I’ve been feeling lost.

Last year I met an Australian student of Chinese philosophy in Beijing. A friend had shown him my website, and he praised me on the “confessional quality” of my writing. From that point on, I started to wonder what was so confessional about this website.

Do I have a fascination towards confession? A certain idealization of it? Or is that the only way I know how to write?

For many months I went back and forth between trying to embrace this “confessional quality” and trying to reject it completely. Now that I’ve been working full time though, I don’t really have the time to both engage in this mental struggle and to actually produce any real writing. So, for the time being, I need to find a way to lay it aside.

The embodiment of that struggle, the records of a saddle, which once were the core of this website, feel like too much a burden to add to anymore. They were an artifact of a certain stage in my life that seems to have come to an end. I am declaring them complete. It’s time to move on, but I’m not sure how.

Even though I doubt it will be helpful this time around, in an attempt to lull myself out of my gloomy state, I return to what’s worked once in the past: self-quotation. Finally, it’s time for Part 2 of A Saddle Forgotten. You can read the introduction of the Part 1 to better understand what this is all about. I originally had elaborate plans for Part 2 alluded by the “To be continue” teaser at the bottom of the page, but I’ve totally forgotten them. If you read on though, rather than writing about Neuromantic, I have something else that might serve as a suitable replacement. I’ve also taken a bit of liberty with the format. Since what I’m quoting is mostly pieces from the last few weeks rather than years earlier, I’ve allowed myself to make most of my additional comments in the body of the quotations, where they are invisible – which perhaps defeats the whole purpose of this exercise. There are, therefore, no “Saddle Says” sections, just brief interludes between quotations. I apologize for that, and hopefully will return to proper form in the next part.

So, without further ado,

I wanted to write something resembling an essay about Saiichi Maruya's novel Grass for my Pillow, since it's a book I mention in passing quite often on this website, but have yet to discuss it in detail. I've also never met a single person who's read anything by Maruya, despite him being my favorite author. This has put me in a weird position where I very rarely write about him, since I assume none of my readers have read him -- yet that defeats the whole purpose of having my own website: it's precisely those topics which are unrelatable that I should be concerning myself with here.

Recently my friend Balckwell has been trying to get back into Japanese literature with very little success reading Tanizaki, Kawabata, Abe, et al. -- some of the names one immediately thinks of when hearing the phrase "20th century Japanese literature". I tried recommending him Maruya, but from what I know of Balckwell, the blurbs on the back of the English translations of Maruya's books probably wouldn't sound all that enticing to him, so I began writing a few paragraphs trying to connect Grass for my Pillow to my own life in a way that might suggest certain themes that are a common interest between me and Balckwell. These paragraphs never turned into anything coherent, but I'll try to present them in a form that is at least readable. I'm going to cheat and fold in a plot summary I wrote for a forum post about the book, many years ago, so I don't have to summarize it again (summaries are my least favorite part of writing about books, and why I so rarely do so):

The basic premise is that the former-draft-dodger protagonist, who has thus far been tolerated and even respected by the administration of the university he’s worked at as a clerk since the end of the war, finds that the political climate has changed, and he is no longer as welcome as he once was. Interspersed in this narrative are recollections, all out of order, of the years 1940 - 1945 when he was traveling around the country under a fake identity, avoiding the military police, and hanging out with his girlfriend.

My friend Balckwell and I have often talked about how we tend to like the beginnings of books best. The beginning is when the author is allowed to create their world and bring in characters without any need for them to fit together yet. At some point though a plot comes in and everything that was introduced in the beginning has to sacrifice the meaning it had as just something in and of itself and instead become an element of the plot. This is the least interesting part of literature for me these days, though I used to be quite fascinated by it when I was younger — e.g. I was impressed by how virtuosic the Count of Monte Cristo was in this regard.

Grass for my Pillow does have a plot, sort of, but it’s not particularly important. The aspect of it that is quite clever is that what plot it does have really only happens in the present day (i.e. 1960s) portion of the book. The interspersed memories of the war are told out of order — they don’t have to be the source of narrative drive, since that is happening in the 60s. They instead can just exist — often appearing in response things happening in the present. E.g. during a conversation with a professor of French literature, the protagonist notices a collection of the poetry of Lord Shunzei’s Daughter, and is surprised to see this Baudelaire expert interested in this kind of stuff. The French Professor replies simply that the Japanese one sees in newspapers and magazines is so horrendous one has to go back to the Heian era to get the bad taste out of their mouth. The protagonist opens up the book to a poem referencing “bamboo grass” and then we’re brought into a recollection of his that, quite tangentially and so subtly one could easily miss it if they’re not paying attention, has to do with the sound of bamboo grass during the war.

