Fifty Sounds, page 23
gee
gosh
goodness
zowie
I said nothing. I did not say yes and I did not say no, I stared at the policeman, again silent in the face of this thing that was happening inside, which I had no way of carrying into a world shared by him.
Again and again as I learned Japanese I had been struck by its expressive possibilities; now, more viscerally than ever before, I felt its banality, its normalizing abilities, and how oppressive those things were. No longer was this about the delight of dressing up my thoughts and feelings in new guises: now there was a feeling which it seemed very important that I hung on to, and I didn’t want it stolen away from me by language that smoothed, made communal, made palatable and comprehensible. I felt something I’d experienced before only in English: the sense that if the possibilities for expression were going to misrepresent me so radically, to cartoonify me, then I wanted nothing to do with them.
Now years on, older and wiser and a more proficient speaker, no longer in the grips of shock and a more underlying sense of linguistic insufficiency, I know better that this is just how language works in this context. The policeman was not attempting to describe what it was that I felt, the feelings that moved in me and the associations I made, but rather to storyboard the situation. He was doing this not to supersede my version, but so he had what he needed for his report. And it is a simple fact that a storyboard, in Japanese, is far more likely to contain sound effects.
Yet I still can’t bear to think of my feeling at that moment through the lens of that uwaa. To represent the complexity of what I was going through in a single word, and for the word to be that one, felt not only that I was betraying myself, but also betraying the person who’d made me feel that way, and the world that had brought it all about. If it came to that, I would have chosen silence every time.
¶ ba’sari: the sound of nevermore, and how it comes when you least expect it
THE STORY OF THE MAN on the mountain should have no epilogue, and yet for me, the episode had a second part. Its content is of a very different kind, and yet the two lie inseparably beside each other, twins grown together in the womb of the same memory.
As it happened, D’s prophecy of trauma came to loom larger over us than I imagined, although now I suspect that lack of imagination on my part was just the effect of some kind of shock. By the time the police were done with us it was almost afternoon, and neither of us had a clue what to do next. We could either carry on with our day of sightseeing as planned, or return home with nothing to do. Both options seemed equally awful, but after conferring—as I recall, our deliberations took place in a deserted bus station—we agreed that it was better to have some kind of distraction, and so we decided to stay in Toba. When we arrived at the aquarium we’d been planning to visit, though, and stood looking up at the huge poster of a sea lion plastered outside, listening to the high-pitched strains of the woman doing the dolphin show carried over to us on the sea breeze, it came to us that entering was impossible. I don’t know if either of us could have said exactly why; entering felt to me cruel and superficial, and the entire place dystopian, but I couldn’t have defended any of those impressions. In the end it was D who voiced it: she just couldn’t, she said. I felt relief at her certainty, because I would probably have swallowed my distaste and traipsed inside if she’d wanted to, but also a form of panic, and irritation: what would we do instead? We’d decided to stay on here; was she now going to veto every course of action? In the end, though, we found something to do: we got on a bus and visited the Meoto-iwa—the Married Couple Rocks, as they were known in English—a pair of large boulders stationed out to sea and tied together by sacred rope, where people went to pray for luck in love and familial safety. It felt surreal and ridiculous to be there, but at least we were out in the open and not around any animals in tanks and cages.
By the time we returned to Matsusaka it was evening, and D was clear: she didn’t want to go back to my flat, she wanted to be out somewhere, so we slipped under the navy noren curtains and inside one of the chain izakaya that dotted the road leading to and from the station. It was only as we slid ourselves along the wipe-down faux-leather banquette in the booth to which we were shown, only as we sat across from each other and looked at each other and let time pool around us that I understood for the first time the reality of what had happened, let that reality assume a coherent form inside my body. That such a thing could happen, I suppose, was a sign that I felt, in some way, protected. I had been dubious about D’s plan to stay out, had found the thought of nesting at home more appealing, but now I could understand it better: there was something immensely comforting about the two of us being held there, semi-privately and in near darkness by some larger structure, some abstract body of people. From the speakers emanated an endless looping shamisen melody, sliding up and down and never seeming to go anywhere.
