A typhoon approaches. Its outer rain bands encircle western Japan, bathing the city of Tokyo for 72 hours in constant, irrepressible rain. At three in the morning, I am awoken by the sound of water gurgling loudly in the drain outside. Sun for two straight weeks. Working from home in a groundfloor apartment shrouded by […]
The life of a lie can last a millisecond or a million years. The life of a lie can belong to a pauper or a prince. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the lie is about extreme moneymaking, personal prosperity, individuality, brokering power, cheating death, and the meaning of freedom. In […]
On my way home from graduation, I brake too abruptly at a stoplight, causing the front tire on my bicycle to turn and skid. Something in the weave of reality contorts too far and snaps, and I tip over onto the asphalt. My right thigh takes most of the impact, and two nights later, like […]
Summer has edges that feel so defined. The horizon looks like a chiseled corner fold; a thin gold-green edge balancing against forget-me-not blue. I close my eyes and imagine that we live inside a handmade paper dodecahedron, its faces cutting into the atmosphere, scarring the sky in vertical stripes. I imagine that, if I reach […]
I sit in the bathtub with my hair braided into a loop and pinned to my head. In two weeks, Strawberry and I will be moving out of the dorm and into our first real place together. Now, when I run errands, I try to be intentional about where I look. This neighborhood will soon […]
Every year, during the summer months, I develop a taste for pickled fruit and vegetables. I eat pickled plums in bowls of rice: they are round, soft, and purple-red, like gluey, zombified eyes. I buy trays of kimchi from the supermarket: lasagna-like layers of briny cabbage and chili spice. I think longingly of my year […]
Clicking through online clips of documentaries, I find myself entranced by the lusty, dynamic collaboration between danger and nature. Springing from a tree like Aphrodite through the foam, a bird cuts through the reddish air to escape a dusky-eyed jaguar just behind. A velvety penguin zooms through crystalline, pale blue seawater while a dove-gray seal […]
I’ve written extensively and enthusiastically about all my temporary places of residence: rural and urban Japan, the southern coast of India, the American Midwest. But rarely do I describe the place where I was raised, and where I have spent the majority of my life thus far. If I am unreasonably reclusive about it, maybe I […]
