All these emotions, all these emotions — Beyoncé, “Virgo’s Groove”
微妙, bimyō, is an adjective meaning tricky, complicated. “How did the negotiation go?” 微妙. “Are you guys broken up?” 微妙. On the morning of new year’s eve I was watching clouds move rapidly across the top of a mountain in Kanagawa. I was overwhelmed by the scene: At one moment painfully sunny, then cloudy, then windy. Then the sun hit the grass and path and the space between light curtains of snow. Hot and cold, hopeful and stormy. A hiker passing the other way looked up. “天気は微妙だなぁ” he said. I agreed. He meant something like, the weather’s dicey. But internally what I heard was, “Weather: It’s complicated.”
If spring brings a quiet agitation to the heart, post-summer in Japan brings a storm that threatens cognition, knowability, measure-ability. The weather app says 12mm of rain, but it’s an empty threat; bone-dry umbrellas crowd the aisles of the train. The next afternoon an unexpected tap hits the roof. Then another. Another. You lunge for the balcony and fling the laundry inside before the unforeseen downpour soaks the patio. (Or worse, you leave the house wearing sunglasses and five minutes down the road it begins to pour, and you’re seized by the knowledge that your towel is now sopping.) Later in the week you go to sleep with the windows open, a cool front having moved in, calming the room, and wake up at 2am drenched in a blanket of steam and your own sweat. The forecast is just alternate facts.
September in the Northeast US is apples, fresh pencils, new schedules, jitters and reunions, fomo over beach days not had, the slow dimming of daylight, and the gradual muting of summer’s rainbow of green. I was born in September on a day the goog tells me is in the top five most popular birth dates in the US (Makes sense—people seek body heat in December. And weather is, after all, everything.) I wonder if that’s why I have never matured out of the academic calendar. I started my first real job the day I turned 23, and the stages of my professional life fall roughly into four-year chunks that begin and end in the fall. (Here I am again, a freshman.)
In Japan, the academic year starts in spring, a symbol of new beginnings. September 1 is the start of the second semester after summer vacation, and though I don’t have any school-aged Japanese friends, I get a very different vibe. Among kids, the first day back has the most deaths by suicide of any day of the year. From Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven, an absolutely brutal novel about schoolyard bullying that I reviewed last year:
Approaching the first day of September, when school would start again, I felt something happening in my body. Whatever I saw, whatever I thought about, no longer felt real. When I lay awake in bed, my throat stung like it was being speared. A weight pressed on my chest.
In these turbulent weeks I’m glued to one app. I open it, watch the neat little lines of wind moving above the patches of calm blue and green. I pinch to zoom out, and there between the Philippines, Taiwan, and Okinawa is a hot pink, purple, orange roiling mass of typhoon. It throbs with color, and the lines of the wind seem to gather force like a cartoon disc moments before it’s shot from the hands of an X-man. In the center is a cute little green oval, the eye of the storm. I move my finger left through time and the vortex makes its way to Busan, then to Shanghai. The news broadcasts warning after warning of x number typhoon, a description of its path, wind speeds that mean little to me but sound bad, predictions of severity. Watch out: Atmospheric instability. As best as modern science can predict, the violence has a clear and observable path, and there’s nothing to do but slide your finger back and forth, wait and hope for calm.
My second September in Fukuoka, one weekend the typhoon winds were predicted to be so bad that the conbinis were going to close. The instant ramen aisle at the grocery store was completely bare. Flyers went out about securing items on the balcony. I actually filled my tub with water.
The following week at school, one of my teachers told us she had never in her 30-something years seen a closed conbini, so she went out at the beginning of the storm to take pictures of the store with its lights off. She said the streets were empty except for someone playing Pokémon Go. I laughed, made a face of mild judgment, then checked myself, recalling my own weekend: That same night, somewhere across town I drank a million drinks and smoked a million cigarettes and toasted to another friend leaving the country, oblivious to the pressure outside. We biked home at dawn down the slick streets on my mamachari, and somehow managed to stay dry pedaling through the eye.
PS. Very, very excited to present my profile of Sayaka Murata, the author of Convenience Store Woman, for Wired. What a human. Hope you enjoy.
I loved Convenience Store Woman. I look forward to reading your profile of her. Great post.