As we began to speak of what had happened, I can remember feeling as though I were talking for the first time ever, and I was genuinely unsure that the words I was voicing would succeed. Perhaps they would describe a reality, in the way that the policeman’s summarization of my account had described a reality, but I doubted that I could put words together in a way that would correlate with my version of events. Maybe the problem was that I didn’t know what my version of events was, that it was wallowing somewhere in the murky mire of dissociation.
And yet, somehow, we did manage to talk. We didn’t touch or lock eyes or move to sit alongside each other as the tears ran down our faces. Still, the feeling of something passing between us was unmistakable, and it grew out of a knowledge that we were the only two people in the world who could possibly be having this conversation—that somebody listening in would have understood the words that we said, but the conversation would have seemed no more than a limp balloon passing between us.
I’d spent a lot of time before this thinking about cultural variations in how to signal that you were listening, taking in, sharing a wavelength with someone. In English, I had been raised to understand, you mostly stayed silent and nodded, waiting for your turn to speak, whereupon you would profess enthusiastically that you understood, or felt the same. In Japanese things were different; more weight was placed on the behavioral cues and interjections known as aizuchi, a term taken from blacksmithing, where the apprentice unleashes strokes in time with those made by his master. As this etymology suggests, there was a focus on continuity, and matching the other; often aizuchi reached a level of vocality that would be perceived in an English context as an interruption or a sign of impatience, and I would occasionally feel affronted by them, find they made me lose my flow. The reverse also happened: when I didn’t keep up a constant enough flow of aizuchi in Japanese I would perceive my conversational partner starting to falter. All of these musings made me wonder how much of feeling “listened to” was a matter of social convention; it was around this time that, on my more preoccupied days, I began to catch myself, on the phone to people back home, giving a perfect and empathetic-sounding response to what they were saying while having not absorbed a single word and thinking: I’m too proficient at this for my own good. I can do the wavelength without the wave.
What happened now between D and me felt different to any trade-off of behavioral cues; we were not reacting expressively to each other’s thoughts, or encouraging the other to go on, and rather the encouragement seemed to come naturally from the other person voicing more or less what you had felt, of the experience feeling both new and shared. What we mostly talked about was how bonded we felt to the man, though we knew we had no real right to be feeling such when we’d never even found out his name or anything else about him. We talked about getting in contact with the police, asking if it was possible to attend his funeral. And as we talked and wept we both felt it: we were changed. We would never be flippant about death or suicide again, but it was more than that—we felt, even in our terror, bound to life. We wanted to take that moment, and do something with it, although we didn’t yet know what. Afterwards it would be difficult to say these things to people without them sounding cheesy and ridiculous, but in that moment in the black-leather booth nothing we could say to each other was trite, because there was only us, and we both felt the same.
After a while, D stood up. “I need to go to the toilet,” she said, hovering at the edge of the table, “but I don’t think I can go alone.”
And so I went with her. Not begrudgingly, either; the request felt reasonable to me, even if I knew it was unusual, and as I was waiting outside the cubicle for her, it occurred to me for the first time how deep we were in this together, and how that was maybe not exactly a good thing, in and of itself, but it was at least a comforting one. It seemed like this: we had both experienced a moment of total loneliness and we had decided that we should band together, with the world, but first with each other.
And thus began our two days of an intimacy for which I really can’t think of a parallel. I have had various relationships that were extreme in ways which, looking back, feel ill-advised, but it’s hard for me to think of any period of time with anybody that felt more quietly intense than that I spent with D in Matsusaka, even if there was nothing sexual or romantic about it. We drank a lot, accompanied each other to the toilet, slept in the same room. At first D was convinced that she wouldn’t sleep, and sat on the sofa as I curled up on the floor, but eventually she did, waking up late the following morning, when we repeated the whole procedure, this time traveling to Ise Shrine. In the evening we went out, came home, and drank and talked until the early hours.
