3.1 the start of new things

sakura season

Random shrine with cherry blossoms along the Philosopher’s Walk in Kyoto, March 2025.

I started this newsletter a few years ago, and after stalling out a couple of times, went completely dark. The pandemic hit hard for my college-age kids, and I was having a hard time with my latest book project. I toyed with the idea of enrolling in a masters program in creative writing. I also toyed with the idea of returning to my developmental editing work. So many things were in flux. Substack felt like another distraction that my scattered brain couldn’t handle. The fact that the Substack app defaults to a stream of “notes” made it feel like social media, which made me feel anxious. I switched back and forth between reading my subscriptions in email and reading them in the app, and neither felt right.

Substack is where I hoped to learn to write essays. You can see me in my books, but they are fiction—veiled and oblique. I felt there was a lot more that I couldn’t say because I’ve been writing books that take place in England (both old and new). I’m neither English nor a New Englander. I felt that I needed to conquer the essay form, and that one day I might write a memoir.

Last fall, I thought I’d finally reached the point where clarity would strike. I was taking my first trip to Japan in decades. I was going to Japan without my mother, but my connection to Japan had always been with her and through her. I was going to Japan on my own terms this time, to figure out how to be Japanese while continuing to be American. I’d decided to put aside my stalled work-in-progress and instead to start the book I’d always intended to write, a book about a historical chapter in Japan that I’ve always loved. I’d prepared for this moment by improving my reading Japanese and watching a lot of Japanese YouTube. I was going to get on a plane and do it.

But I wrote a new intro to my newsletter on the plane…and never finished it. I spent a lot of time in my hotel room, too anxious to go out. Was this a panic attack? It couldn’t have been, I thought, because it lasted for days. I was afraid to speak Japanese, afraid to make eye contact. There were so many elderly women everywhere I looked, and they all had the same hunch that my mother does. It felt like she was following me, judging me, scolding me. Everything about Japan felt so fresh and new, not at all like the Japan I had once known. Was there a place for me here? If so, where was it? In fact, maybe there was even more of a place for me here? Is that what felt so different? I didn’t know. I also didn’t write about it on Substack. I honestly didn’t know what to say and how to say it.

I had enrolled in that masters program in creative writing after all, and when I got home, I started writing that novel about Japan. It turned out to be an excellent and fairly gentle cure for what ailed me. I think I am a fiction writer after all. I struggle with the vulnerability that is required in the essay format. But through my novel’s characters, I can describe my fears and my frustrations. I can also maintain the discretion that is so important to me—I’ve never been one to let it all hang out.

I am a lot more settled into who and what I want to be. I’m also back in Japan this spring. I’m doing more research, and it’s so much less stressful now that I know what I’m trying to do. My novel is in the historical period known as the Kamakura period, which starts in around 1180. My characters are real people, but the primary documents of this period have a lot of gaps in them, so there’s room for my imagination. I’ve been visiting the key areas in their lives and looking for local tales about them, which are not found in the history books. I think I will enjoy telling you about my project, without worrying that anything I write has to be in the form of a beautifully worded essay.

The cherry blossoms are blooming everywhere I look. It’s the perfect time for a new start. There are children on the Kyoto subway in the middle of the day because school is a series of assemblies and half-days and early release days this week. It’s fun to watch them huddled excitedly over someone’s new smartphone game. Middle school jocks were lumbering home with giant gear bags, looking both incongruous and perfectly at home among the deer in Nara. There are lots of kimonos, people taking photos under the cherry trees. New flowers, new leaves, new chapters.