Notes on Language, Self, and Connection
I first met Vee when he was in a glass box and I couldn’t figure out how to get inside. I walked by the building’s clear facade, aware that the people inside could probably see me, and too embarrassed to let my immediate confusion show by stopping to investigate more closely, I kept walking.
Where the hell is the door? It was just a wall of windowed panels.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been confounded by a door in Japan, and it wouldn’t even be the last. I take a breath, turn around, and walk by again, a bit more slowly this time. I glance and finally notice tracks under glass, and that the panel is mounted on wheels. Thank god. Cautiously, I begin to nudge the panel sideways to enter. Somehow?
Still wrong. Vee rushes over, sun-tanned and genial, and motions me to a different, identical pane of glass. Smiling kindly at my flushed-red sheepishness, he leads me in.
Later, I’ll remember that first smile fondly as we stand in front of a vending machine on my last night in Miyazaki, him handing me a Pocari Sweat and telling me that I shouldn’t say *arigatougozaimasu* to him because it’s too formal.
*
There’s a quote attributed to Charlemagne, first Holy Roman Emperor: “To have another language is to possess another soul.” This is a statement that demands further questions.
If having another language means possessing another soul, then by all accounts, I’m not even sure I have full claim to my first one. I often find myself at a loss for words. With the difficulty I have articulating my thoughts in the fidelity I’d like, it’s hard to feel mastery over my own native tongue – particularly given the nearly 30 years of practice, and that most of the globe outside the United States is at least bilingual. How could I possibly manage a second, much less one as wildly divergent and high-context as Japanese?
For all my tendencies toward indecisiveness and aversion to uncertainty, the inexplicable pull to pursue it weighed heavier – which is how I came to spend three months alone in Japan, trailing from Fukuoka to Miyazaki Prefecture, and finally Tokyo.
*
Being surrounded by a language you don’t understand can feel like someone’s dimmed the lights. You’re used to constantly skimming signs and labels, catching fragments of conversation, absorbing all this meaning with no effort. When that stream of ambient information disappears, it’s disorienting in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. You may, like me, realize you’re adrift in a low-level, vague sort of unease.
Over time you grow accustomed to being in the dark. You forget, until amid your wandering a flash of understanding illuminates like a firefly blinking past.
“ちょっと休憩したい!” “I wanna take a break!”
A small boy on a bike whizzes breathlessly up the sidewalk in Nakameguro, his dad close behind, their voices trailing in the warm summer air as they pass. It’s late – maybe 10pm – and I catch it instantly and without effort. Just a small, tossed-off phrase. This might be the first time I’ve passively understood a moment like this without trying, and it lands with weight.
But these moments are slippery. Not long after, I’m seated in a jazz bar, sipping a dark red pour that I’ve already forgotten the name of, and I’ve dropped back into unintelligibility. The buzz of conversation surrounds me, but the only voice I can make sense of is Billie Holiday’s, singing ‘How Am I To Know?’ from the vinyl spinning behind the counter.
I check the time. The last train is close, but I don’t move. There’s something about Tokyo that makes you feel like you could climb all over it. Here, heat is different for me. It’s not internally generated and it’s not the dry heat from home. Instead it’s a stranger that I am trying to play nice with – I pay penance to it with sweat and walk among the telephone poles and zigzagging wire, all of us crackling.
*
Going it alone in a place where you’ll always be seen as starkly “other” isn’t the traditional type of fun. It took me a good two years to even buy a plane ticket. Many who travel to Japan – even those who live there – warn against this omnipresent aspect of the culture.
All in all, it’s been less torturous than I imagined. A big contributor to that is the kindness generously shared by those I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with. Otherwise, a broad reason it’s felt easier than expected is because here, in these complex webs of culture and history and social nuances I will never be able to fully understand, I am insulated by my otherness. I can enjoy and lean on the myth and intrigue of my “foreign-ness” with no concerns about fitting in or measuring up to others.
Of course I don’t fit in, and I never will. In many ways, perhaps unintuitively or contrary to popular belief, this is a kind of luxury. I’m exempt from acing this assignment – always present and paramount – that comes with being a social species.
And I’ve found it to be far less isolating than I imagined. My default mode of choice is to be as gracious and unobtrusive as possible, but surprisingly, people talk to me. They invite me over for dinner. They call their friends on the spot and make introductions, which leads to more dinners in different cities and “Have you been to this vinyl bar yet?” and “Let me show you a great sashimi spot tonight.”
I do yoga with a group of 50-plus-year-olds by the beach. I eat tsukemen in basements with strangers. A bartender tosses me a helmet before we ride his motorbike to a rowdy izakaya I’ve never heard of, where everyone knows each other – the owner is moving away, it’s the last hurrah, and by some odd intersection of events I’m here raising a glass of champagne and listening to a toast that I can hardly understand.
