Moka was born on the new moon in the middle of a typhoon. The rains brought welcome relief from months of record heat. The sound of all that falling water seemed to calm her. That’s how the story of my daughter’s life begins. Continue reading
A Persimmon Biography
The last of the fall leaves on my persimmon tree dropped. This is what it looked like when it was in all its autumnal glory. I bought it two years ago at the neighborhood nursery. It was a skinny sapling of twigs with three persimmons hanging from the branches.
I left the fruit on the tree because it’s just a pretty sight. But once the fruit became ripe, every morning for a week, three species of birds fought over the spoils. There was a bullying crow, a pair of loud plovers or some kind of whitish bird, and a smattering of tiny songbirds that pecked at what it could from the ground. You’d think that it would be beautiful to have birds eat from your persimmon tree. But in fact it sounded like an avian riot at a heavy metal concert. It was vicious. And the balcony was a mess after each feasting.
The year after, the tree was afflicted by some white wormy scales. It didn’t have a chance. The leaves barely matured. I tried to remove them by hand, squeezing them, which left my fingers stained with a deep purple. I later found out that they were actually the insects cultivated in Mexico to produce indigo dye. Near one of the universities where I teach, there was a grove of persimmons, all afflicted by the same pest. So it must have been a nation-wide epidemic. In grocery stores, persimmons are a lot more plentiful and cheaper this year than last year.
This year, the foliage spread out nicely. So nice that somehow caterpillars found their way up to my 8th floor balcony and began eating the juicy leaves. I didn’t mind them. They were easy to remove. Unfortunately, the tree didn’t fruit this year. I was hoping that it would cross-pollinate with the big persimmon tree near the base of my apartment building. But the tiny white flowers never opened properly.
Persimmophilia
I have a special relationship with persimmon trees. I planted several in my yard at my old house. They were the fastest growing trees in my orchard. In the spring, the leaves are delicately pale green. In the summer, it provides shade with pleasing broad dark green leaves. In the autumn, the leaves turn a deep warm orange as you can see above. Then one morning in early winter, the leaves suddenly drop all at once, exposing bright orange-colored persimmons dangling like Christmas ornaments.
My dad told me how in post-war Korea, he had vivid memories of eating persimmons from the neighborhood trees when he was a kid. I never could visualize that image until I came to Japan, where persimmon trees are as common as apple trees in the Northwest. And they are huge. A mature persimmon, filled with hundreds of little round suns is a sight to behold.
Soon after I wrote this post my dad sent me this email:
We had around 10 persimmon trees in the yard. And there was a little tiny stream that flowed right next to the house. They produced the biggest persimmons in the village. It was your grandmother’s parent’s home. There was a persimmon tree near the well which was as old as I was. It was planted by your great grandfather on the occasion of the birth of his first grandson, me. I was born in that house, Aunt Jung Hee, and Uncle No Kyung, too.Jung Hee and No Kyung couldn’t find the old house since the city was developed and the various city plan changes changed everything. Well, it was fifty/sixty years ago.Your writing on persimmons reminded me of those good days. I was a shy kid , but a good story teller.Love, dad
This is the view from my balcony towards the west, last week. It was a particularly beautiful sunset. The big building on the right is the Ebisu Garden Tower. The one on the left is the Westin Hotel. It looks like the sun has split the hotel in the middle, but it’s just a spotlight that illuminates a corner of the building. The buildings are the two most prominent at the Ebisu Garden Place.
The Westin is a gorgeous, luxury hotel. I sometimes go there to read or write in their lush lobbies. On the second floor, there are loads of comfortable, baroque sofas, chairs, and lamps that are bolted down. I learned early in life that if you walk into any place like you belong, no one bothers you. It’s one of my things: I like walking into buildings I have no business being in.
The Tower is one of the best places in Tokyo for a great view. It’s free to go to the top, in the express glass elevators. The top two floors have restaurants, many of them very reasonable. And they are ever so romantic.
