solar term: 処暑 / しょしょ / shosho / limit of heat

sunrise: 7:10・sunset: 19:22・moon phase: waxing gibbous・next full moon: aug 28・high: 34・low: 27・humidity high: 69%・UV: extreme・feels like: the earth itself is sweating

in season: durian, mangosteen, dokong, longan, sauce, sugar, noodles, laksa, bak kut teh, spare ribs, QR codes, “quick chats,” single stream waste, leaving baggage unattended, tissue packets, lines, shiny high-rises, mazes of malls, AC, ceiling fans, pools at night, business casual, omiyage, other people’s towels, hellos, goodbyes

gardening tips: phone several friends

predictions (short term): the heat will eventually abate, the leaves will start to look ever so slightly pale, and you’ll wonder what happened to the endless beach days, and to the year

predictions (long term): the rich will get richer. you will be confounded by the worth of a life and by the system that protects yours. there will be more beauty, more questions, and more seeking, and then it will be winter again

Since the end of April, I’ve only spent about six weeks total in Tokyo. During the same period, I’ve slept on some thirty different surfaces. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of key beds from the last four months:

1. dorm bed in chiba. 11 nights. twin. exhaust levels very high after sitting in stillness and silence for 11 hours a day and facing all of one’s worst, rawest selves. hindrances: lack of privacy, lack of doors, a sharp squeak in the unoiled hinges of the building entrance, snorers, wakeup bell at 4am. sleep: 10/10

2. apartment in sapporo. 11 nights. double. exhaust levels medium after 10 hours a day of writing and reading, walking, light socializing. hindrances: huge, spooky apartment with many dark corners and a spiral staircase perfect for being thrown down by a shadow. sleep: 8/10

3. samarkand guest house. 3 nights. two doubles pushed together. exhaust levels high after days spent in 37C/99F dry heat jostling with other tourists taking photos of spectacular geometric domes created in the image of god and the cosmos. hindrances: coarse bedding, mosquitoes, squealing children dancing around the Marquezian courtyard at all hours, loud french speaking cyclists chortling into the night. sleep: 6/10

4. 18-hour train from tashkent to almaty. 1 night. single berth. exhaust levels: high after a morning spent in a broiling whorl haggling for and acquiring kilos of nuts and dried fruit for two people to be on foot for five days. hindrances: the sound and feel of the wheels hitting the tracks, going bump, bump, bump in the early morning light. sleep: 6/10

5. kazakh/kyrgyz border. 1 night. two sleeping bags zipped together. exhaust levels: high, due to the heat in almaty and the execution of a series of logistical risks, including the decision to pitch a tent near border control in the dark. hindrances: fear of what lay beyond the tent walls, the sound of dogs and cows in the night, which seemed to grow nearer, then farther again. sleep: 7/10

6. guest house in racha. 1 night. twin. exhaust levels high after hiking all day up and down a mountain between a glacier and Stalin’s former holiday house, trailed by a cloud of flies, descending in a golden light particular to georgia, before wondering if we’d ever find where we were meant to sleep that night. hindrances: the sound of more than one hornet circling the rooms, the sound of a kitten mewing from somewhere within the walls, the sound of the dog guarding his precious wards. sleep: 9/10

7. tribeca apartment. 11 nights. twin murphy bed. exhaust levels medium after catch up after catch up after catch up and the unreasonable bliss of springtime weather in july. hindrances: a few days of waking up at 4am from jetlag, mosquitoes. sleep quality: mixed

8. hotel room in singapore. 7 nights. king bed. exhaust levels high after days under the sun in 80-90% humidity, moving in and out of air conditioning, and catch up after catch up and coffee after coffee. hindrances: work-related stress, followed by work-related stress dreams, a collection of violent argentinian ghost stories read before bed. sleep quality: 8/10

9. kuala lumpur apartment. 2 nights. double. exhaust levels high after days under the sun in 80-90% humidity, not enough air conditioning, and bla-bla-ing in step with every stride, every moment until the very last drop of the day had been squeezed out. hindrances: the need to chat. sleep: 8/10

10. planes. several. exhaust levels high from the last four months. hindrances: being on a plane. sleep: pending

solar term: 大暑 / たいしょ / taisho / blistering heat

sunrise: 5:44・sunset: 20:20・moon phase: waxing・next full moon: july 26・high: 27・low: 18・feels: nothing like tokyo

in season: stone fruit, cherries, sugar, breads of many grains, real sandwiches, real bagels, stacks of free napkins, other people’s toilets, other people’s beds, other people’s desks, free coffee, mystery drippings, grime, flesh, shorts, sunglasses, heat blasts followed by cold blasts, digital mazes, digital dead ends

gardening tips: there is such a thing as too much love

recommended reading: Blank Space, by W. David Marx; the faces of your fellow commuters

predictions: absolutely none

At some point I became a character whose running line in the movie is, “You think I got a cell phone? And let them track me?”

Them is the government, the man, big tech. Now instead I’m the one who’s watching you. On the train, in the streets, at the airport.

My iphone was stolen in June and I’ve decided not to replace it for the time being. Last Thursday I bought what I’m calling my smumb phone — technically it is smart, it runs Android 14, but formally it’s incredibly dumb, a flip phone with a T9 keyboard and tiny touch screen, which when opened is the size of two iphone minis stacked on top of one another.

Trying to type at the speed I used to, sending mixed metaphors to my friends, locating buried oblique emoji reactions, dredging up screenshot receipts from years past, is no longer possible. I don’t actually check my phone less; I watch the messages coming in throughout the day, but responding is painful and awkward, so after suffering through some typos I just flip the phone closed again. Take that, Steve.

