Solvej Balle and Ukiyo-o in Fukuoka

The first month in Japan: existential threats & Lost in Translation vibes (but I love it, too)

It’s very hot. Humid and hot, like my days in Hong Kong summers for nearly a decade. Same, same — but different. I wasn’t expecting this and forgot the feeling of suffocation it can bring — the slowness, the desire for indoors that goes against the craving for nature. The avoidance of the light. Bizarre instincts made into the everyday.

Migration has been a strange constant in my life for nearly twenty years. Each time of entry, it’s just as challenging and rewarding. The tumultuous foreignness and Kafkaesque bureaucracy (everywhere, in different iterations) mixed with jet lag and filling/emptying boxes move simultaneously with awe and discovery. With a first grade child in our home, the movement is pushed further in both directions. He sees things I would never notice and finds joy in strange places or morsels of food. He also melts down with fatigue and anticipation. I must be stronger.

Even the wonderfulness can become too much. Perhaps I am just prone to overwhelm. Or the switch to constant stillness created by the heat. We writers, we see all the time. We have no off switch for observation and reading our worlds.

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

I’ve been here before, this country not these exact spaces, but the newness is deeper. It is in the minutiae. One’s entire perspective shifts. Even the angles of houses are different, either asymmetrical or more acute, more obtuse than expected.¹

Two weeks in, we had record rains for three days. I then learned that tidal rivers like the one our balcony overlooks are rarely a threat of overflow. My new Japanese colleagues tell me not to worry about flood or tsunami here. But earthquakes! they laugh, Yes, you must watch out for the big one! They tell me what to do if I’m in an elevator when it happens and all the little tools I can buy at the 100¥ shop (like a dollar or pound shop) to keep my wine glasses from breaking.

Is there a freedom in succumbing to the thought of existential threats? you wonder. Not a suicidal desire but a release to oneness.

We drive to an island where half the road is still closed due to mudslides a week later and are reminded of the damage we avoided. Damage that was not so far away.

We’ve been in Fukuoka for a month. School - both my teaching and our son’s learning - starts tomorrow (I’m writing this last week, August 31). People keep saying: so, you must be settled in now? I don’t have the answer they are looking for. I can survive day to day and our flat looks great, but let’s see, well I still need to learn to drive on the left, get an ATM card, and figure out how to go to a doctor if I need one. Then there’s just that feeling, the feeling of a home-place. I can see that it will come. I can imagine its duration, even. But at the moment it is as elusive as the tiny jellyfish I saw in the sea and both avoided for fear of stinging and moved closer to out of fascination. I kept losing it and finding it again with the way the water moved or the light.

I may crave a (breakable) routine, something that will give me both some control and independence, some rhythm to the days. I know though that reality will be a little like that of this tiny creature, and for this I am grateful. I want to let the salt water wash over me — invisible and free, dancing with the moon’s forces.

Occasionally on those hot August nights, away from the water but still overlooking the tidal river we juxtapose, I have sat with a book in the evening. A kind of meditation. Not the type of storybook to escape in but a challenge for the mind’s sharpness. Rather, an escape into ideas both abstract and practical, placing the puzzles of many philosophers I love into dialogue with the now and with new ideas from both the author and others.

First was Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress, which I picked up on a whim in London a few days before our departure. It was as fascinating as it was depressing about the state of humanity and human nature more generally. However, I found this oddly refreshing — someone articulately able and willing to call out much of the mess we see ourselves in today, able to hypothesize with clarity what a huge meteor coming toward us would mean or the way to actually tackle climate change. Which gives me some abstract hope about fixing it. Zizek also introduced me to the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito’s ideas about eco-Marxism, which is both optimistic in its approach and terrifying in its potential necessity and all-encompassing scope.² The prerequisite for deep concentration while reading these essays, which are also quite entertaining at times especially through references to films, a Zizek signature, took my brain to a comfortable place of thought over worry or ambiguity in my existence (think Lost in Translation vibes).

Then came Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume II. I mentioned the first volume in a post a couple of months ago:

On the Calculation of Volume, by Solvej Balle (translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland), is part of a five-part set about a time loop that Balle originally self-published despite previous ‘mainstream success’ to maintain full control and is in the process of being translated. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize this year.

In the second volume, it is still November eighteenth, a day that has been repeated over and over hundreds of time for the protagonist. The character now moves on trains to find seasonal change and friends, attempting for newness, then meets a mysterious character, leaving us with a cliffhanger.

