Turning Japanese

Memoirs of a Sansei

David Mura

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802196026
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

"The poet David Mura brings an intriguing perspective to the New World quest for enlightenment from this ancient and ascendant culture" ( The New York Times ). Award-winning poet David Mura's critically acclaimed memoir Turning Japanese chronicles how a year in Japan transformed his sense of self and pulled into sharp focus his complicated inheritance. Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up on baseball and hot dogs in a Chicago suburb where he heard more Yiddish than Japanese. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for identity with honesty, intelligence, and poetic vision, and it stands as a classic meditation on difference and assimilation and is a valuable window onto a country that has long fascinated our own. Turning Japanese was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award. This edition includes a new afterword by the author. "A dizzying interior voyage of self-discovery and splintered identity." — Chicago Tribune "There is brilliant writing in this book, observations of Japanese humanity and culture that are subtly different from and more penetrating than what we usually get from Westerners." — The New Yorker " Turning Japanese reads like a fascinating novel you can't put down... Mura's story is a universal one, and one that is accessible to everyone, even those whose experience in the U.S. is not that of a person of color." — Asian Week "[Mura] paints a portrait of Japan that is rich and satisfying... a refreshingly kindly and tolerant study, a powerful antidote to the venomous anti-Japanese mood that seems, distressingly, to be seizing some corners of the American mind." — Conde Nast Traveler

PART TWO

I

“What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it reverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”

—Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”

“When you know the masks as well as we do, they come to seem like the faces of real women.”

—Fumiko Enchi, Masks

1

At the end of February, almost out of season, a last snowfall. At evening, it dusts the city in whiteness, spots the black umbrellas bobbing down the avenues, vanishes in the thick black hair of shop girls, in the short-cropped cuts of sarariman. The tires of taxis slosh through the flakes, darken them to slush. The great crowds rushing through the stations emerge to a night that is muffled, less jangling than the normal pace of the city. The lights in the alley-sized streets flash on the crystals, which then vanish in the shadows. For a moment, quietness settles.

Romping like children, Susie and I build a snowman in the vacant lot in front of our house. Empty space in Tokyo—a minor miracle. She is laughing and singing “Frosty the Snowman.” I grumble about the cold, how my part of the snowman, the second ball, is refusing to grow. It is crumbling apart each time I pat it.

“Whose idea was this anyway?” I lack her patience to pack the snow down after each roll. The ball stays loose, collapses like a delicate, failed soufflé.

We put two olives in the head for eyes. The one olive pit sticking out at the nose makes the snowman look like a snow bird, so we attach tiny wings. Susie exclaims that that the snowman has the webbed neck of Turner’s syndrome, the stunted limbs of a Thalidomide baby, the weird eyes of chromosomal breakage.

“Never make a snowman with a doctor,” she says.

We debate and give up on the idea of using dried lotus roots for hair. I am glad she is so happy, that the tension between us has lifted. Just as we finish, a woman passes, walking her dog, and laughs, “yuki dharama”—yuki for snow and dharama, the little red round-bellied gods you see at Buddhist temples and cemeteries.

Later, after it snows some more, we look out the door, and the snowman or snow bird has taken on a more peaceful demeanor, the rough edges smoothed out into a primitive abstract figure, featureless as any enterer of Nirvana might be.

Sipping tea on the floor in the kitchen, the nabe bowl before us emptied of its stew of shrimp, soy sauce, and vegetables, we watch Japanese television. I can, aided by the visual messages, understand the dialogue of the more stereotypical programs. I forget I am listening to Japanese. On one program, a young American is staying with a Japanese family. Standing in the living room, towering over the others, he looks bloated, pasty, pale. Accepted by the family, he elicits the help of the father in smoothing over his engagement with a young Japanese woman. Still, this young American, his whiteness, seems an aberration, almost a joke. I am seeing the reverse of the Asian stereotypes in Sixteen Candles or Gung Ho or Valentine’s Day. In my revengeful delight, I understand how much loneliness and anger I felt in America.

