Category: Life

About a hundred meters away from my apartment, between two groves of trees and a red-shingled temple, is a bakery that has been shuttered for eight years, ever since the owner hung herself from a second-floor beam. This revelation is available to unsuspecting members of the public in the form of a brutally crude, unpunctuated, one-star online review. Oh, Google Maps, how did it end up like this? Did you expect to be the bearer of such news? Huffing, puffing, energetic information engine, then giant of advertising, and now painful prophet, dressed in babyish, primary colors.

At the local sushi joint, sat on a bar stool upholstered in soft-touch, brown plastic, I read the specials: fatty tuna, sweet shrimp, abalone. I strip the paper packaging from a pair of disposable chopsticks. A cracked speaker above a humming fridge bleeds floaty, 2000s-style synth-pop. I order shochu and watch my ego deflate on the counter. An octogenarian in a square white cap scrapes scales off a body and then hoses down the counter. The restaurant swims with odors.

I watch myself in the mirrored wall opposite. I watch myself, watching myself.

Online, I look up photos: cropped bob on a long face, crown of thorns. Lying on the couch, my feet against the wall, I nurse a tension headache. I feel like I’ve swallowed the full moon. It bumps up against the crevices inside my skull, unhappily. It has the beady eyes of a Lovecraftian infant, peering wetly from over the bassinet. “Can saints be made in these circumstances? Can souls be saved?” it hisses contemptuously. I pat its tender head. So much fear is disguised as scorn. Don’t ask me how I know. Wait, please come back. I’m dying for someone to ask me this question, or any question.

On the weekend, walking under the triple-laned overpass that connects Tokyo Bay’s manmade islands to the mainland, feeling the breeze and the blue-toned light compete for my attention. The gray concrete beams that hold up the road are unashamed of their unconventional beauty. The asphalt is painted in black, white and goldenrod. In this city, hours like these are ruled by the ram, ruled by the red planet, as I am. I have a feeling like I’m playing hide-and-seek, and have yet to be found.

Finally, fall. I roll the bike out of storage. Like the grass underfoot, the air is cool to the touch. I ride down a maple-lined street to the corner store, where I buy freshly roasted coffee beans and freshly baked bread. The sun sets between four and five. I climb up a paved hill, to the bridge over the tracks. I watch the cloud banks recede into the distance. I lean against the railing. I give it time.

I remember how easily I could fall in love. As an adolescent pustule, any glance in my direction was immediately captured, bathed in preservative, pinned between two jeweled panes of glass, then catalogued and forever hoarded in a sharp-edged, silver Rolodex. I never talked to anyone in the flesh world, but, in the paradise inside my brain, I was as voluble as a hyena, as capacious as the moon. Anything could vex me. Anything could captivate me. There was some quality that I locked onto—not beauty, not intelligence. Some grist of identity. In the chilled air of the basement, framed in the wooden doorway, one shoe on the bench, a turn of the head. Against the low bed, the early evening in late summer, a certain angle of the light on a bottle-green eye. A stray comment that could be interpreted, charitably, in my favor; only years later, sleeping with our hands and feet pressed together, do I realize it was never intended for me. Now, if the mood is right, I can depersonalize this same inclination for easy infatuation and bring it, instead, to the linked and varied charms of the world. I walk home, feeling a cherry-red hand lingering on my back. I take a breath. Its fingers trace a wobbly heart over my shirt.

I get older. It’s a truism, but pay attention. Every day that passes, I get older. I refuse to think of this as anything other than a privilege. I’m a woman, not a nymph. I am determined to resist any call to fetishize my own youth, which was emaciated then and is rotten now. You know that I am not nostalgic. My adolescence was documented in unsmiling photos, pained videos, and here, in tragic diary entries. When I relive it in dream, we, my heart and I, understand that it was nothing to celebrate. I’m a woman, not a calyx. I’m a woman, not a chalice. I will happily age, but I won’t be devoured by time. It’s a futile complaint, but make no mistake. I’m not a mother; it’s hard enough to be a daughter, a wife. Of blood plasma, of the skin of the dauphine, of green meconium fluid, I know nothing. I have ten good years left, and then, once those years are gone, once the petals have all wilted, I’ll have the rest of my life, which will be fully mine. Good riddance.

I grasp at the reeds. I rip them out. Handfuls of straw-like, saffron-colored light. I don’t respect nature. What? I don’t. I trample over it with the all the peachy, preachy eagerness of ignorance. But I can’t discard the influences that made me so easily. Cheek against the cold dirt, lying in the dew-wet grass, yellowing already, I am close enough to the signs to finally read them. They are dug into the ground. They are carved into every brick of my body. I can’t scratch them out without risking the foundation. Can I live with all these emblems of vice, virtue and sacrifice? Can I bear them without resorting to terror, to prayer? The rest of my life. Oh. Oh, no. What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What I would give to be free of this specific, shining pain. I’ve been waiting nearly a decade for the knife to drop. When it does, I imagine I’ll feel relief, then grief, then relief, again. The blade will lie uselessly on the floor. But then again, let’s be honest. Take my face into your hands. It’s more likely, isn’t it, that the hurt will be grander and fiercer than I can even imagine today. It will pierce me in a way that I cannot picture. If that’s the case, then what could be the point of all this waiting-in-preparation?

