catch a fly in the air with chopsticks

 

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To keep being a dreamer living in Japan is as hard as to catch a fly in the air with chopsticks, and yet it’s not all impossible. The chain of events that you have never experienced in your life changes your routine days into chaos. While you can’t quite grasp the sudden change of circumstances, it throws you into confusion in which you continually need to make decisions and actions. You are sucked by mighty force against your will and can’t get out. It inevitably changes some point of your life, your way of life, and your inner self also. As a result, you become another person who is not the one you used to be. That is exactly what happened to me from the fall of 2009 to the fall of 2011. At that time, I was too deep in a whirl to understand what was happening and why it was happening. But in hindsight, it was supposed to happen and someone or something pushed my back, yanked my arm, and rushed me who was reluctant into the new place.

For me being a singer-songwriter from Kyoto in Japan, the change coincided with the time when I gave up chasing fame and fortune that I had been craving fervently enough to leave my family and its long good lineage. I ignored the commercial-based timetable for the first time and took time as long as I was satisfied to complete a song for which I composed, wrote English words, arranged, and recorded all instruments and vocals by myself. When the song’s completion was on the horizon, what would change everything began to happen. Embarrassment and conflict in my odd daily life, the massive earthquake and the following nuclear meltdown that unexpectedly knocked the bottom out of such daily life, surprises and transitions in the new place, and my new self. If you find my awkward, tottering adventure funny, it’d be worth taking on and I’d be more than happy.

Surviving in Japan: Awkward days with shakes, escape and Awakening

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Surviving in Japan: Awkward days with shakes, escape and Awakening

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A Ribbon with A Bell

 

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One day in my childhood, a family of stray cats appeared in the front yard of our house in Kyoto, Japan where I was born and grew up.
I was raised by my grandparents and my grandfather had cherished several hundreds of chrysanthemum pots in the yard in those days. The yard was practically a sea of chrysanthemums. For that reason, the apparent house rule existed, which was not to keep a dog. I had never had a pet.
The cats family stood in the middle of the ragged path between the front door and the gate. There were four cats, one was big and others were very small kittens. I was about six years old and standing probably ten feet away from them when I found them that day. While I had constantly talked with my staffed animals, I was quite foreign to live animals. I walked toward them slowly and carefully with full of curiosity and a twinkle in my eye. As I got closer, a mother cat and two kittens quickly ran away. But one kitten didn’t move. He stayed where he was and just stared at me. I reached right in front of him and crouched before him. He was a tortoiseshell cat with gray and brown marks on his fur. He fixed his gaze upon me and never left. We looked into each others eyes for a while. I tentatively stretched my arm and touched him. He didn’t so much as flinch and kept looking at my eyes. I sensed that I was chosen as a friend by this kitten since I had no human friends back then. I held him with my both hands and felt surprising warmth of his body. I brought him inside the house.
I showed him to my grandmother and she promptly prepared a small dish of dried bonito. As I saw him nibbling it, I asked my grandmother if I could keep him with absolute certainty of no. Her unexpected reply was, “As long as it’s not a dog, your grandfather will allow if it’s kept inside.”
I got my first pet. I named him ‘Joe’ because he looked nothing else but ‘Joe’. I asked my grandmother for something like a collar now that he’s my pet. She scrambled and got me a bell and a red ribbon. I put them together and proudly presented to Joe’s neck. His quarters were decided at the entrance of the house, right behind the front door. I gave him some milk in the evening that day and talked to him into the night although I had been sometimes regarded as mute by others to whom I rarely spoke.
I thought Joe was as happy as I was. But after I went to bed, he began to cry. He didn’t call me though because he cried toward outside. Soon, I heard a cat meow outside too. It seemed his mother came to him. They meowed to each other with the front door between them. His fragile meows to the door continued till late at night. My grandmother suggested that I should release him because she couldn’t bear to see him miss his mother so much. I agreed that it was cruel to separate them. He wanted to be outside with his mother. I opened the front door and took him out. He swiftly scurried away. The time I had a pet lasted for less than 12 hours. The time I thought was liked by someone was laughably short.
A few days later, I felt I heard a bell ring. I went outside hurriedly and saw the yard. It was Joe. He huddled together with his family in the middle of the path, at the same spot where we first met. I called out, “Joe!” His mother and siblings ran away on my call, but Joe responded and turned to me. I was amazed that he had learned his name was Joe although our time together was so short. He remained there alone and gazed at me. This time, it looked to me as if he was smiling. At that moment I understood. He came back to see me. I felt an undoubtedly sure connection between us. I walked to him and held him in my arms. I took him into the house and told my grandmother that Joe came back. As she fixed a dish of dried bonito again, she told me not to repeat what we had done to him previously. While I was so happy to be reunited with him, I also knew I shouldn’t keep him. My happiness wasn’t the same as his. After I watched him eating…