Many times since, in the light of what happened later, I’ve wondered if I should have handled the situation differently, specifically whether I should have been more boundaried. I wonder this even while knowing that really it would have been impossible for me back then to do so: I felt I had to take care of her, and I also defined my mental state in terms of hers. Possibly I drew solace from being the solid one, but more than that I drew solace from sharing the experience, from nothing being off limits, and in truth it felt good to cry, and talk, because I knew that there was nobody else that would understand. Both of us were aware, I thought, that we wouldn’t be able to do this anymore after she went home, and so we should make the most of having each other. But it now seems possible that we conceptualized in different ways what that return to normality would have to entail.
The morning D went home, I walked her to the train station and we said goodbye, hugging long and hard in a way I wouldn’t necessarily have expected her to be comfortable with in public, at least Japanese public. The last thing she said to me before she strode off, limbs bladelike, towards the ticket gates was: “I know it was awful, but I feel like the fact that it happened to you and me had some kind of meaning.”
I walked home with this statement echoing around my chest—some kind of meaning. What kind of meaning, though? I didn’t know what she meant by it, and I didn’t know if she knew what she meant by it. I didn’t know how much significance I was supposed to attach to it.
I half-suspected that D would go away and I’d discover myself amazingly fine, but what I found instead was a world of fear far greater than I’d anticipated. Mostly, if I was around people at work then I held it together, but in solitude it all came out. Everywhere I went I saw bodies hanging from lampposts. I had visions of his face burned into my mind as I tried to sleep, as I woke up. We had discovered him in broad daylight and yet it felt that it had happened at night, so evocative was the darkness. For as far back as I could remember, taking long walks alone had been the best way of shaking myself free of obsessive thoughts, or at least generating space around them, but now I found that coping mechanism outlawed, because walking alone was terrible. Still, life went on, and gradually it did get a bit better. My boyfriend, G, came out to Japan to join me, and I talked to him about the day in Toba, and that helped a lot, although there was still a sense in which talking to him about it was not like talking to D.
Except that sense of what talking to D was like was gradually ebbing away. She and I exchanged emails: she was back with her family, her mother and her sister, they were taking care of her, everything was good—and then it wasn’t good, she was thinking about it a lot, she said, but her emails grew more distant and sporadic. We planned to Skype, but she was busy at work and put it off. In one email, I remember, she wrote to me that she’d been researching PTSD; although it hadn’t seemed like that to us at the time, she said, what we’d found on top of that mountain had in fact been a scene of violence, and that was why we’d suffered so much. I could understand what she meant, and yet, if I was going through the wringer a bit, I was pretty sure I wasn’t suffering from PTSD.
In honesty, I don’t know if it was D who taught me the word ba’sari or not. I can see an image in my mind of her saying it, possibly in terms of a haircut, but I don’t know if that’s a real scene or one I’ve dreamed up. My early memories of people speaking are sharp, but past the point of a certain familiarity with Japanese they begin to round off and fade, outside of truly dramatic moments. I’d spent enough time with D and knew her well enough that I can put almost any phrase in her mouth and have it work in my head, so probably I will never know for sure who taught me this mimetic for cutting something forcefully, in a single movement or all at once. To have your long flowing locks ba’sarily cut off. To ba’sarily cut off a relationship with people: “used in particular in cases where no reserve or hesitation is shown,” says the dictionary. It’s also used for killing people, or “mercilessly making them redundant.”
D didn’t want to be friends with me anymore, she wrote. Our reactions to this incident proved that I was more mentally stable than she was. She didn’t quite say “it’s alright for you,” but that was essentially the message. Speaking to me made her recall the event, and she didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t up for debate, and there was no apology.
