At my work I meet imminently talented beings whose creative practice follows a path of precision. The time I spend with these artists, talking to them about their vision, gathering critical responses to their work, and critiquing it myself, makes me aware of the generosity of their imagination and of the desire to share in return. The kindred feeling I have found in Koenji is not delineated by the culture of a country, but by creativity. The artists draw, paint, sculpt, shoot, move, play, use collage and computers; and I write. We communicate through a silent, common respect.
At the center of this wordless creative utopia is Kenzo-san’s gallery: an intimate exhibition space, thoughtfully assembled with softly lit walls and simple furniture, with spare surfaces given over to displaying the work of friends, their business cards, exhibition brochures, and maps to their own galleries. The space Kenzo-san allocates me encourages my own creativity; on my first day, he invited me to sit at a long table and laid portfolio after portfolio before me, giving the reactions of my face closer attention than my words. "Instinct is never wrong,” Kenzo-san told me. "It is only difficult to know.”
Because Kenzo-san believed I could come to know my instinct, even in the confusion of my inside-outside space, I began to. His impeccable insight into people matches his sartorial style, but nothing comes close to his grace. I suspect people come to his gallery to partake of this quality, to stay and talk to him, to drink the tea he so carefully prepares and serves. "I wish you good days,” he tells me every evening as I leave for home. For a good day, I seldom need to move beyond Kenzo-san’s way of ordering the world and its art in the slender space we share.
With the discovery of such spaces, my life in Koenji began to radiate outwards, and the force moved me into the path of kindred company. One day, Fumi-san invited me to come to her studio and sit for a portrait. I had seen her work exhibited during my first autumn in Koenji and knew that she was a democratic portrait artist, feeling that every face deserved her close attention. There is, no doubt, an imbalance between cash and canvasses in Fumi-san’s life; still, she paints, drinks beer freely, listens to cello concertos, and speaks in a loud, laughing voice.
Fumi-san tries to avoid writing in anything but hiragana, and her painting has the same considered simplicity. She works very fast and in hardly any time at all, blocks of color transform into my face with the addition of a few thoughtful strokes. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she rests her canvas against a white wooden block daubed with her favoured palette, which echoes the tints of the neighbouring houses: brown, cream, flesh tones, slate shades of grey and green, some bright blue, edgings of black.
My Japanese language skills continue to hinder deep conversation, though they have improved slowly with regular language classes and a lot of unmusical practice. I can’t remember exactly what Fumi-san and I talked about during my first sitting, or the next. It feels natural to sit and write while she paints and then, while the paint is still wet, leave the studio for dinner or a drink. After some sessions we sit back and listen to Fumi-san’s sound recording of the painting: a microphone, attached to the back of her canvas, picks up the scrubbings and murmurings of the paint, brush, and palette knife. These mesmerising conversations are in a language neither of us recognise but are driven to interpret in more painting, more writing. Sometimes I abandon my pencil and simply sit straight on, waiting for Fumi-san’s wry, bright eyes to capture my form and feeling. I never have asked her what she sees when she paints me, though her choice of color and the expression she applies to my face always seem right. Her eyes are the only parts of Fumi-san that are serious. She knows of the things inside me before I do, most of the time.
III. Mid-life
The streets are layered earth and memory.
Possibly regret makes up one of these.
New paint dries over old facades,
new globes cast light into old corners.
One day, the doubt came—and remained. Usually something as simple as company or coffee or the feeling of moving forward dispels any bad feeling I have, yet one year into my life in Koenji, doubt clung to me and dragged me down. I could not stop asking myself, "Where will these years go and what do they count for? A few lines on my resume, a few trinkets and snapshots, a few notebooks full of memories?” Maybe these questions reveal me as a typical expatriate, who, when contemplating the end of her lifetime in one country, decides she cannot go back home—wherever that is—but must continue the life she started, even if it’s not in her present place. I don’t know if this is what starts off a perpetual expatriate life, but I do know that my life is not so meticulously planned.
My long period of doubt revealed the pointlessness of my existence. Usually there was meaning to each of my days but suddenly I couldn’t recognise it. I went to the gallery, wrote, looked in shops and at cityscapes, talked feebly. Cynically I felt that all the connections I had made so far were only due to another person’s pity or kindness. As the helpless recipient of someone else’s compassion, there was no meaning to my presence except to smile broadly when someone cast a gaze or camera in my direction.
There is a restaurant I go to in Koenji whenever I feel an Anne Sexton mood coming on; normally I don’t linger, lest my despondency become deeper. It is the kind of place that has special dishes for three hundred yen and only one out of the four light bulbs below the shop sign ever light up; lost souls tend to eat there. During my time of doubt, I would start each day unhappily and end each evening benumbed, full of cheap food that I consumed there, night after night. While I ate I counted all the weeks I had spent in Koenji and the weeks I had to go, feeling that the past was simply and hopelessly lost, while what lay in the future was impossible to grasp. At the same time I was aware that in the present, nothing was hurting me except the early onset of nostalgia. To cheer myself up, I fed myself words that had the opposite effect to the one intended: "It’ll be over soon and then what? You’ll miss it, like you do with everything else. You don’t need to write a travelogue to remember because you’re not traveling, you’re living here.”
