THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE CLASS met twice a week in a little storefront belonging to a sumi-e, or ink painting studio. A couple of large tables, coffee cans full of brushes, scrolls in various states of finish hanging on the walls—a crow on a withered branch, a sprig of cherry blossoms. I was the only kid in a group of grown-ups that included a man with a mustache who fell asleep halfway through the lesson, and a fragile-looking woman who announced that she had just become a Buddhist and then smiled a nervous smile.
We made a circle with our chairs, and the teacher stood in the center. She held her hands in front of her, fingertips touching, and her strange beauty seemed to have something to do with the secret she was going to teach us. “Please listen and repeat,” she said. When she spoke next, the sounds moved as quickly as light in the leaves of the trees. I leaned forward till I was almost off the chair, watching her mouth and throat, her hand as she pointed to one thing after another: book, table, clock, lamp, pen.
An hour later, when my parents pulled up in front to pick me up, I came out staggering, light-headed. I could barely pull the car door shut. “How was it?” asked my mother.
“All right,” I answered, not wanting to reveal anything, wanting the experience to remain entirely my own.
“We stopped in a bookstore and got you these.” She handed me a couple of novels by Yukio Mishima, in keeping with her tendency to forget that I was only twelve years old.
“Tell us what you learned,” said my father, who was driving. “Tell us the word you liked best.”
I glanced down at my vocabulary sheet and chose the longest and spikiest. “Wakarimashitaka,” I said. “It means, Do you understand?”
Wakarimashitaka. Wakarimashitaka. My father repeated it a couple of times; he prided himself on his ear for languages. Learning Japanese had been his suggestion, a puzzled but hopeful reaction to the judo classes I’d been taking, their strangely disciplined physical mayhem, so alien to a family of pleasure-loving endomorphs like my own. Rei, my judo teacher would say, and we would all bow, priestly in our white suits. Hajime, and we would start to fight, pulling and twisting, smashing each other to the ground. Neither my father nor my mother understood why anybody would subject themselves to something so uncomfortable, or what all the violence might have to do with me, their sweetly obedient son. They tried to turn it into something that made sense to them, a different sort of self-improvement: learning a language.
“Anyone who can speak to them in their own language will rule the future,” said my father, strangely prescient about the rise of the Japanese economy in what was still only 1975. “Who knows where this could take you,” he said. “You could end up the first Jewish emperor of Japan.”
I set to work on that problem the very next day, after school—or on the problem I thought was that problem, though in fact it was different. Sitting in my room, I closed my eyes and imagined myself in a chair just inches from my teacher, listening to her say each word, repeating it back to her. Chair, book, table. I could see her lips forming the phrases. A kind of dark energy filled my body.
Looking back, can anything be more obvious? I was twelve years old, and desire was still a metaphysical thing. My head told me that there was just one world, and it stayed the same no matter how you described it, but my body knew differently: there were in fact two worlds, English and Japanese, male and female, and the words I was learning were tiny boats to sail me across. When, weeks later, I limped uncertainly through a short conversation in class about the weather—Ah, Robaato-san likes the rain? I like the rain, too, she said—it was like a bracelet clicking shut. She had understood me. We had spoken.
The English world wasn’t like that. In the English-speaking world, the two halves never quite fit together.
“Your father and I were engaged for years,” my mother said to me. “We couldn’t break up and couldn’t take the leap, so one weekend we just eloped. When I told my parents they were very upset, but eventually my father agreed to put on a big wedding for us.”
My mother and I were sitting in Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, waiting for the string quartet to enter, the lights to go down, the concert to begin. Her tone was lofty, as if we were two connoisseurs of human folly, as if we weren’t talking about her and my father, and thus about me. I folded my hands on my lap and smiled a completely frozen smile, my thoughts also frozen. It was impossible for me to think beyond my desire not to think.
“So on the day of the wedding,” she continued, “I panicked and told my father that I’d changed my mind and didn’t want to get married after all. And he said that was a wise decision and he would call and cancel everything, leave it all to him.” She laughed very quietly. “You see, I’d forgotten that I was already married.”
I nodded and tried to look unruffled.
After the concert, we went out to dinner at the sort of restaurant that was dark and glittering, the food rich and complicated—exactly what my father hated. My mother was eating mussels in wine sauce; she put one on my plate for me to try. “When your father and I were first married, I wanted to impress him with a big home-cooked dinner, the kind of thing he likes. I called him at the office, asked him when he’d be home, and then I cooked two big steaks, baked potatoes, and I waited. And I waited. He was an hour late, two hours late. I called his office, but there was no answer. I decided to eat my steak, and then I looked over at his and decided to eat that too, so it wouldn’t go to waste. And then I was so sick to my stomach that I barfed.”
“Where was he?”
“Some client thing.”
I have a vague memory of snails with butter and garlic: what I liked best about them was the long thin fork that came with them. I made myself busy, not looking up.