Predictably enough I felt various things: I was hurt, and angry, outraged, and let down. I was alone, in a new part of Japan without any community to rely on, whereas she lived with her mother and sister in her hometown of Tokyo surrounded by old friends. Okay, I wasn’t crumbling, but I was up and down, and it seemed rich for her to be making pronouncements on how I was without having even spoken to me. But the most powerful reaction of all, whose strength only deepened the more I reflected on everything that had happened and what she’d said to me at the station, was a sense of astonishment. It stunned me to have bonded with someone like that, and to have bonded so intimately in a way that I didn’t want to ascribe to either one of us but seemed more at her instigation, only to have the security of that whipped away from under me. Without that bond, I found that the things we’d dreamed about on the black faux-leather banquette, the cheesy ideas we’d had about making sure that this didn’t slip back into silence and that something good came of it, promptly disappeared. Much as I resented the fact, I felt I couldn’t do that on my own.
It wasn’t that the sudden cut-off was a tactic that seemed totally unthinkable from D. Back when we’d lived together in London, D had once confronted me in tears about how I insisted on always speaking to her in Japanese, even when she began conversations in English. The outburst took me totally by surprise, and we talked it through until we located the source of the misunderstanding: my mistaken analysis of her comfort levels, partly born out of a comment she’d made about how intimidating I was when I spoke English. I was surprised because my behavior as she was describing it to me was undoubtedly shitty, and I could see how upsetting it would have been; not for the first or the last time in my life, I had a visceral sense of how different two experiences of what was objectively the same reality could be. But what shocked me the most was her admission that she’d been on the verge of saying nothing to me and simply moving out. Even to hear her say it gave me a kind of thrill—how fucked up, how intense, how much like something out of a Japanese novel!—but I also shuddered to think how I would have reacted if that was really the course of action she’d taken.
Except to dress up the shut-out in foreign garb is not fair, because I understood its mechanism, and understood why it prevailed in cultures where discussion of feelings was not encouraged—a category in which I included Britain. You repressed and you repressed and you repressed, told yourself you were not feeling a certain way, and then the feelings got too much and there was no holding them back and no reversing them: it was cut-off or nothing.
The thing was, this time I didn’t feel that was what was happening. If I’d sensed that D was looking for a reason to ditch me, or if the event had been caused or exacerbated by me, even if I’d been the one asking her to accompany me to the toilet, then I could have understood her reaction. In reality, I would never have asked her to accompany me to the toilet, even if I’d wanted her to, precisely out of a fear that it would make me too much, and therefore liable for ditching. Instead, I got the sense that her connection with me had been severed to facilitate a total erasure of the event from her memory. I was an inessential organ snipped out in order to access the malignant one, tossed into the trash without a second thought.
Looking back through my inbox, I find that I emailed her a year or so on from the ba’sari email—to check, I suppose, that the decision hadn’t been rescinded. “I had a dream about you last night,” I wrote, “and I think about you a lot. Are you okay?”
D had replied, to say she was fine, not thinking about the event. “Normal life with everything,” she writes. “But I still feel fatigue to that direction so I don’t feel like talking.” So ran the last ever lines exchanged between us. Casting an eye over her words, I still feel like an ice cube has been dropped down my back.
¶ nuru-nuru: the slippery sound of knowing the lingo
I AM TEACHING AN INTERMEDIATE lesson at the language school called “Describing Things,” whose aim is to build up the students’ stock of English adjectives. The students and I go through a number of photo-flashcards supposedly depicting certain attributes—a cactus, some green gunge, a shag pile carpet—and finish off with a game where one person describes something in the room for the other to guess, hopefully using vocab they’ve just learned. I’m fond of this lesson, and teach it whenever the syllabus allows, because I feel like this is the kind of English which is actually helpful in real-world conversations. More selfishly, I like hearing what adjectives my students choose to describe certain objects. This tactile, visceral area of language, where English is full of adjectives ending in y—spiky, glossy, shiny, and so on—is a realm of Japanese festooned with mimetic language; students often enunciate mimetics when they latch on to the meaning of an English word as a way of establishing a correspondence, or scribble them down in their notebook as a translation of a particular English word. Those two don’t correlate exactly, I frequently want to warn on those occasions, but mostly I don’t say anything.
gosh
goodness
zowie
I said nothing. I did not say yes and I did not say no, I stared at the policeman, again silent in the face of this thing that was happening inside, which I had no way of carrying into a world shared by him.
