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In front of the house they share is a shrine It is full of objects Photographs, urines, incense, burned and whole, stone chopsticks, a small helmet She will think of wunderkas that tell a tale There is no one to tell this tale to her, no end The objects simply exist, in the shrine But she will, for just a h her husband does not, that the statue of the little graya red hat and scarf is Jizo, patron of children and travelers, who took on the task of instructing all the beings of the six worlds Who in soure called Sacred Girl He is also the guardian ofjewel to light the darkness and see through to the truth of things The young wo, and she had a ht look after her—though she also knows he is the ferry has a dual nature Even at twenty-three, she knows that

In her second year, she will kno to use her washing machine and her heater She will knohat a cicada is She will crave raw cuttlefish and yakiniku She will stop waiting for her husband to get hoo to Kyoto by herself To Kama-kura, Yokohama, Tokyo She will fall in love with the Shinkansen The retriever puppy she will buy to keep her co She will be able to use the trains without standing in theat the signs Sometimes she will not even look up at all Her feet will know the way She will have h she will not even suspect that he—a friend who sends her a war mat for her feet in the winter—will marry her one autue and what days they should be brought to the refuse station She will kno to close the storm shutters around her house without help She will see her first novel published She will shed some of her parents’ ideas of fe: she will start lifting weights, learn to kill spiders herself without crying and calling for the husband that isn’t there, learn to fix the vacuu on her face She alk up to Tsukayama Park, which rises above her house at the top of terraced, wooded paths, nearly every day She will see the cherry blossoms bloom and think that yes, soht of sothe branches a little

And the young wo alone will have becoarious, occasionally obnoxiously loud But she will have becoht introversion like a virus She will not need sex any, a book that will one day be called In the Night Garden Sometimes she will feel so lonely and lost and broken that she won’t be able to get out of bed except to feed the dog The dog will keep her alive In the Night Garden, boiled down to its irl telling stories to keep herself living But she won’t understand that for years

She will keep the shrine in front of the house clean She will tend to Jizo as best she can She will not even be able to ier here and will always be She will go to Hase-Dera shrine and break down sobbing in the face of Kwannon She will go to Fushih on top of the ious experiences of her life—though it will be a religion she is not a part of, and a pair of experiences she has no right to It does not belong to her and she does not belong to it But she cries and laughs all the same

Japan trains the young woman to be a writer of fantasy and science fiction It is not because Japan is especially science fictional, as her friends back home fervently believe, nor is it that she now stands out in a crowd as one who does not belong It is the peculiar coreater than between Aland or Italy or Russia—and the stubbornly roht reading the tales of Momotaro and Ama-Terasu and the rabbit who lives on thein alooks like a fantasy novel when you don’t understand it Her path through these two years is a journey froown, jail bars, running dog to bus route nu a story for a collection of Japanese fiction, this young wo It isn’t a good thing, but it’s a true thing Everything looks liketi blackly across a white page

It is not a very thrilling reveal to say no

w, at the end of all these paragraphs, that this young woman we have traveled to see is an, as the wife of a Naval officer who shipped out immediately to serve in that conflict I lived in Yokosuka for twenty-five h not always, alone

I have spoken often about my time in Japan I am asked about it in intervieith frequency I usually say: “It was a profound experience for me” And that’s true But I use the word profound to bear the weight of a s It was profound: in a sense, there is the Catherynne that went to Japan and the Catherynne that came home from Japan and they are not the sa, ensconced in acade, but only in e, out of the personality I’d once had When I caether a new person out of the loneliness that had become the whole ofwhether to speak Japanese or English I had gro and exciting social anxieties I felt all the time like my voice was too loud My time in Japan is the part of my history from which my first books came, two of which, Yu Sword, directly engaged with Japanese culture, and one, In the Night Garden, the book that would go on to make my name, contained much that branched and flowed froame, and became someone else—and I am still that someone else, for better or for worse

All this preamble is to say: Look at these stories Look at this decade of writing around those two years, circling closer and closer to saying so true about theine ofIf you knohat you’re listening for

Japan is everywhere in my work Even in stories that seem to veer elsewhere, it is present It is the warm future Hokkaido of Silently and Very Fast It is the hidden history of Sylvie in “Fade to White” It is the paralyzed player of ga to speak first in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time” Most of my novels touch Japan’s borders in one way or another as well, froonists of

Paliht Garden to the Tsukoated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making Part of me has never left I do not expect that this collection represents the end ofabout Japan I do not think there is an end So about Love affairs, deaths, children, missed chances, sicknesses, places you never expected to find, or to find you Countries of the heart And yet, as true as that feels to e a little, for what Western author who ever rubbed elboith a Tokyo train has not professed a love for Japan, if only for the noodles at Narita? Is my love different, special? Well, one always likes to think so, and one is rarely correct

It is my experience that Westerners—and I alasses of expectation Some of that expectation is shaped by the export of Japanese culture, soh econo of the Other When I say I have lived in Japan, people ilasses and make assumptions, not only about the nation but about lish teacher, obviously Clearly, I loved ania and planned to ine it, exactly like they have seen it in the movies, some sort of cross between Blade Runner and Memoirs of a Geisha and Cowboy Bebop None of that is true, of course I went overseas with as few expectations as I could, and yet of course I still had thein to meet Japan until you have peeled back the veneer of the Western i are powerful, hard to look beyond That is the purpose of a culture, though success is always incomplete: to turn a mass of people in one direction and unify their vision into one After ten thousand years or so, huood at it And of course, the West is not the only lens: I saw as a wo person, I saw as a historian, I saw as a writer, I saw as a queer woman, I saw as a military wife, I saw as a near-suicidal depressive, I saw as a roically adept intellectual Maybe it’s just lenses, all the way down

I was in Japan for reasons to do with love and hegeeht me across the Pacific In the end, I loved Japan, and e had become a repressive state There is, perhaps, little difference between the two They can be traded They can masquerade each as the other

And to write of a country, a culture, a world that is not your own is an act, forever and always, balanced precariously between love and hegemony

I have tried to err on the side of love That is a phrase I would not rave I have tried to err on the side of love Because of those years and because of who I a about Japan It was always only a question of horote about it, and I hope, I hope I have done well Since the first words I put down in rate and interrogate my own experience, my own actions,overly kind to ivably ignorant or bullheaded concerning Japanese culture That is always an iterative process You circle the thing itself endlessly and never quite arrive at it And so I have spent a goodly a about a place that is not h it shaped me unalterably And yet this is a deeply personal book Everything has a dual nature It is not a book that purports to speak for Japanese culture in any way, but one which speaks for its author, for a span of ten years of circling Japan and never reaching it, and a single woman’s relationship with a nation not her own, but one which, very occasionally, sat down to tea with her