Fifty Sounds, page 27
¶ sara-sara: the sound of a very smooth fluid taking you by surprise (and being the most acceptable part of you)
YEARS PASS. I’M SINGLE, AND my life is small and solitary, and I cry a lot, even if I laugh a lot as well. At some point it dawns on me that I’ve ceased to be attractive as a woman. Throughout my time in Japan I’ve heard it said over and over again that foreign women are frightening to Japanese men, but I’ve never struggled much before. I was attracted to Japanese men, and women, and they were attracted to me, and that was just how it went. Now, I have the feeling that I’ve slipped off the plate. I am not going anywhere—for maybe the first time in my life, I sense this with a calm certainty. This isn’t an adrenaline-powered whirl of doom like it was back in Tokyo when I was twenty-two. Life is a snail-like crawl towards wherever I sense safety might lie, but the crawl takes me no closer to it. Most days I feel that I simply don’t have the energy to be this different from other people around me, to be treated with so much caution, fascination, surprise, horror. I don’t have the energy to be always slightly wrong, to be flinched from in corridors. Of course I’m aware that if I could just relax and stop being so self-conscious everything would be better, but in these days my cells feel like they are made up of uncontaminated self-consciousness. I’ve always been plagued by it, but now it is a vice-like physical grip.
I could talk here about all the myriad ways in which I feel disgusting, but I’ll limit myself to one very specific way—although if I allow my eyes to soften on it for too long then it blurs into every other form of disgustingness I feel to be mine—and that is: how it feels as though all I really want to do is talk about my feelings all the time, and how that puts me fundamentally at odds with almost every member of Japanese society I encounter. Really, it isn’t that I want to talk about my feelings constantly, but that I need to know it’s okay to talk about them, because only then am I able to relax and not have them constantly tugging at my consciousness all the time like a pack of needy children.
Even this need for empathy isn’t something I experience simply, but rather as a convoluted complex in perpetual dialogue with itself. Approximately a third of me thinks I should be able to talk about my feelings all the time to whomever, and people shouldn’t be threatened by that. I have a friendly face and I’m frightened of hurting people, and I’ve endured a lifetime’s worth of strangers coming up to me in the street to emotionally offload on me, not to mention those people I do know; now, now, it is payback time. Thus spake my entitled portion. A second third recognizes that a space where you can talk about feelings with someone is something that you build up over time; that I would be freaked out if someone I’d just met launched into a conversation about how much they disliked themselves, and considering that Japanese people are disconcerted by talking to me in general, it is hardly a surprise that they don’t open up that space for me. My third third just longs to be different. It wants to have the emotional palette of the people around me, the restraint and the decorum and the talent for repression. It wants to not have to be this guy, this woman, this clammy foreign person whose everything is too gloopy and too much.
At some point during this extended fallow period, I take on a private adult student, S. Later, we will end up ill-advisedly dating, but for the time being we are not together. Before it turns wintry and she starts coming to my flat for her lessons, we meet in parks and sit on benches for hours, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and reading children’s books, and occasionally straying off topic and talking about all sorts of weird stuff.
This situation has come to pass because S came to one of the classes I am giving in a café. A few weeks later I bump into her in the street, and we have an interaction that feels highly charged, though I can’t exactly say with what. There is something instantly and obviously different about her. Everything she says, each movement she makes is like some minor act of bravery, a brutal stroke through a lake of softness. She is tiny, her hair is short, she moves like a boy, her face is so delicate it could have been cast in porcelain. You can feel the conflict breathing in her, and you can feel how she turns from it. In retrospect, I would say, you can feel the unprocessed trauma, although I don’t put it to myself like that at the time—suppose I can’t, because that would mean not proceeding down the road we’re traveling, not trying to see her as she wants to be seen.
Before she ever told me a thing about herself, I could picture S as a kid: the tomboy who’d not have shown the slightest fraction of interest in me, who ran around daubed with mud and could do anything with her body that the situation demanded. These days she is immaculately clean, but she maintains a morbid fascination with bodily functions and anything commonly described as gross. Cuts, diseases, snot, scars, shit, drool, puke—it seems like she saves up her greatest enthusiasm for anything which it isn’t polite to describe in great detail, and when we start reading Dahl’s The Witches together, I can feel the way the words we read out seem to slot into her worldview.
I learn early on that she struggles when our conversations veer into territory that could be described as emotional. When I make the attempt to go down this path, she looks at me like a stunned rabbit then follows up with a barrage of factual questions. I am with her when I find out my mother has just been hospitalized, and before I know what’s what, I am being bombarded by inquiries about the medical system in my country, how it is that healthcare can be offered for free, what the problems are with the NHS, feeling, even as I answer dumbly in Japanese, a numb sort of confusion, until finally my brain clocks out and I stare at her mutely. And yet, so long as we are talking within her comfort zone, particularly on topics for which she has enthusiasm, there is a quality to her attention that feels extraordinary. Maybe it only feels that way because I am so starved of it. But in any case, with all that going on, we sometimes get tied up in strange conversations, more revealing because of what we don’t say. At these times I have the impression we are heading down a narrow alley, knowing that it won’t take us where we want to go but still ineluctably drawn further and further on, because all that matters for the moment is this forward motion, together.