Again and again as I learned Japanese I had been struck by its expressive possibilities; now, more viscerally than ever before, I felt its banality, its normalizing abilities, and how oppressive those things were. No longer was this about the delight of dressing up my thoughts and feelings in new guises: now there was a feeling which it seemed very important that I hung on to, and I didn’t want it stolen away from me by language that smoothed, made communal, made palatable and comprehensible. I felt something I’d experienced before only in English: the sense that if the possibilities for expression were going to misrepresent me so radically, to cartoonify me, then I wanted nothing to do with them.
Now years on, older and wiser and a more proficient speaker, no longer in the grips of shock and a more underlying sense of linguistic insufficiency, I know better that this is just how language works in this context. The policeman was not attempting to describe what it was that I felt, the feelings that moved in me and the associations I made, but rather to storyboard the situation. He was doing this not to supersede my version, but so he had what he needed for his report. And it is a simple fact that a storyboard, in Japanese, is far more likely to contain sound effects.
Yet I still can’t bear to think of my feeling at that moment through the lens of that uwaa. To represent the complexity of what I was going through in a single word, and for the word to be that one, felt not only that I was betraying myself, but also betraying the person who’d made me feel that way, and the world that had brought it all about. If it came to that, I would have chosen silence every time.
¶ ba’sari: the sound of nevermore, and how it comes when you least expect it
THE STORY OF THE MAN on the mountain should have no epilogue, and yet for me, the episode had a second part. Its content is of a very different kind, and yet the two lie inseparably beside each other, twins grown together in the womb of the same memory.
As it happened, D’s prophecy of trauma came to loom larger over us than I imagined, although now I suspect that lack of imagination on my part was just the effect of some kind of shock. By the time the police were done with us it was almost afternoon, and neither of us had a clue what to do next. We could either carry on with our day of sightseeing as planned, or return home with nothing to do. Both options seemed equally awful, but after conferring—as I recall, our deliberations took place in a deserted bus station—we agreed that it was better to have some kind of distraction, and so we decided to stay in Toba. When we arrived at the aquarium we’d been planning to visit, though, and stood looking up at the huge poster of a sea lion plastered outside, listening to the high-pitched strains of the woman doing the dolphin show carried over to us on the sea breeze, it came to us that entering was impossible. I don’t know if either of us could have said exactly why; entering felt to me cruel and superficial, and the entire place dystopian, but I couldn’t have defended any of those impressions. In the end it was D who voiced it: she just couldn’t, she said. I felt relief at her certainty, because I would probably have swallowed my distaste and traipsed inside if she’d wanted to, but also a form of panic, and irritation: what would we do instead? We’d decided to stay on here; was she now going to veto every course of action? In the end, though, we found something to do: we got on a bus and visited the Meoto-iwa—the Married Couple Rocks, as they were known in English—a pair of large boulders stationed out to sea and tied together by sacred rope, where people went to pray for luck in love and familial safety. It felt surreal and ridiculous to be there, but at least we were out in the open and not around any animals in tanks and cages.
By the time we returned to Matsusaka it was evening, and D was clear: she didn’t want to go back to my flat, she wanted to be out somewhere, so we slipped under the navy noren curtains and inside one of the chain izakaya that dotted the road leading to and from the station. It was only as we slid ourselves along the wipe-down faux-leather banquette in the booth to which we were shown, only as we sat across from each other and looked at each other and let time pool around us that I understood for the first time the reality of what had happened, let that reality assume a coherent form inside my body. That such a thing could happen, I suppose, was a sign that I felt, in some way, protected. I had been dubious about D’s plan to stay out, had found the thought of nesting at home more appealing, but now I could understand it better: there was something immensely comforting about the two of us being held there, semi-privately and in near darkness by some larger structure, some abstract body of people. From the speakers emanated an endless looping shamisen melody, sliding up and down and never seeming to go anywhere.