When I was listening to my mother, I felt as she felt, even when I didn’t want to. But when I stepped outside of her point of view, I immediately went back to loving my father with an extravagant sort of need. I would hang around his office with him after school, listening to him talk with his clients, and then when it got late and the windows went black, he would call home and tell my mother that we were on our way home for dinner, and then go back to talking and somehow forget to leave, until finally everyone in the room agreed that, even though there was more urgent business to discuss, they were all very hungry, and suddenly we were at a table in one of the fish restaurants near the Fulton Fish Market that my father liked when he was trying to lose weight.
I remember walking through the door of one such place with a group of clients and lawyers from my father’s firm. “Shouldn’t we call Mom and let her know?” I whispered to my father.
“Do you really want to go home and eat your mother’s pot roast?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Then we’re on the same page.”
We filled a big table. One of my father’s law partners was a skilled magician and did tricks with the breadsticks, making them disappear and reappear in people’s clothing in vaguely lewd ways. There was raucous laughter, shouting, many conversations that eventually converged on one low-pitched conversation. “I’ve got a strategy,” my father was saying. “Throwing doubt on the police investigation is the most important thing. It’s a frame-up. We were framed. That’s the line we’re going to follow.”
I always liked that sort of wizardry, as if my father could access some magic power inside him and wrap the clients in an invisibility spell that would protect them from harm, from the cruel vindictiveness of the police.
“What about the drugs?” the client asked. He was tall and very thin, I remember, with a bit of a mustache and wispy hair in a little ponytail.
“You guys didn’t know the drugs were in the trunk, because the car didn’t belong to you. It’s registered to that other guy,” my father said, and began to laugh, and we all laughed with him, because his laughter was big and exuberant and made us all feel safe and good.
When we got back home, I stood in the living room as my father and mother argued, my mother furious, my father puzzled, defensive. It was work, he told her, you can’t always control what happens with work.
“Forget about the dinner I made. You can’t get him back so late on a school night.”
“He’s learning about life,” said my father.
I trusted him completely; that feeling was such a deep part of me that I could never change it, even if I wanted to. The sense of mistrust bled out into everything else instead. My eyes would pop open in the middle of the night and I would wonder about the real meaning of things. I would worry about what I had said or what other people had said to me, what they had really meant, until my thoughts raced in circles and my legs twitched and I couldn’t go back to sleep.
But the Japanese world was infinitely simple, beautiful, clean:
Is this a book?
Yes, a book.
The subject of conversation hardly mattered. What mattered was saying it in just the right way, with the mouth almost closed and the body in just the right posture of dignified calm, so different from my usual attitude, which was anxious and fidgety, all drumming fingers and bobbing knees. What mattered was listening carefully for the answer and understanding each word. What mattered was the bracelet clicking shut.
Wakarimashitaka. Did you understand?
Hai, wakarimashita. Yes, I understood.
At school, I suffered from a terrible shyness, so self-conscious about what I said and how it might be heard that each word seemed to break apart as I spoke it. Was it the right thing or the wrong thing to say? Would people like it or be angry? Those thoughts spun in my head, even as I was talking; the effect was that I didn’t so much talk to anyone as watch myself speak on the TV in my mind, my heart in my mouth in case I inadvertently launched some terrible, irreversible cataclysm.
Instead, I went home and sat at the desk in my room and practiced writing kana, the symbols that the Japanese language uses to express sound on the page. Writing kana was like drawing tiny images of women, women sitting, standing, walking. Looking at those curving shapes, I could see my teacher standing at the center of our circle of chairs, her hand tracing the shapes of the kana themselves on the big pad she used to teach us how to write. “You’re getting better,” she said when I showed her my practice sheets. “Keep going.”
When she decided to move back to Japan, the word sad didn’t occur to me. It just felt as if something were suddenly out of place, and I had to sit and look out the window, searching among the rooftops. Before she left, I asked her, “How will I know when I’m fluent?”
“You’ll dream in Japanese,” she said.
Years passed, and I kept waiting for it to happen, flipping through my flash cards every night before going to sleep, writing down my dreams in a notebook each morning. I went to college, majored in Japanese, decided to spend my junior year at a university outside of Tokyo. The idea was to break down the wall between the classroom and the world—the wall that was holding back my fluency, my dreaming.
The problem was that Japan was so far. I was in college, yes, but I called home every night. Just the idea of going to a foreign country thousands of miles away frightened me so much that I couldn’t physiologically inhabit the thought: whenever I tried to imagine what living in Japan might be like, my mind went bright white, and a low hum filled my body, as if a wire had come loose inside the TV of my selfhood. The Japanese university application, the airplane ticket—I did all that mechanically, by rote, moving through the glare and the hum. On the day of departure, my father drove me to the airport, the two of us silent, staring straight ahead. My face felt swollen, as if I had walked straight into a wall in the dark. The best I can say is that it felt as if we were on the way to a funeral for someone we both loved dearly but whose name I couldn’t remember.
