I
My grandfather, Takeo Nagai, was the first person I knew who was serious about writing. In the summers when my mother, brother, and I visited his house in the Japanese countryside, every afternoon Takeo sat down at his desk with his diary—a small notebook with a cover, a different color for every year—and composed his entries with a fountain pen. Every page, printed with the date on the right-hand side, had narrow black lines for him to fill with commentary. Like most old people, my grandfather wrote the traditional Japanese way, from top to bottom, right to left. He described the flowers blooming and the tomatoes ripening in the garden, the walks he took with my brother and me, the books he was reading and the neighbors who came to visit. Each day—no matter how eventful or quiet—was made to fit precisely in the allotted space. For my grandfather, writing was about discipline.
His desk was in the middle of his study, where we sat on the traditional tatami floor on thin cushions. Facing him across the desk, I worked on my “picture diary,” a summer vacation assignment. In my notebook, the pages were divided in two: the top half was blank for pictures, and the bottom half was lined horizontally for writing. Because we were children, our words traveled sideways from right to left, Western-style. I described and illustrated my swim in the river, my brother and me eating watermelons in the garden and spitting the seeds on the ground, and Takeo showing us the summer constellations at night. I colored the swimmers with crayons and painted the river with blue watercolor. The oil in the crayons repelled the water and kept the figures from blurring. I wasn’t a child who could stay within the lines. My pictures often crossed the divide and smeared the words. The long stories I told—complete with the things my mother, grandparents, or aunts had said—ran the bottom half and wound around the margins; the last few sentences were written sideways but going up, across the top, then down the edge of the paper. Takeo complimented my writing and drawing, but my notebook was a mess. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to graduate from my childish pictures and keep a diary exclusively with words.
Takeo was an educated man who became a country schoolteacher and rice farmer after World War II, when the government took the land he was supposed to inherit from his parents and redistributed it among their tenant farmers. Instead of living on the rent he collected, he ended up teaching school by day and coming home to work the few rice paddies his family was allowed to keep. By the time I was in grade school, in the early 1960s, my grandparents were able to live modestly on his pension and on the money my mother and her siblings sent them from Kobe, Osaka, and Tokyo. Takeo finally had time to read and write, but he didn’t resume writing poetry or start the book about Japanese literature he might have written if he had led a quiet life of a scholar. By then, he was in his sixties. The only people he knew, besides his family, were country schoolteachers and farmers.
My grandfather did not confide his regrets to his diary. The peaceful commentary he made about the weather, the garden, his reading, his grandchildren, and neighbors carried the burden of what he couldn’t say even to himself. For him, keeping a diary—giving every day the same space and weight—was a discipline of containment. He was glad to see my diary with the words stretching beyond their boundaries because he knew how lucky I was to grow up in a different time.
My mother, Takako, escaped the poverty her family had been reduced to when she married my father—an engineer who was on his way to becoming a division head at a prosperous company in Kobe. Though my father, Hiroshi, was not faithful to her, it wasn’t unusual for a man of his generation to have girlfriends or mistresses (called Nigo-san, or Mrs. Number Two). Takako thought she could accept the way her marriage had turned out, just as her father had resigned himself to becoming a farmer instead of a scholar. She told herself that she had my brother and me, a comfortable home, and a husband who provided well for her financially. Until I was ten, we lived in an apartment house near the sea, where her friends from the neighborhood gathered for needlework and tea parties, which she had organized. Takako wrote weekly postcards to her parents about the flowers in her garden, the excursions she’d gone on with my brother and me, the clothes and the tapestries she was sewing and embroidering. The postcards were her versions of Takeo’s diary—cheerful news that fit on one page in her neat handwriting.
When we moved to a new house in a quiet neighborhood up on a hill, Takako found herself spending the whole day alone while my brother and I were at school. Her friends couldn’t easily visit since they lived an hour away, and the women in our new neighborhood were older, with retired husbands who were around all day and expected their wives to wait on them. Hiroshi seldom came home anymore. His two girlfriends called our house late at night, looking for him. Each cried when Takako or I answered and said he wasn’t home because she knew then that he was with the other girlfriend. No longer able to overlook what a sham her marriage had become, Takako started confiding her thoughts to a diary.
Unlike Takeo’s diary, Takako’s didn’t have dates printed on its pages. It was a small plain notebook with a red vinyl cover and horizontally ruled pages. The year was 1968; most adults wrote sideways by then. Takako marked the date of each entry, but she didn’t write everyday. She started in January, wrote several pages once or twice a week until April, and then she stopped. All summer, she made only one short entry—like Takeo’s—about her garden in July. Then she started up again in November when the weather turned cold and she felt trapped in a house she hated and in a marriage that no longer made sense. She wrote once or twice every week, always coming to the same conclusion: her life was a complete waste; even her children would be better off without her.