As we began to speak of what had happened, I can remember feeling as though I were talking for the first time ever, and I was genuinely unsure that the words I was voicing would succeed. Perhaps they would describe a reality, in the way that the policeman’s summarization of my account had described a reality, but I doubted that I could put words together in a way that would correlate with my version of events. Maybe the problem was that I didn’t know what my version of events was, that it was wallowing somewhere in the murky mire of dissociation.
And yet, somehow, we did manage to talk. We didn’t touch or lock eyes or move to sit alongside each other as the tears ran down our faces. Still, the feeling of something passing between us was unmistakable, and it grew out of a knowledge that we were the only two people in the world who could possibly be having this conversation—that somebody listening in would have understood the words that we said, but the conversation would have seemed no more than a limp balloon passing between us.
I’d spent a lot of time before this thinking about cultural variations in how to signal that you were listening, taking in, sharing a wavelength with someone. In English, I had been raised to understand, you mostly stayed silent and nodded, waiting for your turn to speak, whereupon you would profess enthusiastically that you understood, or felt the same. In Japanese things were different; more weight was placed on the behavioral cues and interjections known as aizuchi, a term taken from blacksmithing, where the apprentice unleashes strokes in time with those made by his master. As this etymology suggests, there was a focus on continuity, and matching the other; often aizuchi reached a level of vocality that would be perceived in an English context as an interruption or a sign of impatience, and I would occasionally feel affronted by them, find they made me lose my flow. The reverse also happened: when I didn’t keep up a constant enough flow of aizuchi in Japanese I would perceive my conversational partner starting to falter. All of these musings made me wonder how much of feeling “listened to” was a matter of social convention; it was around this time that, on my more preoccupied days, I began to catch myself, on the phone to people back home, giving a perfect and empathetic-sounding response to what they were saying while having not absorbed a single word and thinking: I’m too proficient at this for my own good. I can do the wavelength without the wave.
What happened now between D and me felt different to any trade-off of behavioral cues; we were not reacting expressively to each other’s thoughts, or encouraging the other to go on, and rather the encouragement seemed to come naturally from the other person voicing more or less what you had felt, of the experience feeling both new and shared. What we mostly talked about was how bonded we felt to the man, though we knew we had no real right to be feeling such when we’d never even found out his name or anything else about him. We talked about getting in contact with the police, asking if it was possible to attend his funeral. And as we talked and wept we both felt it: we were changed. We would never be flippant about death or suicide again, but it was more than that—we felt, even in our terror, bound to life. We wanted to take that moment, and do something with it, although we didn’t yet know what. Afterwards it would be difficult to say these things to people without them sounding cheesy and ridiculous, but in that moment in the black-leather booth nothing we could say to each other was trite, because there was only us, and we both felt the same.
After a while, D stood up. “I need to go to the toilet,” she said, hovering at the edge of the table, “but I don’t think I can go alone.”
And so I went with her. Not begrudgingly, either; the request felt reasonable to me, even if I knew it was unusual, and as I was waiting outside the cubicle for her, it occurred to me for the first time how deep we were in this together, and how that was maybe not exactly a good thing, in and of itself, but it was at least a comforting one. It seemed like this: we had both experienced a moment of total loneliness and we had decided that we should band together, with the world, but first with each other.
And thus began our two days of an intimacy for which I really can’t think of a parallel. I have had various relationships that were extreme in ways which, looking back, feel ill-advised, but it’s hard for me to think of any period of time with anybody that felt more quietly intense than that I spent with D in Matsusaka, even if there was nothing sexual or romantic about it. We drank a lot, accompanied each other to the toilet, slept in the same room. At first D was convinced that she wouldn’t sleep, and sat on the sofa as I curled up on the floor, but eventually she did, waking up late the following morning, when we repeated the whole procedure, this time traveling to Ise Shrine. In the evening we went out, came home, and drank and talked until the early hours.