The first casualty of the phone transition happened a few days in. On Sunday morning I woke up at 8 and speed-faffed around my kitchen in anticipation of a flight in the afternoon to Newark. At 9:30 I biked in death humidity to El’s, had a speed bla-bla breakfast with her and Sa, then at 12:30 biked home again through the hot bath of Shinjuku. I showered, did all the final floo floo and flee flees, I was running late, K arrived at 2pm to pick me up for the airport, and while I was doing my very last dilly-dally he texted from the car, btw, think your flight’s canceled. I cursed United; found that they had in fact sent a notification at 7am but it had landed in a forgotten crevice of my devices; retracted the blame; and cursed myself. I looked at the trash bags tied up by the door ready to be taken out and sighed. I turned the AC back on.

A week after I got my phone stolen, I started a new job at Bloomberg. The office is in Marunouchi, so for the first time in eight years I have a work commute, and for the first time since moving to Japan I feel like I’ve joined society. On the train to and from work, I’ve been watching. I watch people watching TV, watch them scroll aimlessly down their feeds and flick sideways between home screens, nowhere to go. I watched a woman hold up the line onto the train because she was playing a candy crush knock-off. I watched a guy just miss falling over onto a seated woman because his hand and face were glued to his phone, and when he put out his other hand to reach for the handle, he missed, because he was still looking at his phone, and again almost fell onto the woman. I watched a guy picking his nose in the corner seat, a guy trip on the escalator, a terry cloth hand towel get dislodged from its owner. I watched a woman watching me. We locked eyes, and she looked equally surprised, her face seemed to say, “What are you looking at?

sunrise: 4:25・sunset: 19:00・moon phase: half full・high: 27・low: 21・feels: cool and thick

in season: apricots, cherries, crab apples, plums, mystery pears, eggpl…

Read more

solar term: 小満 / shōman / minor fullness

sunrise: 4:05・sunset: 18:56・moon phase: quarter full・high: 19・low: 11・feels: windy, then warm, then cool, then all of it again

in season: tulips, daff…

Read more

pentad: 葭始生 / ashi hajimete shōzu / reeds begin to bud

sunrise: 5:02・sunset: 18:18・moon phase: waxing crescent・next full moon: 11 days・high: 24・low: 15・feels: great

in season: azaleas, pansies, petunias, bamboo shoots, snap peas, asparagus, long eggplant, broad beans, shinano gold, miyazaki mangoes, grapefruit juice, hummus, dust, hooks, emails with bullet points, announcements, hellos, goodbyes, paperwork, old files, lists, open tabs, videos of daikon getting cleaned, videos of carpets getting cleaned, videos of jeffrey epstein getting deposed, dirt in the fingernails, fresh cuts (bangs), fresh cuts (succulents), sandals, microplastics, micronaps

gardening tips: it’s grow time babyyyyyyyy

recommended reading: “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” by Kerry Howley

recommended watching: this guy cleaning carpets

best time to see: new life in places you’d long given up on

predictions (short term): warm scraps will become hot garbage

predictions (long term): the rich will get richer. you will be confounded by the worth of a life and by the system that protects yours. there will be more beauty, more questions, and more seeking, and then it will be winter again

It’s the beginning of 穀雨, grain rains, when the weather gets warm and rain starts on and off and in on the year’s crops. Gone is winter’s predictable sky. I feel the weight of low clouds, punctuated by occasional clarity in the form of sun coming from the balcony or a clean draft moving through the apartment.

Many things are springing to life: A dark green spider plant El gave me one fall outside a movie theater has grown the impressive shag of a 90s Nickelodeon character and is giving its first pup. A rabbit’s foot fern, bought with Dino Investigator one year ago when I was groping around at the bottom of a pit of grief, looks ready to lift out of its pot like a tarantula.

Yiyun Li writes in her latest book, “Gardening is good training for a novelist. One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one’s visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist.”

But she also writes: “My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live.”

Over the weekend in Kyoto I was at one of those artist parties where I never speak to any artists, I am just relieved to appear to be talking to any human at all about any topic at all, so that I can justify spending this long in a loud place where I don’t know anyone. I’ve been here before, but things were different (see: grief pit), although some things were the same: I was exhausted, not drinking alcohol, and about to leave for vipassana. It was the kind of party where editors are indistinguishable from influencers, the kind of party where the person giving me unsolicited book recommendations speaks very closely and the zipper on his shirt keeps sliding farther and farther down his bare torso before winding up back at the top again, without his hands ever moving. I wondered dimly why there didn’t seem to be anything in my brain, if a lack of seeking and a lack of void might actually mean a lack of self, before I heard myself agreeing that in fact adding “read Steppenwolf” to my rapidly growing to-do list before leaving for vipassana did seem like a great idea.

The first time I recognized I was having what people described as an “out of body experience,” I was thirteen at a nerd camp in Pennsylvania where I absorbed almost nothing of the writing course I was taking. I had a roommate named Eileen, and she had straight black hair down to her butt, so wispy and thin it probably couldn’t be held by any white girl ponytail, and she also had tiny spectacles and a very fine mustache, all of which gave her the vague air of a Confucian scholar. Eileen was neither cool nor uncool. She had a mini Zen rock garden, the kind you could buy while waiting in line at Brookstone or Barnes and Noble, and she kept it on top of her dresser and would comb the sand with the tiny rake with her long slender fingers that my piano teacher would have killed for me to have. One night we laid in our dorm room in our beds and there were street lights coming in through the slats of our blinds, and Eileen asked me some questions whose contents were probably of a religious nature, and I saw my body in the bed from above, wearing an oversized t-shirt and baggie shorts, because I didn’t know how to dress for sleep in public.

