So right now, I ought to be doing the considerable amount of homework that I have, but part of the way this semester is not going to be a sinkhole of unmanageable stress and bitterness (yes, it was) is by me taking a little time now and then to do the things I want to do, and what I want to do right now is write.
I’m listening to a genius playlist based on The Decemberists’ “Billy Liar.” It’s dark outside, but it’s clear, and if I weren’t in the middle of a city with terrible light pollution, I would be able to see stars. It’s cold in Kyoto these days (though nothing like Chicago, and by “nothing like Chicago” I mean about twenty-five Fahrenheit degrees warmer, a count which would mean nothing to most of the people around me), but the sun is finally starting to come up by seven, so I can wake up with light again. There are some dried jonquils in a little narrow-necked clay jar on my desk, tiny white and yellow things, which used to be fresh and fragrant— my host parents (probably Okaasan) put them there to welcome me back when I returned to the city two weeks ago (is that really all??). My room is covered in scattered papers and jackets and bags, which hide most of the tatami; it only took me thirty-six hours to take this space from pristine to me.
Coming back to Kyoto after three weeks in the States felt like coming home, which surprised me. I’d only been here for three or four months, after all, and you can add to that the fact that for any place in Japan to feel like home is a defition that I’m applying 無理矢理に, despite the fact that no matter how long I live here, I’ll more or less never be accepted as part of this society, especially in a city as foreigner-sodden as Kyoto.
I’m reading a novel by Enchi Fumiko, called 女坂, Onna-zaka, which is literally “Woman-slope,” as in the long, painful, arduous hill up which woman must climb over the course of her life. Twenty-four pages in, a woman is set to looking for a mistress for her husband, who respects domestic tranquility enough to say “pick out some innocent [virgin] girl from a good family, someone you can train to take care of the house” instead of bringing who-knows in from who-knows-where. It’s an assignment for class, which means spending most of my free time reading is actually doing homework, which is really nice for a change, but it’s hard. Enchi is a well-known and -respected female author (a separate category in Japanese bookstores), in fact so much so that it’s possible you might find her outside of the Woman Writers section, in just the regular Literature.
[As an aside, while this is pretty sexist and Japan is a very sincerely and well-meaningly vaguely sexist society— on which note, I am learning that it takes two to tango in that regard, broadly speaking— this notion of literature by woman writers being somehow markedly different than literature by men writers, theme aside, is also very par for the course for Japan in a lot of ways. For example, Murakami Haruki has been criticized for not being a Japanese writer, though his books are in Japanese and set in Japan. Apparently, their themes often are too universal— they could take place anywhere. What exactly it is that makes a book Japanese, on the other hand, is hard to define. The Japanese also think one of their intestines is longer than everyone else’s, so go figure.]
My classes this semester are translation and religion, both interesting and deficient in their own ways, but both, I think, useful for me beyond being inherently things I care very much about. It’s a bit frustrating that my translation professor, while kind and knowledgeable, is not infallible, and also is not always very good at declaring things positively, so we’ll talk about a sticky point and then just leave it sticky. My translation professor obviously knows a vast amount, but English isn’t his first language and he thought he’d be teaching in Japanese, so while his English is very good, he frequently asks if he “can say” things, and his organization suffers a little. (That said, I couldn’t teach a class in English LET ALONE in Japanese, nor could I be as amiable as he is while doing it.) More important to me in a big-picture sort of way is that I only have class after noon on Mondays and Fridays, giving me a great deal of the time I so lacked last semester. It’s wonderful. I still take care of my literature/translation professor’s son on Tuesdays, but Wednesdays and Thursdays are open open open, and that feels so wonderful. I can’t wait til it’s warmer and I can sit outside without needing to be inside somewhere.
On sitting inside places: unless you’re in a relatively big Starbucks, you can’t just go into a cafe and get a coffee and cake and study for three hours here. You shouldn’t sit in a coffee shop for more than an hour at the longest, and it’s much more usual to hang out visiting, not reading. Starbucks is an American import and the landscape of college students somehow came along with strategic lighting and gingerbread lattes. (Decaf espresso, to my despair, did not, however.)
Other large thing I’m doing this semester: a research project on 神仏霊場巡拝の道 (there’s a Japanese Wikipedia article but nothing in any other languages yet), literally and clunkily Gods and Buddha(s) Holy Site Pilgrimage Circuit Road— that is, a new pilgrimage route listing hundreds of places holy to gods and the Buddha/s. It’s a really big deal because while Shinto and Buddhism (Japanese flavored) are both practiced on the lay level, they’ve been more or less strictly separated at the level of clergy since official anti-Buddhist movements during the Meiji period (cf. ie. haibutsu-kishaku, the violent effect of Shin-Butsu-bunri, both meant in “the more narrow” sense of Meiji activity), and this is a pilgrimage being put on by major clergimen in Buddhism and Shinto, and involving shrines (S) and temples (B). This may very well turn into my thesis for graduation next year. While originally I was looking for other things— dietary restrictions, lay practice, liminal spaces— this is getting more and more interesting, because the disconnect between official policy and practice is something I’ve always had an eyeball on in different ways in the States.
Two last notes:
1) Japanese people LOVE OBAMA, mostly because he’s black and that is FASCINATING, but also because the more politically savvy Japanese got wind of the fact that our last president at the very least sounded stupid when he spoke and did things a lot of people didn’t like, plus this new BLACK MAN president had major popular support, which is weird and foreign and interesting. Relatedly, there is a tiny nowhere fishing town with a hotspring in Fukui prefecture called Obama, and boy HOWDY did they capitalize/are they capitalizing on that.
2) A poem from centuries ago, which I have to cut to tiny pieces to show you why it’s so beautiful:
たち別れいなばの山の峰に生ふる まつとし聞かば今帰り来む
tachiwakare inaba no yama no mine ni ouru matsu to shi kikaba ima kaerikom(u)
Though we part and I am gone, if I hear that like the pines on the ridges of the mountains of Inaba you are waiting, in that moment I will return to you
The English is three times as explicit as the Japanese, which turns on two kakekotoba, basically unfunny puns, double meanings on words that sound the same. The kakekotoba in this are ‘inaba,’ which is ‘if/when I am not here’ and also the name of a mountainous place, and ‘matsu,’ which means ‘pine [tree]’ and ‘to wait.’ So you have to read this poem in three bursts: “tachiwakare inaba,” “We part and I am not here”; “Inaba no yama no mine ni ouru matsu,” “The pines growing on the ridges of the Inaba mountains”; and “matsu to shi kikaba ima kaerikomu,” “If I hear that you wait, now I will return.”
It should be noted that this is the ONLY thousand-year-old poem I can read, because we studied it in my Noh class last semester (it’s central to the play Matsukaze, which you should find a translation of STAT). It should also be noted that all good poems a thousand years ago worked like that, basically. This poem is in the Kokinshu (Kokin Waka Shuu), a collection of ancient and modern waka poems, compiled between like 900 and 920 CE. Modern is a relative poem. It was written by Ariwara no Yukihira, who was a huge G.
