Tag Archive for ‘life’ at Worse Than Coleslaw

I was flipping through my journal earlier today while I was at work and came across an entry I’d made over Winter Break while I was staying with a couple of friends in Marumori and unwinding after our successful five-day excursion to Tokyo. Said entry detailed a small but extremely poignant (to me, at any rate) “Japan” type moment. I have reprinted it here with relevant hyperlinks for your reading (and viewing [and listening]) enjoyment:

January 05, 2009
12:40 AM

After spending the entire day loafing around Jamie’s apartment, him and James playing “Valkyria Chronicles” while I read the Murakami book I’d picked up in Sendai, the three of us stopped at a Daily Yamazaki, which is a well-known chain of Japanese convenience stores (or “konbini” as they are often referred to here), to get some latenight snacks. As we entered the store I heard the opening strains of a familiar tune from back when we were all in high school. “Dude,” I said, “It’s Jimmy Eat World, the one song with the video where everyone’s in their underwear.” We proceeded to make our way around the store picking up its various delectable wares, all the while singing along and doing a kind of shuffling walk that was almost-but-not-quite a dance. The only other person in the store was the middle-aged Japanese man working the cash register, who had obviously been trained to display no emotion. I found this to be an extremely cool little moment, and as we were driving back to Jamie’s apartment I realized that this experience really reminded me of that famous scene in Reality Bites where Winona Ryder and Janeane Garofolo dance around a convenience store to “My Sharona.” Except in Japan. Adding “except in Japan” to the end of any anecdote that evokes a particular memory from the past just increases the awesome exponentially.

So I spent five days in Tokyo at the beginning of my Winter Vacation and have made a short detour to Miyagi prefecture with some friends before I head back to the frozen northlands from whence I came. Miyagi prefecture, with its milder climate and larger and more interesting capital city, is still a major improvement over the town in Iwate where I currently lay my head, but it seems like a major drag after the kidney punch to the senses that was Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolitan area. While this does mean that I have some time to breathe and do some writing, it wasn’t easy for me to get on that northbound bullet train, to leave behind what seemed like a great gig—all the glitz and glamour and energy from such an enormous population combined with a crime rate that would be phenomenally low for an American city a tiny tiny fraction of Tokyo’s size—for the promise of rice fields and sub-zero temperatures and poor cell phone reception. I’m not knocking rice fields, exactly, but they’re not really my thing.

As I rode the Shinkansen up to Miyagi, when I wasn’t sleeping or listening to the old man in the seat across from mine suck off a toothpick for what seemed like (and actually was) two hours, I spent some time reading a book about the ending of the world and allowed my mind to wander, entertaining visions of moving to Tokyo and doing the big-city thing after a lifetime spent in places where a bunch of my friends and I could get together and while away half the night standing in a circle asking each other a million permutations of the question, “So, what is there to do?” without ever coming up with an acceptable answer. Sure, the rent’s high and I’d continue to have trouble communicating with people due to my lack of Japanese ability for the foreseeable future and would still probably feel isolated and alone more often than not even amidst all those huddled millions…but my thinking is that if I can put myself in a place that has the best of everything to offer, I can at least be hopeful of eventually finding whatever it is that I am looking for—be it serenity, security, a decent cup of coffee, inspiration, motivation, and/or creepy anime memorabilia for me to browse through in back-alley storefronts and then not buy in quantities sufficient to last an Age. The seasons of my soul (or whatever) have often been characterized by unnamed longing, so a big city seems like it might be the right place to hang out in. It’s simple mathematics: even though I still don’t know what it is that I want out of life, it is statistically more likely that if I ever do figure that shit out, I will be in a better position to obtain whatever Thing it is in Tokyo than I would be in most other places. Unless that Thing I wanted out of life turned out to be snow, in which case my current place of residence would provide a pretty solid foundation on which to build my future.

In Iwate prefecture—a place that sucks even compared to the other sucky (and not-so-sucky-but-still-kind-of-meh) places I have spent significant amounts of time in, and sucks even more than a similarly proportioned American town would simply because of the language barrier—I often feel like I am drowning, so far removed from anything that moves me or even feels real that, for all my complaining, I don’t even know how to go about improving my life other than to wait for my current contract to expire in March and toss the dice again to see if the next place I end up will be an improvement. It’s hard for me to tell whether my current existential discomfort is due to my own bad attitude and inability to experience joy even while inhabiting a place that actually is beautiful and serene and magnificent, or whether I have 100% accurately described said place as being total ass and am thus justified in being a little disgruntled every now and then while I plan my escape. Am I making a Hell out of Heaven, or am I merely seeing Hell for what it is?

If I moved to Tokyo, though, maybe I’d finally be able to tell once and for all whether it’s me that’s crazy, or whether it’s everyone else.

I have a lot to say about Tokyo, although it might take me a while to get it all down. Stay tuned.