In the Beginning

Valentine's Day was uneventful as such; a regular, busy Tuesday, trying to catch up after my absence on Thursday and Friday to attend a conference in New York (more on that later), and cope with the horrendous sleep deficit caused by said conference and accompanying snowstorm that trapped me on a runway for five hours. But somewhere in between scrambling to get to class on time and handing out the worksheets in my seminar, I remembered that it was Valentine's Day 2005 that I received the acceptance e-mail to Berkeley (the letter followed), and my life changed. I started this blog, for instance. But seriously, the limbo that I had been laboring in for months was gone, suddenly, and my path was cleared for the next two years. This is a wonderful feeling. I can still remember plopping into my chair to check e-mail at the beginning of another workday, seeing the Berkeley address in the "Sender" column, thinking it was just a "please hold; we will consider your application in the order it was received. Thank you for your patience" notice, or a request for some other scrap of paperwork, and then opening it and grinning from ear to ear, calling everyone I knew, etc. And then spending three months trying to hide it from my boss, for fear he would can me posthaste in order to hire someone who actually knew what s/he was doing.
And then the ceremony of quitting (tossing ID badge in harbor, getting plastered at the Midtown Yacht Club), sailing, loafing at home with Mom while she recovered (swimmingly) from her foot surgery, trips to Woods Hole and New York, a lovely twinkly yummy funny crazy going-away party, one last swelter in the heat wave, and getting here and starting all over again.
I'll do my best to chronicle the past six months concisely, but some of you might wonder just why I'm here, studying Japanese and running up ghastly debt while doing so. So here's an excerpt from my personal statement on a financial aid application (apparently you can't just say, "give me money, you fools!" to the officials here, nor can you kick and scream and beg and plead and hold your breath and turn purple. Well, you could, I suppose. But it won't work. You have to be all articulate and stuff.

At first, Japan hovered on the edges, strokes in the backdrop of my upbringing. My maternal grandfather kept a small jade statue of Kannon in his study, and another one of tigereye next to his reading chair. I loved to walk around them, bending around (I was not allowed to touch, naturally) to watch light glow through the milky, melon-colored jade and set the caramel-colored ribbons in the tigereye rippling through the brown stone. In a woodlbock print of a Kabuki scene, frightening men with white faces and stretched, agonized expressions contorted grotesquely in their quiet dining room. This I stayed away from, but they danced in blue and red, catching my eye every time I went to the kitchen, until I was almost in high school.
My father, stained-glass artist, used bamboo brushes to paint on glass, and let me try them a few times. He had grown up in Fresno, taken judo as a boy from an old sensei. He kept books of kimono, paper patterns, basketweaving and marquetry in his studio to inspire the delicate tessellations of glass he set in lead for his window designs, and more recently, took careful photos of Japanese roofs and porches when I led him through Tokyo. A year later, he proudly showed me a glass portrait of St. Francis Xavier, part of a series of hagiographic church panels. Francis X went to Japan and started a painting school, and the window shows him standing on the veranda of a Japanese house, complete with tiles and sliding doors, gazing up at flame-colored momiji maple leaves.
That was all, when I was little. Colorful origami guides I could never quite master at Christmas. Whispers that the Japanese ate fish raw—why?!—and could kill you with their hands, when I was in middle school. Tidy, quiet Japanese ladies, wives of doctoral students at Hopkins, teaching one semester of Japanese to a sel`ect group of seniors (myself not among them), in high school. Growing up on the East Coast, the closest most of us ever came to Japan was a brother's video game and embarrassing Hello Kitty childhood toys.
Until I took a Japanese history class, taught by a vivacious art history doctoral student from Penn who led us through twelve centuries of Japanese history using mostly slides and an inexhaustible supply of praise for brushstrokes, bubbling glazes, and lacquer. Wandering on a beach the next summer, sorting through potential majors, Japanese came up again and again, for many reasons. I was already familiar with the exotic baubles of Japanese aesthetic culture, and now, more deeply, its history and character. I learned languages quickly and thoroughly, as sixteen years of French would prove, and taking an area-studies major more or less required a study abroad. I was in all the way.
Six years later, having plowed through a dozen textbooks and hundreds of kanji, partied with salarymen in Ueno Park in cherry-blossom season, woken to the scent of incense and the bonging and chanting of a Zen temple's morning prayers, translated a Tokugawa-period manual on wifely behavior, and endured two years of secretary grunt work to get back to graduate school, I still haven't had enough. There are always more kanji, more paintings, more proverbs and gitaigo and ki-idioms.
My current research focuses on the voice of Japanese-ness in Western literature. First of all, the voice of Japanese-ness in the context of naturalization vs. barbarization; more precisely, the choices made by the translators to produce an exotic, “Japanese” voice markedly different from that of a comparable writer in English. While Waley, in his translation of Genji Monogatari, deliberately strove to create a Japanese Camelot for his readers, I argue that it is possible for translators of Japanese classics to unconsciously slip into an overly and overtly exotic, foreignized tone which places the text above the reach of a modern reader. Secondly, the voice of Japanese-ness adopted by non-Japanese writers for their own fiction. Arthur Golden, of Memoirs of a Geisha fame, is the most famous contemporary example, but many others—Pico Iyer, Laura Joh Rowland, Liza Dalby—attempt to produce a Japanese voice in English. Do they succeed, i.e., does this “read” in Japanese, or is it simply an over-exoticized aping of a more delicate and subtle literary collective voice?
Currently, I am starting from the beginnings, taking courses in classical Japanese to plumb the depths of the origins of Japanese literary voice. Study of modern Japanese literature will follow, coupled with close readings of the above-mentioned authors to compare the style and voice. With my degree in linguistics, I have been continuing my study of the intricacies of Japanese language, including an in-depth examination of Haruki Murakami's stylistics, the linguistic analysis of style.
My career aspirations lie in art or writing: museum work or publishing, travel writing or a post at a newspaper or magazine, in Japan, Europe or the United States. I want to understand Japanese like I understand French: to the point where the chatter of children and the murmurings of grandmothers are intelligible, where I get jokes in bars, where the subtitles aren't the first thing I look at in the movies, where regional dialects are intriguing instead of frustrating. I miss Japan, with its narrow streets, rows of bicycles, its energy that flows along different channels than in the US but no less intensely.