Many times since, in the light of what happened later, I’ve wondered if I should have handled the situation differently, specifically whether I should have been more boundaried. I wonder this even while knowing that really it would have been impossible for me back then to do so: I felt I had to take care of her, and I also defined my mental state in terms of hers. Possibly I drew solace from being the solid one, but more than that I drew solace from sharing the experience, from nothing being off limits, and in truth it felt good to cry, and talk, because I knew that there was nobody else that would understand. Both of us were aware, I thought, that we wouldn’t be able to do this anymore after she went home, and so we should make the most of having each other. But it now seems possible that we conceptualized in different ways what that return to normality would have to entail.
The morning D went home, I walked her to the train station and we said goodbye, hugging long and hard in a way I wouldn’t necessarily have expected her to be comfortable with in public, at least Japanese public. The last thing she said to me before she strode off, limbs bladelike, towards the ticket gates was: “I know it was awful, but I feel like the fact that it happened to you and me had some kind of meaning.”
I walked home with this statement echoing around my chest—some kind of meaning. What kind of meaning, though? I didn’t know what she meant by it, and I didn’t know if she knew what she meant by it. I didn’t know how much significance I was supposed to attach to it.
I half-suspected that D would go away and I’d discover myself amazingly fine, but what I found instead was a world of fear far greater than I’d anticipated. Mostly, if I was around people at work then I held it together, but in solitude it all came out. Everywhere I went I saw bodies hanging from lampposts. I had visions of his face burned into my mind as I tried to sleep, as I woke up. We had discovered him in broad daylight and yet it felt that it had happened at night, so evocative was the darkness. For as far back as I could remember, taking long walks alone had been the best way of shaking myself free of obsessive thoughts, or at least generating space around them, but now I found that coping mechanism outlawed, because walking alone was terrible. Still, life went on, and gradually it did get a bit better. My boyfriend, G, came out to Japan to join me, and I talked to him about the day in Toba, and that helped a lot, although there was still a sense in which talking to him about it was not like talking to D.
Except that sense of what talking to D was like was gradually ebbing away. She and I exchanged emails: she was back with her family, her mother and her sister, they were taking care of her, everything was good—and then it wasn’t good, she was thinking about it a lot, she said, but her emails grew more distant and sporadic. We planned to Skype, but she was busy at work and put it off. In one email, I remember, she wrote to me that she’d been researching PTSD; although it hadn’t seemed like that to us at the time, she said, what we’d found on top of that mountain had in fact been a scene of violence, and that was why we’d suffered so much. I could understand what she meant, and yet, if I was going through the wringer a bit, I was pretty sure I wasn’t suffering from PTSD.
In honesty, I don’t know if it was D who taught me the word ba’sari or not. I can see an image in my mind of her saying it, possibly in terms of a haircut, but I don’t know if that’s a real scene or one I’ve dreamed up. My early memories of people speaking are sharp, but past the point of a certain familiarity with Japanese they begin to round off and fade, outside of truly dramatic moments. I’d spent enough time with D and knew her well enough that I can put almost any phrase in her mouth and have it work in my head, so probably I will never know for sure who taught me this mimetic for cutting something forcefully, in a single movement or all at once. To have your long flowing locks ba’sarily cut off. To ba’sarily cut off a relationship with people: “used in particular in cases where no reserve or hesitation is shown,” says the dictionary. It’s also used for killing people, or “mercilessly making them redundant.”
D didn’t want to be friends with me anymore, she wrote. Our reactions to this incident proved that I was more mentally stable than she was. She didn’t quite say “it’s alright for you,” but that was essentially the message. Speaking to me made her recall the event, and she didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t up for debate, and there was no apology.
