONCENTRATED ON the word carefully enough, I could feel it giving out tiny vibrations of light. Tokyo, I had convinced myself, would be the place where my life came together, where I learned to shine, where the seeds I’d been scattering would cease to be messy flecks littering the ground, and would leap up in green to become a coherent, unified growth. The desire to change and be changed was upon me again, and now it had an urban flavor. My branches would grow neon baubles, and they would pulsate and twinkle. My life would be charmed, and effortless, and magic.
In retrospect, I think my experience on the island had been genuinely magical. That’s obviously a simplification, but it feels like a true-enough one. Things were awful and they were wonderful; they involved endless quantities of panic, alcohol, doubt and joy. They felt, for the first time ever, unmediated and raw. But I was having an affair with a married man with whom I worked, and for bureaucratic reasons I wasn’t allowed to stay on the island, would have had instead to relocate to the mainland in order to renew my teaching contract—the situation, I knew, was not a sustainable one. Besides, as wonderful as the island was, it was not a place where things happened. “It’s like coming to England and staying on the Isle of Wight the whole time,” my mother said to me on the phone at some point. “It’s good to try somewhere else, no?” Even Y agreed that “someone with a shining future” was better off in Tokyo.
One of the aspects of being on the island I’d liked most was precisely the fact that I hadn’t had to think about my #shiningfuture, but I also knew that I couldn’t put it off forever. I had visited Tokyo a couple of times after my orientation week there, and it had seemed to me like a place where one could have wild adventures. On those visits, I had indeed had what passed for wild adventures, the only notable detail of which I remembered was a man calling out in his best English to me and a friend on the street, declaring “I have a big cock.” It was such perfect katakana pronunciation—ai habu a bi’gu ko’ku—that I couldn’t help but think back to the ko’ku sa’kingu gēmu, and realize that I was now living that reality that had once seemed so far off. I didn’t find this man’s behavior remotely appealing, but maybe, in the chaotic mess of my mind at the time, it somehow symbolized that Tokyo was the right place for my new adventure. In any case, I applied to one of Tokyo’s countless private English schools, and found myself a job.
The Japanese verb for moving to the city, noboru, is related to that for climbing a slope or a mountain, albeit written with different kanji, and this seemed apposite as I made the journey over from the island. I was wedded to this idea of climbing, because emotionally, everything told me that I was sinking, that I had fallen through into nothingness. Back on the island, we had moaned and joked about how much attention we were paid, people stopping us while we were out walking, staring into our shopping baskets and later recounting their contents to us. Now I felt utterly invisible, even as I was universally stared at.
As if in response to a subconscious realization that this new job and this new life of mine were really not right for me, time began almost immediately to pass strangely, woozily. I had trouble sleeping, and adrenaline deluged my system. Returning home to my tiny box flat, I forbade myself from drinking out of the fear that I was going to turn into an alcoholic, and some desire for asceticism. Instead, I would sit out on a cardboard box on my balcony, a large wedge shape almost the same size as the flat itself, smoking cigarettes, reading, skirting around a black hole of loneliness in my chest as the motorbikes roared past on the street below. I was miserable, I felt utterly unsafe, and all I thought about was how much I wanted to be back on the island.
What is alarming to me when I think back to that time now is not how low I was, which makes a lot of sense considering my total isolation and how out of touch I was with my feelings, but the way I struggled to console myself with a sense of how great, how cool, how magic my life was. Being infatuated by the strange newness of my life had come naturally on the island, but now it was an effort, a stiff, unwieldy thing that I clipped onto the front of my unclothed misery, like a paper-doll dress with its fiddly little tags. I had an artist boyfriend who took me to art museums, and to eat vegetarian ramen with field mushrooms in a trendy part of Tokyo. I had a bright orange mobile phone with a toy dangling from it, half lion half panda, that I’d bought in a vending machine in one of said art museums. I booked myself in to take a Japanese exam that was far above my capabilities, and began to study Japanese like a fiend. I lost weight, wore red lipstick and red shoes. Never mind that this me who was doing all of this felt so detached from the balcony-lonely me that I find it hard, now, to position them in the same mental space. If I can convince myself, I thought, that I am going places, then I will really go places.
In this magical-thinking mindset, where everything takes on some symbolic value, music played an especially transportative role. If I felt a song deeply enough, if I knew all its words and I entered into its spirit, then it could free me and make me happy. As far as the Japanese music which I had begun to listen to went, it would also improve my Japanese (in fact, it wasn’t untrue that it facilitated improvement, given how much I pored over and studied the lyrics) and make me accepted within Japanese society (again not entirely farfetched, since this kind of cultural knowledge aided communication, but this of course was not the miraculous, all-consuming sense which I envisaged). In particular, there was a song I was obsessed with while in Tokyo and in fact for some while after called “Kira-kira,” sung by a young singer I thought extremely pretty. I would listen to it over and over again, and write out its lyrics in my best Japanese handwriting. I already knew the word kira-kira, which meant sparkling, dazzling, shining, because it cropped up in the Japanese translation of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which I’d sung back at my Saturday morning kids’ class, but now it took on a new meaning, namely, to signify the hope that my life would come to have. Kira-kira, to signify my magical life.
The thought of this seems almost unbearable to me now, not just because of how fan-girly it is, but because the singer in question seems a close to perfect exemplification of everything I have come to feel great resistance towards, less musically and more in terms of the type of womanhood she represents: infantile, saccharine-sweet, subservient, a magical pixie dream girl for a society where “small” is the second greatest compliment you can pay a woman after “cute.” And then there are the lyrics, segments of which I stuck up on my wall, about a woman waiting for her lover who is away in some unspecified destination: “When you come back, I’ll tell you about all the things that have happened to me,” she sings. When her lover returns, she promises, she will tell him of how she grew wings and talons, how her silver ring turned black. If the world vanishes before he returns, she pledges to become the wind and wait for him. “That’s how I get through the sad days.”
I find it uncomfortable to remember now how enamored I was with these lyrics, but it also seems fitting. Of course, they paint a typical picture of the faithful, stay-at-home wife idealized by society, waiting with great endurance for her man out bravely adventuring in the world, but they also offer a startling insight into the kira-kira mentality, where the fantastical magicalness of one’s life is offered up as a kind of totemic sacrifice. And what do you earn when you have proved you are magical enough? I’m not sure that I could have articulated the answer to this question, but what I really wanted, or at least what I really needed, was the day when I could stop presenting to others or to myself as magic, stop objectifying myself, and just feel. Feel magic, potentially, but most likely feel very ordinary, and have that be okay.