In almost every way, I am confused about how the child I was wound up there in that room with Eileen, and how that teen got to the party in Kyoto with the editor. How did I get here from last year, how did we get to the end of April in the year 2026, am I stupid for thinking these cuttings will take root, why do some things grow in a matter of hours, and others take months to tell you they’ve died?

sunrise: 5:45・sunset: 17:52・moon phase: one day past new・visible conjunction: moon and venus, 18:28・high: 12・low: 7・feels: wet

in season: lupines, freesias, ra…

Read more

sunrise: 6:23・sunset: 17:26・moon phase: two days old・next full moon: mar 3・invisible appulse: moon and mercury, 7:18・visible conjunction: moon and mercury, 17:53・high: 10・low: 2・feels: sunny, dry, gusty

in season: tulips, freesias, peach blossoms, oranges, mandarins, kumquats, apples, strawberries, lotus root, spinach, mushrooms, bánh chưng, pork five ways, cheese all day, stamps, slippers, eye drops, podcasts, memes, dry facts, wet predictions, receipts, thrifts and fleas, exercise bands, cleaning spray, little dirty towels, money (giving), money (receiving), money (hoping), fortunes, incense, nephews, horsing around, the big clean

gardening tips: if it looks sad, act fast

recommended listening: iphone ringtone “little bird” (settings > sounds and haptics > ringtone > little bird. also here)

best day for a haircut: before or after feb 17

last chance to see: “crafts and the weather” at the national crafts museum in kanazawa

predictions (short term): the daylight will stretch along the carpet and lengthen by the hours, skin and hair will limp along until spring, buds will become swollen with pollen and promise, our leaders will be ever more emboldened, we will continue to expect a near-constant around-the-clock stream of spectacle, something will happen that is unfathomable, unpredictable, and unforgivable and then will become normal, possibly forgotten, by the following week

predictions (long term): if and when the AI bubble bursts, the rich will still get richer. you will be confounded by the worth of a life and by the system that protects yours. there will be more beauty, more questions, and more seeking, and then it will be winter again

This time of year means Keats, tight fists of pre-spring, the loosening of window latches, the big clean, the big thaw.

Winter in Tokyo is warm outside and cold inside, and there is a lot of sun. In my apartment, it’s sunny enough that all the tulips crane toward the window, and the air is so dry my eyelids click open in the morning.

In the Chinese calendar of solar terms, sometimes called micro-seasons, Feb. 19 is 雨水, rain water, though there’s none in sight. As the old system predicts, this is the time of year that rain, not snow, starts falling from the sky; frozen rivers and mountain snow melt; rice fields shine like mirrors; the earth becomes wet.

In Kanazawa over the weekend, though, oh did we sloosh. At sunrise on Saturday morning, our legs and feet thick and dry as drumsticks, we waddled off the bus we’d boarded in Shinjuku the night before and into the snow-covered city. We stomped and slipped, slushed and sloshed, on our way to and from museums and restaurants and shops, stopping to inspect the various formations of 雪吊り, conical rope configurations that protect trees and bushes from heavy snow and make everything look like an art installation.

Kanazawa gets a lot of snow — 1.5 meters in January — but when we arrived it was warm, and underneath the white covering the roofs and streets ran internal rivers. Water rushed from above, flying down the rain chains connected to rooftop gutters, and at our feet, piles of white leaked into the drains in the pavement. It didn’t rain all weekend, but everything was nonetheless wet, like the streets were making their own weather. And all around the city we could hear the dynamic, unmistakable sound of winter coming to an end.

sunrise: 6:48 ・sunset: 16:56 ・moon phase: one day past new・moon set: 18:16・high: 8・low: 1・feels like: -3・visible throughout tonight: jupiter

in season: tulips, sweet peas, spray roses, ume blossoms, cabbage, spinach, mandarins, strawberries, yuzu peel, reese’s peanut butter cups, nori shio potato chips, soup, paperwork, magnets, push pins, cords, blankets, tooth sensitivity, fingerless gloves, caffeine, texting, bed

gardening tips: no matter what, despite your best intentions, things will die

recommended reading: On the Calculation of Volume (Books 1~) by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

predictions (short term): the days will get longer, and you will be briefly motivated to learn new skills and stretch every morning, you will have the energy to be patient in meetings, to be honest with your therapist about your therapist, and to chop vegetables in advance

predictions (long term): the rich will get richer. you will be confounded by the worth of a life and by the system that protects yours. there will be more beauty, more questions, and more seeking, and then it will be winter again

best day to get off spotify: tomorrow

gardening calendar: good day for plowing, poor for planting

I’m back in Tokyo after three weeks, and it’s been unnervingly warm, getting up to 13 C/55 F. In the Chinese calendar of solar terms, of which there are twenty-four, Jan. 20 is 大寒, major cold. I was surprised when I woke up today to find that the meteorological calendar actually bore out; the temperature dropped today to 4, with a wind chill at time of writing of -3.

Back home, where it’s much colder outside but much warmer inside, I hugged many friends and kissed many babies. I have been thinking a lot about something my friend Da said to me. It’s been a few years now since we last saw each other. When we met, I was 22, and he was 25. Da was living in a small, beautiful, and very conservative city of 30,000 in Turkey, where the average low in January is -4. I went to visit him, and when we took public transport, I could only board if the open seat was next to a woman. I was impressed then as I am now by Da’s casual monastic approach to living. He didn’t have a fridge in the housing his university provided him, and he couldn’t be fussed to ask for one, so for the year he put his vegetables on the window sill next to some tin foil, and just drank milk quickly.

We had coffee next to the famous church where he works now, which I learned on the tour he gave me has an endowment about the size of New York University’s. We discussed my last letter, then Da leaned over his decadent vegan cookie and told me conspiratorially, with a complete seriousness lined with a characteristic awareness that everything is a joke, “Thu, you don’t need to have goals. You can just maintain. Forever.”

As the people around us accumulate more and more, buy houses, make people, acquire cars and property and consider future inheritances, Da said, it's acceptable, even as we enter the middle age, not to climb, save, add, build. I nodded, but I couldn’t believe it. Just maintain. Forever. Can that be right?

I suppose I’ve been asking similar questions for a few years now, calling what Da referred to as “no goals” variously as “giving up,” living nowhere, bailing on society, joining the convent, sleep, death. They tell me that just to be is enough, but I’m still not convinced. I want proof.