Episode from

Cats, Dogs and Kyoto, Japan by Hidemi Woods

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A Woman with An Iron Heart!

 

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The nearest train station from my home that I usually use has no station attendants on site. All it has are a ticket vending machine and an emergency phone. There’s no ticket gate either. A passenger gets a ticket from the machine and goes directly onto the platform. Upon arrival, they put the used tickets into a box on the wall. There are several no-attendant stations like that along this local line.
That means it’s possible to ride free if you get on and off the train both at those stations. It’s kind of an honorable system that whether you pay for the ticket or not all depends on your conscience.
Of course riding a train without a ticket is a crime. To crack down on it, a conductor sometimes makes spot checks on the train. He or she checks all passengers’ tickets and stamps on them. If someone has a ticket for the minimum fare, the conductor asks the destination and collects the full fare. Since many passengers make the payments on the train, I suspect the honorable system doesn’t work so well.
I’ve once seen a passenger without a ticket caught by the conductor. She received the conductor’s severe rebuke and paid a lot of money. Some passengers try so badly not to be caught when a conductor begins the spot check. Their common ways are simply running away from the conductor by moving back and forth between the cars. A conductor sometimes gets off the train and steps onto the platform at a no-attendant station to check the tickets of the passengers who get off there. In those cases, a passenger who cheats on the fare walks toward the far end of the platform opposite to the conductor. The train eventually has to leave on schedule and the conductor doesn’t have enough time to go up to the passenger for the ticket. The passenger waits there for the train to leave with the conductor back on while pretending to rummage through his or her bag for the ticket that doesn’t exist.
The most impressive passenger I’ve seen was a young woman who pretended to sleep in her seat when the conductor asked her to show a ticket. No matter how loudly the conductor asked repeatedly, she wouldn’t wake up. Although he almost shouted in her ear in the end of the persistent demands for the ticket, she was still asleep. I thought if she wasn’t acting, she was dead. After he went back, her acting finished and she woke up. Unfortunately for her, the conductor was as determined as she was, and came back to her again. She was caught this time, but pretended to look for her ticket and declared she had lost it somewhere. A woman with an iron heart! She told her departure and destination stations which credibility was questionable, and paid the fare to the conductor after all.
A stingy person like me buys a ticket each time. Even so, I feel nervous and have shifty eyes every time a conductor walks through the train cars. That’s because I may or may not devise some ways to save money for the ticket, but I leave it to your conjecture…

Episode from

Country Living in Mountain of Japan by Hidemi Woods [Click to Buy at Amazon.com]

Kindle and Audiobook available at Amazon.com

Memoryland hr686

 

My memories shared with my mother are stored in Memoryland. It’s the place inside of me that holds all my memories and I named it Memoryland by myself. Recalling my memories means visiting Memoryland. Like it or not, a scene or conversation with my mother sometimes happens to flash back in my mind when I inadvertently step into Memoryland.

I carefully avoid the section concerning my mother whenever I visit there. It always evokes heartache and anger. Taking a glance at my mother’s section, I find notable examples. I was in my late thirties and came back to my hometown for the first time in years to see my family. Instead of welcoming me, my mother said to me, “You’re not famous at this age of yours. That proves you have no talent in music. You have failed in music and you are a failure.” On my other visit, she said, “To get this family’s fortune, I gave up everything that I wanted to do and married without love. But you are doing what you want with someone you love. Taking everything isn’t acceptable! Because you don’t sacrifice anything,  you’re not entitled to inherit the family fortune. So, don’t ever come home. Visits are unnecessary since you’re not a successor.” Just a few glimpses of my memories with my mother cause a lot of pain, and that’s why I try to steer away from my mother’s section in Memoryland.

