The salon

A sentence remains

Books do not always console. Sometimes they give a feeling its proper outline, and that is enough.

The long table

The best conversations have no efficient ending. They make room for a person to become more particular.

Chosen company

Deep connection is not a performance of closeness. It is attention, returned over time.

Lika Lives Inside Me

A friend of more than ten years texted me once: “Fuma is a little like Akana Rika in Tokyo Love Story. Cute.”

This was before I had backpacked through Japan. I was alone in the Victorian living room of the mushroom house in San Francisco, drinking Hibiki and finishing Tokyo Love Story.

I was stunned by her appetite for life, her refusal of the expected, her habit of leaving home every day with a whole backpack of curiosity. Rika, too, is sensitive, a little avoidant, a girl who keeps moving because stillness asks too much.

Maybe that is why she never felt fictional to me. She felt alive beside me—alive inside my body.

Photograph: @qifang.luo

One Glass, a Century Apart

🚶 Reading at City Lights in North Beach, San Francisco. 📚

This was once a gathering place for the Beat writers—Jack Kerouac, for one. Reading and drinking here, I feel as though I am breathing the same air as someone from a century ago, drinking from the same glass. Two eras briefly make eye contact.

Cycling Through Old Selves

I rode past my primary school, middle school, high school, the first and second companies where I interned. I rode past the first bar my father took me to, to watch the 2014 World Cup; past the FamilyMarts I had entered so many times I no longer needed to look up; past the road where, in senior year, I walked my best friend home every day.

Wind lifted the loose pieces of my hair and the past began to flash—jump-cut, frame by frame, like a roll of film. The girl in middle school who believed in the outside world. The girl in high school who had no idea where her future lived. The girl in college, sleeping five hours a night and always in transit. Speeding down the street felt like time travel: like falling into the world’s kaleidoscope.

Now I cycle a shared bike through Shanghai’s plane-tree streets at night, watching everything as an outsider. Perhaps I, too, have become a Jiangsu person constructed by society—subo live matter! Between me and the world there is a gauze-thin layer. The city is noisy, restless, and full of human warmth. I can be cool and solitary here, and still love it from somewhere very deep.

San Francisco Starter Culture

Three whole years in San Francisco.

At first I joined City Walks: the coastal forts; the Presidio and the history of Spanish invasion; the wartime incarceration camps and the long, uneven lives of Japanese Americans on the West Coast; Japantown’s Cherry Blossom Parade; Chinatown, the railroad built by Chinese laborers, and the legal history Chinese Americans helped force into being—the idea that to be born here is to belong here.

Then, one step at a time, I began measuring the city with my feet and became a small part of it. I started hosting: cable cars that keep beating at the city’s center twenty-four hours a day; the old streetcars broken by 1906 and Muni reborn in 1980; sourdough tastings in Alamo Square Park.

Maybe I had only survived in the city before. Slowly, by breathing its air each day, I began to grow L. sanfranciscensis somewhere inside me. My body accepted this strange, feral fermentation and joined the place. Pink sunsets, San Francisco’s sudden crying weather, the minor miracles of a parade or a strange event: all of it interrupts the plan, and makes it fresher.

Fuma has been growing up with this city, too.

When I Am Not I

When I am not myself, I am usually wind. I scatter the stamens of flowers, compasses, indices, and dawn; sort their former lives by color and number, legend and outcome. I pawn petals, wicks, and pronouns to lame time and more maps.

📍Havasupai Tribe Backpack 🎒

People Are the Smallest Window

Only when our lived experiences begin to overlap do seeing and understanding really begin. We can look at people through a city, or come to understand a city—and the cultures braided beneath it—through people. Compared with a city, a person is the smallest window onto the world.

In a co-living community, it might be idle tea in a kitchen at dawn; it might be the helplessness of facing a mess after an event. Different souls knock against each other in these small details. They became anchors, letting me rebuild a feeling of home with the social world.

Even while drifting everywhere, you know there are things that hold you: people you love, landscapes you cannot stand, maybe the familiar argument, maybe the laughter that follows.

The Sea of Fertility / Thank You

For one instant, the vast universe seemed to acquire the force of eternity. When I closed the book, the four volumes of The Sea of Fertility had arrived at their unavoidable ending.

Before opening The Decay of the Angel, I delayed for as long as I could. I loved Mishima’s work too much to leave it. I read around its edges: returned to Thirst for Love; read his lectures on immorality and new love. Before this late summation, they all seemed like fragments that no longer knew what they were pointing toward.

Kiyoaki’s white death for love. Isao’s stallion-bright death for an ideal. The princess’s death of the body. Tōru’s death inside an evil, wounded pride. Four reincarnations. Only at the end does Honda seem able to lay down money and looking, those things he once called reason; to leave behind the loudness and fuss of the ordinary world, and return to Gesshū Temple—to a place with neither memory nor a single thing.

The heat of being eighteen, the obsessions of being eighteen, those burning summers and spilled blood: on the running line of our lives they flash once like afterglow, then pull a bright tail behind them and vanish toward some corner of the sky we do not know.

Maybe after the hundredth, the ten-thousandth, or the hundred-millionth rebirth, you and I will meet somewhere again.

Thank you.