As I edit this post, it is 11 am on a Thursday morning. I have decided to have coffee as a treat and am listening to Opera. My balcony door is wide open, sun shining in and construction pounding loudly from next door. They are raising the building next to mine all month. 

I am powerful and strong and wild and willful.  I have magic inside passed down through generations. 

 

When I am in New York, one of my favorite spots is the Lower East Side and the old tenement neighborhoods that so many immigrants inhabited at the turn of the last century.  I visit the tenement museums and walk through the neighborhoods, lofty. I read about the lives of the immigrants and picture myself among them. I have spent many an afternoon alone in Battery Park, standing at the water, staring at The Statue. The streets definitely feel haunted but in that benign New York way. You know you are alone and it's spooky and always potentially dangerous but for sure but you get the feeling that the spirits aren't out to get you. The ghosts of New York are the last people you need to worry about. They are your sympathizers, your protectors. You are not alone because history is your companion. This is true anywhere on earth. New York alone is one of my best friends. I have always romanticized the past and fantasized about the lives of not only my own ancestors but all people of that era, all over my country. My country that I am quite absent from physically but never far from emotionally. True, life then for most people, by most accounts should have been hell; squalor, prejudice and poverty, crime and disease abounded but there is something about the spirit or the hope or maybe it's the possibility of the era that gets to me. 

I am in my own era of incredible possibility.

Yesterday I decided to see a movie. Of all my travels and time spent so far abroad (not that its an incredible amount of time or vast distance covered) I realized this would be my first movie seen in a theatre, in a foreign country. It's the little things, you know! So I had a date with myself. Walked around the city in my new tall boots and old corduroy shorts, turning heads it seemed but I think mostly it was for my turned out hair; had it piled high and in some typical strange weird twist that sticks up in the back, one skinny long side braid and a bouffant in the front. Generally speaking, Native American warriors are my hair inspiration. It's getting longer lately and that pleases me, a visual representation of the passage of time. A year ago we chopped it after I shattered one of the joints in my left elbow and couldn't do anything to it. Jesee decided it was best. Jesee always decides what's best for my hair and occasionally for my overall look. I remember on the day of her wedding after I got the upside down sideways french braid I wanted and finished with the Amy Winehouse (not quite but almost) eyes and then started putting on all the gold bangles, Jess said gingerly, "That's enough Kate." I had to oblige. 

Anyway, yesterday, I walked all around Shizuoka. Since Nathan's visit, I hate my bike and walk mostly lately. My bike really is a wreck and showing it to someone who knows more than a thing or two about bikes kind of broke the spell I was under. I knew it was no gem before but having showed it to him, now it's hard to ignore. Now I see it for what is really is, a total mess with a completely rusted chain, cut gears and no breaks. Eh, I am usually an autumn walker anyway. I so enjoy taking my time and looking in all the windows. 

Alright, Nathan side bar. The man is beautiful and sweet and gentle and strong. He is smart and fun and didn't get annoyed one bit when one night I drank too much shochu and went through all the motions; laugh, cry, argue, love. In that order I suspect. In fact he played right along with me, bought a full body purple sweatsuit, put my bike lock around his neck and carried me home. Needless to say, we had a great time. We ate sushi and sashimi, went to the beach at night and drank beers through a typhoon. Before I moved to Japan, a few people somewhat cautiously offered me a, "I sure hope you find what you are looking for," with a little doubt in their voice and a pensive sigh. "I'm not looking for anything," I repeatedly insisted. And I really wasn't (am still not) except maybe a little adventure and admittedly an alley to the next avenue. Well, I found something. And somehow, in this wild world, a person from Columbus, Ohio, a person who unbeknown to me was living blocks away from me downtown earlier this year, a person on a strangely parallel path to mine, found something too. My pages are turning and in the next chapter I go to India. Now there are two main characters. 

