I’ve been back in Japan for a week now. I’m completely back into the swing of Japanese life. I’ve lost the indescribable floating sensation I had during the journey, and with a strong grounding in reality, I’m back to life as usual. It is said that planes have the biggest chance of crashing during take-off and landing. When people say they got off to a bumpy start, or that they had a rough landing, or something along those lines, these remarks stick with me. But this time around, not only did I have a turbulent patch both before and after my business trip abroad, it was also unbelievably hectic throughout my trip to The Hague.
In Japan, we try to bring as much closure as possible at the end of the year. We call this “nenmatsu shinkou” (lit: deadlines before the year’s end). I wonder if people elsewhere also have this. Around New Year’s, all the companies shut down, and because the printing presses are closed, work picks up speed even more than usual. This means that writers are faced with rush deadlines. Even though Japanese employees are workaholics, they usually take their free days around New Year’s. In a nutshell, this means that all writers in Japan are chased by their nenmatsu shinkou deadlines and struggle to meet them. It’s the same story for me now. I thought I would be free from words while I was in The Hague, but because I had to write 3 columns, I was constantly preoccupied with them. Before and after returning to Japan, it was as if I was being hunted by words; my head and my computer screen were crowded with them. I would of course be concerned if my screen were a blank slate, but I am really getting sick of this life where words spread everywhere like a disease.
My morning begins with my daughter calling “wake uuup!”. While feeding her, giving her juice and getting her ready to go, I listen to the clumsy words she babbles in her child’s voice. I understand what she is saying and respond to her demands. After leaving her at the day-care centre, I switch on my computer and completely submerge in a sea of words. When I return from this sea of words, I connect my computer with the Internet, check my work e-mail and do some light household chores. I read the material from my book, allow my eyes to pass over the manuscript and somehow I surrender to the words. When I am in a café and someone next to me says something interesting, or when I encounter something of interest, I jot it down. When I pick up my daughter and ask her “what did you do today?” and when my husband, who is an editor, comes home, almost automatically we start talking about literature. The world is filled with words. Sometimes I would like to spend some time in a shack on a tropical island, without television, computer, magazines, books or any such things, even though I know full well that I too am a criminal, guilty of bringing words into the world. At this point in my life I can only be free of words when I’m doing some housekeeping, for example, or taking a bath. When I see people craving for words, I have the feeling that they are possessed by something. I want to spend my time in peace. I used to think that back when my daughter constantly cried and screamed, but now she’s bigger and uses words all the time, I cannot help this thought from growing even stronger.
When I go home after having talked to people all day, I want to spend some time in silence at home. Sometimes when I come home worn out from a day of chattering, I want to watch TV, read a book and talk with my family. I don’t know if this is because we live in a world full of words, but there is a certain part of people that can only be healed by words. And there are other things that make me feel better, such as sweetly stroking my head, getting a massage, or sex – but I am only healed by things such as reading a book, people paying attention to me or a deep conversation. I wonder if people who are composed and shaped by words involuntarily exhibit such traits.
Every day, my daughter drags her picture book along with her everywhere, and she goes on about wanting to read it. She asks “what is that?” about fifty times a day. She wants to use the words she has remembered, and while applying them in every situation, she soaks up even more words. When we were in The Hague, her vocabulary suddenly expanded. So far, whenever we’ve gone abroad, my daughter always makes tremendous leaps in her Japanese. I think this is due to some kind of mechanism in which the inability to understand words is equated to the collapse of your ‘self’. Searching for words entails dependence on language. When you see your own likeness, determined by words, it is a beautiful but vulnerable creature, revealing itself as love for humanity. I think I’ll keep on using words, abusing them, and telling stories with them after all.