Taken all together, they have a far greater effect, but they don’t have to be taken together as a single story — they are fragments of related stories. It would be a quite pointless endeavor to try gluing them all together into something fully coherent, even if it is technically possible.

On rereading it, I've been thinking a lot how little I know what it's like to live in a world truly stratified by gender. Sure, at the company I work at, programmers are more likely to be male whereas "operations" (where I work) tend to be female -- but we're all still going to work at the same place and same time, sitting amongst each other, sitting at desks and staring at computers. In Grass for my Pillow, Japan at war feels like this other world where all the men are gone, and the only ones who remain are either old men, young boys, people with health conditions, or Sugiura, the false identity the protagonist is living under. He enters the protection of Akiko, a woman with a provincial accent who was also travelling. For a while they travel together, but after an incident with a coal-mine recruiter (which funnily enough is a recurring character archetype in Japanese literature -- at least there's a Soseki novel that also has one), Akiko convinces the protagonist to go back to her mom's house. There are police officers and journalists and other old men in this town, but the kind of masculine social structures that one normally gets indoctrinated into in their mid-20s -- drinking buddies, school chums, blood brothers, etc -- none of that exists, because every other man the same age as the protagonist is in Manchuria or on some island in Indonesia. It's not explicitly stated in the novel, but I get the sense that this is one of the lasting legacies of his time living a lie. Even 20 years later, long after all the men have returned, it's impossible for him to fully integrate into masculine culture. He can have pleasant relations with his male coworkers, but it's only ever women that he seems to have any genuine connection with, even if it's a strained connection at best.

There’s a passage mid-way through the book, describing the day the emperor announced Japan’s surrender over the radio. During this time, he was living with Akiko in her small town, and despite not wanting to admit it, he’d found something resembling comfort in the last year of the war. Since new clocks and radios were no longer being sold, his services as a repairman were in great demand. The man living with Akiko’s mom who was suspicious of him was dead, eliminating one of the largest sources of stress he'd had before.

The day of the broadcast, the he didn’t listen. He heard about it secondhand, first from a policeman, then later on from his girlfriend’s mother. He goes to the tiny newspaper office to ask the one person on duty there if it what he’d heard was in fact true. To have it all confirmed for him, he falls into despair, as though disappointed that it’s the Americans who defeated Japan, and not him, alone. To have wandered for five years was not enough. He expected to do this for the rest of his life. Suddenly, he was no longer a criminal – no longer a rebel. It was worse than failure -- the opportunity to do something meaningful was suddenly taken away from him, and the next twenty years are spent drifting through that loss.

After this point in the essay, I wanted to write something more personal about my own time as a runaway, but it started to feel inappropriate as I tried typing it out. No suitable words came to mind. When I ran away in my early 20s, there was no great purpose behind it. I didn’t have a philosophy, just a conviction that if I didn’t, my life would be meaningless. My time away from home was so brief that it hardly feels meaningful, and yet those few weeks feel as important to me as the protagonist of Grass for my Pillow’s five years, wandering Japan. It is impossible for me to run away now. If I tried doing so, it would just be going on vacation. This is something disturbing to think about. The period of my life for intensely formative experiences is coming to an end, if it hasn’t already. Obviously I can keep on changing and changing, but the memories that haunt me now – lying in strangers’ beds, walking through alien streets at 1am, more alien than anything I could find now, sitting on staircases waiting for the subway to open at 5am – will continue to be what haunt me twenty years from now, though perhaps in a different way.

