On Tuesday I was awoken at 6:00 am
by the sunrise. Apparently my window was facing east. I got up, drew the
shades, then went back to bed. I awoke two more times when the phone rang, then
forced myself back to sleep. I hadn’t slept in for weeks, and this was my one
precious morning to do so. I rolled onto my side and wrapped my arms around the
bunched up comforter. I held it like I wanted to be held, and fantasized that a
lover was wrapping her arms around me and caressing me in my sleep.
At noon I could no longer force
myself to continue sleeping. I dressed and left for Miyakoshiya Café in Odori station. I might have expected
something posh, or at least something easy to find. Instead I wondered around
the station, alternating my gaze between signage and my cellphone GPS. After
asking for directions I followed an exit sign up an obscure staircase, to a mezzanine
level between the ground and basement floor, where a café was inauspiciously
placed.
I noticed that all the patrons were
elderly, which was a sure sign that the coffee would be bitter, and it was. But
I was left alone on an brown oak bar counter to type away on the keys of my
laptop while jazz music accompanied my writing, so I couldn’t complain.
After lunch I went back to the hotel, where I napped for an hour then
wasted time chatting on line for another hour. The conversation I had left me
uneasy. I thought about it long after I sent and deleted the messages. I was
hoping for closure. Something that I could forget, instead it all felt awkward
and unresolved. It continued to plague me even as I tried to forget it while
writing at the café. And I wondered to myself, why are there so many methods
that teach people how to remember, but not how to forget.
In the evening, I wandered into the Fab Café, another place recommended to
me by a friend. There I got to thinking about my identity
I have never found an identity that
really does me justice, that really is an expression of the many layers and
many forms that is me. I am a different person in every country, in every
language. My name changes, my friends changes, my behavior changes. I cannot
continue to be one person, the same person, all over the world. The same person
to everyone.
I have many selves.
They are not me.
They are all me.
They are separate selves. They
don’t know each other. They are incompatible with each other. But they live
together inside this one body, and they all fight for time in this one short
life.
We are all struggling with our
identities at some level. For me, I have never found an alliance with any
culture. But for others, as Tchaikovsky
said, “I am Russian, Russian, Russian,
to the marrow of my bones.” But maybe they are wrestling with other parts of
their identity, their sexuality, their relationships “what is my role in my
family?”, their places in society. We
struggle to grasp these identities, and we often fail to hold on to them
because they are always changing. Sexuality is fluid, our roles in our families
change with age, and our position in society is relative to the society that we
are in, and what we are doing at the temporal moment. Culture changes too, and we
change irrespective of our cultures. It is meaningless to try and cling to one
identity, to find security in one form. The cloak we wear cannot be worn for
long, and soon enough, it will be time to discard them for something that
offers a better fit.
And then it occurred to me, how many days had truly passed since I told a
Japanese woman who tried to introduce me to her foreign friends one night in
2008, “I didn’t come all the way
to Japan to hang out with a bunch of foreigners.”
It was true, at the time. But six
years later I am living here and hang
out with foreigners. The difference was that after months of living in Japan, I
no longer felt the desire to be special.
To be the only foreigner in a group of Japanese people. To be the only foreigner who shopped in the grocery
store of my obscurely small town, or the only foreign friend that a Japanese
person had.
I didn't long to feel special.
I longed to feel understood.
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