THE NOVELS OF MY JAPANESE WORK-LIFE

Most people say that out of all the degrees you can do, a Bachelor of Arts doesn’t really prepare you for the real world. Those familiar with this real world tend to enter into it by dipping their toe into a full-time, 9-5-day job, and soon find themselves submerged.
So, in 2002, when I graduated from my own BA, double majoring in English Literature and Film Studies, I had trepidations about submerging.
And rather than just dip my toe into the workforce, I decided to dip my toe into another country’s workforce.

When I moved to Japan at 22, not only was this my first time living in another country, it was my first move away from home, my first extended period residing in a place where I wasn’t a native speaker, and most confronting of all, my first attempt at a full-time job.

My role was to be an assistant English teacher at an Agricultural High School in rural Japan. The school I taught at was notorious in the area. Unlike the neighbouring town, where the best students spent their days studying, head-down in their well-pressed uniforms, the students at my school were less academically focussed and wore big hoop earrings and razor cut mullets to prove it. Rumour had it that some of our students were the sons and daughters of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. And yet despite their rebellions, the students would tend to the farm that was part of our school with diligence and care.

To this day, when I speak to Japanese people about the rural area in Hyogoken that I lived in, even their minds’ draw blanks to its exact location. Like some mystical place that never existed, it was surrounded by rice-paddies, encased by mountains embedded with Shinto shrines and fortified with a mushy heat that makes insects the size of small animals.
My Japanese days did seem like an alternate reality. But it was my reality.
And my degree in English Literature and Film, did qualify me for this reality, in ways I couldn’t have foreseen. The love of literature it cultivated in me became a salvation of sorts.
Because for each awkward moment I encountered at my new job and the life it entailed, there was a book or film I would use as a reference point to help navigate it.

Book #1, The Fantasy Novel: “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll as depicted in the Disney movie of 1951.

In Alice and Wonderland, after Alice falls down the rabbit-hole, one of the characters she meets in her new world is the hookah smoking caterpillar. While exhaling vapoured letters of the alphabet to her, he asks: “Who are you, explain yourself!”. These letters don’t often correspond to the words he is saying, and begin to entangle Alice. An O wraps around her neck, a U sticks to her Mary-Jane shoe, prohibiting her to walk.

This was how I felt when my colleagues or students would speak to me in Japanese. The words they exhaled would engulf me too. If I understood a word I could never connect it to the whole of what they said. I’d focus on the word so much, I’d miss the rest of what they were saying, and would have to stumble forth in my own lilting Japanese.

Alice answers the caterpillar’s question with, “I’m afraid I can’t explain myself sir, because I’m not myself you know.” And in Japan, especially in my first months there, I wasn’t myself either. Our environment makes up a big part of who we are, and when I was plunged into such a new one, I was unsure about the myself I had been, and would be, in this new setting.

There was a moment in those early days in Japan, when the strangeness of this environment manifested itself so that I met my own caterpillar. In my case, it was a centipede. In the rural areas of Japan, where the humidity causes insects to balloon as if on steroids, there is a strain of giant centipede known as mukade whose bite is poisonous. When I got to Japan, I had heard about the mukade but had yet to encounter one. Until one night, at two o’clock in the morning, I heard one hundred pairs of small insect feet shuffling on the tatami mat that my futon was placed on.

If one of our non-poisonous insects entered my room in New Zealand, my Dad or my flatmate would scoop up the invader for me and release it out into the ether, while I cowered on my bed or in the furthest corner of the room. But as part of my new job, I was given an apartment where I lived alone. It was at this moment, that a braver me emerged. In the middle of that night, I encased the insect beneath a glass, manoeuvred a piece of paper underneath it, and let the mukade back out into the humidity. I then went back to my futon and fell asleep. But not before calling my Dad in New Zealand, to let him know of my handiwork.

Book #2, The Memoir: Sei Shonogan’s “The Pillow Book”

During the 11^th Century in Japan’s Heian Period, a lady of the Court, Sei Shonagan wrote a collection of lists, poems, musings, short essays and observations about her daily life as part of the Heian upper class. The compilation of these narratives became The Pillow Book, and was initially meant only for the author’s eyes and amusement only. It was a diary of sorts, and one I began to read during my long days at school in Japan.

The reason my days were often long, was because as an assistant English teacher, at times you were more of a nuisance to the Japanese English teachers, rather than an assister. This was especially true close to exam time, when teachers needed as much time as possible to teach their students the curriculum for the upcoming exams. One of my teachers would only utilise me once every week for five minutes. He would have me read out loud a passage of English to the class, presumably to aid them in their pronunciation, after which I would receive resounding applause for my efforts.

So, during those days when I was not needed, but required to attend school, I would sit at my desk in the desolate staff-room and read Sh?nagan’s book. What fascinates me about Sh?nagan’s lists are her witty insights that still hold relevant today. For example, under the heading – “Things that give a pathetic impression”, she writes, “The voice of someone who blows his nose while he is speaking” and “The expression of a woman plucking her eyebrows.”

Emboldened by Sh?nagan I embarked on my own set of lists, documenting my life at the High School in Japan. One of my lists, entitled “Things that while away the time, as an Assistant English Teacher in Japan” is as follows:

• Eating a twenty-compartment bento, in order of least liked taste to best.
• Having a silent fly-swatting competition with the only other teacher in the staff-room. (The farm at the school, the humidity and the prevalence of Japanese fly-swats, which have tweezers at the end to pick up swatted flies, meant mine and Mr Akihagara’s competitions were plentiful and fierce.)
• Perfecting an American accent to teach English with by listening to Hip-Hop. (American English was the preferred English to be taught at the school, and I was asked more than once to stop speaking in Kiwi.)

Book 3, The Gothic Horror Novel: “Interview with a Vampire” by Anne Rice.

Amongst the other Assistant English teachers in Japan that I would socialise with, who came from all over the world, I noticed that in terms of engaging, adopting and integrating with Japan, its culture and its people, there would often be two camps. Based on the two vampires in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, I would call one camp Lestat, and the other Louis. Lestat is the vampire who is at ease with his blood-sucking nature, and plunges forth into the world. In terms of the Assistant English teacher, in my mind, this was the better camp to be.
It meant that you plunged forth into your new environment, ready to suck up whatever it proffered to you. I prided myself on being more in the Lestat camp. Louis on the other hand, is the vampire who is less at ease with his new world, and is conflicted with his new life.

Though I kept my definitions of the two camps of Assistant English teachers to myself, one day a conversation I had with one the students at the school caused me to stop using them at all.
It was rice planting day, a celebration where every student, teacher and guest, would enter into the town’s rice paddies to plant rice together. A self-confessed city person, I was new to rice paddies, but eager to learn I entered the tepid, calf level water to help plant.

It was then, one of the students of the school grinned and said to me, “Be careful!”.
When I gave him the quizzical look as to why, he answered my fears with shouts of “Small, snake Dracula! Small, snake Dracula!”.

To this day, it is still one of the best descriptions of leeches that I’ve ever heard.
And at that moment, I realised I was no longer a Lestat.

Words by Shana Chandra.
Illustrations by Irene Ghillani.