An Interview with My Hindsight

So, how was your first year in Japan, anyway?

It was very much like a free fall. I lunged back, took a running head start towards the edge of that proverbial cliff, and jumped. Like jumping right off the edge of the western coast of Canada, holding this enormous, blind faith that Japan would catch me. I felt a little as our forefathers must have felt — you know the ones, the ones who finally decided to challenge the theory that the world was flat and ended at the horizon. Of course, modern collective knowledge reassured me that there was much to see beyond my horizons, but it took a bit of faith that first time, willfully throwing myself past the boundaries of firsthand knowledge and into the realm of — what had been, up until then — imagination and hearsay.

Did Japan catch you?

Not right away. Hence the free fall. Only now that I’m out of the free fall can I look back and say, “Yeah, the free fall was a necessary state of evolution,” because when I was in it — well, it sucked. I was falling and falling, and getting caught on all of these… things along the way. Things like fitting in with the ex pats, fitting in with the Japanese, negotiating the ways in which I’d never fit in with either group, no matter how hard I tried… changes in food supply and availability, something you’d never expect to shake you up quite as badly as it can… language issues. University instills you with this illusion that you know all sorts of things, like how to speak Japanese, for instance, but then you get out into the real world… and it’s like that Hungarian Horntail in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Studying Japanese from a textbook in Canada is like holding a miniature model of the dragon in your hand, but then you come to Japan and realize that the language is massive, and fire-breathing, and unpredictable, and that not only do you have no clue how to subdue it, but that you’ve also pretty much forgotten everything you thought you knew in the first place.

But you’re out of the free fall now, right?

I think so. As I said, for the longest time I was falling, and getting really frustrated and trying to see the ground through all of the “issues” I kept on getting snagged on. I was tired of the issues and the challenges. I was impatient. I just wanted to hurry up and hit the ground running. But then it occurred to me not to be so impatient. This isn’t a race to get back to Canada and go to grad school. This is a rare opportunity to check out of “real life” for a while, tuck myself away in an obscure little sphere of time and experience — a little floating world — and allow myself to get pelted by the weird challenges entirely unique to this place. Well then, as soon as I’d riddled that out — it took me an entire year — lo and behold, there was the ground to break my fall.

How is running on the ground different from free falling?

Like NIGHT AND DAY. Once you’ve been through the experience of having a ton of expectations and having nearly all of them disappointed, you learn to be a lot more wary of expectations. And then its like something gets unclogged, and things start to happen. It doesn’t take quite so much effort to form relationships with people, situations no longer feel quite so alien, even the lights in your apartment will seem to hit the furniture at different angles. I can recall so many nights last year, taking the train home from Tokyo, feeling utterly vanquished by the city’s hollow restlessness and how it wouldn’t hesitate to further hem me in my misery with its endless mess of jam-packed concrete, escalating heat, and impersonal crush of human bodies. Contrast that with Friday night two weeks ago, in the car of a Japanese friend of a Japanese friend, freely cruising the highways of rural Saitama until we found this mountain in Chichibu, far enough removed from the incandescent glow of Tokyo to see the stars. Up we crawled the hairpin road, right to the very top, where we got out of the car and seated ourselves along a low concrete divider. No sounds, save for the lowing of cattle from a nearby farm, the tinkling of wind chimes, and the subdued nighttime chirping of the cicadas. Above us, the stars seemed to echo the sound of the wind chimes, visually, and ahead of us, dropping away from our feet, lay the lights of Saitama, congregating into a very bright Tokyo far down low on the horizon. Rows of pitch-black, pointy mountains framed the scene.

“I dare you to yell something,” said the Japanese friend of my Japanese friend. All I could see of him was the bright orange tip of his cigarette in the darkness.

“Okay.”

I attempted to gather up every feeling, every remnant of frustration I’d felt over the past year, all of those impulses to speak, yell, or cry that I’d never acted upon and release them all in a single, Godzilla-like roar.

And what was it about roaring at Tokyo from the top of a mountain that shifted things, imperceptibly?

For once there was no hollowness, no echo. Rather, the landscape seemed to catch me, snatching my voice from the abyss to hold and mull it over, thoughtfully.