Flood of Words
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
Monday September 17, 1990
I am rushing along in a flood of words. I'm quite happy right now because I have someone to talk to. It's Jenny, the new teacher at Beppu University that my friend Jeanne brought to my Twin Peaks party a week ago Saturday. Since then, I've bicycled the 15 minutes up the hill to Beppu University 3 times and she's come down twice and we spent all this weekend together.
Kazen
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
June 19, 1991
Mt. Unzen is erupting on the other side of the island, on the west side near Nagasaki. Beppu's on the east side of Kyushu. But the eruption is front page news here every day, magnificent as well as disastrous.
I'm also interested in the eruption in the Philippines because I lived near that volcano as a child when my father was stationed at Clark AFB. It's incredible that the volcano which appeared in all my pastoral drawings of life in the Philippines is now erupting.
Of Two Minds
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
January 20, 2003
That time of year has come again for people on the JET Program to sign up for another year, or not. When I made my decision to stay for a second year, I felt very unsure of myself. The weather was cold and I felt cutoff from my friends and family in the states. I didn't socialize much with the other foreign teachers because they were all much younger and single and still doing the bar scene. But I did decide to stay and, later, was very happy that I did.
Even more than a year later, as I wrote to various people about finally coming home, I still seem of two minds.
Dark and Gloomy
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
October 6, 1990
Although it is Saturday, a continual rain prevents me from going out. Another typhoon is hitting us, the third in two weeks. The rain and gloom have been ceaseless. I struggle to take advantage of the time alone and calm, to remain cheerful and productive, although all I really want to do is crawl into bed.
Hyoutan Dream
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
Monday, July 8 1991: A Letter in Three Parts
Part 1: Water Gourd
Times like this each moment is isolated in a self-contained eternity. Here at Hyoutan onsen, the water rushes off the rocks above. Funneled through bamboo poles, the water pounds down on my back. As each drop hits the water it plucks a note from the water's surface. I drift in the dark, quiet space between the notes.
After Ellen and I part ways, I am walking through the streets of Beppu all ears and eyes. A junior high school boy shouts from his upstairs window, "Hello. Hello!" But I cannot open my mouth to answer him.
Part 2: Coined Words
I dream a waking dream.
When I close my eyes I feel your moist breath on my face. You part my lips with your fingers and place a go-en coin on my tongue. I open my eyes and you press your forefinger against my lips, to shut them, to seal them shut.
Your secrets weigh heavily on my tongue, grave secrets. They are cold and taste metallic.
I am walking through the streets of Beppu only ears and eyes. A junior high school boy shouts from his upstairs window, "Haroo. Haroo!" But I am dumb. I cannot open it to answer him, lest your currency drop from mouth. He continues to shout at me, "Haroo, haroo. Fuck you. Haroo, fuck you."
Part 3: Into the Eye of the Tornado
I leave this world of sound and sight and reenter the world of words. I am awake now and falling. Enveloped in silver. Falling from the sky. Falling through time and space, falling backward to a time and place I left.
Times like this each step we take pulls us along an undeviating course, drags us, accelerates us toward that inescapable attractor; our destiny propels us into the eye of the tornado.
The whirlwind of my anxiety ends in a dead calm.
I am awake now and landing. The red Fasten Seat Belt light blinks off. We all jump to our feet and wait our turn, balancing our bags, shifting our weight from one foot to another, shuffling forward, jostling and jostled. Down the corridor, illuminated in pale fluorescence, they stand waiting: my son, his father, the other Melissa. They are waiting to pull me back into their world. In the instant before I see them over the heads of the passengers in front of me, just as I pass through the door of the plane, I remember, "I forgot to tell M. Quigley thatc"
Yamaga Dance Festival
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
Sunday, November 11, 1990
I went to a museum opening and dance performance in this tiny town with all the sensibilities of Buda (and probably smaller). I met several artists from Tokyo. The reason I went was that Jenny was participating in the dance with this guy from France and several people from Tokyo.
The dance was held outdoors in a cleared field on which a stage, several wooden structures, and several geometric pools of colored water had been constructed. We gathered at sunset. It had turned very cold and clear and dry. People built bonfires in 40-gallon oil drums. Watching the fires, the smoke and sparks rising in the golden haze of sunset, the silhouettes of figures moving between the fires, created an eerie, ritualistic atmosphere.