In the house where I grew up,…

Read more

This is the most basic understanding I have of where I live. The place where my devices (brain, body) most readily switch to autopilot and can most efficiently recharge when needed, where pillows and toilets do not present a challenge.

But this time of year, the plugs and credit cards get jumbled, the body’s clock is scrambled, the beds are lumpy, the face wash is on a shelf in another country, minutes slip loose from the normal joints and I find them where they don’t belong. In the spleen, the left eye socket.

Earlier this month, walking in the shadow of Fuji san, the biting cold descending as quickly as the dark settled over Fujiyoshida, El and I discussed future homes. We’d passed a few evenings at friends’ places, apartments filled with large antiques, the margins crammed with books, surfaces dotted by objet accents. These places feel homey and full and settled in a way that belies the prolonged and ever-shifting liminal state of ex-pat life. El for her part remains in active resistance to her imminent move out of Japan; she collects paper ephemera and adds it to the walls, purchases a live Christmas tree, orders new plates for a dinner party, building out her elaborate shelter even in its final month of being a home. I work on a snail mail craft at her dining room table, and we look inside her box of a few years’ worth of collected printed matter. Paper is perfect, she says, it’s so flat and light. I disagree. Paper is a burden.

The Deluxe Nun Quarters is relatively bare compared to my friends’ places. There are a couple paintings, a few rocks, meager plants. But there is a lot of paper. Files accumulated over six years, notebooks going back to college, books brought over in bulging suitcases and then shipped home from the airport. Each time I bring a book over I consider it carefully, whether it’s worth its weight in effort, not only in the transit from New York to Tokyo, but to whatever is beyond that.

I know from years of living with one foot out the door/city/country the importance of investing just enough in the presence of the life you are currently living. If you’re running low on chopsticks, just get a new set. Don’t grin and bear it through months on a crappy mattress. I know that, and yet I’m always thinking about the end of this, even at the beginning.

I find it very hard to see the future. There have been a few moments: As a kid I sometimes saw warm yellow lighting in a book-filled apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts (I also saw myself as a Bengali immigrant — I believe Jhumpa Lahiri had a large part to play in this vision), and I have sometimes seen a house in the mountains with very large windows behind a large wooden table, and sometimes I just see a huge desk, big enough to hold the weight of free association in paper form — but then just as quickly, the scene goes dark, I’m like a little girl clutching matches to light something out of reach.

No one can see the end of their own story from the middle of it; but unlike other people, I rarely think to try.

Last week, on the way from my parents’ house in New Jersey to my sister’s country house in upstate New York, I stared vaguely out the window at the passing forests alternating in succession with highways. The winding roads reminded me of wood bead mazes toddlers use to develop their motor skills, the kind of plaything I used to see lying around this or that sibling’s living room and which, with the children getting older, I realize I haven’t seen in a while. (“I love those,” my four-year-old niece whispers, and when I ask her if this toy has a name, she says, “It’s called ‘where you move these blobs wherever you want’”).

It occurred to me that I spent a childhood looking out these windows at these very scenes, and several more decades staring out windows in different cities and countries, yet so often I don’t see what’s outside them. I see something else; I am somewhere else. And maybe the reason I don’t have even the vaguest idea of a future home — no dream house pinterest, no sense of what time period of furniture I want, no opinion on the garden, no strong preference for a color palette — is because the place I spend the most time, the place I feel I really live, is not in any physical reality.

And yet. Very lucky to be whatever is the opposite of the little match girl, I have fun hopping around to other people’s homes. For a few days the people I love let me live physically with them and don’t mind that I have at least one foot and a head somewhere else. I’m writing from stop three of four, at Sarah’s house in upstate New York, once her family’s ski vacation house and where the year I turned thirty I lived alone for six months as I tried to extract myself from New York City and the United States.

I haven’t been to the house since she moved here full time with her partner and their two cats, and the other night after passing through the kitchen which is now a cat playground to go to “my” room, I stopped at the entrance of the hallway and laughed audibly. The narrow space has been turned into an art gallery, and hanging wall to wall is all the oil paintings I made in the depths of new year’s parties we had in this house. In bright angry colors, textured and pointed strokes, more than a decade is captured — several “works” are quite violent, there are birds and ocean creatures, one is named after a Calvino story and another after a Faulkner story, one is about my sisters, one is about a tomato party. I see in them longing and heartbreak, the rise of Trump, and in the most recent one, a spiritual question which I attempted to answer in the years that followed.

All signs point to the conclusion that this is not where I live: My socks are in a suitcase, the toilet is too cold, my bank accounts are very unbalanced, and if I need to go to the hospital for any reason I am done for. But any passerby can see clearly that in fact, I do live here. Also there. Also here, and here, and here.

Summer, when it seemed like we’d never feel a breeze again, is over. In September the meteorological agency forecasted a brief autumn: High temperatures would end late and cool ones would start early. Suddenly everything is too cold. The touch of the laptop kept by the window, the water jug from the fridge, the faux wooden floor by the balcony door. Climbing down from the loft in the morning like a stupefied teenager, air hitting ankles and ass.

Inside the house I wear fingerless gloves, tabi socks, a quilted down vest, drape the lower half of the body in fuwa fuwa until my figure is just a pile of fabrics with fingers protruding, skimming across a clacking keyboard. The lady is a tramp.

The summer sun though punishing was useful. It called forth the leaves and flowers toward its face; it dried the bath towels in an hour; it broke down banana peels inside the compost box. Now my body doesn’t know when to get up. It flails in the hot pocket of the duvet, caught between waking and sleep, fighting off shadows of the unconscious, I can’t figure out how people keep getting in when I’ve locked the door, someone snuck in and broke the latch so that they can intrude on my peace whenever they want, in the crowd of faces there’s an assailant disguised as a friend, they keep coming in and making themselves at home. I should really start setting an alarm.