It wasn’t till I was on the airplane, waiting for us to push back from the jetway, that it occurred to me that I might be making a mistake. I jumped up and made for the front. “Where are you going?” asked the stewardess. Everyone else was buckled in. She was busy closing things.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get off,” I said simply.
“It’s too late, the doors are locked.”
My eyes went wide. The frozen sea inside me began to slosh. “No, you don’t understand.”
“Sit back in your seat. Right now,” she said. “We’re about to move.”
I went back and sat down, and then my mind went white like the blinding light from a naked bulb. I spent the next thirteen hours staring out the porthole at the sky, feeling my own emptiness mirrored there. The sun rose and set a couple of times: reds and yellows that made my head hurt. At Narita Airport, I followed everyone else off the airplane, not clear on where we were going or what I would have to do in order to wake from this stubborn dream. What frightened me most was the way the Roman alphabet had suddenly disappeared from the world. I had never understood how those familiar shapes signified the human voice, and thus human kindness. Signs were in kanji, the Chinese characters that look like dinosaur skeletons or the bones of dead birds, curled in on themselves. I’d learned about fifteen hundred kanji in school, enough to read a newspaper, but now I couldn’t understand a single one. Their voices had closed to me, like doors.
I believed so completely that I was lost that no proof to the contrary could convince me otherwise: not chatting quite successfully in Japanese with the cab driver, my voice a nervous teakettle singing, not sitting in my landlady’s parlor, a little plate of sweet bean paste balanced on my lap as we talked in Japanese about my life in the U.S. I understood in a distant, intellectual way that she was kind, but it did not register physically in my body. Instead, my mind kept drifting to the phone booth I had seen from the taxi window, standing incongruously alone at the end of the suburban street, with nothing else but houses and walled gardens around. I wanted to speak to my parents, to hear their voices, but we had agreed that international calls were too expensive. “Don’t worry, I’ll write every day,” my mother had said to me.
“Me too,” I said, with the distinct feeling that I was talking about someone else. I still didn’t believe that I was really going, though my flight was just a few days away.
Nobody stopped to consider how out of character this bit of economy was for us, given our general tendency to spend like sailors out on a spree. Nobody even bothered to find out how much a long-distance call might actually cost. I remember being confused about why we were so certain on this one odd point, but I couldn’t quite formulate the question, let alone speak it out loud.
I said good night to my landlady, and instead of walking over to the little apartment building next door, I headed down the street to the phone booth. When I stepped inside and pulled the folding door shut, the glass enclosure filled with light. Night had fallen, and the neighborhood was dark. I placed my hand on the receiver but did not lift it from the cradle.
The next morning, I got up as early as I could and tried to walk the five blocks to campus from my apartment. As my landlady had explained it, the route was simple, but I somehow managed to get mixed-up. Dead-end alleys, blank cinderblock walls, strange blind corners, and not a single street sign, or a soul to ask for directions: after a couple of hours of wandering and backtracking, I gave up all pretense of figuring out where I was going and just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, like a traveler lost in the desert. When by sheer luck I finally stumbled upon my little apartment building and staggered into my room, I had to lie down on the tatami, trembling.
An hour or two later, I sat up and wrote my first letter home:
Dear Family,
I’m here in Japan and everything looks incredibly tiny, like a scale model. My apartment is a single room and I can almost touch both walls when I spread out my arms. But there’s a big window and the floor is tatami matting and smells like straw, a very sweet smell. I love it.
I filled the sheet and sealed the envelope without ever mentioning that I had just gotten lost for an entire afternoon a block from my house—an experience like almost drowning in a foot of water. I was going to hover above all that: if I didn’t admit to being scared, then I wasn’t scared. But at the same time, the underlying meaning of my letter was that I was terrified and didn’t think I’d last another day.
The neighborhood’s little post office was straight down the street, so I walked over and mailed the letter the next morning and then ran back, nervous that my building would disappear. Once inside my room, I didn’t leave except to check the mailbox. Every few hours I would creep downstairs to open the little metal container and run my hand around the inside, then climb back to my room. I did this for about two weeks, until I found a letter inside, sitting there very modestly, as if it weren’t important. Heart banging hard, I tore open the envelope and pulled out the sheet of yellow legal paper, examined the blue ink, my mother’s big, looping script, pressed the sheet to my face and breathed in the papery scent. And then I read:
“Dear Robert,” it began, “I’m glad to hear you’re settling in.” She had gone to the supermarket and bought lamb chops; she’d taken her heels to the shoemaker.
I read it again and again, about a thousand times, at first overjoyed, and then obscurely disappointed in a way I could not understand. This was just a list of trivia. Where was the help I needed? After an hour or two, I felt almost annoyed, vaguely resentful.
