Cicadas

There is a giant tree that stands in my grandmother’s front lawn, on the south side where, in the wintertime, it throws shadows across the brown grass and cement driveway. One of my favorite family fables tells the story of how my mother accidentally tore off one of the branches while trying to climb the tree when she was just a girl and tree was not so big. In despair, she decided to re-attach the branch in the only way she knew how to re-attach things: with glue. Surprisingly, the glue held up, the branch repaired itself, and the tree grew up to be a solid presence in the front lawn.

By the time I learned how to climb trees, the branches of the tree were already too big and too high for my short arms and legs. Instead, I was drawn to the tree to inspect it for the hollowed-out exoskeletons of cicadas.

The golden-brown shells looked just like real insects, except when I got closer, I could see that they were actually ghosts: transparent and delicate membranes that crumbled as I pried them from the bark. Initially, I was afraid of the cicada ghosts; they were rather large for insects, and their curled brown ghost legs seemed to sinisterly cling to whatever they touched. But after getting over the initial squeamishness, I aspired to collect as many cicada ghosts as I could find. I would make little piles of them in the grass, stacking them neatly like jumbo-sized popcorns.

I clearly remember my mother explaining to me that even though they looked just like bugs, the cicada ghosts were not exactly bugs. They were not alive, but they were not dead either. They were more like a memory of what the bug used to be. This fascinated me. The idea that there was an actual bug somewhere out there that used to be inside my cicada ghost was almost mythical. My wonder was made ever the more acute by the fact that I had never actually seen a real, live cicada. At nighttime, the trees on our block would fill with the insects’ rattling buzz, and my father would explain to me that we were listening to the cicadas. Some people find the trill annoying, but for me in my over-imaginative childhood, the call was a solid link to the fantasy world of dragons, Santa Claus, and cicada ghosts.

Supposedly, the cicadas of Japan rival those of the Midwest. I think the trees must have been full of them last August when I arrived here, but there were so many other, more conspicuous distractions that I cannot recall with clarity with what volume they broadcast from the treetops. I hope they will be born soon here; the weather seems perfect for them.

It hardly seems like so long ago that I last wrote something here, but in some ways I feel like a whole lifetime has passed- or has turned over and molted like a cicada ghost. In the interim, I have read much, thought much, touched the western side of the Pacific, climbed a small mountain, fallen in love with Tokyo, danced alone in my apartment, held conversations with house plants, bathed communally, run 5 miles without stopping, cried at work, fed the homeless, ate noodles out of a bathtub, hosted a tea ceremony, worn kimono, pet a koi fish, planted a garden, rode the bullet train, played dress-up with my best friend Elisabeth, turned 25, and decided it is time for me to wrap up my adventures in Japan and come home.

But before I can do that, I still need to hear the cicadas. And I wouldn’t mind actually seeing one, either. But then again, my imagination might be more satisfied if they continue to remain a mystery.

Sakura

I went on a brief trip to Kyoto last weekend and returned to find Utsunomiya in bloom. The Japanese call the soft pink, yellow, and white flowers that drip from the springtime bowers sakura, which means cherry blossom. Now, the avenues that line the city’s streets and parks are framed in these springtime flowers, and the air is heavy with the moisture of afternoon rainstorms and the heady sweet aroma of the blossoms. But the flowered streets and perfumed air will only last for a short time before the petals fall away to accommodate a more lasting life; I live in an ephemeral garden.

The pleasant outdoor atmosphere has inspired me to wander the winding limestone-walled streets of my antiqued neighborhood, taking special pleasure in meandering at an impractical lazy saunter. My companions on these walks are the giant crows who perch on the lichen and moss-carpeted walls dividing the landscaped gardens. They are mostly silent, but sometimes cry out to me, as if disturbed to see they are not the only ones studying the city. For my part, I do my best to ignore them, and try not to allow myself to be jostled by their sharp cries cutting through the eventide fog.

I read a news article this morning about 450 Somali and Ethiopian refugees who were thrown off their ship by their smugglers as they tried to make safe passage to Yemen. The smugglers forced the people to jump into the ocean after they noticed Yemeni security forces and wanted to make a quick get-away. Those who resisted where beat, punched, and stabbed with wood and steel batons, then they, too, were thrown into the ocean. 29 people are confirmed dead and 71 are still missing.