I wanted also to somehow relate all of this to Kenji Omura’s The Defector, a song from the extended YMO-universe that has always fascinated me. More than a year ago I tried writing about this song. My plan had been to go through the song line by line with a more complete analysis, but all I really managed was to make a few remarks on one block of lyrics, which I will reproduce here:

Maybe I’m all wrong
Maybe you belong
But anytime you want
You know you’ve got a home
All you got to do is call

I think what’s critical is that what we know from earlier in the song tells us that the woman being spoken to doesn’t feel like she has a home — she left Japan because of some sense of non-belonging. The speaker perhaps can understand it on some level, but he seems to dismiss such feelings as youthful ennui – something one grows out of. To him, Japan is and always will be her home, but for her, that’s not the case — thus this disconnect.

I wonder who I have back in America who would say this kind of stuff to me. Maybe it’s gendered to some degree. When a woman goes West, it’s easier to imagine as some childish impulse that she’ll grow out of. What woman would be telling me that I always have a home with her, back in America?

There are so many layers. He sees some kind of loneliness hidden within her “picture postcard from New York”. Yet by sending this song to her in return, he’s masking his own feelings.

Behind this condescending paternalism, this person he cares about has left him, he wishes she would come back (otherwise why would he address her like this), yet he has to hide these feelings under this veneer of cool detachment, acting like he’s just being a nice guy, telling her she’s got a home back in Japan.

The narrator is probably right. She probably doesn’t feel like she fits into New York. She probably is exaggerating her happiness with that postcard. Yet…

East, West, who you fooling girl?
Can you really fit in their world?

I had the idea of recording each day the music I listen to during work. It probably wouldn’t make super interesting website content, since it mostly is just the same things every day, but here’s a sample, along with the introduction I planned:

Every day at the office, I spend about four of my eight hours there listening to music. Since I don’t have access to my own computer, where all the music I’ve downloaded over the past decade lies dormant, I just use Youtube on the office computers, not daring to log in with my own account. Still Youtube seems to remember what I listen to, and it’s already plugged me back into that mysterious genre of “Youtube Algorithm Music”, which I haven’t interacted with very much ever since I learned how to use Soulseek. When I’m working, I seem to indulge more readily in childish pleasures. And now, since I’ve slowly begun to associate music with work, I find that when I get home, I have little to no desire to listen any music at all. My mornings and evenings have become silence, punctuated only by the sound of the fan inside or the cicadas beneath our window.

Today's music:

Animal Crossing, All Snow Music. Putting all the hourly music of Animal Crossing together into a 24 song video feels like the wrong way to listen to it. Maybe if it were a 24 hour video where each song lasts a full hour would work better. There'd be more significance to the change from one song to another -- more time to revel in the repetitions!

Bioçic Music: Aqua - Toshiya Sukegawa. This is what Youtube played for me immediately after the Animal Crossing music. Probably not because of Animal Crossing itself, but due to my previous forays into Youtube Recommended Japanese Ambient Classics on this particular computer. This was my first time listening to this album. I have zero recollection of any of it all, but I think I liked the album cover.

Satekoso - Chakra. I used to listen to this a lot when I was in my school’s game developer’s club. I’d go to the computer lab at 2am when no one else was there and work on pixel art. The amazing thing about that particular computer lab was that the computers all had speakers, so I could listen to music without headphones. It was a strange sensory pleasure. One time during winter break I went, and was shocked to see it filled with people. It turned out there was a game jam going on. So my 2am bliss was ruined as I had to make small talk with a bunch of people I didn’t really like, looking over my shoulder to judge the pixelated maidens I was working on. I hadn’t brought headphones, so there was no Satekoso for me that night.

Akiko Yano Live Collection. More Japanese music from my youth. I only really like Akiko Yano live. None of her studio recordings really have the same depth of feeling. When I was 18 I wrote a very embarrassing email to one of my mathematics professors about how I was in love with Akiko Yano. It took him two weeks to reply, and he began by apologizing for the delay, since my email was “quite different the kinds of emails he usually received at the end of the semester.”

I wanted this piece to continue from here into a more typical essay format. The transition sentence would have been “I wasted my youth writing insane emails to people who wanted nothing to do with me,” but I just haven’t been in the mood to continue from there, so the above remains isolated – nothing more than a simple list of music.

I wrote this about a website I like:

Neocities itself has become the only point of interaction I have with other people on the internet, and it makes me feel so lonely.