Lately I’ve been feeling a familiar tightness but in a new form. In spite of everything the family has achieved in one lifetime, I feel deterministic, maybe even fatalistic. That I exist in a prescribed field of possibility, a stratum of limitation that may be wider than, say, a caste, but is still fixed — creatively, economically, spiritually.

I listen to the nonfiction book about young IRA members, barely adults, and the one about children, barely teens, toiling in a Mumbai slum. I’m amazed by their lives, one of ideology and one of survival, but all driven by an unflagging belief that beyond loss and desperation is something else, something that glimmers. But what neither the readers nor the characters know is whether that something will be reached in their lifetime.

I listen to the interview with two liberal public intellectuals arguing over political life and their roles in it. “We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose. … The honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.”

The contribution that I am supposed to make. What is that?

I make a little mess, I do my best to clean it up. Prices go up, but I keep spending money. On blocks of energy and tools for maintenance. I unwrap them. I’m forever throwing away plastic. I make some people laugh. Consume something else. Make waste. Jesus. The futility of my narrow station is overwhelming.

But then: What would it actually look like to give up? E asks me one night a few weeks ago on her new balcony, in the narrow window in which two women cackling over dinner on a balcony in Tokyo are neither sweating nor shivering. We are always ping-ponging between ribs and reality, but now I consider the question seriously. Death, probably, I say.

TM never seems bothered when I bring up death. Earlier today, I talked to her over a video call, me swaddled, both of us looking like we’d been drugged and would rather be sideways.

She says I’m exhausted from the summer. She says that with the temperature fluctuating by more than seven degrees in a day, we’re stuck in erratic transition, our autonomic nervous systems out of balance, that I’m not alone, it’s a region-wide lethargy. She asks what my body wants, and no matter what answer I give her, she says the same thing. No, that’s the mind talking. What your body wants to do is rest.

That can’t be the contribution I’m supposed to make, I want to say. That can’t be the role I’m meant for. Sleep, sleep, she says.

Hair, as we know, is everything. The first time a professional cut my hair was at age 10 in Greenwich Village. Atsuko cut my and my sisters’ hair…

Read more

My fingers close around the empty space of OK, a gesture I made without thinking. It’s not universally recognized as positive reassurance; my fingers remember in the town in Turkey where I taught conversational English at a university for a year, I made the mistake one day of signaling we were good to go with my hand. The class erupted. I had made the gesture without thinking, I immediately recognized my mistake, at orientation someone had warned the youthful American Fulbrighters that in Turkey the OK sign was a slur, the symbol of an asshole and the men who love them.

The night before, very far from Anatolian Turkey one street from Shinjuku ni chome, a constant bacchanalian celebration of assholes, on the six floor of an apartment building I sat at a desk across from a lawyer. Between us was a stack of papers, an application for a serious new visa. As the lawyer and I reviewed the details of each page one by one, my hand went up from my lap and two fingers formed a circle. Silently, I said OK. OK. OK.

There is land personality and ocean personality. Some people’s overlap by a lot. Young J, whom I’d only known on land before we went diving in June was just as excitable, extraverted and helpful in the sea. D and I, who’ve been friends for almost twenty years, now probably spend just as much time together underwater as we do on land. We spent the better part of the last week diving in Sipadan, Malaysia, and I noticed he vacillates between Land D (easily distracted, full of air, insatiable) and Water D (calm, reserved, almost limp).

Others become different people under water. One of our Sipadan dive masters was practically comatose on land, barely speaking and often just asleep behind his sunglasses; but under water he had the comportment of a mad conductor, riffing, scratching, twisting, twitching, striking every part of his suit with his wand, trying to lure the sharks out.

Underwater, I’m obedient and cautious. To conserve air, I try to think and move as little as possible. There is no way to assert my ego. Language is prescribed and limited. “OK” means “okay”; “thumbs up” is the opposite, a sign you want to end the dive and ascend. There is no room for creativity or linguistic experiment. I can’t express myself, and I don’t try.

I simply raise my fingers up, OK. The response to every question other than “how much air do you have left” is two fingers, OK, go down, OK, you cold? OK, did you see the eel, OK, did you get a photo of the cuttlefish, OK, stay here for three minutes, OK, time to go up, OK.

As a professional opinion-giver, typically requiring at least 600 words, this limitation to nonverbal answers is a kind of freedom. Freedom from performance, from cleverness, from expression, from narrating. Everything is reduced to, expanded to, pure momentary sensation.

I’d never done a blue dive before, and we did a few on this trip: Instead of swimming by a reef or along the bottom, you swim into the open ocean, into the blue, into the nothing. The idea is that somewhere deep below are sharks and other large animals you can’t see, and by creating noise — like cracking sounds they think are bones cracking — they’ll swim up to your level. All around, absolutely nothing to see, nothing to stay oriented, just the knowledge that the reef is to your back and a long-haired jazz musician of the sea is guiding you ahead. My stomach flipped briefly; I kept swimming out; at some point I stopped looking for animals; there was nothing, only release.

Back on land, the impulse toward and expectation of verbosity return. Jab jab jab with jokes, tell stories, make connections, unearth memories, criticize others, criticize self, assess, charm, speculate. This is the default mode network in an active state, one which must be intentionally and regularly suppressed, the ability to speak or communicate wrenched from my lips and fingers for one week under water, for twelve days of silent sitting, for eight hours a night, alone on mountains, alone on planes, extreme identity loss in an effort to confirm, reaffirm, in an entropic ego-less state, away from who you tell yourself you are, you’re still 👌.