The light sighs, then chokes. Red, orange and pink run across my view, long, faint, flecked, like spittle. The temperature of the air, the rumbling of the train below, the twisted color of the sky, the flushed luster on everything. For a second, the stiches open. The door yawns wide enough for me to latch tightly onto a specific feeling. What I feel, then, is the power and the brevity of my life. I feel its madness, its divinity, its profound stupidity. I feel it tumble over me, like a playful wave. I feel its scarred simplicity. Then, as though struck, the feeling snaps away, and, lacking the instinct to fight for it, I lose it immediately. The wind takes it over the railing, the tracks, the bridge, into the distance.

When did I start writing this like a manifesto? Will the pretensions of my ego, many-winged, never cease? Finally, fall.

I read back my writing and find it uneven, like a mislaid path. Cobblestones, ruddy with rusty moss. But the unevenness doesn’t bother me. In the gaps between sentences, where the rhythm breaks and disperses, where traces of it are cast irregularly over rocky paragraphs, like a varnished wave smeared wetly against the shore, I glimpse something glittering, something close to feeling. That leak of light is a comfort. You must understand that I grew up among extremes of emotion: Perplexing, knotted, treacherous. Every step on the knitted ecru carpet, a tripwire. Now, years later, when I go hunting for feeling in the briars of my being, I can’t make sense of the tracks laid there. The footprints double-back, then crisscross. I can’t follow them to their source. Only in probing my past writing, in examining its tempo—occasional adagio, occasional allegro—am I able to spot, in the underbrush, the large, wet eye, the chipped fang, the blurred expression. Sometimes, if I wait by the foot of the hill, I even see her, half-monster, half-girl, face smeared with dirt, tears, and green phlegm. Howling, she crawls out of the cave, raw and new and filled with a panic that spurts like a fresh wound, weak to the many pains, the various joys, the intermittent horrors—

I travel an hour to a bookstore on the opposite side of the city. It’s nighttime, and I feel Tokyo‘s disregard fall over me like a shroud. Anonymity is this city’s gift. It’s not that I fit in, or don’t. You must understand that I grew up caught between cultures, and now, when I go searching in the brambles of birthright, no branches part to reveal a hidden pool of rippling water, of mossy, rusty relics half-buried in the silt, recovered by my hand, mine by inheritance. Sometimes, I hear someone talk about going home and I see how their blood trickles down their body, through the floor, and back through corrugated stone, to a lightless aquifer where their bones will one day go. I grew up in too many places; I am the product of two already uprooted people. I don’t long for belonging, but I have sometimes felt like I am supposed to. Only in Tokyo does that need seem undesirable, unnecessary. This city does not think of me, and I am therefore free to find untethered relief in its iron-colored rain; its encircling neon glows; its dirty shadows; its million gaudy lights like broken rubies; its clouds of cherry-like sweetness that, in maroon October, can be traced back to the orange-petalled osmanthus tree blossoming in the alleyways.

In the many years I’ve lived in this body, I like to think I’ve never misunderstood myself. I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as self-confident, but I am almost obsessively self-aware. I have a sense of watching myself from a third perspective at all times. I watch myself watching myself. Feet propped up on the sofa, trying to find the words. Squinting at the yolk of the setting sun. Leaping up the stairs at the train station, two at a time. Standing in my blue bathing suit, the rain leaving coin-sized dimples on the water, feeling, under my plastic flip-flops, the forking, copper-colored twigs wince, then split, like wishbones. Counting down the seconds between the seam of light and the answering thunder. Sitting in a scoop of fiberglass, twisting a rope around my hand as a flock of birds dart through the dusky blue. They abruptly dissolve their formation and descend, pointed and bulletlike, towards the lake, pulling up at the last moment—my breath caught in my throat like a lie—to land soundlessly on its surface. When it comes to telluric landings in late summer, an angel might try but could do no better.

After thirty years of following the rules, I rebel. It’s not spirited disagreement that I feel with the status quo, but fatigue. It dogs me like a lump of flesh, like a shadow. I go to the supermarket in sunglasses and without a bra. I fight to get a word in. I stick out my tongue at the fluttering Fata Morgana on the horizon.

