Human behavior confounds her, and so she has built a quiet life mimicking others’ voices and reactions, reading in their facial expressions expectations for her own. The titular character of the prolific Japanese novelist’s first English-language translation-Keiko-is a misfit in almost every area of her life, except for the aforementioned convenience store. My investigation also included reading as much Japanese literature as I could, and I was particularly excited to read Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori), to spend time with this curious protagonist. In the four years since that first trip, I’ve been back twice more, pulled like a magnet, to investigate this feeling-to see what is mine, undiscovered or forgotten to see what will never be mine and to find some way to reconcile the two. The experience was like scavenging a pitch-black corner of my identity I’d let cobweb over. Though I was not fluent, my pronunciation of those elementary vocabulary words was nearly perfect, a sense memory from my childhood Saturdays in Japanese school.
Artifacts I recognized from our Buddhist temple dotted shrines on practically every street corner. The food my mother made was regularly available in the convenience stores. That trip unlocked in me a sense of cultural belonging that-until I walked down an Asagaya side street alone, without my white friends, in new Uniqlo flowy pants, looking more or less like everyone around me-I’d never before experienced. Belonging dangled before me, drifting in and out of view. A Japanese student told me, unprompted, that if I learned the language, I could “become famous, like a television host” because of my mixed heritage.
Sometimes I was very obviously not Japanese enough. Sometimes I was confused for being native Japanese. A place where everything from the food to the language to the quality of light was Extremely Different.īut when I went, I discovered something far less tidy: I was both alien and not. Though I am half-Japanese, I had this idea (informed mostly by the film Lost in Translation ) that Japan was a place of intense foreignness. The first time I went to Japan, I was afraid of feeling like an alien.
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