The rest is mostly puppy-eyed pleading and flattery, but that ought to give y'all a sense of what I'm doing, why and how, and where I hope it goes.

Rainy Monday...not much else to say. I'm going to a sewing circle tonight to fix up the costumes I bought for my upcoming competition at Harvard. But that's another story entirely.

And here we are...President's Day at Cesar Chavez Park, with frisbees and kites. Good day.

My Best Friends' Weddings, Part Deux

So the last post was a melancholy meditation on the wedding of my oldest friend--not my friend who is the oldest, my friend whose friendship with me is the oldest--but the sharper-eyed of you may have noticed that the title is plural, and right you are. This second part is about my tribe, my posse, my apartment, the friends I made in college and lived with for two years. They are all getting married, and all to each other, it seems.
I went back and read the entry I made in April of this year, after going to the Haverford Corporation meeting, where I snivelled about how much I miss college and how rotten my life seemed in comparison, and came to the line where I bravely asserted that I was all down about it just because I wasn't doing what I really wanted to be doing (living independently, using my brain for more than avoiding obstacles in my path) and that as soon as I got out of the holding pattern I'd been in, the feeling would disappear.
Well, it did, for the most part, but yesterday Aron and Stu and Gabe came to town, and we ate sushi and played frisbee and talkedtalkedtalked, and while I haven't laughed that hard in quite a while, I would be struck in quiet moments with the knowledge that this is no substitute for the Way We Were, and we can't go back.

And then A told me Kingsley was getting married. And I literally dropped my chopsticks.

No kidding. I thought that sort of thing belonged with spit-takes under "Cheesy Movie Reactions to Shocking News", but when I heard that Chris KINGSLEY is getting MARRIED, for Christ's sake, honest to god my fingers just stopped working for a second.

