“Between the Desert and the Pool” by Yoshiko Teraoka
1.
I sat staring at a blank document in the wet month of January, 2020. I had taken leave from work to write about a potter back home in Japan, but sheltered there in my dry, Southeast London flat, the new page was a dam, my thoughts trapped on the other side. I longed to return to my former, uninhibited self.
I had spent the previous year writing company contracts and policies behind walls of monitors in the office of the broadcasting company where I worked, the sounds and images beaming in from a Japanese news channel that reminded me of the home I left nearly a year earlier. I was homesick, that I knew—but for what? What had I done except flee Japan and the memories of my father’s death?
As I sat in that London room, vapid and comfortably numb, I waited impatiently for the words to naturally appear on the page; except it occurred to me that I could not write a single thing. In choosing to alienate myself from my own pain, I was unable to write about anyone else.
Suddenly I started typing, spewing involuntary nonsense, flitting from laughter to shame as I fought to override the internal voice that demanded clarity and emotional detachment. What came out was a scattered, if not completely incoherent recollection of my memories surrounding my father’s death in 2012—memories which I had proudly put away all these years.
2.
My family emigrated from Japan to New Zealand in the late 1990s. Inside the classrooms of my primary school in Rotorua—whose motto read “We Always Shine” in sunny yellow—I struggled to grasp the rules of the English language. Outside, during lunch and afterschool, the playground was familiar and freeing; a refuge from the structures of language, a place to explore ways to fall. We climbed the monkey bars and walked precariously across their tops, or took turns flying off the swings, the rusty residue staining our palms. We leapt for no reason other than the joy of falling, with the occasional smack on the bars and turf turning our lips the color of Sam Blue Pops.
In 2002, sitting before a hand-me-down CRT TV—a centerpiece of the living room in our rented home on the other side of St. Mary’s Church—I would marvel at Kurt Cobain diving into the drum set in the music video for “You Know You’re Right,” the last song Nirvana recorded, released eight years after the singer’s death. The brooding bassline, the wailing guitars, the discord were in tune with the heavy tension of the verbal fights that broke out in that same living room. Ten years old, I thought I heard “Hey” or “Yeah” in the song’s chorus after the line, “Things have never been so swell / I have never failed to fail”; in fact, he’s belting out “Pain.” The song was written amidst press rumors about Cobain's marital fallout, but none of those personal details really matter. Cobain liked to fool around with double meaning and resisted interpretation by refusing to enunciate words, slurring or mumbling and then denying that the lyrics had any meaning at all. In “Sliver”—a title often confused for “Silver”—Cobain sings about displacement through the eyes of a child whose mother and father have abandoned him for the day. The song’s story of being passed around from one family member to another, of feeling unwanted, is countered with a playful bassline and mundane childhood details, “Mashed potatoes and stuff like that.” The pain and banality of a broken home collapsed into a two-minute pop song. I’m struck by the irresolute ending, that after all the fits and pleading with grandma to take him home, Cobain ends with, “I want to be alone!” Home, as it turns out, is not a place; it is neither in the comfort of his mother’s arms, or his grandmother’s, or his father’s. Is home, then, the inescapable return to pain and solitude?
My mother and I left my father in New Zealand and returned to Japan to live with my grandparents. I stopped listening to heavy music.
3.
Now, writing gibberish in London almost twenty years later, I reimmersed myself in the music of my youth—Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and White Zombie. I worried this was a sign of regression. Was I becoming like the backward-looking, middle-aged hosts of The Rock radio station in New Zealand, the DJs who played the same old classic rock over and over as if this were any way to recapture the shiny days of youth? At first, I tried to repress my impulse to listen to White Zombie—when I didn’t turn it off entirely, I would lower the volume so the sounds wouldn’t spill out from my room and scare my flatmates across the hall. Thousands of miles separate the lush, wet environments where I grew up and the barren wasteland of White Zombie’s California desert. WZ’s world is awash with sin, amoral and corrupt to the point of absurdity; this self-aware, over-the-top theatricality is what made it so intensely appealing when I was young, and seemed so embarrassing now. In the music video for “Thunder Kiss ‘65” —inspired by Russ Meyer’s 1960s exploitation films Motor Psycho and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! —Frankenstein’s monster parties with go-go dancers in hot pants under an acid-tainted, swirling green sky. It’s metal you can swing your hips to, alive, dead, enthralling. Rob Zombie howls and groans like a hot rod’s dirty engine. Abrasive, brash, blasphemous, grating and profane, the deranged frontman spits nonsense like a maniacal preacher; clumsy lines forgo grammatical correctness; patchworked words and B-movie samples collapse into non-meaning and ride waves of soaring riffage. On close inspection, lyrics like, “Livin' fast and dying young like an endless poetry,” “My soul salvation liberation on the drive,” or “Demon-warp is coming alive” make about as much sense as Zombie’s junk shop attire. But it’s not the words that carry meaning, it’s the attitude. It’s the way he punches and cuts the air with his arms and hands, the way he stomps the ground like he wants it to be heard in the earth’s core.