Now, sitting at my desk in my one-room flat, facing the window that gives on to Osaka Castle, we are talking about childhood memories. Surprise surprise, both of us were weird kids, although differently so. I am describing one of my earliest memories to her, which even now I find hard to explain. I was sitting at my desk in reception class when I felt a tingling sensation in the back of my nose, like it was about to run. The next thing I recall, there was a great puddle of water on my desk, larger than my hand. I remember looking down at it, feeling totally bemused as to how that quantity of fluid had come out of my nose, and not having a clue what to do about it. In fact I don’t know what I did do about it in the end; it probably doesn’t bear thinking about. In any case, my memory ends with that scene, staring down at the puddle in astonishment.
As I sensed she might be, S is delighted by this conversational offering of mine.
“Woah! Your nose ran that much?” she asks, her voice soaring. “You mean all that sara-sara water came out of your nose?”
I know sara-sara as a word, but I never really know it until she says it now. The emphasis—saraSA’ra—seems to express in a way that now feels close to totally intuitive both how runny this water is and how excited she feels about its runniness.
Years later, I will translate a short story with a narrator who hears an anecdote stating that the first time Japanese people in a certain region saw Westerners drinking red wine, they believed it was blood. The narrator doubts the credibility of this because, as she puts it, “as if blood would ever be that sara-sara.” I deliberated long and hard on how to render “sara-sara” before finally opting for “runny”; now I think that “watery” would have been the better translation. But either way, it’s hard to imagine a native Anglophone focusing on that aspect of the wine, just as it’s hard to imagine an English speaker who had been told my nose-running anecdote focusing on the texture of the water, at least in that way. We might say, “Wait, a whole puddle of water came out of your nose?” But to pinpoint the smoothness, the textural quality of the water seems improbable, if not impossible as something to do in English, not exactly because we don’t have the muscles for it, but maybe because our muscles for giving expression to the sensate properties of things are less well developed than the muscles of the average Japanese speaker. We sound less good when we flex them.
In this particular moment, this precise tactility of the Japanese language dovetails so perfectly with S’s personality that it appears to me like a natural extension of it, and I feel a powerful hankering for this ability to root oneself in the specific, physical sensation. Never mind that S’s emotional life is clearly opaque to her, that she doesn’t really understand herself—in this moment, I wish I could be like her. I wish I could be smooth and watery, and not constantly attempting to serve up my viscous emotional stew at any possible opportunity. I wish I was different, and that this conversation we are having was the real world, for me as well as for her. Or, at the very least, that this was the only kind of communication that I needed. So we keep on talking, relating our various gross childhood anecdotes and trying to believe that our words are all that is the case.
¶ ho’: the sound of the xenophobe returning home, or being restored to magical normality by your friends, or tolerating yourself in photographs
SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE DOOM I trod were little pockets of breathable air, whose existence I owed entirely to my friends.
I know that when I’d first learned, right at the beginning of my Japanese education, that to say “I found a friend” you said tomodachi ga dekita, which translated literally into English as something like I was able to make a friend, I’d found it an amusing and endearingly childish turn of phase. Nowadays I thought nothing of it, but when students rendered it literally in English, as they often did, asking me “Could you find a friend?” or declaring proudly, “I was able to make a friend,” it still tickled me because of the way it seemed to imply talent, or effort, or a sense of achievement, none of which I associated with the act of making friends. I believed that finding people with whom to be friends was out of your control, not an art form or something for which you could claim any responsibility.
But then I met T, and before very long I wanted to shout it from the rooftops: I WAS ABLE TO MAKE A FRIEND! The friendship felt no more like something I’d accomplished personally through effort or talent than any in the past, but the sheer importance of what it represented to me generated a sense of achievement. Maybe my change in perception was as simple as this: never had I needed a real friend as much as I did then. But even if need greased the wheels for me and T, our bond never felt like one of convenience. Instead, there were elements of our friendship that I’d not experienced before with anyone. Specifically, I’d never before had this feeling of being safe to talk with someone about anything—to be as ugly and uncool as the occasion demanded, to speak about myself with unlimited seriousness in the knowledge that I’d be heard—and because we’d gone to those places, there was a trust that suffused all of our conversations, so that even when we talked about crass and superficial and extremely silly subjects, as often we did, it rarely felt like there was much pretense or artifice between us. We were both of us good at pretending, and had spent a lot of our lives burdened by a feeling of doing exactly that, as we discussed in great detail, so it wasn’t entirely clear to us how we had managed to create a space of honesty, only that we had. And this space announced itself physically—either immediately that I saw T or after a few minutes’ conversation, I would feel the relief pass through me, the tension of being inside my body lifting. It was like the videos of drain unblocking fluid you saw in adverts, where a pipe’s worth of gunge would be converted to a peaceful stream of clear blue in a sheer instant.
