It will be soon time to bid farewell to this country, and I feel like time is ripe for me to write down some thoughts about what I made of this experience.
So far, I’ve been living in Japan for 215 days (when I leave, it will be around 255). It is a number so high that I almost cannot believe it. I want to say time has run, even though in reality, thinking about my first days here feels like thinking about a different life. I was not single, I had no clue about what was coming, and I didn’t know anything about this place. At the time, I knew many many less people than now, and I had a few less friends. I could speak almost no word in Japanese (that has not changed) and I wouldn’t have been able to tell apart a soba from a udon.
I wish I could have an app that told me how much time I spent on each single one of the activities with which I entertained myself here. If I had to make a wild guess, I would say that (excluding sleeping), eating, drinking and sitting on a subway train would sum up to 75% of my days, with the rest spent travelling, visiting temples or museums, dating.
Since I became single, I went on 54 dates with 16 different people. I knew the number would be high, but I didn’t expect that high. If I think about it, it is clear that I have been trying to fill a void. Why the void is there in the first place, and how large is it, are questions that I still cannot answer. I don’t regret spending so much of my time chasing after an ephemeral pleasure. After all, at that time I wanted to do it, and if I could go back, with the exception of a few times, I would probably do the same all over again. Of course, meeting so many new people has taught me a lot. About myself, about them. I may have learned more about what I like, and how to understand faster if I am wasting my time with someone. I have learned how to say no, which is something that I’ve had trouble with my whole life. I’ve also learned that, compared to other guys, I’m incredibly kind and nice. This is something that has changed recently, and under the prophecy of one of those dates, my heart is indeed starting to become darker. Which means that I started to care less about other people, and more about me. This is, of course, not necessarily a bad thing. But it will inevitably make everybody else around me a little more miserable. It will steal time from them to give it back to me. I don’t know if this is a part of what becoming adults is all about, but it definitely is in my case.
A person that I met gave me an interesting point of view about life and relationships in general. She talked to me while we were sitting on a dead tree trunk, laying on a beach somewhere in Naoshima. The sea had brought to the shores the body of a dead fish. It was a middle sized fish, like one that you would expect to find, roasted, served as the main dish in a Japanese breakfast. A seagull was feasting on its body, eating its interiors.
*In Chinese legends, we say that in its next life, the seagull will have to marry the fish. Because the seagull, who feasted on the fish’s body, owes something to it.
There’s a Chinese saying related to this concept, which I want to remember in the future.
有人的地方，就有江湖。有江湖的地方，就有恩怨。
It is difficult to translate it. The word 江湖 is literally composed of the words river and lake. Rivers and lakes may refer to the world of the common people, that is, the people below the aristocracy and the imperial bureaucrats in ancient China. In the old stories of wandering heroes, the protagonist would refer to his past as to the time in which he was travelling through rivers and lakes. This expression is not only geographical, that is, it doesn’t just refer to the typical geographic features of the Middle Kingdom (especially of its South). It serves as a catch-all sentence, which summarises the adventures, the troubles and the difficulties of one’s journey through life. Sometimes, the world may refer to the specific life of the underworld, with all its perils, its crimes and its charm. The word 恩怨 is also interesting but hard to translate. Its first component, 恩, refers to compassion. It is the feeling of giving something to somebody free of charge. The second one, 怨, is the exact opposite. It is the feeling of complaint that arises when someone takes something from us without our permission. The two words combined translate as resentment, but a more accurate translation would only concieve the plural form: resentments, and actually, mutual resentments. 恩怨 captures the grudges that humans hold onto each other. The chains of favours and grievances that connect every human being in society, like in an edgless network. And thus, the initial phrase could be translated as,
Where there are humans, there is a world of troubles and opportunities. Where there are troubles and opportunities, there are also mutual resentments.
The saying has a beautiful way of summarizing the experience of life, or rather, of life when it is lived with others. It describes the world as an incredible mess, as an intricate tangle impossible to unknot. And it describes human feelings of guilt, gratitude, complaint and mercy as the inevitable consequence of this mess.
For my eight months in this city, I felt like I’ve lived inside that mess. I made my way around it, trying to understand its structure, trying to find a place for me within it. This involved meeting many people, which created a whole world of mutual resentments. In most of the cases, unspoken ones.
If the intuition behind Chinese legends is true, there will be many seagulls to which I owe a piece of my body in the future. And maybe, in some way, there will also be some fish which owe me a piece of theirs. Everything is 江湖, and 恩怨.