Life is suddenly quiet here, dampened by the absorbent clouds and flower petals, drugged by sweet perfume and echoing with the memories of a year already one quarter past. The Japanese academic year ended last week, and my office is now shuffling to rearrange desks, responsibilities, and staff in preparation for the new term, which begins in two weeks. I am left to sit idly at my desk and stare out the window into the courtyard, where a giant sakura tree is unfolding tiny bright pink blossoms. I wonder if the color is made more vivid by the watery grey sky.

A Pact

Sunrise in Navarra
Originally uploaded by oncemore.

On February mornings in Utsunomiya, the sun rises at some point between half past six and quarter to seven. It’s difficult to give an exact time as the horizon, and the arrival of the sun on the horizon, is nearly impossible to see beyond the tall cement and glass buildings which reflect the first pale light in the sky. My favorite time of day has long been the dim and dreamy hours between sunset and darkness, but I have comparatively little experience with the other side: the gradual awakening of morning light.

The sunrise happens only for a few minutes once a day, but we are guaranteed the sun’s arrival every day of our lives; it is a fulfillment of some Divine pact.

I will live another day if the sun will meet me on the horizon.

We trust that if we continue to live, if we continue to try, the world will continue to spin. This is faith. Sometimes in life, I hesitate at the dawn. I stand on the far edge of darkness and feel, for a moment that feels like forever, that the sun may never come.

The sun rose today and I watched it from the bridge over the Utsunomiya River. The water was dark and bluish-grey as it tumbled over the rocks below, and seemed almost black against the indigo wash of the shadowed embankment. From the bridge, I could see more clearly the sky in the East, tinged with hues of peach and pink. The colors were soft and warm, and even the cool blue of the Western sky reminded me of the pastel blankets newborn babies are wrapped in. Perhaps we are drawn to swaddle babies in these colors because they remind us of this daily moment of birth. The warm pinks and yellows are like fruits beginning to ripen. This is only the beginning.

The Bookcase

When I was a little girl, I had a white pressure-board bookcase in my bedroom. It was the type of furniture that comes in a big, flat cardboard box with instructions on how to assemble. I can’t remember when the bookcase first appeared next to my dusty rose canopy bed, but I do remember deciding to designate it as my “special stuff” place, where all special things without obvious purpose were to be kept. The shelves were full of items such as small stuffed animals, a glass-lidded music box, ceramic figurines, and half a dozen tin Reading Rainbow buttons. I know now that the term for those items is knickknack (a term which, in it’s very obscure semantics, demonstrates the pointless nature of such items), but in my budding sentimentality at age ten, they were nothing short of little treasures. As I was a compulsively tidy child, I remember religiously clearing the bookcase once a week, dusting the shelves, and carefully replacing the items in their proper places. Each item had a story and each story came with special memories of some happy moment in my life.

There was a purple “Ribbon of Participation” for my position as catcher on my ponytail softball team. I was never a very good catcher, but my hard work on the field was always rewarded with a post-game team snack (usually popsicles). I kept the ribbon for the memory of those popsicles.

A clear plastic Hello Kitty coin purse which was discovered at the bottom of a paper sack of hand-me-down clothing reminded me of Heather, the original owner of the purse. Heather was the much older (and much cooler) daughter of my mother’s best friend Sara Ort. When we were lucky, we would have Heather as a baby sitter. She once brought a cassette tape of “Leader of the Pack,” which she generously played over and over again for me and my sister.

There was a miniature set of cedar dresser-drawers my father had bought me as a gift during a vacation in the Ozarks. I would occasionally open one of the drawers and inhale the sweet smell of cedar wood. This made me think of my dead hamster, Deseree. The pet litter in her cage was made from shredded cedar pulp.

The two shelves of the bookcase were full of such items, and I was proud of the collection I had amassed at such a young age. I was experienced. I was cultured. I had the paraphernalia to prove it.

And then one day, when I was in the throes of teenage crisis, I lost all of my friends. I won’t bother to go into the details of the tragedy; nearly everyone has had some similar social disaster sometime in their youth. But the point is that I came home from school one afternoon, looked at my prized bookcase of wonders, and decided to re-evaluate my priorities in life.

Why had I kept all of these trinkets?

What did it all mean to me?

If the objects’ value was related to the value of memories, what would happen if I disposed of the objects?

Is it possible to throw away a memory?

I didn’t give myself long to ponder these questions. Impulsively, I retrieved an old grocery bag from the kitchen downstairs and a shoebox from the closet. Items were divided into two categories: those things which had been given to me by loved ones whose feelings may be hurt if I threw them away (to be placed into the shoebox), and those items which held exclusively personal sentimental value (to be placed in the bag). Five minutes later, I had a heavy sack of nostalgia and a smaller box of responsibilities. The sack went out with the garbage the next morning. The shoebox went onto the top shelf of my closet. The memories remained, undisturbed.