Susie finds the exchange student both funny and annoying. She is almost as angered by Asian stereotypes as I am and shares some of my resentment toward American culture. And yet she is who she is.

“How is this picture of the foreign exchange students any different from the one in Sixteen Candles?” she asks.

“For one thing, the Japanese woman he’s becoming engaged to isn’t seen as a freak.”

“How do you know? You can barely follow the dialogue.”

“You can see it. Look how the father treats him.”

Arguments on culture, on race, discussions of distance, the histories between us. Trying to negotiate the space that is marriage. In our two small rooms, we sit watching television; later, I am at the computer, Susie behind me, huddled in bed, the red coils of the heater humming beside her. Photographs of Butoh dancers, prints by Utamaro, tacky tourist watercolors and postcards from Tono, Kamakura, Kurama, on the walls. The pottery in the kitchen, cheap, newly bought, rough-hewn with charm. The TV set and washer picked up on the street, the tables from secondhand furniture stores.

We are nearly midway through my stay. At times a sense of severing comes over me, as if I can hear the ties to my old life breaking, the way one can hear telephone wires snapping in the cold or ice buckling. Something is coming apart. There’s a loss of balance, a floating, as if I were adrift at sea, out of sight of land for so long that the sight of land, once thought to be so reassuring, so absorbing, seems frightening and strange, an impossibility. I had started the year thinking I would return at its end to the comforts of America. Now America seems distant, distasteful, no longer my home. And yet I cannot stay here in Japan. Or can I? And if I were to leave, I’d rather go on to other parts of Asia, and then to Europe. Susie feels less certain. At times she longs for home.

Who are my friends? An architect and publisher of a dance magazine; a student in music composition; an artist who runs a snack bar; a photographer who teaches at a radical school each Thursday and is writing an article on the uses of violence; a highschool English teacher; a Noh musician; a translator in a trading company; my Japanese teacher, who’s the wife of a section chief at Mitsubishi. They speak English in varying degrees, and each conversation is full of confusions and mistranslations. At times the results are comic. A woman in Susie’s tea ceremony asked, “Sun de imasu ka?”—Where do you live?—and Susie in confusion replied, “Shin de imasu ka?”—Am I dead? Later she told the woman that she was drinking sake (wine) rather than seki (cough medicine) for her cold.

“She must have thought I was a lush.” Susie laughed.

At other times, the language intervenes in more difficult ways, in questions that are not understood or can never be asked since to a Japanese they would seem either rude, irrelevant, or unanswerable. I think that Reiko mentioned something a few weeks back about taking a trip to Shingu, my grandfather’s hometown, with Haruki. But she’s said nothing about it since.

“Should we ask her about this?” I asked Mrs. Hayashi.

Maybe these friends are impolite, Mrs. Hayashi suggested.

I don’t know what to make of this. Reiko has been so kind to me. It ought to feel natural simply to ask about this. But it doesn’t. Somehow it would interrupt the flow of our friendship. I fear appearing the crude American. I let it go.

Eleven ‘Clock comes on, with its silly wisecracking hosts and games. Young women in bathing suits run across the stage and, using a rope, pull themselves up a greased incline. At the top they put on underwear and slide back down. “I’d be furious if it weren’t so silly,” says Susie, as she turns off the set. “But of course, that makes it even more infuriating.”

We open the closets, pull out the futon, roll it out on the tan tatami mats. Beside it are a book of Japanese vocabulary, tapes of dialogues, my Noh recital. I write, listening now to the sounds of the Noh Kan, the taiko, otsuzumi, the kotsuzumi, an instrument which I learned to play just last week.

