I have been having writer's block. Or blogger's block. I like 'blogger's block' better. Alliteration has a way of winning.
When I lived in Japan at 18, I kept a copious written diary. I filled eight journals with minutiae, including the songs that used to play on my mix tapes to and from school, back in the days of walkmans and mix tapes. If I missed a day, I fretted until the moment my pen would touch the page again. At which point I'd make sure to list what had happened. Who I met, what I thought, what I ate, epiphanies and heartaches. That's how we learn to do it. "Dear Diary..." Who, What, Why, Where and When. Not unlike the questions an actor must ask herself. Who are you? Where are you? What do you want? What's in your way? Who are you talking to? It's how we tell a story -- to ourselves or to others if we are making believe. When you keep a diary, you record what happened with the strange built in audience of your imagined future self, someday picking it up and reading it. Because the future is unknown, everything is significant.
When I got to Kobe last week, I spent all day Wednesday writing, wanting to make sure the images of my journey weren't lost to new agendas and realities. I left off on Monday 3/14, like a page folded in a book that I meant to come right back to. The rest of the week I was in a 'liminal' state (thank you Victor Turner and George Mentore). Not on the inside, and not quite on the outside. Out of Tokyo, but not yet back home. But the beauty was -- I knew the town. Kobe was where I first learned to speak Japanese. The marune color of the Hankyu train cars -- which I once rode to school dressed in uniform -- were the same. Each station with its town written in both English and Hiragana, cream lettering on navy blue. Once upon a time I stared out those same train windows, a sea of clay tile roofs stretching towards mountains in the distance, listening as the conductor announced the next stop. I'd study the foreign script, the curvaceousness of Hiragana (once used only by women) testing myself on the characters. Slowly, slowly learning how the sounds got mushed together. Then I would try it out for myself. "Toyonaka." "To.Yo.Na.Ka."
That's what last week was like. I kept stepping back in time -- remembering all the pieces that led up to the earthquake in '95 -- and all the pieces that followed. Okuno San took me to Minoh Kooen -- Minoh Park. We walked the paths that stretch up the mountain towards the waterfall. It's where I got attacked by three monkeys whose claws broke my skin -- the scars of which I still have on my right forearm. My battle scars. My monkey scars. The weather was cool and Minoh was green, lush, reminding me of Big Sur and Idyllwild all at once. We kept looking for the monkeys but they were no where in sight. It was too cold for them to be out yet. When I used to run there, it was Spring and the Cherry Blossoms were in full bloom. The pinkest pink you've ever seen.
The day before I left, Yoshii San drove me to the top of Rokko mountain and we looked down at Kobe Harbor. She pointed out the name of a small mountain in the foreground and I felt myself topographically, staring southward towards the tip of Honshu, the Pacific ocean to my left and beyond that, California. Just the night before I had been singing Joni Mitchell with Yukiko, Okuno San's granddaughter, who is 2 years younger than I and who I had been friends with so long ago. We called ourselves "Reiko and Peach."
Oh it gets so lonely
When you're walking
and the streets are full of strangers
all the news of home you read
more about the war
and the bloody changes...
oh -- will you take me as I am?
Will you take me as I am?
Will you -- will you take me as I am?
Yoshii took me to Arima -- one of the oldest onsen in Japan where soldiers went after World War II to heal their wounds. We took off our clothes and sat side by side in small 'booths,' washing each other's backs before stepping out to the hot springs. The first was rich in iron deposits and the water left a brown tinge on the pink sandstone wall. The second was a milky white, highly ionized (or so the English description explained) with the power to cast off negative ions from a bather's body. A glass wall separated us from a grove of bamboo giving the impression that you were in fact outside. Yoshii told me of her swim lessons as a little girl, on the shores of Kobe harbor. Her instructor would toss a red rock out into the waves, and each student had to dive and swim while holding their breath until they surfaced, rock in hand. Cocking her right arm, she demonstrated the toss as water droplets hit the milky water, forming cocentric circles, spreading outward. They became the circles of long ago, as I imagined Yoshii's nine year old body swimming toward the point of entry, beneath the waves, lungs filled with determination, eyes wide and fixed on the prize.
It was getting too hot, and we had to be at Konan for a meeting with Mrs. Nagao. Yoshii San left and I decided to try one more steaming pool, but as I stepped in an older woman and perhaps her granddaughter stood up suddenly to leave. The woman my age smiled and said they were already leaving, and I smiled back, waiting for them to step out. When they were gone I stared out towards the mountains, my face newly hot with a mixture of pride and shame and anger. I stood naked and thought of Jim Crow laws and water fountains. Reasoned that maybe they really were already getting out. But let it go, knowing full well I'd never know -- and that it was time for me to go anyway.
True to form, there was Yoshii, waiting for me. She pointed towards the standing shower with a glass wall that faced the carp pond. "To cool off," she told me. I stepped in and pushed the big silver dial on the wall, a spray of frigid water stealing the steam from my skin and taking my breath away. I thought of Sendai and World War II and began to cry. My whole body felt like one big tear. Cold, so cold. My skin rippled with goosebumps.
At the end of the day we visited Konan's Women's College and took a tour of their priceless collection of books in a locked room above the stacks of the library. Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Hardy, Goethe, and more. All first editions. Archives of letters written on stationary from The Dorchester in London, where I once stayed. As we left I couldn't help but stop and stare at the statue of "The Thinker," with Kobe beginning to twinkle in the blue hue of twilight below. A flock of crows overhead. It was strange, everyone said, for them to be cawing so loudly. I thought of my plane flight the next day. The full moon on Saturday 3/19, leaving on a jet plane. Don't know when I'll be back again.
The next morning I furiously typed into my i-touch as I rode the bus with Mr. Yoshii to the airport. All the images. Desperate to record them. Lest I forget them. Afraid of the silence that did come over this past week. Of plane rides and sleepness nights and waking in hotel rooms, sure that I was just in another room of Yoshii's house that I had not yet seen. Or even in a hotel in Tokyo. Slowly coming to the realization that I was home. Back to where I once belonged. To Seattle and to the faces of my family, airports and a train ride to Penn Station where I found Chris, on his birthday, waiting for me. And Bentley beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
Too many moments and images to properly do justice. But I will continue to try. Or, as Yoda once said: "there is no try, only do." So I sit here now, in New York, listening to the sound of the MTA bus sail by outside...a whale beside the yellow fish taxis. All swimming upstream on the island that never sleeps, powered by the almighty hum of oil, the resource we all now hate to need -- so desperately.
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