This was my first experience of letting go. That same week, I began stripping the wallpaper off my bedroom walls and removed the lacy pink curtains from their rods. The white bookcase now housed only a flat metal stripping spatula and a bucket of water for loosening the paper. I was tearing down the past. And as the inside of my bedroom changed over the next few weeks, my own malleable teenage insides changed as well. I became more introspective. I sat alone at the lunch table. I no longer coveted all things lacy and pink.

But as I purged my surroundings of seemingly meaningless riff-raff, I did not abandon the memories that were housed in my old treasures. In fact, the more I cleared my environment of visual aids, the more I was inspired to find a new way of remembering: the memories that had before been captured in trinkets and toys started developing into narratives in my mind. Instead of keeping a bookcase of knickknacks, I began to build a library of stories.

My parents will tell you that I began my personal story-telling tradition when I learned how to talk. They would have to belt me into my high chair because I would become so animated while speaking, I would try to stand up in my seat. I was a champion talker.
Even though I was an enthusiastic story-teller as a baby, I consider the clearing of the bookshelf to be the advent of my way of keeping the past.

After two weeks of neglect, I finally cleaned my apartment last weekend. I still had some unpacking to do, but most of the work was simply disposing of unnecessary clutter. When shuffling through the mess, I came across a coffee bean in the bottom of a suitcase. I knew immediately that this little stowaway was from a bag of Nairobi coffee I had picked up on my last day in Kenya. The coffee bag had torn during the long journey to America, and the bean must have got stuck in the lining of the suitcase. Normally, I would have just pitched it, but instead I set it aside on a bookshelf. It sat undisturbed on the shelf for two days, where I looked at it every time I passed it. On the third day, I picked it up, finished the story, and threw it in the wastebasket.

My brief desire to keep the bean reminded me of the white bookcase of treasures. For two days, I had gone back to the place where all things special could be put on a shelf for admiration. But after two days, the bean no longer was something remarkable: it was just a stale and dusty coffee bean. It was the value of the bean that was far too grand to be kept on a shelf.

We spend our lives deciding what to keep and what to throw away. We clear through the clutter of our messy kitchens and untidy bedrooms, picking the keepers from the disposables, the valuables from the rubbish. We are constantly evaluating what we can live without and what is indispensable. Clearing the white bookcase was my first experience of deciding what is important to me. It was a small event, but it shifted entirely the way I remember the past. By letting go of the treasures of the bookcase, I was able to find a deeper place within myself: a vast library of books half written, full of empty pages awaiting the next twist in plot.

Takeoffs and Landings

I never used to be the type of person who is afraid of flying. My first time in an airplane, I was so excited about the shrink-wrapped airplane food and barf bags embossed with the airline’s logo that it didn’t occur to me to be afraid of the fact I was being propelled through space thousands of feet above the ground. (And it was some years later before I learned I should also have fear for the food and the bags, and the relationship between them.) I made my first trans-Atlantic flight when I was fourteen, and specifically remember feigning fright so that the young man in a cowboy hat who was sitting next to me would hold my hand to “comfort” me. But secretly, the thrill of flying overpowered any worry about the safety of the mode of transport.

My favorite parts of flying are, ironically, the most dangerous: takeoffs and landings. Sitting on the runway is rather boring, but once the jet’s engines start to hum and the armrests begin to vibrate, the fun begins. There is always a moment when the mounting churning of the engines breaks from a rattle to a forward push, and it is this moment when, without fail, my heart begins to beat faster. I am pushed back into my seat as I careen to look out the window to see the ground flying by. Similarly, landings provide the exhilaration of the fast approaching ground and the invisible force of momentum pulling me forward as the plane rapidly decelerates. Takeoffs and landings are not frightening; they’re thrilling. My discomfort is reserved for cruising altitudes above 30,000 ft.

Looking out the window and seeing, thousands of feet below, nothing but an endless sheet of blue ocean is not relaxing. The reclining seatbacks and child-size pillows do little to ease my concern about the unlikely suspension of our multi-ton aircraft.

I am a reasonable person. I have reasonable confidence in modern understanding of aeronautical physics. Our heroes Mr. and Mr. Wright took to the skies over one hundred years ago, and commercial air transportation has since become a multi-billion dollar industry that transports millions of people all over the world every year. So why can’t I just sit back and enjoy the mini pretzels and five-dollar cocktails?