“There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point.” — Anne Carson, preface to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

in this one-month course we will learn that the bakery will close for summer holidays and there will no good baguettes for several weeks. we will learn that it’s possible for the entire east side of Japan to be under a tsunami warning while Tokyo stays sheltered. we will learn that rabbits used to be counted as birds, possibly because their long ears look like wings.1 we will review the lesson that the simple act of texting someone far away in space or time can darken the whole afternoon. we will learn a beautiful brilliant fearsome woman who can shrink you with a single look can still be kept up at night by an unanswered email.

we will learn that “pleasure is our birthright”2; but also that seeking pleasure and trying to avoid pain is a “tragically human habit.”3 we will learn that the characters for 自由 freedom, 社会主義 socialism, and 共産主義 communism are Japanese constructions, translated from Western texts, before being adopted into Chinese.4 we will learn that a professor before a room of people can still quiver with nerves, in two symmetrical spots just below his nostrils, like misplaced dimples. we will learn that washing one’s washing machine is an actual task that actual adults do, and it is actually disgusting.5

we will revisit the fact that the guy who established the UK’s first national meteorological department took his own life at age sixty under duress from the scientific establishment for his daily “weather forecasts,” as he called them.6 we will review the results of failed attempts at seeing into our own future, discuss the eventual order and timings of our parents’ deaths with ourselves, a lawyer, our sister, our father, and we will learn that the thickening wild of existential agitation can neither be hacked at nor pruned by known methods. we will learn that things in nature merely grow.7

we will learn that some people are capable of long-term, complex decision making at a personal and global scale, that these people make maps, use algorithms, consult forecasts, gather teams of experts, the kinds of people who have “executive” in their job descriptions. we will learn that when deciding whether or not to get married, Charles Darwin made a pro/con list. we will learn that some people are, for some reason, quite good at predicting future change, that these people have been coined “superforecasters,” and that one thing that unites them is that they tend to score very high on openness to experience, also called curiosity, on the big five personality test.8 we will explore the possibility that despite scoring very high on this dimension, for other people being open to experience is the very reason they find the future so opaque and making predictions especially useless. we will reread and reread and reread previous coursework demonstrating that we have no control over anything, but also that to some extent we ought to pretend like we do or risk paralysis, meandering, and eventual self dissolution like newspaper fallen into the pool.

there will be no breaks.

we will learn while receiving a haircut that kyacchi kopii actually refers to slogans and taglines not catching and copying foreign buzzwords as we previously thought. we will learn this in the context of rising anti-foreigner populism in Japan, using the example phrase “Japanese first.”9 we will learn that a pinecone is architecture.10

we will learn that in July at 3,000 meters up it can still be too cold in a tent, that even if there is doubt in the forecast about rain, to always bring extra socks or face the sleepless night. we will learn that the absence of people we haven’t spoken to in years can still make us feel terribly alone.

we will learn that if we have to make a statement to the police because a drunk driver has hit us from behind and attempted to flee the scene, but failed and flipped his van onto its side, the police will ask us over and over and over what country we’re from, where we work, that they will take our statement by hand, rewrite the whole page if there are any mistakes, and offer us tonjiru for dinner. we will learn later in the course that for a thin, well-groomed older woman who’s gone off her meds and refuses to leave the hair salon for the entire day, it will take three cops to remove her from the premises.

we will read extensively the conflicting scholarship on grief. we will learn that in trying to love you we sought to “transcend our existential aloneness, a salve against the wounds of life,”11 and that “heartache is not something we choose to invite in, it’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape,” but that “scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy” and we ought to seek “a relaxing and cooling loneliness.”12 we will learn that grief is “but a word, a shortcut,”13 is not something that leaves but rather stays, not something you get rid of but something you grow around.14 we will learn that “grief and rage — you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out.”15

we will build on previous lessons that fiction can make us feel pleasantly fungible. we will read one novel about egomaniacal ambitious twenty year olds whose heads are so far up the asses of their own destructive intellectual collaboration16 and another with youths gathered around a vat in Brooklyn brewing cocktails of wayward longings above which gathers the perpetual steam of a hungover dream state,17 and we will learn that this combination can create nostalgia for a time that cannot and should not be returned to. we will conclude that the current course, which follows Hedonism 101, is hard and boring, but a prerequisite for graduation.

we will review material that this hole is not the grave.18 we will learn, and unlearn, and learn again.

Read more

Twelve days of silent meditation pass with pains of every kind, new and old, deep and shallow, and when I get back to my apartment I sit on the couch and stare at the wall, overwhelmed. The place is full of distractions, and I haven’t even turned my phone back on yet. I’m amazed by how many things inside these four walls have nothing to do with the questions I’ve been asking myself. I check the plants, exfoliate, poke around in the freezer for something palatable to my dulled palate, stare at all the tiny plastic bottles in my bathroom. I put laundry in, take it back out. I sit down again, at a loss. The opportunities to faff are endless. I open my laptop to search for one fact. The internet is completely unusable. For every block of text there are six to twelve blinking ads, and all the people look CGI. I keep getting asked to prove I’m human. I close the laptop again.

Everything is so bright and so loud.

In the following days readjusting to life as a salaried city dweller I’m taught the words 出家 and 在家. Shukke, leaving + house, zaike, staying + house. They’re not, as it appears, related to being home or going out. Shukke is to go forth from the house to enter the monastery, as contrasted with zaike, to remain home, referring to a lay devotee, someone (probably a man) with the responsibilities of a householder but who’s taken Buddhist vows. Strangely I don’t find leaving for shukke daunting. To bail on society, to enter the convent, to let someone tell me what to believe in, how to live my life, to opt out of capitalism and devote all my time to the pursuit of emotional freedom — sounds simultaneously lofty and comforting. To live in society and pursue a material life with no spiritual investigation, to continue the thing I’ve been doing, to stay in the place where I know the rules and I have friends — sounds fun and reasonable. But both of these — leaving and staying — seem easier than this third option, zaike, to remain in society surrounded by all its faffs and temptations and demands and performances, and to still seek truth. In any case ignorance and truth both seem dire, though with divergent consequences. Run this way, run that way, run down a third path, all the while checking over your shoulder for the heavy hand of grief.

