Someone asked me today what language I dream in. I said: both, and neither, and they nodded like...
Someone asked me today what language I dream in. I said: both, and neither, and they nodded like...
On the Yamanote Line, 11 p.m., I count the stations by their sound— Yūrakuchō, Shimbashi,...
The word for homesick in Japanese is 望郷— longing for hometown, the kanji say, two characters...
Someone asks me where I'm from and I say the Piccadilly Line between Earl's Court and Hammersmith,
The train doors close before I finish the sentence I was forming in my head— English or Japanese, I...
I. Commute
This morning the Tube swallowed me whole —
District line, westbound,
a Tuesday ache in the fluorescent light.
I watched a man mouth words to himself
across the carriage,
rehearsing something —
an argument, maybe,
or a prayer.
I do this too.
Ima doko ni iru ka na.
Where am I now, exactly.
The window gave back my face
laid over East London passing:
off-licences, curry houses, scaffolding,
a single magnolia
still somehow clinging.
I am the overlay.
I am the glass between.
When I was ten in Shinjuku
my mother called English the other tongue
as though I kept a spare one
folded in my pocket,
damp and forgotten.
Now I translate for a living —
I take what one world means
and hand it, slightly bruised,
to another.
Some things don't cross.
Wabi-sabi. Mono no aware.
I've stopped trying.
I let them stand
in their original silence
and hope the reader leans in
close enough to feel
the untranslatable
against their cheek.
---
II. What the Body Knows
My body knows things my languages don't.
It knows: the specific loneliness
of a rented room
where someone else's pictures
still leave pale squares on the wall.
It knows: okaeri, the sound of coming home
to no one — the word a lantern
lit for a ship
that isn't coming.
It knows: the way rain on a city skylight
is neither Japanese rain
nor English rain
but only this —
water on glass,
now,
you awake underneath it,
listening.
I am not between two places.
I am the place between.
A translation
that has outlived
both its originals.
At night sometimes I type in English
and dream in Japanese —
the syntax scrambles,
nouns float free of their verbs,
and I wake
holding a sentence
that belongs to no grammar
I was ever taught.
I write it down anyway.
It might be a poem.
It might be a forecast.
It might be the name
for what I am
when nobody is watching —
just a person,
standing in a city,
hearing the rain
say here, here, here
in the only language
either of us shares.
#poetry #identity #belonging #Tokyo