Happy New Year! I would like to extend my gratitude and best wishes to each and every one of you out there in Substack-land. Japanese people send a new year’s greeting postcard in December, to reach all of their connections on January first. So I’m quite late, but I promise I’ve been thinking about you and wishing you well! I hope 2024 lives up to all of our hopes for a bright, happy year.
I’ve tried not to take my Substack newsletter too seriously lest I disappoint myself in the middle of all the clutter that makes up my writing life. But I think 2024 will be the year that I decide to take it seriously. I’ve not put any pressure on myself to publish regularly or to be chatty on Notes, and I’m not sure if those are good organizing principles for me anyway. But I’d like to commit to more regularity and more chatting this year.
I know I’m capable of it; I’ve had a newsletter for my fiction since 2017, and I pretty much never miss sending one out. But I think the Substack experiment has felt much more fraught because this is about me and my relationship to Japan, non-fiction rather than fiction. If you hate my novels, then I’m cool with that, since we all have our individual taste. But if you hate the way I tell my life story, then that feels a lot more personal. So I do more self-editing here in Substack than I do in my fiction, which makes me question myself…repeatedly.
I’m working hard on two novels this year that have nothing to do with Japan. I hope to finish up and get them out the door before the end of the year, pending rewrites and editorial schedules. Those are pretty big goals which should be more than enough for me to conquer over the course of a calendar year, but I have another big goal which has a lot of little goals clustered underneath, and that is a planned trip to Japan, probably in the fall.
I’ve not been to Japan since 1990, since I’ve been waiting for my family life to settle down before making the trip. All of my kids are athletes and I’ve been a prisoner to their sports schedules for the past couple of decades, so I’ve rarely had the chance for travel that wasn’t connected either to my husband’s job (Europe, Middle East) or a sports competition (California, Florida, other venues across the country). With the graduation of my two younger kids from college in 2024, I finally feel that it’s my time.
I have a complicated relationship with Japan; my mother is from Japan, but she’s never considered us kids to be Japanese, so she didn’t try to keep us connected to her home country. I believe there’s more than a little wartime trauma involved in her standoffishness, as she has never been willing to discuss the war with us. And I do feel 100% American. I am a native speaker of English, was born in the U.S., was educated in its schools, and generally feel in sync with the values and preoccupations of this country, even if I sometimes worry about the economy, politics, or our lack of universal healthcare. I’ve never felt that I wanted to relocate to another country or that I would prefer to carry a different passport. I don’t think I personally would want a digital nomad visa to anywhere; I like my home and I like my life here.
But I acknowledge that even with all of those basic truths, I am bicultural, and I don’t know what it’s like not to have a foreign language in my head, to not crave foods that my neighbors have never seen, to not want to hear pop songs from the Japanese radio station of my youth. When I’m sick, I want soft rice, a pickled plum, and tea. And that’s something that will probably never change. It’s built into me physically. And even the United States can feel frustratingly parochial. Too many people want to ignore the fact that the engine of this country is built out of immigrants, and even the immigrants themselves feel pressured to hasten out of that category, causing them to repress their interesting backgrounds and cave to the blandest type of majority culture.
So I’m thinking ahead to taking that first trip to Japan in a long awhile, and I’m expecting it to be emotionally overwhelming. What makes it worse is that I can’t start the actual logistical planning until I know where my kids will be (they are still applying for grants and looking at jobs and thinking about grad school), so the prospect of this trip is dangling just in front of me, within sight but not quite within reach. There’s a lot of anxiety wrapped up in this non-planning state, and the only way for me to exorcise it seems to be to think about the non-logistical bits, like continuing to study Japanese, and also continuing to explore long-dormant interests of mine, like kimono and dance. I hope I can do that here, with you, on Substack.
I just want to integrate the person that I am with the person that I was, and to locate the person that I can be somewhere in the midst of all of this. I’d like to have a fresh view of Japan, not just memories of a place from 1990 that doesn’t really exist anymore, but I’d also like to pay respect to the forces that shaped this place. It would have been “nice” to have been able to jet back and forth between the U.S. and Japan over the course of my life and to have never felt disconnected or adrift, but I think diaspora mostly doesn’t work that way. If anything, my mother was a sort of refugee, and my suspicion is that refugees often hold close an outdated version of their homeland, maybe to their detriment, and maybe in a way that isn’t good for their kids. I’d kind of like to both start afresh and integrate with respect, if that makes sense.
As I start to plan this trip, bit by bit, I’ll be sure to talk through everything with you here in this newsletter. I am relying on the knowledge and experience of several of you with Japan-oriented newsletters, in fact. I also have a great Japanese tutor who is an incredible source of both objective information and interesting perspective.
And this brings me round to taking this newsletter seriously in 2024. Thank you for taking an interest. Thank you for buoying me along thus far and putting up with my erratic schedule. And yoroshiku onegaishimasu for the future—please continue to look kindly on me. I hope to be more solid and steady this year.
Maya, I like your card! The circulation of New Year's cards is shrinking in Japan yearly. My son doesn't send; instead, he uses more message applications. But as part of the older generation, it is good to hear from my old friends yearly.
I am not a writer, so I don't know, but writing nonfiction allows the reader to get a real sense of the author's personality and thoughts, naturally leading to sympathy. I was born and raised in Japan, but having lived abroad for a long time, I understand what you are discussing very well.
This was such a beautiful post. I smile so much to hear that you edit so much more in non-fiction. I just dash out my non-fiction but I go over my fiction over and over and over again! It might be fun to think of your trip to Japan as we search for a novel that you might write that is set there!!! My son has only been back one time since we left 12 years ago and I have never been back. I have no plans to ever go back even though I miss it every single day. I’m hoping my son can visit again this summer.