Hi, thank you as always for reading. I’m working on something new and more intimate. If you’re interested in reading, or if you like the grief and want to support my work more generally, please consider a paid subscription. You'll receive small batch grief, high quality experimental sadness for a smaller audience. The first batch will come out in June.

“‘You are perhaps a ‘yang’ person; your mind is ‘boiling,’ even at night.” — Marie Darrieussecq quoting her Norwegian translator, Elin Tobiassen, in Sleepless

On the precipice of spring, the weather is bimyo. We’re sweating in t-shirts in Niigata, surrounded by compacted walls of snow two meters high, the lines like thick slabs of pork belly. I lug my winter coat like an extra duvet onto the shinkansen, it deserves its its own seat. Back in Tokyo I borrow El’s puffer to wear to bike home after hanami, its thick long blue tubes extending to my wrists out from the ends of my ill-advised short-sleeved tunic jacket. I look like Link after putting on some weight. By the time I arrive home my hands are frozen chapped knobs. We’d passed through an oddly situated music festival in the middle of Shibuya, I see a handful of people I only see at parties, it’s strange to see their faces in the city daylight, and not in the wet fevered night out in the mountains. People are restless to vibe, to meet, to check each other out from behind sunglasses. House plants that have barely moved all winter suddenly are busting out new growth. I check five different forecasts and they give five different predictions; I can’t get a grasp of my mood. It shifts like a barometric maelstrom. I wake with bone dry eyeballs coated with allergens. I set into motion big system changes no one else can see. In a month I’m going to spend 11 nights at a silent meditation retreat. After some years of climbing mountains I’m curious about the ones inside. I’m determined to be the first person in the history of vipassana to not talk about it to everyone I know after. To get ready, I practice sitting and stop drinking. I don’t take melatonin even, as I’ll have to face the dark nights alone. To replace drugs, I list things, I’m embarrassed by how readily my mind can produce white boys names. Adam. Brian. Chris. David. Eleven days without exercise, getting into bed in a space without a door, I know I’m not going to sleep. “We want you to fully observe sleeplessness,” says the sensei on the phone when she calls to check my Japanese level. “To enjoy it.” My sitting is so basic and surface level, I don’t know what I’m doing, some things improve, only to be replaced by new issues. “Yes, that’s very much it,” says M, reassuring and not. In the latest session, sitting for an hour, I see how much I'm attached to the noise inside, I don’t want to tell it to be quiet, the leaping dynamism is a reminder of self, proof that I’ve not yet been sucked dry of creative energy, of the free-wheeling association that gives every second of experience its potency. What I’m most afraid of isn’t bad sleep or boredom or shooting leg and ass pain, it’s the ban on writing. Even as I sit this morning I fight the urge to edit this grief; I lose. I dread the cork on voices, on taking notes, on playing loose with metaphors, on narrating, you’ll have to pry my gnarled chapped hands from their grip on the story — you know what, nevermind, forget it. Just forget it.

“This narrow loch has never, I believe, been sounded. I know its depth, though not in feet.” — Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

I read this sentence and remember it later incorrectly as “I know the heights of this mountain, though not in feet.” I’ve been thinking about what we know and what we don’t know, what we can and can’t, what we seek to know and what we don’t. E says she’s not a deep thinker, I disagree, then I think, maybe I’m not either. I don’t ask questions about how tall things are, how deep, I don’t categorize according to any objective system, I register only because people tell me to. I wouldn’t count how many books I read in a year, or pay attention to the heights of summits, but people kept asking, so I started tracking. It would be hard to be a reporter who doesn’t care about facts. But I’m here to tell you, I don’t care. How deep, how high, how far, how long. In diving it’s important to constantly monitor air, time, depth. But a mountain is a binary: It’s either mountain, or it’s not. I either hope for it, or I don’t. I think fondly and often of my brother-in-law’s rating system: 1 is good, 3 is bad, 2 is everything else. It would be professionally difficult for a critic to operate on such a scale, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable. It seems evident that substances should be measured, that they have obvious quantifiable limits, and yet, this knowledge doesn’t seem to bear on my behavior. Deep down, it’s like I don’t believe it. Japanese friends ask me, is that countable? It’s one of those English rules native speakers never learn, that nouns are considered countable — friends, apples — or uncountable — advice, fear. I travel with scientists; I like it. They measure and classify. Things are knowable. I walk behind feeling heights. Afterwards, we compare notes.

It’s the last new moon of the year.

I don’t sleep as well and as deeply anywhere as I do in my childhood bedroom, even if the new mattress my mother put in is weirdly plush and the body sinks into it, leaving the imprint of a criminal, wherein the crime is the unique sloth of a fully grown professional woman. The feeling of utter relaxation comes from, I realize after I sleep another 9-hour shift, the fact that I never have to feed myself in this house, and I rarely have to keep time. In my apartment, I set the clocks and clean the bathroom. Any moldy lemons are my fault, as are dead plants, and missed flights. At my parents’ house, there is a stove, of course, and there are many timepieces, but they all seem sort of distant, vaguely irrelevant. This place falls under the purview of a higher power, the highest, really, as far as I was once concerned.

In this place I am eternally the lowest level line cook, my only job is to dry lettuce or portion out the noodles or blow skin off roasted peanuts. I have the self-assigned responsibility of memory keeping and observational humor, but if I were sitting in the driver’s seat or put down my credit card at lunch, if I were to choose the wine or make the coffee, it would mean something in the pecking order had gone deeply amiss. I’m convinced this would be true even if I had a fleet of my own children. In this house, motherhood does not trump hierarchy.