We talked about this feeling that we both had in the other’s company, and yet it was oddly hard to find the vocabulary for. Part of that, I think, was that it seemed slightly illicit to describe feelings that grew up between a woman and a man who weren’t in a romantic relationship. Maybe that was good; instead of falling back on banalities, we had to actually think about what it was that we felt. We had to speak of drain unblockers. Or: someone who recharged your batteries—that was T’s phrase, which sounded a lot better in Japanese than it did in English. We had more improvisational creative alternatives, too, and more emotional ones that came out after a drink or two, but the most standard phrase we used, and which became our go-to choice, was ho’to suru. Ho, with a sokuon after, was the sound of exhalation, and ho’to suru meant breathing a deep sigh of relief, the reassurance of having your concerns and worries taken away.
Up until that point, ho’to suru was not a phrase with which I had particularly good associations. It was common enough that I’d heard it in a variety of contexts, but the strongest connotation was with a certain section of students I’d taught over time who would tell me how relieved and comforted they were to return from a trip abroad and see clean streets and Japanese faces again, smell the scent of dashi billowing out from the restaurants, and speak their own language, because, “When it comes down to it, Japan is the best.” Another set phrase that these same people would come out with frequently was “I like traveling but I prefer Japan,” and when I asked why, the answer would be formed of some variation on the three big concepts: it’s safe, the food is delicious, and I can speak Japanese. And then they might say it again: In Japan, I feel ho’to. Or they’d ask me how to say it in English. From mouth after mouth, across different age groups and in different parts of the country, I had watched these sentiments emerge, dazzling in their uniformity, and when I was irritable I would think reflexively: fuck you. No really, fuck your stable national identity, your crimeless safe haven, your rich and unique culinary tradition. It felt like the smugness attached not just to the qualities of Japan, but also to the meta-activity of leaning back into and parroting the received narrative. And thus, over time, I’d come to associate the phrase ho’to with lazy patriots, uncritical, boring, scared people who lived oblivious to their own privilege, the kind of people who had never even considered what it meant, for example, for their country to accept so few asylum seekers, or why that could be seen as problematic for the third largest economy in the world.
Speaking honestly, I can’t promise that if I were back in Japan teaching right now, I wouldn’t feel this exact same rage all over again; even in my calmest moments, I believe this phenomenon merits genuine concern. I see something inherently problematic about the patriotic messaging that pervades Japanese society, and however benign and apolitical its expressions might appear in the context of an English class, I feel it shares an ecosystem with phenomena which are anything but. I could go further and say that I think that when “Japan is number one!” can pass as a simple expression of preference without calling for any unpacking, then that society is bound to have problems, and some of the shapes that those problems will take are nationalism and xenophobia.
And yet I would also say this: like most vehement fuck-you reactions, there was a backstory to this one too, a reason why I was taking the affront so personally. I also think that it was in part through being friends with T that my grievances began to heal. It was through experiencing a feeling of unbounded security for the first time in what seemed like forever—and not as a sudden burst of euphoria, but something drawn out across months, years—that I was able to accept (gradually, unwillingly, problematically) that it was okay to want safety. And then, in time, to see that in some way that was all I’d ever wanted, and had therefore immunized myself against ever wanting—scorned others for wanting, and resented when they actually got those desires fulfilled, and recognized it, and expressed it: ho’to. That ho’to was a reasonable thing to want and hope for and enjoy, although that didn’t mean you’d always get it.
When I think about feeling comfortable in this way, there’s one specific episode I remember; like the thermal imaging cameras you see at the airport that turn your body heat into lurid yellows, pinks and greens, it seems to cast in visible form something I’d never thought I’d be able to visually perceive.
It was summer, and more or less the worst that I’d been feeling. Great waves of self-loathing would wash over me when I was walking down the street or getting out of the shower or standing on the train, and it would take me all my energy not to double over, to physically flinch, from the horrendous spectacle that was myself as it flashed before my mind in the form of images that weighed a ton. Sometimes I didn’t manage it. Even when the invitation came to go on a day-trip with T and his boyfriend, N, to Awaji Island, I didn’t feel enthused. It was important, my therapist would tell me, that I battled through the waves and met with people, and though I found it nearly impossible to imagine how anything good could come of something which felt so awful, I did as she said. For a start, I said yes to T and N. When the morning of our trip came around, it was blistering hot, and as I stepped into their car, I felt only foreboding for what the day had in store.
Somewhere on the journey there, though, I began to realize that I didn’t feel too ill at ease. By the time we stepped into the cool underground recesses of the Tadao Andō temple, which from surface level looked just like a lily pond, I was having twinges of a different feeling: not perfect enjoyment, for sure, but held in place, as if I were part of a family. Was I being perfectly authentic in that moment? I probably wasn’t—as usually happened when it was the three of us, we all fooled around a bit, and the conversations we were having were hardly serious. But somewhere, somehow, I felt deeply comfortable. I could feel my lungs, breathing.