Predictably enough I felt various things: I was hurt, and angry, outraged, and let down. I was alone, in a new part of Japan without any community to rely on, whereas she lived with her mother and sister in her hometown of Tokyo surrounded by old friends. Okay, I wasn’t crumbling, but I was up and down, and it seemed rich for her to be making pronouncements on how I was without having even spoken to me. But the most powerful reaction of all, whose strength only deepened the more I reflected on everything that had happened and what she’d said to me at the station, was a sense of astonishment. It stunned me to have bonded with someone like that, and to have bonded so intimately in a way that I didn’t want to ascribe to either one of us but seemed more at her instigation, only to have the security of that whipped away from under me. Without that bond, I found that the things we’d dreamed about on the black faux-leather banquette, the cheesy ideas we’d had about making sure that this didn’t slip back into silence and that something good came of it, promptly disappeared. Much as I resented the fact, I felt I couldn’t do that on my own.
It wasn’t that the sudden cut-off was a tactic that seemed totally unthinkable from D. Back when we’d lived together in London, D had once confronted me in tears about how I insisted on always speaking to her in Japanese, even when she began conversations in English. The outburst took me totally by surprise, and we talked it through until we located the source of the misunderstanding: my mistaken analysis of her comfort levels, partly born out of a comment she’d made about how intimidating I was when I spoke English. I was surprised because my behavior as she was describing it to me was undoubtedly shitty, and I could see how upsetting it would have been; not for the first or the last time in my life, I had a visceral sense of how different two experiences of what was objectively the same reality could be. But what shocked me the most was her admission that she’d been on the verge of saying nothing to me and simply moving out. Even to hear her say it gave me a kind of thrill—how fucked up, how intense, how much like something out of a Japanese novel!—but I also shuddered to think how I would have reacted if that was really the course of action she’d taken.
Except to dress up the shut-out in foreign garb is not fair, because I understood its mechanism, and understood why it prevailed in cultures where discussion of feelings was not encouraged—a category in which I included Britain. You repressed and you repressed and you repressed, told yourself you were not feeling a certain way, and then the feelings got too much and there was no holding them back and no reversing them: it was cut-off or nothing.
The thing was, this time I didn’t feel that was what was happening. If I’d sensed that D was looking for a reason to ditch me, or if the event had been caused or exacerbated by me, even if I’d been the one asking her to accompany me to the toilet, then I could have understood her reaction. In reality, I would never have asked her to accompany me to the toilet, even if I’d wanted her to, precisely out of a fear that it would make me too much, and therefore liable for ditching. Instead, I got the sense that her connection with me had been severed to facilitate a total erasure of the event from her memory. I was an inessential organ snipped out in order to access the malignant one, tossed into the trash without a second thought.
Looking back through my inbox, I find that I emailed her a year or so on from the ba’sari email—to check, I suppose, that the decision hadn’t been rescinded. “I had a dream about you last night,” I wrote, “and I think about you a lot. Are you okay?”
D had replied, to say she was fine, not thinking about the event. “Normal life with everything,” she writes. “But I still feel fatigue to that direction so I don’t feel like talking.” So ran the last ever lines exchanged between us. Casting an eye over her words, I still feel like an ice cube has been dropped down my back.
¶ nuru-nuru: the slippery sound of knowing the lingo
I AM TEACHING AN INTERMEDIATE lesson at the language school called “Describing Things,” whose aim is to build up the students’ stock of English adjectives. The students and I go through a number of photo-flashcards supposedly depicting certain attributes—a cactus, some green gunge, a shag pile carpet—and finish off with a game where one person describes something in the room for the other to guess, hopefully using vocab they’ve just learned. I’m fond of this lesson, and teach it whenever the syllabus allows, because I feel like this is the kind of English which is actually helpful in real-world conversations. More selfishly, I like hearing what adjectives my students choose to describe certain objects. This tactile, visceral area of language, where English is full of adjectives ending in y—spiky, glossy, shiny, and so on—is a realm of Japanese festooned with mimetic language; students often enunciate mimetics when they latch on to the meaning of an English word as a way of establishing a correspondence, or scribble them down in their notebook as a translation of a particular English word. Those two don’t correlate exactly, I frequently want to warn on those occasions, but mostly I don’t say anything.