A psychologist might suggest that another reason I sleep so hard and deeply at my parents’ house is a feeling of safety. I would argue this was hard earned. I’ve been an anxious sleeper since childhood. Looking back the thing that really seemed to scare me was being the last one awake, seeing other people sleeping peacefully in another world and being unable to bridge the gap between us. For many years I would go to bed with all the lights on, and my father’s job was to come by and turn off the light and close the door after he was sure I was asleep. Many times completing this task caused the cycle to start anew. I was afraid of open closets. When my paternal grandmother died we were in southern California for the funeral. I was lying with my mother in my uncle’s house and she said she dreamt my grandmother was hanging in the closet. I hastened to close the closet door that night before bed, and every night after that.

I dreamt once that while I was doing homework in the family room, my mother making dinner as she did every night, I heard the garage door open and the sound of the door knob rattling as my mother entered the house, as it did every night when she got home from work. In the doorway was another woman taking off her shoes. The imposter — she had long black hair like the Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, which my mother would never allow — claimed to be my mother and started across the kitchen to go upstairs to her bedroom closet and change out of her work clothes and make dinner. But, my mother said, I’m Mother. Who are you?

This week I felt dread in the house again. On Christmas afternoon, my brother in law said he felt nauseous. Over the next several hours, down they went, one by one, as a stomach flu ripped across the eleven east coast family members. I watched as each was claimed, the sounds of cries and bodily fluids filling the night. At 5:30 I woke up to go to the bathroom and could hear a nephew somewhere in the house suffering through mortifying grossness. Only my sisters and I remained unaffected. I thought, this was the beginning of an apoca-horror movie, a contagion that touches everyone but those who are the exact combination of half my father and half my mother, I have to call my brother, I need to find the pattern, so we can save humanity.

I went to the basement to look for some fish and felt the hair stand up at my left temple, I turned and saw my ancestor standing in the doorway of an unfinished side of the basement I never dare to enter. He was young with thick black eyebrows, dark and slender with long arms in a big dirty white shirt. He said wordlessly, someday soon, you’ll need to do better than keep time with letters, you'll need to make more than sentences. The time is approaching, the day is closer than you think, when you'll be the one in charge.

Thanks for another year of grief. Next year the letters will come on a new schedule, potentially in a new form. Stay tuned.

I’ve reoriented.

The closest I’ve come to “having direction” was in early adulthood, when life was clearly oriented toward seeing as many new things for as close to zero dollars as possible. (Two years ago while stuck in my childhood bedroom with covid, I wrote about this, about love, god, pain, and other unwavering heart needles.) Chi Hai recently told me about a “round the world” plane ticket, through which you could visit six different cities in a week. Sounds exhausting, I said, even though I’m younger by 14 years and have no kids and am not a multiple home owner. Some part of me has lost the taste for constant movement and novelty, some part disillusioned by the aimless, pure accumulation of experience.

Instead I move my dresser from the middle of the room until it’s flush against the wall, and move my desk from that wall to the eastern-facing window opposite. These days the sun is so weak by 3pm, and as I write this thin gold and blue light is scattered through the teeth-like prism of the glass blocks. It’s a window but not one for looking out of, instead the whole wall is a lamp that fades on and off at will. As I prop up books and plants throughout the apartment, slowly filling it with long-term investments in short-term pleasures, shadows form little cities. The room, “for whom light is an inexhaustible magician.”

I’m having difficulty writing this because I went to bed at 4am, after a long night of spilling drinks and shouting to be heard. I was the first person at the party and the last to leave. I’m in denial, I think we’ll do this again next weekend, unable to realize the truth of this night: It’s a farewell party for two of the brightest lights in my city life. We stand in a circle, I avoid talking about what direction the country is going in now that the Republican mandate is so clear. Instead three Milanese discuss navigation back home: Street names on street names on street names, it’s on Via Manfredo Fanti, where’s that, it’s between Via Pietro Micca and Via Sant Bla Bla. I think of LA, there’s no such thing as absolute distance, everything is multiplied by a factor of traffic, and of Manhattan, how the grid allows extreme precision in telling people where things are, so long as you’re in on the ruse, that “north” is a baldfaced lie.

I can’t list the names of even five streets in Tokyo. If your phone’s dead and you’ve only got the string of nonsense numbers for where you’re going, you better bone up on your polite Japanese because you’ll be relying on shop keepers and police people to find your way. Orientation begins with the name of a train station, which exit, the south one or the new south one, is it near L-Breath, the vexingly named camping goods store, no it’s on the other side, by the Lucky Spot, you know the one, I’ve always wondered what that was for, is it a meeting place for lovers, no, they sell lottery tickets.

El and I go south to a town on the coast and turn off our phones, determined to navigate without them. G gave me a compass for my birthday, and I’ve become very attached to it, using it to get out of the subterranean maze of Shibuya Station without having to consult Google Maps’ convoluted exit strategies, but of course it’s detached itself from me just when I need it most, lost in a pocket somewhere back home. I’ve been pathetically scrolling through navigation quizzes on Instagram, here’s a picture of moonlight casting shadows on some gravestones; what direction are we facing? So much of childhood life was spent indoors, books and homework and video games and CDs and piano lessons and dance recitals. A sealed world with screened windows for recently mobile refugees from the old country, where outside was so bright and alive that I imagined rice left unattended would cook itself.

So when we need information we query people and maps, usually both. Each person produces a new map and by evening I’ve got a thick booklet of printed matter. It takes longer to do everything, to find a place to eat, to locate the e-bike rental, to climb down into the right secret beach. As we jump into the mid-November sea we see Fuji and a heron, the two icons of Japan high-five each other as the sun goes down, my toes would be numb if we were facing anywhere but west. It feels like young adulthood, just on the cusp of independence, when life is something to stare at through goggles on a long summer afternoon.

Later El shows me a photo she took, of me biking off into the blue day. I’m wearing a black high school-era bomber jacket from H&M — fighter pilots wore fast fashion in the early aughts — and I look like an actual child, jacket and hair flying. I find it amusing how determined and sure I look, that I seem to know exactly which direction to go, certainty is funny, don’t you think, kind of like a joke.