A Piece of the Pie

The bittersweet and the transitory.

Just moved up the hill within our Tokyo neighborhood and bade goodbye to the apartment that sheltered us for the past three years and three months. Although a change has been a long time coming, it was still rather bittersweet to see the living space completely emptied out.

The cats—after crying bloody murder for an hour, forced to stay in my office while the movers did their work—explore an altogether alien landscape.

This was, of course, after we packed up pretty much all of our affairs within 36 hours, a madcap enterprise that reminded me of 1) how many earthly possessions I have; 2) how excruciating it is, the process of disassembling your entire life to transport even just one kilometer away; 3) my selective amnesia when it comes to the physical and mental exhaustion of this ordeal; 4) how sentimental I am when it comes to even the mundane. (Although this last point is no surprise to me or anyone who knows me.)

We still commute from the same train station, have access to the same grocery stores and restaurants, are about equidistant from the cheery local thoroughfare of Kagurazaka. But I’ll never be holed up in the old apartment again, where I had my tiny workspace with the good light—the place where I spent untold amounts of time writing my novel, editing my novel, agonizing over query letters (a.k.a. wavering between tentative hope and utter despair), studying Japanese, hammering away at my doctoral dissertation.

My first meal in the old apartment: a bento from the nearby grocery store, an establishment I would come to know very well as househusband and freelancer.

That good light. Late December 2020, a few weeks before our boxes arrived from their transpacific journey.

I started this newsletter in November 2020 as a repository for reflections on and stray musings about living in Japan, returning to academia, linguistic and cultural encounters. While the Substack platform has mushroomed around me and I’ve discovered many delightful dispatches from far and wide, it’s clear from my irregular rhythm and meandering content that I don’t have the bandwidth to do much more with my own newsletter than treat it as the LiveJournal of my late thirties.

Nonetheless, since I’ve had a small uptick in subscribers lately (presumably from novel-related news and whatnot), I felt the need to say hi again and offer a brief snapshot of where I am, what I’m doing.

Almost a full year ago, I wrote about feeling like a chrysalis. And I suppose I am very much still in a transitional state, on the cusp of another season of beginnings.

My novel Masquerade is just over six months away from publication. Thanks to an early-bird online writing group, I’ve gotten about a chapter and a half into writing my second novel.

I officially received my PhD from Waseda three weeks ago. (What is time?!) Continuing to churn along with other writing, teaching, and translation work, as usual. Meanwhile, I’m still straining to define what my career could look like as I hover somewhere between these literary, academic, and cultural spaces.

Where am I going with all this? (And by “this,” I mean this post, this scattershot lifestyle, this finger-in-many-pies idealism or inanity.)

Ah, but it wouldn’t be very interesting to have a neat and easy answer, now would it.

Thanks for indulging me all the same. 🌱🌓