I’m really into views. Whenever I go apartment or house hunting, I instinctively go straight to the windows to see what I can see. Only then do I check out the inside of the place. The apartment could be great, but if the view is another nearby building, I feel claustrophobic. It’s no accident that I’ve lived in lots of places with great views. The following is the top 5.
1. Monterey Bay. I lived in a beach house for a couple years in Santa Cruz, California. My bedroom had sliding glass doors that opened into a balcony that faced the bay and the Pacific Ocean. There was a spectacular sunset over the waters every evening. It sounds tranquil, and it mostly was, except that I lived with anywhere from 6 to 8 other people in that huge house.
2. The Bradford City Town Hall and Clock Tower. When T and I lived in England, we had this corner apartment in a building that was newly converted from a post office. It was right across the street from the main city centre plaza. The town hall and clock tower are Gothic, Italianate works of art. It was a joy to wake up to great architecture every morning. AND we always knew what time it was. Although, the clock was anywhere from 2 to 3 minutes late. And since the whole city set its time to the clock, the entire town was always a few minutes late.
3. The Willamette River. From the balcony of this Oregon townhouse, I could see a spacious rolling lawn, a humongous tree that shaded the entire lawn, a bike path, and the forested banks of the river. This might be one of the best places I’d ever lived in. There was a pool and jacuzzi, and a community garden. There was also a lot of active wildlife. Marauding squirrels gnawed through any kind of container possibly containing food left on the balcony. And dueling raccoons often hissed through the night.
4. Tokyo City Lights. After a day jostling in the urban crowds, it’s nice to go home and rise above the fray. Sometimes, me and the missus turn off the lights, sit on the couch, and chill out, looking out over the sparkling city lights. One of my favorite household chores is hanging the laundry on the balcony while drinking a beer.
5. A Redwood Forest. When I lived on campus in Santa Cruz, I lived in these dorms that were among the redwoods. The buildings were Mondrian, post-modern, whimsical, with lots of windows. I felt like I lived in an Ewok village. Unfortunately, it was one of the worst living situations I’d ever been in. But I guess it was a typical college dorm with decomposing pizza boxes, and beer can monuments.
I have a knack for finding a place with a great view. It’s because my eyes demand that they not be aggravated by uninspiring visions, and because my mind requires a lot of space.
This is the last installment of the Windiad, my epic journey back to the West Coast of the US, with thick references to Homer’s The Odyssey, another story about a man going home. To read the whole thing, all out of order but conveniently numbered for the linearly-minded, click on this sentence.
At the End of the World
It’s been a few weeks since we returned from the US. It took two weeks just to finish unpacking because I was so busy with work. And three weeks to write the rest of the Windiad. America already seems like a dream. Except when I follow the election and then it’s a bit of a nightmare.
I’m back among the busy, hard-working, sleep-deprived Japanese. The cicadas have already gone underground. Typhoon season has begun, with a huge monster of a storm coming this way.
The first week back, there were nonstop thunderstorms. Twice, the boom of thunder woke me up and I thought Tokyo was being attacked or there was a terrorist bomb that exploded nearby. It was apocalyptic. There’s no other way to describe it. If the world ends, that’s how it would go. It’s since calmed down and now the weather is balmy, cool. I feel like I can think again, without the weight of humidity pressed against my brain.
Where is Ithaca?
I’ve been able to contemplate once again, what home is to me. Is it America? Most certainly. I felt comfortable and at ease. My family is there, most of my friends. Large swathes of my past.
And what part of America is my home? I haven’t been to my hometown in Southern California since 1999, and I haven’t lived there since 1988. I felt a disconnect in Eugene, where I lived for a decade. Aside from many good friends who still live there, the town was full of faces I vaguely recognized. Santa Cruz, where I attended university isn’t recognizable at all since it’s been rebuilt after the ’89 earthquake. And I’ve never lived in Portland, where I most felt at home.
