Context: Proustian Road to Nowhere

I am in the latter half of my thirties. I am in a remote Japanese village.

I am in my parents’ car twenty-five years ago staring out the window at flat, dead fields that spread out, and out, and out, like a firmly-tucked sheet, under a huge sky.

I am daydreaming about going somewhere far away, somewhere not here.

The Eagles always summon a memory of driving along a Texas-or-Oklahoma road with my dad, but this time, hearing them in Okawachiyama, entering a small building from a silent Japanese mountain village, I was thrown back with a Proustian force. And I was in two places at once, two times, on opposite ends of the world. I was ten, looking up at airplanes. I was in my mid-thirties, adult, free, traveling simply with a backpack and a journal, and I could in theory walk to the horizon and there I would still be, free, with my journal, my camera, everything I needed. I had the freedom of the outsider. Everybody is, if anything, pleasantly surprised when I comport myself politely and humbly; not much else seems to be expected. The Traveler will have strange ways. It is accepted, so long as you respect the peoples you visit.

Tokyo might as well have been the dark side of the moon when I was a kid in the Panhandle, for as likely as it was I would ever get there, and a small village in Kyushu, Mars.

There’s a city in my mind

Going to the Champs-Elysées I found unendurable. If only Bergotte had described the place in one of his books, I should, no doubt, have longed to see and to know it, like so many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into my imagination. That kept things warm, made them live, gave them personality, and I sought then to find their counterpart in reality, but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my dreams.

– Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, “Place-Names: the Names”, In Search of Lost Time

There was a factory between my house and town that, from a distance, at night, looked almost like city lights and towers. I pretended it was the towns in the Pokémon anime. I pretended it was Tokyo. I pretended it was the future, and we had dense cities with trees and clean air and starry skies, and nobody cared about your gender or your religion or esoteric interests or any of those considerations that caused so much friction with people outside my family. That patch of “city” was a lodestone, a reminder that these places—places that more closely resembled the cities in my mind—existed, somewhere out there. The future-places, the potential-places. The future-times, when I would be in possession of myself.

I’ve always had a good sense of direction. Even when I was never the one driving the car, I knew which turns to take, which cardinal direction we were going at a given time. The airport was fixed in my mind, an anchor around which all my spatial awareness turned. It was a small airport but it could get you to bigger places where you could go anywhere. I had done it before. And I would gaze at airplanes passing over that were going from Somewhere to Somewhere, Somewhere where things happen.

The term “flyover country” is perfect. It is a gravity well.

I hyper-fixate on things. It has been enough of a problem in the past I had to get help. I also fixate on an idea, something I want to do in the future, and fall into a rapture of obsession where everything about my current life I do not like will be better, somewhere else. This is especially true if I genuinely do not like my current location, if everything in it—politically, culturally, spatially—is at contrast with what I want.

And it’s very far away, but it’s growing day by day

“…Names, offering us the image of the unknowable that we have invested in them and simultaneously designating a real place for us, force us accordingly to identify the one with the other, to a point where we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its name…”

-Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, In Search of Lost Time

I still have my copy of the Sailor Moon Role-Playing and Resource Book from 1999. The pages are falling out. The spine is broken. The broken places in the spine make the book fall open onto spreads I obsessed over, spreads I remember verbatim. Character profiles. Summaries of episodes I never got to see. This was pre-streaming, pre-simulcast. Most anime took on the order of a few years to make it to the US and it was in a heavily-censored, bowdlerized form. I had free run of internet 1.0 (I am still grateful for this; I was able to create my soul) and there was a tight ring of Geocities and Angelfire fan pages for fansubbing groups, low-resolution screenshots, rambling single-paragraph episode descriptions in a tiny font poorly spaced under one screencap, often written in highlighter yellow on a background that was just another repeating screen shot or concept art, tiled poorly and unevenly. The patchwork nature of old websites is what I recall when I think of them: the seams between images, the MIDI files, text plopped over the seams, a box dragged-and-dropped in a browser-based website builder. I could sense the absolute mess that was the source code, a pile of fixed location boxes.

