last tango in paris

(where tango = typhoon and paris = tokyo)

someone in charge of overseeing my concurrent spy assignments dropped the ball (where ball = SMALL PLANET), thus making my last two weeks here a little stressful. but still, i am catching up to the ball. i may soon reach the ball and may even be able to dribble, or even pull off some tricky globetrotter move before slamming the damn thing in at the last second. it just makes me wonder – if every single assignment makes me this crazy, why do i keep asking for it?

well, i suppose: losing my fugu virginity on saturday night. catching a crosstown-rivalry baseball game – yomiuri giants vs the yakult swallows – at tokyo dome. watching the sunset sky from my tiny balcony against a soundtrack of traditional singing drifting up from the temple below and crescendo of cicadas.

tokyo has abruptly shifted from summer to autumn, a difference of tens of degrees fahrenheit. i'm actually cold in my sweater and jeans at 11:35pm, as opposed to sweating in tank top and sarong with aircon on and mosquito coil burning. the wind's howling, the rain is whipping walls and streets, and i'm about ready to go. tomorrow!

mata ne! (see you later...)

sixty-five

my mom would have turned sixty-five yesterday. the best way to honor her would've been to spend a productive day working hard, eating healthy meals, maybe putting on some lipstick and standing up straighter. then toasting her in the evening with a sip of ume-shu (sweet plum wine) – only a sip! but i felt sort of preoccupied and didn't get as much done as i could have.

when her sister and oldest brother came to SB for her funeral, they asked if we could find some of her hair in a hairbrush, or maybe even nail clippings somewhere? impossible – she was so neat that she never left hair in her brush. since my mother insisted on being buried in california, all they wanted was to take some bit of her back with them to japan. in the end, we found a tiny glass pot filled with bobby pins and small hair clips; they bent over the pins and clips together, reading glasses on, and tweezered out the wispy gray and white strands of my mother's short, baby-soft hair that had grown back after her last round of chemo.

so now, as my brother showed me photos of on his digital camera, there's a little monolith in the family cemetery, marking the place where they buried the wisps of my mother that they carried over the ocean from our faraway coast. i'm glad there's a bit of her here; though i don't feel the need to travel to that place, it's comforting to know we're both here, and that her family has that place to go, to wash the headstone, burn incense, visit.

at home last night i wrote her a letter, and then after having sat with the words for awhile, as the evening breeze wafted in, i burned the paper and released the words. words on paper now gone, as her physical being is also gone, but sent off with the hope that the spirits of both have met somewhere.

it's a boy

the huge news yesterday was that princess kiko gave birth to a boy, the first male heir to the japanese throne born in more than 40 years. over the last several years, there has been debate about whether to allow women to succeed a male emperor, and majority of japanese people feel that this would be acceptable. however, a vocal and conservative minority has been aggressively opposing such a change – arguing about the all-crushing power of Y-chromosomes and male appendages, and even suggesting that royal concubines be instituted so as to manufacture more potential heirs. for now, the debate has lost some steam, but the question still remains whether japanese law will change.

japan is still a pretty sexist society, evidenced from one angle (with great, daily annoyance on my part) by the obsessive-compulsive attention to appearance that grips the women of tokyo. no matter how well-educated, driven, accomplished and/or brainy a girl might be, her immaculate appearance counts for quite a lot. today i'm counting my blessings that i was born a farmer's daughter in california, and not to a harvard-educated princess trapped in an imperial palace.

tsukareta

...means 'i'm tired.' in a good way, mostly. my pop and brother are here visiting, and my mother's siblings have taken such good care of us that we're all fecking knackered. it's strange, my brother and i have noticed, that despite how close these siblings are and how tight and challenging their childhood and upbringing was, they don't keep in better contact. some of our cousins have explained it by saying how busy everyone's lives are, an incredibly valid point in a city and country where the work ethic – or at least the obligation to be present – is so insane.

there are three of us cousins who are the same age, one of whom took us out to a french dinner tonight with his friendly wife. neither my brother nor i had seen him since our last visit with our mother about eighteen years ago. to me he is unrecognizable from the teenager i last met, his face has changed so much. but living on separate continents for so long, not seeing many photos of one another, not really knowing the who of who each other is, naturally distances us. when shown photos on my brother's camera of our youngest cousins, this cousin was shocked at how old they've gotten, and yet they live – at maximum – half an hour from each other.

then again, my brother brought up the fact that he and i rarely see our cousin on our dad's side. for several years, my brother lived about half an hour from him in LA, and during that time they never saw each other. yet whenever we all meet, it's such a pleasure and such a visceral feeling of kinship that i wonder why we don't make it happen more often. and it's the same reason – we're so busy with our own lives, we don't really make the time for these important undercurrents that make us who we are.

in the same sense, it's strange how close you can become with people in certain circumstances. in one month i've made such good friends; at the end of that month, we all moved out of our shared house at the same time and only i remain for the next few weeks. it feels almost silly to be so sad that someone has left when you've known them such a short time. but, so it is.

and so i am exhausted. tomorrow morning i send my best boys off to the airport and back to cali, and after that? perhaps some iced oolong tea, a long nap and possibly a rainy day in tokyo if i'm lucky. but, anyway, without rain or the perfect day or bags of cash to spend on trinkets and clothes, i have been pretty damn lucky.