It struck me that some kind of time loop seems to be at play with me now. Some of her sensations and ponderings mirrored my own. It could be sending a child to first grade or moving after just a year in a new place or staying indoors. I feel cocooned from real life, real time, though somehow it is of course passing at the same speed it was previously. Something else may be at play — the date constantly repeated in the book, one that is frequently named, is the day before my son’s birthday. I may have inadvertently created a kind of metaphorical eve.

Another art form that has moved me since arrival was an immersive digital Ukiyo-o experience at the top of an eleven-story mall over a giant metro station.

Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) are Japanese woodblock prints, which flourished during the Edo Period (1603-1868). They originated as popular culture in Edo (present day Tokyo) and depicted popular kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers and geisha from the world of entertainment. Ukiyo-e, literally "paintings of the floating world", were so named because their subjects were associated with impermanence and detachment from ordinary life. (Japan Guide)

Much of the focus of the ephemeral museum is on the beauty of the changing seasons, enhanced by digital movement among adapted prints and paintings into a surreal journey. You also see tsunami, warriors, whaling hunts…but they are somehow beautiful, re-imagined, re-signified. The digital images dance with the reality of the mind. They freeze time while paradoxically taking you to histories and through seasons to come.

The great wave of Hokusai had me thinking about tsunami and the warnings on the day of our arrival - and then all the doom in Zizek, the dystopia of Balle…why do we focus on these disasters if they are to come anyway?

Are all these dystopic visions just intelligent anxiety - collective - designed to save us?³ I mean, a lot of the scenarios are real, and implanting the imaginary in enough human brains calls for action. Because you need a world where people imagine — not just to save us from the doom of (all) life threatening possibilities but to be human, to make our worlds more vivid than just survival. Many have that taken away from them, through war or poverty or natural disaster or political oppression. I’m not saying it’s impossible to keep your imaginative reality at those times, but it’s certainly more difficult, though perhaps more beneficial.

Some, however, persevere. They continue to create art as reflection of the imaginary + the subconscious + the critical mind all at once. They create it and they share it. And this allows others to imagine as well. It gives those in similar situations hope or empathy or simply a lack of isolation. It gives those outside of anything familiar the ability to see and to connect. We grow as a community toward some kind of oneness that is not sameness but is a single organism made from billions of distinct parts all working toward survival, toward something better…

And if we cannot arrive at distant galaxies due to the speed of light and other inhibiting factors, let that be reason to seek contentedness and move like an infinite sea of birds in flocked flight, each with a brain intact and free, looking not for an escape into the abyss but for the next landing point on Earth: some remote island with aquamarine shores or some city perch in which to be a flâneur or some warm bed in some quaint town where everyone is staying put because they enjoy each other’s company and the surrounding hills.

But now it is September and I can relax into my new world, because I know what autumn means. And the refreshing quaintness is here — it’s all around. In the tiny cafes that roast coffee beans, in the quietness of the inhabited streets, in the focus on food and art and literature, in the tiny bows I now take a hundred times a day. When that blanket of close air dissipates, we can fly.

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Dear Matterhorn Readers,

It dawned on me about halfway through writing this that some of the ideas would make for a better story of fiction, but this is what I’ve come up with at this point with the limited free time until those routines come. When I find it difficult to understand something I’m observing or feeling (in this case, most obviously due to foreignness), fiction gives me the freedom to explore. Anyway, that is kind of the whole mantra of this newsletter - truth in fiction.

Yes, I’ve got more of The Man from Brooklyn for you soon. However, I’ve shifted the genre enough that it requires much more than edits. This has been an exciting consequence of posting online mid-write and not really taking advice but just listening to comments and emails I received to think about the strongest parts and direction.

In the next Creative Lab, I’ll talk about this concept and discuss our old friend Graham Greene, inspiration for my Viennese psychological thriller, who shifted genre midway through writing Brighton Rock.

Thanks for being here!

P.S. The first week of school was great! The students are super and everyone’s getting into their groove.

1. Read Gianni Simone ‘s article on this concept.

2. Read an intro to Saito’s ideas here.

3. This is not meant to sound grim! I’m genuinely fascinated…and some of this may come from the sheer amount of emergency training and warnings present since I moved here. At school, we shall have practice drills for fire, lockdown, earthquake, and tsunami. Just to get through them all a few times a year they will occur every other week. How does this change us, preparing us or re-aligning the wires in our brains?