I kept listening, and by summer, my skepticism for the music melted away—and with it, my concern for taste and skill. I turned the volume back up and returned to face the scattered words I’d spewed into my computer that winter. I accepted my grief for what it was: pathetic, absurd. The music from my youth did not simply appeal to my escapist desires, it spoke to my diasporic experience, conjured up the forgotten turbulence of childhood. It accepted my incompetence, my failure to connect words with feelings. I realized that I could use slippage, where grammar fails or when mishearings and misunderstandings give way to new meaning, as an attitude—just as I’d relished falling at the playground as a youth. A story I finished writing that summer—about my inability to make sense of the last days of my estranged father, the man who wasted his life away by smoking while I watched in silent judgment—was not the story I wanted to write, but it was a necessary starting point.
This return is the literary home that the postwar Japanese writer Ango Sakaguchi writes of in his essay “Bungaku no Furusato” (“The birthplace of literature”). Sakaguchi, who famously wrote the words “ikiyo-ochiyo” (live, fall), demystified the romantic nostalgia of furusato (meaning “home” or “hometown”) by redefining it as the irresolvable world devoid of morality; the condition of abandonment when arbitrary suffering befalls us. He argues that the only salvation we can find is the knowledge that there is none. Heavy music allows me to be present in that reality without judgment. The music thrives on the contradicting forces of life’s promises and shortcomings. We summon and then sway with life’s chaotic rhythms in times when silence threatens to take over.
4.
“I never try anything, I just do it”—the sample of movie star Tura Satana’s voice from “Thunder Kiss ‘65” was in my mind when, at the end of that summer, I went to Japan House. I had gone there to study the ceramic works on display, but after nearly four months of isolation during lockdown, I had mostly left my flat in search of some semblance of home. Inside Japan House, a group of elderly Japanese ladies approached me with a maternal warmth that reminded me of my childhood neighbors in Japan and New Zealand. We exchanged business cards—one was a fashion designer who I instantly recognised as I looked down at her clothes, the other a humble Kumon teacher—and after being reassured, I accepted their invitation to ride along with them to a nearby cafe for coffee and cake, though it was revealed to me after I got into their car that they were part of a religious group. The coffee was a ruse to take me to their parish on the outskirts of North West London. I was dumbstruck by my foolishness, but also curious to see where this ride would take me.
When I arrived at the Iesu No Mitama Kyokai (Spirit of Jesus Church)—an unassuming, white and red-bricked suburban house that seemed to promise stability, care—one lady pointed to a placard next to the front door, reassuring me that they were registered. I didn’t care, but I pretended to look impressed. I can’t recall the words I heard preached there, nor could I—an atheist who can barely clasp her hands in prayer—keep up with the rituals and sounds; and yet I soon found myself agreeing to partake in a baptism, dressed in head-to-toe sheer white cotton, kneeling in a pool with the pastor’s daughter presiding. Five or six parishioners watched me, giddy. Cold and wide awake, no longer craving the coffee I had wanted a half-hour ago, I felt a hard push on my back and with that my head was dunked under the water. I found myself floating among memories: Days of falling head-first into the mud and water of the rice fields surrounding my childhood home near Lake Biwa; jumping from high places in the playgrounds of my adopted home; falling from a tree branch above a stream in Henderson Creek; failing to grasp meaning as an art school student while reenacting a work by the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader.
What I encountered in the depths of that chlorinated water was not a longing for youth, but a sense of satisfaction in being present in the face of my own contradictions. Somewhere between Zombie’s desert and this pool, between Cobain’s fall and my own, I had returned to myself. Home was not a warm embrace, a place where you felt grounded. It was accepting that you are always falling.
Yoshiko Teraoka is a writer and translator based in Tokyo. Her work has previously appeared in After the Art, Lumpen, and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Auckland University Press.