My relative called me ten days ago and let me know that my mother passed away.

She was a chronic liar and an evil-doer. She got our family’s fortune by sacrificing her life, yet seemed unhappy day after day. It appeared that she had taken it out on others by trying to do harm anyway she could think of. Eventually she lost the fortune when she and my father failed the family business and moved out of their big house. After she moved into a condo, she had submitted to violence from my sister. She ran away to hide and moved into a small apartment where she died alone, covered with her own vomit and excreta. Despite her advanced age, I had assumed she wouldn’t die soon. Her revenge for her unhappiness was never enough. I supposed she would persistently plot evil schemes or throw heartless words at me and others around her which would keep her going. Since I had thought her time wouldn’t come in the near future, her death took me by surprise.

Has she repented and gone to heaven? In my theory, people realize their mistakes and wrong deeds before their deaths. They admit, regret, and thus are forgiven, released from suffering called life, and then die. I wonder if she also has been forgiven. Considering her nature that she wouldn’t admit her wrong doing, it’s hard to imagine she could ever be forgiven. Nevertheless, as she has actually died, she might have been.

I dared to go into her section of Memoryland. Passing through her countless lies I received and her desperate efforts to make people unhappy, I found a tall, heavy brass gate in the deep back of the section. It was locked by a huge bolt, which meant I had blocked this memory. Summoning courage and bracing myself for what horrible memory was there, I unbarred the bolt and got inside. It was on the bus that was running along the beautiful coast of the sea. My family was on a trip and taking a tour bus. I was a small child and was in the window seat with my mother next to me. She pointed at a big rock jutting out of the sea and uncommonly tenderly asked me, “Hidemi, what does that rock look like to you?” “An elephant,” I replied. “Really? Yeah, you’re right! It does look like an elephant! Then, how about that rock over there? What does it look like?” We continued this conversation for one rock after another and she said I was right each time kindly. While she seemed a different person from the one I met every day, I felt extremely happy. Later though, when I told her how happy that bus ride was, she confessed to me that she had just tried to divert my attention so that she wasn’t embarrassed by me who could have thrown up on the bus because I usually got car sick too easily. In any case, the funny thing was, I unconsciously had blocked one of the happiest memories of mine.

On the night of that day when I was told about my mother, I burst into tears all of a sudden. I couldn’t figure out why. I just couldn’t explain the emotion I was having, but it engulfed me. While crying hard, I was dismayed and tried to understand what I was feeling. It was more like emptiness rather than sadness. I felt as if the long fierce battle I had engaged in abruptly came to an end with my arch enemy evaporated. I even no longer knew whether I loved her or hated her.  Maybe both. I was simply overwhelmed by an illogical, strange emotion that I couldn’t comprehend and kept bawling.

Good-by, My Dear Friends hr685

 Our furniture and appliances have finished being moved into our new apartment. My partner and I were gazing at an array of our musical instruments spread all over the floor in the living room of our empty apartment.
Five synthesizers, two electric guitars, an 88-key MIDI board, two rhythm machines, three sequencers, three sound source modules, many effectors, an 8-track open reel recorder, an 8-track mixer, a 16-track mixer, a drum set and accessories. Those instruments have occupied a large space of our tiny apartment although they haven't been used for over twenty years since a computer became a dominant tool for me to make my music. Today, a person from the used instrument purchase company was coming to our apartment to make an assessment and collect them. The instruments that spent so many years with me were on standby for their last work with a  somewhat tense look.
We shared a lot of memories. It was my custom in my old days to carry several heavy instruments on foot and by train into the studio every time my band practiced and rehearsed. I input data of the arrangement I made for my song on the sequencer by staying up all night and the entire data was all gone in a flash when I tripped on the power cord toward morning that got pulled out of the outlet. Technical difficulties were rampant on the live stage since I used so many kinds of electric instruments connected to each other in place of human band members, such as no sound came out of the sequencer or unexpected sound was produced from the synthesizer, which needless to say horrified me and gave me a cold sweat each time. The instruments felt much heavier on my way home whenever I lost a contest or an audition. We had trodden together on a long, endless road of disappointment and cravings. Though I had already stopped using most of them by the time I moved into this apartment, I brought them anyway by paying costly moving expenses because I was too attached to them to let them go.
For this move, however, I decided not to bring them to my new apartment. I was no longer my past self who had desperately coveted success as a band or had focused too much on writing songs and recording them without sleep until I harmed my health. As I grew older and accumulated more experiences, I came to understand things and be mature. That helped me sort out my feelings. I felt it was time to take the next step of my life, thus time to leave my instruments.
Looking back, not all the memories we shared were bitter. There were fond memories as well. An extremely hopeful feeling that I had when I got a new instrument with all the money I saved by working for months on my part-time job. An indescribable satisfaction I obtained when I got the best take after redid recording hundreds of times. Heavenly bliss I felt when I listened to my completed song after a long period of time of making. After all those years, I finally realized how happy I had been and how valuable my experiences were.
The person who came to our apartment from the used instrument purchase company was a young man who undoubtedly wasn't born yet when I bought these instruments. He carefully looked into each of them to decide the price. When he was done, he asked, "Why are you selling them?" My partner replied, "We make music with a computer now and don't use them anymore." Then he said to my partner and me, "It's so wonderful that you have been making music all the way together."
The price he offered was far higher than we had expected. While we didn't have much income from our music no matter how hard we strove with those instruments, they earned a good sum of money for us at the very end. We helped him load the sold instruments onto his van and saw them off. I was a little sad, but somehow refreshed and cleared at the same time. And that made me feel like our new life had just begun.