One day, in the fog of a hangover, buoyed just enough to stay afloat by the glow and motion of Harajuku’s winding streets, I wandered into Brain Dead for a quick lap and offered my well-worn *arigatogozaimasu* to the guy at the counter before continuing on my way, only to have him quite literally run down the cobbled path after me and my fellow *gaijin* friend to give us free canvas tote bags, with no other explanation than, “Present. Present.”
All this to say, it’s been easy to take on the role of novelty. Not only this, but when you’re unpracticed in navigating each other’s languages, it’s nearly impossible to perform. You can hardly explain yourself in any complex way, much less self-stylize yourself in the subtle pushes and pulls of conversational theater.
In a way, you’re forced to exist with each other in the present, accepting that each person contains a deep history and exists within a context that cannot be shared. A mutual suspension of disbelief occurs, and we are liberated from the burden of being fully seen. In this gap, created by the impossibility of full understanding and known-transience, the illusion of more possibility yawns wide. We laugh next to it and share plates of nigiri.
Dislocation – physical and mental – the feeling of being on the verge of losing balance tips me forward into momentum. I find comfort and safety in estrangement, under corners where people forget to look, and more luck than I deserve. I feel both intensely fragile and indefatigably invincible, a hum of tension beneath a smooth, lucent exterior.
*
Even three months in, though, there are times in the deepening summer where I worry less about any stink induced by the increasing heat and balminess (it’s everywhere, and it’s polite not to notice) than I do about that particular smell of sweat that only comes when co-mingled in equal parts with fear – of being misunderstood, of the inability to express myself, with the uncertainty that the kindness I’m experiencing is genuine, or tied to any real ability to be liked.
It’s deeper-rooted and duller than the constant anxiety I felt at the beginning of my time in Japan, where I felt below everyone and incapable of existing correctly in this country – a country of unspoken rules and quiet observation. I eventually got past this (mostly) the more time I spent around people in Tokyo. Nobody is perfect. And as a friend said to me after driving together in a rental car from Fukuoka to Itoshima, sitting on a seaside rock and chatting over nikuman and canned highballs while the sun set behind the white torii gates of Futamigaura, “There are assholes everywhere.”
As for the comfort I feel, getting to opt out of any true opportunities to be fully known, I’m not sure what that ultimately says about me. For now, I’ll call a spade a spade and wait until a new and truer card reveals itself to me.
*
Viorica Marian, a psycholinguist known for her work on how multilingualism shapes cognition and self, writes that, “Just as H2O can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas depending on temperature, a person can be a different version of themselves depending on which language they are using.”
This is part of what’s kept me hooked. My interest in embracing another, alternative half-persona stems less from disliking that I’m me, and more from feeling limited by it – it can be exhausting, constantly existing tethered to yourself, unable to experience the world in any other way than through the lens of your own being. At least that’s what I tell myself.
Either way, the more grammar and patterns of expression I absorb, the more an atmospheric “other” sublimates. Polly Barton describes something similar in her memoir, 50 Sounds, when writing about her first forays into learning katakana, and the way the English loan words sounded: “Like being confronted with a distorted mirror of oneself—disarming, intriguing, unsettling.”
One night on my way back home, I’m headed towards Ueno on the last train, just after 12am. I arrive and the station is still and silent as I wander alongside the tracks towards my exit. I finally approach a set of stairs, and keep a respectful distance behind a girl my age, who’s dressed sharp and composed in all-black and pinstriped trousers. She’s the only other person around, so it’s just the two of us climbing upward in unison, hugged by concrete and weak fluorescence.
Partway up she begins to falter, not just in the pace of her steps but in overall affect, before coming to a stop and slowly, slowly bowing at her waist to some unknown god, shoulder-length hair slipping past her cheeks and concealing her face.
She silently vomits on the steps.
*
The transient connections I’ve experienced, while romantic, feel a bit haunted. One night I’m at an afterparty with friends, coming down from one of the most deliriously surging post-punk-meets-techno sets I’ve ever heard. Euphoric noise with teeth. We’ve shimmied our way along the wall and found space at the bar-top. The bassist for the band hops behind the counter and starts slinging drinks, and somehow I end up chatting with another band member for what must have been hours, about music and the scene in Japan, a conversation mediated by, of all things, ChatGPT – each with our phones, a texting-like exchange seated right next to each other.
We joke about this at some point aloud, in English.
“You, me, and chatGPT,” he says.
“Yes, us three.”
The next day, my memory a bit soft around the edges, I went back and read through the chat history on my phone. It was just a long string of questions, translations of my own words returned to me, and no answers.
*
It’s hard to say where these connections could have gone if we’d just had the ability to see each other a little more fully. I consider this and think back to a couple months earlier, in Miyazaki, when Vee and I first made plans to meet up.
Me, in Japanese *10:42pm*: “What do people in Aoshima usually do around this time?”