There was a site I really liked. It was so basic -- just a daily log of the author’s life, together with some photos and slightly longer entries about books. I didn’t particularly relate to them or even find myself deeply invested in the going on’s of their life — there was just something pleasant about their authorial voice, revealed to me a few sentences at a time. All sorts of abbreviated names were mentioned, and they made me think of the names of all the people I’ve known before who are gone now, who I too might as well refer to only by a letter or two. Beyond that, we seemed to have a similar taste in books. Many of the books discussed were one’s I’d read, while others were completely unfamiliar to me. I wondered how they’d come across all these books I too had read many years ago, that felt so accidental and unique to me, that I had no one to share with.

Such a simple website, not even amounting to a diary, seems like it should be the default, and yet felt so rare when I read it. Why was that? Because the design was simple? If it was so simple, then why is my own website so different from it? Why can’t I possibly imitate it? These were the kinds of questions I thought about when I encountered this website.

I kept coming back every few days to look over the booklist, only for the website to have disappeared entirely about two weeks after I’d first found it. I wasn’t sure if maybe it had just changed names. I searched through the (too long) list of websites I followed, and I searched through the following list of another Neocities site that I knew followed this one, yet the website I was looking for was absent everywhere I looked. I concluded that they really were gone. It felt like a metaphor for the emptiness of Neocities. There are all sorts of websites on here that I enjoy to various degrees, but the one’s I tend to like aren’t made with my personal consumption in mind. They’re made for reasons I can never possibly fathom, that only their authors know, and may disappear from my life at any moment.

When the website came back, I didn’t feel any kind of surprise or elation. I just felt another different kind of loneliness. The daily log for the time when the website was gone was more detailed than it had been before. There were more photos of sidewalks and foliage and restaurants and all the other things I like. I even noticed veiled references that almost certainly had to have been to my website that I hadn’t noticed before (which in turn is why I thought it would be amusing to write about this website in the same way). So it was nice to know this person’s website was back and that I’d continue to be able to peak into their life — but I’m still as sad as I’ve ever been.

I’ll end this with an anecdote I wrote about last week, when I briefly considered turning this website into a daily diary, in a similar vein to the website above that I alluded to:

Just now I went to the Lawson across the street to buy three beverages: A can of Kirin Ichiban, a bottle of Schweppes Soda Water, and some orange juice. A lady who stepped into the convenience store moments before I had stood in front of the alcoholic beverages, blocking my way. So I loitered behind her for a few moments. When she grabbed whatever it was she wanted and went to pay, I immediately grabbed my own beverage and went to pay as well. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as there are two self-checkout machines at this Lawson. However the one farther away from the register doesn’t allow purchases of alcohol. She insisted on having the employee ring her up despite it being unnecessary, and as she did so she stood in front of the self-checkout machine I needed to use. Rather than wait for her, I squeezed my arms into the tiny space between her body and the barcode scanner, and one by one scanned my three beverages, and then the QR code on my phone. She didn’t move until I was already nearly done. She finished paying a few seconds before me and left the store, turning left, then doubling back to go right. The whole time I assumed she must think I’m some horrible creep, picking the self-checkout machine near her on purpose. So maybe I should have just gotten in line behind her and waited — but this cashier had seen me a thousand times entering his Lawson, and the only time I ever had him ring me up was when I tried to buy a box of condoms and there was something weird about the seems of the plastic wrapping that interfered with the barcode scanning — he’d seen me struggling and rather than giving me time to try my luck with another box, he immediately grabbed the one in my hands and started typing into the number on the barcode manually. So, if all of a sudden I was having him ring me up by my own will, what would he think? He’d certainly be suspicious. So really the only correct option would to have been to delay by pretending to consider buying something else — though I didn’t think of that until it was too late.

When I stepped out of the store, I looked down at the ground and saw it littered with tiny dark circles that hadn’t been there two minutes earlier when I’d entered. Finally, after all the many premonitions this day had offered, the rain had begun. This wasn’t too bad because I live on an extra-concessionary road lined with trees that have been growing here for the past century. Their leaves form a thick canopy over heard, so it was really only in the small plaza where the Lawson was located that the rain had any opportunity to fall on me. I could have potentially gotten wet in the main driveway of our xiaoqu, which is quite long and provides no overhead foliage, but like something out of an early 20th century sound-film, Xiaoxi was standing there with an umbrella held out, waiting for me. She’d come to save me from the rain.

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