Susie climbs into the futon beside me, her body steaming from her bath. She asks me to hand her her book on shiatsu. I pick up a familiar novel, with descriptions of dinner parties with a Margaux on the sideboard, smoked trout, a cassoulet, and the sounds of the words are strange to me, the food foreign. Rather than The American Poetry Review, or the latest minimalist fiction, I read The Tale of Genji, The Tales of Heike, The Tales of Ise, the theories of Zeami, who weaves an aesthetic around hana (flower) in a discourse that seems bafflingly vague, self-contained, intuitive, and circuitous, that lacks the specificity, directness, or linear logic of Aristotle’s Poetics. I study poems of Buddhist doctrine, Noh plays about Gods, feudal daimyos (lords), and princesses, stories of lovers in tiny inns, temple monks, fishermen, merchant daughters in Osaka. All of them say the form is empty, the self decentered, the substance you learned in the West is absent here.

As I fall asleep, I think of sleeping in a bed two feet above the ground. The idea seems awkward, surreal. I think of my grandfather, his emigration. Of a circle closing. When will I return to the place he was born?

The next morning, the snow had melted to mush in the streets, our sculpture to a small mound. There was the sound of dripping from the eaves, with an occasional plop when a big glob fell, and the scrape-scrape of women cleaning off the street in front of their houses. Susie was meeting Takako Inada for lunch. Then she was going to accompany Takako through her day and pick up Takako’s children from day care.

“I think she’s going to do it,” said Susie. “I’ve finally convinced her that Kei-chan and Haito-chan aren’t going to go crazy if she divorces her husband.”

“You’re the devil in her ear.”

“Get serious. She told me she’s been supporting her husband for several years. He wanted to leave his job at the kaisha (company), to stop being a sarariman, so she agreed to finance him in setting up a business. Only the business still hasn’t taken off. She’s going to be better off financially after the divorce.”

Near noon, I went to a take-out sushi shop on Mejiro Avenue and had some maguro, ika, and futomaki. I asked for koora, but was told they had none. I settled for a Kirin cider. At least I’d finally learned to pronounce Coca-Cola in Japanese. Japanese is an unaccented language, but I’d had difficulty eliminating the accent in words borrowed from English. I also couldn’t quite pronounce the Japanese r, which is approximately halfway between the English r and the English l. I’d already given up on using the reshito for receipt and found that ryoshusho, the Japanese word, was easier to pronounce.

I walked a few doors up to Renoir, one of the half dozen coffee shops along the avenue on the way to the station. Its decor was white, stark; the clientele mainly college students from the nearby university. They wore white shirts, oversized black sweaters, dark pants and skirts. They’d adapted the style of the American fifties, a time of innocence, frivolity and prosperity, safe from the problems of crime and race, the decay of the city.

I ordered a bienna koohi (Vienna coffee), scones with whipped cream and marmalade. I was reading Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years. I was going to see her in a week, and I was worried about how the meeting would go. She was eighty years old and was in the hospital for cancer. The interview would take place there. I was surprised that she had agreed to see me. She was the leading Japanese woman novelist. The other novelists I’d tried to see had all said they were too busy. I lacked the credentials, wasn’t writing a dissertation on their work.

When I left the coffee shop, the afternoon sunlight had melted all the snow, the air had warmed. I passed the stationery shop, the pottery shop, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Chinese restaurant, the French restaurant where we went for paella. Around me schoolchildren in their blue uniforms giggled; women on bicycles carried their groceries home, a child sometimes strapped to the seat in the back. Young men in the local 7-Eleven browsed through manga (comic books). The young women beside them were reading Sassy, My Life, Elle. We often stopped at the 7-Eleven on our way home late at night, picked up some instant curry rice, a bento of teriyaki chicken or sushi. I realized again how much I would miss this country, how I felt I was dwelling in some protective womb, this world of faces that looked like mine.

When I got home, I went up on the roof. I’d been meaning to do this since Okubo, the real-estate man, had shown us our apartment. As I stepped onto the gravelly surface, the skyline of Tokyo hit me on all sides—the shopping center of Ikebukuro, with its thrust of skyscrapers, a little to the left; then to the right, Shinjuku, and beyond that Shibuya, the ring of centers along the Yamanote-sen line. All my travels through the city had been by train or subway. My sense of the city was from the ground, winding through small streets, looking for this shop or that class, or trying to choose a restaurant. I felt as if I’d just climbed up from a system of tunnels, was suddenly seeing sunlight and distance, with a new sense of space and vertical heights.

