Fiction, consumed incautiously, eventually bleeds into reality.
I used to watch Naruto on Thursday evenings after school. It was always a huge relief to leave the serious, entangled world of high school and puberty and gossip for twenty-three action-packed minutes of animated ninjas beating the crap out of each other. For one half of one hour each week my mind was translocated to a place with rules I could understand and interactions I could follow, and so I became obsessed. I remember discussing the Sasuke-Itachi showdown with the same grave, hushed tones that most people reserved for the kind of events that involve the police. I could (and still can) make hand signs with disturbing fluency. No, I promise I can, check this out—wait, where are you going??
After years of Naruto, years of swimming in incomprehensible streams of speech, one starts to fish out fragments of thoughts; hear kuso and korosu in context enough times and soon enough you’ll realize when some piece of shit is about to get killed. Partial understanding, however, is endlessly frustrating. It felt like entire empires rose and fell in the gaps between the ten common words I knew. In the spirit of a religious man seeking to understand the most authentic version of his sacred texts, at the age of fourteen I began a decade-long love affair with the Japanese language.
When you begin to learn the Japanese script you look at characters and see inscrutable geometry; in the end you look at 恋 and see a thousand memories inscribed into ten simple strokes. The thrilling emergence of meaning is tempered by the realization that you’ve seen the beautiful, unadorned lines of the script for the last time.
And words—unlike in your native language, words are stories. Words are people. 毒 (poison) means that the clear liquid in this plastic water bottle is actually gasoline siphoned from a kei truck. The difference between 八 and 蜂 (respectively, eight and hornet; both pronounced hachi) is the frustrated face of a kid at the summer camp who came up to me and grabbed my shirt, repeating hachi, hachi. I kept asking him “Eight of what?” until he started crying and making buzzing noises.
抜群 (beyond compare) is the word that described the kindness and dedication of my former professor and friend, in the condolences I sent to his family two years ago.
I’m leaving for Japan on Monday, for around five weeks. This will be the third time; once for volunteering, once for sightseeing, and now this trip—I’d like to call it a pilgrimage. A chance for me, as an adult, to journey again to the place that fascinated me endlessly as a child.
I’ve been practicing speaking, always my weakest skill. The high point of my life was when someone asked where in Tokyo I grew up; apparently at one point my conversational ability passed for a foreigner raised in Japan! But it’s been eight years since then and the gears are rusty.
I will also probably be hiking a literal pilgrimage route, but I haven’t planned that part of the trip yet and need to do that soon.
Until next time!
Thanks for sharing! I started learning Japanese in May 2022, in preparation for a 5 week trip to Japan that just ended two weeks ago. I've been really enjoying the process, particularly by starting to understand how ideas are built in Japanese. I also grew up watching Naruto, although I was watching the dub, and only started listening to Japanese audio when I started watching other shows.
Sounds like you're just a little bit* further along in your journey, and it's lovely to hear your reflections on the process and particularly how you have these stories about specific words. I look forward to being at the level where I can experience more of those. Keen to hear more ☺️
*A fair bit 😂