I wrote back that afternoon, determined to try again. Classes had started, so I told her about the food in the cafeteria where I ate lunch on campus every day: the bowl of rice, the little dish of brightly colored pickles, the green tea poured from gigantic banged-up teapots the size of a watering can. “Things are off to a great start!” I said. Surely, she would get the message now.
Her reply: “Dear Robert, So nice to hear from you. It’s been raining the last few days.” She’d gone to the movies; she’d gone to the bank.
Our correspondence continued this way for an entire year. We were nothing if not dutiful, sitting down to write as soon as the other’s reply had arrived. I would say something about school, and she would list all the chores she had done that day. Her letters covered exactly one sheet of yellow legal paper, never more, never less. It took exactly seven days to get the next one, but I checked the mailbox every day anyway, the act of peering into the container part of my daily ritual of return.
At times, the sheer flatness of my mother’s letters made me suspect that something might be wrong. I would register that feeling for just a moment, in the unthinking way that you notice a drop in the daylight when a cloud moves across the sun. My heart would seize up, my shoulders tense and then relax. But I ignored it, because I didn’t really want to know if something was wrong. I was barely managing to get through my day as it was, walking the five mysterious blocks to school and not disappearing.
What I would learn when I returned to New York was that something was wrong: my father was in trouble with the law. Later that year, his office would be raided and DEA agents would carry away his records. The process moved with astounding slowness, and formal charges were still a couple of years away, but prosecutors were talking about weapons possession, drug running, drug selling, drug use. The source of these accusations seemed to be a long-time client, so there was an element of betrayal, as well—a sense that the world had been turned upside down and revealed as something different from what we had always thought. We had always thought that being a criminal defense family was really fun and exciting and glamorous because we got to see up close what other people only saw on TV.
My father fell into a deep depression. He stopped going to court and talking to new clients. He stopped going to his office. Current clients began hearing the rumors and leaving. My sister would tell me later that our father went raging through the house one night, saying he was going to call me up and tell me to come home; my mother ran after him, screaming that he better not go near the phone, weeping. My brother removed all the knives from the kitchen: it looked like my father might try to hurt himself.
Though I didn’t know it back then, my father’s legal problems had actually started before I left—which is why, I think, they didn’t want me calling from Japan. Letters were better: it was so much easier to say nothing in a letter.
Those letters sit in a box in the attic now: my mother saved mine and gave them back to me when I returned, and I saved hers and kept them. I got the box down the other day and began sorting through them, long enough to find the first couple in the sequence, the ones I’ve quoted here. But then my hands began to tremble, and it got harder and harder to breathe. I ended up putting them all away, closing the lid, and taking them up to the attic again.
THERE WERE PLENTY OF other foreign students at the university, but they were all grouped together in the dormitories on campus, a self-enclosed pack. I envied them but also chose to avoid them, because I didn’t want to speak any English. It had never occurred to me that the alternative would be speaking nothing at all. I was alone much of the day, but I could not shake my loneliness even when I was at school, surrounded by other people. I walked home enveloped in silence, went to bed in that same silence, woke in silence. In that bubble of isolation, my interior life swallowed the rest of me. I was entirely my interior. My interior felt paradoxically huge and also tiny, like a cramped and narrow closet. Going through my day was like watching the world through a peephole bored into the back of that closet, spying on events that were mysteriously fraught with a meaning I couldn’t know, a narrative that was always incomplete. Surfaces and stray details became important; the look of the street, the odd scratches on a car in traffic, faces and the clothes people wore. I would think about them in the silence of my little room, still not equipped with TV or radio. I’m alone repeated endlessly in my brain, a kind of emergency signal that I was powerless to turn off. Even though I’d been on my own at college for two years, I hadn’t ever learned to truly care about myself: to think that I mattered enough to not disappear when I was alone.
And then one day at the school library a student who needed help with his English homework approached me; I corrected some pages of writing; with Japanese politeness, he invited me home to meet his family. His sister took me to see some of the tourist sights around Tokyo and then introduced me to a friend of hers, who took me to a coffee shop to meet one of her friends, who then invited me to go sightseeing . . . In this way I began a strange, meandering journey from coed to coed, each playing host for a while, until she got tired of talking so slowly and passed me on to one of her friends.
Those outings had some of the feel of dating, but they were really just cultural encounters, a sort of cross-cultural proto-dating. On some level, I understood that I was being treated as a curiosity, but that seemed only natural to me and I never resented it. Isn’t that what the opposite sex is, at least at the beginning? A fascination, a hunger to know, an electric strangeness? Isn’t that what travel is? Foreignness? We sat in coffee shops and stared at each other across not one but two barriers, gender and culture, even as those two barriers blurred together and became one.
The good thing was that I didn’t have to agonize about what to say, as I had back in the U.S. Speaking in Japanese demanded my complete attention; there was no energy left over for self-consciousness. Just stringing a series of grammatically correct sentences together felt as if I were steering a gigantic ship in difficult waters.