Now when people ask me where I’m from, I just say, The West Coast. It encompasses the Pacific Ocean, the Coast Mountain Range, the Cascades, the conifer forests, the oak hills, and Interstate Highway 5. It covers all the small college towns that I’ve lived in all up and down the coast. Most of my family and many of my friends are there. So the West Coast, that’ll do.
And what about Tokyo, my home for the last 3 years. Is this the Ithaca (Odysseus’ home) that I’ve been sailing to? Or is this just another of the many islands that I’ll be stopping at on the way back ‘home’? It certainly is home. I have a blast with T’s sizable big-hearted, fun-loving family. They really make it feel like home.
Odysseus criss-crossed across the Aegean Sea trying to get back to his kingdom and his wife, Penelope. But in my odyssey, my wife traveled with me. So in a way, I was already ‘home’, yet on my way home.
On My Way, Never Arriving
One of my favorite books, that’s almost impossible to find now, is Ursula K LeGuin’s ‘anthropology of the future’, Always Coming Home. This work of fiction imagined a future, post-industrial California. The title refers to a song sung by members, of this imagined culture, who are best described as the tribe’s adventurers and explorers. I was finally able to write down this song from the copy that I’ve kept at my parents’ home.
The idea is that these explorers are always on their way back home, even if they are on their way to other lands. At the same time, wherever they are, they are at home. They are always coming home. I relate to this sense of never having arrived, never feeling like I’m home yet. But I have also always felt that wherever I was living at the moment, I could stay there for a long time. I felt both at home and not at home.
That’s how I feel about Tokyo too. Our plan, my Penelope and I, is to stay a couple more years. But it doesn’t really matter where we go. Our home is wherever we are together. Maybe when people ask where I’m from, I should just say, “I don’t know quite where my home is, but I do know that I’m here.”
Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge by Ursula K LeGuin
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be your mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
Wait a minute. What happened to the Windiad 7-10? I’ll fill those in in the coming days.
After 23 hours of total travel time from when we left my parents’ home, we finally returned to Japan last night to a typhoon-like rainstorm. The rain was blowing sideways. Consequently, today is nice and cool and not humid. What a nice transition from the perfect weather that was California and Oregon.
I went to work today, jet-lagged, bleary-eyed, and quasi-nauseous. It’s only a 5 minute bike ride to work, but I was dodging pedestrians, dogs, other bicyclists, and brake-less taxis. Wow, there are a lot of people here. I also wore a tie and a dour expression.
I also went to the gym, which is in crowded Shibuya, and it was weird being back in the land of skinny stylish teenagers aimlessly meandering fixated on their cell phones. But I wasn’t grumpy weaving through them. Though I did walk exactly 3.04 times faster than I did in the US. And my body, which was relaxed and filled up space in the US, began to hold itself in and take up as little space as possible.
At the airport it was no problem to slip right back into bowing, thanking, and excusing oneself. I was newly in awe of the super-organized, orderly, smooth-running, polite (but not quite friendly) society that Japan is. I missed the clean public bathrooms, the manageable food servings, the vending machines.
When we entered our apartment, it felt like home. My trees were alive. The city light sparkled from the balcony. And this evening there was even a little earthquake. It’s home. For now.
The Best Airport in the World
It’s Vancouver. T and I spent our 3 hour layover in the Vancouver airport along an indoor stream. We picked a nice spot by potted fake maple trees. We sat on plush chairs. There was free wireless internet. All the workers are patient and nice. They accept US dollars (but give change in Canadian). And it’s easy to find gates and connections. The whole airport is warmly accented with wood.
In contrast, the worst airport has got to be LAX. I can’t even begin to describe the utter decreptitude of this mess. And almost as bad is the new Bangkok airport, which has all the charm of an air duct with rows of metal chairs only a Nazi fetishist could find comfortable.