Why does everything end before I can say goodbye? I want to do more with my time. I forget to eat. I do my taxes. I rant and rave like someone chained to a metal ring in a hole. At night, I fall asleep thinking—

I—

I—

I drink red water and bleed green blood. No, that’s not right—

In Akihabara, that twilight wasteland, an ad pasted on a brick wall on the other side of the road catches my eye. I shift position to get a better look, to decipher its meaning. In capitals, the words “EAT ME” and, directly underneath, a bug-eyed, pale-faced girl with permed, sticky-looking hair and telescoping lashes. I do a full-180, turning around completely, and see, on my side of the road, directly parallel to the ad, a vending machine in garish colors with its own lettering: “FEED ME”.

Eat me and feed me. At eight in the evening, after a long day, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. In my ears, a throaty guitar-string sound that is like slitting something ancient open.

Planet of towers, waves, and claret-colored skies. This heart does not eat nor feed. These heart never felt like a home. I open your letter and see you wrote the wrong thing, and you know it, and I know it. No, that’s not right—

I. Hard to sleep

I meet to talk with the cynic for the second time in as many years. In my first entry, she had no name, but today, let’s call her Magdalene. Previously, she was all about godly concern—but this time, we leave God outside, leashed by the ornate door. He looks at us through the windows with baleful eyes rimmed in purpling flesh.

We come to you live from the gory insides of a new-wave coffee shop in an upscale Tokyo neighborhood. Geopolitics like mold on the mind, destiny like damage on our parts. We stir thimblefuls of white-dyed cottonseed oil into lukewarm, six-dollar beverages. Our focus today is the moral life. That vaunted playground of the confused young woman.

“I want to do good,” Magdalene says, eyes glued to her plate as she pushes a wilted French fry around.

“What is good,” I reply, bitterly. “Is your definition of good what someone on social media told you to do?”

It was mostly meant in jest, but when Magdalene looks up, her face is contorted—in surprise, in fear, in anger?—and I immediately regret the impulse to wound her. Why do I crack jokes when what I really want is to argue? Wouldn’t it be more honest to just pick a fight?

We pick up our phones for the ten-millionth time. Tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. The alliterative quality of these buried names, finished off by lugubrious gold, activates something barbed and bloody in me. Wipe collective responsibility off our screens. Scrape this fate off our knees. The Magi could not have devised more poetic, more perverse gifts.

“Have you watched the Good Place?” Magdalene asks, eagerly, but with a certain shyness, like a church girl asking if I go to confession, probing me for a penitent’s heart. I imagine pouring out a libation of holy water into the mouth of the dog outside.

“No,” I say, sourly, though I have watched it by proxy through Strawberry, who patiently conveyed, at my request, each plot point from the polyester pulpit of our living room while I lay on the carpet, groaning and writhing in mock torture.

Magdalene talks like immorality is a pollutant, and morality, a bleaching agent. Molecules of disease and of purity. But, she insists, their movements can be charted, and therefore the stuff of life is to work to avoid, or attract, the right habits. For a while, I indulge this perspective, and we discuss its chief doctrine, which is a form of abstinence from consumption. The main thing is to buy as little as possible, because no amount of consumer research can conclusively clear any product of wrongdoing. We’ve tried and we’ve failed, and we commiserate now about our every attempt to perform the grand feat of a moral purchase, standing waist-deep in web searches in the middle of a supermarket aisle, speed-reading annual reporting on forced labor, carbon emissions, animal cruelty, water use, health and safety violations, sex crimes. Amateur excavators, trapped in a desert of objects, we reach to extract—with exquisite tenderness—the product from its nest but never fail to crush the surrounding ecology in the process. Our hands come away black, blue, and red, fingers clasped around a Temu gadget first seen on Tiktok. Zarathustra picking a t-shirt with a sequined collar off a Zara rack. Artemis ordering a sacred fawn off Amazon.

II. Impossible to dream

Magdalene and I leave the coffee shop and cross the road, coming to a candle that towers above all else. Within the ring of its light, fully aware of the dog-shaped shadows at our backs, we stare at the flame at the top of the column, trying to gauge how far the fire can grow before we are forced to put it out.

“I think we’re bad,” Magdalene starts, tentatively. The flame flickers coral and orange. Then, feeling braver, gasoline on the tallow of her tastebuds: “I think we’re takers, and not givers.”

I nod in agreement, though I am privately unimpressed, because I’d phrase this more harshly, and failure to name cruelties cruelly registers to me as willful ignorance.

I think of my grandmother, born in a village at the edge of a crater. Her ten blue babies, the indigo ash in her part. She gave until there was nothing left to give. I think of the beaded necklace of her DNA, laced through her descendants, all clinging to the long, winding supply chain of remittances, cinder blocks, and diamonds shaped like teardrops. Notches on a black ladder to the underworld. They give until there is nothing left to give. And yet—following a wobble in the universe in which I played no part—I am the lucky one. I get to live a life of precise, precious, pernicious luxury. I get to eat rhinestones and pretend to be a visionary. No, of course it’s not fair, but it’s more than just unfair—it’s more than I can bear.

