The evenings are beginning to cool off, which means that Chapter One: pnts and kzi vs. Murphy’s Law and Japan[1] is drawing to a close. It was chapter of epic proportions in which we saw our heroes move halfway across the world, engage in mighty battles with the most formidable of bureaucratic systems, dodge deportation and food poisoning, discover innovative ways of using clothing for pillows and blankets, dance lithely between pronounced cultural differences, obtain gruesome facial wounds, and drink lots of beer.
It’s true that technically our worries came to an end the day we obtained our gaijin cards, but the lingering and oppressive summer heat was too heavy with reminders to really allow one to dislodge established panic-mode-on mindsets and move on. Now that the mind-numbing heat is slinking away I can breathe a sigh of relief and begin to really focus on the fact that I’m living in Japan. Which means that there are now two aspects of my life that evoke that ‘woah’ sentiment that Keanu so perfectly embodies, the one word distillation of a rather profound moment in which you are able to step back from being ‘in’ your life and kind of look ‘at’ it (which can sometimes trigger a mild case of freaking out about simply being alive) and realize just how absurd, bizarre, and amazing it is. My thought bubble is then as follows:
Woah. I’m married.
Woah. I’m living in Japan.
The trifecta will be completed when I wake up one morning and exclaim, “Woah. I know Kung-Fu.” One of the most critical things that I can now focus on is language aquisition and navigating the most superficial layers (I think deeper layers go hand in hand with more advanced language skills) of this complex, bizarre, and multifaceted society. Like ARGs (Alternate Reality Games; draft in progress post forthcoming), learning Japanese, more specifically written Japanese, is a step-by-step process to unlocking a mysterious and beautiful puzzle. The learning curve is steep (at least for this neophyte, whose only prior language experience has been with romance languages) for the ideogrammatic kanji, but each new character inches me closer to an entirely different and new way of formal written representation and communication. I’m flailing at articulation here, so I’ll put it this way: imagine reading Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle in Japanese, just as he wrote it with nothing lost in translation (yes, we are assuming an absurd level of fluency here of which one can only obtain by *being* Japanese, but hey, a girl’s gotta dream).
Which is all really to say, I’m finally at that rather vague but even more specific place known as *here*, be that geographically, temporally, spatially or otherwise; all of me, that wildly nebulous entity, is timidly coalescing after six months months of total fragmentation.
I’m also drinking wine out of a monkey cup.
[1] The prelude (working title IPv4: LOL, Nice to Meet You, I Do), which constitutes a book in and of itself kind of like The Hobbit was to LoTR, begins with the first day our heroes met and subsequently married and spans the time spent in Boulder, the details of which will not be gone into here.