Singing softly

A few nights ago I was at a bar in a small Japanese town called Shimanto. A close friend lives there. I’m sipping something, probably Asahi or Sapporo, talking to another foreigner, an Englishman. The bartender passes by and my partner in conversation employs the local dialect to ask for another drink. Perfection. To speak standard Tokyo Japanese, fine—but to command the dialect endemic to a place that is eighty-one bus stops away from the nearest express train, on the remote southeast coast of the smallest and least developed of the four main islands of Japan, where the elementary school built for a thousand students sits empty but for the vines and the weeds—to have tamed that wild tongue as if it were yours by birth…

You don’t learn a language simply by hearing it spoken around you. It’s possible to spend years in Japan, or anywhere, and never get past the how-are-yous and can-I-get-the-checks. You learn a language by loving it. You learn by coming back again and again, so many times that it’s a bit embarrassing that you’re still here, still quietly asking for just a little more.

But you keep coming back, because sometimes… later that night, actually, you’re sitting next to a girl. This is a karaoke bar, and for the last minute she’s been scrolling past the top charts to queue up some obscure folk songs. You happen to know a few of them. A lull comes over the conversations around you, and you begin to sing quietly, so that only she can hear. She looks up suddenly, finds your eyes, and laughs, her eyes playing over yours for several wonderful seconds, as if in your voice she hears not just you tonight, but you, fifteen years old, being reprimanded for covertly studying the wrong language in French class; seventeen, straightening out your accent over months of talking to yourself; twenty-two, at the memorial ceremony, the voice accustomed to sarcastic quips suddenly shattered by emotion as it struggles for just a few good words; and tonight you’re twenty-five, next to her, singing softly in an adopted tongue.

Later, a pause in the conversation; she turns away, then back again—in that simple motion it dawns on you that she is beautiful—and asks, do you ever think about living here?

“Yeah, all the time. All the time.”

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As those words cross my lips I think of the friends who have made their home in this land, I think of everyone back in California, of the Englishman and his linguistic skill, and of the girl in this out-of-the-way karaoke bar. I see her eyes—all of their eyes—shining like lamps aimed at the future. And in the dazzling light I see the promise of a place beyond leaders and followers, beyond victory and defeat, ruled by joy and peopled by its descendants. Not here in Japan, nor in sunny California, but a place beyond places that holds all of us forever in its thrall. We search tirelessly for the warmth of that hallowed place, and the embrace of its people, in each city we move to and each person we welcome into our lives.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

So in the pursuit of that warmth—in the pursuit of love and belonging—we must apply the astronomer’s trick¹ and confine that which we seek to the fringes of the vision. To chase such things directly is to cast the self in a common mold, and risk becoming loved for the fidelity of an imitation. Of course, a degree of courage is requisite in rejecting the mold and choosing instead to continue chipping away at your incomplete form—the courage to believe that the grand patterns that gird the world yet prepare to delight in you.²

1. Averted vision

2. this line inspired by “The Laughing Heart”, Charles Bukowski