On my last flight, I found myself asking this question somewhere over the Arctic. Cruising alongside a four-hour sunset reflected in a sea strewn with cracked sheets of aquamarine-edged icebergs, I turned to the young man sitting in the seat next to me and pointed at the view out the window.

“Why is that so scary?” he looked confused, and leaned over me to get a better look at the ice below.

“I didn’t see it. What was it?” he clearly was having trouble matching the concern on my face with the beautiful sunset.

“That,” I pressed my palm against the small plastic windowpane, “that huge ocean full of ice and freezing water.”

“Ice is freezing water,” he smirked, “and anyway, that’s nearly six miles below us. We’re safe up here.”

“Safe?” I balked, “That’s exactly the problem: we’re up here. And what is keeping us up here? Do you see the wings moving?” I knew my argument was making me appear like a lunatic, but really I just wanted someone to talk me back into a rational place.

“Actually, the wings are moving. Can’t you see them flopping around at the tips?” I could. And it was not making me any more at ease. “Look, if it bothers you, just close the shade. Try to relax a little. Airplanes are, after all, the safest way to travel.”

And there it was, the phrase that everyone likes to tell the sweating pteromerhanophobic: flying is the safest way to travel. And suddenly, like the doorbell ding of the fasten-seatbelt sign, I realized that my fear of flying was not a fear of crashing, but a fear of safety.

It would seem that a fear of safety is oxymoronic; after all, aren’t we usually afraid of things that threaten our safety? But fear can also be understood as unwillingness to accept the unknown. My fear of cruising altitude, of safety and security, is just another way of interpreting my fear that my life will become, for lack of a better word, comfortable. Of course, I enjoy the comforts in life. I have been extremely fortunate and am deeply grateful for everything I have. And yet, I fear becoming too settled into any one place or situation. I yearn for the dramatic perspective shift of takeoffs and landings.

Though this elevated epiphany helped occupy my thoughts for the remainder of the flight, it did not relieve my uneasiness about our impossible yet secure suspension above the freezing -and frozen- ocean. I found my relief seven hours later as the plane crossed Japan’s eastern coastline and roofs and cars began to loom up from the terrafirma below. As we bumped along the runway and were jostled in our seats, I turned to the young man next me. He was firmly clutching both armrests with white-knuckled fists.

“Why is that so scary?” I asked him, pointing out the window.

“Landing is the most dangerous part of flying. Anything could happen,” his lips pressed into a concerned grimace. I turned back to the window and let the momentum of the halting plane pull me forward from my cushioned seatback.

“And isn’t that wonderful?”

Beauty Secrets

Tuesday morning, I woke up to the sound of the wind rattling my front door, and could almost feel the draft through my thin walls. I must have hit the snooze button on my small plastic alarm clock four or five times; the tapping of the rain against the windowpane urged me not to climb out of my cozy futon. When I finally did get up and draw back the curtains, I felt like I was looking out on the deck of a ship at sea, not my courtyard. The rain coming down in sheets was moving horizontally, matching the branches of the trees and bushes as they were pulled by the wind. In my groggy morning thoughts, the only thing that could solidify was “Maybe there’s such a thing as a rain day. I can’t possibly be expected to ride my bicycle to work in this.”

But alas, the Japanese workforce is unflagging, and they expect the same of their foreign visitors. Autumn has finally come to Honshu, and although Japan boasts an excellent reputation for its calm fall climate and spectacular foliage, I am finding that the most dramatic feature of the season is the typhoon weather that I woke up to early last week. The chilling gales wouldn’t be so bad if my school was heated -which it isn’t.

In fact, this is the standard practice in Japanese high schools. They think each individual should be responsible for his own heat conservation. (What happened to group mentality?) The office of my school is tolerable, maybe 67 degrees, but the doors of the school are kept open, causing the typhoon winds to whip down the corridors, bringing the hallway temperature down to around 45. I asked my co-workers if the exterior doors of the school are always kept ajar and they assured me that even in the wintertime, during blizzards, the doors remain open “for the convenience of the students who must pass through them.” I’m thinking that these kids are smart enough to be able to manipulate a doorknob, but maybe I’m overestimating my students’ aptitude.

My students see me suffering from the cold and ask if I am from a warm climate. I explain that Illinois is just as cold as Tochigi, but the people of America have a strong belief in indoor heating. This may somehow be related to our obsession with freedom, but I’m still trying to piece that one together.