Not that Chris is unfit for marriage, or that Maura, his choice of bride, isn't the right one. I'm sure he is, and I know she is. That's fine. It's just the thought of my friends getting married. Some of them already have: David (see last post), John Boyle way back (but he's older), a few other couples from college. But we saw those coming a mile off. What throws me is that when and if we manage to get everyone together again, those gold bands on some of those fingers will make it utterly impossible to be, or even to pretend, that we were The Way We Were. You can play at adolescence for years, like me, back in school and planning to travel and muck around for the forseeable future, and so when you hang with your college buddies, it's almost just like back in school. Not quite, but enough so you can pretend. But one by one (two by two, actually), my friends are passing over a threshold of adulthood, a real one that you can't undo or return from or come back through. They're on the other side of this divide, and good for them. We've all gotta cross it sometime. But their doing it is really unsettling, not least because my turn's coming up. Certainly not soon, but if they can do it, so can I. So should I.

Plus, I have NO idea what to get them.

My Best Friends' Weddings

My father calls us cradlemates. Our mothers were friends as we grew, first inside and then out. His mother felt ill watching Reagan's inauguration, but it turned out to be him, about to be born. David. Beloved. I myself emerged the day before Reagan was shot; in the days before everyday luxuries were common in hospital rooms, my mother had to special-order a television on which to watch the drama unfold while holding me on my first day of life. Evelyn. Hazelnut.

And now he's married, wed one meltingly hot day in June, next to a stream on his aunt's farm, to his Anne, surrounded by his sister and brother and cousins and friends and family, by a freshly and suspiciously ordained youth who barely looked old enough to drive a car, let alone preside over a wedding. But he did, and it was legal, and binding, and beastly hot, so we hurried back up the hill to the tent, where the food was lovely, of course, and the wine was flowing, and we even danced a little dripping sweat all the way.

David is the closest thing to family I had in Baltimore after my grandparents died. He and I spent holidays and weekends together, play-fighting, play-flirting, reading comic books and watching movies, sneaking treats off the tables and annoying our fathers playing poker. Later we would sprawl around the living room, he strumming on the guitar that seemed to be an extension of his hands, me playing with his sister's hair or scratching the ear of whatever dog had thumped down next to me. We built our wit, riffing off of each other's jokes, trading good-natured jabs or teasing the other kids around. Even later we played off of each other in public, for real, on stage in school plays. I was usually the straight man: Juliet's Nurse to his Mercutio; the Prince of Aragon; a dour stagehand (for real and for show); while he got the leads, the goofball parts, the ones that required lots of lines and lots of energy and lots of hard dramatic work.

And we danced. He was my first real partner (cootie-infested elementary-school boys in my early early ballroom classes notwithstanding), and together we learned the silky footwork of East Coast Swing: the steps, the twirls, the subtle hand cues and leads. We went to clubs and dances in the Scottish Rite Temple and Tall Cedars Hall. He was fluid on the floor, as if he had bones of silicone as supple as the flesh around them. I was more energetic, always hoping for another spin, another tricky step, another lift. I still do.

Then we went to college, and that was sort of it, except at holidays. But it wasn't the same. We were so wrapped up in our lives there--as we should have been, of course--and suddenly our stories about this guy and that time we were all locked out and what that crackpot prof said and so on didn't work. We had all this history, but for once I felt like it didn't matter.
But I think I equalized a little, after the total-immersion first semester, when everything was new, and once I settled in it was easier to come home and be home. David came home and stayed there, pushing through a thicket of depression. I can have no conception of what that was like, and not for the first time, I felt like I stood on the outside of his life.

One of our friends committed suicide. I don't have the e-mail that Dave wrote me after the funeral that I didn't attend, but I still have one he wrote a few years later, when I was in Japan. It's wise and warm and shot through with not only his stiletto wit and cleverness, but, I fancy, a tacit understanding of all we were together. I always thought he was much cooler and more advanced than I was, and that could make me feel like a clumsy, silly child, but to read his chatty, intimate, utterly comfortable prose cut through all that, and I knew that we would continue to drift away from each other, but keep a line, however, thin, between us. We can't cut it.

We're not that close anymore. I don't even have his e-mail address. I saw him briefly at the annual New Year's party, but he and Anne split early. And of course, he had other things on his mind at the wedding. But no matter what, he knew me when I was missing teeth and got scared by loud movies, and it's important to have someone like that in your life. No matter where you are with them, you're home. You've got a link to your own past that's outside your own head. I hope he thinks of me in the same way. My cradlemate. Beloved.