Endings

Some things I will miss about Japan, Part 29c

• The chocolate peanut butter pie at that cafe in Sakuragicho that looks out over the big wheel in Yokohama. But then, everywhere looks out over the big wheel in Yokohama. It's the cafe that plays Nine Inch Nails followed by Bob Dylan and then the Spice Girls. Unasked for western nostalgia, whisking you back to another time without permission. You need time to prepare when you go back.
• At school, that kid who always writes "Fin" at the end of all his journals. God knows where he picked that up from. I see him in the corridors, having walking-backwards competitions with his friends, and at lunch, hiding his vegetables in his neighbour's carbohydrate.
• The Toyoko line. You should really stand at the front of the train to get off at Kikuna, but you have a better chance of getting a seat if you remain at the back and walk up. I always forget to walk up. On the way to shows, I am that crazy girl in the corner, silently mouthing the words to my set, or out loud if I'm really worried. On the way to conversation lessons with salarymen, I prep with articles about sweatshop workers in China, floods in Bangkok, collapse in Europe. The Toyoko line home from Nakameg.
• Mimi, a ball of unaffected energy and unconditional love.
• Dean & Delucca, Marunouchi. Your coffee always gave me epiphanies.
• The tedious everyday minutia that added up to a life for me and I thank it for that. At the end, during the packing and the almost ritualistic binning, I am left with just a dress that I can't bear to part with because it's so special or the pattern is beautiful or that I was so happy in it, and a pile of notebooks attempting to document My Life In Japan. A ¥6000 package sent home, and a little bag for the road. This is a little or a lot or nothing.
• The urban, yuppie cleanliness and disposable income I'm going to trade for unemployed, wandering homelessness. In these final days, I wonder whether I should get some kind of trinket to serve as a trophy. This is what it meant. But this is when people are most vulnerable to getting tattoos.
• It's difficult to summarise an experience until you are well out of it. How this is not how life works for most people, who don't have the luxury of A London Phase, The Japanese Phase and endless Malaysian Days. Most people just continue on, from day to day, in the same place with the same things, not needing anything to reflect on/from. "Japan" as some finite experience, now finished and neatly tied with a bow at its fruition. It's ongoing. You aren't allowed to have several lives, or even two. You have to drag around the same lead character wherever you go, moving from plot to plot, with the same tired old flaws that occasionally lessen and improve.
• It began with 12 simple kanji. Tree. Power. Man. Soil. Car. Emergency Exit.
• To have all my hopes and fears either confirmed or pacified by spending time with all those other people doing exactly the same thing as me. Travel in the hope of finding a narrative thread.
• Talking with a British guy, in a bar in Tokyo, who hasn't been home in a while, and that look they give you that says: "Oh yeah....I remember what you British girls are like!" and suddenly my personality has currency again.