Takako left her diary on the kitchen table when she killed herself in March 1969. She had thrown out or burned the last few pages, leaving a crooked scissors-blade edge near the binding. I couldn’t imagine what she could have written on those pages that were worse than those she’d left intact. When she first turned to her diary, she must have been hoping for a relief. She believed she could express her unhappiness, and once and for all be done with it, or maybe she was trying to put her feelings into words in order to contain them, the way her father had tamed his bitterness and regrets. However, her despair only got greater and greater the more she wrote about it.
I started keeping a diary when I was thirteen, the year after my mother’s death. By then, my father had remarried, and I was no longer allowed to see my mother’s family. No one at our house ever mentioned her. My brother, four years younger than I, called our stepmother Mother and followed her around the house, hanging on her every word. My father refused to give me Takako’s diary, but I wasn’t surprised anymore by anything he said or did. I wrote in mine because I was afraid of forgetting the life I once had with my mother.
My diary mixed the daily events—school, friends, books, sports—with the memories they brought back. I wrote about seeing my mother’s favorite paintings again at the city museum I’d revisited with friends, walking in the public gardens she’d taken me to in Kyoto, and practicing the breast stroke she had once taught me in the river near her parents’ home. At least in my notebook, the past and the present existed on the same page. I used the ruled composition books with speckled blue or black covers. At the time, I attended a bilingual junior high school. Because I suspected that in my absence, my stepmother looked through my desk drawers, I wrote in English—a language she could not read.
Perhaps it was this choice of language that, over the years, transformed my diary into a writer’s journal: not simply a personal record of activities, reflections, and feelings, but a working notebook for words, images, stories, and ideas. A few years before I moved to the U. S.—first, to attend high school for a year at sixteen and then, at twenty, to finish the last two years of college—I was already learning that putting my daily life into words involved a kind of translation.
II
I write my journal entries by hand, with a blue Pilot Vball Extra Fine pen that has a see-through barrel—the ink inside sloshes up and down, making tiny bubbles. I’ve given up on fountain pens because they scratch, leak, and smear. The Vball pens write the way I imagine a fountain pen would—if I could only find the right one—smoothly with a light touch. An ideal notebook for a journal is a “blank book” with a pretty cover: marbled paper, art-deco designs, stenciled stars or flowers. A blank book is smaller than the speckled composition book and easier to carry around.
When I travel, I write in my journal everyday. In 1991, when I went back to Japan for the first time in thirteen years, my grandfather had been dead for ten years but my grandmother was still alive. I spent a weekend at the old house where she was living alone at ninety-three. We looked through the stacks of photographs she’d kept—some from before my birth—and she told me a story about each one. I went to bed in the same room where I used to sleep on our summer visits, woke up in the middle of the night, and walked into my grandfather’s study. I sat at his desk, which was still in the middle of the room, and wrote down everything I could remember from my grandmother’s stories about the photographs to the tiny red potatoes we dug in her garden. The rest of the trip, I saw my other relatives, my father and stepmother and a dozen old school friends. Because I was jet-lagged, I woke up at two or three every morning, ready to review the preceding day’s events in my notebook. The moment my eyes opened was the only time I felt completely clearheaded. In one relative or friend’s house after another, I sat in the empty kitchen with a glass of water, writing until dawn.
As soon as I returned to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I was living at the time, the trip seemed more like a stray scene from my childhood than a recent event. The Japan of 1991 felt just as far away as my childhood, both in time and distance. This sense of distance was what I needed to write my memoir, The Dream of Water, but without my journal, I wouldn’t have remembered enough details to reconstruct the scenes I put in the book. Though I had a handful of photographs I’d taken, I’m a terrible photographer—especially of landscape shots; I can seldom recall what I was trying to photograph because everything looks off kilter. During the trip, I’d jotted down reminders like “4 P.M. Meet Miya [friend] in Kobe” in my pocket calendar. The calendar helped me keep track of the sequence of events, but the brief notations wouldn’t have made much sense without the journal, which described the green dress Miya was wearing when I spotted her at the train station, the iced coffee we drank at a café in the underground shopping center, and the eighth-grade skit we remembered together. Each time I opened the notebook, it was like stepping into the past—my recent trip and the more remote past of my childhood. This double sense of stepping back became essential to my conception of the memoir.