Smash-cut to the present to find that Magdalene and I have arrived at the crossroads. She drags a two-headed, tattooed body. The body is the girl we had to kill to become the woman, the spell we had to cast to survive the transition, the poison we had to drink to inoculate ourselves against the plague. The sky is crème de menthe. The skin comes off the body in pink flakes like chips of candy paint. The yellow brick road like a stream of sweat, piss and gold. La vie en rose.

“Magdalene,” I whisper. “I’m afraid.”

“Why?” she asks. She holds a grimoire of laws in her free hand. I, a sword. Neither, in this case, is any form of power, until it’s turned back on its user. I try to decide how to tell her that I think the moral life is dead, that it vanished forever in the freezing vacuum between the incandescent atoms that string us together.

“The problem is you think humans are skin and blood,” I say, finally. “But I’m convinced we’re only empty space.”

The candle goes out. In the next moment, the horizon is aflame. A dog howls. I take a sip of watery coffee. Lightweight ceramic cup with glazed edges. Laminated menu. Overly crisp photo of a hamburger, cheese pooling on the plate. Laminate tabletop. Potted fern. Spiked Nike sneakers in a stylish colorway. Dollar-store earrings. Uniqlo button-down with stitching that smells like iron. Deep red dissolving into pure white, then back into red, and then into white again.

Magdalene waits for my final blow. We act like this is a duel but in all honesty, I don’t even have the strength to fight myself, I say, my legs crumpling, and she breaks into tears.

Suddenly, I am a high-powered career woman. A woman of disturbing industry. Heels clack on the floor. Fragrance—petrichor, patchouli—wafts into the room like a storm cloud.

I want to pound this out before my mind catches up to what I’m writing. I want to press the feelings onto the page like flowers. Seconds and minutes bubble up like a pox.

Can I make it, I think, can I make it. Can I run up this hill without leaving my body halfway up, strewn in pieces among the blades of grass. Lose myself. Can’t stop talking mad shit. Rolling around in the squelching mud and then getting up and sending my cream-and-iron ensemble to the dry cleaners.

To think that just two weeks ago my time was my own to kill. I don’t miss it, but I don’t know that I suit these new conditions. I need to relearn how to breathe underwater, how to say “synergy” without flinching. This was an ordinary room before they gave it a lavish name and stuck an elevated platform and microphone stand in one enameled corner. I sit in the audience, perfectly still, and feel the flame drain away through the hole in my head.

If I have but one regret, it’s that the demands of transformation have warped every stitch of skin, every latch of flesh. The only part of myself I still recognize is my anxiety. Chuck me back to a time where I could walk forever and never leave the radius of my desires.

Rainy Shibuya, my socks soaked through inside ragged sneakers. The body, more than ever a vessel, more than ever a target of distrust. I don’t like the twinges in my joints and the pangs in my heart; I don’t enjoy seeing my parents age into phantoms. In this weather, central Tokyo doesn’t seem real. The city, more than ever a fantasy, more than ever a house of illusions. I blink and see gems scattered across the pavement. Another half a heartbeat and they resolve into puddles reflecting the watery yellow of the traffic lights.

Trust the process, I think to myself. A mantra as I live out days chained together like plastic beads in a rosary. I ride the trains and observe hairstyles, clothing choices, shoes tapping against the sticky floor. I scroll through online stores. Waves lap ceaselessly at my shores. When I can’t find faith in myself, or the life I lead, or the choices I make, or the world I inhabit, I turn to the process. I have no religion; this is the closest I get. I see the process at work as I weave through crowds. I see it in the raindrop that travels from his tear duct into the burning bush of his brow. It speaks no language and therefore makes no promises. It feels no feelings and therefore holds no grievances.

Sunny Shibuya, my skin red and irritated underneath my clothes. The elastic band of my pants digging into my waist. The mind, one huge pustule. The hands, twitching at the ends of my arms. The process, following me around.

How can the treasure chest of time available to me be both so prized and so pointless? Nothing has meaning, I think, indulgently. I love to hate on everything, especially the usual maxims (truth, ego, despair, morality, amorality, the pursuit of anything). Nihilism is as decent a refuge as any. But I always come back to the process, revealing then the depths of my caprice, because no one as self-absorbed as I could not be steadfastly dedicated to the expectation that some of this will amount to something, that some of us will make it somewhere better than this.

Nighttime Shibuya, aflame with disappointment at my genuflection, at my earnest interest in a life lesson. Forgive me, city of swamp and terrors. It’s not exactly that I want to believe in a higher power, or a cosmic project, or a common destiny. I’ve tried, and I don’t. But I want to trust the process, and I want it to trust me.