This book, these pages, were my Bible. I was a Biblical scholar seeking out every scrap of sacred word I could access and carving it on my heart. It took three hours on dialup to download a minute-and-a-half RealPlayer video of the Sailor Stars opening and it was as a fixed star in my memory, always coming back to worship. The role-playing book recommended the usenet posts of Maiko Covington on daily life in a Japanese school. I studied them as Gospel. In seventh grade I wrote a 200,000 word magical girl team novel in Japan scaffolded on them. I found the files recently, the ones I wrote. I checked the word count. I am in awe of my childhood prolificness. I want that abandon back, that surety-in-self, that desire to get something down.

Well we know where we’re going.

I was a kid. Of course I romanticized anywhere so different from where I was stuck, and which was shown to me in the context of magic and adventure and acceptance – the woman-prince Utena, the butch crossdresser Haruka, children going on their own adventures and being responsible for their own lives. Hints that the restrictions around beliefs and conduct in Christianity were not everywhere enforced. Even at the time I was aware that Japan had significant social issues and that anime in no wise represented daily life, and that as a solitary, proud, boyish girl I would make few friends. I accepted this was my lot anywhere out here east of Eden and frankly it didn’t much bother me. I would never find ‘home’, but there would be different challenges and deficiencies in other places: perhaps ones I could better live with than the ones in my current life. I at least wanted a chance to try. And I loved cities; traveling I felt I was getting to join the real world for a time, a global world, an international world, a world of universities and art and research and Different Ways.  

That that dense future-city neverwhere in my mind attached itself to various city names as Proust notes happens with a place that is built up in the mind before it is visited. The scaffolding for the city that has built itself over decades. It is still a place dear to me. I visit the same dream-cities. I gave them the names of real cities, and sometimes, some parts of them match the namesake, as I am delighted to discover when I actually visit. But the mind-cities are always there and hold a primacy the real city cannot match, and in my dreams I still yearn to get there. I have mental maps. They are consistent. I am a strong lucid dreamer.

And we’re not little children. And we know what we want.

Of course I do not hold hard feelings against my parents for not giving me free run of the wide world in elementary school. They did the best they could and always meant well, encouraging my independence where they felt it would be fortifying. But childhood dependence was hard, for me. I still maintain, fully aware of myself and the realities of adult life as I am now, that I would have been happy with independence even if it meant great responsibility, more chores, hard decisions, figuring things out for myself. I would have accepted real threat of death or harm to feel that I was in control of my own life. I was enthralled with the independence awarded Ash at my age — ten! — to travel, to get into danger and scrapes and get himself out of it. He held himself tall. I wanted to have that self-respect, the ability to look an adult in the eye as an equal and be respected in turn. Sakura at the same age walked to and from school and all over town, took the train, took the bus, went grocery shopping, cooked, did chores, took day trips to other towns. So long as she did her chores and homework, she was free, able to act as an autonomous individual, worthy of respect. And she was contributing to the household, not a care burden.

Of course in my gut all that freedom got mixed up with “Japan”-the-place in the Proustian sense. This was all Japanese media. Little kids could ride the bus there and run errands, couldn’t they? Or go on their Pokémon adventures at ten? What do you mean American kids had the same levels of freedom a hundred years ago? Today’s Tom Sawyer is stuck in afterschool care hitting people with shoe-chucks. The adult-I-am begins to feel a neurotic child even imagining the current level of surveillance on children leveled on my child self. Despair closes over me and I would gnaw off my own leg to get out of the trap. I see the kids I work with and, at once seeing myself in them, want to scream “Leave me alone!”, want to run somewhere far away, somewhere I am alone with my own thoughts. My own decisions. I want to build myself.

And the future is certain. Give us time to work it out.

I am again in Japan. A man is asking me in my native language if I am okay. His wife is peeking out from the office, concerned.