故郷和他郷 When I think about this title ,I have no specific images of 他郷 because in japanese we use the word 異郷(faraway from home)more ,personally I’m not so familiar with the word 他郷. And it sounds to me as if it’s ,somewhere not related to me but someone else’s homeland.
In this meaning , my first 他郷was Hokkaido北海道 ,Sapporo 札幌.I was born and grew up in Tokyo東京, but in Japan there is a tradition of big and even small companies to send employees from the main office to faraway branches for few years and send them back to the original place. It called Tenkin (転勤) I believed this kind of system exists everywhere, but actually it may be not so popular in other countries ,because when I attended Dr. Paul Andra of Colombia University’s Japanese film class, he explained Tenkin system that they have seen Ozu ’s 小津安二郎 film. But now a days Tenkin is old fashioned in Japan, fathers leave the family and are just sent away alone. It called Tanshinfunin単身赴任Anyway, when I was 6 my family moved to Sapporo and stayed there for 2 years as Tenkin. That was my first airplane trip. I found I loved traveling ,moving fundamentally. Deeply. House ,stove ,flowers ,jacket, weather ,everything is different from Tokyo’s. I loved it. But next week ,when I entered elementary school , classmates asked me ,you are Ainu aren’t you? I had no idea about Hokkaido’s history ,I was 6. so just answered I don’t think so,I ‘m from Tokyo. Then I watched my classroom carefully, and found 2 girls were quite different from the others. Very black round eyes , waved hair, eyebrows almost like Frida Kahlo’s , skin is little darker , Yes,they look more like me that the others.
As you know Ainu are native Japanese based in Hokkaido,and even now a kind of discrimination exists in Japan. But as a small kid I found Ainu girls so cute charming& beautiful ,and I wanted to be an Ainu girl .
From that day ,Hokkaido became my他郷. Not me but someone else (who looks like me)’s homeland. In Hokkaido , names of the cities rivers plants animals are from Ainu languages (the origin) Those sounds are very mysterious. Every time I listened to them, I imagined Hokkaido a long time ago without Japanese , only Ainu people .
Last year ,I had a chance to meet many kyrgiz and kazakstan women writers, and they said their culture and Ainu’s are very close, and they said I look like their relatives or friends very much.
In my story Han Seyin’s moon ,(韓素音的月瞭) the heroine is a Japanese girl who started to learn Chinese in Beijing in early 90’, and also about the gap between two countries and two languages. She practiced Chinese with taxi drivers everyday, and drivers asked her You are Kazak, aren’t you? Why? And she started to be interested in Kazak culture and pretended to be a Kazak girl in Beijing. Now I’m sure this episode is from my own 他郷experience when I was 6 in Hakkaido.
In China and Japan ,usually we think only about bad & good histories of the counties ,but sometimes it’s interesting to change the way of thinking ,for example ,to think about the far northen roots between Ainu and Kazak.
My second 他郷is New York. After I came back to Tokyo in 1964 ,(Tokyo Olympic year) my life changed again to become a shopping girl. My generation Japanese is a little like Shanghai &Beijing young kids now; we grew up in an economically buoyant society, always think about enjoying life, buying new things that are fashionalble.
In 64 I got my first Barbie doll ,and her outfits. That was the very beginning of my shopping life. A few years ago ,I published an ethnology book about the Barbie doll ,Barbie was made in Japan from the beginning for more than 10years (1959-1972) at that time Japan’s products were just cheep and low quality ,but Mattel found Japanese were working hard and serious ,so they decided to make their new fashion doll in this country, and sent a Japanese American guy to coordinate everything. That was a very new and positive project between Us & Japan after the world war 2 era.
I and my friends,many kids grew up buying ,dolls outfits every week, and their own outfits every week and started to go to new restaurants clubs, sometimes to write something for trendy magazines or travel magazines ,but mainly we did nothing ,that was the trend ,when I was in my teens and twenty’s, all my friends including me never made money; we just spend spend spend; we enjoyed spending money. No profession was the trend. (now a days in Japan the situation has changed totally; there are working poor young people living in internet cafes and they are reading avant war proletarian literature 小林多喜二 蟹工船)In 80’ my generation of Japanese girls &boys started to travel all over the world . And I found there are two types of the cities, type A ,even as first time ,so familiar ,and close, which felt like I had visited many times already, for example ,NY ,Honolulu ,Sao Paulo, Beijing Helsinki etc.
Type B, place where I felt that even if I visited then several times ,I was always touching only the surface of the city, for exampleParis, Seoul, L A, Madrid ,and Shanghai
I visited Shanghai ,many times from Tokyo and from Beijing ,but I always stayed in the same Hotel and went to the same restaurants ,walking exactly the same street and stopping in the same café., so this time there is a big chance that shanghai changes from type b to type A.
As a writer , the normal way may be to write about your homeland and hometown ,but to me ,Tokyo is too real to write about. It is too close to my own life or everyday life. In becoming a writer ,I found a writer’s life is not exciting at all. I don’t like to write about things too close to my life as a writer in Tokyo.
So I need some fictional space in my stories. That’s why ,for almost all of my stories,I choose type A cities. The stay in type A is half real, half fictional ,very comfortable. Mishima said (or maybe Tanizaki???) in Japan we have unique space called Tsuginoma (anteroom )(次の間)between corridor(or passage) and rooms..
In the traditional Japanese house ,there is a small room between inside and outside. the role of that space is important,I believe. Ideally, it’s in the middle of the heaven and the earth,; this world and another one. To me ,living in Type A is living in two languages and two cultures ,like sleeping in the TsuginomaNY in 80th was my favorite Type A. city. I instantly liked the air of that city ,that time ,and I visited many many times , sometimes staying a few months and then returning back and back again. Art and stockmarket (like now in Shanghai) My friend Page Powell was working for Andy Warhol’s factory , she introduced me not only to Andy but also to Basquiat, Keith Haring ,Tama Janovits, Suzan Minot, Jay MacInerny, those kind of people. Parties and night clubs, galleries, so called bright lights big city, I walked everyday and felt inspired ,blessed the air of 80s NY.
I loved to be in NY, as nobody then.I enjoyed it simply. The pressure looks last forever. And in Ny I met many important friends, ,for example. Kenji Nakagami, the famous Japanese novelist died in 1991 ,who was one of my favorite people I’ve met directly. He lived in NY then and some times we went out together .He loved Asian culture and foods ,so we met at 34 th street Korean restaurants and karaoke bars . I’d never been to Korea at that time ,but learned something important from Nakagami’s Korean fever then. That’s just for one example. I believe I made the core of my writing during these days in NY.
These last 10 years ,I joined asian writers meetings, sometimes visiting Korea or other places; ,each time I remembered nostalgically the cheap restaurants in 34th middle of the night in mid 80thMy writing is mainly about the misunderstanding of two different cultures. And silly but important love (affairs). Even now ,my favorite novelist is Manuel Puig ,my idea of love is very close to Puig’s. So, I continue to write strange misunderstanding love stories between two culture ,two languages, two cities ,and two people.