The first dancer wore dress pants and a tie. He is a famous butoh dancer from Tokyo, but I didn't understand or connect emotionally with him and his spastic movements. The second dance featured a woman who moved slowly and woodenly across the field, while a male dancer, who 10 days earlier had fought with a woman and in his anger kicked a glass door, severed a tendon, and thus was reduced to dancing with a cast and crutches, moved anguishedly about. Along one side of the field, a wall of fire was burning. The man flung himself into the pools of colored water and when he came out the air was so cold steam rose off his skin. An attendant poured oil in another pool and set it ablaze. I found th he third dance, by the Frenchman, the most interesting. At the end, one man was suspended on a wire above the stage; a woman's shadow was cast on a white sheet as she danced, and the Frenchman was buried alive and then reborn, crawling naked across the field until he reached the woman.
After the performance, we grilled meat and vegetables over the fires and drank beer and sake.
Changes
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
19910212 Tuesday (blue aerogramme)
Last week the first warm breeze of spring blew up from the south. It felt great. It still seems cold, even though I'm warmer than when fall first descended. My fingertips aren't icy anymore. But I've been cold for so long, that as warm as it is, I still think it's cold.
Things change, even in backwards Beppu. Joseph, remember that huge, rusty building near downtown Kamegawa that used to be a theater (I took your picture in front of it). Well, they tore it down. And in the Oita Tokiwa, they now have the escalator announcements alternating in Japanese and English. Now that I can understand what they're saying, they're really annoying. "Please step between the yellow lines when boarding the escalator and hold onto the red handrail. It is dangerous to push baby carriages onto the escalator. Please use the elevator. If you have children with you, please hold their hands. Smoking is prohibited by law in this store. Please smoke in the lobby areas. " Hard to believe the part about smoking, huh?
Boxes and Bees
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
Monday July 22, 1991
Dear Melissa, (It feels odd to address a letter to myself -- sort of like Dear Diary.)
I know that you will receive this after I arrive [in Austin], but I DON'T CARE! At 12:20 today, the last of 32(!) boxes was packed, taped, labeled, and triple-checked. At 16:00 three jokers showed up to truck them away. After years of helping my mother pack, I've developed a healthy mistrust of moving company flunkies. That's why I've spent so much time wrapping and rewrapping, putting boxes in boxes and fitting everything together as if it were a giant Chinese puzzle box. Still, my face blanched as these three began tossing boxes around.
But the boxes are gone. A burden is lifted. I am free tocdo what? Go shopping!
I was about to hop on my bike when Aya Sato's (former student) boyfriend showed up. He explained that Sato-san was unable to say goodbye to me because her college had a school festival this week, so she sent him in her place. (All of this in Japanese and I understood it!)
On my way to Tokiwa, ran into some of my second-year students, out of uniform now that it's summer vacation. One of my boys looks like a gang member. I point an accusing finger at him and he does a fake double-take. "Ah, Marissa-sensei." Sort of nice to still live in a town where people on the street know you by name.
TANGENT: I was standing in line at Toyomi when a bee landed on the head of the man in line in front of me. The man's hair was thinning and he had grown it long to hide the bare spots. I watched as the bee burrowed into a tunnel of hair and then brushed its little bee hands together as if praying before a meal. I began waving my hands slowly over his head so as not to excite him or the bee and saying (in English), "Sir. There's a bee on your head." He and the check-out clerk gave me peculiar looks. But I knew that that bee was about to bite and I persisted. Then the bee flew up. "Hora!" I pointed at it. The clerk and man nodded and smiled. Life went on. I wish I could hear the old man's version of this story. "I was standing in line at Toyomi when this crazy gaijin woman began shouting and waving her hand over my head as if to strike mec"
The Measure of Seasons
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens.
October 21, 1990
The days are passing through small but perceptible stages toward winter. In the penultimate week of September, exactly as last year, a typhoon blew summer away, leaving the sky a deep blue that is rare for usually humid Beppu. The mountains loom over us, suddenly stunningly close. As I leave my apartment for school, I feel that the warmth has been drained from the air, although the air is not yet crisp. But as I walk on I feel my cheeks and the tips of my fingers grow cool to the brush of air. I gulp deep breaths, like someone half-drowned, after panting shallowly through the heat of summer.
A week passes and I stop turning on the fan at night. The next week I put it away for the season. Then it becomes too cold to sleep with the doors open. Then I slide close the fusuma and the shoji cocooning myself in one 6-mat room. A blanket replaces the summer's terry cloth sheet, and then a comforter replaces the blanket. My fingers grow cold if I sit too long typing and I wear my socks all the time. Finally on October 18th, I mark the first chill of autumn, a chill that raises goosebumps on my arms and leaves my fingers cold.
How can we measure our days in degrees of Fahrenheit or Celsius? We all nourish themes in our lives that progress from passion to obsession to eccentricity. And for me, living within each season has become one of those eccentricities. It is not a habit that I assimilated from Japan, although living here has allowed me to practice it completely, for here is a society whose traditional rhythms match the cycle of seasons.