On my subsequent trips to Japan, or to Wisconsin where I don’t live anymore, my journal has become more than a recording tool. I carry it around like an amulet as I bounce between nostalgia and fear—between the shocks of “How could I have left this place?” and “How could I have lived here at all?” I can see just how my life would have turned out if I’d stayed, and I’m amazed, once again, by how regretful and relieved I am about leaving. I want the visit to last forever, and I can’t wait for it to be over. The journal allows me to immerse myself in this tremendous confusion without drowning. It reminds me that I’m here not only to experience everything but also to translate it into words. This very moment, too, will begin to make sense on its pages. Keeping a journal is the difference between living a life and writing about it.
When I’m home—which is now in Washington, D.C.—I don’t write in my journal everyday. If I’m in the middle of a long writing project, months might pass between the entries. I can only come up with so many words every day, and I need to save the best for the book I’m drafting or the essay I’ve started. At these times, there’s not much to record anyway, since, by design, I live a steady, uneventful life while working on a long project. When I take a break and turn to my notebook, it’s to explore new ideas, images, or stories rather than to record anything specific. In fact, I need to write in my journal, because I don’t know, anymore, what there is to record; I have to get to know my thoughts again. After a month or two of working on the same project, my mind feels both too full and too empty. There’s nothing in my head, it seems, except the same old ideas I’ve been stuck on forever.
I start my journal writing by rereading the last entry to remind myself where I’ve been. Then I describe the few mildly interesting things I’ve seen or heard since that last entry, whether they come from my life or from my reading. I don’t expect to be coherent or articulate. I let myself repeat or rephrase the same words and sentences as many times as necessary. I might begin with a list of furniture in someone’s living room, the books on the coffee table, the colors of the dinner plates, salad plates, and coffee cups. Or maybe all the dinnerware was white and there were no books on the coffee table or anywhere in the house. I have no idea if any of this material will be useful in any way. Usually, the writing moves from description to speculation—“Why does so-and-so have furniture like this? Is this the kind of dinnerware I thought she would have? If not, what about this is surprising? What does it say about her, or about me for noticing it?”
The loose, speculative writing is a grownup version of the picture diary I kept as a child. I go over the same scene two or three times, using various methods that possibly conflict with each other and blur the picture, letting the words stretch beyond the lines and get messy. I allow my thoughts to roam and meander rather than come to any point of order too soon. In the process, I usually discover that my mind’s not as empty as I feared. There are a lot of ideas I’ve been tossing around, and they even have an overall pattern or direction. A new realization has been shaping itself, trying to make itself known to me. I can almost articulate it. The journal, plus living alone, allows me to find out what my ideas are without boring another person with an observation I haven’t yet made clear to myself, or worse, embellishing the words to entertain or impress the listener before I know what they really mean. In my notebook, I can look for the story I would tell if I wasn’t playing to an audience.
My journal is a combination of my grandfather’s and my mother’s diaries. My thoughts grow bigger and repeat themselves like my mother’s, though not with the same tragic consequences; and then they fall into order like Takeo’s, although with much less discipline. I don’t often reread the journal entries I’ve made when I wasn’t trying to record a specific event. Those speculative entries are more like grocery lists and work without my having to read them. For example, half the time I drive to the Whole Foods store near my house, I get out of the car and realize I’ve left my list on the kitchen counter, but I don’t rush home to get it. As I walk up and down the aisles inside the store, I can remember which items were on the forgotten list. Making the list has sorted out the groceries in the aisles inside my head. The right things resurface in my memory at the right time, because I’ve written them down. I keep a journal so I can forget everything and still remember it.
As important as my journal is to me, I wouldn’t want the notebooks kept beyond my lifetime. Because I don’t use my journal, usually, to rehash petty hurts and resentments among friends (they’re not interesting enough to write about; they bore me even while they’re happening), there isn’t much in it that would hurt people close to me. The harsh observations in it are about people—like my stepmother and my brother—with whom I’m no longer in contact. I don’t keep a lot of secrets in person or in writing. The details in my journal—about my marriage, for example—are earlier versions of the stories I ended up telling publicly, so there won’t be big surprises for anyone. All the same, I don’t want anyone reading my journal, in or after my lifetime, because the writing in it is not even remotely my best. The wordy, trite, repetitive sentences I scratched in my notebooks shouldn’t outlive my need for them.
I’m going to leave my notebooks to my friend Jim, who is an artist and a Catholic priest. Jim takes the books from small-town churches and libraries that closed down and builds sculptures from them. The hardbound books, many of them with edges colored red, yellow, or green, are as cheerful as the blocks we played with as children. When he finds a particularly beautiful book no one wants to read anymore, he cuts out the middle and turns what is left into a shadow box, with beads and religious paintings placed inside like a reliquary. Or he crinkles all the pages till the book stays open like an accordion or a seedpod. I like to imagine the words falling off the edge to scatter and disappear.