Stranger in a Strange Land

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A large part of the liberation of living in suburban Japan comes, I think, from the enforced simplicities that accompany a very foreign life. Living far from anywhere, without a bicycle or private car, I conduct my days, nearly always, within the boundaries of my feet. Living without newspapers or magazines--and with a television whose spoken words are usually modern Greek to me--I can be free, a little, of the moment, and get such news as I need from the falling of the leaves, or the Emerson essays on my shelf. Living in a small room, moreover, prompts me to be sparing, and to live only with the books and tapes that speak to me in ways I can respect. And not knowing much of the local tongue frees me from gossip and chatter and eavesdropping, leaving me in a more exacting silence. I cannot hold very much to these austerities. (Nor can I really refuse technology, which allows me to communicate with bosses half a world away--and to get on a plane when I need a dentist.) Yet being in so alien an environment is the first step toward living more slowly and trying to clear some space, away from a world ever more revved up. In our global urban context, it is like living in the wilderness.

The person with whom I share these adventures is a little like the society itself, alluring both for the parts I recognize and for the parts I don't. Daily she recalls to me that the point of familiarity is to make one comfortable with mystery. All of us know, too well, that no place is more foreign than the face asleep by our side; yet in our modern world such old truths gain especial force, as more and more of us find ourselves sharing homes with our own private Japans, half strange and half strangely familiar.

Every couple has its private tongue. In my case, the setup is even stranger because I share no public tongue with Hiroko, my partner of 12 years. Because my Japanese has never been good enough to teach her English, nor her English good enough to teach me Japanese, we can communicate only in a kind of fluent pidgin with English words thrown into Japanese constructions. It sounds a little like the way the neighborhood looks to me.

This means, however, that we are free, for the most part, from subtexts, and from the shadows and hidden stings that words can carry. I can't make puns with her, spin ambiguities, or engage in very much verbal subterfuge, and she can't pore over my words to see what they mean or what they don't mean, what covert weapons they hide. Speaking across a language gap means speaking less to win than to communicate.

The global village has given us the chance to move among the foreign, and so to simplify and clarify ourselves. Even in the neighborhoods where we were born, often, we find ourselves speaking by gesticulation, or enunciating slowly to saleswomen and telephone operators. And living away from words means living away from the surfaces they carry. Neither my girlfriend nor I can read a word the other has written, and so we have to apprehend one another in some way deeper than the known.

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