The women would ask me question after question. What did my father do? How many siblings did I have? Where did I go to college? In Japan, government and the most prestigious corporations draw from the top universities only. When I said Harvard, the coeds’ eyes went wider; for the first time, Harvard seemed not a burden of expectation but something of value—it surprised me, because I’d never thought of it that way. But now I could see them suddenly lean forward across the table in the coffee shop. We were a little bit closer, to the point where I could almost imagine what it might be like to touch their hands. And then it would come out that I was Jewish, and they would lean a little closer still. Of course, that’s why you’re so smart, they would say. Is your family very rich?
Now wait a second, I said, the first time I heard this. It seemed like the opening to a Philip Roth novel. But I soon came to see that the stereotype was a complete positive for them, that nothing was intended but admiration. Rich, connected, smart: those were all good things.
“They say that Jews are the foreigners most like the Japanese,” one girl said to me. “They value family and education.”
“That’s true,” I answered, reasoning that this exactly summed up my own family, the messiness of reality aside. “We do.”
“And you speak such excellent Japanese.”
“Me? Not at all. I’m afraid I still have a long way to go.” I had learned to wave my hand in front of my face in the standard gesture of modest denial.
People were especially impressed when I got gestures right, even the smallest of them. She laughed. “You are a chinju.”
“What’s that?”
“A chinju is a rare and valuable creature, the sort that you find in a fairy tale.”
I liked the idea of myself as a chinju, maybe because the word felt archaic, rare and valuable in its own right. But I didn’t like the more common term that I heard all the time, henna gaijin, which meant “strange foreigner,” the kind of foreigner who showed excessive zeal in adopting Japanese ways. Foreigners were not supposed to do that. It was important that they remain foreign, a marker by which Japanese could define their Japaneseness. It was important that foreigners remain perennially lost, bumbling oafs who spoke too loudly and laughed without covering their mouths and failed to use chopsticks or take their shoes off at the door. And Japan, with its lack of street signs and its weird, non-geographic system of assigning house numbers, seemed to secretly collude in making them that way.
For this reason, a foreigner speaking Japanese in Japan was interesting to Japanese people as a sort of category confusion, an exception that proved the rule. There was, back then, a small number of Japanese-speaking Westerners who made a living appearing on TV game shows and variety programs; their one real talent seemed to be speaking Japanese while having blond hair. They would have to answer questions about various aspects of Japanese life, while expressing their surprise and admiration. Viewers loved this.
There was an idea that the language was too difficult for foreigners to learn, not only because of its complex grammar and the intricate cultural ideas about social status and politeness embedded inside it, but because it partook of the Japanese essence, which could not be understood by non-Japanese. You had to be Japanese to speak Japanese.
Deep down I agreed with that proposition: my desire to speak Japanese had already begun to blur with the wish to be Japanese. That wish was secretive and a little ashamed, because it was obviously pathetic and silly, on top of being deeply disloyal to my own origins. But I didn’t want to be a foreigner anymore, an outside person. I wanted to be an inside person, a part of this mysterious group of people who knew where the subways went and what tunnel to take to get to the exit and what the signs said and what honorific particle to append to a sentence when speaking to an elder—people who had friends and never felt lonely.
Foreigners who spoke Japanese made many Japanese people nervous: language was open and permeable in a way that race wasn’t, an unguarded border. People sometimes had a bad reaction, as when I asked an older woman on the train platform whether this was the train to Tokyo Station. She looked at me, scanned my face, her eyes went wide, her mouth dropped open, and she started to back up, waving her hands . . . Or the time I called the house of a schoolmate and her mother put down the receiver and yelled, “It’s the gaijin . . .” or the Japanese mother-in-law of a British classmate who said to me, Gaijin can’t speak Japanese.
Why not? I asked. It was a reasonable question since we were speaking in Japanese. Her daughter-in-law also spoke to her exclusively in Japanese.
“Because they can’t understand the Japanese kokoro,” she replied. “Only a Japanese can.” Kokoro means “heart.”
That assumption was deeply ingrained. I would speak to someone in Japanese and they would address their answer not to me but to the Japanese person standing next to me, as if that person had somehow put the words into my mouth. I would listen and respond, and they would answer the other guy, making eye contact, smiling, and bowing while ignoring me—whole conversations went that way. Yet I still tried. I practiced bowing in front of a mirror. I practiced hand gestures. Before sleep, I reviewed my vocabulary cards, wondering if I would finally dream in Japanese. But my dreams were always in English—worse, they were always in New York, full of the ache of longing for the home I had fled.
Finally, near the end of my year, as the date for returning to the U.S. approached, I had coffee with a coed so many steps removed from the original coed that they didn’t know each other, didn’t go to the same school, had no friends in common. There was a different feeling to this coed, too, a different atmosphere. At a time when Japanese women tended to wear highly gendered clothing, shirts with bows and flounces, skirts with pantyhose, lots of pink, she was in jeans and a brown sweater, no makeup. She brought something with her to the coffee shop to show me, I forget what, a book, perhaps, as if our meeting were something serious, a school assignment.
