In the home of the fireflies: memories of my ‘o-shogatsu’
キラキラと光る「蛍」の家で、自らのお正月の思い出
This month’s guest writer Nick Horton returns to one of his many homes away from home, Tokyo, to spend the new year with 美.
The year is rapidly slipping away from my fingertips; the meringue far from ‘soft peaks’.
Arashi is causing a storm in the background as kouhaku blares forth with the faded glory of Bubble era sequins and glitter, ageing enka starlets mixed in with trance-inducing pyrotechnics.
In the kitchen, it’s a scramble for already cramped benches, and the holy grail of the renji. In the space of two-and-a-half tatami mats, filled to the brim with two fridges, a washing machine, said holy grail and stove-top, my fellow countrywoman and I will our pavlova to materialise, all the while fending off advances by the three French gourmandes, stealthily inching towards our pre-heating prize.
At last, the wispy summits appear through the blades of the persistent whisk, and are hurriedly spooned on to the baking tray to be blasted at 180 degrees.
Time to breathe and open the bubbly.
***
I am back in Tokyo again, almost six months after leaving Japan.
Departures tend to be bittersweet.
Taking off from Narita that day in July was traumatic.
A wise friend once told me that it takes four seasons for a house to become a home. In fifteen months, I had twice seen Tokyo’s boulevards bathed in the cherubic pink of spring; weathered its rare but nonetheless bracing winter snow; and trudged through the cascading canopy of its plum rains.
The first omens had seemed promising. Descending from thirty thousand feet above the archipelago on my flight from Beijing in April 2015, I was greeted by the white peak of Fuji-san, backlit by the orange burst of an early spring sunset.
But, stepping onto Japanese soil, student visa in hand, came a terrifying jolt of realisation.
I knew nothing.
With the Japanese proficiency of a newborn, it took all my compunction from 21 years of life to resist the urge to scream. Within seconds the great folly of my decision nine months earlier to apply for a scholarship to study in Japan with only a baseline understanding of Japanese politics and Studio Ghibli, struck deep and mercilessly.
Soon, the anxieties of outsider status, of simple daily incapacities, and of the seeming inevitability of sliding into an expatriate bubble divorced from my host society, loomed large. Every day became a struggle to accelerate my linguistic and cultural literacy to hyperspeed: anything to overcome the countless barriers that kept me seemingly in perpetual orbit around, but never intersecting with, Japan.
I made incredibly supportive and nourishing friendships with people from the four corners of the world, brought together by a shared sense of adventure and willingness to propel themselves beyond their comfort zones. But, our intersections — nights spent under the whispering branches on a Donkihote picnic blanket sharing life stories from across the continents — soon proved to be time-sensitive. After all, for all of us, Tokyo was just a temporary abode. None of us could call it ‘home’.
But something changed with that first mouthful of o-sechi ryori, surrounded by my friend Naomi and her family, nine months into my life in Japan.
In front of me was a rich palette of symbolism and tastes, arranged immaculately on generations-old servery each imbued with the memories of celebrations past.
The black kuro-mame beans for a year of good health ahead; the golden kurikinton walnut paste, symbolising wealth and prosperity; the semi-circular kohaku kamaboko fishcakes evoking the sunrise reflected in so many motifs in this ‘land of the rising sun’. And then, of course, there was the mochi.
Back then, I knew almost nothing about Japan’s New Year celebrations, or o-shogatsu. Even now, my knowledge is best described as somewhat vague. In short, don’t expect any ‘fun facts’ or a history lesson.
What I do know, however, is that o-shogatsu is arguably the most important holiday in Japan: a time for family to reunite, to usher in a new year of health, happiness and prosperity together. For children and parents scattered across the archipelago, it offers a rare respite to return home, and once again be surrounded by the warmth of family at the height of winter.
By virtue of that same fact, however, it is also a time when one’s ‘foreign-ness’ strikes as particularly acute. As families gather around the nation, you cannot help but think of the thousands of miles of ocean separating you from your own. As the carriages of the Tokyo metro empty, only you are traveling without somewhere to be. Wandering along usually bustling shotengai, you wonder what lies beyond the shuttered storefronts.
And yet, after nine months of struggling to find my tongue, my feet, and my vision amid the daily paroxysms of self-doubt, far from the bosom of my own culture and family, and caught between the hopelessness of the repetitive cycle of daily incompetence borne from much-less-than-fluency: at last, here I was, in a ‘home’.
It may not have been my own, and it may have only been for a couple of hours on a winter’s day in early January. But, brought into the all-too-familiar fold of a family celebration, the edifice-like barriers of ‘culture’, ‘language’ and ‘society’, often seeming so unscaleable, re-configured.
No longer a precipice, but a doorway.
From a sense of existing as a temporary apparition on the margins of Japanese society, through a simple invitation to lunch, I felt as if I had suddenly been brought into the quintessentially ‘inner’. With that first taste of being in the uchi, with an even greater sense of urgency, I willed to be freed from the soto.
Which is how I ended up in the house of the fireflies.
After finishing my exchange at Todai, I had found myself inspecting a two-storey Showa era jutaku in Toritsudaigaku at 8:00pm on an early February evening, the air still heavy with the last gasp of winter. Surrounded by imposing brick and concrete danchi, somehow little ‘Hotaru’ had survived the onslaught of Heisei era high densification, and continued to sparkle with the mischievous glint of a previous age.
Here, after a year living in a ‘one room mansion’ in Komaba, I found six housemates from around Japan and the world. With them I found a new rhythm, a new vocabulary, a new window into the country I was ready to leave a few months earlier, but which now I couldn’t fathom departing.
We had laughed together, cried together. We had shared our hopes, our dreams, our vulnerabilities, our strengths, our weaknesses. My life in Japan had lost its sense of looming impermanency. Which is why when July 4th came, I was woefully unprepared for the shock of departure.
Back on the other side of the world, in the biting cold of a highland Australian winter, the glittering fireflies of that Tokyo summer seemed like a cruel illusion. Like all nostalgic fantasies, I thought that it would forever be immaterial, consigned to a rapidly receding past.
And yet, here I was, at 10:30PM Japan Standard Time, on December 31st, peering triumphantly at the glistening white mounds smothered in matcha cream and topped with tropical fruit, surrounded by the faces that had become family half a year prior.
With our sprawling spread of duck toshikoshi soba, maguro sashimi, smoked salmon salad, foie gras and tarte tatin, we may not have had the most ‘traditional’ o-sechi ryori, but that’s beside the point.
Here I was again, in Tokyo, counting down the few remaining hours and minutes to a new year.
Twelve months prior, a one line invitation had triggered a turning point in how I connected with a country I had struggled to feel anything more than a visitor to.
This year, I didn’t need an invitation.
I was home.
Nicholas Horton. Always caught somewhere between Japan, Taiwan and China, I’m passionate about studying Northeast Asia. I lived in Tokyo for eighteen months from 2015–16, and as an exchange student at Tokyo University began laying the roots for my own connection to Japan, and now 「美」.
