I’m not yet
sure if my writing is smart enough to rip off Žižek, but this is a blog and I
do what I want. But, really, he was a safety net—as if the suffocating language
of his cynicism is something most people hold onto to keep them afloat (not yet
sure, like I said). His name did, however, sparkle up at me in the middle of
the sixth floor of a bookstore in Tokyo. I had never been inside a bookstore
with more than one floor, and I had thought for more than one irrational second
since I had landed that I’d never see another book written in English again,
that I’d be rereading forever the small selection I’d brought with me, that until
the very end of my days I’d have to forsake my love of collecting books;
learning Japanese be damned. Not true of course, that bookstore had all kinds
of things, and I’m now the proud owner of A
Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which I will enjoy shamelessly in my
native language. Nor am I ashamed to say in that moment that I needed Žižek,
and I’m certainly not ashamed to say that since then I have tossed around
several stupidly Japanese variations of that essay title of his for my first
blog post to try and prove to you how smart I am. But let’s cut the crap shall
we? This isn’t cheap gas station sushi, this is the real thing, and it’s kind
of hard. I needed Žižek in that bookstore because even if he is, and the most
of our critical theory oeuvre for that matter, dense and purposefully difficult
to understand—I understood him a lot more than most things in my life at that
moment, and probably even now, a whole week later.
Since I’ve
been in Japan I’ve learned a lot about the Desert of the Real: that place in
the Matrix that is the shitty realization that the real world is not real, not
where you’ve been living, that you haven’t really been living at all. This,
perhaps, is getting overly complicated. What I mean to say is that I’m living
in a world where there is no diet coke* and spam is kind of expensive. In other
words, I’ve been unplugged, like Neo, from where everything was normal and—more
importantly—where everything was easy, but yet also where everything was overly
idyllic. And I’ve struggled to adjust.
Okay so pop
and spam aren’t uprooting me, but when enough little things change, and the
weather is hot, and you have to give up ideas of going to school for the rest
of your life and find a real job—now that it’s actually important you do so
soon—it feels like you’ve been transplanted and that maybe possibly it was too
soon for your little roots. Wilting in the land of the rising sun. I don’t mean
to be dramatic of course, as my time here has been dotted about with wondrous
things.
Take for instance this view of
Tokyo:
Or this one:
But I do
mean to tell the truth. And the truth is, it’s been all too real. Desert real. Žižek
real. I don’t have wifi, like ever, (that’s not completely true because yes you
are reading an online blog, but in terms of actually communicating with your
friends you had add you on all kinds of new apps, it’s quite unfortunately
true). And that communication, that closeness I felt to people who may have
been a hour, four hours, or half a country away, that’s what had always kept me
going. To be without that, it’s like being truly alone. I’m telling you all right
now, I miss you like crazy, and you know that I’ve always been one to cultivate
online relationships like it’s nobody’s baby-boomer bullshit business—and that is
a button you should probably not push…
Sure a few
tourist daytrips and a week later, and I’m in a much better state of mind, but
if you’re itching to get out of where you’re at and it’s the first time or the
second time but for longer or you still think of the world as perfectly real
and non-Matrix-y, then I don’t want to pretend for you that it’s all adventures
and Hello Kitty and city lights. You should probably learn more Japanese than
you’ll think you’ll need. You should definitely try sustaining yourself on
rice, just in case, and don’t think that it’s really not that different.
Because it is different. And it’s going to take time. But hey, I’ve always been
told I’m pretty good at being pretty darn well patient. I mean, didn’t the
Matrix teach you anything?
* So Japan has Coke Zero, which, if you ask any serious pop
drinker, is not the same as Diet Coke. Also, stick deodorant is apparently not
a thing?
** Up Next on Gaijin Kid: all the weird things I’m
eating.
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