My solution was to walk off the desperation. For a while I had the company of Hiroaki-san, a gentle young design student who had been living a starving-artist existence on the fringes of Koenji. His family, Hiroaki-san told me, did not approve of drawing as a job, and soon he would have to leave Tokyo, go back to his parents, and explain (again) why he didn’t want to work in a bank. There were times when Hiroaki-san looked close to tears, though he always insisted everything was daijoubu (fine). Everything was certainly not fine; Hiroaki-san could not find the way out of his trouble, or even see it. Suddenly I had someone to get lost with.
There is something soothing about the normalcy of the lived-in city: the small twisting streets, bicycles, traffic, and congestion. The markings on the streets around Koenji are white, except for the yellow painted squares around the drains. The gutters are always clear of litter. Hiroaki-san and I walked where the light was warm, not cool. We would take the walkway under the Chūō line, walk the length of the path to Asagaya, and only feel at peace when the train rattled overhead. We walked the streets as we probably never would walk them again; we walked before knowing where we were, before our lives became too familiar with locations, vocations, and partners, before we realised we had to work harder at what we were talented at. In that moment of shared uncertainty, the suspicion of what lay before us was enough.
"Kassorin-san,” Hiroaki-san would say as we walked side by side down an unknown street, tasting the air of our city, "please do not complicate this business.”
IV. Chart
Amongst the pictures
We do not notice the cold
Inside it is warm.
When I have the chance, I walk the streets of Koenji at night to see the stamp of life on the tongue and groove of the streetscape. Sometimes I walk alone, to take in details, and sometimes in company, to share them. One night I came across an orange paper lantern outside a yakitori bar. The pa
per had split from the wire frame, and the light shining out was bold rather than muted. In fastidious Japan, you would think that the lantern would be taken down, thrown away—but there also exists, in Koenji at least, a sense of retaining and seeing beauty in what is worn out and breaking down. All around, the broken lantern cast jagged, surprisingly sharp shadows.
Some streetlights radiate a green glow. I come across an arrow that points one way but deliberately take the wrong direction. I have ground down my claws on these streets over so many nights that I now move with the sole intention to discover. The streets gleam, as if they have been washed especially for my wanderings; the blended tints of neon light reflect against the asphalt like slicked oil. I pass by the gates of a shrine and the park where Haruki Murakami imagined one of his characters sitting and gazing at the moon. I pass the coin laundry that is open every night to no customers, the racks of secondhand clothes protected by thick plastic slips. I notice little dirt but plenty of graffiti; I see where signs have been painted over and where the paint is chipping. Nothing is perfect here, including my approach.
I have started to take photographs rather than scribble words. I photograph the light and the shadows. I walk and wave at people I see behind windows, who smile at me but bow back. I also bow. I have remained silent and I have written about this silence. I have begun to gather my words and my life. I have a favourite drink at the Flamingo and can easily place an order for it. I know which chairs are the most comfortable in my favourite coffee shop, where I can get the freshest vegetables on Saturday mornings, the best homemade miso paste, my preferred brand of tinned crab meat. I know at least part of Tokyo’s subway map and attend parties where I recognise more than one face as friendly. I have charted the path I have taken through Koenji while knowing that what has passed may not prevent against loss, or getting lost, in the future.
I appreciate the freedom of Koenji, for the claim I have on life here is impermanent—or not quite permanent, not yet. Sometimes the realisation of my eventual departure allows me to throw off certain inhibitions, to take a risk and clasp the present experience. After all, can’t the process of getting to know a place, or a person, sometimes be rushed? Why doesn’t something rapid equate to something real? At whatever rate they come, the moments exist to be lived. The moment of relinquishing the self you knew in the old place, of tracing another identity in the new, of coming to a dead end, of losing yourself again. All the while, the place surrounding you expands, so the memory of it first draping folds over you is not forgotten, but continues, promising recovery. If you continue to walk, or even drift, along, charting the movement as you go, the more complex and colorful your creation becomes, even if it is something borrowed.
Kathryn Hummel’s fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in publications and anthologies from Australia, New Zealand, the US, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India. Recently she has completed a major work of narrative ethnography, drawing on memory and conversations with women in Bangladesh. Kathryn was a writer in residence in 2011 for the Cafe Poet Program (Australian Poetry) and for the Forever Now project (Aphids and Vitalstatistix), featured during Adhocracy 2013.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the many women whose work I read during the selection process for this anthology. There were far more wonderful stories than I could include here. Thank you for helping to create a collection that I hope represents the incredible variety of experiences we encounter in our lives abroad. I chose these stories because they capture deeply personal and specific moments in the lives of their authors. Thank you, writers, for sharing these moments with me.
I would also like to thank my grandmother, Donna Young. She is, for me, the original expat woman in Asia. She moved to Japan in the ‘50s to teach English, married my grandpa there, and then proceeded to live in Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines over the next forty years. I am grateful for her example of what it’s like to live a full, varied, adventurous life, even on the other side of the globe.
I would like to thank Xu Xi for the idea for this anthology, and Marshall Moore and the team at Signal 8 Press for its publication. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work on this project.
Of course, I must also thank my family back home in the US, my in-laws in Hong Kong, and my husband for their support and encouragement. You guys are the best.
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1 Editor’s Note: The publisher acknowledges the sensitive issues surrounding the naming of Burma/Myanmar. Signal 8 Press has chosen to use the name Burma in this collection.
How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia Page 29