We met a number of times after that in coffee shops. She never suggested a trip to a tourist sight; she didn’t seem to be thinking of herself as somebody hosting a foreign guest. Finally, she made dinner for me at her place. I believe it may well have been the first time I’d been to a Japanese woman’s apartment, any woman’s apartment, and I felt as if I was seeing something mysterious and important, a glance into how I might be able to live, too. There was her bookshelf, with paperback translations of French and American writers. It led to an extremely inexpert kiss—almost a lunge—that seemed to shock her but not surprise her. The look in her eyes said that she had thought of this, too.
But we were out of time. I returned to New York and in September went back to college to finish my last year. I learned about my father’s legal troubles, the secret that my family had kept from me for a full year, that had nevertheless oppressed me as silence.
She and I wrote back and forth. I have those letters in the box, too, but no intention of looking at them. It’s not that they were empty, but rather, that they were over-full, and there was something about their fullness that made me feel dishonest and guilty, though I didn’t even know how to begin thinking about the problem. Looking back, I just wasn’t used to having feelings that needed describing. For the most part, I avoided saying what I felt. When I wrote to her, I felt the slippage of the written word, as I tried to find a convincing voice on the page—a voice that would convince her and feel genuine to me, too, but wouldn’t have any of the pain or embarrassment of actual truth—that wouldn’t do damage to either one of us. I never once mentioned my family’s crisis. But I felt false for other reasons, too. How did I really feel about her? The truth was that I hardly knew her, and I barely had the mental space to include her. I was in a sort of deep mourning for the person I’d thought I was, the family I thought I came from, and from that vantage point the whole world seemed unknowable. Was I writing to her because I missed her or because she was my link to Japan? There were times when I wrote to her thinking that she would pull me back somehow, rescue me. And there were other times when she seemed like an annoyance, irrelevant, because I would clearly never get to go back. The situation with my father was so bad, I couldn’t imagine the kind of personal liberation that Japan still represented to me, the dream of becoming some sort of new, free person. I would never learn to dream in Japanese.
I graduated from college, found a job at a publishing house, answering the boss’s phone, and then a couple of months later, got a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education to study at Tokyo University. It was unexpected: I was a second alternate. When I got the news, I quit my job, and within a couple of months, I was back in Japan, back in Tokyo, living in her neighborhood in an apartment she had found for me. Was I glad to be free of the troubles back home? Most definitely, but guilty, too, and I felt hobbled by the image of my father stretched out on the couch and staring at the ceiling, fat and unshaven, bleary-eyed from depressive insomnia. How could I leave them now in order to become Japanese? It seemed like the lowest form of betrayal.
She got angry with me often. I wasn’t attentive enough. Or I was too attentive. Why couldn’t I leave her alone sometimes? Why was I crowding her? I think she was conflicted about me. That shocked me; I considered myself so loveable, so fun, and so interesting. But she explained that she had grown up with the assumption that she would have to get married, that it was her job to find a husband while still in her mid-twenties, and that that husband would be Japanese, of course. She couldn’t waste time on a gaijin.
There’s a saying, she told me once. A girl is like a Christmas cake—it’s half price after twenty-five.
That’s terrible, I said, full of indignation on her behalf.
She didn’t want to get married, she told me; she wanted to work and pursue a career. But most companies didn’t want women hanging on in the office after a certain age. And her parents—her parents would be so disappointed.
Looking back, I imagine she believed that if there was no way out of getting married, then she should marry me. I was the most un-Japanese man she could possibly marry. I would allow her to continue working and have a career. The only problem was that she didn’t want to marry me: she wanted to marry a real Japanese man, someone like her father, someone her parents would understand and respect. Someone she could respect. And so my presence forced the issue in a really irritating way. In effect, I created the whole problem; it was my fault. It would be so much better if I simply weren’t around. And yet she didn’t want to break up with me, either. It wasn’t clear what the solution was.
All this charged and complicated talk about the meaning and direction of our relationship was terrifically upsetting to me. It wasn’t clear to me who wanted to marry whom, or who wanted to avoid marrying whom. It changed from day to day: sometimes me, sometimes her. In any case, all I needed was to hear the English word marriage and I would feel an electric charge zap my nervous system, stop my breath, scramble my brain. My consciousness would go white like a TV with a busted tube. The associations were with my parents’ marriage, which I considered, on one level, a priori perfect, since I loved them and considered them perfect in their complete imperfection, like mountains or great storms or wonderful chaotic cities (think Rome, think Taipei). On another level, however, what I had seen of marriage seemed like a continual miscommunication, two people arguing in two mutually unintelligible languages, shouting those mutually incomprehensible words across great chasms and through locked doors: anguished and lonely.