The cold isn’t completely bad, though. I’m beginning to suspect it’s one of the secrets behind why Japanese women age so well. When I refrigerate my produce, it stays crisper for longer before it turns soggy. Perhaps the same is true for the feminine countenance. If so, the freezing work conditions are actually a perk of working in a public school. Additionally, our bodies burn more calories trying to stay warm, so the lack of indoor heating also helps a girl maintain a slim figure. I consider myself lucky to be receiving these ancient beauty secrets of the Orient, at no cost save the possibility of frostbite-induced amputation.

Like natto, my unheated school is something I’m beginning to warm up to (though strictly in the figurative sense). I can now begin to reap the beauty rewards Japanese women have been enjoying for centuries. Discovering the age-preserving benefits of the unheated workplace actually comes as excellent news; all this time I’ve been eating sheets of seaweed like it’s going out of fashion.

Ghosts

While waiting for a train on Platform 9 last week, I thought I saw a ghost. In the scratched plastic window of a passing car, the face of my mother appeared like a dreamy vision, and then was carried away down the tracks to Kuroiso. My first thought was, “Why is my mother on a train in central Honshu?” I had spoken with her on the phone that morning, and was fairly certain she was in Midwestern America, giving lectures on computer programming and speeding around in her silver Saturn. It was impossible for her to be here. As I pondered this mystery, my train arrived and as the song of scraping metal and wall of thick warm air washed over me, I saw her again, and understood my mistake. On the cloudy surface of the sliding doors, my own reflection looked back at me, and in my face I saw my mother.
This was not the first time this had happened, not even the first time it had happened that week. I have recently been seeing apparitions of my mother in store windows, rear-view mirrors, and group photos. These visions are not exact representations of my mother as she is now; they resemble my mother as I remember her from when I was a child. It is a bizarre phenomenon; its oddity overshadowed only by the feelings which surface within me when it happens.
Seeing my mother as I remember her from my childhood makes a little well of childlike devotion spring up within me. I am filled with the memory of how it feels to depend entirely on one person for all of my needs. When I was very little, I used to think of myself as an extension of my mother, a detached digit or appendage that must remain close to the parent as much as possible. I would always want to be held or carried, and would even leave my bed in the night so I could go sleep next to her.
Now I am no longer a little girl, and the love I have for my mother has changed with me as I have grown. And although it has been many years since I have felt the obsession young children have for their parents, I have begun feeling the strange echoes of this love, and am left to wonder from where they are reverberating.
I did the math, and discovered that I’m the same age that my mother was when she was pregnant with me. It’s hard to imagine expecting a child at this point in my life, though when my mother was 24, she was married and already had one baby. Things are different for me: I have no career, no children, no house, and no husband. I only have freedom (only, as if it were such a small thing).
I am beginning to wonder if the strange narcissistic feeling of nostalgia brought on by seeing my mother in myself is actually an indication of my desire to regain that special relationship. But I can’t go back to being a child, nor do I want to. So I am left to conclude that part of me is looking for the other side of the relationship: motherhood. It’s a scary thought, but I’m growing accustomed to scary things like seeing apparitions in passing train cars and growing up.
We are coming up on Halloween, a time when the door between our world and the spirit world opens a crack. Halloween is based on the Celtic celebration of Samhain, a holiday whose purpose was to mark the transition between the summer and winter months. It was a time of celebration, but also a time of reflection of the past and a shift in mindset for the future. Samhain and Halloween are both tinseled with dichotomy: the gruesome and the cute, the sweet and the rotting, the summer and the winter, the dead and the living. I find it appropriate that as we draw near to this holiday, I am encountering my own transition of consciousness, from wanting to be held to wanting to hold. The ghosts who stare back at me from shop windows are ghosts of my past, phantoms of who my mother was to me when I was just a baby. But they are also reflections of my own face, of the woman that I have become. And maybe (I like to think) they are visions of who I will be someday, to someone else.
It’s amazing to think how we change and grow, how our love matures and develops as our bodies and minds become adults. The ways we grow can be both fascinating and surprising, and it all happens with such flourish; it’s something beautiful that sneaks up on us like the leaves turning from green to crimson, or the first thick frost on an autumn morning.
The ghosts who haunt me this Halloween aren’t anything to be afraid of. Instead of nightmares, they bring me dreams of a future when I can be for someone what my mother was, and continues to be for me. She may be thousands of miles away, but I carry with me, in my face and my memory, everything my mother is to me. It’s a spirit I’m more than happy to live with.

Happy Halloween.