I FIND IT BY accident, pressed between two large volumes on the shelf. Though it has been over twenty-five years, I recognize it instantly: a mere sliver of a book, about half the size of an American trade paperback, with tan card-stock covers smudged from handling.
This is my copy of Yukiguni—in English, Snow Country—by Yasunari Kawabata, the first novel I ever read from start to finish in Japanese. I hold it up to my nose, breathe in the musty smell, and feel a terrible mourning for the loony stupidity of my youth. The feeling is so strong and so complicated, so full of what the Japanese call mono no aware, the sadness of things, that I can only stand there with the thin little volume in my hands, half-wishing I hadn’t found it, half-wanting to put it back.
Over the years, I’d come to think of myself as a failed student of Japanese: too soon frustrated, too easily distracted. But turning the pages of Snow Country, I am startled by the sheer amount of work I put into reading it. Notes are scrawled everywhere, in a childlike Japanese handwriting, and they contain almost no English. Rather than use a Japanese-English dictionary to look up the words I didn’t know, I’d limited myself to a regular Japanese dictionary and obtained the definitions in Japanese, which meant that here and there I was forced to branch off and define a word in the definition, too—again, without resorting to English. It was a purist’s semi-delusional procedure.
But then consider that I marked up my copy of Snow Country in a suburb of Tokyo, while living in a little six-mat room smelling sweetly of new tatami. I was a nineteen-year-old Japanese lit major who had never been so far from home, and I was both terrified and elated—the terror and elation sometimes hard to tell apart or disentangle, because I was also in love with everything around me: the local shrine with its stone steps and red gate, the trains clacking past, the smell of roasting chestnuts in autumn, the silvery drill of the cicadas at night. Of course, I fell in love with every woman I met, including my landlady, a widow in her sixties who would invite me in to eat red bean cakes and watch the sumo matches on her black-and-white TV.
I channeled all that desire and sense of being lost into learning Japanese, as if it were possible to slip into another life through another language. My notes focus only on grammar and vocabulary, the literal meaning of each sentence, but they seem to ache with an unspoken yearning. I didn’t simply want to understand the book: I wanted to be a part of the culture that had produced it, wanted to dream its collective dreams and share its secret codes—wanted to belong.
I probably don’t have to point out the absurdity of this wish. Japan was a pretty insular place back then, ambivalent about the outside world and uncertain about foreigners. Little kids would run from me on the street or, conversely, ask to touch my skin. There was no possibility of forgetting who I was, that I already had a history, a personality, a language, a culture, a family of my own.
But then again, don’t we ask for doomed and hopeless things from books all the time? Looking at my notes, I feel that incredible emotional hunger come back to me, and I realize that Japan showed me what books are truly for: they are laboratories for our desires.