The Japanese word for marriage, kekkon, affected me differently, however. In Japan, at least back then, everyone got married. Single wasn’t an option. Kekkon was woven into the texture of things; it was soothing, it meant you belonged, you had a family, roots, a place to go home to at the end of the day, not like my miniature apartment, with its little stack of books and its single table and its silence. You weren’t lost, and you weren’t a gaijin. You weren’t alone.
At night, I went to sleep next to her, assuming that I would finally dream in Japanese. But my dreams were in English, even when she was in them, though we never spoke English together.
We didn’t argue about marriage or kekkon; we argued about everything else. “Do you understand?” she asked me once. We were back to that first word from the first day of my first Japanese class: Wakarimashitaka?
“I do understand, but I don’t agree.”
Her eyes narrowed; she looked at me as if I were a simpleton. “That makes no sense. If you understand, you must agree.”
“I definitely do understand. But I don’t agree.” Wakattakedo, sansei dekinai. I was saying that I could see her point of view, but felt her to be mistaken—that I had a different point of view. And yet even to my foreign ears it didn’t quite sound right, as if I were combining two things that shouldn’t go together.
“Then you don’t really understand,” she said, as if correcting a grammatical mistake. “In Japanese, understand means agree.”
“But I don’t agree.”
“Then you don’t understand.”
“But I do understand. I see exactly how you feel. I just think you’re wrong.”
We went round and round, stuck at a cultural impasse and also a battle of wills. The two of us surprised, increasingly stressed, by this ridiculous linguistic problem, but unable to find our way out. It would have been easy enough to simply say, Fine, I don’t understand, but I wouldn’t do it. I prided myself on understanding, on empathizing. That was my unique skill as . . . whatever I was, an American observing the Japanese around him like a pickpocket looking for an easy mark. An actor studying for a role. A shape-shifting chinju ready to steal a new form. A dutiful son who imagined himself (it was always an illusion, probably) taking care of troubled parents, so that, in turn, they could continue taking care of him.
We solved it in the best worst way possible: I helped her get into graduate school in the United States. With a graduate degree she could have a real career in her field, perhaps even work in the U.S. instead of Japan; there would be more opportunity for a woman in the U.S. In a hallmark move, I arranged for her to stay with my parents, whom she came to loathe in a way that felt, well, a little ungenerous—their lives were unraveling, after all. Had I thought she might do something to shore them up? It’s possible. The way she saw them, the accuracy of her lampoon of them in her letters, hurt me deeply, though I didn’t defend them. In time she moved out and we dissolved. Maybe that was the intention all along—to find a way out that didn’t require my saying that I simply wasn’t ready yet.
But that was still in the future. I remember the day I saw her off: after she was gone, I walked to the subway, feeling as if the city would swallow me up, that it would pull me under as the sea pulls down a tired swimmer. I had so much time now and didn’t know how to fill it. I started spending hours in the library, reading books in English, just for the soothing familiarity, the reminder of the safety of home, and because I found it too depressing to finish things, I wanted them to be long. That’s how I alighted on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Over the weeks and months, little by little, I read it to the end, feeling as if each of those arcane stanzas with their antiquated English and complicated rhyme scheme were a sort of crossword puzzle containing the answer to my loneliness.
I can’t quite remember exactly how I met Mr. Tanaka, though I know it was through a friend—that chain of acquaintance once again. Mr. Tanaka was a Buddhist priest. He was in his thirties, probably, and he dressed in ordinary street clothes; there was nothing obviously priestly about him, other than his shaved head. Though I kept expecting him to say something philosophical and priestly, it never came.
We were taking a little walking tour of his neighborhood, which was in Shitamachi, the oldest part of Tokyo, full of little shops and narrow alleys dotted with flashes of great beauty—a red arch the color of lipstick, a flight of stone steps leading somewhere shaded and mysterious. It was the kind of place I could see making my own and never leaving, forgetting the rest of the world even existed—the kind of place that made me hungry to belong.
We ended up at his temple, a squat, muscular structure with a swooping tile roof and massive pillars, squeezed between two modern buildings maybe four stories tall. We stopped at the incense holder and lit sticks of incense and waved the smoke onto ourselves. The interior was impressively dark, a marvelous Buddha statue sitting inside, glinting brass: Kannon, the goddess of compassion. But what I remember best is Mr. Tanaka’s wife in a white apron standing on the gray granite steps in front of the temple after we stepped outside again. She had a gentle smile on her face that made me ache.
Those inchoate feelings. I realize now that I wanted the Tanakas’ temple to be my temple, my home, that I wanted to live there with them. But they had children already—a little boy had come out to stare at me, wide-eyed.
Mr. Tanaka walked me back to the train station. My mood became wistful. I hated to go home. And as with many acquaintances, I wasn’t sure when or if I would ever see him again. “Thank you for the tour,” I said to him, bowing.