 

Shifting Seasons, Renewed Mind hr684

 

The local bus I got on was crowded. While I barely found a seat to sit on, my partner was standing with heavy bags on his shoulders and hands. A woman behind him got up and said to him, “Would you like to sit here?” and he declined saying, “No thank you, I’m fine.” He told me later that he was shocked when he was treated as an elderly by being offered someone’s seat for the first time in his life. He may have looked older than his age since his hair was grey and wearing sunglasses and a mask.

I have taken this local bus before and it is usually near empty. But early November causes a sudden change every year. The section deep into my rural town is a popular tourist destination for skiing and autumn leaves. Many tourists from the metropolitan area visit to see the colorful landscape in autumn. The skiing slopes operate ski lifts for a midair trip by gondolas that run above trees and between valleys of colorful autumn leaves, which has been a major attraction of my town in recent years.

On the local bus, I heard a woman who was sitting next to me and traveling as a group exclaiming to her friends, “Look, look, how beautiful the colors are! Look at the gorgeous view! How wonderful!” The route of this bus was on a narrow winding road that threaded into mountains. It climbed steep slopes with numerous curves and through long tunnels. After each tunnel, the leaves along the road grew more colorful and the mountainous view got more and more breathtaking with trees that changed their clothes into red and yellow. Although this view was an autumn norm for me and what I had gotten used to seeing, it must have been worth taking hours to come to see as a weekend trip for people from the city.

The reason why both my partner and I were carrying so much baggage was because we were in the middle of moving. We had decided to move from an apartment in a remote town to a different one further deep in the mountain inside the same town. Since we’ve got too much stuff, we have spent several months packing and have sent our furniture and packed boxes in parts repeatedly by a small moving company because we don’t have a driver’s license. Before moving into this town for the first time, we used to live in the urban area. Once we settled in the rural small town surrounded by mountains, we found that living in nature suited our liking. Our fondness for nature had grown in the course of our country life, which led to our decision of moving much deeper into mountains. No human lives beyond our new apartment. Only nature and wild animals reside there.

Since I left an urban life, I have less and less compared myself to others and have hardly cared what people make a fuss about. A sense of happiness has increased as I have been able to concentrate on my work. I chose to move into more isolated mountains probably because I would like to be freed even more from a secular society.

By the time the local bus arrived at the bus stop close to our new apartment, all the tourists had gotten off near the ski lift and my partner and I were the only passengers. When I entered our apartment, heaps of cardboard boxes holding our stuff welcomed me. Out of the window was a range of colorful mountains filled with red, yellow and green trees. As words in a song say, we can get truly wonderful things without money, such as love and appreciating beautiful nature. It seems to make no sense to use up a lifetime by spending a large sum of money for worthless things and working like stink to afford them. Observing my parents’ life in which they unwillingly married without love for money and the family name and lost everything in the end, I have nurtured that kind of thought.

While we were eating dinner, the sun set, and a sky full of stars began to shine out of the new window.