Vee, in English *10:44pm*: you know here is country side so just night walking around with grab some alcohols lol
Vee, in English *10:45pm*: or drive to somewhere
Me, in Japanese *10:45pm*: Sounds fun! lol
In Aoshima, sitting in Vee’s van outside the Lawson’s, we eat ice cream. He chose a tin of something new and multi-flavored, and I stuck with a chocolate Parm – a simple, chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar. I love them because the chocolate is soft, not tempered, so it doesn’t crack all over, inevitably causing a few pieces to scatter and melt into my clothes. Vee explains to me that there’s a word for that – for the sensation of biting into a tempered chocolate ice cream and having it crack.
“It’s called パリパリ(pari pari).”
He mimics biting into what I can only assume is a chocolate shell. I must have laughed, because he asks if these kinds of Japanese words sound cute. He says that many Westerners think so, but to Japanese they don’t. They just sound normal.
By “these kinds of words,” he means onomatopoeia, of which there are thousands. In Japanese, these words are integral to everyday conversation, and convey so much more than just sound. They evoke texture, feelings, movements, states of being – so much is contained in these small words, usually made up of just two sounds repeated, acting like emotional shorthand. But yes, to my ear they stand out, cuteness be blamed. Maybe one day they’ll come naturally.
Vee and I didn’t really use ChatGPT much to communicate. This meant that we learned a lot from each other, and almost nothing about each other. Like the first night, where we sit with our heads craned up to look at the stars through the windshield, wading into basic conversation while the ocean laps at the sand in the darkness. I struggle to find the words for something trivial, so I pull out my phone as I mumble, “調べてみる” (I’ll try and look it up), and he laughs and says, “Already?”
Or later, after trying to convey more nuanced things. We’re driving into the forest, I glance into the back and see at least one surfboard, a wool sweater, more miscellanea. Eyes on the road, Vee says, “I did some research on this word. Flirt? Flirting?” There is no real equivalent in Japanese.
“It’s like ‘skinship’?”
“What?”
“What???”
His brow furrows, my confusion making him doubly confused. We find other ways to navigate the concept, but later I do my own research. “Skinship,” it turns out, is a very real Japanese term. It’s one of many “wasei-eigo” – words that look or sound like English, but were invented in Japan.
This one refers to close physical contact, affectionate touch that builds emotional bonds. Made by blending “skin” and “relationship”, it applies heavily to familial or friendly contexts, not just romance. It’d offer something English lacks if speakers were to co-opt this word made from co-opted words. In being borrowed, it returns something essential.
*
These moments of clarity bring me back to Kitago, a small, tight-knit town in Nichinan, along the southern coast of Miyazaki, known for its blankets of Obi cedar, forest bathing, and basalt-lined hot springs. I’d watch herons stride across rice paddies from my room, and share dinners with Ryoko and Harry, who lived on the lush property with their eleven-year-old daughter, Hosaki. We’d chat about our lives – their farm, the house they’d built on it, surfing, past and future plans. In terms of wayfinding they’d given me a hand-illustrated map with all the important landmarks labeled: “trampoline”, “beware the cliffs”, “forest trail”, “chicken coop.”
I never managed to find “a shallow spot in the river where you can swim (beware of rising water levels after rain)”. I cruise past the paddies as another day fades and see what had to have been 20 herons traversing the reflective surface. I stop for a moment to gawk at them in disbelief before going inside to set down my things. When I go back outside they’ve all vanished.
One night we’re trading bits of language, while their yellow lab, Lucy, lounges near the front door.
“What’s the difference between ‘なるほど’ and ‘分かった (I understand)’?” I ask Harry about this unfamiliar word as Ryoko lifts a kettle off the burner.
“‘なるほど’ means the same thing, but like, I feel it more.”
“Ohhhh. That’s a really good explanation.”
Wide-eyed, I tell Ryoko about the dozens of frogs I saw on the mountain road the night before while driving in the rain, and she laughs – “カエルいっぱい!” Hosaki shows me her plastic swords. Lucy wags her tail and gazes at us from behind the wood-burning stove. We sip hōjicha and the conversation continues until everyone drifts towards sleep.
*
When questioning my own insistence on learning Japanese – despite the failures, the effort, the knowledge that I’ll never fully master it the way a native speaker does, will never belong to it fully or it to me – I find affirmation in more of Polly Barton’s writing.
“Over time, I have come to believe that if language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.”
I’m satisfied with the fact that being understood and understanding on a different plane of syntax always feels like a small miracle. This language I am acquiring is imbued with the people and places around me. Every word and turn of phrase is forever altered by the scenes and voices they’re interwoven with. A different world is made. Through these encounters, even words in my own native language take on new meaning, and are changed.
Thinking back to Itoshima, at the start of my trip in April, I’m standing outside a cabin with Miyuki and Toriko – my first hosts in Japan – while we fumble for words in each other’s inherited vocabularies. The three of us are admiring the old sakura tree in bloom on the neighboring hill. I take a photo of them in front of it.
As we enjoy the last light of the evening, Miyuki says this is the best time of year to be there. “The air is shiny.” She says. なるほど.
Photos by the author