“I’m wondering,” he said, and then asked if I’d be interested in teaching English conversation to a group of priests to which he belonged.
I hesitated. English conversation was a big thing in Japan: people paid huge fees just to talk to a native speaker for an hour, to sit next to their foreignness, their bulk and hairy hands, listening to the strange syllables of English floating through the air. But I avoided English—other than The Faerie Queene—and I avoided foreigners and anything that foreigners typically did. The idea that I might be considered a typical foreigner filled me with dread. I’d been tempted into teaching English conversation only once, at an engineering firm, but my classes contained so little actual English, and so much instruction in Japanese, that I was summarily fired.
But I thought of the low dark temple and the Kannon glowing in the dark. I thought of Mrs. Tanaka and her smile. I said yes. And it turned out that Mr. Tanaka’s group was perfect for me: the less English we spoke, the more we joked around in Japanese, the more they liked me. They looked relieved that nothing foreign would be required of them. We all went out drinking after class, and though I had feared that I would end up being treated as an on-call English-conversation resource, a professional foreigner, English was instantly forgotten.
Maybe that was the priestly thing about them, the way they included me effortlessly, without any self-consciousness. But I never lost the odd sense that I wanted something from them. That I wanted them to do something for me, or tell me something that I needed to know.
I saw Mr. Tanaka as much as possible, taking advantage of his good nature. I remember he once took me to a temple, and the temple grounds were full of tiny Buddha statuettes made of stone, some of them worn, stippled with lichen, others clearly new. These were Jizo images: Jizo is the guardian of children and travelers. You see them by bridges and on the side of the road wherever there’s been a traffic accident. Through some kind of deep sympathetic transformation, they look a bit like babies themselves: bald head, round face, mysteriously calm expression. Some were dressed in bibs and smocks like babies wear; others had offerings of plastic toys, particularly pinwheels. Imagine an ancient temple yard, full of row upon row of baby-like figurines, a pinwheel planted before each one, spinning in the breeze.
“You are familiar with the story of Jizo?” asked Mr. Tanaka.
The rows of statuettes seemed like the loneliest sight in the world, the wish for rescue. They made me think of my brother and sister and my parents, their lostness. Of course, I was really thinking of my own. I felt an embarrassing rush of emotion and became terrified that I might suddenly begin to weep, that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.
“Yes, of course,” I said, trying to keep it as light as possible. “As a traveler, Jizo-sama is my guardian Buddha.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Mr. Tanaka, glancing at me and then looking away. “Robaato-san, the other guys and I have been wondering if you’d be interested in joining us one evening to play Tosenkyo. We could really use you.”
I never told Mr. Tanaka or any of the others about my family. Instead, I learned how to play Tosenkyo, a curious Edo-period drinking game, supposedly much loved in the pleasure quarters, in which you sail a fan across the room as if it were a paper airplane. The aim is to knock a target about the size of a saltshaker, called the “butterfly,” off the box on which it stands. The butterfly is made of cloth; it is stuffed and brightly colored and looks something like a miniature jester’s hat, with little bells hanging from either curved end. Scoring is arcane and wonderfully arbitrary, since it is based on nothing but how the butterfly falls relative to the fan and the box—each possible configuration named after a chapter from The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century aristocratic tale of loss and erotic longing. Miss the butterfly completely, which scores nothing, and it is called “Calligraphy Practice,” after chapter fifty-three, when the heroine Ukifune enters a nunnery to escape her jealous lover, Kaoru. Knock the butterfly off, but in a way that lands butterfly and fan on the ground separately, and it is worth just a single point: “Village of the Falling Leaves,” after chapter eleven, in which Prince Genji has a brief affair with a woman of low rank. But all sorts of artful and surprising havoc is possible: the butterfly landing on the tatami standing upright (chapter forty-eight, “Young Sprout,” ten points); the butterfly hanging from the edge of the box, failing to fall (chapter three, “Cicada Shells,” eighteen points). Most improbable of all is probably “The Floating Bridge of Dreams,” in which the butterfly lands upright on the tatami and the fan comes to rest on top of the butterfly but on top of the box, too, creating a sort of bridge. It references the last chapter of Genji, in which Kaoru finds Ukifune’s nunnery. He spies on her there, but that’s where the novel ends, in that suspended moment between obsession and the possibility of release. We don’t know what he’s going to do.
I was pretty deft with the fan. We put together a team and joined a sort of local league, something like a bowling league, made up of all sorts of people from Shitamachi, not just priests—I remember there was an insurance agent with deadly aim on one of the opposing teams that had us a little cowed. The key, I found, was to get into a sort of Zen state and just let the fan go while staring hard at the butterfly, forgetting everything else. At that moment, you are not yourself; you are not a gaijin, not a chinju. You are not speaking but you are not silent, either, because you are not thinking. There are no words in your head in Japanese or English. You are just sending the fan on its way through the air. All you have to do is let go.