I could see dozens of apartment buildings within a block, and dozens of balconies with clotheslines. Tiny walkways ran between the buildings. No yards, though here and there a single pine or a large jade plant fronted a building. The balconies indicated that each apartment was about twelve feet wide, rabbit hutch after rabbit hutch. The scene had an Asian sense of space. Inside, the apartments were cluttered with goods, the people well fed, the refrigerators full.

Down below, I heard the yaki-mo man and his loudspeaker recorder blaring out his selling song. Yaki-mo were mountain potatoes roasted in charcoal (most apartments, like ours, did not have an oven). His song, a folk tune, seemed ear-splitting and obnoxious, rather than charming and quaint.

The skyline suddenly reminded me of the panoramas at the beginning of cop shows. Television gave no sense of Tokyo space. Either the small rooms looked large on the tiny sets, or the streets, seen one at a time, lacked the curves and dead ends, the layout which was designed in feudal times to ward off invaders and which gave the city its labyrinthian feel.

So, I thought, this is where I live. I’ve become one of them, an anthill dweller, a member of the hive.

2

On a late afternoon in March, the huge shadow of the Ikebukuro Seibu fell out over the crowds leaving the station. On the walks were old men and women with wizened faces, kerchiefs or caps, their clothes a soft pale blue. Shoe boxes and rags laid out before them. Sarariman stood with their feet propped on the boxes, fingering a toothpick, a cigarette. The shoppers joggled by, laden with bags. We passed the Mister Donut, a Pachinko parlor, an electronics store, the cameras and recorders layered in tiers, the prices on little tags beside them.

“You remember the number?” Susie asked.

“Of course.”

“Oh, don’t go off in a huff. I just don’t want to go through that again.”

I was going into the Ikebukuro branch of our bank to use the cash machine. I knew she was right. Two days after we had built the snowman, I tried to use our card in a bank in Shinjuku. I’d forgotten our code number, but since I couldn’t read the kanji, I didn’t realize that was why the machine wasn’t working. I thought I hadn’t pressed the right buttons. On the third try, the machine ate my card. I felt like an idiot. We were nearing the end of the month and short on cash. We had to borrow from Daniel and then ask Hasegawa, from International House, to arrange for a new card.

This time I emerged from the bank triumphant. “Here it is. Your sugar daddy provides.”

All through our stay in Japan I enjoyed being the one who was providing our income. Back in the States, there’d been many years when Susie had made more than I did, and we assumed that after she finished her medical training, this would certainly be the case. She had trouble adjusting to our changed situation in Japan, and she thought about going back to the States more often than I did. Lately, especially after visiting Takako at her clinic, Susie would talk of how she missed being a doctor, how not working was beginning to unsettle her.

I stopped at a shop window to admire a sports coat. A mother passed by with her daughter, in her navy schoolgirl uniform. The girl’s hair was cut in bangs. Like me, she kept stopping to look in the windows. Her mother yanked her along.

“Takako keeps telling her children that their father’s away on business trips,” Susie was saying. “I told her there’s got to be a point when she tells them the truth.”

“Well, she’s finally told him she wants a divorce. She told his in-laws too. That’s a start.”

“She still thinks she’s a freak, that there’s no one else who feels like her.”

“It’s hard to tell, though, what people actually feel here. You can’t assume they want the same things Americans want or think the same way.”

“Of course not. But I think things are just beginning to change. Did you see in the paper that the Socialist Party just elected a woman as its head?”

We walked into Seibu and took the escalator to the great depato market. It was so familiar by now, the sections for pickles, for sushi and sashimi, for pre-mad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Part1
• Part2
• Afterword
• Acknowledgment