OK, where was I? I walked around Shizuoka, window peeped, ate lunch at a place that had STD burgers and STD tacos on the menu--what the hell is that? I had to ask and the waiter told me it was a mistake and that they had meant 'standard.' Yeah, I'd say that's a mistake alright, in more ways than one. I ordered a salad.  I happened upon some teenage girls in the park practicing a dance routine in sweatpants and boots. They were cute and I watched for a bit, thinking little girls must be the same everywhere. I window shopped here and there and bought some postcards at a gallery that was selling the most beautiful Japanese woodblock prints of local landscapes, landscapes I now recognize firsthand. The cards were by far the only things I could afford but the little old lady humored me and told me some of the prices of the giant, gorgeous things. I would have to spend two whole paychecks. Miraculously, this weekend 3 or 4 second hand shops popped into my peripheral, in the corners of places I pass all the time. I have been seeking some such thing for months now and had nearly decided this was a trade that simply wasn't popular here when, last Saturday, on my way to work, I passed a huge flea market in Aoba Park. I was thrilled but on my way to work with no time to spare, as usual. I went directly to check it out on my lunch break but by then, 5pm, everyone had packed up and gone home, there was not so much as a trace of the massive market I witnessed hours earlier. It was definitely an only the smoke remains moment. But since then, within two days, I have stumbled on three or four different second hand shops. Japan is kind of magical like that. None have been especially incredible but still, happy to know they are here and that if I continue to visit, I will likely find some cool stuff. Mostly, I seek photographs. I like to collect old anonymous family photographs. Black and whites are usually best. Perhaps I like them so much because of the anonymity and the sheer possibility they represent. With random found photos, I can make up my own stories and often I do. Too be fair, I love my own families old photographs first, histories are written there. If I had to pinpoint the time or rather the photograph where my fascination began, I can easily tell you. It's that old Oliva Family portrait taken somewhere circa 1955, 56... can anyone confirm? I can stare at that picture for hours, imagining the pandemonium that was for one brief moment quelled. And in that moment time stopped and the family has remained, in that photograph, forever as they were once and then never again; complete, young, beautiful, full of possibility. Some of the members there have already passed on and surely, eventually, all will but in that photograph, in that moment, nothing will ever change.  

Possibility + permanence. 

In August, when I was in Tokyo, I found a small little antique stand in Asakusa that sold mostly old prints of Ukiyo-e and some mismatched nick knacks and used kimonos and yukatas but on his counter the dealer had these two old photos of Japanese peasants, they were a couple I think. Stern, proud and ragged, fully Showa Era. They stared directly at the camera eye, captured forever on the cusp of Japanese history, straddling the global border of east and west that would never, ever be the same. Mighty yet defenseless. The couple was nearly emotionless- mysterious and telling all at once; stories like these seduce me. I wanted them. I covet photographs like this. The man said in broken English that he didn't have any other photos and that those two were not for sale. Perhaps they were not anonymous characters to him... or perhaps my curiosity as a foreigner held no provocation for him...I can understand a motivation to protect and preserve relics like this from the casual tourist and outsider. At any rate, I quest. This is what I am looking for and luckily I can collect as many as I might please, as many as I might be fortunate enough to find. Unlike massive woodblock prints, I can afford to accumulate such souvenirs both financially and spatially. 

Back to the movie. I decided to see the new Audrey Tautou film about the life of Coco Chanel, the famous and pioneering female French designer.  There's not a ton of western films showing at the theatres here and the ones that are mostly look totally bo bo so the idea of seeing something artistic, biographical was enticing. French subject, French star, don't know why I didn't even consider that it would be, in French. I thought, English with Japanese subtitles, right? Actually, it was in French with Japanese subtitles. Still, I watched and enjoyed the experience in all it's absurdity. I gathered what information I could and then came home to fill in the blanks with a little Internet research. So it goes.

Picture me, alone, at the movies in Japan in a nearly empty theatre smiling to myself, watching a beautiful film about a woman I admire in two languages that I can't understand. Do this and you are pretty accurately picturing my life in Japan.